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Great Army (Not-So-Great Officers)

The latest book by a former Army officer proves a general rule, Observes Newsweek..
The author bribed a laboratory assistant to get access to secondary school papers while he
was a student, made his way to the army, amassed black money and now sermonize the
youth to follow the truth. He believes all he did was right. This is the irony of Pakistan
where career public servants think all they are doing is right.
In December,
Shahid Aziz,
a former
lieutenantgeneral of
Pakistan
Army, went
public with
the secrets
of Pakistans
1999 Kargil
operation
which was
the first act
of war under
civilian rule
that brought
yet more

discomfiture
for
Pakistanis to
bearin
Indianadministered
Kashmir.

More Stories on Related Subjects

Gen Shahid and his unshakeable report to General Musharraf
Aziz had just
finished
Kargil from Surprise to victory
writing
a
confessional
book, which
contained
revelations
on the fiasco
brought on
by the-then
Army chief,
Gen. Pervez
Musharraf,
Azizs
relative by
marriage. In
rejoinder, the
former
president has
called Aziz
an
officer
without
character.
It is
said

often
that

Pakistani
troops are of
a
high
quality, but
Azizs Urdu-language book, with its telltale subtitle, Yeh Khamoshi Kahan Tak: Ek Sipahi
ki Dastan-e-Ishq-o-Junoon (How Long This Silence: a Soldiers Story of Passion and
Absorption), proves that once again. The pity of it is that Aziz thinks he is a maverick
because of his religious passion. His opinion actually adheres to the general ideological
view popular in Pakistan, perhaps furtively anticipating reprisal from terrorists if the truth
is revealed. He repeats the platitudes daily unloaded on an already heavily-indoctrinated
public by retired generals, led by former Army chief Aslam Beg and former Inter-Services
Intelligence chief Hamid Gul. And Aziz defers to the latter by approving of his Council
Elders ruling Pakistan in lieu of the currently soiled Western system of democracy.

The
truth,
however, is
that the book
is yet more
devastating
proof of the
defective
military
leadership in
Pakistan,
where most
Muslim
officers,
brought up
on
nonrational
beliefs,
decline into
end-of-career
religiosity
and find fault
with
the
world they
think
they
are about to
say goodbye
to.
Now,
Aziz is like
any retired
general
dangerous to
Pakistan
because of
the
extremism of
his thinking.
Before
his
book came
out, former
General Aziz
was paraded
by
keen
anchors on
cable
talk

shows
luxuriating in
the
new
scandals
attached to
Musharraf,
who
cant
enter
Pakistan for
fear of being
arrested on
charges
of
murder and
the threat of
being killed
by
the
Taliban.
It was an unsound military plan based on invalid assumptions, launched with little
preparation, and in total disregard to the regional and international environment, Aziz said
of Kargil in an interview. He says Musharraf did not even share with the Corps
Commanders plans of the war he was going to unleash on India. Only four officers, he
says, knew about it: Musharraf, the chief of general staff, the Northern Areas commander,
and the 10 Corps commander. Aziz was director-general of the ISIs analysis wing at the
time of Kargil, but, he says, he remained unaware of the operation, which was not studied
professionally because secrecy was paramount.
CONFESSION AS SERMON
Azizs book follows no recognizable format. Its chapter titles are simply phrases taken from
poems giving no clue of the subject discussed under them. (The great Pakistani poet Faiz
Ahmed Faiz, whose lines are copiously strewn all over the book, would not have liked this
extravagance in aid of bad prose.) There is no index, so you have to plough through the
unexamined gushing of an average man living on the basis of clichs to get at facts, or what
Aziz thinks is analysis. An Urdu columnist who reviewed the book has praised Aziz for the
style of his prose. This is surprising given that the book in fact needed a going-over from a
language editor who could win readers gratitude by excising several sprawling sermons
palmed off as chapters.
Shahid Aziz was what one might call a typical success story in the Army. Commissioned in
1971, he saw action in Kashmir, and was smart enough to rise to the level where he was
trained at Islamabads National Defence University before being appointed director of
Military Operations. As major-general, he was placed at the head of the ISIs analysis wing
from where he studied the Kargil operation and came to the conclusion, as the war wound

