Political Role of Army in Pakistan: Some Reflections
In almost all twentieth century states, the professional officer corps of the military forces is a significant segment of the political elite. In post-colonial states especially, the officer corps shares with many politicians and higher civil servants an advanced education, a privileged economic position and a high social status. Whatever the class origin of the military leadership, its contemporary position is at the centre of organized political life and, therefore, at the centre of the public policy decisions of a country. Military officers are likely to share with their fellow leaders in other spheres of life a particular outlook on the need for national development, patriotism and unity. They are likely to disagree with their fellows about the means toward similar goals, and the investments necessary to sustain them. It may be expected, therefore, that within a national consensus on goals political rivalry should exist between civil, political and military segments of the elite. What distinguishes the military role among differing states is the relative influence of soldiers in the decision-making process, the scope of public policy in which the military voice is heard, and the differing security environments in which a national elite takes decisions.
PAKISTAN'S UNIQUE PROBLEMS
Observers of Pakistan are ill-served by political biography of the kind and quality that would illuminate the early days of civil-military relations. The death, intestate, of many of the country's first leaders, the ill-handling and poor preservation of primary materials and the sharply partisan nature of the issues involving military politics suggest that we are unlikely to ever know the fine points and human dimension of the political relationships between men like Liaquat Ali Khan and General Akbar Khan, or between Iskander Mirza, Mohammad Ayub Khan and H.S. Suhrawardy.
Even in the case of Mohammad Ayub Khan, in which we have an autobiography and two major biographies, all were written about a “sitting king,” and are therefore both discreet and politically self-serving. Among outside observers, there has been a tendency to judge Ayub Khan's actions in the first days of the state in the light of his later assumption of power. Since he became dictator-president, it is simplistically assumed that he plotted to become dictator-president from the beginning.
The absence of reliable information and the polemics that grew from the 1958 coup and the subsequent regime have led, unfortunately, to some highly inflated “theories of conspiracy and some overtly simplistic notions about what was, surely, an uncertain, evolving and complex historical process. Nor are we served any better for the Army's role in prepartition politics. There are some excellent studies of conflict within provinces, and between the leaders of the Muslim League, the Congress and the British administration, but little attention has been paid to the military and civil service elites. Could it be that Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan had no regular access to advice and information from bureaucrats and soldiers? Is it conceivable that these creatures of government were innocent of calculations about the advantages or disadvantages of a separate Muslim state? Lt. General T.N. Kaul's controversial book* surely makes clear the fact that Nehru used General Kaul as a source of information about intra-army issues, personalities and policies. If we had such a book for Pakistan, we could perhaps learn the same lesson about Jinnah and Liaquat.
The one major source that may become available will be the British archives. Since British generals and governors commanded and controlled key forces and agencies in the period 1947-49, their memoirs should shed light on the pattern of relationships between the civil servants and politicians of the tenuous new state. Thus far, those records are not generally available and they may well be heavily censored when they do become available. The result of these several fundamental problems of research on civil-military relations in Pakistan is that there has been much more deduction than solid analytical research, and this essay is no exception. For that reason, it is entitled as a reflection upon military politics rather than a study of them.
POLITICIZATION OF ARMED FORCES
The earliest period of Pakistan's history was dominated by three factors of great importance to the officer corps: (1) unexpected war, first in the plains of the Punjab and then in Kashmir, (2) Jinnah's over-powering personality and role, coupled with a very weak and small political support base, and (3) completely dependent nature of Pakistan's security, and the peculiar British role as guarantor and manager of partition. The communal violence in the Punjab and the massive exchange of populations struck directly at the heartland of the Pakistan Army. Almost all Punjab families lost some members in the carnage of 1947-48, and a large percentage of the population either witnessed or participated in the slaughter. camera a fury, a joint Army requiring Indo-Pakistan cooperation was impossible. But the greater cost of the violence was that it politicized and militarized the Army and the Punjab general.
The old regimental traditions of multi-communal cooperation died in 1947-48, and in their stead emerged a militarized communal hostility. The officer corps was very largely shocked and anguished at the carnage, but they could not ignore what it had done to their troops. The war in Kashmir sealed the hostility, and India's victory in battle and diplomacy turned soldier against civilian, Pakistani against Hindu and Briton, and Punjabi against Bengali. Members of the elite valued Kashmir differentially but as frustration and humiliation further soured Indo-Pakistan relations in Karachi and Rawalpindi, the Army became most embittered. The grand arbiter, Jinnah, died on the eve of the Indian Army's march into Hyderabad, and from that time forward civil military relations, especially concerning India and Kashmir, were tense and divisive.
