The Army and Democracy ARMY The and DEMOCRACY MILITARY POLITICS IN PAKISTAN AQIL SHAH Cambridge, Massachusetts London, Eng land 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America library of congress cataloging- in-p ublication data Shah, Aqil, 1973– author. Th e army and democracy : military politics in Pakistan / Aqil Shah. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0-6 74- 72893- 6 (alkaline paper) 1. Pakistan. Army— Political activity. 2. Pakistan. Army— History. 3. Civil-m ilitary relations— Pakistan. 4 . Pakistan— Military policy. 5. Democracy— Pakistan. 6 . Pakistan— Politics and government. I. Title. UA853.P18S53 2014 322'.5095491—dc23 2013037070 To my late father, S. M. Jan Shah, poet and idealist CONTENTS Preface ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 1 Waging War, Building a Nation 31 2 Marching toward Martial Law 72 3 “Revolution” to Revolt 94 4 Recapturing the State 119 5 From Zia to Musharraf 150 6 Musharraf and Military Professionalism 186 7 Th e Military and Democracy 215 Conclusion 254 Notes 289 Ac know ledg ments 379 Index 381 PREFACE O n May 2, 2011, American Special Forces killed al- Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad in an early m orning raid when much of Pakistan, including apparently its army and air force, were fast asleep. Th e raid also laid bare Paki- stan’s perennial civil-m ilitary pathologies. For one, it shattered, once again, the military’s carefully constructed myth of invincibility and raised the hopes of many Pakistanis, including some members of parliament, that the military would fi nally be held accountable be- cause it was caught sleeping at the wheel. But as tensions between the army and the government fl ared, there w ere also fears and ru- mors of an impending coup. Th rough all this, the Pakistani army’s putative civilian boss, Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, remained clueless. He later told a government inquiry commission that he found out about the incident when his daughter called him from New York the next day. Th is would be unimaginable in a demo cratic state. In Pakistan, it is business as usual. It would be tempting to blame it all on corrupt or self- serving politicians. Th ey have not covered themselves in glory. But there is an even more compelling reason: Pakistan is a garrison state, one of ix