Abstract
The creation of an army loyal to the state is one of the most important institutional tasks of post-colonial leaders. But how do novice political leaders develop the capacity to subordinate the armed forces to the authority of state institutions? This essay explains alternative methods of formulating post-colonial civil–military relations and explains why four states – India, Pakistan, Ghana, and Tanzania – took such different routes of institutional development. I make two arguments. Firstly, building armed forces that willingly acquiesce to state authority is always a critical issue of regime change – whether to democracy or some other form of government – though it is more difficult to accomplish in some contexts than others. Secondly, the political and socioeconomic contexts in which armies must be built are very different and thus pose dissimilar challenges and tasks to those crafting new armies and civil–military relations. I will assess the power of several variables to explain the disparate outcomes of the four cases: the quality of political leadership and leaders’ approach to the armed forces, the strength of political institutions, ethno-religious and regional policies, civilian control mechanisms, military–societal relations, and foreign influence.
Keywords
Introduction
How does a new state build an army? How do novice political leaders develop the capacity to subordinate the army to the authority of state institutions? The answer to these questions is complex and depends primarily on what political context is one’s starting point. Clearly, the challenges of building military establishments are different for states that are emerging from, say, colonialism, military rule, or state-socialism. Moreover, within each of these categories there may be enormous disparities between individual cases owing to a large number of variables, such as the quality of political leadership, levels of socioeconomic development, ethno-religious relations, regional disparities, and the international environment.
In this essay, I explain why civil–military relations developed differently in four newly independent post-colonial states. I will contrast the experiences of two countries each from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the South Asian context India and Pakistan practically offered themselves as case studies given their similar historical background of imperial rule and their drastically different developmental trajectories. In Africa I selected countries that were also predominantly colonized by Britain to enhance comparability with the South Asian cases: Tanzania, which had never been subjected to military rule, and Ghana, which endured a variety of praetorian governments. Assessing the entire post-colonial era would be lengthy and unnecessary, but a sufficiently long time-span must be observed to identify patterns. The year 1979 is a convenient cut-off point for both African states: it marked the end of Tanzania’s war against Uganda, while in Ghana a counter-coup and the end of a second stretch of military rule gave way, albeit briefly, to a third attempt at civilian governance. My coverage of India ends in 1975 when the handling of the “Emergency” confirmed, yet again, its generals’ lack of political ambition. In the case of Pakistan the end point will be 1977, when General Zia-ul-Haq’s coup overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civilian regime.
I make two arguments. Firstly, building armed forces that willingly acquiesce to state authority is always a critical issue of regime change – whether to democracy or some other form of government – although it is more difficult to accomplish in some contexts than others. Secondly, the political and socioeconomic contexts in which armies must be built are very different and thus pose dissimilar challenges and tasks to those crafting new armies and civil–military relations. I will assess the power of several variables to explain the disparate outcomes of the four cases: the quality of political leadership and its approach to the armed forces, the strength of political institutions, ethno-religious and regional policies, civilian control mechanisms, military–societal relations, and foreign influence.
This essay has three parts. The first briefly considers the colonial armies, the starting point of the paper, and looks at the native portion of the armed forces at the time of independence. The second part summarizes the patterns of military politics in the four countries during the periods under consideration. The third and longest section of the paper explains the reasons for their different experiences.
The British legacy
Few imperial powers succeeded in leaving behind such durable impact on their subject peoples as the British did in India – much of which had been under British rule by the 1770s – and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan. That bureaucracies and large organizations are resistant to change is a truism but it is a testimony to the quality of British military training and institution-building that after more than six decades of independence no other Indian or Pakistani organization retains as much of its British origins as the armed forces. The British India Army (BIA) originated in the army first created by the British East India Company to protect its personnel and property. After the Mutiny of 1857, the colonizers changed their personnel policies and paid more attention to the “divide-and-rule” principle. 1 During World War II nearly two million Indians were fighting with the British in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East (James, 1994: 507). The BIA played a critical role in handling the sporadic rioting, civil unrest, non-cooperation and resistance from Mohandas Gandhi and the Congress Party during the war; its Indian officers and non-commissioned officer (NCOs) did not participate in the struggle for their country’s independence, which put them in a curious position once it was achieved.
As in India, the British presence in West Africa was dictated by commercial interest. In the Gold Coast, the Empire’s formal relationship began with the granting of trading rights by the Bond of 1844 (Assensoh and Alex-Assensoh, 2001: 2). At independence, Ghana inherited a reasonably well-developed physical infrastructure, particularly in the coastal areas, a superior body of indigenous civil servants, and a thin segment of well-educated natives (Shils, 1962: 38). Tanzania was colonized by the Germans as Deutsch Ostafrika in the late 19th century; it changed masters when the British took over the territory they renamed Tanganyika in 1920. Following World War II, Tanganyika became the largest of the United Nations’ Trust Territories and remained under London’s administration until independence. Unlike Ghana, resource-poor Tanganyika was not slated for colonial development: in 1961 85% of the adult population was illiterate and there were only two trained engineers and 12 doctors in the entire country (Ndembwike, 2008: 121). Notwithstanding its relative advantage – compared to Tanganyika, that is – Ghana, too, had a “pitifully small stock of professional and technical experts” (Nkrumah, 1968: 65).
The armed forces of British-ruled West Africa trace their origins to the amalgamation of units from the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia in 1897 to form the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF). In 1901 the Gold Coast Regiment was constituted in which all officers and most senior NCOs continued to be British. The beginnings of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in East Africa go back to the days of chartered companies during the earliest days of the British conquest. The KAR was – according to an early 20th-century writer – “a normal instrument of the civilized authority, never intended to take part in anything but localized operations against a savage or at most a semi-savage” (Lloyd-Jones, 1926: 42). Between the two world wars the colonial armies in Africa were little more than a loosely organized and military-based gendarmerie (Luanda and Mwanjabala, 1993: 11). Nearly half-a-million Africans fought in World War II: the roughly 75,000 from the Gold Coast and Tanganyika served first in East Africa (particularly against the Italians in Abyssinia) and then against the Japanese in India and Burma. For many of them the war presented the first opportunity to learn English, master new skills, and to encounter other countries and cultures. World War II also boosted the education and socialization of a small but important segment of Africans, who often became leaders of the independence struggle and then the government of their countries.
