The Bajwa Doctrine

[ghazi52]

https://www.facebook.com/

 

[ghazi52]

Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor on Wednesday said that if a 'Bajwa doctrine' exists its scope is limited just to the security aspect in Pakistan.

At a press conference in Rawalpindi, the DG ISPR was asked about the doctrine that bears the incumbent army chief's name and whose existence was purportedly confirmed in the chief's recent meeting with some media personnel.

"When the media interaction took place, things were lumped together and made a part of the Bajwa doctrine," said Maj Gen Ghafoor, who had mentioned the said doctrine himself in a TV interview in January. "If there exists a Bajwa doctrine, then it is only related to the security aspect.

"Every army chief has their own perspective and General Bajwa's is to promote peace which existed in the past. That is what the Bajwa doctrine is."

The DG ISPR said the army chief's views in his informal meeting with journalists may have been misrepresented by some.

"I take pride that some media anchors respected the norms of media interaction in that off-the-record conversation," he said. "But some presented their own interpretations and some, who were not even present, wrote articles."

Maj Gen Ghafoor clarified that the army chief is not against the 18th Amendment but simply wants to ensure the provinces are capable of making the decisions.

"There was a lot of talk about the 18th Amendment," he said. "The army chief never said that as a whole 18th Amendment is not good; amendments are brought because the Constitution remained incomplete in certain aspects.

"This amendment did certain good things like decentralising certain matters. There is nothing better than every province being responsible for its own matters, but they should also be capable of making those decisions."

 

[Solomon2]

Husain Haqqani
Director for South and Central Asia
March 22nd, 2018

Here We Go Again
Husain Haqqani

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers patrol near the site of an attack by gunmen on policemen in Quetta, February 14, 2018 (BANARAS KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)


Less than three months after President Trump promised in his New Year’s Day tweet that the U.S. government would not accept “lies and deceit” from Pakistan, some U.S. military leaders are ready to praise the half-hearted steps Pakistan has taken against terrorist safe havens. If past experience is any guide, the use of softer language by American generals in the hope of strengthening military-to-military ties will only encourage Pakistani generals to assume that their two-track policy of reassuring Americans of cooperation while maintaining support for jihadi terrorists is working.

Last month, CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel told a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives that he saw “positive indicators” that Pakistan is becoming more responsive to U.S. concerns about its abiding militant safe havens on its territory. He qualified his statement by remarking that Islamabad’s actions do “not yet equal the decisive action that we would like to see them take in terms of a strategic shift.” But General Votel’s words still sufficed to reassure Pakistan’s military leaders, who claim that, after several false starts, this time they really are on the verge of a policy transformation.

Pakistani media have been reporting that the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, wants Pakistan to continue along the path of democracy, end all support and tolerance for jihadi militancy and terrorism, and develop better relations with Afghanistan and India. But all evidence on the ground suggests that the “Bajwa Doctrine” is not fundamentally different from the “Kayani Doctrine,” named after General Ashfaq Kayani who served as Pakistan’s army chief from 2007 to 2013. And the “Kayani Doctrine” did not differ in substance from the policies and premises espoused by military commanders before Kayani, notably General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled Pakistan for nine years.

The training and education of Pakistan’s military officers tends to cast their minds in a similar mold, and that mold remains mostly unaltered by changing realities around them. Georgetown University’s Professor Christine Fair makes that point in her 2014 analysis of writings by Pakistan army officers: “Fighting to the End”: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.

And while General Bajwa may not want to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan’s long list of coup-making commanders, he cannot avoid politics even if he wants to, for he presides over an officer corps that spends more time thinking about politics than about purely professional matters. (Aqil Shah proves that thesis methodically in his 2014 empirical study, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan.)

Notwithstanding a genuine personal distaste for getting directly embroiled in politics, every Pakistani commander must give voice to his institution’s views and beliefs, most of which have remained unaltered since the ascendance in 1951 of General (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan as the first indigenous Muslim commander of the army that Pakistan inherited from the British Raj.

In that worldview, jihadi terrorists serve as a force multiplier for Pakistan against a permanently hostile India and an Afghanistan whose sense of history prevents it from becoming subservient to 70-year old Pakistan, despite the latter’s much larger population and economy. The only terrorists Pakistan needs to oppose, according to this template, are the ones who attack inside Pakistan; those that menace the Americans in Afghanistan or Indians in Jammu and Kashmir are more than tolerable.

