By Dr. Ajmal Kakar
Since the very birth of Pakistan, not a single government has governed with true responsibility or institutional discipline. The military and intelligence generals, who have repeatedly taken the nation and its civilian rulers hostage, have committed such historically reckless and audacious acts that even the immense sacrifices of the Pakistani Muslim people have never been able to redeem their deeds.
Pakistan’s first Prime Minister was Liaquat Ali Khan. After his assassination, the country fell, both directly and indirectly, under the grip of military dictators. As early as 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had noted with concern that General Muhammad Ayub Khan seemed more engrossed in political matters than in his military duties.
History is merciless toward those who treat nations and their destiny with carelessness and arrogance. Liaquat Ali Khan, while addressing a massive gathering at Company Bagh in Rawalpindi on October 16, 1951, was shot in the forehead by an Afghan named Syed Akbar Khan. During his speech, Liaquat had uttered arrogant and insulting words against nations, provoking Akbar Afghan to shoot him dead on the spot.
The mindset of Pakistan’s generals has always been molded in the spirit of subservience. They possess no genuine sense of independence and have repeatedly joined hands with enemies against their own people. This servile and treacherous character has defaced the entire history of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Historical records describe General Iskander Mirza, regarded as the father of the Pakistani army, as “a descendant of Mir Jafar, the faithful agent of the British colonizers who betrayed Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula and spied for the British during the occupation of Bengal.”
Espionage and betrayal have been recurring features in the careers of Pakistani generals, and this disgrace has cast its shadow over the entire nation. It is therefore the duty of the Pakistani people to refuse silence in the face of those generals who have desecrated their national history.
Their disdain for governance has been equally cynical. During Iskander Mirza’s tenure, five prime ministers were dismissed within only three years, from 1955 to 1958, simply because he regarded the office of prime minister as a joke. This frivolous and reckless attitude brought Pakistan nothing but repeated humiliation, sometimes in Bengal, at other times in Kashmir.
Their contempt did not stop at government or politics. They violated the laws and constitution of the land, and with the aid of foreign patrons, imposed an alien system upon the Muslim nation of Pakistan. History records that “Malik Ghulam Muhammad, a bureaucrat crippled by illness, dismissed Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin with the help of General Ayub Khan and, in 1953, replaced him with Muhammad Ali Bogra, then Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. Ghulam Muhammad was so weak that his words had to be interpreted by an American secretary. It was during this same period, in 1954, that the draft of Pakistan’s constitution was prepared.”
The generals’ arrogance and recklessness cost them Bangladesh once before, and the same history may repeat itself in Kashmir and Balochistan. The separation of Bangladesh was the direct outcome of the generals’ shameless interference, as they refused to accept the results of free elections. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Bengali liberation movement, called on his people to fight for independence and to implement his party’s six-point program. After a brutal war and unspeakable human suffering, East Pakistan collapsed. As Maulana Azad had foreseen in April 1946, Pakistan’s artificial structure disintegrated, Bangladesh emerged as a sovereign state, and the Pakistani army suffered a humiliating defeat.
The generals’ crimes did not end with the oppression of their own people or their Muslim neighbors. Their violence extended across the region and beyond. Even the oppressed Palestinians were not spared. King Hussein of Jordan, a close ally of the United States, feared that the champions of the Palestinian liberation struggle might threaten his throne, and that Syria, then backed by the Soviet Union, might support them. In September 1970, to secure his rule, Hussein ordered military operations against Palestinian refugees.
Those operations became infamous as Black September. Israeli intelligence assisted the Jordanian army, while the campaign was overseen by a Pakistani delegation led by Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq. As a result of these operations, more than 35,000 Palestinians were martyred. Zia later returned to Pakistan, rapidly climbed the ranks, became Chief of Army Staff, overthrew the elected government, imposed martial law, and ultimately executed the prime minister on fabricated charges.
For his role in the slaughter of Palestinian refugees, Pakistani General Zia-ul-Haq received Jordan’s highest military decoration. According to Yasser Arafat, the death toll reached nearly 25,000. The operations were carried out under King Hussein’s direct orders. Israeli General Moshe Dayan later remarked, “The number of Palestinians Hussein killed in eleven days, Israel would have taken twenty years to kill.”
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Pakistan’s military regime under General Zia-ul-Haq profited immensely from the Afghan jihad. The generals extracted vast economic, military, and commercial benefits while promoting ruthless doctrines such as “death by a thousand cuts,” “burn Kabul,” and “boil the water to the proper degree…”
On August 17, 1988, Zia-ul-Haq met his end when a C-130 transport aircraft exploded midair near Bahawalpur, Punjab. The crash killed him along with the American ambassador, a U.S. military attaché, and about thirty senior Pakistani officers. He had traveled there to inspect American M1 Abrams tanks that had originally been supplied to the Mujahideen through international channels.
From beginning to end, the story of Pakistan’s military elite is one of plunder, corruption, brutality, arrogance, and servility, woven together with a shallow and irresponsible attitude toward national affairs. Whenever they seize power, they treat the blood and sweat of the Pakistani people, the national treasury, as their personal bounty. Not long ago, both Pakistani and international media reported that Generals Pervez Musharraf and Ashfaq Kayani owned sprawling islands and properties in Australia and the Gulf states, while the common people of Pakistan languished in dire economic hardship.
We now understand clearly why Pakistan’s generals harbor such animosity toward Afghanistan and the peoples living along the artificial border. What pains them is not national security but the collapse of their old ambitions, the dreams they once pursued during the anti-Soviet jihad. Once again, they are chasing those same illusions, hoping to profit by smuggling the remnants of abandoned U.S. and NATO military equipment from Afghanistan into Pakistan.
In the end, it is worth reminding them of the words of their own admired Western philosopher, George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it.”