Several attributes of the British military establishment influenced, to varying degrees, its successor forces in Asia and Africa. Although the British spent far less time in the African countries we are concerned with than in South Asia and had invested much less effort into building African armies than the BIA, some of their basic policies were similar.
Continued service of former colonial officers in all four countries’ newly independent militaries was another, important British legacy. Owing to the shortage of high-ranking officers, both Pakistan and India employed British personnel for more than a decade. At independence Pakistan’s 150,000-man army needed 4000 officers but there were only 2500; to fill this void, the government retained 500 British officers and accelerated the promotion of native officers to fill higher ranks (Cheema, 1990: 80). The first native Indian Chief of the Naval Staff assumed office only in April 1958 with the retirement of his predecessor, Vice Admiral Stephen Hope Carlill (Narain, 1999: 261). Curiously, in the 1947–1948 Indo-Pakistani War British generals were commanding both sides.
The British policy of the slow Africanization of the officer corps was justified with the poor preparation of the natives and was enabled by nationalist politicians in the Gold Coast and Tanganyika who – unlike the Indian Congress Party that pressured the colonial governments as early as the 1920s to increase the number of Indians in the BIA – took little interest in the composition of the colonial armies. The last British active duty officers only left the Ghanaian army in September 1961, when President Kwame Nkrumah ordered them (Chief of Defense Staff General Henry Alexander, 80 officers, and a 120 NCOs) out of the country just before the visit of Queen Elizabeth II, presumably to impress upon her the sovereignty of her former colony (Baynham, 1988: 109). Their colleagues in the re-named Tanganyika Rifles left only in 1964.
Military politics from independence to the 1970s
How did the newly independent states fare from the perspective of civil–military relations? A cursory glance suggests two divergent paths: military subordination to civilian authority in India and Tanzania in contrast to recurrent military rule in Pakistan and Ghana. Taking a little closer look at our cases, however, suggests four distinctive outcomes.
India
On Independence Day, 15 August 1947, the government of India adopted the collaborationist army – that is, the Indian component of the BIA – as its national military force and with it accepted the attendant problems of legitimacy and trust (Dasgupta, 2001: 94). Partly because the British kept the BIA apart from Indian society, its native-born officers and soldiers proved generally reliable, quelling riots and fighting nationalists. Still, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the rest of the political leadership agreed early on that India needed stability and an effective and disciplined military force, and there was no alternative to the army in place. In any case, virtually all Indian officers in the BIA were young and posed no political threat.
The retention of the native component of the colonial army is most unusual in post-colonial states. Independence movements ordinarily had their own liberation army that, once sovereignty was achieved, served as the nucleus of the new military. In liberation armies, however, officers tended to have highly developed political views and were used to voicing these views. Perhaps if Nehru and the new Indian leadership had been interested in recruiting the remnants of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army – which wanted to overthrow the British Raj with Japanese assistance during World War II – then the new Indian Army would have been less apolitical. But Nehru and most Indian leaders – who viewed the BIA as a repressive feudal institution – wanted to hold the new army separate from society and to drastically reduce its internal policing role so prevalent under the British.
For more than six decades Indian military politics have been devoid of serious crises in spite of having weathered – without major upheavals – defeat and victory in war, ever more frequent government requests to the army to stop civil conflicts, and the military’s diminishing socioeconomic status. Some stresses did develop in the 1947–1975 period, for instance during the Sino-Indian War (1962), the Indo-Pakistani War (1971), and the Emergency (1975–1976). The theme common to all of them is that political leaders, not the military, caused them. The biggest problem, however, has been the Indian Army’s involvement in containing civilian, mostly ethno-religious, conflicts. This activity – on-going between 1947 and 1975 and even more frequent since then – has posed a major challenge to the political neutrality of the armed forces, as has been clearly demonstrated in many contexts in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Thus, it is all the more remarkable that in India the state’s control of the military has remained virtually unshaken.
Tanzania
Civil–military relations during the first three years of independence were remarkably uneventful and the army Tanganyika inherited from its colonial masters had changed little aside from its name. The command structure continued to be dominated by British commanders; native soldiers could wonder with good cause whether they served in the army of their own sovereign state. Prime Minister Julius Nyerere’s confidence in the armed forces was shattered in January 1964 when two battalions of the Tanganyika Rifles mutinied. The two main objectives of the disgruntled soldiers were more pay and accelerated replacement of British officers by Tanzanians. Some participants appropriately referred to the events as “an industrial paystrike” (Luanda, 1993: 105–106). Its objective was not to overthrow the regime: the only political action of the mutineers was their two trips to the State House in Dar es Salaam for the purpose of seeking an audience with the president to air their grievances.
The insurgence – it was quelled by 60 British marines, at the request of the Tanganyika government – was a humiliating lesson for the ruling elites, as it revealed their continued dependence on their colonial masters. The mutiny is most conclusively explained by internal factors. A few years after gaining independence, the fragile and poorly institutionalized state was particularly vulnerable to military rebellions. Internal order and public safety issues had not yet been sorted out and the state had not yet assumed full control of its military establishment. In such environments, even mild and merely “existential” demands from the armed forces could and did generate public disorder easily (Bienen, 1978: 140–142; First, 1970: 411–465; Parsons, 2003). For Tanganyika, the rebellion sounded an alarm bell indicating that the army was strong enough to create havoc and revealed the lacking capacity of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – the dominant political party – to mobilize the mass support that might have contained the mutiny (Pratt, 1976: 179).
In April 1964 the United Republic of Tanzania was formed with the unification of Tanganyika and Zanzibar and the 1967 Arusha Declaration committed the country to a socialist development. The institutional design of Tanzanian civil–military relations was very similar to that of other socialist states. The party’s authority trumped that of the government – the two had a symbiotic relationship – and the legislature enjoyed no autonomous decision-making power. One of the main missions of the renamed Tanzanian People’s Defense Force (TPDF) was to ensure domestic political stability; it was, after all, the army of the party-state. When necessary, the military intervened in domestic politics as the servant of the government; in the late 1960s, for instance, the army broke the occasionally violent resistance of farmers to resettlement in ujamaa villages (Pinkney, 1997: 121). The army as an institution was also a reliable adversary of post-1964 coup plotters. Minor coup attempts occurred in 1969, 1972, and 1982, but they were non-violent, poorly planned, and enjoyed virtually no public support.