Yet Pakistan’s generals need the United States and China to help make up for deficiencies in the nation’s economic performance and as suppliers of military hardware. Pakistani policy toward China is not particularly problematic, since a shared suspicion of India makes it Pakistan’s strategic partner—and geography ordains that this circumstance will not change. The United States, on the other hand, has scruples that coincide with its interests and so must be treated as a transactional ally—as well as an ally likely to come and go from the region as it sees fit. Only with Washington, then, do the generals need to practice their discipline of duplicity as diplomacy.
p(firstLetter). Plenty of U.S. officials have by now caught on to the Pakistani generals’ drill. So a few days after General Votel’s nod to the Pakistani military, a senior U.S. official had to clarify that the “United States has not yet seen Pakistan take significant steps to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network militant groups.” According to this official, Islamabad had failed to take “the kind of decisive and irreversible action” Washington had asked for to help with the war in Afghanistan. As for the “positive indicators” mentioned by General Votel, and later by Defense Secretary James Mattis, the official saw these as attempts by Pakistan “to appear responsive” to American requests. The Pakistanis “have done the bare minimum to appear responsive” to U.S. government requests—the sort of tactical cooperation that has misled Americans into trusting Pakistan in the past, and that has been a key factor in prolonging the war in Afghanistan.

In other words, this has all happened before. In December 2008, for example, then-Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, saw a positive trajectory in relations with the Pakistan military, based on what seemed like encouraging steps against terrorists and in relation to Afghanistan. Mullen put his faith in the military-to-military relationship just as General Votel seems to be doing now, and he engaged in intense interaction with General Kayani via 26 in-person meetings, punctuated by numerous telephone conversations.

Kayani managed to sell Mullen on the idea that change was around the corner in Pakistan’s policies as well as its military’s thinking. But three years later Admiral Mullen realized that he had been wasting his time. By the beginning of 2011, Mullen’s frustration with his Pakistani interlocutors spilled over in public statements. Just days before his retirement in September 2011, Mullen told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Pakistan’s spy agency had played a direct role in supporting terrorists who had attacked the American Embassy in Kabul a week earlier. According to Mullen, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” and “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy.”

A decade after Admiral Mullen began his effort to try and change Pakistan’s strategic calculus, his eventual disappointment should not be replaced by General Votel’s unqualified optimism. After all, the Pakistan military’s priorities in relation to Afghanistan have not changed much, nor has its core belief system. So it is worth remembering that, as of 2013, General Kayani’s approach to Afghanistan was described as being based on four pillars: “American troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan; reconciliation among Afghan factions is not possible without the ISI; the Jalalabad-Torkham-Karachi route remains the most viable for withdrawing American forces; and India cannot be allowed to encircle Pakistan.”

None of those considerations has changed. The Pakistanis still expect U.S. troops eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan and seem prepared to leverage their control of ground and air lines of communication into Afghanistan. Unless the U.S. and Afghan governments can figure a way to negotiate directly with Taliban leaders and commanders, the ISIcontinues to believe in its sway over a future peace process. The fear of encirclement by India is also embedded in Pakistan’s national psyche and is maintained with a steady dose of hyper-nationalist propaganda, this despite the fact that it has since been many years since Indian attitudes toward Pakistan could justify such a view.

For Pakistan to move toward a drastic transformation, it is essential that Pakistanis should have the option to discuss alternative futures for their country, including views on Afghanistan and India that do not paint them as permanent threats. Unfortunately, one of the most consistent themes in the thinking of Pakistan’s generals remains the belief that contending ideas about Pakistan’s direction threaten Pakistan’s survival and stability. Pluralism and open debate are not in their mental manuals. They are sure that the army is better suited than civilian institutions or venal politicians, of which admittedly there are many, when it comes to defining Pakistan’s national interest.

Until signs of change in that thinking appear, American civil and military leaders should withhold praise for “positive” developments in Pakistan’s terrorism policies. That praise only postpones Pakistanis’ much-needed reflection over the faulty worldview that has shaped Pakistan’s flawed policies.

