Maladroit or Malicious: Why We Need To Really Be Frightened Of Our Military Might
May 6, 2011 10 Comments
I’ve written and re-written this post in my head about five times already. I didn’t write it down when the news first came out, and I didn’t do it in the following couple of days when our government and our military maintained its eerie silence. I didn’t want to write it out of anger. I wanted to wait till we knew more. But with every passing moment, the anger refuses to subside as the insult to injury grows more and more unacceptable.
We have been let down repeatedly. By our elected leaders, by our trusted army and by our supposedly vigilant agencies. The disappointment is not new but it is newly abysmal.
We’re a country of 180 million people out of which 50% will never go to any school and 40% will never come out of extreme poverty in their lifetime. As food, energy and fuel prices reach new record highs every month, we are at the brink of chronic food insecurity. Our urban infrastructure is falling apart and there is no electricity to operate our production lines on most days.
This year our fiscal budget will further slash the slice of the pie apportioned to health and education. In total our government will be pledging to spend a little over 3% for health and education combined. Notwithstanding its shortcomings, our Higher Education Commission is at the risk of being dissolved. The funds that are going to be made available will most likely not reach the ultra poor because of egregious gaps in governance and accountability.
Contrast this with the 18% that goes into ‘Defense Affairs and Services’ alone. Our esteemed protectors have been enjoying increases in their budgets especially because of this bloody war on terror that is costing us more and more every year. Last year alone, military expenses increased by 17% to over $5 billion. Some estimate that the military might takes up a whopping 70% of our GDP if one adds up the assets of the various military corporations, the profits made in the plethora of their businesses from cement to cereal, the real estate owned by the military, the army welfare trust and the numerous peripheral hidden costs.
As if that was not enough, the Pakistani government doled out US$ 25 million and US$ 20 million in subsidies to the Fauji Foundation in 2004 and 2005, respectively. This is downright criminal in a country where the Dean of its most prestigious business school speaks against subsidies to small farmers claiming neo-liberal bullshit about how market intervention makes poverty worse.
Even by extremely conservative estimates using official government statistics from 2006 (as Hans Rosling illustrates) Pakistan lies in a shameless position in the military-poverty nexus:
Source: Gap Minder
The Pakistani government spends 3.3 percent of GDP more on defence than other countries of its income level. The overspending on defence is roughly equal to the sum of the underspending on health and education as a percent of GDP and almost twice as much is spent on defence as is on health and education combined. Pakistan’s defence expenditure as part of its GNP is the highest in South Asia.
In the bin Laden aftermath, a bill is being tabled in the US House Committee to stop aid to Pakistan. What does it matter? As Akbar Zaidi notes, 84% of the aid from the US to Pakistan is military aid. It would not be too off the mark to say that even if US cuts aid to Pakistan, it would not hurt Pakistan’s extreme poor who do not benefit from it in any significant way. Most of the development aid fills up the coffers of Pakistan’s elites who act as the benevolent middle-men.
For a charity trust with so much money, it is surprising there are no publicly accessible annual reports or audits. The Accountability Ordinance (1999) precludes the military and judiciary from being questioned under the new accountability rules. From a legal standpoint, the welfare foundations are not required to make their operations public, as they were chartered under Charitable Endowments Act 1890 as private entities.
I don’t know about you but I’m absolutely horrified that given all this treachery, our army and intelligence agencies claim they simply did not know that Osama bin Laden was building houses and walking in and out of their own goddamn neighborhood.
Such colossal incompetence is staggering. It is also absolutely unethical and positively criminal when so much money, resources, efforts have been entrusted to them on the pretext of protection, security and the war on terror.
Pakistan’s army and its intelligence agencies are to blame for the country’s poverty, weakened infrastructure and debilitating inflation. It is not a long shot to say that our people are starving even though we had the money to feed them but chose to buy more weapons instead.
A decade after 9/11, Pakistanis are not safe. They have not been able to justify all the money they hoarded to protect us because they simply haven’t been protecting us.
And they are not even trying to justify it anymore!
“While admitting shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it was highlighted that the achievements of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) against al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates in Pakistan have no parallel,” said an Inter-Service Public Relations (ISPR) statement after the meeting.’
Nobody is really talking to the Pakistani people. In the last five days we have been confused, shocked, livid, curious, sad, offended but the folks we put in power don’t care to explain anything. Some of our brilliant journalists have tried asking questions.
See Shaheryar Mirza here:
How could the Army not have known and/or engaged foreign forces conducting combat operations within Pakistan’s borders? The same senior Pakistani diplomat told me, “Pakistanis are just unaware of the U.S. military’s capabilities.” If this is the case, then the American military machine has immeasurable might, or the Pakistan Army has short arms and deep pockets.
Or Cyril Almeida here:
Could the self-appointed custodians of the national interest themselves be the greatest threat to national security?
There is no joy in asking this. Pakistan exists in a tough neighbourhood. A strong and vibrant army is necessary and desirable.
But as the initial shock and disbelief wears off, there is a deep, deep sense of unease here.
Did they know he was here? Surely, they knew he was here?
