24
The militaries of South Asia

Stephen P. Cohen

Introduction

South Asia contains some of the largest and most important military organizations in the world today. The Indian Army is the world’s second largest, Pakistan’s is the world’s sixth, and both countries have a growing stock of nuclear weapons.1 The Bangladesh Army is active in UN peacekeeping activities and plays an important political role in that country, although not as great as that of the Pakistan Army, which has directly or indirectly dominated Pakistan for more than half of its 60-year history.

While these three armies have much in common—notably a shared origin in the British Indian Army—the subcontinent is home to other military forces with divergent beginnings. These include the navies and air forces of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the three Sri Lankan services, and importantly, because of their political role and rapid growth over the last 20 years, South Asia’s many paramilitary organizations. The latter include both government forces and the proto-armies of numerous separatist, terrorist, and auto-nomist groups. One such non-state military force, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka, challenged the state itself, and others, such as Nepal’s Maoist para-militaries, may be given official or semi-official status in the future.

This chapter focuses on the origins and roles of the three major subcontinental armies— India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—and in passing discusses other South Asian forces.2 While their roles in politics will be emphasized (in the Indian case, the absence of such a role is notable), it should be borne in mind that all armies are complex state bureaucracies that perform several functions. Their stated purpose is to apply force in a war against a foreign enemy, or to use force at home to maintain law and order. Yet South Asia’s armies (far more than its air forces or navies) have a complex relationship to their respective societies, especially to their many ethnic, caste, and linguistic groups.They may also play a role in decision making, and their budgets are often the state’s single largest expenditure. Finally, militaries (again, especially armies) often play a role in shaping both state and national identities.

British roots

Over a nearly 200-year period, the British evolved a military structure in India to serve their own purposes.At first this was to establish control over the territories they ruled directly and indirectly. Later, as part of a larger imperial project, the British deployed Indian-based forces throughout Asia and Europe which played a critical role in both world wars. This structure and these policies have shaped the present-day armies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

The first building block in the construction of the British Indian Army was the “sepoy” system. The first regiment of what was to evolve into the Indian army was raised in 1748 by Colonel Stringer Lawrence.3 Ironically, the idea was borrowed from the French, then the leading European rival to Britain in India.4 The sepoys (derived from the Persian sipahii; after Independence they were renamed jawan, or youth) were drawn from rural and tribal India, and trained along modern, professional lines under the command of British officers. Sepoys were recruited on the basis of merit and some were often as professionally competent as the officers of the British Army. This system allowed the British to raise large and loyal “native” forces, with which they defeated the French, various Indian rulers, and, ultimately, the Mughal Empire itself.5

A second major innovation came in response to the Mutiny of 1857 when Hindu and Muslim troops rose against their officers and nearly succeeded in routing the British. Recruitment was subsequently restricted to the most loyal regions, castes, and ethnic groups; members of those groups (“classes” in Indian Army parlance) that were deemed disloyal were discharged.6 They also reduced recruitment from those regions, such as the south, which had been pacified, justifying both steps in terms of a freshly invented theory that deemed only some classes to be martial. The designation of “martial races” shifted over the next 100 years, and some groups, thought to be martial in the middle of the nineteenth century (such as Oudh Brahmans and Tamils) saw their numbers markedly reduced.7

In reorganizing the army after the Mutiny, the British reinforced the regimental system, which tightly bound officers and soldiers together. The importance and utility of the regimental system is evident in the comparison between Gurkha units in the British and Indian armies and those in the Royal Nepal Army, which have proved militarily ineffective, as seen in their recent failure to take the field against Maoist insurrectionists.

The British also saw to it that each ethnolinguistic class was balanced by a social rival. All Indian units were also balanced by British forces, which retained control over artillery, the era’s most advanced military technology.8 The railways, built with an eye towards the strategic unification of the subcontinent more than its economic development, were also placed in the hands of a loyal Anglo-Indian community. The one class that did not have its own regiment was Muslims. During both world wars, Punjabi Muslims were the largest single class recruited to the army. Fearing another uprising, the British dispersed their Muslim soldiers among regional regiments, such as the Punjab Regiment, where they were balanced by Sikh and Hindu soldiers. Today, the Indian Army’s Punjab Regiment is still “mixed,” but that of the Pakistani army is overwhelmingly Punjabi, although some regiments have Pashtuns. This presented problems in dealing with insurgencies in the FATA, where all-Punjabi units sent there found themselves ill-equipped to deal with local issues.