 

[Reichsmarschall]

Husain Haqqani
Director for South and Central Asia
March 22nd, 2018

Here We Go Again
Husain Haqqani

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers patrol near the site of an attack by gunmen on policemen in Quetta, February 14, 2018 (BANARAS KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)


Less than three months after President Trump promised in his New Year’s Day tweet that the U.S. government would not accept “lies and deceit” from Pakistan, some U.S. military leaders are ready to praise the half-hearted steps Pakistan has taken against terrorist safe havens. If past experience is any guide, the use of softer language by American generals in the hope of strengthening military-to-military ties will only encourage Pakistani generals to assume that their two-track policy of reassuring Americans of cooperation while maintaining support for jihadi terrorists is working.

Last month, CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel told a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives that he saw “positive indicators” that Pakistan is becoming more responsive to U.S. concerns about its abiding militant safe havens on its territory. He qualified his statement by remarking that Islamabad’s actions do “not yet equal the decisive action that we would like to see them take in terms of a strategic shift.” But General Votel’s words still sufficed to reassure Pakistan’s military leaders, who claim that, after several false starts, this time they really are on the verge of a policy transformation.

Pakistani media have been reporting that the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, wants Pakistan to continue along the path of democracy, end all support and tolerance for jihadi militancy and terrorism, and develop better relations with Afghanistan and India. But all evidence on the ground suggests that the “Bajwa Doctrine” is not fundamentally different from the “Kayani Doctrine,” named after General Ashfaq Kayani who served as Pakistan’s army chief from 2007 to 2013. And the “Kayani Doctrine” did not differ in substance from the policies and premises espoused by military commanders before Kayani, notably General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled Pakistan for nine years.

The training and education of Pakistan’s military officers tends to cast their minds in a similar mold, and that mold remains mostly unaltered by changing realities around them. Georgetown University’s Professor Christine Fair makes that point in her 2014 analysis of writings by Pakistan army officers: “Fighting to the End”: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.

And while General Bajwa may not want to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan’s long list of coup-making commanders, he cannot avoid politics even if he wants to, for he presides over an officer corps that spends more time thinking about politics than about purely professional matters. (Aqil Shah proves that thesis methodically in his 2014 empirical study, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan.)

Notwithstanding a genuine personal distaste for getting directly embroiled in politics, every Pakistani commander must give voice to his institution’s views and beliefs, most of which have remained unaltered since the ascendance in 1951 of General (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan as the first indigenous Muslim commander of the army that Pakistan inherited from the British Raj.

In that worldview, jihadi terrorists serve as a force multiplier for Pakistan against a permanently hostile India and an Afghanistan whose sense of history prevents it from becoming subservient to 70-year old Pakistan, despite the latter’s much larger population and economy. The only terrorists Pakistan needs to oppose, according to this template, are the ones who attack inside Pakistan; those that menace the Americans in Afghanistan or Indians in Jammu and Kashmir are more than tolerable.

Yet Pakistan’s generals need the United States and China to help make up for deficiencies in the nation’s economic performance and as suppliers of military hardware. Pakistani policy toward China is not particularly problematic, since a shared suspicion of India makes it Pakistan’s strategic partner—and geography ordains that this circumstance will not change. The United States, on the other hand, has scruples that coincide with its interests and so must be treated as a transactional ally—as well as an ally likely to come and go from the region as it sees fit. Only with Washington, then, do the generals need to practice their discipline of duplicity as diplomacy.
p(firstLetter). Plenty of U.S. officials have by now caught on to the Pakistani generals’ drill. So a few days after General Votel’s nod to the Pakistani military, a senior U.S. official had to clarify that the “United States has not yet seen Pakistan take significant steps to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network militant groups.” According to this official, Islamabad had failed to take “the kind of decisive and irreversible action” Washington had asked for to help with the war in Afghanistan. As for the “positive indicators” mentioned by General Votel, and later by Defense Secretary James Mattis, the official saw these as attempts by Pakistan “to appear responsive” to American requests. The Pakistanis “have done the bare minimum to appear responsive” to U.S. government requests—the sort of tactical cooperation that has misled Americans into trusting Pakistan in the past, and that has been a key factor in prolonging the war in Afghanistan.

