Crisis may mend civil-military relations in Pakistan

Crisis may mend civil-military ties: Gen Karamat urges checks on military role
By Muhammad Badar Alam: Dawn, May 5, 2007

LAHORE, May 4: Former army chief Jahangir Karamat has said that the presidential reference against the chief justice of Pakistan and the protests triggered by the move may prove to be “perhaps a step towards resolving the problems the civil-military relations” have faced in the country.

Delivering a lecture at the Lahore University of Management Sciences on Friday, he said in the past a powerless judiciary had only sanctified the military’s coming into power. “When the current regime took over in 1999, there was a difference though. The Supreme Court gave it only three years to do what it wanted but those three yeas have now stretched into eight.”

He agreed with a questioner that the military had a lot to answer for and it had corporate interests as well.

Mr Karamat said that civil-military relations had always remained ‘difficult’ in Pakistan. The difficulty “started when politicians asked a serving military chief (Ayub Khan) to become the defence minister.”

He argued that military was inherently aggressive and interventionist, and with inordinately large resources at its disposal and no challenge from other institutions to its supremacy, it would end up being where it was in Pakistan now –- at the acme of power.

"The military has to be checked through legal and constitutional means as the United States and India have successfully done, despite having much bigger armies than Pakistan has," he said.

He was of the opinion that the country faced no immediate external threat. “In fact, Pakistan has a lot going for it on the international scene,” he declared.

He cited US strategic interests in Pakistan’s neighbours, including Afghanistan, Iran, India and China, as a reason for the country facing no imminent threat of a war. “For the first time, the US has political leverage with both Pakistan and India. It never had such leverage with India in the past and this should help create peace rather than war between the two countries," Mr Karamat said.

He said the country was exposed to dire internal threats, including the challenge of providing infrastructure for its increasing population, human resource development, the gap between economic performance and poverty alleviation, civil-military relations, governance and, above all, extremism. "If we are unable to resolve these issues, they will become vulnerabilities which any other country can exploit." Pakistan, he emphasised, more than anything else, needed to put its own house in order to be able to secure its future.