Ghana
After independence Ghana’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, wanted to build a large army to put military muscle behind his ambitions for pan-African liberation. Once the British trainers left, the message to keep the army out of politics no longer had a forceful advocate in Ghana. Like many intellectuals in former colonies, the Ghanaian political elite were disdainful of military officers, ignorant about security issues, and their policies harmed both the army and Ghana. The military as an institution disliked Nkrumah’s policies and despised the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the widespread corruption, and the “capricious exercise of power” by the president who ran the country “as if it were his own personal property” (Pinkney, 1972: 1).
By early 1966 the military was fed up with Nkrumah’s dictatorial rule and ruinous economic policies. The army and its leadership was hurt by the president’s divisive schemes, particularly his favoritism of politically loyal officers in promotions and assignments, retirement of competent generals who refused to flatter him, cutbacks in amenities and services for the regular armed forces, and threats and rumors regarding deployments in support of risky foreign adventures (Decalo, 1976: 19). In other words, the conditions preceding the first military coup in 1966 that unseated Nkrumah and his regime comprised a textbook case of military takeovers. The coup’s objectives included the rehabilitation of prominent officers whom Nkrumah shunted aside, indicating that esprit de corps issues were also important coup motivators (Wiking, 1983: 87). Most importantly, the conspirators truly believed that they were ridding Ghana of an authoritarian leader. By any measure, the coup – followed by several more coups and 22 years of intermittent military rule – was remarkably popular, as most social groups enthusiastically supported the overthrow of Nkrumah’s dictatorship.
After three years of relatively progressive military rule, power was transferred to civilians in 1969. Prime Minister Kofi Busia made several major political mistakes; the most costly were alienating his erstwhile supporters, the armed forces, by imposing deep cuts in the defense budget and exacerbating the rising tide of ethnic antagonisms within the armed forces. These and other factors led to the bloodless military coup that unseated Busia’s democratically elected but underperforming government in early 1972. Seven more years of military rule – this time marked by widespread corruption and incompetence – was punctuated by counter-coups in 1979 and another brief interlude of civilian governance. Ghana’s transition to democracy commenced only 13 years later.
Pakistan
The traumatic experience of Partition, the Kashmir War, and a number of subsequent war scares had increased the Pakistani officer corps’ distress about military weaknesses and soon taught them that the exigencies of state-building overrode the old British insistence on the separation of politics and the armed forces. The army’s conviction of civilian incompetence was reinforced from early on by the frequent “aid-to-civil” missions when the civil administration called out the troops to quell sectarian riots (Shah, 2008: 18).
Already in the first years of Pakistani independence, the military played a dominant role in the state given that it was, in essence, the only formal institution that worked. In 1951, army officers in Rawalpindi, dissatisfied with the government’s moral and material support of the military in Kashmir, conspired to assassinate General Douglas Gracey, the army’s British Commander-in-Chief (CiC), and some top officials. The first successful coup in late 1958 replaced President Iskander Mirza, himself a Sandhurst-educated former general, and started Pakistan’s history of military rule (1958–1971, 1977–1988, 1999–2008).
After his relatively successful reign (1958–1969) the erstwhile Field Marshal, President Mohammed Ayub Khan, transferred power to another general, Yahya Khan, the Chief of the Army Staff, whose short-lived rule is most remembered by the December 1970 general elections – the country’s first – and the war that followed and ultimately resulted in Pakistan’s dismemberment in the following year. The discredited Yahya Khan handed power to a civilian, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the head of the Pakistan People’s Party. During Bhutto’s six years in power the military was never far from politics; indeed, his closest advisers were generals, he shared the military’s hawkish views on national security matters, and he embarked on an ambitious weapons modernization program. With the 1977 coup staged by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the army’s heavily Islamist Chief of Staff, the military once again assumed a self-appointed role as the final arbiter of politics.
In short, then, we witnessed four different trajectories of military politics. Firstly, India, an electoral democracy, established strong civilian control over the military right from independence. Secondly, soon after achieving sovereignty and having learned from the lessons of a small-scale mutiny, socialist Tanzania developed solid control of its armed forces. Thirdly, in Ghana where a different variety of African socialism took root, the military overthrew the regime and seized political control. Finally, in Pakistan the armed forces enjoyed a dominant political position from the moment of independence. How can we explain these disparities?
Explaining the variation in military politics
Political leaders and their approach to the armed forces
The quality of political leadership and the approach politicians adopted toward the armed forces may well be one of the most important variables that explain the particular turn of civil–military relations in the four countries in this study. From the perspective of civilian control, the robust leadership in Delhi and Dar es Salaam was very successful. India and Tanzania were fortunate that their foundational leaders retained their political authority and often their personal popularity. Pakistan and Ghana were not.
India benefited from experienced and brilliant leaders like Nehru and others who represented stability and continuity in the country’s formative years. Nehru and his closest colleagues had little interest in defense matters and no strategic vision. He famously said that “India doesn’t need an army, it needs a police force. We have no enemies.” 3 His cabinet’s attitude toward the military was likened to that of “a teetotaler who had inherited a brewery” (Kundu, 1998: 82). The government did its utmost to prevent military interference in political matters – efforts were redoubled after the 1958 coup in Pakistan owing to unfounded worries about India’s own army – through a number of mutually reinforcing regulations, arrangements, and practices. In terms of approach to civil–military relations, India actually erred on the side of marginalizing military elites, to the extent that a precious resource – a large fount of expert strategic knowledge and advice – went untapped. This was a mistake for which India has paid a heavy price, most manifestly in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.
Tanzania had generally poor preparations for independence but it did enjoy a considerable advantage in having Julius Nyerere as its leader. Nyerere founded the TANU in 1954 and was president from 1964 to 1985. He detested corruption in all its forms and was one of the few African leaders who left office voluntarily and whose memory is surrounded by genuine respect and affection. Nyerere believed that communist China’s developmental model was most suitable for Tanzania’s conditions and used the single-party system to govern society more or less benevolently, running an authoritarian state in which political opposition had no place. Initially, many Tanzanian politicians argued – similarly to their Indian colleagues – that the country had no enemy; therefore, national defense was not a priority. In response to the crystallization of an activist foreign policy that put a premium on aiding liberation movements, in the mid-1960s the military began to receive serious attention from the government.
