“Pakistan A Garrison State” an article written by Mashal Khan Takkar. It is a series covered in three part. Article exposes the Failed state of Pakistan that was created to play the biggest joke in the history with the lives of Baloch, Pashtun, Sindhi People (Sindhis include the Residents of Sindh both Mohajirs and Sindhis).

In the first part Pakistan A Garrison State – Part 1 of 3 By Mashal Khan Takkar we covered about the formation of this unnatural state of Pakistan.

The second part we covered in our previous article Pakistan A Garrison State – Part 2 of 3 By Mashal Khan Takkar exposed Failed state of Pakistan offering a home base for transnational terrorist networks to initiate wars & Pakistan military elite came to dominate the economic & political systems.

In this part we cover how International Community despite giving financial aid to Pakistan, policies of these nations were one of the “lost opportunities” and misguided priorities. How Pakistan Army Owns all businesses in Pakistan. How Pakistan needs to be disintegrated by International community for regional peace and to prevent Nuclear Weapons from falling in the hands of Islamist Radicals.

State civil-military elites, encourage the army to pursue a military-first approach to the problem. The warrior state flows directly from this logic.

Pakistan’s alignment with China may be provoking India to respond negatively toward Pakistan.

Pakistan Army must be prepared for the next war, which can happen without warning.

A warrior state creates several social, political, and psychological pathologies.

Pakistan army, civil-military establishment and elites tend to exploit windows of opportunity whenever presented.

They also do not often learn from past mistakes.

In time, Pakistan army becomes the core national actor in both the political and economic realms.

Unless there are countervailing power centers that can take on the military by emphasizing the need to abandon a hyper-realpolitik approach, the military will never change its policies.

The absence of strong demand for institutional reforms thus acts as a major impediment to change in Pakistan.

These demands usually come from powerful social and political groups and they can succeed during brief windows of opportunity such as a national crisis.

Activism by an internationally oriented civil society, comprising progressive political parties, with the support of powerful elements of the middle and business classes is essential for change. Indeed, civil society needs to have the ideas, power, and inclination to demand new democratic institutions and continuously defend such institutions from attacks by the military.

From time to time, a form of social revolution has to take place for a society to transform. These revolutions are “revolts from below” that can produce rapid social transformation.

If a state has a semi feudal system and the military emerges as a powerful economic actor, it will have little interest in modernizing or pursuing economic and political reforms.

Such states are not good at extracting internal resources either, especially if external aid is sufficient to pay for militarization and security competition. A weak civil society can simply perpetuate this system. Pakistani elite has failed to extract or innovate because outside aid largely compensated for economic shortfalls. A weak state has been the result of these processes.

The demand for institutional reform in Pakistan, has not been strong enough to force the military to abandon either its commitment to national dominance or its security-first approach.

Political parties, whenever they have assumed power, have been almost invariably corrupt. The military has remained the powerhouse of the country even when civilians hold office. The middle and working classes are too weak to wage a social revolution that would overthrow the warrior state and generate a true democratic order.

They are also vulnerable to nationalist or religious myths and exaggeration, propagated by the military and the national security managers.

Pressures for revolutionary change can also come from outside. In this case, the main source of such a demand should have been the United States, the core supporter of Pakistan.

Secondary supporters, such as China or Saudi Arabia are unlikely to pressure for institutional reforms because these are themselves, not democratic countries.

US policy has been one of the “lost opportunities” and misguided priorities. Washington has generally found the Pakistani military a useful ally in geopolitical conflicts or in the pursuit of short-term regional policies.

Powerful stakeholders in both countries developed links that allowed the perpetuation of the status quo, and not to create a proper democracy in Pakistan.

The Pakistani army was the more reliable partner in the United States’ various geopolitical conflicts over the years. The complexities in this relationship are many, but the Pakistani Army always had the shrewdness to function as a loyal ally of the United States, despite occasional ruptures in the relationship. Powerful sympathizers in Washington never saw a democratic Pakistan as feasible or desirable due to the overwhelming need for Pakistan to be on the American side, whether against the former Soviet Union or the Al-Qaeda.

Much of this is the result of US policymaker’s preference for quick and dirty solutions instead of a more far-reaching policy based on a deeper analysis of Pakistan’s problems.

The United States has almost exclusively employed one ready-made instrument—military and economic aid and that’s it. However, this is in sharp contrast with US policies in Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, where US agencies such as the (USAID) demanded structural change and economic integration with the world market.

American and Western-controlled global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund IMF and World Bank WB, occasionally made demands on Pakistan, and set conditions for loan disbursement, but were not strong enough as they had to bow to the pressures of their lead donor members.

Similarly, China and Saudi Arabia have also helped to perpetuate the system by supporting Pakistan for the balance of power or religious reasons.

While South Korea also faced an existential security threat and had a deep alliance with Washington but its elites managed to transform the national economy. Indeed this transformation was partly driven by the security imperative which is the opposite of Pakistan’s experience.

In the postwar period, economic and political development has been rapid, and states have been able to grow out of their centuries-old poverty and political underdevelopment in a shorter time span.

Only independence is not enough to be a strong country, In Latin America, states have been independent over 150 years, yet most remain weak.