In other words, this has all happened before. In December 2008, for example, then-Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, saw a positive trajectory in relations with the Pakistan military, based on what seemed like encouraging steps against terrorists and in relation to Afghanistan. Mullen put his faith in the military-to-military relationship just as General Votel seems to be doing now, and he engaged in intense interaction with General Kayani via 26 in-person meetings, punctuated by numerous telephone conversations.

Kayani managed to sell Mullen on the idea that change was around the corner in Pakistan’s policies as well as its military’s thinking. But three years later Admiral Mullen realized that he had been wasting his time. By the beginning of 2011, Mullen’s frustration with his Pakistani interlocutors spilled over in public statements. Just days before his retirement in September 2011, Mullen told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Pakistan’s spy agency had played a direct role in supporting terrorists who had attacked the American Embassy in Kabul a week earlier. According to Mullen, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” and “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy.”

A decade after Admiral Mullen began his effort to try and change Pakistan’s strategic calculus, his eventual disappointment should not be replaced by General Votel’s unqualified optimism. After all, the Pakistan military’s priorities in relation to Afghanistan have not changed much, nor has its core belief system. So it is worth remembering that, as of 2013, General Kayani’s approach to Afghanistan was described as being based on four pillars: “American troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan; reconciliation among Afghan factions is not possible without the ISI; the Jalalabad-Torkham-Karachi route remains the most viable for withdrawing American forces; and India cannot be allowed to encircle Pakistan.”

None of those considerations has changed. The Pakistanis still expect U.S. troops eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan and seem prepared to leverage their control of ground and air lines of communication into Afghanistan. Unless the U.S. and Afghan governments can figure a way to negotiate directly with Taliban leaders and commanders, the ISIcontinues to believe in its sway over a future peace process. The fear of encirclement by India is also embedded in Pakistan’s national psyche and is maintained with a steady dose of hyper-nationalist propaganda, this despite the fact that it has since been many years since Indian attitudes toward Pakistan could justify such a view.

For Pakistan to move toward a drastic transformation, it is essential that Pakistanis should have the option to discuss alternative futures for their country, including views on Afghanistan and India that do not paint them as permanent threats. Unfortunately, one of the most consistent themes in the thinking of Pakistan’s generals remains the belief that contending ideas about Pakistan’s direction threaten Pakistan’s survival and stability. Pluralism and open debate are not in their mental manuals. They are sure that the army is better suited than civilian institutions or venal politicians, of which admittedly there are many, when it comes to defining Pakistan’s national interest.

Until signs of change in that thinking appear, American civil and military leaders should withhold praise for “positive” developments in Pakistan’s terrorism policies. That praise only postpones Pakistanis’ much-needed reflection over the faulty worldview that has shaped Pakistan’s flawed policies.

how can one expect this bastard to be fair and neutral in his analysis about the country where he is wanted for treason

 

[Ghessan]

being so faithful to US and raising the voice of US being deceived by Pakistan over the years, he must know it was vice versa in the history of Pakistan. What? a man he is? Besides personalities being heroes in the history of Pakistan he must also be pictured and subjected in the text books being a traitor.

 

[Solomon2]

how can one expect this bastard to be fair and neutral in his analysis about the country where he is wanted for treason

Fair is to judge by a fixed set of standards. Neutral is to be impartial between sides. So unless the items compared are the same, it's impossible to be fair and neutral at the same time, isn't it?

 

[Wolfhunter]

Husain Haqqani
Director for South and Central Asia
March 22nd, 2018

Here We Go Again
Husain Haqqani

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers patrol near the site of an attack by gunmen on policemen in Quetta, February 14, 2018 (BANARAS KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)


Less than three months after President Trump promised in his New Year’s Day tweet that the U.S. government would not accept “lies and deceit” from Pakistan, some U.S. military leaders are ready to praise the half-hearted steps Pakistan has taken against terrorist safe havens. If past experience is any guide, the use of softer language by American generals in the hope of strengthening military-to-military ties will only encourage Pakistani generals to assume that their two-track policy of reassuring Americans of cooperation while maintaining support for jihadi terrorists is working.

Last month, CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel told a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives that he saw “positive indicators” that Pakistan is becoming more responsive to U.S. concerns about its abiding militant safe havens on its territory. He qualified his statement by remarking that Islamabad’s actions do “not yet equal the decisive action that we would like to see them take in terms of a strategic shift.” But General Votel’s words still sufficed to reassure Pakistan’s military leaders, who claim that, after several false starts, this time they really are on the verge of a policy transformation.