Lord Kitchener, the British commander-in-chief in India at the turn of the twentieth century, turned the primarily constabulary and border force into an expeditionary one, giving the Indian Army a greater role outside the subcontinent.This coincided with a growth in strength from 155,000 to 573,000 soldiers during the First World War, when the army was employed in France and Gallipoli, and to 2.5 million during the Second World War, when it fought in North Africa and Burma. Kitchener’s reforms also brought larger numbers of Indians into the officer corps, effectively nationalizing the army before India’s Independence. When British India was partitioned on the eve of Independence in 1947, a new Pakistan Army was formed out of units of the old, and officered by those Muslim Indians who opted for Pakistan. Subsequently, the Indian and Pakistani armies began to diverge markedly, especially in their political roles.

India and civilian primacy

In 1905 Kitchener forced the resignation of the viceroy, Lord Curzon, after the two disagreed over the extent to which Indian forces would be used to protect imperial, as opposed to Indian interests, in what was possibly the last assertion of military power in India.While Kitchener won the political battle, the British Indian government evolved a system of fiscal and political control over the army that ensured civilian supremacy.

By the time of Independence, civilian control was firmly established, although operational matters remained in the hands of the military.That the last two viceroys—Wavell and Mountbatten—were from the military largely obscured the degree of civilianization that had taken place. Indian defense budgets were hotly contested in the nascent Indian assembly by Indian representatives, who were also critical of the way in which the military was used to support imperial goals. Directed by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the relative power of civilians was further enhanced. The position of commander-in-chief was abolished (the president of India is now the titular commander-in-chief). Control over the armed forces was lodged in the civilian cabinet under the prime minister, and the status of the officer corps vis-à-vis the civil service as well as elected and appointed public officials was sharply downgraded.

While in retrospect the bargain between the nationalist movement and the Indian officer corps—effectively brokered by the British— seems inevitable, at the time there were other viable possibilities. During the war, Nehru’s rival, Subhas Chandra Bose, raised the Indian National Army (INA) out of captured Indian Army personnel in Southeast Asia. Bose’s force was militarily ineffective but ideologically potent—he challenged the martial races theory and there was no pretense that the INA was anything but a revolutionary army. Bose died in an air crash in 1945, but had he lived, or had the Japanese succeeded in invading India, the role of the army might have turned out quite differently. As it was, the INA officers were praised by Nehru and other politicians as great heroes, but were effectively denied re-entry into the army.

Civilian control was further tightened after the 1958 coup in Pakistan, as were contacts with foreign armies. Nehru believed that the Pakistan military’s coup had been facilitated by ties to its American and British counterparts. The Indian government had two other major policies in the immediate post-Independence era: it attempted to “democratize” the army by effectively doing away with the martial race theory and it kept military matters away from public scrutiny.

As for organizational patterns, India’s new leaders, encouraged by the British, permitted the army to retain its colonial structure, but emphasized loyalty to the new government. One consequence of the way civilian control was imposed in post-Independence India was that the political leadership stayed away from military matters while the military leadership remained institutionally frozen. This implicit bargain—internal autonomy in return for political supremacy over the armed forces— was strengthened by the events of the 1962 war against China. India’s defeat in the conflict was squarely blamed on political interference. Prior to the war, Nehru and his defense minister V. K. Krishna Menon had promoted politically pliable generals, requiring them to pursue a risky “forward strategy,” a move that had clearly backfired. Later wars in 1965 and 1971 reinforced military autonomy. In 1971, in the war that led to the independence of Bangladesh, General Sam Maneckshaw, the army chief, asked for operational freedom and came back with the country’s only outright military victory. This further ensured that political leaders remained wary of interfering in the internal matters of the military so long as the armed forces accepted political supremacy. In later crises, notably with Pakistan in 1999 and 2001–02, civilians called the shots. The stalemated 2001–02 crisis led to some reexamination of the essentially eighteenth-century army structure, the archaic defense budgeting system, and the absence of real “jointness” between the services and among the various civilian agencies responsible for national security policy.9

While India’s robust civil–military arrangement is different from virtually every other ex-colonial or developing society, it does not mean that it is optimal.10 Civil “control” has been achieved, the military is politically docile, but India has not really had a debate on the purpose and role of the Indian Army, let alone its relationship to Indian society, and civilians generally lack the professional expertise or experience to make informed decisions when it comes to the use of force, training, or weapons acquisition. Rather than institute real reform, India prefers to expand its forces.

The absence of a sound methodology for making important strategic and military decisions has been often noted by India’s most influential strategic writer, K. Subrahmanyam.11 While he and others have urged that a modern mechanism be established to develop and implement strategic policy, there is an unwillingness to make the changes necessary.12 The move to create a national security council only wrapped existing institutions in new cloth. Efforts to establish a chief of defense staff position have been stillborn. India also lacks an effective, transparent defense acquisition process.