Perhaps no other African country started independence with more promise than Ghana, but within a decade its economy was wrecked and its international reputation was in tatters, mostly due to Kwame Nkrumah’s ill-advised and irresponsible policies. Nkrumah’s conception of socialism was also influenced by Mao’s China but, unlike in Tanzania, in Ghana the emphasis of economic development was placed on “total industrialization” with a corresponding neglect of agricultural production. 4 By 1966 Ghana was bankrupt, unable to feed its people who were far worse off than they were even a few years before (Edgerton, 2002: 149). The increasingly megalomaniacal Nkrumah declared himself “President for Life” in 1964 and led a regime characterized by massive corruption that only expanded popular support for its removal (Edgerton, 2002: 149; Mbaku, 2004: 131–134). Nkrumah’s approach to the armed forces was underscored by two principles: subordinating the military to his own personal authority and utilizing it as a tool of his strategy of African liberation. In 1960, he committed the army to aid nationalists in the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo in a move that deteriorated his already precarious relations with his military (Baynham, 1988: 128).
Many of the circumstances surrounding the creation of Pakistan were unfortunate and saddled the new country with tremendous burdens. The country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, died within a year of independence, while its first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated at a political rally in 1951 – one of the first in a long line of Pakistani politicians to be murdered. This is not to suggest that they were necessarily wise politicians – Liaquat, for instance, in more than four years as premier made no serious attempt at writing a constitution – but to point out the striking contrast in terms of leadership with India. Pakistan became rudderless soon after independence, at a time when political direction, constancy, and steadfastness were most needed.
Several other issues having to do with the Partition of British India in 1947 suggested that the military would be the quintessential institutional actor in Pakistani politics. Firstly, there were many disagreements between India and Pakistan regarding the hastily prepared Partition. The feud regarding the state of Jammu and Kashmir could not be resolved and eventually led to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948. Secondly, Muslim suspicions about Hindu intentions were only reinforced by India’s handling of the division of British India’s assets. Delhi’s inequitable treatment extended to the BIA’s military equipment that was to be divided between the two successor states – for instance, only 3% of the Pakistani portion of 165,000 tons of ordnance stores was delivered by April 1948 and none of its allocation of 249 tanks was ever transferred (Cheema, 2001: 18). Thirdly, in view of the above, perhaps it is not surprising that from the beginning, Pakistani elites believed that India was an adversary, out to harm their country, and therefore it was imperative to turn Pakistan into a fortress against India. In sum, as Husain Haqqani noted, “The dominance of the military in Pakistan’s internal affairs is a direct outcome of the circumstances during the early years of statehood” (Haqqani, 2005: 313).
Institutional strength
It is hard not to notice the positive correlation between strong political institutions and effective civilian control of the armed forces. The British, notwithstanding the many adverse effects of their reign, established a number of institutions indispensable to democratic governance: an independent judiciary, a capable and relatively upright civil service, political parties, and apolitical police and armed forces. The institutional inheritance of former British colonies depended on two factors: the length and, for lack of a better term, the “intensity” of British rule. The longer and the more involved the reign of the British, the more sophisticated network of political institutions they left behind. Of the four countries in this essay, it was India where the British ruled the longest time and the most intensively.
The state structures the British developed stayed in India proper after the Partition; in terms of political and administrative infrastructure Pakistan started with little more than nothing. The seat of the new Pakistani government in early 1948 was a row of tents in contrast to the palatial administrative buildings of Delhi. The vast majority of the BIA’s physical assets were also located in India. The two former colonies in Africa faired considerably worse in terms of political institutions: firstly, the British were there for much shorter periods of time and were more interested in the short-term exploitation of natural resources than in long-term investment. Of the two, Ghana had taken over a relatively well-developed bureaucracy, while the British institutional imprint on Tanganyika was minimal.
Some states succeeded in building and improving their political institutional structures, while others failed. In all of these countries the most important organizations were the dominant political parties. India’s Congress Party was founded in 1885, more than six decades prior to independence. Led by the Nehru-Gandhi family, it has been the country’s foremost political party ever since. For most of the post-colonial period, it enjoyed widespread popularity, solid financing, and encountered no serious challenges to its political supremacy. The government in Delhi built upon the extant institutional structure and created numerous new ministries, governmental agencies, and public institutions, such as schools and hospitals.
Despite its crushing early institutional deficit, Tanzania, like many other socialist states, was quite adept at public mobilization and the creation of an institutional network. TANU was officially committed to the building of a socialist society as early in 1962 (Nyerere, 1968: vii). Nyerere and his colleagues built executive, legislative, and judicial institutions along with a bureaucracy, basically from scratch. Nkrumah in Ghana was similarly enthusiastic in developing the political institutions of a one-party state. The new organizations he established included the Presidential Guard, a privileged parallel military force in 1960, whose existence was a direct threat to the regular army’s professional autonomy and self-image and intensified the officer corps’ deep-seated resentment of Nkrumah’s regime.
Armies and bureaucracies can become training grounds for modernizers if they think they can strengthen their institutions (Kautsky, 1972: 102). That is precisely what happened in Ghana where there were many more British-educated military personnel than in Tanzania. In Pakistan the only functioning state institution at independence was the educated, disciplined, and ambitious (officer corps of the) armed forces. The rule of the general-turned-president Mohammed Ayub Khan (1958–1969) was remarkable for its relative success in promoting socioeconomic development. Ayub was a capable institution builder, even if his objective was the concentration and expansion of his powers (Huntington, 1968: 251).
Ethno-regional policies
All colonial forces were impacted by the “martial races” conception of the British to some degree or another. After independence, the new states – all multi-ethnic societies and composed of diverse regions – dealt with ethno-religious and regional issues quite differently. Governments that attempted to alleviate ethnic tensions tended to promote socioeconomic development and to control their armed forces more effectively.
Soon after independence India abolished caste-identity as the organizing principle of the armed forces. The units of the two relatively young services, the air force and the navy, were completely integrated but not all ethic-, religion-, or caste-based units in the army were terminated. Opponents argued that people from similar backgrounds fought better together and sacrificed more readily for one another than in mixed units. In any case, only a few single-group regiments remained; these units go back a long way – some trace their histories to the 18th century – and are the repositories of tradition and history and are often characterized by extraordinarily high morale and pride in service. 5 The government did its best to alleviate remaining tensions between Sikhs, Hindus, and the relatively few Muslims, and “[w]ith its multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural composition, the army [had become] a shining example of the national goal of achieving ‘unity in diversity’” (Kanwal, 2008: 12).
