By Shairee Malhotra
Pakistani citizens need to reconsider their tacit support for the Army and its national narrative.
Pakistan and the world were shocked by the deadly and heartbreaking attack by the Pakistani Taliban on a school in Peshawar that killed more than 130 children, many the sons of Army personnel. Yet just a few days later, Pakistan’s courts decided to grant Zaikur Rehman Lakhvi, the terrorist mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, bail.
The debilitating situation in Pakistan is the natural outcome of a strategic culture that is entirely the creation of the Pakistan Army. A perpetual hostility towards India is a keystone of the ideology of the Army, and by extension, the Pakistani state, given that Pakistan is an army with a country. Its strategic depth theory, whereby Pakistan is undefeated as long as it continues to challenge and resist India’s rise, has seen it resort to asymmetric warfare and encouraged it to solicit the support of dangerous non-state actors. Indeed, the Taliban has been famously funded and supported by the Pakistan Army to heighten its influence in Afghanistan, at the expense of India’s. The Pakistani elite has allowed geopolitics and its desperately ambitious agenda to destroy the internal state of the country, while sustaining its material interests. True, the Army has become wary of an Islamist takeover – especially after the Pakistan Taliban conquered the Swat – which would alter its unparalleled grip on power, and so has finally begun cracking down on such groups with Operation Zarb-e-Azb.
Meanwhile, ordinary Pakistan’s have been rightfully condemning the Taliban, yet by and large they consistently fail to consider the role of the Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in creating and perpetuating an untenable status quo. Pakistanis have historically viewed the Army as their protector, and have granted it a legitimacy that has been perpetuated by the sustained myth of the Indian threat and by the failure of civilian governments to govern, more often than not because of the Army’s penchant for coup d’états. (When the Army has ruled Pakistan, as it has done for much of its existence, it has fared little better.) Through the successful political manipulation of the general public, the Army has effectively guaranteed that ordinary Pakistanis share the Army’s strategic concerns and priorities. This has encouraged widespread support for the Army and its policies, despite the heavy costs these policies impose on ordinary Pakistanis.
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