The Indian military is expected to modernize significantly over the next few years, an effort that is backed by an explosive growth in India’s defense budget enabled by a rapidly expanding economy.13 India’s defense budget grew by 75 percent between 2002 and 2007. However, it remains under 3 percent of India’s GDP, less than China’s allocation of about 5 percent. Between 1999 and 2006 India was also the largest recipient of military equipment by value, importing $22.4 billion worth of arms. While the military has some input in acquisitions, decisions ultimately remain in politicians’ and bureaucrats’ hands. The defense acquisition process has also been tainted over the years by major scandals. Allegations that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi received kickbacks from Swedish armament manufacturer Bofors for a major howitzer contract resulted in his losing the 1989 general election. In 2001 Defense Minister George Fernandes resigned after a media investigation uncovered large-scale corruption related to defense acquisition.

Internal security and the rise of the paramilitaries

Over the last 20 years, the Indian army has become enmeshed in the gargantuan task of maintaining internal security. An increase in domestic violence has taken place in most of the South Asian states. While the immediate causes may be different from state to state, or even from region to region in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, the general trend is the same. In an era of rapid social change and dislocation, caused in part by the impact of globalization on traditional societies, more and more young men (and women) find themselves educated to the point where they no longer have a place in traditional society, but are unable to find a role in the slow-growing modern sectors.

In India, this trend is especially notable in an eastern belt stretching northwards from Andhra Pradesh through Chhattisgarh, Bihar, and Orissa, and extending into the northeastern states, where discontent has led to a significant rural leftist militancy, called the Naxalite movement. By government admission, over a quarter of India’s districts are affected by Naxalite activity. There are also regions of endemic insecurity in Kashmir. Other uprisings have been dealt with more successfully by the Indian government. The massive Sikh uprising in Punjab in the 1980s was contained by the Punjab police action, and there has been some success in containing separatist and autonomist groups in Nagaland and Mizoram.

Partly to meet such challenges, the Indian Army has been dragged into an internal security role. The only time the army was called on for internal security during the Raj, after Britain’s European rivals and rebellious princely states had been defeated, was during “aid to the civil” operations, such as quelling a communal riot or containing a political demonstration that had got out of hand. In such cases, ultimate authority remained in the hands of the local civilian magistrate who directed the local army commander when and where to apply force.While there were notable excesses, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the army’s role remained limited.

Recent army history has been as much about internal security as it has been about fighting external enemies. Indeed, the importance of internal security is reflected in the dominance of the army over the other services. Twelve of the Indian Army’s 18 major campaigns between 1947 and 1998 were fought on Indian soil.14 Constabulary duties in counter-insurgency campaigns in the country’s northeastern states, Punjab, and Jammu & Kashmir, eroded the country’s ability to project power outside. In addition, long and arduous internal duty led to soldiers from armored and air defense units being rotated through counter-insurgency formations.

The government’s response to the expanding internal security challenge was to turn to the army, and then, when the army resisted, to create new paramilitary forces. These now outnumber the army 1.3 million to 1.1 million.15 The major paramilitary forces include the Border Security Force (208,422) and the Central Reserve Police Force (229,699). There are also about 450,000 state armed police forces.The Indian paramilitaries fall under the control of the home ministry, and India’s home minister commands one of the world’s largest armies, albeit one of its most unruly, with a long record of abuse, disobedience, and even mutiny. Yet, the paramilitary task is so important that the army has created its own paramilitary force, the Rashtriya Rifles, which is manned by regular officers and soldiers who rotate through it from regular army units.

Thus, the army in India suffers from an identity crisis. It really is a three-in-one force: a counterinsurgency army fighting primarily in Kashmir and the northeast, backing up the generally unreliable paramilitary forces; a mountain defense force guarding against a Chinese incursion, divided between the borders in the north and the northeast, with some elements, particularly in the latter, also engaged in counterinsurgency; and a mechanized and armored strike force, focused on the next war with Pakistan along the western border, but now made less relevant because of nuclear weapons.

The air force, navy, and nuclear forces

India’s other two services, the air force and the navy, never acquired as many of the colonial trappings as the Indian Army. They do not recruit on the basis of caste or language, are keyed to advances in military technology, and play no role in Indian politics. For both these services, however, acquiring and deploying modern equipment has been a paramount problem, and their share of the Indian defense budget has always been very small, compared with that of the politically more sensitive army. In 2004, for example, the army was allocated 41.9 percent of the defense budget while the Indian Navy’s share was 14.7 percent and that of the Indian Air Force was 24.7 percent.16

