In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947 – 2011) by Ahmed Ishtiaq
  • Ehsan M. Ahrari (bio)
Ahmed Ishtiaq: The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947 – 2011). Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2013. 508 pages. ISBN-10: 0-1990-6636-1, ISBN-13: 978-0-1990-6636-0. $45 (hardcover).

Ishtiaq Ahmed’s book, The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947 – 2011), is a comprehensive study of the evolution of the country into a garrison state. With this book, Ahmed seeks to explain and contextualize how the Pakistani army rose from its origins as a weak and poorly equipped organization to its status today — as the author argues, “the most powerful institution in the country.”

According to Ahmed, the drivers of the political and social rise of the Pakistani army are to be found in a unique mix of real and imagined existential threats to Pakistan during the Cold War, when Pakistan sought totally itself with the United States in order to offset the many security and military advantages enjoyed by India. “Internally,” he writes, “incompetent politicians and their factionalism generated conflict and instability while the civil servants, and later the military, came to represent stability.” Another factor in Pakistan’s emergence as a garrison state, according to Ahmed, is “a lack of clarity on national identity” that drove that country “towards a search for an Islamic identity.”

The chief theoretical basis of Ahmed’s analysis is the garrison state, a concept developed by the eminent American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell. This concept underscores the development of the Pakistani military on the basis of “a peculiar evolution of historical and contemporaneous internal and external factors, as well as religious-cultural and social dimensions.”

Ahmed argues that societies that exist under near constant threat of war are more likely than others to develop into garrison states. He points, for example, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioning similar threats faced by the United States in its preoccupation to militarily compete with the Soviet Union. Ahmed adds that even though Eisenhower may be famous for his farewell speech, during which he cautioned Americans against the growing military-industrial complex, Eisenhower had nevertheless pursued policies that expanded the reach of the US military. Indeed, Ahmed points out that Pakistan became “one of the chief benefciaries of the worldwide garrison-building strategy” of the United States starting in 1951.

The promise of Pakistan’s becoming a democracy was fragile from the beginning, since the country departed from the model of the secular state. Ahmed notes: [End Page 112]

The Pakistani modernist rulers, who held power from 1947 to 1977, failed to provide an alternative of the Islamic state: on the contrary, more and more dogmatic features were added to the Pakistani national identity until, in 1977, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq set aside the charade of democracy and went about constructing Pakistan as the fortress of Islam, braced with not only military but also repressive legal and cultural measures. Consequently, contemporary Pakistan bears the hallmarks of not only a fortress state, but also a society with garrisons studded all over it to ward off various assaults: political, ideological, sectarian, [and] military.

Thus, the very nature of Pakistan was flawed, in the sense that there was profound disagreement on both sides about the feasibility of a separate state as a home for Muslims while millions of Muslims were still residing in partitioned India.

A little more than two months after the creation of Pakistan on 14 August 1947, the first war between those two nations started in Kashmir on 22 October. The eruption of a war with its powerful neighbor soon after its inception, and the fact that Pakistani forces could not wrest the entire Kashmir area from the grip of the Indian military, deeply affected the Pakistani psyche, and the nation became obsessed with security concerns.

Even though the Pakistani military did not perform well during the first Kashmir war, because it was extremely ill equipped compared to Indian forces, the Pakistani army created “the legend of a brave Pakistani fighting force that militarily annexed one-third of Kashmir.” With this, the process of building the Pakistani garrison state began in...

pdf

Share