APC: a military vehicle

What would Thursday’s all-party conference achieve? I write these lines before the conference but my safe bet is, not much.

Hours before the conference the army chief met the president and the prime minister, he briefed the two top civilian principals on the military’s position on the current crisis. Absent from the meeting were ministers of foreign affairs, finance and interior. Does that mean something? Yes. It means, at the minimum and all other things being equal, that we continue to put the security policy ahead of foreign policy; it also means we continue to put the national military strategy ahead of the national security strategy.

Corollary: we continue to put the cart before the horse. But there’s more.

The issue, before being presented to an APC, should have been discussed in the DCC (Defence Committee of the Cabinet), the correct, existing forum. The chiefs of the armed forces are not just part of that forum, but technically the lowest ranking members of the DCC.

Had it been brought into action, the DCC would have looked at the current crisis through the broader prism of national security strategy, presumably with the help of the ministers of foreign affairs and finance. The input from the minister of defence, aided by chiefs of the armed forces, should have sought to reconcile the military strategy with the national security strategy.

But let me go back a little. Where is the national security strategy? Is there a document that I have missed? In all the years that it has been in power, has there been any attempt by the current government to create one? I have been urging undertaking such an exercise for years. For all the good it did, I might as well have banged my head against a wall.

It is a bogus argument that the current government could not do it because the military lords over this domain and guards it jealously. Pray, what would the military have done if the government had put together an informal, advisory body of experts to formulate a national security strategy document – mounted a coup? Of course not. While it is true that the military wants to be in the driver’s seat, truer still it is that it manages to do so because the civilians have simply abdicated responsibility.

Result: we keep talking about threats but have failed to develop any response other than what the military tells us. The argument is not that what the military tells us is incredible but that by its very nature it must analyse threats in operational terms and develop military responses to them. It is the job of the civilians to determine whether a policy must rely on a military response or, as is likely to be the case given the complexity of such issues, avoid linearity and develop a combination of responses. In other words, the same set of facts can either be used to take a narrow approach or, by changing the framework and bringing in other facts that lie outside the operational domain, broaden it.

The current APC will thus unfold the same way as the past two APCs. The DG-ISI will brief the political leaders on the threats facing Pakistan. But that is precisely the problem. Those threats have been determined exclusively by the military/ISI and they have also been analysed exclusively by the military/ISI.

If we had institutional mechanisms, that information, over a period of time would also have come to other bodies that would have analysed it to see if the military’s assessment is indeed the only course of action possible.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in Pakistan. Our political parties and legislators do not have the independent capacity to research these issues and there are no independent think tanks to brief them. In the absence of data or experience, it is no wonder that they rely on slogans and knee-jerk nationalism. With minor exceptions, the universities are worse. The government think tanks, on the other hand, are subject to control by the very people whose narratives need to be challenged, not necessarily in any adversarial terms but because long-term sustainable policies demand varied expertise. The government think tanks end up doing very little thinking and in their ability to say something new generally tank like a bad film at the box office.

Given that we live in a data free environment and have shown neither the will nor the capacity to take foreign and security policies seriously, the civilians end up looking for guidance to the military. And while the military is organised and can make smart presentations, the content and analysis are heavily skewed in favour of operational strategy.

None of this should be construed to mean that there will always be something wrong with the military’s approach. That would be missing the point I am trying to make and many would want to miss it deliberately. The point that I am making is that our current configuration makes it impossible to tell whether the military’s approach is wrong and instead forces us to assume that foreign and security policy is one and the same, allows one point of view to crowd out others and lets the military decide and analyse threats the way it is best suited to do which, may not be the best way to deal with them.

So, the DG-ISI will brief the leaders. Some of them will ask tough questions, questions based not necessarily on facts and any sound analysis but general suspicion of what the military says, the government will reiterate that we all stand united and expect that everyone will live happily ever after.

But the real problem is the assumptions on the basis of which the military will have prepared its answer. Once those assumptions are left unchallenged, it becomes extremely difficult to challenge the conclusions which flow from them: after all, the military is perfectly good at proceeding to a logical conclusion. But what if the initial assumptions are wrong?

At this moment, our leaders lack the capacity to challenge the fundamental assumptions of their military commanders. Given that handicap, why expect anything different to come from this APC?

The writer is Contributing Editor, The Friday Times.