Finally, it is important to consider the impact of the introduction of nuclear weapons on the role of the armed forces in India, and the accompanying potential for miscalculation or misjudgment. On the ground, there is a slow but steady introduction and integration of nuclear weapons in the military arsenal. Based on its fissile material production capacity, India probably has somewhere between 50 and 100 nuclear weapons of proven design and the aircraft to deliver them.17 In the future, there are plans for missile-delivered nuclear warheads, and even a nuclear navy, which would be able to range widely, delivering nuclear weapons onto targets many thousands of miles from the Indian mainland. The Indian government has tried to apply the principle of civilian supremacy in the use of these weapons, has a designated chain-of-command in emulation of western nuclear powers and the Soviet Union, and has built secure shelters to protect key decision makers in a crisis.Yet, there appears to be no integrated service nuclear doctrine, and the government has not faced up to the problem of command and control and delegation of authority during a crisis in which nuclear weapons might be used. In the recent history of the subcontinent, three crises (in 1990, 1999, and 2001–02) involved nuclear threats, and possibly the movement of nuclear assets.18

The Pakistan army

It has been said that Pakistan has an army in control of a state, and the army’s dominant role is unlikely to soon change.The Pakistan army is unique among armies of the world in its combination of size, military professionalism, a dominant political role, and its possession of nuclear weapons. It still reflects its British Indian Army origins, and thus has much in common with the Indian and Bangladesh armies, as well as many western armies. Perhaps the most important aspect of this inheritance, however, is that it more closely resembles the military-centered Raj of the nineteenth century than the civilianizing Raj of the early twentieth century.

Beginning in 1954, the Pakistan Army’s political role expanded rapidly and General Ayub Khan seized power in a bloodless coup in 1958. He unsuccessfully “civilianized” himself and, as a result of domestic unrest, was displaced by General Yahya Khan in 1969. Following Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s chaotic period of governance (1971–77), General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a third coup, and governed with an iron fist until he died in an air crash in 1988. Zia built on Bhutto’s attempts to Islamize Pakistan, and the army became more overtly “Islamic” than at any time in its history. After ten years of erratic democracy, the army again seized power in 1999, and Pakistan was until 2008 governed by General Pervez Musharraf. Most of Zia’s efforts to Islamize the army have been rolled back, although the army retains close ties to some Islamist groups, and Islamic dimensions of the army’s identity are still taught in army schools.

Why did the army assume power in Pakistan, when it stayed on the sidelines in India? There were three main factors that pushed the army into the role of Pakistan’s dominant political force.

First, Pakistan very early lost whatever competent civilian leadership it had. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding leader of Pakistan, died only one year after Independence and there was no follow-on leadership of equivalent stature. Neither was there another leader with proficiency in strategic and military affairs, such as Jinnah had developed early in his career.The only Pakistani civilians with professional skills of a high order were the bureaucrats, and Pakistan was initially dominated by a coalition of senior civil servants and army officers.

Second, the Pakistan Army came to see itself as the only force that stood between Pakistan and destruction by a hostile India, and was accepted as such by the people. Jinnah had argued that Pakistan would be a homeland for oppressed Indian Muslims. The army came to the view that this homeland had to assume the shape of a fortress, besieged by a malevolent India, and that the army best knew how to prepare these defenses. Echoes of this view were also heard in President Musharraf ’s declaration that the Pakistan army knew best what Pakistan’s “national interest” really was. Because of the army’s central role in Pakistani politics, certain military formations are politically very relevant. This includes the 10 Corps, based in Rawalpindi, and its 111 Brigade. Also politically critical are the corps in or near Pakistan’s major cities, Karachi and Lahore.19

Third, the army was strongly influenced by its contacts with Washington, which equipped it in the 1950s and 1960s mainly to serve as a bulwark against the Communist threat in Asia. With US aid and encouragement, the Pakistan Army grew from approximately 150,000 in 1947 to 320,000 in 1970, and 550,000 in 2006. During the 1980s, China supplanted America as a major supplier of military equipment, but the US role was revived when a massive military aid program was instituted after 9/11 and Pakistan assumed the role of a frontline state in the so-called “war on terror.”

Other than its gradual Islamization under Zia, the Pakistan Army has not changed very much in 60 years. Its corps and divisional structure, the hierarchy of ranks, and its military schools would be familiar to western (or Indian) visitors. Neither has the officer–other rank relationship changed very much. Officers are drawn increasingly from Pakistan’s middle classes and are overwhelmingly Punjabi, but they are part of Pakistan’s ruling elite. Other ranks are still predominantly rural and peasant in their origin and most come from a few districts in Punjab. Unlike India, where political power is widely dispersed among geographical regions, in Pakistan it is concentrated in dominant Punjab, which is home to more than half the country’s population.

Despite its role in the “war on terror,” Pakistan’s army is largely deployed to meet an Indian conventional military threat. In the past, the Afghan border was lightly covered, and the army relied on frontier and paramilitary forces for local security arrangements. But with the rise of Islamic militancy in the North-West Frontier Province, and separatist sentiments still in evidence in Balochistan, this is fast changing, and the Pakistan Army has moved several divisions from the eastern front to fight insurgents in the NWFP.