Or Mohammad Hanif here:
Pakistan‘s security establishment, of course, went into a sulky silence, and wasn’t around to reassure us. Were they protecting Osama bin Laden? Or were they so hopelessly inefficient that they couldn’t track the world’s most recognisable face when he was camped out practically at the edge of the Pakistan army’s most famous parade ground? As they are answerable only to their mistrusting partners and permanent paymasters in Washington, they didn’t feel like obliging us with any information.
But anyone who has lived through Pakistan’s three military dictatorships sponsored by Washington can tell you there is no need to be such a reductionist. Why can’t Pakistan’s security establishment do both? Why can’t they shelter him and then forget about the fact that they were sheltering him? Or why can’t they shelter him and then shop him at a later stage?
Not that we expected any better but immediately after bin Laden was assassinated, our current President Asif Zardari and the guy vying to be the next President, Mr Imran Khan, chose to write op-eds in the Washington Post and the Independent rather than addressing the people they so badly want to control.
Even our old celebrated heroes such as Tariq Ali, Ahmed Rashid, Robert Fisk, Salman Rushdie have fallen terribly short of comforting us. They have been talking to the Western audiences explaining Pakistan’s double game and it’s imminent downfall but nary a word from any of them on what this means for Pakistan’s civilians who never signed up for this.
It’s pretty clear that in this great ball-game on terror, the common folks in Pakistan don’t matter. 10,000 lives sacrificed last year alone is largely irrelevant to the world.
When the fiscal budget is presented next month with an increase in the military spending justified because of our continued strategic role in the war, I will need all of you to raise the earth in protest. This cannot go on anymore.
It is fucking unacceptable.
About baylawajah
excellent
Great post. But then, well, it isn’t possible either. They are going to take the pie, again. As Cyril puts it, ‘Take a look around. Does anyone think Asif Zardari has what it takes? Nawaz may have the chutzpah, but does he have the nous? Beyond them, what is there but a fetid pool of opportunists and political mercenaries?’ .
P.S.: Never found Rushdi even remotely favorable to Pakistan.
I am Indian, so I may not have understood the whole thing, but why was the Army waiting to scramble jets when they could have walked across from the Military Academy? 40 minutes should have been enough to get them there even if they crawled. This is without counting the noisy approach before the actual operation. The operation literally happened inside their armpit.
Someone guarding the academy should have been able to target the helicopters flying over without moving an inch from the sound of it. There are reports of snipers and all kinds of protection in that area…. where was all of it?
Either they were not doing their jobs, or they knew/guessed what was happening and chose to stay out of it.
Whether the ISI put OBL there, or he voluntarily chose the place, it cannot be denied that it used to be an ISI safehouse. It cannot be denied that if OBL came there on his own, its a little strange that in a wild and rather ungoverned country, he found it safest next to those supposedly hunting for him. Whether he trusted them to keep him safe, or had unshakable trust in their incompetence, OBL lived there for years.
Army reached there in 15 minutes, cordoned of the area. Those were their orders. They knew.
Go fight the insurgents yourself. Thousands of soliders have died protecting our land. Cut their resources and show them how its done. Do it.
We have a sick establishment, corrupt & coward leadership and a bastard president.
It’s nice to hear (read) someone say it’s fucking unacceptable instead of talking around it while trying to play to the notion of “civil discourse.” The idea that somehow both sides are equally “right” in their own regard has taken the national conversation in the US hostage. Everything is either left or right and the right answer, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. It’s bullshit, the idea that the right answer is always in the middle. Pakistan’s government doesn’t care about the masses, but neither does anyone else. I know, it’s particularly horrible there. Here, I see us moving more and more toward fascism with each passing day and with every major event like this. War is peace. The enemy never dies.
What if this is exactly the backlash propaganda mongers wanted from the Press on the army because for years they were unable to budge out the ISI or bring the army to its knees fully. No doubt, the army and the government are flawed, weakened and have elements of corruption within. BUT, the army is the final wall of defense that we have now, our politicians and bureaucracy has failed.
So lets criticize and be angry, lets ask for a bigger piece of the pie for education, energy, law and order, economic and social welfare. But still, the army must prevail. It can not be battered down, there is a conspiracy abound to bring down the last stand of this nation, the army may have corrupt elements within but their is no doubt about its loyalty or patriotism, these are our jawans we’re talking about.
It is next to impossible for Bin Laden to be hiding at such a spot without the army’s knowledge, the US is reluctant in releasing the photograph of the man that was the single cause of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars PLUS the hell that Pakistan went through. Madam, do not believe everything you read in the news, for all we know this could be a sham and we’re playing right into the hands of the puppeteers, lets wait for the proof of bin laden’s death and digest how a burial at sea so hastily actually makes sense. THEN we shall talk about the army’s capabilities.
This is big, it isn’t as simple as ‘the army was unaware and unprepared’. Backs have been stabbed, and alliances have been broken.
Like you, I resisted the urge to react, but find the unfolding events totally unacceptable – especially in the light of the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s announcement of the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden.
Despite the urgings of our political overloads, I am not sleeping better at night.
Pingback: The PTI Rally in Karachi Or Democracy Is Alive And Well In Pakistan But Not Really « Obama Says Do More