Liaquat Ali Khan's dilemmas were many, and his options were few. He could not afford to accept a subordinate settlement with India after the bloodshed of partition and what his countrymen believed to be Indian duplicity in Kashmir. But neither could the Prime Minister overcome India's clear preponderance, military, diplomatic and political. Liaquat could ill-afford to strengthen the Army's position within the country, since its officers disagreed with him about foreign policy, but neither could he afford to perpetually allow the British to dominate both security and foreign policy management. To make matters worse Liaquat's position within the Muslim League, and the Muslim League's position within the country, were both weak. Provincial political leaders, many of them with close ties to bureaucrats and soldiers, were pressing hard against “national leadership.
Liaquat attempted to meet these problems with a series of tactical compromises designed to win him, and the country's time. The Nehru-Liaquat Pact was a temporary detente, not a permanent settlement. British officers were kept on in technical and “invisible” sensitive roles, but Pakistani officers were promoted to command positions. A military officer, quite junior in the line and quite remote from the Kashmir imbroglio, General Ayub Khan, was brought from East Pakistan to become the first Commander-in-Chief.* Liaquat's efforts to defuse' Indo-Pakistan relations and to nationalize and neutralize the Army was accompanied by a series of moves to repress his provincial challengers. Like Jinnah, he cultivated factions but, lacking Jinnah's charisma, used legal authority (The Public and Representative Offices Disqualification Act), and governmental authorities, the police, to sustain his control.
These efforts did not succeed, in part because time was to run out on Liaquat so Soon In 1950 a group of senior military officers were arrested and tried in camera for reason. The so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy confirmed Liaquats fears about military alienation, exacerbated in this case by an alleged link between the officers and members of the Communist Party of Pakistan. The accused were not uninfluential in Punjab political circles, and at the time the abortive coup almost appeared to be a provincial one. The trial transcript has never been made public, although the Ayub Khan regime did release the last of the accused. It is generally believed that the conspirators aimed at a coup d'etat to reverse Liaquat's “accommodationist-internationalist approach to the Kashmir issue.
The relationship between the military officers and the leftists is suggested to have been more in the nature of personal ties than ideological predilections. It has recently been suggested, however, that the conspirators were little more than disgruntled amateurs, critical of the regime's foreign and domestic policies, but not cabalists. The "revisionist argument is that Liaquat sought to rid the Army of “provincialis generals just as he sought to rid public life of their political equivalents, and that he framed the charges, supported by or instigated by, General Ayub Khan who was interested in "purging his Army rivals. Whatever may be the truth, this argument was one used in the legal defence of the accused by H.S. Suhrawardy, and may help to explain the personally bitter relations between him and Ayub Khan which date from this period.
Liaquat's attempt to build a strong centralized political system came to an end with his death, by an assassin's bullet in the Punjab, in 1951. Whatever chance the policies might have had under an able successor was ended with the well-meaning but ill-conceived decision of Khwaja Nazimuddin to resign as Governor-General to assume the mantle. Nazimuddin was a simple, pious man thrust into a demanding and complex role. To make matters worse, he was replaced as Governor-General by a master intriguer, Ghulam Mohammed. By occupying, but not dominating, the centre of the policy process, Nazimuddin unintentionally weakened cabinet discipline, policy coherence and political unity. Whatever got done generally was the product of a bureaucrat, soldier or minister exceeding his authority. The tragic fruit of this lack of leadership may be found in every phase of the ensuing history of Pakistan's politics, and is documented in the Munir Commission's report of the shameful anti-Ahmadiya riots in Lahore in 1953.
It appeared to many that the only practical choice in politics between Ghulam Mohammed and Khwaja Nazimuddin was between the knave and the fool. Because there was no effective leadership by the Prime Minister, and because no consensus existed on either domestic or foreign policy, strife within the political elite was especially serve. As a result, politicians turned to bureaucrats and soldiers to build factions capable of pursuing effective public policies. It was in this period that General Ayub Khan forged close working relationships with key civil servants, notably with Iskander Mirza, the secretary of the Ministry of Defence. One can imagine this to be part of a grand design, but the more reasonable interpretation seems to be that Ayub Khan could only look after the Army and its interests by dealing with effective civil servants and so, he did so.
It was the civil servants, in the first phase, who were the politically motivated parties.