A balance sheet of the army’s stewardship over the state of Pakistan would show that while it has done well in some endeavors, it was average in others, and was grossly deficient in a few areas. The army has engaged in a number of international peacekeeping operations, often under United Nations auspices, and these can be judged an unqualified success. The professionalism of the officer corps, the discipline of the other ranks, and its considerable experience have earned the army praise from many quarters. When it comes to conventional military operations—all against India—it has acquitted itself well militarily. The 1965 war resulted in a standoff, despite the greater numbers on the Indian side. Pakistan’s conventional capabilities were also used to good effect in the 1987 “Brasstacks” crisis, when it maneuvered in such a way as to force the Indians to abandon what might have been a pre-emptive strike.

Since 1990 all of Pakistan’s conflicts with India carry with them the threat of escalation to nuclear war. In this regard, the army has presided over a nuclear weapons program with some success, involving the covert acquisition of technology from many countries, including the United States, Germany, Holland, and China. Pakistan now has at least 80 nuclear weapons, enough to deter any significant Indian attack.

Pakistan’s covert military operations have been a mixed success. In the 1980s it worked with China, the US, and some Middle East states to support the anti-Soviet mujahiddin in Afghanistan. This support was effective, but Pakistan suffered the consequences of “blow-back” as drugs, weapons, and Islamic extremism filtered back into Pakistan itself, destabilizing several parts of the country, including Karachi. Subsequently, the army supported jihadi elements in Indian-administered Kashmir, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. India and Pakistan fought a mini-war in 1999 in the Kargil region of Kashmir when Pakistan-supported Islamic jihadis, operating alongside army units, infiltrated across the Line of Control, triggering a violent Indian response, and bringing the United States to support India’s side.The 9/11 attacks forced Pakistan to nominally withdraw its support to Kashmiri separatists and the Taliban, although there are still allegations that the Pakistan Army tolerates Taliban operations that are directed against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. In Kashmir, the support seems to have declined, but a major terrorist incident, especially one that is traced back to Pakistan, could lead to another crisis.

The two areas in which the Pakistan Army can be judged to have consistently failed are in the political management of the state of Pakistan and in counterinsurgency operations on its own territory.

The story of the Pakistan army’s involvement in politics is an oft-told tale. Three extended military regimes, those of Ayub Khan, Zia ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf, have each left the state worse off than it was before the military took over. The army maintains a firm front against civilian rule, and this façade will have to crack before there is any real progress in transitioning from a chronically inadequate system of military rule to something that approximates a competent civilianled government. No change is in sight: the army still believes that it is Pakistan’s savior, and that the civilians will ruin the state. The prognosis is that a stable transition is highly unlikely, and that Pakistan will lurch from domestic crisis to domestic crisis.This will be manageable as long as Pakistan receives significant amounts of economic and political help from its major outside supporters, such as Saudi Arabia, China, and the United States.

The army’s failure to manage domestic insurgency is paradoxical because Pakistani intelligence services and home-grown jihadis have been successful in destabilizing Pakistan’s neighbors, notably parts of India and Afghanistan, and Pakistan-based Islamic extremists have operated in China’s western provinces as well. Historically, the army’s operations against Bangladeshi separatists were ineffective, and the army should never have allowed the situation to deteriorate to the point where it was faced with a massive Indian-supported movement. Subsequently, its operations against insurrectionists in Balochistan failed to effectively combine political and military elements. This problem is evident today in Balochistan and in large swaths of the North-West Frontier Province, where the army, after being attacked by Islamist extremists, discovered that it lacked either a counterinsurgency doctrine or an understanding of growing social dislocation.

As in India, Pakistan has responded to social dislocation and the breakdown of law and order by increasing paramilitary forces, which now number well over 300,000, compared to the army’s 550,000. Yet social turmoil, stemming in part from political incompetence and from the effects of globalization on a hitherto conservative social order, continues to grow, and is critical in the NWFP. So great is the problem that the army is now faced with a three-front war: in the east with India, in the northwest against Taliban-like militants, and in Punjab, against rising sectarian terrorist violence. Ironically, some of the militants were trained by Pakistan’s own intelligence services and shielded over the years.

This confronts the army, and the state of Pakistan, with a deep existential crisis.20 Can the army engage in effective counter-insurgency without the support of its own population? Can a largely Punjabi army deal with a Pashtun or Baloch separatist movement, the former reinforced by Islamist extremism, the latter by subnationalist passions? Army leaders have no clear answer to this, but Pakistan’s politicians argue that only they, with a popular mandate, can exert the force necessary to tackle these extremist and separatist groups. They draw on classic British counter-insurgency doctrine, which teaches that fighting an insurgency is 80 percent political and economic and only 20 percent military.

