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Pakistan's premier  website that covers current affairs and news.  Great Army (Not-So-Great Officers)

The latest book by a former Army officer proves a general rule, Observes Newsweek..

The author bribed a laboratory assistant to get access to secondary school papers while he was a student, made his way to the army, amassed black money and now sermonize the youth to follow the truth. He believes all he did was right. This is the irony of Pakistan where career public servants think all they are doing is right. In December, Shahid Aziz, a former lieutenant-general of Pakistan Army, went public with the “secrets” of Pakistan’s 1999 Kargil operation—which was the first act of war under civilian rule that brought yet more discomfiture for Pakistanis to bear—in Indian-administered Kashmir.

 

 

 

 

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Aziz had just finished writing a confessional book, which contained revelations on the fiasco brought on by the-then Army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Aziz’s relative by marriage. In rejoinder, the former president has called Aziz an officer “without character.”

It is often said that Pakistani troops are of a high quality, but are poorly led by their generals.

Aziz’s Urdu-language book, with its telltale subtitle, Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak: Ek Sipahi ki Dastan-e-Ishq-o-Junoon (How Long This Silence: a Soldier’s Story of Passion and Absorption), proves that once again. The pity of it is that Aziz thinks he is a maverick because of his religious passion. His opinion actually adheres to the general ideological

view popular in Pakistan, perhaps furtively anticipating reprisal from terrorists if the truth is revealed. He repeats the platitudes daily unloaded on an already heavily-indoctrinated public by retired generals, led by former Army chief Aslam Beg and former Inter-Services Intelligence chief Hamid Gul. And Aziz defers to the latter by approving of his “Council Elders” ruling Pakistan in lieu of the currently soiled “Western system of democracy.”

The truth, however, is that the book is yet more devastating proof of the defective military leadership in Pakistan, where most Muslim officers, brought up on non-rational beliefs, decline into end-of-career religiosity and find fault with the world they think they are about to say goodbye to. Now, Aziz is like any retired general dangerous to Pakistan because of the extremism of his thinking.

Before his

book came out, former General Aziz was paraded by keen anchors on cable talk shows luxuriating in the new scandals attached to Musharraf, who can’t enter Pakistan for fear of being arrested on charges of murder and the threat of being killed by the Taliban.“It was an unsound military plan based on invalid assumptions, launched with little preparation, and in total disregard to the regional and international environment,” Aziz said of Kargil in an interview. He says Musharraf did not even share with the Corps Commanders plans of the war he was going to unleash on India. Only four officers, he says, knew about it: Musharraf, the chief of general staff, the Northern Areas commander, and the 10 Corps commander. Aziz was director-general of the ISI’s analysis wing at the time of Kargil, but, he says, he remained unaware of the operation, which was not studied professionally because secrecy was paramount.

CONFESSION AS SERMON

Aziz’s book follows no recognizable format. Its chapter titles are simply phrases taken from poems giving no clue of the subject discussed under them. (The great Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose lines are copiously strewn all over the book, would not have liked this extravagance in aid of bad prose.) There is no index, so you have to plough through the unexamined gushing of an average man living on the basis of clichés to get at facts, or what Aziz thinks is analysis. An Urdu columnist who reviewed the book has praised Aziz for the style of his prose. This is surprising given that the book in fact needed a going-over from a language editor who could win readers’ gratitude by excising several sprawling sermons palmed off as chapters.

Shahid Aziz was what one might call a typical success story in the Army. Commissioned in 1971, he saw action in Kashmir, and was smart enough to rise to the level where he was trained at Islamabad’s National Defence University before being appointed director of Military Operations. As major-general, he was placed at the head of the ISI’s analysis wing from where he studied the Kargil operation and came to the conclusion, as the war wound down to the discredit of Pakistan, that it shouldn’t have taken place to begin with. Aziz shocked a deflated Musharraf by suggesting, during a top-level meeting, that certain defeat be avoided by expanding the war into other theaters.

Aziz is a warrior typically not given to any holistic analyses that military theorist Carl von Clausewitz recommends to military leaders living under civilian governments. He is liberal with religious sermons while what he actually needs is an examination of the functioning of the national economy and the global environment.

Where he should have inducted regional and global factor-analysis, Aziz makes do with conspiracy theories some people, especially Muslims, all over the world prefer over logical connections. On a study tour in the U.S., he bowled over his American lecturer by calling former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s 1995 book Diplomacy a “Machiavellian” piece of writing. A rare intellectual among Pakistan’s generals, former major-general Hakeem Arshad Qureshi says in his 2002 book, The 1971 Indo-Pak War: a Soldier’s Narrative, “We have displayed a tendency to enter a contest mostly on the rebound, with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the halfway mark for want of resources … We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the Subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress.” Aziz gives no evidence of having read Qureshi’s corrective volume.

