The policy-shaping strategists and ideologues of Washington have since long started believing that the influence of the Pak Army on the country’s foreign policy and on the matters of strategic direction-setting is quite detrimental to the U.S designs and interests in the region. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and, as per Francis Fukoyama’s doctrine, the emergence of a world with America as its only super power, the U.S strategisers have adopted India as its future ally against Chinese threat in the region, and made ‘political unification’ of the South Asia as its principal goal. Meaning thereby that the Pak Army has become irrelevant in the U.S scheme of things. Hence America’s efforts to subordinate the Pak Army to the political alternatives, Washington has discovered in the likes of Asif Ali Zardari and Mian Nawaz Sharif. The Memogate conspiracy can be cited as a glaring example in this respect, and the emergence of Nawaz-Modi embrace as the other example.
Americans don’t have a pleasant history of relations with the Pak Generals. Field Marshal Ayub Khan was not a docile viceroy. He infact authored Friends, Not Masters as a kind of ‘curt rebuff’ to Washington. Resultantly he was made to quit the national scene at the height of his power. Same fate was met by General Zia ul Haque when Washington realized that the grinning general had designs of his own on Afghanistan — and could easily make the said country, Pakistan’s backyard and strategic depth.
General Pervez Musharraf was a handy ally but he was perceived as ‘foxy’ and too strongly welded to ‘national aspirations’ to be depended upon long-term basis. Hence the lawyers’ Movement, the emergence of the media power, and the re-birth of the PPP-PML (N) leaderships.
Will America succeed in cutting the Pak Army down to size by raising its support to the “Democracy Project?”
The answer is a big No. The people of Pakistan today are afraid, not of the probability of a military takeover, but of the dreaded alternative—the military not acting decisively to bring to a grinding halt, the ruling party’s dream of transforming this country into the new breeding field of cronyism, nepotism and crude fascism.