Pakistan's defence policy was, and is, inseparable from its foreign policy to a much greater degree than in most countries. The new country had no defence industry and was wholly dependent upon external supplies for even the most simple arms. Pakistan's quarrels with India—a country four times its size, population, wealth and military power-over a wide range of issues ranging from religion to water to territorial disputes in Kashmir, and its division into two wings separated by 1000 miles of Indian territory, presented its military planners with immense problems. Military needs had to command foreign policy, or so argued one of the politicalmilitary-bureaucratic factions. And because foreign and defence policies were, for the new state, matters of survival, they had to dictate domestic policy. By this chain of logic, the leaders of the Pakistan Army were propelled to the centre of the decisionmaking process, and became first its arbiter and then its monopolist.
General Ayub Khan's 1953 “appreciation” of Pakistan's political problems shows that his mind was turned towards the kind of domestic political order necessary to sustain a strong and coherent foreign and defence policy. It was not, as is sometimes argued, a blueprint for conspiracy. Indeed it, as a structural argument, focusing upon the need for organizing centres and leadership which, if adopted in 1953, would have made the 1958 coup d'etat most unlikely. Liaquat Ali Khan, if he could have read it, would have approved. In the early 1950s, however, such an appreciation was little more than that. The Army did not have the status, the power or the will necessary to displace quarrelling politicians. Provincial elections were being held, and in their turbulence there was the promise of new leadership and, perhaps, an end to the constitutional dead-lock in Karachi.
Even if Army leadership could have asserted the primacy of arms in politics, it could not have thereby produced any arms, or for that matter, any other foreign policy assets. The first task for military leaders was to find military support and foreign aid both to stabilize the Army's role within the political system and to strengthen Pakistan against India. By the greatest good fortune for Pakistan's Army, the United States was then seeking Cold War partners as Secretary of State Dulles saw the need for enlarging "containment doctrine in West Asia and on China's frontiers. Pakistan stood ready to be recruited, or at least its generals did.
It seems clear that General Ayub Khan strenuously wooed and won the Americans, and not the reverse. And it seems equally clear that he did so quite independently, so far as his cabinet “masters” were concerned. His first trip to Washington came as a surprise to the “formal leaders of the state, and he appeared to be a "free agent” with full powers. There is little doubt that once an alliance with America became a genuine possibility, an army-civil service-political faction moved rapidly to instal a pliant cabinet. The Communist Party of Pakistan had already been outlawed, Nazimuddin had discredited himself in domestics politics and was in any case unloved even in his native Bengal, and in remained only for Ghulam Mohammed to dismiss the parliament and or realign the cabinet. The new Prime Minister, not surprisingly, was Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Mohammed Ali Bogra. Defence policy was dominating foreign policy, as was shown when Pakistan did not accept Nehru's 1lth hour offer of accommodation on Kashmir in exchange for an “unarmed” Pakistan. And it was also dominating domestic politics, as was shown by the authoritarian acts of Ghulam Mohammed.
By 1954 when the first fruits of the alliance became visible, the military-bureaucratic-political faction had demonstrated both its power and its success. The alliance with America offset India's immense preponderance and changed the diplomatic weightings of the Indian and Pakistani cases on Kashmir. The Army's own "tools” were not only expanded, but much enhanced in quality and sophistication. US military advisers brought new techniques of command and communications to what was, in fact, an obsolete light infantry formation. Whatever the officer corps might have thought of Ayub Khan before the alliance diplomacy success he produced, thereafter he could hardly be faulted. Moreover, the political elite of the country generally viewed the alliance as a success and Pakistan witnessed its first period of foreign policy consensus.
But within the new consensus, political competition continued. At the time of the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, H.S. Suhrawardy defended the alliance with the US but opposed military bureaucratic dominance in domestic policy. He used this strategy of “rendering unto Caesar” foreign and defence autonomy while refusing to render total leadership responsibility even more obviously in his cooperation with the American political “adviser,” Charles Burton Marshal. Suhrawardy was aware of the need for the kind of external support so effectively used by Ayub Khan and his allies, and therefore attempted to mobilize American support for parliamentary control.
It was at this juncture that Ayub Khan had to act if he was to remain in control of foreign-defence policy. He sought American military assistance, not American political intervention on behalf of his old enemy, Suhrawardy. Between 1956 and 1958 the decisive battle was fought and the political system reflected the intense struggle. The outside world appeared to see the disintegration of the government from within. The election scheduled for ( 1958/1959 ) would almost certainly have led to a decisive victory for the parliamentarians, and especially for Suhrawardy. And although Ayub Khan had managed to get his tenure as Commander-in-Chief extended beyond the expiration in spring 1959, he must surely have known that his retirement would have been called for by the new Prime Minister, if that Prime Minister was Suhrawardy. The Army proclaimed a coup d'etat in October 1958. The elections and the constitution under which they were scheduled were eliminated. The military officers had demonstrated what they can almost always demonstrate—“clubs are trump.” The politicization of the Army was now complete.