One strategic conclusion that can be drawn is that Pakistan may be driven into an arrangement with India regarding Kashmir, and that the long-cherished goal of prising Kashmir from India will have to be abandoned. Some Pakistan army officers have reached this conclusion, and embedded in Musharraf ’s unsuccessful peace overtures towards India was an understanding that Pakistan itself cannot afford to “bleed” India as it is itself facing a major threat of its own in the North-West Frontier Province, the FATA, and the Punjab itself.

The army’s political role is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future. The army is in the peculiar position of being unable to comprehensively run Pakistan, but not letting civilians do it either. It regards Pakistan’s civilian politicians, not entirely without reason, as self-seeking, corrupt and incompetent. Under Musharraf,the army further dismantled Pakistan’s civilian bureaucratic institutions. It is attempting to reconstruct the entire educational system. It tries to contain the spread of Islamist extremism while partnering with radical Islamist parties. Since the army lacks the expertise and training to actually administer Pakistan, or to move it ahead economically, its penetration of administrative and economic sectors will eventually be costly. The army is skilled at playing “balance of power” games with Pakistan’s political parties, but it cannot substitute for political parties that can broker compromises among Pakistan’s contending class, ethnic, sectarian, and regional elements. The contradictions in the army’s position became increasingly evident and, as of 2008, Musharraf ’s position as Pakistan’s leader had been undermined and the army’s position as the state’s most important institution had come under attack.

The Pakistan Amy faces challenges it is not prepared to meet.The question suggests itself: can a professional army with conventional roots fight a major counterinsurgency war against diverse enemies, prepare for both a conventional and nuclear war with India, remain the dominant political force in Pakistan, and oversee Pakistan’s economic, educational and administrative institutions? No army in history has ever successfully coped with such a wide range of tasks over a long period.The Pakistan Amy is unlikely to do so either.

The Bangladesh experiment

Until 1971, East Pakistan, like West Pakistan, was dominated by the Pakistan Army. A civil war, followed by indirect and then direct Indian military intervention led to the army’s surrender on 16 December, 1971 and the establishment of Bangladesh.

When the Bangladeshi liberation struggle broke out in March 1971, officers and men from Pakistan army units were among the very first to turn against the West Pakistanis. Most of the Bengal Regiment’s battalions had been trapped in the west, but enough were in the east to form the core of military resistance. They were joined by the Bengali elements of the East Pakistan Rifles, a paramilitary border force which had many non-Bengali officers. These regulars and irregulars were led by commissioned Pakistan army officers, all of relatively low rank, but who eventually formed the backbone of the Bangladesh Army.

A second component of the new Bangladesh Army consisted of veterans of various “bahinis,” or forces, which thrived during the nine-month liberation struggle.The regular Bengali soldiers who were brought together as a resistance force were first known as the Mukti Fauz and then as the Mukti Bahini. Meanwhile, thousands of civilians had formed themselves into guerrilla groups of varying degrees of competence and training. The Indian government covertly assisted these groups, often via Indian Bengali officers who temporarily resigned their commissions to lead the bahinis.

The Bangladesh government in exile had only limited control over the bahinis. Some came under the control of the Awami League’s student group. Others such as the Quader Bahini, named after its leader Quader “Tiger” Siddiqui, operated independently and retained their identity after independence.

Unlike India and Pakistan, the new Bangladesh government began with a clean slate in creating an army. Its forces consisted of regular Bengali officers from the Pakistan army officers and jawans, plus the bahinis. However, there were also strains between former Pakistan army officers who fought with the bahinis and those who were prisoners during the war, who returned after liberation. In addition, there were tensions between those who favored a military establishment along Pakistani lines and were suspicious of India, and those who understood that large armored forces were unnecessary and were willing to accommodate the much larger India, especially given Bangladesh’s dependence on Indian economic assistance.

With Indian encouragement, the decision was made to stick as close to the British military model as possible, and in a few years the bahinis were terminated and a new Bangladesh army was established.This decision echoed that of Jawaharlal Nehru and his Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel when they rejected the idea of folding the Indian National Army into the regular Indian Army. Eerily, however, Bangladesh soon began to replicate the tortuous civil–military relationship that had plagued Pakistan since the 1950s.

The first prime minister of Bangladesh, the charismatic Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, elevated himself to president in 1975 after launching a scheme of nationalizing key industries, one that paralleled the policies pursued in Pakistan by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.21 Mujib was assassinated later in the year, along with most of his family, and General Zia Rahman assumed the presidency, creating a political party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) to rival Mujib’s Awami League. He lifted martial law in 1979, but was assassinated during an abortive military coup in 1981.After a period of further instability and chaos, General H. M. Ershad assumed power in a 1982 coup, suspending the constitution and political parties. Ershad assumed the presidency and, to India’s conster-nation, Islam became the state religion. Ershad was forced to step down eight years later and was convicted and jailed on corruption charges, returning to politics on his release, but with little success.

