Military Inc. - Second Edition: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy Paperback – November 20, 2016

Well researched and well written book. Good interesting reading. Very thorough and well backed by facts, good editing with some interesting facts

Pakistan, it has been said, is an army with an attached state. This book goes further and aims to prove that Pakistan is a corrupt army with a corrupt attached state and that the two are hand-in-glove with each other in the business of plundering and parasitizing the unfortunate common people of that unfortunate country. To a significant extent, this book achieves its aims.The central concept of the book is that of “Milbus”, which is supposed to be a contraction of “Military Business” and is defined (p. 5) as “military capital used for the personal benefit of the military fraternity…not recorded as part of the defence budget… controlled by the military…” It is an inelegant term which might be better replaced with “Milicon” (Military Economy), which would align more neatly with the subtitle of the book.The book narrates the chronology of the army’s dominant, and now domineering, position within Pakistani society. The story begins with the first Kashmir war in 1947-49, when the Pakistan Army, weak though it was in the aftermath of Partition, was nevertheless successful in blocking Indian attempts to force a military solution to the Kashmir dispute. A senior Pakistani officer, Major General Fazal Muqeem Khan, proudly stated that “only the Army prevented Pakistan from being wiped off the face of the map.” The confidence engendered by this achievement enabled the army to project itself as the nation’s savior, which in turn allowed it to treat Pakistani politicians as co-equals rather than as civilian superiors. A cascade of events was initiated that culminated in the outright takeover of the government in 1958 by Ayub Khan.After that, there was no stopping the military. It had tasted absolute power and was thereby corrupted absolutely. It started acquiring land by means both legal and illegal, ostensibly for the provision of retirement benefits for its soldiers, but in reality for the enrichment of the officer cadre and especially the senior generals. The book details how the subsequent military takeovers of 1977 and 1999 led to the military extending its tentacles into virtually every sector of the economy, but especially the real estate sector. Military officers have now become part of the landed gentry, and indeed now form a self-righteous social and economic class which deals contemptuously with any attempts by civilians to rein it in. It boasts of providing more efficient services through its many companies and subsidiaries, but this book demonstrates that evidence for these claims is thin indeed, largely because of the utter opaqueness of any accountability protocols. This is one of the book’s strengths.The book is weakest in its recounting of the history of the events leading up to the outbreak of civil war in East Pakistan in March 1971. The author does not take to task the Bangladeshi leader Mujibur Rahman for his divisive and muckraking rhetoric between 1966 and 1971, not only against West Pakistan but also against Urdu-speaking people in East Pakistan (commonly known as Biharis). The latter formed 20% of the population of the eastern wing but Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League (erroneously referred to as the Awami National Party on p. 89) launched a campaign of atrocities against them throughout March 1971. This precipitated the brutal army crack-down on March 25 (not March 15 as erroneously stated on p. 90). The Urdu-speaking population of Bangladesh is now minuscule, and it would have been intellectually honest of the author, and added to her credibility as an academic, if she could have brought herself to admit that Bangladesh was the product of the Awami League’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the non-Bengali minority.Other blind spots in the book are related to the author’s academic training in the West. She takes for granted the superiority of Western “democracy” and the “free-market economy” but this book was first published in 2007 (postscript added in 2017 and riddled with grammatical errors), and it would be interesting to know what she now thinks of the current parlous state of democracy in the US and of the economy in the UK. More alarming is her thinly-veiled belief that pressure from the US to bring about reforms within Pakistan is both desirable and to be encouraged. This attitude, which apparently is unmoved by the abject failure of the US to do any nation-building in Iraq or Afghanistan, needs to be condemned in the strongest possible terms, because it simply feeds into the popular Pakistani delusion that there is an international conspiracy against their country.The book has a wonderfully comical cover photograph of a Pakistani soldier on parade, with a very Punjabi face and a very military mustache. Its diagrams are quite basic and could have used larger fonts and some colors.After reading three hundred pages about the greed, avarice, and high-handedness of senior Pakistani of-ficers, one is left wondering how long such corruption can last, and what that means for a military that is armed with nuclear weapons. Joe Biden is said to have remarked that this makes Pakistan “the most dangerous country in the world” (this was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza). I wouldn’t worry too much, Joe: The evidence provided in this book offers a simple solution: Just tell the Pakistani generals that they can have all the land they want, and all the places at Harvard and Oxford that their offspring want, and they will surrender their nukes without a fight, just like they surrendered East Pakistan.

Great book to know how State Above (not within) State (army above country) can ruin the fabric of scoiety, destroy social set up and cripple economy by controlling and manipulating the industry, repelling other competitive industry. How loac and freign investors are threatened to abolish any competition in Fauji corporation products which exceed $200 billions. Must read to understand why India (which got indepdence at the same time as Pakistan) excelled and became 4th largest economic power, with $1000 bullions surplus and how Pakistan became under debt of $160 billions and reached bottom of nations in every respect; decadence, loss of ethial moral values, extremism, sectarian violence, 65% (130 millions) population below poverty line, and how elite capture (comprising of army officers, corrupt politicians, beurucrats and rich businessmen) accumulated wealth in billions.