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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. As US-Pakistani
relations continue to deteriorate--witness the testimony of Admiral Mike Mullen accusing
the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI of being directly involved in what they call the Haqqani
terrorist network, or at least the Haqqani section of the Taliban. Prior to that, there
was many statements from Mullen and others talking about Pakistanis' military and intelligence
perhaps protection in some way or another of Osama bin Laden, and Mullen's direct accusation
against the ISI being involved in the assassination of Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist
who did a lot of reporting on the Pakistan military, including for The Real News Network.
The whole role of the Pakistan military and its role in Pakistan society and in the Afghan
War has become more and more an issue. And, of course, US policy towards it. One of the
things that doesn't get discussed very much is the important economic role the Pakistan
army plays in Pakistani society and the relative autonomy that gives it. Now joining us to
talk about all of this is Professor Shahrukh Rafi Khan. He's a visiting economics professor
at Mount Holyoke University in Massachusetts. Thanks very much for joining us.
SHAHRUKH RAFI KHAN: You're welcome.
JAY: And Professor joins us from the PERI institute at Amherst, Massachusetts. So let's
start with talking about the important role the Pakistan military plays, 'cause it's not
a role that people in the West, at least, are so used to, where the military has such
direct economic holdings. I guess one sees it a bit in places like Thailand, Indonesia,
maybe Turkey, but it's very developed in Pakistan. Why don't you elaborate a bit on this?
KHAN: One could say also in Egypt we heard about that after the uprising, with people
saying the holdings could have been as high as 40 percent. In Pakistan, the documentation
is obviously very difficult in terms of an absolute number, but it's clear that they
have very significant interests in the financial sector, the industrial sector, in real estate,
in commerce. And it works through monies that they have received, with which they have developed
their foundations, one for each service--the Fauji Foundation for the Army, Bahria Foundation
for the Navy, and [incompr.] Foundation for the Air Force. And these conglomerates work
as a kind of a welfare state to ensure that the military personnel, when they retire,
particularly the senior military personnel, can essentially live the way that they have
been accustomed--.
JAY: Why don't you speak about that, the way they are accustomed to? Because the higher
echelons of the Pakistani military, if I understand it correctly, live like very rich people.
I guess they are very rich people.
KHAN: They are rich people with--they have good accommodations. They have service, good
educational and medical facilities. So, yes, it is a very high standard of living. Plus
through the services that they belong to, they can get real estate, they can get agricultural
lands. So that continues to provide real income after they retire.
JAY: When they get these lands (and your--in your paper you call them a sort of continuation
of land grabbing), do they get them personally, or it's the military that owns the land?
KHAN: No, this is personally. The land goes to individuals.
JAY: Can you just give us a bit of historical context? From the beginnings of Pakistan,
how does this develop that the army becomes such a economic institution? As you point
out, the importance of that is it has such autonomy from civilian governments, and then
when it doesn't like civilian governments, it organizes coups. But a lot of that comes
from this economic independence.
KHAN: Yes, that is what the theory suggests, and it seems to be playing out. When the country
gained independence, Pakistan's political forces were not as developed and sophisticated
as in India. The civil service and the military were two institutions that were functioning,
and in that vacuum that seemed to be created, without unity and galvanizing force of the
political leaders, these two institutions acquired a lot of strength. Over the course
of time, they started to get--particularly after the first intervention under General
Ayub Khan, they started to institutionalize a role for the military in the civil economy.
The foundations were basically created to provide welfare services, initially, but they
started to expand. And so when there is a military intervention, the constituency for
the military is not civil society or the citizenship broadly; it is the military, so that there
comes a compulsion to please that constituency. And one way in which this is done is through
creating the ability to provide them more services into retirement and while in service.
I think that seems to be what is driving it. My own concern, of course, is that I personally
would like to see the strengthening of the political process, because that for me has
legitimacy and provides some hope for the citizenry, and particularly the disenfranchised,
to become stronger.
JAY: The point here is that much of the Pakistan military budget and the monies they have to
operate now comes through these foundations that own sections of the Pakistan economy
and not through a national budget that actually gets passed and vetted by some kind of a parliament.
Is that right? And do we have any idea of the numbers?
KHAN: Well, I've given some numbers in my paper, the ones that I've got. I mean, for
example, one of the numbers that the Public Accounts Committee recently announced was
that up to 50 percent of the expenses are subsidized, of these public sector corporations,
so that without the subsidy they couldn't survive. My concern, then, was that if they
can't survive, it's not a level playing field and they're crowding out private sector activity.
No, we don't know what, as a percentage of the total budget, how much they derive from
internal sources, but we need to remember that what they derive from internal sources
through their own economic holdings serves a particular purpose that's not an operational
purpose. For an operational purpose, it does come through the budget, and it has to be,
now, because we have a civilian government, approved by Parliament.
JAY: Well, when you say not operational, then where does this money go? One is for pensions
and such for retired officers. But what else does it do?
KHAN: Well, they're monies would then provide facilities like better hospitals, better--.
But it's also--a lot of this is jobs. I think I'm trying to make a slightly different point,
which is that the greater the economic stake that the military has, and the more that senior
and retired--senior retired officers rely on these conglomerates, the more stake, then,
they have in preventing any change in--any change of the system; the harder it becomes,
then, for the political process to be revised. And any time they are threatened, such as
when they were under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, when they were by Nawaz Sharif, then there
becomes a case for intervening to protect those interests. What I'm saying is that it
undermines the democratic process. Once they're not beholden to Parliament for their funding--.
And I think that the US funding can play the same kind of role, because--. But there is
also another issue at this point, that parliamentary oversight simply isn't there. I mean, you
get the occasional statement from the public accounts committee that the funding is understated,
because, for example, retirement incomes were first noted as part of the defense budget
under General Musharraf's administration--they stopped being counted as part of military
allocations. And simultaneously we saw very [incompr.] that these monies, as a portion
of what was going to equivalent civilian administrators, was much higher, 73,000 relative to an average
of 12,000. So I think those are the issues that concern me more.
JAY: And how is this covered in the Pakistani media? To what extent can journalists deal
with all of this?
KHAN: I think that there is silence for the most part, although in the last two years
I've been able to read more in the newspapers than I did before. Particularly after Osama
bin Laden was found to be present in Abbottabad, there was a disaffectation and more speaking.
But things also changed. They're very dynamic, and very often you find that people close
ranks. And particularly when there's a sense of not being treated fairly, then you find
that people rally behind the Forces.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Professor Khan.
KHAN: You're most welcome.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.