The military’s millions

Making sense of their priorities

Few outside the military understand its working system’s nuts and bolts, especially its financial mechanism, better than Dr Ayesha Siddiqa. Her bestseller, Military Inc, found few admirers in the forces, but none of the numerous challenges to its authenticity could hold ground, and she remains an acknowledged expert on the subject.

And since she’s also an active political and social commentator, and occasionally contributes comments to our features, we turn to her to make sense of the military’s present position. This is immediately post-Karachi (airport attack). The world on the street is that the army is out for blood. But the government, and its right leaning friends and foes, might still want to talk. There is urgent need to end the insurgency, one way or the other. People are dying, security is terrible, and the economy is suffering.

It is the last feature that we want to talk to her about. Now, it’s no secret that wars wreck economies – businesses shut down, capital flies, investors run away, etc. But what about the military? How do its investments change in wartime?

This is right up her alley. Surely if they are firing more bullets and bombs and flying more sorties than peace time, their cash flow would increase manifold. And the coalition support funds and foreign military aid packages notwithstanding, would they not really need more from the budget? They go on about it long enough.

“Their accounting process is very fuzzy”, she says, not too impressed by it, apparently. “Cost calculation in the military is a very complicated process. And more often than not these figures can be stretched to mean a lot of things”.

While calculating expenses, for example, it is difficult to know where to draw the line in some cases. You can never tell, she explains, if some numbers owe really to war on terror related losses, lack of governance, or pure corruption.

Very wrong priorities

It doesn’t help that the military remains a conventional behemoth, whereas the needs of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare of the 21^st century variety requires a different kind of outlook and way of functioning.

The cost structure is further confounded by military’s sense of priorities, especially regarding hardware. Talking about F-16 imports from Jordan she sites military research regarding insurgencies in Vietnam, Korea, East Pakistan, etc, concluding that ultimately tanks and aircraft have very limited value in COIN operations.

Considering our own example in FATA, she says the F-16 is a multipurpose dog-fight, air superiority aircraft. But its advanced features are of very little value in Waziristan, for example, where our biggest present threat comes from.

“For our purposes, the JF-17 thunder serves the purpose adequately, so why must such huge investments be made?” she says, before explaining where the money is better spent.

“For COIN, a different structure needs to be put in place. Investments need to be geared towards police and paramilitaries. But we have seen no such investment in the last 14-15 years”.

Conventional militaries are meant to counter an enemy fighting a traditional war. For insurgencies, a very different approach is needed. And unless the military transforms itself, especially its spending priorities, it will continue wasting a big bulk of its budget money. Eventually it will put more undue burden on the development budget?

Karachi, Waziristan, etc

At a time when the Karachi attack is all the rage in the local and foreign press for its audacity –country’s largest, busiest airport, investment loss – she takes it as a routine matter.

But wasn’t it a slap on the face of a government staking its position on talking to the Taliban?

“When have they not slapped?” she asks, almost surprised that I think so. “And what was so special about Karachi? It was not a particularly extraordinary operation on their part. The Mehran base and GHQ attacks were far more audacious”.

There is a lot of sense in that argument. Back then the hits were not only fiercer, they were also a bigger bolt from the blue, a surprise that militants are acquiring such strength. But now the surprise factor is gone. The fact that bomb blasts and suicide hits can occur anytime, anywhere is now part of the national psyche.

And again, if you ask her, it’s not that those who should do something about it have not done anything. It is that they have used their energies in very wrong, non-productive enterprises. The militant threat is no longer at a point where it can be controlled by public gestures like dialogue, or even threat of military action.

Going forward, she says, the common sense approach is to clean up the Punjab and Sindh heartland, which is now teeming with hardline militants. And, of course, many are not just tolerated, but still supported by agencies.

”Here’s an example”, she says. “Suppose you need to guard your house. You put a magic lock on the front door, then pile up furniture against it just for good measure. But you leave the back door wide open. Is that smart security?”

Again, I’m unable to disagree.

So, the way I understand her so far, a pragmatic way forward should be investing out of a more bulky to a more agile fighting force, bolster police and paramilitary and clean up militant proxies in Punjab and Sindh? But what about the military smelling blood? What about chatter that a unilateral operation might be closer than we think?

“Nonsense”, she says. “What makes you think that the army wants an all out operation there? If it did you would have seen it some time ago. So far it has engaged in limited strikes, and lost its own men also”.

Rather than thinking in terms of a sweep, she believes the army’s energies are better spent in reprioritising its strategies and calculations.

“For example, non-state actors should really not be employed in matters of foreign policy”, she says, referring to Hafiz Saeed going active when the prime minister visited India recently. “He is clearly their boy. And he was clearly used for a reason”.

Going by her take, then, it is not just the cost structure of the military that is riddled with loopholes. Its way of functioning, too, has lagged behind both modern day demands and Pakistan’s own particular situation.

Spending priorities must improve, of course, but so must the army’s way of doing business. And the old method when the Deep State employed proxies and ran militias can no longer do.