In Pakistan the Muslim identity of military personnel was supposed to prevail over historical and cultural differences. Because officially all Muslims were equally eligible to serve in the military, the ethnic imbalances in the Pakistani army were all the more apparent. Bengalis, long considered unsuited for military life, suffered harsh discrimination under this system, which fueled their drive for independence. Even though they were Pakistan’s majority population, in the 1960s they made up only 7% of the army (Haqqani, 2005: 61). For many years, Pakistani officers were taught that the country’s “core area” was Punjab and the other regions were merely “invasion routes,” something that could not but increase the defiance of Baluchi, Bengali, Sindhi, and other non-Punjabi citizens (Cohen, 1984: 45). With the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, the discrimination against those of Baluchi and Sindhi backgrounds appeared even sharper. Political activists from Baluchistan and the Sindh had often called the Pakistani armed forces the instrument of the Punjabi-Pashtun ruling elite, not of the federation of Pakistan (Sattar, 2001: 394).
Although both African leaders drew the wrong conclusion from their own tribal backgrounds, their ethnic policies could not have been more different. In Tanzania the concept of ujamaa (“familyhood” in Swahili) served to justify the forcible relocation of millions of peasants to “ujamaa villages.” The idea behind ujamaa was, in fact, deeply flawed: Nyerere extrapolated from his own tribal experience – his Zanaki tribe was well-known for its egalitarian spirit – which was in stark contrast to that of most other tribes, where communal ownership did not exist. Still, Nyerere must be recognized for pretty much eliminating the “ethnic factor” from the armed forces as well as from politics in general in a complex tribal context. In an ethnically volatile region he built a nation out of over 120 diverse tribes. The magnitude of this achievement may be best appreciated when considering the many other societies in Africa and elsewhere ravaged by ethnic conflict. Tanzanians traditionally value peace and stability above all, and Nyerere’s success in delivering these must not be underestimated. 6
In contrast, tribal relations in Ghana frequently became fraught with tension. Interestingly, it was not military rulers who mishandled this issue but the civilian governments of especially Nkrumah and to a lesser extent Busia who, for their political ends, manipulated and exploited tribal communities. Nkrumah’s roots in one of the tiniest groups, the Nzima of southwest Ghana, predisposed him to advocate intensive political centralization with sharply negative consequences for the larger ethnic groups, particularly the influential Ashanti of Central Ghana, who strongly opposed his regime (Andekson, 1976: 254; Shils, 1962: 31). 7 After 1961 Nkrumah misused the armed forces to ensure that tribes whose support he enjoyed would improve their position in the military. 8 In addition, the army was increasingly tribalized, as Nzima tribesmen and members of supportive northern tribes were appointed to fill sensitive posts in the defense-security establishment. The regime also introduced the practice of simultaneously appointing two or more persons of different ethnic backgrounds to positions of overlapping responsibility in order to encourage rivalries and mistrust between people (Andekson, 1976: 264).
Ghanaian generals were unusual among the military rulers of sub-Saharan Africa insofar as they had compiled a record of consistently trying to reduce tribal tensions in the armed forces and, when they were in government, in society at large. The first military regime attempted to reverse the discriminatory ethnic policies pursued by Nkrumah. It was the civilian Prime Minister Kofi Busia, who came to power after the army returned to the barracks in 1969, who again provoked ethnic antagonisms within the armed forces as he deliberately replaced Ewe officers by Akans in command positions (Baynham, 1988: 262). After the 1972 coup that uprooted Busia, the generals succeeded in alleviating ethnic problems, as tribal groups gained more balanced representation in the military.
Mechanisms of civilian control
How civilian politicians attempt to ensure that soldiers would be loyal to the constitution or, in a non-democratic regime, to them or to their party, may be the most important variable in civil–military relations. In this respect, too, the four former British colonies had profoundly different experiences.
India
The Indian government’s objective was to maximize its control of the armed forces and implement what Samuel Huntington called “subjective control.” One of the cornerstones of Indian military training is that the military and politics do not mix; during the period in question junior officers were actually taught to be political illiterates (Cohen, 2001: 184). The position of CiC, theretofore the chief of the army and the main source of military advice for the government, was abolished on Independence Day in concert with Nehru’s view that in a democracy the head of state should be the supreme commander.
The heads of the three services – the army, navy, and the air force – were placed on the same level and rank, signifying a major blow to the prestige and influence of the army, by far the largest and oldest service. The three service chiefs were now reporting to the civilian defense minister who took over the previous role of the CiC. In this new system the CiC designation made no sense; in 1955 the heads of services were renamed the Chief of the Army/Navy/Air Force Staff. For decades, the military had lobbied in vain for the appointment of a fourth chief – the Chief of the Defense Staff (CDS) – something similar to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States. From the government’s perspective the introduction of a CDS would go against the grain of earlier regulations, as it would almost certainly increase the influence of the army (the two other services would have little hope of having one of their own selected).
The 1950 Indian Constitution vested supreme command of the armed forces in the president, but the de facto control over the government was the prime minister’s responsibility. The government’s top forum dealing with defense issues was the Cabinet’s Defense Committee, whose members included the prime minister and the ministers of defense, finance, and home (interior). This body, assisted by a large civilian bureaucracy, made the principal decisions regarding defense and security. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defense conducts several reviews annually of different areas of the armed forces. The actual reviews are carried out by civil servants; most committee members, in any case, have modest knowledge of military affairs. The one constant feature of the institutional evolution of the defense-security sector had been the continually shrinking influence of the top brass.
From early on, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had been dominated by civilians. MoD bureaucrats received a great deal of decision-making authority, which allowed them to reduce the access of uniformed personnel to politicians. There was no formal interaction between military leaders and members of parliament except in cases when a legislative committee asked generals to testify (Dasgupta, 2001: 106). MoD bureaucrats intervened even in relatively minor military matters: their approval was necessary for all promotions above the rank of major.