MILITARY MANAGEMENT AND POLITICAL PROCESSS
The Martial Law authorities justified their autocracy by referring to bickerings among politicians (in which their own leadership should have been included), fiscal recklessness (of which military expenditures were no small part), a lack of leadership (which might have been remedied by elections, only three months away) and a loss of international prestige. Certainly it was true that the uncertainty in public life was a significant source of anxiety for the middle classes in the country. Moreover, there was an honest "work to rules" puritanism on the part of many military officers who considered politicians to be immoral, lazy, unkempt and wholly unattractive characters to be flying under the Pakistan flag. The economy was weak and its growth practically non-existent, and the weight of defence, let alone development was almost more than it could bear. The lack of a strong political leader in the central position of authority created the illusion of a power vacuum which General Ayub Khan could claim was his by default.
To many West Pakistanis, he had the virtue of being non-Bengali, whatever his other credentials, but to the Bengalis, he appeared to have no virtue at all. For the next decade, Pakistan's public authority was mildly authoritarian (except in the case of Suhrawardy, where it was harshly authoritarian). The press and the Universities were alternately "free" and "controlled.” The American embassy was moved out of a position of domestic political influence, and the Russians and Chinese were slowly worked into the position of "internal balancers.” Foreign, defence and domestic policy were coordinated in the person of Ayub Khan. The Central Government was strengthened against the provinces, and political participation was sharply reduced. US economic assistance started to move the economy out of its low-level equilibrium "trap” and, growing in strength and experience as a politician, Ayub Khan handled the threats posed by Generals Shaikh and Azam Khan with finesse. Military postings and promotions were carefully looked after and politically weak technocrats were appointed ministers.
The foreign policy strategy developed in 1953 showed signs of bearing fruit in the aftermath of the 1959 Sino-Indian border dispute, as it had in the United Nations in 1955 and 1956. The Sino-Indian war of 1962, and the previous refusal of Nehru to accept the bonafides of Ayub Khan's "joint defence of the subcontinent" offer (which was, of course, an offer to India of a "non two front war", threatened the entire architecture of Pakistan's defence posture. US-UK aid to India, coupled with Pakistan's newly normalized relationship with Peking, left Ayub Khan in the unhappy position of courting America's enemy while America courted Pakistan's enemy. Ayub Khan then readjusted his foreign policy, especially with the USSR. The Indian military built up after the 1962 war and the moves of the Shastri government to formally incorporate Kashmir into the Indian Union left Ayub Khan with an ineluctable choice; either re-open the dispute militarily, before the balance of power had swung overwhelmingly in India's favour, or "write off Kashmir and witness its highly visible incorporation under the Indian Constitution. The latter course was politically unacceptable if only because of the passion within the Army that Kashmir inspires.
Ayub Khan's regime was not so strong that he could afford political challenge in the Punjab and North-West Frontier and an erosion of support within the Army as well. By 1965 the choice could no longer be avoided, not only because of Mr. Shastri's “constitutional schedule” for Kashmir, but also because the 1965 presidential election in Pakistan had severely weakened Ayub Khan's reputation and strength within the elite. If the government was to govern, it either had to become more representative (develop a broader base through participation), or repeat a success comparable to the American alliance “hat trick.” And thus developed the clashes in Kashmir, the limited conflict in the Rann of Kutch and the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.
At their end, the whole design of Ayub Khan for Pakistan lay shattered. The war led to a de facto end of the American Alliance, the demonstration of Indian military superiority, the persistence of Indian Cotrol in Kashmir, and the extraordinary vulnerability of what had been called pakistan's “economic miracle.” The politically humiliating capitulation at Tashkent, and the subsequent defection of the Foreign Minister, Z.A. Bhutto, left little doubt, that the ship was sinking. Ayub Khan's last days were as a more and more isolated petty tyrant as his wazirs clamped down on an already alienated, sullen people. It was but a matter of time. . Ayub Khan, after 1961, had kept the Army officer corps as far from the political process as possible. The 1965 was brought them back to centre stage, and they could not be banished after Tashkent. He therefore, balanced, and divided, his possible rivals. General Musa was given control over the important western wing was Governor and General Yahya Khan, very much Ayub Khan's man was made commander of the Army Admiral A.R. Khan was appointed Defence Minister, Air Marshal Nur Khan was moved out of Rawalpindi to Peshawar, Generals with indifferent war records or with political ambitions were retired to jobs in the civilian sector. These were the steps of a weak government and were seen as such by the growing opposition.