Pakistani media have been reporting that the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, wants Pakistan to continue along the path of democracy, end all support and tolerance for jihadi militancy and terrorism, and develop better relations with Afghanistan and India. But all evidence on the ground suggests that the “Bajwa Doctrine” is not fundamentally different from the “Kayani Doctrine,” named after General Ashfaq Kayani who served as Pakistan’s army chief from 2007 to 2013. And the “Kayani Doctrine” did not differ in substance from the policies and premises espoused by military commanders before Kayani, notably General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled Pakistan for nine years.

The training and education of Pakistan’s military officers tends to cast their minds in a similar mold, and that mold remains mostly unaltered by changing realities around them. Georgetown University’s Professor Christine Fair makes that point in her 2014 analysis of writings by Pakistan army officers: “Fighting to the End”: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.

And while General Bajwa may not want to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan’s long list of coup-making commanders, he cannot avoid politics even if he wants to, for he presides over an officer corps that spends more time thinking about politics than about purely professional matters. (Aqil Shah proves that thesis methodically in his 2014 empirical study, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan.)

Notwithstanding a genuine personal distaste for getting directly embroiled in politics, every Pakistani commander must give voice to his institution’s views and beliefs, most of which have remained unaltered since the ascendance in 1951 of General (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan as the first indigenous Muslim commander of the army that Pakistan inherited from the British Raj.

In that worldview, jihadi terrorists serve as a force multiplier for Pakistan against a permanently hostile India and an Afghanistan whose sense of history prevents it from becoming subservient to 70-year old Pakistan, despite the latter’s much larger population and economy. The only terrorists Pakistan needs to oppose, according to this template, are the ones who attack inside Pakistan; those that menace the Americans in Afghanistan or Indians in Jammu and Kashmir are more than tolerable.

Yet Pakistan’s generals need the United States and China to help make up for deficiencies in the nation’s economic performance and as suppliers of military hardware. Pakistani policy toward China is not particularly problematic, since a shared suspicion of India makes it Pakistan’s strategic partner—and geography ordains that this circumstance will not change. The United States, on the other hand, has scruples that coincide with its interests and so must be treated as a transactional ally—as well as an ally likely to come and go from the region as it sees fit. Only with Washington, then, do the generals need to practice their discipline of duplicity as diplomacy.
p(firstLetter). Plenty of U.S. officials have by now caught on to the Pakistani generals’ drill. So a few days after General Votel’s nod to the Pakistani military, a senior U.S. official had to clarify that the “United States has not yet seen Pakistan take significant steps to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network militant groups.” According to this official, Islamabad had failed to take “the kind of decisive and irreversible action” Washington had asked for to help with the war in Afghanistan. As for the “positive indicators” mentioned by General Votel, and later by Defense Secretary James Mattis, the official saw these as attempts by Pakistan “to appear responsive” to American requests. The Pakistanis “have done the bare minimum to appear responsive” to U.S. government requests—the sort of tactical cooperation that has misled Americans into trusting Pakistan in the past, and that has been a key factor in prolonging the war in Afghanistan.

In other words, this has all happened before. In December 2008, for example, then-Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, saw a positive trajectory in relations with the Pakistan military, based on what seemed like encouraging steps against terrorists and in relation to Afghanistan. Mullen put his faith in the military-to-military relationship just as General Votel seems to be doing now, and he engaged in intense interaction with General Kayani via 26 in-person meetings, punctuated by numerous telephone conversations.

Kayani managed to sell Mullen on the idea that change was around the corner in Pakistan’s policies as well as its military’s thinking. But three years later Admiral Mullen realized that he had been wasting his time. By the beginning of 2011, Mullen’s frustration with his Pakistani interlocutors spilled over in public statements. Just days before his retirement in September 2011, Mullen told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Pakistan’s spy agency had played a direct role in supporting terrorists who had attacked the American Embassy in Kabul a week earlier. According to Mullen, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” and “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy.”