Pakistan
The manner in which the Partition took place, the unresolved issues regarding territory, the Indian government’s failure to honor its pledge to deliver Pakistan’s share of war materials, and the 1947–1948 Indo-Pakistani War, practically ensured an outsized political role for the Pakistan Army. In terms of socioeconomic development, Pakistan was essentially a feudal country at the time of independence. Given the absence of strong civilian leadership and functional political institutions, and the fact that the armed forces were the only well-managed sizable organization, it is hardly surprising that whatever civilian control over the military existed was largely pro forma.
During the first few years of independent statehood it was actually the army’s British leadership who exercised some control over the armed forces by restraining the ambitions of politically inclined Pakistani officers and continuing to apply rigorous promotion standards (Nawaz, 2008: 79). Liaquat Khan, the country’s first prime minister who concurrently served as defense minister, was a weak leader who possessed neither the authority nor the ambition to bring the military under civilian oversight. His successor, Khwaja Nazimuddin, was embattled by regional conflicts and power struggles between and within major political and religious organizations. He resorted to imposing martial law and calling in the army to re-establish order in a deeply divided and increasingly restless society. The military, in any event, remained the only widely popular institution owing to, among other things, its effectiveness in assisting the population following natural disasters. Furthermore, the growing frequency and magnitude of the army’s aid-to-the-civil-power activities established it as a major force in the national political scene.
In traditional societies the military often plays three functions: maintains the established order, provides a channel for upward mobility, and spearheads modernization (Organski, 1965: 49–51). In time, Pakistani soldiers fulfilled all of these missions. They were more disciplined, deeply patriotic, and especially early on, better educated than civilians. The primary motivation in the Pakistani generals’ drive for political power was not self-enrichment but guarding the national interest. Although they were not responsible for achieving independence, they did play a crucial role in keeping the country together. 9 Circumstances practically forced them to abandon the “military-stays-out-of-politics” thesis of the BIA and become the essential state-building institution and the country’s political administrator.
Ghana
During the first few post-independence years, the government trusted the military’s autonomous professionalism and based civil–military relations on the Huntingtonian concept of objective control. Oversight of the Ghanaian Armed Forces was primarily exercised by the defense ministry, which was divided into a civil wing, headed by a Chief Director, and a military wing, administered by the Chief of Defense Staff. For coordination and cost reduction purposes, joint headquarters for the three services were established in 1962. As Nkrumah’s regime had become increasingly dictatorial and socioeconomic conditions had continued to deteriorate, he realized that the support of the armed forces could not be taken for granted. Therefore, as in other state-socialist polities, the regime gradually extended subjective control over the military, devising several mechanisms to assure its quiescence and loyalty.
The Armed Forces Bill of 1961 aimed at reining in the troops, while the Security Service Act of 1963 consolidated what some observers called a “counter-military system.” 10 Membership in the Convention People’s Party and identification with the party-state became basic criteria of hiring and promotion, Marxist–Leninist political indoctrination of armed forces personnel was given more emphasis in training and education, and all influential military officers were held under surveillance by the security apparatus. Moreover, as I noted above, the tribal backgrounds of personnel were used to foment ethnic within the armed forces.
The state created additional security and intelligence formations to spy on, compete with, and counter-balance the regular armed forces. These included a quasi-military Workers’ Brigade (conceived as an armed reserve of the Convention People’s Party (CPP)), the National Security Service, and, most importantly, the Presidential Guard. Established in 1960 as a company-sized unit, the Presidential Guards were gradually expanded and by 1966 had grown to 1150 men and 50 officers and renamed as the President’s Own Guard Regiment (Baynham, 1988: 138). 11 The Guards – like other special armies of the executive branch from Ethiopia to Iraq – were better paid and equipped than the regular forces; their commander received special training in Moscow. The existence of a privileged parallel force was a direct threat to the regular army’s professional autonomy and self-image and intensified the officer corps’ deep-seated resentment of Nkrumah’s regime. It proved also to be a double-edged sword for Nkrumah, for it was the Presidential Guards that unseated him when the state treasury could no longer disburse their salaries on time.
Tanzania
Tanzania was an exceptional case in Africa in that at a time when most African leaders grew wary of their armed forces, Nyerere developed a politically active military in order to co-opt potential opposition to one-party rule. After the 1964 Mutiny he decided that the new army had to be built around the TANU Youth League (similar to the Soviet Komsomol) and political indoctrination had to be developed as an essential component of military training. Overt politicization of the army became official policy and the principle of politically neutral troops was explicitly discarded: Nyerere wanted every soldier and officer to be active supporter of the state. Party-membership became a mandatory entrance requirement and every unit had its own party branch and political commissar who was responsible for the ideological vigor of the troops. 12 The military academy was merged with the TANU cadre school in 1977, underscoring the party’s influence on military life.
The politicization of the military went hand-in-hand with the militarization of governance; the relationship between the two has been described as “the party in the army and the army in the party” (Omari, 2003: 89–106). Not only did the party enter the army as politicians served as political commissars, but army officers routinely received appointments in party and/or state bureaucracies. During the early 1970s, for example, at times more than one-third of Nyerere’s cabinet was composed of military officers. 13 The state and party positions Tanzanian officers were transferred to were important jobs, not the kind of overwhelmingly pro-forma appointments that generals in other socialist systems received, usually as a reward for their loyalty (Barany, 1997: 22–25).
The MoD became an independent bureaucracy only in 1966; until then it was combined with foreign affairs. The minister was at times a civilian with an active-duty officer as deputy, at other times the other way around; the state also tried to balance mainland and Zanzibari politicians in leadership positions. The MoD – unlike in many other authoritarian and socialist states – always had a large contingent of civilian employees. The armed forces’ leader in peacetime was the Chief of Defense Force – in war-time his name changed to Chief of Defense Forces because then his responsibilities included overseeing a number of other services, including the police, the prison system, and the militia. The TPDF included the three conventional branches and the National Service (NS) – a semi-militarized societal organization.
To enhance its control over the armed forces, the state created paramilitary organizations, most importantly the People’s Militia. The Militia was a reservoir of people with military training and its access to weapons lessened the likelihood of the army’s political intrusion. Founded in 1963 and established as one of the components of the TPDF in the 1966 National Defense Act, the Militia provided valuable assistance to civil authorities in maintaining law and order and in combat operations during the 1978–1979 war with Uganda (Kinghazi, 2006: 28–30). Finally, the rotation of officers in and out of politics and of politicians in and out of the TPDF gravely complicated matters for would-be coup plotters.