Civilian rule returned, albeit shakily, when Begum Khaleda Zia became prime minister in 1991 and the presidency returned to ceremonial status. From this time onward, the military played no overt role in politics, but there remained a divisive rivalry between Begum Zia, General Zia’s widow, and Sheikh Hasina Wajed, one of Mujib’s surviving daughters. The two women traded places as prime minister and opposition leader for much of the following decade, while Bangladesh’s internal security situation steadily deteriorated. The military remained vital, and was called on repeatedly to deal with general strikes, mass bomb blasts, and the rise of Islamic militancy.

There were several attempts in late 2006 to draw the military into politics, but the army resisted the temptation, intervening only in January 2007 when it moved to neutralize the two major parties, possibly preventing massive civil strife. A state of emergency was declared and the scheduled national election was postponed. The interim government—urged on by the generals—restricted the freedom of movement of both Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, and continued to govern Bangladesh. Since then, the armed forces have worked with the civilian administration to tackle corruption and maladministration, but remained overtly subservient to civilian authority.

The Bangladesh Army, unlike its Pakistani counterpart, is reluctant to get deeply involved in politics and openly govern again. Yet, it is fearful of continuing violence, and behind the scenes has urged discipline and calm on the political community. One reason why it has refrained from again intervening in domestic politics is that it plays a major role as an international peacekeeper. Bangladesh earns a good deal of its foreign exchange through such peacekeeping missions, currently contributing about 9,000 peacekeepers to eleven different countries, the largest contribution of any state.22

Another consequence of a potential military coup could be sanctions that would reduce aid programs to Bangladesh.Thus, civilian government is maintained in part by the concerns of the international community, whose aid programs keep Bangladesh solvent.

In addition, the military maintains a self-imposed distance from politics. It understands the vast scale of Bangladesh’s developmental and sectarian problems.Two failed experiments by Generals Zia and Ershad seem to have deterred the current generation of officers from attempting a third spell of military rule.

The Aspirants: Non-state armies

An important development in the military history of all South Asian states is the emergence of significant paramilitary forces, on the one hand, and non-state forces, some approximating professional armies in terms of their capabilities, equipment, and discipline, on the other hand.

Sri Lanka presents the most important case of a non-state military challenging the state itself, and holding the government’s forces at bay. Ostensibly a political party, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which claimed to speak on behalf of the island’s ethnic Tamils, was also an army with a political agenda, engaged in a permanent war against the Sri Lankan state.23 Unlike some of the Indian non-state groups or Nepal’s Maoist insurgents, the Tigers sought the practical dissolution of the Sri Lankan state and its transformation into a federal state to give the LTTE control of slightly under one-third of the country as part of an ethnic Tamil homeland. Further, the Tiger ideology would not stop at the water’s edge, for the LTTE at times articulated aspirations for a much larger Tamil nation, to include the much more populous Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

The LTTE was by far the most sophisticated non-state army in South Asia, perhaps in the world. It pioneered the technique of suicide bombing, successfully assassinating Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, and senior Sri Lankan general Parami Kulatunga in that manner.24 The LTTE had an extensive overseas support network that relied on expatriate Tamils, and it maintained offices, like a state, around the world. Although declared a terrorist group in a number of countries, it still managed to extract, willingly or otherwise, a huge amount of money from expatriate Tamils to purchase weapons, retain an army of about 8,000–11,000 fighters in the field, maintain a small fleet of ships (the “Sea Tigers”), and even a tiny air force, made up of a few light aircraft purchased abroad and assembled in the jungle fastness of northern Sri Lanka.

Facing them was the Sri Lankan army of about 150,000 troops, largely Sinhala, although there have been leading Tamil and Burgher officers over the years.The Sri Lankan government has a small air force that it sent on air strikes irregularly. Its tiny navy was barely able to monitor the comings and goings of the Tamil Sea Tigers, and Sri Lanka relied on Indian help to detain or sink supplies coming to the LTTE from abroad.

Despite being immersed in a vicious civil war for nearly 20 years, the Sri Lankan state avoided the pitfall of militarization. Key decisions were made by civilians, and the parliamentary system worked as best it could under near-wartime conditions.

Postscript

In Bangladesh the army yielded power to civilians at the end of 2008, and Sheikh Hasina once again became Prime Minister. Bangladesh’s paramilitary border guards mutinied in February 2009, only to be put down by the army, but the mutineers slaughtered many of their officers.