down to the discredit of Pakistan, that it shouldnt have taken place to begin with. Aziz
shocked a deflated Musharraf by suggesting, during a top-level meeting, that certain defeat
be avoided by expanding the war into other theaters.
Aziz is a warrior typically not given to any holistic analyses that military theorist Carl von
Clausewitz recommends to military leaders living under civilian governments. He is liberal
with religious sermons while what he actually needs is an examination of the functioning of
the national economy and the global environment.
Where he should have inducted regional and global factor-analysis, Aziz makes do with
conspiracy theories some people, especially Muslims, all over the world prefer over logical
connections. On a study tour in the U.S., he bowled over his American lecturer by calling
former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissingers 1995 book Diplomacy a Machiavellian
piece of writing. A rare intellectual among Pakistans generals, former major-general
Hakeem Arshad Qureshi says in his 2002 book, The 1971 Indo-Pak War: a Soldiers
Narrative, We have displayed a tendency to enter a contest mostly on the rebound, with
overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up
the effort at the halfway mark for want of resources We have also failed to understand
the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the
Subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemys reaction to a major ingress. Aziz gives
no evidence of having read Qureshis corrective volume.
Musharraf got Aziz over as his director-general for Military Operations and, in 1999,
planned the overthrow of prime minister Nawaz Sharifs elected government. Aziz later
commanded a division in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In 2001, after 9/11, Musharraf
still thought he could trust Aziz, his relative, as chief of general staff, a post from where
most officers ascend to the top job. If the book is to be trusted, it is here that Aziz woke up
to the wickedness of America and its games in the region. Aziz spent the last two years of
his military career as Corps Commander in Lahore, falling prey to religious quacks and
building his beautiful farmhouse (No budget, expense doesnt matter we have an
amount of money we never thought of before, he writes) near Murree. He rues the fact that
while in Lahore he was relentlessly pursued by dirty rumors.
He retired in 2005, decorated with the prestigious Hilal-e-Imtiaz medal. Musharraf quickly
appointed him head of the National Accountability Bureau, but put him off the very first
day by asking for immunity for one of his corrupt ministers, Faisal Saleh Hayat. Aziz
resigned from NAB one and a half year later. His anticorruption confessions prove,
again, that Pakistan should stay away from accountability, which its leaders and institutions
use more for revenge against enemies than for cleaning up corruption.
Democracy comes in for condemnation in his book as an ill-smelling order where
politicians make money hand over fist while the common man starves. The greedy
intellectuals who relentlessly speak for democracy also come in for scathing criticism in
Azizs book. Despite his stint in the analysis wing of the ISI, there is scant reference to
terrorism and the Taliban, who equally criticize democracy as being abhorrent to Islam.

Aziz abstains from taking a look at Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiris treatise on
Pakistans Constitution which is treated by many as the blueprint for the countrys next
Constitution when the Taliban finally rule from Islamabad.
AMERICA IS KILLING US
While Aziz writes about the current Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, with deference, he
clearly doesnt accept Kayanis stated position that Pakistan faces internalnot external
danger. In this he is with many retired officers, like one Shahzad Chaudhry who recently
accepted that Pakistan faces an internal rather than an external threat, but could not refrain
from connecting the Taliban attacks on Pakistans expensive surveillance aircraft at PNS
Mehran base, in 2011, and Pakistan Air Forces Minhas base at Kamra, last year, as
possibly Indias deed because these planes were targeted only at India. But Aziz is not
even forgivably reductionist like Chaudhry; he has firm conviction and cant accept that the
Taliban are the real threat. He writes: The bombs that kill innocent Pakistanis in bazaars
and mosques are planted by friends of America, and this terrorism is done to persuade
Pakistan to embrace America more closely, allow the government to pursue pro-America
policies and to alienate Pakistan from the mujahideen. But this trend of support to the
killers of Muslims is open rebellion against Allah.
Of course, Aziz doesnt believe that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Muslims. He buys
into the theory that America destroyed the Twin Towers to give itself grounds for attacking
the Islamic world. The adoption by Musharraf of the slogan of enlightened moderation is
also condemned by Aziz as double-faced slavery of an America busy planning the rollback
of the true faith of Islam by making Pakistan lean on the false religion of the Mughal
emperor Akbar and the latter-day rationalist exegete of the Quran, Ghulam Ahmad
Parwez. He condemns Musharraf for using this slogan to label the orthodoxy as
fundamentalist and militant while inviting society to become deviant from the path of piety
dancing to the drumbeat of materialism.
Aziz was a major at the Command and Staff College, Quetta, where one day, responding to
the challenge of a possible Soviet incursion into Pakistan after the 1979 occupation of
Afghanistan, he made a presentation to his class. He proposed that if and when the country
was seen to be falling to the Soviet Army, the Pakistan Army and government leaders
should be made to leave Islamabad and Rawalpindi and hide in the mountains of Chitral
and Kashmir from where they could organize popular uprisings against the Soviet
occupiers. Aziz typically doesnt dwell on the scenario in full as that would have involved
discussion of the notorious resource base that our officers are not supposed to look at.
NO ST. AUGUSTINE
While on a course in the U.S., Aziz confesses, he once got so drunk at night that he could
not get his homework right and was reprimanded by his American teacher. But he is no St.
Augustine; his confessions are harmless and not detailed enough. Here, too, he fails the
yardstick of analysis and is more focused on nonanalytical opinion. Why do officers as

