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Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse

which, just a decade ago, headed what was hailed as a front-line state in the War on Terror. But why has Pakistan’s army sponsored Islamist militants at home and abroad, overthrown elected governments, and persistently done so despite the extraordinary human and financial cost within Pakistan’s borders? C Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University, has written what is at once an intellectual biography, psychiatric evaluation and work of philology. Fighting to the End draws on thousands of books and essays produced by serving or retired Pakistani officers to distil the army’s strategic culture. Given the army’s political, economic and cultural grip on the nation, this is also, by default, the country’s strategic culture. These texts, warns Fair, are replete with ‘bizarre’ and ‘non-credible’ arguments, ‘racist and xenophobic stereotypes’, and religious fervour (pp. 29–34): Qur’anic battles merit deeper analysis than wars with India (p. 39); while jihad against the ‘kufar’ and ‘mushriks’ (unbelievers and apostates) is exalted as an important motivation for professional soldiers (pp. 96–97). Whole articles, written by ranking officers in respectable military journals, resemble jihadist propaganda. All of this sustains a corrosive ideology of perpetual, ideologically driven struggle with India, the nurturing of Islamist radicals at home and abroad, and contempt for democracy. Fair traces these beliefs to three things. First is the ‘two-nation theory’ that brought Pakistan into being, the resulting ambiguity in the relationship between Islam, democracy and nationhood, and a resulting antipathy toward ‘Hindu’ India (p. 69). The emphasis on Islam as a unifying force – nationally, and within the army – took a conservative turn from the 1970s. Fair quotes a senior officer from this period as lamenting that ‘the Service Chiefs sounded more like high priests than soldiers’ (p. 84). This religiosity continues to have many effects, including outright military delusion (‘no power on earth can subdue the valour of the Mujahidin’, p. 99); an emphasis of Sunni Islam ‘to the exclusion of other Muslims and non-Muslims’ within Pakistan (p. 75); and the routinised reliance on ‘patently Orientalist, if not outright racist, concepts’ such as the ‘Hindu psyche’ (p. 162). Second is the contentious process of partition in 1947, which reinforced Pakistan’s conviction that India would never accept its smaller neighbour’s independence (p. 65). Fair notes that this belief is resistant to all facts – notably that, ‘with the exception of 1971, Pakistan was the initiator of every war with India’ (p. 165). Yet it persists, and Fair doubts that ‘any amount of countervailing evidence can mitigate Pakistani fears’ (p. 165). Third, Fair argues that Pakistan inherited British narratives about the subcontinent’s defence, and particularly the idea of Afghanistan as a neutral buffer against Russian threats (pp. 112–15). She deftly dismantles the canard that Pakistan’s sponsorship of Islamist proxies in its neighbour came only at the behest of the CIA in the 1980s, and shows how the army and intelligence services began this process in the 1960s – long before the Soviet Union invaded its neighbour. Between 1973 and 1977, for instance, Pakistan’s army trained 5,000 militants to fight in Afghanistan (p. 122). In sum, Pakistan is ‘a greedy and ideological state’, such that even solving the Kashmir dispute ‘will not satisfy its hunger, and may embolden it’ (p. 22). According to Fair, this revisionist fervour is ‘deeply assimilated in Pakistan’s civil society and sustained through the public and private media, through public education, and in the country’s bureaucratic and political institutions’ (pp. 265–66). Scholars and journalists who dissent are threatened ‘with physical harm ... to the author or her family members’, including ‘lethal methods against intransigent journalists’ (pp. 35–36). This is no hypothetical matter. Investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad, who had been looking into links between Al-Qa’ida and the Pakistan Navy, was murdered in 2011; and the Obama administration later acknowledged it had ‘reliable and conclusive’ evidence implicating Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI. The consolidation of civilian rule, economic shocks that force the army to accept liberalised trade with India, and changing patterns of recruitment within the army might all contribute to limited shifts in policy. But real change would require the army to ‘abandon its practice of describing the rivalry with India in civilizational terms’, which would in turn threaten its own ‘ideological commitment to the two-nation theory’ – the founding rationale of the Pakistani state (p. 268). Fair is scornful of those who think the Pakistan Army is changing its ways, or will realistically do so in response to monetary, symbolic or territorial incentives. In the final pages of Fighting to the End, she exhorts policy-makers to consider how best to ‘contain the threats that emanate from Pakistan, if not Pakistan itself’ (p. 282). This is a sobering message, starkly at odds with decades of American policy and the perennial lure of seemingly professional, ordered armies in disordered countries (Egypt is another recent example in this regard). Yet it will resonate with a generation of Americans – notably soldiers – who have witnessed first-hand the contradictions of Pakistan’s partnership with the United States. In Rawalpindi, the men in khaki can hardly complain: Fighting to the End damns the army using its very own words.