While Ayub's regime had smoothered dissent, its economic policies had stimulated social change and, inevitably, economic and social tension. These new tensions—together with re-emergent ancient ones—reappeared as the government's writ started to weaken. This was especially true in the smaller towns of West Pakistan, and in East Pakistan. It was nearly impossible to fashion an alternative set of responses to these extremely difficult problems. The continuing Indian arms build up after 1965, coupled with US reluctance to resume grant arms assistance, left Pakistan with the costly option of accepting Indian hegemony or buying French arms for scarce foreign exchange. The increased arms bill required the scrapping of social and educational investments, together with yet higher taxes.
Ten years of population growth in Pakistan kept food reserves under constant pressure, and prices were rising. The tensions between soldiers and civilians about the distribution of national resources under these conditions, and with Ayub Khan's authority shattered, became as divisive as they under Khwaja Nazimuddin. Provincial tensions surfaced and grew. Two assassination attempts were made on Ayub Khan, and he also fell victim to advancing age with a pulmonary embolism incapacitating him for almost half a year. It was government by wazir, and in 1969, the Army reasserted control in Yahya Khan's "coup by invitation."
DISINTEGRATION OF MILITARY MANAGEMENT
General Yahya Khan began as had Ayub Khan. He constituted his service colleagues as "super-ministers” and administrators, and very shortly he learned what Ayub had learned, which was that such appointments divide the services and are dangerous to the national leader. Civilian cabinet advisers were then found, with the soldiers being returned to barracks, posted in the provinces, or gently retired. Yahya han, like Ayub Khan, knew that the services and especially the CSP was envied and hated. There is no doubt that charges of corruption had substance in more than one case. One civil servant built a honeymoon cottage in Murree, the hill resort, with a swimming pool-an enterprise as impossible on his salary as it was shameful given the country's poverty. Yahya Khan therefore answered the cry for justice by indicting 303 Class I officers. But reform by elimination alone was not adequate for the reconstitution of the government. Yahya then announced that a civilian government would be created and nation-wide elections held.
A constitutional convention peopled by elected representatives would draft the constitution, which he would certify, and democracy would return to Pakistan. The Army's role in this process was as guardian of order and the nation, and Yahya Khan pictured himself as a cromwell, “Lord Protector of the Nation." Restraints on political life, parties and agitation were removed, and Pakistan indulged in a long postponed enthusiasm for contention and advocacy. The Army and the purged civil service sulked out of view, their beneficial works scorned by politicians free to make charges that three months before would have been answered by imprisonment. The election results were staggering as millions of Pakistanis peacefully exercised their franchise in the first direct national election in the country's history. In East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League won by a landslide that amazed even its leader.
In the West, Z.A. Bhutto's short martyrdom in the last stages of Ayub's reign was adequate atonement for his long service for the same regime previously, and his Pakistan People's Party seeked out a narrow victory, drawing strength from socialist rhetoric, a youthful panache and a hard line against India.
The old guard and the allies of Ayub Khan were utterly routed. After eleven years of military and quasi-military government, Pakistan in 1969 was where it had been in 1958. There was no policy consensus, either domestic or foreign, except some form of nationalism which itself took different meanings in the provinces. One East Pakistan politician stood head and shoulders above all the rest, as Suhrawardy had in 1958. There was an implicit minimum coalition and consensus in a divided West Pakistan, and it was that there should be no dominance by the more numerous province in the east. The Army would not allow a political system to develop that threatened its definition of defence needs.
But there were also great differences between 1958 and the period after Ayub Khan's fall. Mujibur Rahman spoke more convincingly of the need for provincial autonomy than Suhrawardy had ever done, and the election results left no doubt whatsoever that the Bengali electorate was fully in agreement. The Army was doubly concerned over this development. A Bengali Prime Minister, committed to redressing the imbalance that had grown so much after 1958, would surely to do so under a "west to east” scheme of resource transfers, and probably at the expense of the budget. Moreover, that same Bengali Prime Minister would insist upon the recruitment and rapid promotion of Bengali officers in the Army, granting them a “political parity” with more experienced West Pakistan officers. There is also no doubt that Suhrawardy inspired more respect than Mujibur Rahman, and was himself a more experienced, less emotional, leader. The election having been held, however, the Army could not repeat the 1968 coup d'etat. The people's voice had been heard.