Pakistan’s President Musharraf resigned after nine years in office, on 18 August, 2008, leaving behind a weaker economy, domestic political chaos, a chastened army, and a raging insurgency in the federally administered areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier province. He was eventually succeeded by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who has presided over further chaos. A reluctant army is likely to step in again before the year is up. A crisis with India was narrowly averted after ten (or more) Pakistan-based terrorists launched attacks on several Mumbai hotels, a railroad station, and a Jewish center.The event was televised globally over a three-day period, which, along with the murder of nationals from over twenty states, contributed to heavy international intervention in an attempt to avoid escalation and to identify and bring the perpetrators to justice. Despite its achievements in other spheres, India displayed supreme incompetence in coping with this attack before, during and after the event.

In Sri Lanka a fresh assault, aided by Tamil Tiger defectors, led in early 2009 to a comprehensive military victory, but the Tigers will probably revert to guerrilla war.

The Nepali Maoists were the more successful of the non-state paramilitaries, and have come to uncertain power in a debilitated Nepal. They abolished the monarchy and are attempting to supplant the Nepal army.

Notes

1 Throughout this entry figures on numbers of troops, paramilitary forces, and other armed groups, as well as defense budgets, are drawn from the authoritative Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 2006 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2007).

2 For a comparative study of the role of the army in these three countries, see Veena Kukreja, Civil–Military Relations in South Asia: Pakistan, Bangladesh and India (New Delhi: Sage, 1991).

3 For three different histories of the British Indian army, see Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation, rev. edn (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Philip Mason, Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974); and Lt. Gen. S.L Menezes, Fidelity and Honour:The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

4 For a summary of the important French contribution, see Lt. Gen. Gurbir Mansingh, French Military Influence in India (New Delhi: Knowledge World and United Services Institution of India, 2006); also see John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Boulder, CO:Westview, 2003).

5 There is a vast literature on the battles of the British Indian Army. For an historically informed and accessible description of the way in which it was used alongside the British Army in India, see the Sharpe series of novels by Bernard Cornwell, the first three of which cover the battles of Seringapatam, Assaye, and Gawilghur.

6 The Indian army’s use of the word “class” does not refer to economic or social stratification, but to the various castes, religious groups, and even regions that contribute men to the military. Each class had its own quota. Thus, before Partition, Punjabi Muslims and Punjabi Hindus were two separate classes for purposes of recruitment.

7 The British compiled a series of handbooks in which the special qualities of each recruited class were narrated. See Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2001).

8 For details of army expansion, see Bisheshwar Prasad (ed.), Official History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War: Expansion of the Armed Forces and Defence Organization, 1939–1945 (New Delhi: Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, India and Pakistan, 1965), p. 298.

9 Perhaps the most scathing criticism of the decision-making system was that of the Kargil Review Committee, a quasi-official body appointed by the government in 1999; it whitewashed the army’s performance but did offer some useful suggestions regarding defense organization.

10 For a comparison of the Indian and Pakistani armies, see Cohen, The Indian Army, and Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1992; rev. edn, Oxford University Press, 1998).

11 For a definitive collection of his writings on strategy, defense organization, and civil–military relations see K. Subramanyam, Shedding Shibboleths: India’s Evolving Strategic Outlook (Delhi: Wordsmiths, 2005).

12 For a discussion of Subrahmanyam’s views see P. K. Kumaraswamy (ed.), Security Beyond Survival: Essays for K. Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Sage, 2004).

13 For a comprehensive overview of the relationship of the armed forces to Indian society and politics, and their search for a strategic framework, see Verghese Koithara, Society, State and Security: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Sage, 1999).

14 Jaswant Singh, Defending India (Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

15 For authoritative details, see The Military Balance, 2007, pp. 230–35.

16 The Military Balance 2007 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies), p. 310.

17 Accurately estimating the strength of India’s nuclear arsenal is notoriously difficult. See George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 430; and David Albright, “India’s Military Plutonium Inventory, End 2004,” Institute for Science and International Security, 7 May, 2005.

18 For a comprehensive overview of the role of nuclear weapons in these and other crises, see P. R. Chari et al., Four Crises and a Peace Process: American Engagement in South Asia (Washington: Brookings, 2007).

19 The creation in 2007 of three army commands, each encompassing several corps, may change the hitherto critical role of the corps commanders.

20 For an attempt to describe Pakistan’s possible futures, see Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington: Brookings, 2004).

21 For a survey of the relationship between the politicians and the military, see Talukder Maniruzzaman, Politics and Security of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press, 1994).

22 The Military Balance 2007, p. 314.

23 For studies of the Tigers and the Sri Lankan dilemma see Rohan Gunaratna, Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Crisis and National Security (Colombo: South Asian Network on Conflict Research, 1998); and, by the same author, International and Regional Security Implications of the Sri Lankan Tamil Insurgency (Colombo:Taprobane, 1997).

24 A remarkable film, The Terrorist (1999), traces the recruitment of a female Tamil fighter to the ranks of a suicide squad, and her journey to (presumably) India to carry out a mission against a foreign politician.