It is widely understood that the military is the most significant political entity in Pakistan. But what is less understood are the conflicts within the military—differing ideologies, personality conflicts, and internal and rarely seen political battles—which Crossed Swords ably reveals. Basing this work on both extensive research and numerous interviews, as well as having lived in a professional capacity through much of the history he retells, Shuja Nawaz provides a comprehensive and at times critical account of how the military has shaped Pakistan and the conflicts it has endured in doing so. Hence, this is a very important contribution to our understanding of political history and contemporary political dynamics in Pakistan.
Nawaz carefully weaves the story of how the military has risen to dominate the country, not only through its own institutional capacities but also through the industries it runs, the influence of retired military personnel in political and commercial bureaucracies, and its overall impact on public opinion. He traces the role that the military played at the outset, when Pakistan was born in 1947, through periods of social conflict, war, ostensible democracy, and outright martial law. He shows how this process was not the linear progression that many others have recounted, but rather was wrought with differences, grandstanding, and mistakes that make the military as an institution seem eerily vulnerable, something that is rarely considered in the case of Pakistan.
While Crossed Swords is essentially organized as a chronology, Nawaz deftly integrates his own analysis into the causes of what he chronicles. (Indeed, this kind of analysis is sorely missing from most works written by retired Pakistani bureaucrats.) He argues that as the military expanded, it did so at the expense of political and civil society groups:
The paradox that hobbled Pakistan's political development was that as the army grew in strength and size, it stunted the growth of the political system whose leaders either made no attempt to redress the power imbalance between the institutions of the state and that of the army, making the latter effectively the centre of power; or worse, they invited the army to settle political differences amongst themselves. (p. xxviii)
This is particularly poignant when he assesses the impact of Zia ul-Haq's rule (1977–88) on Pakistan:
His regime was to be the longest military rule in Pakistan's history with far-reaching effects that still haunt the body politic of Pakistan. It witnessed the emergence of the lower-middle class, the rise of Islamists in the military, and state sponsorship of militant Islamic (largely Sunni) groups (which provoked a Shia backlash and spawned sectarian warfare). His regime also saw the maturation of the country's nuclear technology, the intrusion of the military into almost all sectors of the economy, and a growing Culture of Entitlement, reflected in state-endorsed asset accumulation and corruption in both the civil and military environment. (p. 359)
The “mentality” of the military was changed by Zia, notably in his efforts to change its ethos and to get soldiers to pray more, which, in turn, led to a marked change in the new breed of officers nurtured by his regime (p. 384). But Nawaz surprisingly tiptoes around analyzing the pervasive social and political impacts of Zia's regime, even asserting, unconvincingly, that Zia “did not have a clear political agenda for the country” (p. 361) when he certainly did: not socialist (markedly different from his predecessor, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto), culturally conservative (hence his disdain for integrating women into political and economic institutions), and deeply committed to integrating sharia, or Islamic law, into the country's legal code. To argue, then, that Zia had no political agenda removes Zia's own agency from his actions and sterilizes the military's responsibility as a key cause of the “culture wars” that are currently ripping the country apart.
Indeed, while Nawaz tries to reveal different opinions within the military, he shies away from criticizing the military as an institution that has overstepped its boundaries in Pakistan. For example, he lists many theories about what caused the Ojhri munitions blast in Rawalpindi in April 1988 (p. 393), though not all. A compelling theory that is not included but that I have often heard discredits the military: High-level military officers had the munitions depot destroyed to cover up the fact that there were fewer weapons there than had been accounted for—that is, military personnel had been directly involved in smuggling and theft of these goods, likely for personal gain.
Nawaz steers away from his impersonal account of the military in Pakistan at the very end and reveals the passion that inspired him to research and write this book over so many years in the third appendix, which discusses the “Investigation into the Death of General Asif Nawaz” (pp. 599–607). This was the death in January 1993 of his own brother, whose insights he references at length throughout the volume. His brother was ostensibly poisoned, another tragedy in the lineage of the “wars within” Pakistan's military.
