Pakistan’s Army: Running and Ruining a Country

T.V. Paul, a professor of international relations at McGill university, and Aqil Shah, a long-time scholar of democratization in Pakistan, have written two very different but ultimately complementary accounts of the Pakistan Army—The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World and The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan, respectively. Both books describe Pakistan’s long-standing security competition with India and exposit the primary means through which Pakistan has sought to impose its will on India: a reliance on Islamist proxies, an ever-expanding nuclear arsenal, and alliances with countries like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia, among others. Whereas Paul focuses on the policies pursued by the military and their sequelae, Shah focuses on how the institution of the army came to dominate the Pakistani state. Whereas Paul places the blame for Pakistan’s development largely on the United States, Shah holds the army accountable for its ruinous role in the troubled state.

The Warrior State examines the roles of war and war-making in the development of Pakistan in particular and several other historical and contemporary nation-states in Europe and Asia. Paul finds that although the experiences of many countries suggest that war-making helped spur national development and consolidation, Pakistan’s own trajectory has been an outlier. Despite pursuing militarized security for some six decades, Pakistan is insecure and politically fragmented. The book describes how Pakistan’s political elite pursued militarized security at the expense of the country’s political, human, and economic development. Oddly, for the most part, Pakistan’s citizenry has supported these policies and has rallied around the army’s incessant warmongering and selfish claims on the state’s budget.

Paul argues that great-power patrons such as the United States—and to a lesser degree China—have played a preeminent role in undermining Pakistan’s development, security, and ultimately stability. These patrons discouraged the Pakistani elite from forging state policies that would enhance social, economic, and political development and incentivized them to instead pursue geopolitical goals and a narrow strategy of military security based on hyper-realpolitik assumptions. In doing so, these elites have neglected other potential national goals and, in turn, have undermined the state’s very viability. In summary, Paul contends that because of the interests of great powers, Pakistan’s political elites have “had both the motive and the opportunity to pursue such policies” (p. 3). Like Ayesha Siddiqa and Husain Haqqani before him, Paul puts forward the argument that Pakistan is a rentier state that has lived “off the rents provided by its external benefactors for supporting their particular geostrategic goals” (p. 18). He further argues that Pakistan’s alliance with the United States through the Mutual Defense Pact of 1954, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) was “the beginning of the geostrategic curse” (p. 117). The Warrior State’s overarching argument is important and compelling. The book’s logical conclusion is that the United States and China are responsible for a large share of the burden for enabling the recklessness of this crisis-prone state.

Yet this argument is not without some important problems. First, Paul implies that the United States sucked Pakistan into its alliance strategy. With India being unwilling to join hands with the United States, the latter was “desperately looking for strategic partners in Asia-Pacific. … Sensing a major opportunity, the Pakistani elite began discussions with Washington and in 1954 they struck an alliance” (pp. 116–17). At times, the book implies that the United States was predatory in its approach to cultivate Pakistan as a partner. However, until the mid-1950s...