By Aqil Shah

THE conventional wisdom of the day is that the army is beating a retreat to the barracks. The prime minister keeps thanking the generals for withdrawing army officers from civilian institutions, a process he reportedly considers conducive to creating a ‘balanced’ civil-military relationship.

But recalibrating civil-military relations would take more than recalling military officers seconded to the civil bureaucracy. It would require that the two spheres be made impervious to undue interference from each other.

That is easier said than achieved in the context of Pakistan where the military has routinely trespassed on civilian territory without any regard for constitutional and democratic norms. Even when it has formally left civilian politics, the military has managed to retain authoritarian prerogatives in the state apparatus which continue to violate the precepts of democratic civil-military relations. These prerogatives continually entrench and reproduce what the political scientist Alfred Stepan calls the ‘latent structural power’ of the military.

One such prerogative is the employment of retired military officers in strategic locations in the civil service. In this context, the military’s colonisation of professional institutions of bureaucratic recruitment, training and professional development is particularly troubling.

I explain why that is the case below. But first let’s consider the evidence: the chairman and three members of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) are former military officers. The Civil Services Academy (CSA), the National Institutes of Public Administration (NIPAs), and the Pakistan Administrative Staff College (PASC) are all militarised at the top. And military penetration of these institutions does not stop there. Ex-military men have also been appointed as ‘master trainers’ in the NIPAs and PASC. Even the Central Selection Board (CSB) and the Civil Service Reforms Unit are headed by retired military officials.

This practice is unacceptable and defies logic. For one, militarisation distorts performance incentives for career bureaucrats as they are often denied posts to which they are entitled after years of service.

Second, and related to the first, it undermines organisational morale by subjecting civil servants to the ridiculously irrelevant military notions of order and discipline.

Third, military officers are what Harold Lasswell calls professional ‘managers of violence’. In other words, they are trained in the art and science of the use of coercive force. Their main professional duty is the planning and the conduct of interstate warfare. Neither their staff nor their field appointments provide them with the education, skills and experience required to manage civilian institutions let alone to train civil servants. Simply put, civilian jobs are best performed by civilians and vice versa. Some might argue that these officers are no longer in the army. For all practical purposes, they are civilians now. Hence, any debate over the impact of militarisation on the civil service is misdirected and pointless. They would be wrong.

If Organisation Theory and Practice 101 is any guide, every bureaucratic organisation infuses its members with a set of collectively held assumptions, beliefs and perspectives that govern their behaviour. These organisational biases exert a powerful influence especially in hierarchical military organisations where tightly controlled processes of indoctrination and socialisation create a hegemonic worldview.

In the case of Pakistan, military organisational biases translate into a deep-rooted suspicion of and contempt for civilians in general and democratic politics in particular. Thus, military officers, in or out of uniform, are by training and disposition unsuited to performing civilian jobs which require voluntary subordination to civilian authority. Simply put, you can take the man out of the army but you cannot take the army out of the man.

Of course, there might be exceptions to the rule. Some military officers might be suited to some civil jobs. But just as civilians are not entitled to purely military jobs, membership in the military should not endow soldiers with the right to hold any civilian job regardless of what their own sense of entitlement might be. After all, the military would not even consider appointing civilians to head the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, or the Command and Staff College, Quetta. And rightly so. But then, it should also learn to respect civilian institutional boundaries.

To be fair, the induction of military men in the civil service is not unique to Pakistan. But its scope and scale have been alarming. Historically, the practice can be traced to the British colonial period when military officers were seconded to the Indian Political Service designated for the administration of ‘sensitive’ frontier areas. But it was after independence that different military dictators formalised the practice for their own political ends, such as rewarding favoured officers with plum civil service posts.

The real damage started with the institutionalised militarisation of the bureaucracy under General Ziaul Haq. The military then created for itself a statutory quota in the civil service both at the entry and upper levels. That policy has served as a short cut for well-connected officers who are otherwise not competent enough to qualify for the competitive, even if flawed, process of selection. Come General Pervez Musharraf, and military penetration of civil departments and agencies has only deepened.

What is to be done? Successful transitions require that the deleterious legacies of military rule are eroded and eliminated through conscious policy reform. If the prime minister is serious about ‘balancing’ civil-military relations, he must act decisively and immediately during this post-transition window of opportunity to demilitarise civilian institutions.

More specifically, he ought to reclaim civil service selection and training institutions by appointing civilians familiar with the organisational logic, structure and operations of the civil service. As chief executive, the prime minister obviously has the authority to appoint lateral entrants ‘responsive’ to government policies. But there should be no reserved seats for military officers in the civil services. All existing quotas must be abolished as soon as possible. If military officers are really interested in working in the civil service, they should be subjected to the same criteria of selection as civilians. It is as simple as that.

The writer, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia University, is currently doing research in Pakistan.

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it