Pakistan:While Musharraf's likely successor as army head has worked with the CIA, he will be taking the helm of an Islamicised, riven body, writes Rahul Bedi
When US deputy secretary of state John Negroponte visited Pakistan last weekend, he met President Pervez Musharraf for two hours. But before he left town he held three meetings with a lesser-known figure - Gen Ashfaq Kiyani, the deputy army chief.
The attention paid to Kiyani has added to speculation in Islamabad that he will soon be anointed Musharraf's successor as head of the army - and, as such, will be a vital ally for the Bush administration during a time of crisis.
"Use your influence. You can help save Pakistan," Negroponte told Kiyani during the visit, according to a western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Musharraf has repeatedly said he will step down from his army post. It remains unclear when he will do so. But if Kiyani is named successor, he will command Pakistan's 600,000 troops and lead the country's most important institution.
Throughout the recent turmoil, Kiyani has remained out of the political spotlight. Before being the armed forces' number two, the general was head of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's spy agency, where he worked closely with senior Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon officials.
Gen Kiyani has farming roots, having been raised in rural Punjab - sometimes called the country's "martial belt" because many teenage boys from the province enter the military, lacking other economic opportunities. He was educated at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Power in Pakistan flows from the uniform, as a popular saying goes. Half of the country's rulers have been sons of the military. But, as in Pakistan's politics, judiciary and civil society, disturbing cracks are emerging in the nuclear-equipped army that has directly or indirectly ruled the country for most of the state's 60 years.
And, as it increasingly engages jihadis in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan who are worryingly on the ascendant and swiftly seizing vast swathes of territory in places like the Swat region within sight of the capital Islamabad, the military's normally robust command and control system appears wobbly.
The writ of the Pakistani state, previously brutally enforced by the army, is fast receding in these regions and being replaced by armed and organised jihadis enforcing a strict Islamic code.
Over the past fortnight, jihadis have successfully pushed into Shangla, east of Swat, where indigenous and foreign militants have established their hold. There they operate parallel administrations dispensing summary justice, regulating traffic and patrolling villages and townships.
More than 2,000 soldiers were deployed to the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) in July, but they have remained largely inactive, unsettled by the militants' ability to easily capture them.
Within hours of imposing the emergency in Pakistan on November 3rd, Musharraf ordered the release of 25 militants captured in August in return for 213 soldiers captured by the warlord Baitullah Mehsud in FATA.
Many Pakistanis are concerned that as the seemingly unwinnable war of attrition against the Taliban and their allies unfolds, their fears about the army's professionalism and cohesiveness could fast become a reality. Since 2005, over 1,000 Pakistani soldiers have died in firefights with militants or in ambushes and suicide bombings; another 400, including officers, face disciplinary proceedings for refusing to engage their "Muslim brethren"; while some 500 others had surrendered to Taliban cadres and other jihadi groups without a fight. All military officers concede no professional army, especially one fighting insurgents, has ever been known to so abjectly surrender to the opposition and survive.
At independence in 1947, Pakistan - like neighbouring and rival India - inherited a professional army from colonial rulers that was honourably blooded in the second World War and broadly centred on regimental traditions and an abiding esprit de corps. This largely survived the three wars with India in 1947-48, 1965 and 1971 that led to the formation of Bangladesh, with the ignominious surrender of some 90,000 Pakistani troops to the Indian army.
But things changed drastically after the 1977 coup by Gen Mohammad Zia-ul Haq. He assiduously launched the army's Islamicisation and institutionalised its strategic relationship with the mullahs. The Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan two years later greatly helped. Having launched the jihad in Afghanistan, Zia set out to legitimise his military dictatorship in the name of Islam by creating a theocracy and nurturing Muslim fundamentalist groups in his pursuit of establishing a Nizam-I-Mustafa (system of the Prophet) across Pakistan. He concentrated on what he knew best - the army. Under Zia's rule, the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party (JEI) took firm root within the army and the omnipotent Inter-Services Intelligence that ran the Afghan campaign against the Soviet army and thereafter in 1989 began fuelling Kashmir's insurgency by infiltrating Muslim insurgents into the disputed province.
The JEI - now significantly bolstered by similarly inclined Islamist parties under Musharraf's patronage to form the all-powerful Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - decrees that Islam is not only a way of life but a complete system of politics, economics and culture. It remains virulently opposed to secular democracy and socialist doctrines.
The result is that the majority of officers recruited during Zia's tenure (which ended somewhat abruptly with his assassination in 1988) - many of whom have achieved senior positions of brigadier and above - became fundamentalist in outlook, nurturing visions of a pan-Islamic homeland. For them, this was centred on Pakistan and included Kashmir, Afghanistan and parts of the Central Asian republics.
What remains to be seen is whether the Pakistani army can stay resilient in the face of the tremendous contradictory pressures it now faces.
That is an extremely difficult task, made all the more stark by the fact that it is nuclear-armed. - (Additional reporting by LA Times service)