gifted as Aziz shun intellect and fall prey to irrational connections which they confuse with
intellectual activity? Chapter Five of his book is titled Wave of Inspirations, and it
describes his prayer and Quran routines in Kashmir instead of the realities of confrontation
with a state, India, which would deliver defeat after defeat to a revisionist Pakistan
dismantled by the costs of conflict. The Faiz poem complaining of ideological oppression
at the end of the chapter has no relevance here.
The book is full of sermonizing on faith; and the author apparently doesnt tire of it. Yet, he
talks disparagingly of former 10 Corps commander, Lt. Gen. Ghulam Muhammad, known
for his blatantly fanatic injection of faith into the Army which he called Construction of
Character, mainly based on how many Quranic recitations the subject officer should know
by heart, and reinforced by his routine of blocking upward movement of officers who did
not say their prayers. Aziz ends the chapter by, inappropriately, inserting a long rambling
poemnot by Faiz this time, but by himself, in English. Azizs habit of rational
disconnection perhaps became vaguely known to him later on when he writes: Why am I
full of contradiction? Why cant I be balanced? Then I console myself with the thought that
a pendulum has a balance too; what use is balance that is static and frozen. Real balance is
in movement. One should be flying back and forth on a swing.
As a soldier, Aziz is forgivably worshipping of Pakistans nuclear weapons, but is rough in
his condemnation of antinuclear peacenikswho take moneyfor attacking the bomb.
His explanation for having violated the basic rules of nuclearization with the Kargil
operation is unconvincing, probably because of his weak control of the Urdu idiom rather
than reasoning. He goes on to claim Pakistans bomb as the bomb of the Muslim world and
accepts the Wests reference to it as the Islamic Bomb. (He, of course, ignores Iran, where
the Islamic Bomb of Pakistan caused alarm; and might ignore now the alarm the Iranian
bomb has raised among Arab states across the Gulf.)
Azizs meditations on the media fly in the face of all theory about the connection of
freedom of expression with a strong private sector in the national economy under a
democratic constitution. He relates media freedom to another conspiracy, hatched by the
West, to undermine Pakistans civilizational foundations and replace them with a satanic
system through injections of money into a media marketplace where journalism is
business.
He opposed the Kargil operation, which posited that after Pakistan has cut India off from
Siachen and internationalized the dispute, New Delhi will be forced to cough up Kashmir.
But he is tough on trade with Indiawhich, he writes, Americans keep pressuring
Pakistan to allowbecause it would be a first step toward saying farewell to Kashmir. He
thinks politicians who promote trade with India are crippled in their thinking by their
narrow political interests. He doesnt bother to analyze how India has handled its own
Kashmir dispute with China and allowed bilateral trade without damaging itself while
growing at the rate of 8 percent of GDP.
Far from being trained as a disciplined military thinker, Aziz insists that Pakistan should

focus on the grand conspiracy behind Americas imperialist dominance of the world. He
knows that the theory is airy-fairy, but proclaims that a large number of people around the
globe believe it: The world order is not running by itself, it is being run according to a
secret plan by a powerful secret organization that has first conquered global banking,
followed by the media and entertainment. This plan is being worked out with the help of
the United Kingdom, the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank, the funded
think tanks and their intellectuals, big corporations, and reputable universities.
FOLLOWING PROTOCOLS
Perhaps the most interesting nugget in the book is Azizs reference to the eye of Dajjal on
the U.S. dollar bill. He believes that this symbolizes the grand conspiracy set afoot by the
Freemasons and many powerful families in league with American neocons. He thinks that
whatever is happening in the world is in line with the Jewish conspiracy outlined in The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that surfaced in Europe in the early 20th
century to rouse people into a fit of anti-Semitism and resultant holocaust. By another
strange leap of logic, Aziz thinks that the American imperium was following the program
of world domination through a shameless pursuit of sensual pleasure. Only the Quran
stands in the way of this satanic way of life, he writes.
The former general is falling back on an elaborate campaign unleashed in Pakistan in 1995
against the New World Order proclaimed by an American president after the first Gulf War.
A pamphlet, The Pyramid, the Global System, and Control Mechanisms, circulating in
Pakistan had referred to the one-eyed pyramid on the left side of the one-dollar bill,
calling the seal a deeply laid Jewish-American conspiracy to dominate the world. The eye
on the note was called The Eye of Lucifer, also designated as the eye of the antichrist
Dajjal in the Muslim belief system.
How Long This Silence is in bad need of good editing, with special emphasis on style and
removal of irrelevant matter passed off as inspiring verse. Faiz, who stood for a secular and
pluralist Pakistan, may be spinning like a lathe in his grave seeing the use Aziz has made of
his works to promote his own patently irrational and unrealistic worldview. (Aziz asserts
that Pakistan is still secular even after the establishment of the Federal Shariat Court under
a Constitution declaring Pakistan an Islamic state.)
The book has been welcomed in Pakistan by an anti-America, anti-Musharraf, and Talibanfrightened media. The author has been lionized for his bravery to speak the truth. The
book has photographs of an adolescent Shahid Aziz in tight pants and pointed shoes,
growing up normally, before the Army and undigested religion happened to him.
By Khalid Ahmed (Courtesy Newsweek Pakistan)
February 22, 2013

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