S#!t Civilians Say to Veterans

Pakistan's Military

This is an excellent overview of civil-military relations in Pakistan from Al Jazeera.

Towards the end of the piece, one commentator states that if the Taliban attempted to storm Karachi, or just walk through a city, they would stick out like a sore thumb and would be crushed. I guess this would be similiar to how a NASCAR fan from Pennsyltucky drinking a PBR in a koozie would stand out in crowd of coked-up, two-tone shirt and pinstripe suit wearing analysts in the financial district of Manhattan and be promptly arrested by the NYPD. Interesting.

The Pakistani military is the most important institution in the country.

Ayub Khan, a former military ruler, described the relationship between the Pakistani state and the military thus: "The military in our country is an institution for which a piece of real estate was attached."

Pakistan's army is the seventh largest in the world with 650,000 troops on active duty plus 302,000 paramilitary and 528,000 reservists; that gives the country a 1,400,000 fighting force.

The military institution of Pakistan received a huge boost in 1999 when the country entered the nuclear club.

As the Pakistani army intensifies its offensive against the Taliban, Inside Story asks: Is the army really committed to the fight? Is it properly prepared for counter-insurgency? What role other than fighting does the military hold in Pakistani politics and how much control does the army have over the future of the country?

Lauren Taylor, our presenter, is joined by Maria Sultan, the director of the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute; Salman Ahmed, a journalist specialising on Pakistani Affairs; and Julian Schofield, a professor of political science at Concordia University and author of numerous books on Pakistani military affairs.

The Civil-Military Debate

Who should control a war? Who is responsible when a war fails? The current belief is that war is to be controlled by those who know best, the professionals, those who studied it for 30-plus years. Why hand that responsibility over to a armchair general, especially a politician! When war becomes political then we will get the results of Vietnam, right? WRONG, as argued by Eliot Cohen in Supreme Command. He argues, in the hardest wars fought--the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II--the political leaders were down in the details, at times on the front lines being shot at (Clemenceau), in essence "micro-managing." And when the political leaders are not driving the generals mad with the hard questions, that is when wars fail.

Clausewitz argues that war is politics by other means, which is true. The military does not decide when to go to war, it is the politicians. The military does not decide when to terminate war, it is the politicians. Lastly, civilians are put in charge over the military for a reason. They are responsible for funding the war--money which ultimately comes from taxpayers--and therefore it is the politician who is held accountable to the people via elections. It is the politician (sad to say at times) who is the link between the people and the military in a Democracy. When this link fails, we get a runaway war, as we did in Vietnam and in Iraq.

Now common history tells us that Vietnam debacle was the fault of the politicians micromanaging the war, as argued by Eliot Cohen in Supreme Command. Recent historical studies of the Pentagon Papers and LBJ White House records tell us the opposite. Bombing target selection is the most commonly cited form of micromanaging, but in fact almost all targets selected proposed by the Air Force were approved by the White House, without any bruising discussion! If Churchill or Lincoln were running the White House during Vietnam, as argues Cohen, there would have been tense arguments about the nano-details. And if Clemenceau were running the White House, once a week he would have been going to Vietnam to infuriate the generals running the war through detailed questioning. All of this political interest in war details would surely have made a general quit or have him fired, none of which happened in our commonly cited failed wars, Vietnam and Iraq II.

Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the politicians to take the long view, the historical view of the results of the war. When this does not happen and the politician obsequiously follows the generals, the war is short-sighted only thinking about the near-term victory, and the result is the premature finish of the first (1991) and second Gulf War (2003).