One alternative to this disintegration of Army management in Pakistan was a Pakistan without Bengal. It was unattractive because the military officers are nationalists, and believe in national unity. Moreover, it would leave West Pakistan a country half the size and completely unable to bear the current defence budget, let alone a larger one necessary to meet Indian force increases. Pakistan would, in such a case, have to disarm suddenly and perhaps catastrophically, and any chance to reopen the Kashmir issue or attain a position of parity with India would be irretrivably lost. The only acceptable alternative to the Army, therefore, was one Pakistan with substantial Army representation at the centre and with a constitutional order which would prohibit the kind of public policies inimical to defence interests, as defined by the Army.
That is, the Army was willing to grant the Suhrawardy position of 1956 to the Awami League of 1971. Mujibur Rahman might have been willing to make this “deal for a time, to gather strength, develop confidence and then push for the most desired outcome. But his own young followers were impatient, and the size of the electoral sweep was so great as to make impossible a compromise based on apparent weakness. Neither the Army, nor the Awami League, had any room in which to manoeuvre. The “apparent compromise, in the spring of 1971, was a provincial decentralization coupled with an East Pakistan agreement on the size of the defence budget. The modalities of this kind of constitution would have had to be negotiated over a period of time, but the negotiators apparently accepted both the political and military facts of life. But such a settlement left Z.A. Bhutto in the wilderness. The winning coalition was to be the Awami league and the Army, and West Pakistan's politicians were to take the opposition benches where they would have little more than a voice in parliament.
Bhutto saw this as much less acceptable than a Pakistan without Bengal (of which he would be Prime Minister), and he therefore began alerting his followers of a “sell-out”, to the Awami League. This alarm rung in the capitals of the West Pakistan provinces and in the Army as well, and left Yahya Khan in a highly exposed position. Neither Yahya Khan nor Mujibur Rahman could deliver their followers to their grand compromise. Sometime in March the crucial decision must have been taken to substitute force for consensus, and to destroy provincial political strength.
The Army interest in this step came out of desperation, not design, and the decision proved divisive within the Army as well as within the country. The final act of politicization, the development of conflict between officers, took place. The Awami League leadership was also divided into militant and accommodationist groups. The events of March 25-26 are inordinately complex, and observers have been to quick to Judge “root causes. Throughout March, the level of violence in East Pakistan was rising, in personal crimes, attacks on supporters of the Ayub regime, in Bihari-Bengali conflicts and in communal disorders. The East Pakistan Rifles and the East Pakistan police became increasingly alienated from the West Pakistan troops in the province, and there was trouble between them. Intelligence sources, filled the rumours of hundreds of conspiracies and plans, filled the decision-makers of the government with the picture of a planned massacre of West Pakistanis in the East.
And the Awami League leaders with notions of a massive army attack. Events clearly outran choices and the declared civil war emerged. The army's heavy weapons and gross destruction was well reported, and so, in the second phase of the war was the killing of the West Pakistan Chittagong community. Many Hindus were attacked indiscriminately, and ethnic, linguistic-cultural and political antagonisms all seemed to explode on March 26th. The subsequent Indian role in providing a sanctuary for millions of refugees, and in providing overt support for the guerrilla army of Bangla Desh seems to have confirmed the “hawkish” Pakistani military position that the Bangla Desh forces were operating with the support of India. The civil war threatens to become another Indo-Pakistan war.
As the costs — human, psychological and financial — mount against the Yahya Khan regime, West Pakistan society is beginning to disintegrate. Without aid, Pakistan cannot grow or even stay with population growth. Z.A. Bhutto is again attacking the regime, convinced that it lacks support even within the west wing. A war would change nothing but further depress an already bereft community which is in the process of tearing itself as under. In sum, the army in Pakistan has been at the centre of power for two decades. Its power within the country is the product both of its command over the means of violence and its willingness to use them politically.
Alternatives to military authority are few because of the nature of the country and of its security environment Pakistan's army has been more powerful than in other countries because of the deep divisions of national life, the weakness of politicians in identifying support within the society and because, in a disorganized society, military forces have an inherent coherence which only power in office can break. It remains to be seen what will emerge in Pakistan, but whatever the evolving state structure, military officers will walk the corridors of power.
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