On a miserably wet and gloomy day recently, the visiting British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, abandoned his helicopter in Lahore and drove to Gujrat on the Grand Trunk Road to be with his long-distance constituents. Mr Straw has 25,000 Muslims in his constituency in the UK, many of whom hail from the Gujrat region in Pakistan. “I wake up every day to the muezzin’s call for prayer”, he joked, “there’s a mosque and a madrassa in my neighbourhood”. So he also took time out to visit a local madrassa in Gujrat. That’s saying something, isn’t it? Compare this with how it works in Pakistan.
Dr Shazia Khalid was raped on the premises of the Sui hospital where she worked. Her civilian colleagues and employer, no less than the military security institution tasked with site-protection, all actively connived to conceal the crime. The media was barred from talking to her. The local police was obstructed from investigation. The main accused, an army officer, was not detained and interrogated. Far from it. He was actually protected by his institution until the situation became untenable. Even now, the official military spokesman is mealy mouthed about the detention and interrogation of the accused.
Why wasn’t a thorough and transparent inquiry ordered swiftly at the highest level to establish guilt or innocence? If a civilian had been charged instead of an army officer, rightly or wrongly, the law would surely have taken its quick toll. But that’s not the way it works in our “democracy”. The military is innocent unless proven guilty and civilians are guilty unless proven innocent. Ask any wretched cop who has as much as dared to challenge a khaki on the road, and he will tell you that he got a black eye and a suspension from service for his efforts, thank you very much.
The issue, of course, is not about culpability or righteousness. It is about accountability. To be sure, the military is deadly serious about accountability and indiscipline within its ranks. But it is not prepared to submit to the rules of accountability by civilians in a democracy. Of all the specific accountability or ehtesaab laws framed in this country by civilian or military-controlled parliaments since 1995, every one explicitly excludes senior military officers from its ambit. The military insists its internal accountability mechanisms are sufficiently daunting for the purpose. This is true. But the same argument could be flogged for civil servants whose service rules are equally uncompromising. Yet the latter are fair game and the former are not for the National Accountability Bureau. And that is not just because NAB is a civilian outfit governed by civilian laws but headed by a military man. It’s because that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The same sort of attitude is apparent in other areas of governance. When a civilian senator recently rose in the House to ask why the government had only now woken up to a violation of the Indus Waters Treaty by India over the Baglihar Dam when construction on the dam started way back in 2000, another senator, a military general and former DG-ISI to boot, castigated his colleague by accusing civilian governments of negligence while India had been engaged in constructing a couple of other controversial dams in the past. One might have thought that such a matter of national consequence should have been resolved without resorting to finger pointing, but no, Pakistan must be one of the unlucky few countries in the world where the “us versus them” civil-military syndrome is alive and kicking.
It is unfortunate that a national tragedy triggered by the collapsing dams in Balochistan in which hundreds of lives have been lost has not occasioned a ruthless accountability of the construction companies and engineers who built the dams as part of the federal government’s plans to open up the coastline and lay down the infrastructure of Gwadar. Surely it shouldn’t matter whether civilian contractor and military companies designed and built the dams. What matters is that they should be held publicly accountable for willful criminality. But nothing of the sort has been ordered. Instead, the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, has deemed fit to accuse the media of unnecessarily “playing up” the devastation in Balochistan and feeding its sense of deprivation. Of course, the allegation is totally misplaced. The media has in equal measure front paged the heroic efforts of the jawans and officers of the armed forces in shouldering the relief campaign, no less than the personal anguish and concern of the military president and civilian prime minister of Pakistan.
On another tangent, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, the military’s blue-bearded but absent civilian on the National Security Council, is rather equivocal about “family planning”. He says that, despite their deterrence value in controlling population growth, condoms should not be sold because they may be used for illicit sex. By the same criterion, then, we should dispense with the military and nuclear weapons because they can be used for warring. This is how we slide from the sublime to the ridiculous when we try and unravel the contours of civil-military relations in Pakistan.