This tells us that time is not a sufficient factor in making a state stronger, other factors may be at work.

A developing country, even when it faces extreme national security challenges, can become cohesive and strong through a developmental path.

The Pakistan army, civil-military establishment and Punjab elite mafia proved to be shrewd in one thing—milking the geostrategic rent, but not developing or extracting sufficient resources from its society.

The major allies would not allow Pakistan to go bankrupt. During the past two decades, Pakistan came very close to bankruptcy at least twice. Once in 2008 and then in 2013. But under the influence of America, the International monetary fund IMF came to rescue.

The economic sustenance of Pakistan by the United States, China, and their allies as well as international aid agencies serve their short-term strategic interests, but it has destroyed the transformation of a country.

The failure to transform means, Pakistan will remain a major challenge to global and regional peace for decades to come. In Pakistan, there is a potential for state failure and the weapons falling into the hands of Islamic radicals.

War and war preparation do not make a state strong.

As the Pakistani case shows, if a state fails to innovate, it can become a geopolitical and security nightmare for its neighbours, other states, and—not least—itself.

The role of political Islam in Pakistan’s development is also a big impediment.

The military is one of the vital organs of the state. However, in Pakistan, the military becomes deeply involved in the politics of the state and dominates all other institutions.

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Powerful Pakistan military allocate greater resources to the defense budget. Since this military capital is hidden from the public, it is also referred to as the military’s internal economy.

In Pakistan, the military is the sole driver of Military business activities. This military capital in Pakistan also becomes the major driver for the armed forces’ stakes in political control.

Therefore, the Military’s business activities in Pakistan is caused by the military’s involvement in politics. This phenomenon intensifies the interest of the military in remaining in power in direct or indirect control of governance.

This does not nurture the growth of democracy or rule of law, and makes this kind of military’s business activities the most precarious.

In Pakistan, there is a militaristic and totalitarian system where an army general is the real head of the state.

Pakistan’s military today runs a huge commercial empire. There is no transparency of the military’s internal economy. The estimated worth runs into billions of dollars. Moreover, the military’s two business groups – the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust – are the largest business conglomerates in the country.

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Besides these, there are multiple channels through which the military acquires opportunities to monopolize national resources.

Consequently, profit is directly proportional to power. Financial autonomy gives the armed forces a sense of power and confidence of being independent of the ‘incompetent’ civilians.

Related Article Institutional collapse of Pakistan: Solution

Pakistan is a garrison state, one of the last ones in the world still standing.

It is the military that has directly or indirectly ruled Pakistan for most of its existence.

There are three international community’s most serious and interlinked concerns about Pakistan: the war-prone conflict with India, the jihadi threat, and the security of its nuclear weapons.

The army sustains the ruinous security competition with India, so directly or indirectly facilitates Islamic extremism and terrorism by harboring militant groups as a tool of foreign policy. But democracy in Pakistan has never been allowed to stand on its feet.

After all, military coups happen when armed men want them to happen. And Army retracts from power when they want to.

About all, its democratic transitions have been aborted by military coups.

Punjab dominated Pakistan army and civil-military inherited the state of Pakistan with all its colonial institutional structures.

India, which attained statehood in the same world with a similar colonial institutional inheritance. But India is a consolidated political democracy with firm civilian control of the armed forces, however, the two new states were born with a common constitutional framework, the civil service, the judiciary, and the military.

The two militaries inherited the same organizational structure, bureaucratic norms, fighting doctrines, training regimes, and, above all, a belief that the military and civilians had separate jurisdictions of responsibility that neither should breach. But the Pakistan army has been breaching it all the time.

The military in British India was to prevent politicians and a parliamentary form of government from destroying the only “focal point of authority”— the viceregal executive.

Pakistani military leadership believed that centralized authority was key to nation-building. So the military finally set aside constitutional government and seized control of the state in October 1958.

Pakistan army is determined that continuing with a parliamentary government would only bring more chaos rather than solving national problems.

The military subsequently established a government with the help of the civil-military establishment and judiciary.

Within that institution, the officer corps and its senior leadership makes the most important institutional decisions during both war and peace.

Military mindset will never change in Pakistan.

It is very dangerous to underestimate the determined opponent. The people of Afghanistan are determined to take their land back occupied by Pakistan. The Baloch and Sindhis are determined to get freedom from Pakistan.

So sooner or later Pakistan will be disintegrated.

But Now the world community has the responsibility to do this disintegration peacefully, otherwise, if the disintegration of Pakistan will take place like in 1971, then the nuclear weapons can fall in the hands of terrorists which will be then disaster not only for South Asia but for the whole world as well.

So the best solution is to make Pakistan a part of History as soon as possible for the sake of peace and stability in the world.

About the Author: Mashal Khan Takkar, from Peshawar Pakistan.
M.Sc. Electrical Engineer, Politician, Poet, Writer, Broadcaster, Freedom fighter. He can be contacted on twitter via his twitter handle @Mashaltakkar

Founder of Great Afghanistan Movement (GAM), which has one point agenda to liberate Afghan land from Durand line to Indus Rive and make Great Afghanistan from Indus River to Oxus River.

Here is what Pakistan Army has to say about Mashal Khan Takkar

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