Pakistan’s Army likely needs such motivation against a larger, existential nemesis because — though it has started every war with India — it has never won any of them.
Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who seized Pakistan’s government in a coup in 1977 and ruled until his mysterious death in a plane crash in 1988, was most notorious in efforts to Islamize the Army. He permitted religious groups to distribute their materials to the rank and file and officers alike. Under Zia, Islamic training was introduced in the curriculum of the Command and Staff College, which provides important training for promising officers of the captain or major rank.South Asia scholar Stephen P. Cohen found long ago that the Army’s professional journals contained numerous essays that studied the question of Islamization of the military and the degree to which the Pakistani Army should achieve greater adherence to Islamic principles. Pakistani military analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi has noted that Zia’s orthodoxy changed recruitment and retentions patterns by ensuring that piety was a part of an officer’s evaluation. Despite Zia’s efforts to Islamize the Army and the state, however, Cohen found that the changes in the officer corps, while important, were in fact quite modest at the time of his research.