Musharraf got Aziz over as his director-general for Military Operations and, in 1999, planned the overthrow of prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s elected government. Aziz later commanded a division in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In 2001, after 9/11, Musharraf still thought he could trust Aziz, his relative, as chief of general staff, a post from where most officers ascend to the top job. If the book is to be trusted, it is here that Aziz woke up to the wickedness of America and its “games” in the region. Aziz spent the last two years of his military career as Corps Commander in Lahore, falling prey to religious quacks and building his beautiful farmhouse (“No budget, expense doesn’t matter … we have an amount of money we never thought of before,” he writes) near Murree. He rues the fact that while in Lahore he was relentlessly pursued by “dirty rumors.”

He retired in 2005, decorated with the prestigious Hilal-e-Imtiaz medal. Musharraf quickly appointed him head of the National Accountability Bureau, but put him off the very first day by asking for immunity for one of his corrupt ministers, Faisal Saleh Hayat. Aziz resigned from NAB one and a half year later. His anticorruption “confessions” prove, again, that Pakistan should stay away from accountability, which its leaders and institutions use more for revenge against enemies than for cleaning up corruption.

Democracy comes in for condemnation in his book as an “ill-smelling” order where politicians make money hand over fist while the common man starves. The “greedy intellectuals” who relentlessly speak for democracy also come in for scathing criticism in Aziz’s book. Despite his stint in the analysis wing of the ISI, there is scant reference to terrorism and the Taliban, who equally criticize democracy as being abhorrent to Islam. Aziz abstains from taking a look at Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s treatise on Pakistan’s Constitution which is treated by many as the blueprint for the country’s next Constitution when the Taliban finally rule from Islamabad.

‘AMERICA IS KILLING US’

While Aziz writes about the current Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, with deference, he clearly doesn’t accept Kayani’s stated position that Pakistan faces internal—not external—danger. In this he is with many retired officers, like one Shahzad Chaudhry who recently accepted that Pakistan faces an internal rather than an external threat, but could not refrain from connecting the Taliban attacks on Pakistan’s expensive surveillance aircraft at PNS Mehran base, in 2011, and Pakistan Air Force’s Minhas base at Kamra, last year, as possibly “India’s deed” because these planes were targeted only at India. But Aziz is not even forgivably reductionist like Chaudhry; he has firm conviction and can’t accept that the Taliban are the real threat. He writes: “The bombs that kill innocent Pakistanis in bazaars and mosques are planted by friends of America, and this terrorism is done to persuade Pakistan to embrace America more closely, allow the government to pursue pro-America policies and to alienate Pakistan from the mujahideen. But this trend of support to the killers of Muslims is open rebellion against Allah.”

Of course, Aziz doesn’t believe that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Muslims. He buys into the theory that America destroyed the Twin Towers to give itself grounds for attacking the Islamic world. The adoption by Musharraf of the slogan of “enlightened moderation” is also condemned by Aziz as double-faced slavery of an America busy planning the rollback of the true faith of Islam by making Pakistan lean on the false religion of the Mughal emperor Akbar and the latter-day “rationalist” exegete of the Quran, Ghulam Ahmad Parwez. He condemns Musharraf for using this slogan to label the orthodoxy as fundamentalist and militant while inviting society to become deviant from the path of piety dancing to the drumbeat of materialism.

Aziz was a major at the Command and Staff College, Quetta, where one day, responding to the challenge of a possible Soviet incursion into Pakistan after the 1979 occupation of Afghanistan, he made a presentation to his class. He proposed that if and when the country was seen to be falling to the Soviet Army, the Pakistan Army and government leaders should be made to leave Islamabad and Rawalpindi and hide in the mountains of Chitral and Kashmir from where they could organize popular uprisings against the Soviet occupiers. Aziz typically doesn’t dwell on the scenario in full as that would have involved discussion of the notorious “resource base” that our officers are not supposed to look at.

NO ST. AUGUSTINE

While on a course in the U.S., Aziz confesses, he once got so drunk at night that he could not get his homework right and was reprimanded by his American teacher. But he is no St. Augustine; his confessions are harmless and not detailed enough. Here, too, he fails the yardstick of analysis and is more focused on nonanalytical opinion. Why do officers as gifted as Aziz shun intellect and fall prey to irrational connections which they confuse with intellectual activity? Chapter Five of his book is titled “Wave of Inspirations,” and it describes his prayer and Quran routines in Kashmir instead of the realities of confrontation with a state, India, which would deliver defeat after defeat to a revisionist Pakistan dismantled by the costs of conflict. The Faiz poem complaining of ideological oppression at the end of the chapter has no relevance here.