Military and society
The experience of the four post-colonial states shows no correlation between the social distance linking the armed forces and society. The military was farthest removed from the rest of society in India, the only democratic state in our study, and was most closely integrated into society at large in Tanzania, with Pakistan and Ghana, the two praetorian states, somewhere in the middle. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani armies instituted mandatory conscription. The two African states did not either, although the NS they introduced could be argued to have some similarities with the draft.
The Indian Army’s personnel were relatively isolated from mainstream society, whereas officers and NCOs in Pakistan were much more integrated into it. Soldiers there spent as many as 200 days a year away from their units – on annual or casual leave, vacations, holidays, weekends – and during this time they returned to civilian life (Rosen, 1996: 217). Perhaps this close social proximity made the military more acceptable to the rest of society and their appearance in other – including political – roles, more palatable. Upon retirement, Pakistani officers, particularly those who achieved higher ranks, were often rewarded by lucrative jobs in the country’s large defense-related civilian sector as bureaucrats, advisors, and experts. This was by no means a widespread practice in India.
With respect to military–society relations the two African states, and especially – given its far longer-term experience – Tanzania, are more interesting. Nyerere wanted to create a positive image for the army as an integral, organic part of society. He told officers that “You are just as much citizens of the country as are farmers and fishermen. There is no reason, therefore, of refusing any citizen of the country to have a say in the politics of the country” (Mazrui, 1969: 33). His notion of citizen soldiers shared some attributes with the West German concept of Staatsbürger in Uniform.
After 1964 the regime began to search for an appropriate model of social mobilization in order to bring together young people from all geographical, economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds in order to build a sense of national identity. The NS was officially created in 1965 and became one of the key pillars of Tanzanian social development, occupying an important place between the civilian and military realms. Soon after the 1966 student demonstrations against their NS obligations, the NS was subordinated to the TPDF. From this point on joining the NS was mandatory for high school and university graduates who served for two years as a way of reimbursing the state for the cost of their education. There was no standard conscription in Tanzania, but the NS also functioned as a recruitment pool for the TPDF. In fact, many youths with lesser education, particularly from economically underprivileged areas, joined the NS with the hope of being absorbed into the armed forces (Lupogo, 2001). Even today, the ministry is called the “Ministry of Defense and National Service.”
The Ghana National Service Scheme (NSS) was first established under the 1969 (Article 179), Republican Constitution of Ghana through an Act of Parliament. It was re-established by a Military Decree in 1973. The minimum duration of the service was one year and all university graduates aged 18–40 had to participate as a way of reimbursing the state for their tertiary education. 14 The main objectives of the NSS were to provide trained manpower to supplement and improve existing levels of employment in the public sector; to make available workers for rural development and community action; and to impart re-orientation, introduction to a vigorous work culture; additional life skills; and an awareness of national and social problems requiring attention to young individuals (National Service Scheme, 2009). Within the scheme’s context, the NSS is considered a special program to provide first and foremost support for the usually neglected and most needy areas. Beyond these technical objectives, the NSS aims at instilling in the youth the sense and spirit of nation building and integration through positive programs. The NSS was much less geared toward service in the armed forces than its Tanzanian counterpart but it, too, had a military training/orientation for selected individuals.
Foreign influence
It has been argued that, all things being equal, the longer the duration of British – as opposed to other European – colonial rule, the higher the likelihood of democratic survival (Bernhard et al., 2004: 225–250; Weiner, 1987: 3–34). This argument was supported by our South Asian cases but not by the experience of the African countries. After all, the British were longer and more intensively involved in Ghana than in Tanzania, yet Ghana had to endure first Nkrumah’s repressive dictatorship and then several bouts with military rule, while Nyerere’s was a relatively benevolent and progressive regime, albeit an authoritarian one. As we have seen, owing primarily to staffing constraints, selected professional British military personnel did stay behind in all of the newly independent states for several years. The impact of foreign states on the military-security policies of these countries is important given that they were all emerging from a colonial environment, that all four of them enjoyed some – although different levels of – geostrategic significance, and that the period in question coincided with the first three decades of the Cold War.
On the opposite sides of the Cold War, India received significant supplies of war materiel from the USSR, while Pakistan had strong support from the United States. Pakistan was strongly affected by its alliance with the US that allowed its armed forces access to weapons, technology, and high-level training (Asghar Kha, 1983: 200–203). This alliance, it is important to note, was conceived to offset Pakistan’s disadvantages in resources and at no point meant that Islamabad was “pro-American.” In a similar vein, India developed close relations with the Soviet Union, but it did not mean – as many in the west thought – that Delhi was enamored with Moscow or Soviet-style communism. After 1961 Nehru – together with Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser and Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito – became a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, an international organization of states considering themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.
The two African states were less affected by superpower rivalries as they were not pivotal states in international politics. Although in certain periods they had a closer relationship to one superpower or the other, both of them managed to stick rather consistently to a policy of non-alignment while shrewdly taking advantage of opportunities to obtain aid, in whatever form – economic, military, educational, etc. – from whoever was willing to offer it. In any case, the Chinese – whose developmental model seemed more in line with African conditions – not the Soviets had become the favorite benefactors of the African liberation movements.
Both Nkrumah and Nyerere were committed Pan-Africanists although, in this respect, too, Nkrumah was far more radical. Along with the gradual widening of African unity, Nkrumah pursued the idea of a pan-African army and an African Military Command but neither his generals, nor those of other African states, were the least bit interested. 15 Tanzania supported African liberation movements and anti-apartheid forces far and wide with arms, men, training facilities, and by providing a safe haven. Both were interested in forming federations with neighboring countries: Nyerere was a proponent of an East African Federation of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda while, in 1960, Nkrumah signed a secret Ghana-Congo Union agreement that he envisaged as the first result of his grand strategy for Africa (it was never implemented).
After Nkrumah deepened his alliance with communist states, he began to send some officers to be educated at Western military academies (in Britain and Canada, primarily) and others in the Eastern Bloc (primarily in the Soviet Union). The top brass was worried that this policy would create a divided officer corps in which one part received top-notch professional training while the other acquired heavy doses of Marxist–Leninist indoctrination. As one prominent general saw it, “The saying that ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’ came to acquire a new and more vivid meaning for me when Nkrumah took his leftward turn and tried to drag the country and the Army with him” (Orcan, 1968: 15).