A decade after Admiral Mullen began his effort to try and change Pakistan’s strategic calculus, his eventual disappointment should not be replaced by General Votel’s unqualified optimism. After all, the Pakistan military’s priorities in relation to Afghanistan have not changed much, nor has its core belief system. So it is worth remembering that, as of 2013, General Kayani’s approach to Afghanistan was described as being based on four pillars: “American troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan; reconciliation among Afghan factions is not possible without the ISI; the Jalalabad-Torkham-Karachi route remains the most viable for withdrawing American forces; and India cannot be allowed to encircle Pakistan.”

None of those considerations has changed. The Pakistanis still expect U.S. troops eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan and seem prepared to leverage their control of ground and air lines of communication into Afghanistan. Unless the U.S. and Afghan governments can figure a way to negotiate directly with Taliban leaders and commanders, the ISIcontinues to believe in its sway over a future peace process. The fear of encirclement by India is also embedded in Pakistan’s national psyche and is maintained with a steady dose of hyper-nationalist propaganda, this despite the fact that it has since been many years since Indian attitudes toward Pakistan could justify such a view.

For Pakistan to move toward a drastic transformation, it is essential that Pakistanis should have the option to discuss alternative futures for their country, including views on Afghanistan and India that do not paint them as permanent threats. Unfortunately, one of the most consistent themes in the thinking of Pakistan’s generals remains the belief that contending ideas about Pakistan’s direction threaten Pakistan’s survival and stability. Pluralism and open debate are not in their mental manuals. They are sure that the army is better suited than civilian institutions or venal politicians, of which admittedly there are many, when it comes to defining Pakistan’s national interest.

Until signs of change in that thinking appear, American civil and military leaders should withhold praise for “positive” developments in Pakistan’s terrorism policies. That praise only postpones Pakistanis’ much-needed reflection over the faulty worldview that has shaped Pakistan’s flawed policies.

LOL, didn't this weasel use the murder and rape of a young girl to try and flog his wife's book on twitter? What a shyster!

 

[Solomon2]

being so faithful to US and raising the voice of US being deceived by Pakistan over the years, he must know it was vice versa in the history of Pakistan.

You mean, "the history taught in Pakistan," don't you?

Look, in 1965 Pakistan used U.S.-supplied arms in an attempt to liberate Kashmir. The U.S. did not supply them for that purpose; they were to defend against Communism. When the U.S. objected the Pakistani leadership responded that they were tired of negotiations and wanted to be conquerors; they considered America's lack of support as "betrayal", rather than their own deceits.

Only one version of the story made it into Pakistan's history books, yes? Yes you can check out the declassified U.S. diplomatic record (FRUS 1965 South Asia) for the other side of the story.

 

[Ghessan]

US has always put its own interests (evil or fair) first where ever it goes, otherwise they never bother. You said: "U.S. did not supply them for that purpose; they were to defend against Communism"
Who was in danger of communism, Pakistan? This is what cold war was.
Same was the story in Afghanistan against USSR, they again came and aid for their own interests. Had that occupation was not of any interest to them they would never bother to jump in.
Whenever Pakistan need help were refused and then sanctions.
This is same US who is facing humiliation in Afghanistan these days and to save their face they are putting pressure on their Non Nato Ally(striping expected soon) with FATF, ban on companies for nuclear trade and the list goes on and will keep going. These things were never highlighted but now it is fair to do so?

When it is war, arms are to consume, not to differentiate with their use form what ever source are availed.

 

[ghazi52]

Opinion
The story of a doctrine

Shahzad Chaudhry
March 30, 2018

It has descended, we are told, from an unprecedented interaction that the army chief held with some selected journalists of varying hues and disposition. A few that I have learnt were there are mostly characterised ‘liberal’ and ‘independent’, able to formulate their voices effectively in support of democracy. In Pakistan, it translates differently because the military is now patently defined anti-democratic by the same class of journalists without any inhibition.

‘Inhibition’ too is important to define here: the influence, in popular refrain, exercised by the military on the media to proffer the military’s point of view which in popular proclamation of the largely ‘independent’ media is anti-democracy. In reality it is not, but who cares? Who has ever bothered checking facts in the larger media culture globally where fake news has value and can sway opinions in untold manner? So it goes here. Build a bogey, then smash it to smithereens. The story builds unchecked and then sustains on its own steam. And there are craftsmen at work in the field on this one. A task has been handed out and they fulfil orders to satisfaction.

