Abstract
Why has Pakistan persisted in pursuing a military rivalry with India for nearly seven decades despite repeatedly suffering defeat in war and incurring ruinous costs to their economy and the health of their polity? This is the puzzle that Christine Fair examines in Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, which identifies the Pakistan army as the source of this surprising behaviour.
That the army wields significant influence in Pakistan is unsurprising to even a casual observer of the events in South Asia. Not only is it one of the world’s largest military establishments, it directly ruled the country for more than half of its existence, and wields considerable influence behind the scenes, even when a civilian administration assumes the titular leadership of the country. However, Fair focuses in particular on the Army’s strategic culture, a construct identified by Alistair Ian Johnson ‘an integrated system of symbols (e.g., argumentative structures, languages, analogies, metaphors), which acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting strategic preferences’ (p. 5). The particular strategic culture of the army renders Pakistan not a conventional revisionist state vis-à-vis the territorial dispute with India over Kashmir, but a ‘greedy state’ which is ‘fundamentally dissatisfied with the status quo, desiring additional territory even when it is not required for security’ (p. 4). By virtue of the military’s influence over the country, including the media and the educational system, Fair argues that these values and viewpoints have come to be inculcated in the civilian population as well.
How does one identify and analyse the belief systems of an institution like the Pakistan army? By examining its own writings. Fluent in Urdu and Punjabi, with years of experience in South Asia, Fair is uniquely positioned to wade through decades of professional military journals that are filled with articles written by current and former army officers. Not only have these sources been largely untapped by Western scholars, unlike some prior authors, her analysis is not coloured by a close relationship with Pakistan’s military elites.
What Fair finds in these journals is a bizarre combination of falsified history, racist stereotypes, and religious zealotry. In the world of Pakistani military writings, India has started all four wars with Pakistan, the Pakistan Taliban and Baloch separatists are the sole creations of the Indian intelligence services, and New Delhi desires to exert a coercive hegemony over all of South Asia. In the world of Pakistani military writings, the manliness and virtue of Pakistanis contrasts favourably with the cowardly, treacherous, and devious inhabitants of ‘Hindustan’. In the world of Pakistani military writings, waging jihad against apostates and unbelievers is an important duty for professional military officers in the twenty-first century, and the seventh-century battles of Mohammed and his followers merit the same level of analysis as contemporary military operations.
The various writings Fair draws on are not military doctrine or official Army manuals, although some publications are given the personal imprimatur of the Chief of the Army. Consequently, it is possible to question whether these writings represent the authentic views of their authors or if they are the views that ambitious officers feel a need to visibly conform to in order to advance their careers. Irrespective of the answer one comes to on this issue, however, these writings still tell you quite a lot about the culture of the organization in question.
Where does this particular strategic culture emerge from, and why is it so different from that of the Indian army which was once one and the same with the Pakistan Armed Forces? Foundational elements of the Pakistan army’s belief system can be located in the country’s origins. Partition and the violence that accompanied the end of British rule on the subcontinent in 1947 inculcated a belief that India’s leaders had never and would never reconcile themselves to the creation of Pakistan. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the idea that India seeks to undo partition is a fundamental element of the Pakistan army’s worldview. However, their antipathy towards India is not merely driven by political rivalry, but by a civilizational clash. The ‘two-nation’ theory justifying the very creation of Pakistan argued that the Muslims of South Asia were a separate people who required their own separate homeland. This made Islam a key pillar of the fledgling nation which united disparate groups of Punjabis, Bengalis, Sindhis, Balochs, and Pashtuns, who did not even have the benefit of a common language. As an increasingly conservative and intolerant strain of Sunni Islam was fostered by various Pakistani leaders – primarily in the army – for instrumental political reasons, religion became a natural counterpoint with India. From the army’s perspective, conflict and rivalry wasn’t between India and Pakistan, but between ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim Pakistan’, a view that conveniently overlooks the fact that India is a secular nation with more Muslim residents than Pakistan. Finally, the Pakistani army inherited legacies of the Raj. This included a military that was ‘born’ with an unrepresentative force structure that was more Punjabi than Pakistan itself and virtually bereft of Bengalis, the legacy of which would be made clear in 1971. In intellectual terms, the army inherited Orientalist notions of ‘martial races’ which justified said exclusion of Bengalis, as well as an obsession with Afghanistan as a key element of the country’s ‘strategic depth’, the latter drawn from the British focus on Afghanistan as a buffer between the Russian Empire and the Raj.
The synthesis of these various elements produces a military organization with a fundamentally different outlook and different view of objective facts. Consequently, the Pakistani army can claim to have never been defeated by India because in their view the very act of resisting or thwarting India’s aims is a ‘victory’, even if it occurs in the context of a lost war or a failed diplomatic initiative. Hostility towards India is not a result of an analysis of the contemporary state of bilateral political relations between two neighbours, but is an ideological imperative which is largely impervious to any evidence of New Delhi’s benign intent. Consequently, this would appear to be a rivalry that this ideological army will never abandon.
On the basis of this incisive analysis, Fair’s policy recommendations are depressingly realistic. She ably articulates the view – held by many scholars of South Asia – that a resolution to the dispute over Kashmir will not fundamentally affect the Pakistani army’s attitude towards India. However, she takes this argument a step further by suggesting such a move may even embolden the institution in its ultimate aim of undermining India’s position in South Asia and maintaining parity at all costs with one of Asia’s rising powers. Attempts to bring about change internally by broadening the recruitment patterns of the army to make it more representative of the nation as a whole, or bolstering Pakistan’s civilian government, would, in her view, only have a marginal impact at best. She is even more dismissive of external efforts to regulate the Pakistan military’s behaviour through inducements of military aid or threats to withhold it. Instead, Fair suggests that the best that can be done is for Western powers to ‘contain the threats that emanate from Pakistan, if not Pakistan itself’ (p. 282).
With a work of this length and a country as complex as Pakistan it is certainly possible to nitpick, were one so inclined. Is the Pakistani army today quite as confident about its ability to shape events in Afghanistan as it once was, or having been burned by the very Islamic militants it once sponsored, are their ambitions more limited? Is the Pakistan army’s worldview truly replicated across civil society or are their signs that major political parties are willing to resist their caricature of India and work to improve bilateral ties? These points are open to debate; however, these are, at best, minor quibbles. Christine Fair has produced the definitive intellectual biography of the Pakistan army, which will be necessary reading for anyone interested in the country or South Asia as a whole.