For Nyerere the search for the best possible developmental model for Tanzania to emulate was a conscious intellectual endeavor. In the mid-1960s, he became fascinated by Israel’s kibbutz system, as well as the broad social basis of the Israeli Defense Forces and adopted some of their components. By 1966 some Tanzanian soldiers were trained by Israelis both in Israel and at home and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) experts helped to set up what became Tanzania’s National Service Camps. The diversification of sources of officer training abroad (in Britain, Canada, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, the US, etc) was also an official policy in Tanzania in order to maintain neutrality and professional balance in the officer corps. During his long tenure, Tanzania played an important role as a “frontline state” in the international response to white supremacist regimes in southern Africa.
At the end of the day, Tanzania’s most important Cold War ally was China, although it certainly never became Beijing’s “client state.” In the military realm the Chinese system of joint control by separate political and military commanders was not copied (Tungaraza, 1998: 295). China was allowed to have the largest impact on military training because, as Nyerere famously said, “I trusted the Chinese, they could train our army which would be ours” (TPDF, 1993: 151). Ultimately, Tanzania managed to stay an autonomous actor in African politics precisely because it had no imperial patron.
Military effectiveness
The issue of the four armies’ effectiveness needs to be addressed from the perspective of how they measured up to the tasks the state asked them to carry out. The Indian Army acquitted itself creditably and for its occasional failures the political leadership not the high command was primarily responsible. For instance, owing to the policy that kept defense spending at the minimum, when China – responding to Nehru’s provocative Himalayan border policy – attacked India in 1962, the latter was woefully unprepared. To make matters worse, politicians imposed constraints on how the generals conducted the war. Defense Minister Krishna Menon and Nehru – neither had any military experience and both refused to believe that China would attack – insisted on supervising the placement of army units from individual brigades to platoons with disastrous results. When Indian troops were overrun by superior Chinese forces, Menon resigned and a competent general was rushed to the front to rally the retreating Indian forces until a cease-fire was declared (Patel, 1962: 255–259). The Indian Army also reliably executed its missions to contain and put out internal conflicts, notwithstanding the apparent bitterness of its personnel about having to engage in such activities at all.
The Pakistan Army’s merits of holding the new country together in the early years of independence are irrefutable. Not only in the 1947–1948 Indo-Pakistani war, where it received its baptism by fire, but also in the many skirmishes in Jammu and Kashmir with India and in its actions to maintain domestic stability the army performed well (Cloughley, 2006). In the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, which was the culmination of skirmishes over Kashmir, miscalculations abounded on both sides. On the Pakistani side, however, some of these blunders were political – for example, that the local population would revolt against their Indian rulers – not military in nature. Nonetheless, the Army’s leadership was faulted for indecision in battle and for exaggerating the weakness of their enemies (Cohen, 2004: 73–74, 103). Six years later, in the Indo-Pakistani war that grew out of the Bangladesh Liberation War, Pakistani forces were soundly and swiftly beaten by India’s numerically superior forces at sea, in the air, and on the ground (Paret, 1986: 802). All of the Pakistan Army’s coups were bloodless and, at least initially, popular.
Ghana and Tanzania had fewer occasions to learn about the effectiveness of their armed forces. The Ghanaian Army participated extensively in international peacekeeping operations but has not fought a war since independence. One of the main missions of the TPDF was to ensure domestic political stability; it was, after all, the army of the party-state that could be called to action to control crowds and to give assistance to the civil power, as we have seen in the cases of other former British colonies. The army as an institution was also a reliable adversary of post-1964 coup plotters in 1969 and 1972. In the 1978–1979 Uganda-Tanzania War, provoked by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, the TPDF – buoyed by extensive social support, a relatively full treasury, and more volunteers than could be enlisted – convincingly routed Ugandan government forces, hastening the demise of Amin’s regime (Mambo and Schofield, 2007: 306).
Conclusion
Civil–military relations played a crucial role in determining the political development of independent India, Pakistan, Ghana, and Tanzania. The competent and popular political leaders of India and Tanzania were able to bring the armed forces under state authority even if they used different methods to do so. Weak or corrupt politicians – as in Pakistan and Ghana – lost control of the military and ended up losing power. The inheritance of robust political institutions, in the case of India, was certainly an advantage in fitting the military into an already existing political institutional framework. Nonetheless, strong institutions could be and, as Tanzania’s case shows, were built anew after independence even in settings without propitious initial conditions. The four cases also suggest that pursuing policies aiming at alleviating inter-ethnic and inter-regional tensions promote civilian control of the armed forces. Military rule is often associated with divisive ethnic policies, as we saw in the case of Pakistan; remarkably, in Ghana it was the generals who advanced progressive ethnic policies in contrast to civilian rulers.
Airtight civilian control of the armed forces in India also meant the separation of the military not only from politics but also from society. At the same time, the opposite scenario, the unusually close social integration of the armed forces personnel in Tanzania, did little to endanger the party-state’s hold on the military. None of the four countries were dominated by the Cold War superpowers. Ghana and Tanzania were not considered important enough, while India and Pakistan would have been far too difficult to suppress by the main protagonists. For their leaders, the colonial period was far too recent to allow even contemplation of a close entanglement with a potential patron state. All four, however, were quite adroit in using their respective allies for their own benefit.
None of the variables we considered seemed to have a strong relationship with the effectiveness of the four armed forces we studied, although the dearth of evidence in the case of especially Ghana must be acknowledged. One clear lesson that emerges from this study is that overly rigorous control of the military by politicians – one that does not allow generals to execute the tasks they are given without political interference, one that refuses to take advantage of military personnel’s accumulated knowledge paid for by state and society – adversely affects military performance, as the case of India (and many others throughout history) demonstrates.
The minimum criterion a state sets for its military establishment is that it must be loyal to the state – whether that state is an electoral democracy such as India or a socialist regime such as Tanzania. In other words, military elites must share an unshakeable conviction that their first obligation is to be the faithful and steadfast servants of the state. This most fundamental requirement was amply satisfied in India and Tanzania but not in Pakistan and Ghana in the first decades of independence.