The book is full of sermonizing on faith; and the author apparently doesn’t tire of it. Yet, he talks disparagingly of former 10 Corps commander, Lt. Gen. Ghulam Muhammad, known for his blatantly fanatic injection of faith into the Army which he called “Construction of Character,” mainly based on how many Quranic recitations the subject officer should know by heart, and reinforced by his routine of blocking upward movement of officers who did not say their prayers. Aziz ends the chapter by, inappropriately, inserting a long rambling poem—not by Faiz this time, but by himself, in English. Aziz’s habit of rational disconnection perhaps became vaguely known to him later on when he writes: “Why am I full of contradiction? Why can’t I be balanced? Then I console myself with the thought that a pendulum has a balance too; what use is balance that is static and frozen. Real balance is in movement. One should be flying back and forth on a swing.”

As a soldier, Aziz is forgivably worshipping of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, but is rough in his condemnation of antinuclear peaceniks—who “take money”—for attacking the bomb. His explanation for having violated the basic rules of nuclearization with the Kargil operation is unconvincing, probably because of his weak control of the Urdu idiom rather than reasoning. He goes on to claim Pakistan’s bomb as the bomb of the Muslim world and accepts the West’s reference to it as the Islamic Bomb. (He, of course, ignores Iran, where the Islamic Bomb of Pakistan caused alarm; and might ignore now the alarm the Iranian bomb has raised among Arab states across the Gulf.)

Aziz’s meditations on the media fly in the face of all theory about the connection of freedom of expression with a strong private sector in the national economy under a democratic constitution. He relates media freedom to another conspiracy, hatched by the West, to undermine Pakistan’s civilizational foundations and replace them with a “satanic system” through injections of money into a media marketplace where “journalism is business.”

He opposed the Kargil operation, which posited that after Pakistan has cut India off from Siachen and internationalized the dispute, New Delhi will be forced to cough up Kashmir. But he is tough on trade with India—which, he writes, “Americans keep pressuring Pakistan to allow”—because it would be a first step toward saying farewell to Kashmir. He

thinks politicians who promote trade with India are crippled in their thinking by their narrow political interests. He doesn’t bother to analyze how India has handled its own Kashmir dispute with China and allowed bilateral trade without damaging itself while growing at the rate of 8 percent of GDP.

Far from being trained as a disciplined military thinker, Aziz insists that Pakistan should focus on the grand conspiracy behind America’s imperialist dominance of the world. He knows that the theory is airy-fairy, but proclaims that a large number of people around the globe believe it: “The world order is not running by itself, it is being run according to a secret plan by a powerful secret organization that has first conquered global banking, followed by the media and entertainment. This plan is being worked out with the help of the United Kingdom, the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, the funded think tanks and their intellectuals, big corporations, and reputable universities.”

FOLLOWING PROTOCOLS

Perhaps the most interesting nugget in the book is Aziz’s reference to the “eye of Dajjal” on the U.S. dollar bill. He believes that this symbolizes the grand conspiracy set afoot by the Freemasons and many powerful families in league with American neocons. He thinks that whatever is happening in the world is in line with the Jewish conspiracy outlined in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that surfaced in Europe in the early 20th century to rouse people into a fit of anti-Semitism and resultant holocaust. By another strange leap of logic, Aziz thinks that the American imperium was following the program of world domination through a shameless pursuit of sensual pleasure. “Only the Quran stands in the way of this satanic way of life,” he writes.

The former general is falling back on an elaborate campaign unleashed in Pakistan in 1995 against the New World Order proclaimed by an American president after the first Gulf War. A pamphlet, The Pyramid, the Global System, and Control Mechanisms, circulating in Pakistan had referred to the “one-eyed pyramid on the left side of the one-dollar bill,” calling the seal a deeply laid Jewish-American conspiracy to dominate the world. The eye on the note was called “The Eye of Lucifer,” also designated as the eye of the antichrist Dajjal in the Muslim belief system.

How Long This Silence is in bad need of good editing, with special emphasis on style and removal of irrelevant matter passed off as inspiring verse. Faiz, who stood for a secular and pluralist Pakistan, may be spinning like a lathe in his grave seeing the use Aziz has made of his works to promote his own patently irrational and unrealistic worldview. (Aziz asserts that Pakistan is still secular even after the establishment of the Federal Shariat Court under a Constitution declaring Pakistan an Islamic state.)

The book has been welcomed in Pakistan by an anti-America, anti-Musharraf, and Taliban-frightened media. The author has been lionized for his “bravery” to speak the truth. The book has photographs of an adolescent Shahid Aziz in tight pants and pointed shoes,

growing up normally, before the Army and undigested religion happened to him.

By Khalid Ahmed (Courtesy Newsweek Pakistan)

February 22, 2013

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