When Pakistan Army plays with fire

The Hindu

30-04-2025

Whenever Army chiefs in Pakistan with a strident anti-India posture have precipitated conflict with India, the fallout has been severe on the Pakistani people, not to mention the steep downward spiral in bilateral relations. At every juncture in the past, when democratic institutions and Pakistan's civil society have attempted to seek a dialogue with India, ambitious Generals have usurped power and deepened the India-Pakistan divide.
General Ayub Khan started the rot by initiating the 1965 war with India, and his protégé General Yahya Khan took his legacy forward by precipitating the 1971 crisis that dismembered Pakistan and left its military nursing the humiliation of a military defeat. From that humiliation arose the ambitions of General Zia-Ul-Haq, who oversaw the next phase of Pakistan's descent into chaos.
Alarmed with the rise of the Bhutto family and putting together a carefully crafted strategy of 'bleeding India with a thousand cuts', Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1978, and it was his regime that executed Pakistan People's Party leader and former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He then went on to systematically and successfully direct both the Pakistan Army and Pakistan's civil society on the path to 'Islamisation' and away from modernity, unmindful of missing the bus of progressive liberalisation that India was about to board.
Covert war
Dying in a mysterious plane crash in August 1988, Zia did not live to see his strategy of covert and asymmetric warfare against India put into practice beyond stoking secessionist fires in Punjab. However, so profound and deep had been his anti-India impact on a whole generation of Pakistani military officers, particularly from the ISI, that it was only a matter of time before Pakistan's active covert war in Jammu & Kashmir was put into motion soon after his death. The rest, as they say, is history with the covert war waxing and waning for the past three-and-a-half decades and morphing into a hybrid war that has constantly challenged India's national security establishment.
After Pakistan experienced democracy for a few years, it was the turn of another ambitious Pakistan Army chief, General Parvez Musharraf. Deeply scarred by his inability to dislodge the Indian Army from the Saltoro Ridge (Siachen) during his tenure there as Pakistan's Brigade Commander in the late 1980s, he orchestrated an ambitious but ill-fated operation a decade later known as the Kargil conflict. Apart from again suffering a bruising reality check at the hands of India, Musharraf had a role in diminishing Pakistan's stature as a responsible state. In fact, it is impossible not to flag the fact that Pakistan's descent towards a 'rogue state' status commenced during his tenure at the helm of affairs in Pakistan at various levels when the attack on India's Parliament (December 2001) heralded the complete embrace of the Jihadis by the Pakistani security establishment. Since his departure from the scene, it has been downhill all the way for Pakistan with analysts suggesting that the day is not far when it could be termed a failed state, notwithstanding its emergence as proxy for a rising China.
Multiple challenges
Where does General Asim Munir stand in this unenviable list of Generals. Commissioned in 1986, a couple of years before Zia's death, Munir has held several prestigious appointments in the Pakistan Army including that of Director-General, Inter-Service Intelligence, and Corps Commander of the Gujranwala Corps. He took over as Pakistan's Army chief in November 2022 and has since commanded a force that has been seriously challenged for the first time by entities other than the Indian Army in the form of organised Baloch fighters and anti-Pakistan Taliban factions. For the Pakistan Army, which is probably among the few Armies in the world that owns a nation state, this was an unacceptable state of affairs. Was this the tipping point for General Munir's recent inflammatory speech to a congregation of Pakistan's diaspora that raked up anti-India sentiment and placed religion at the centre stage.
To add to Munir's problems, Imran Khan too has been creating a ruckus from jail and so were the restless Jihadis in Muridke and Bahawalpur who were facing continued pressure in Kashmir at the hands of the Indian Army. The local Kashmiri population was just beginning to reap the fruits of a democratic process and improved governance.
Clearly, the dastardly Pahalgam attack on selected males by terrorists belonging to The Resistance Front (TRF), an affiliate of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), could not have been conducted without a green flag and active support from Rawalpindi. There is little doubt that this desperate attack is as much an attempt to shift focus from Pakistan's western front, which does not grab public attention in Pakistan as much as India and J&K does, as it is to deflect attention from the poor performance of the Pakistan Army in its battles against Baloch rebel fighters and the Taliban.
Escalation with India is clearly on Munir's mind and so is probably a grandiose idea that it may also be the right time to seize power in a situation that may be again be projected as an existential crisis for Pakistan when India retaliates at a time and place of its own choosing. It is important, during these troubled times, for India's policy makers to use the post-1988 period as a historical lens to respond to the current situation with assertiveness that goes along with the tag of being a responsible and rising power. General Asim Munir may well be lighting a fire that he may not be able to douse.
(Arjun Subramaniam is a retired Air Vice Marshal and military historian, and the author of India's Wars I & II; views are personal)