Yes, an off-the-record interaction took place; and no, I wasn’t there as weren’t most who have ended up commenting. And most of those who were present weren’t exactly ‘friends of the accused’. And those inviting were properly aware of the kinds who were being invited to hear the chief out. Does that put to rest the assumption that those invited were intended to leak the chief’s observations? The train of such thought (convoluted?) assumes that the interaction was kept off-the-record so that it could not be kept off-the-record. Who should one believe? The army or the journalists so invited for their mostly speculative approach towards the military’s intent towards democracy? In strictly legal terms, where would a ‘defence lawyer’ home on to blow holes in a testimony from a witness with obvious proclivities? Let a lawyer address that.

So the story came out from one of the participants, ever so committed to the cause of democracy. Clearly, I use the same ruse as a convenient classification to explain the nature of reporting. Popularly, this is when the bogey was first built. And then it got smashed. Those who did not print spoke with abandon and unrestrained glee of yet another revelation from the army chief of his disdain for things constitutional. After all, he had violated the limits of his domain and undertaken to discuss areas of concern – to him – about the government’s policy; this was constitutionally outside his remit.

Hence the bashing and the comparisons and the unfortunate but very clear references to the military being bereft of the necessary qualifications to address issues that the chief had chosen to speak on. Come on, who did the chief think he was? Picketty, or Keynes, or Malthus? BISP is not handing out a fish, neither teaching how to fish, but is a modernistic interpretation of the famous poverty alleviation theory unbeknown to the simplistic soldier the army chief is. Or a means of building a vote-base. I dared to append the last bit.

Forget economics because largely I agree with the broader statement that the economy is too complex a matter to be left to the generals alone. And yet the generals have an unexplained fetish for it; I can vouch that generals do take their economy seriously. That restrains real economists from exercising the economy the right way, keeping it stagnated especially when they must work with the generals in power.

But pray, do tell me if all those exercising their minds day-in and day-out on all kinds of security issues as experts in the media are qualified to address the issue? For that matter, what expertise do we carry to comment on foreign or defence or security policies? The economy I agree is too technical, as is security or law, and one must tread carefully into such avenues. But who cares? This is open season for self-styled experts to formulate unrestrained views without even peripheral knowledge.

The 18th Amendment is interesting; some view it only in how it impacts the army’s budgetary needs. The amendment qualifies to be a game-changer in the constitutional evolution and a significant step in empowering the provinces and giving them a sense of ownership.

And then in Pakistan’s history there stands that one sad chapter when the country was dismembered because a province was denied rights. This gets repeated as a testimony of what might befall if we repeat the mistake. Hence the criticality of why the 18th Amendment must be preserved. Except that the policy and structural adornments which must accompany such devolution of power and responsibility remain hopelessly untouched even if the geography wasn’t a factor.

This enhanced role was accompanied by increased allocations under a revised NFC award. The provinces court enhanced allocations but absolve themselves from attending to attached responsibilities. The provinces are still not raising enough revenue to fulfil their responsibility. This keeps the people deprived and makes the federation weaker because of weaker constituents. But this is only one aspect.

The second relates to an uncontested hold of the governments in power, which translates into political parties as the wholesale owners of provinces because of their strong regional presence. There isn’t a political force even in conception capable of dislodging the PPP from Sindh, and perhaps the PML-N from Punjab, in the foreseeable future. If Sindh seems to be stagnated in governance and regressive in the treatment of its people, there is little that anyone can do to change the Sindh government’s approach. To leave it to the people to vote the party out of power is as simplistic as it is misleading.

So then was the 18th Amendment really meant to enable a closer-to-home delivery than building firewalls from federal influence? That remains the pressing concern in an environment of all-round weak governance and exploitative power which these political actors arrogate. Asif Ali Zardari may not soon see a return to power in the centre but none can dislodge him in Sindh. This may have been the real, though underlying, intent of an otherwise altruistic 18th Amendment. There is thus a need to build checks and balances to stem unrestricted exploitation of a province’s political environment in favour of only one group of political elites. This remains imperative even if the army has been pushed to distance itself from any speculation of the attending impact of the amendment.

A doctrine was thus falsely framed and then demolished by democracy aficionados. In the world of fake news, this hardly is news. To be sure, though, the army chief may speak with care – with even greater care exercised in forming the list of invitees. The subject of the economy should still be avoided as a slippery slope. I concede.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com