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Asia Times says purging of Pak Army is underway
The silent tug of war being fought between the Pakistani army's Islamists and its liberal army leadership appears to have reached a boiling point, with well-placed sources telling Asia Times Online that the army, for the first time in its history, has taken on a different - and much more harsh - strategy to deal with its internal struggles, one that includes the death penalty. In the 1980s, for the sake of maintaining its "strategic depth" against India, the Pakistani army modified the structure of its jihadi outfits, with the aim of boosting its leverage in Central Asia and Afghanistan before forging a strategic alliance to establish Pakistan's political hegemony on South Asia. Since September 11, 2001, however, under immense US pressure, Pakistan was forced to take a U-turn and undo this policy, which resulted in many internal divisions within the army - the only organized institution in the country. Musharraf reacted to the situation in a number of ways, including by court-martialing the renegade officials and sending officials who were not ready to go along with government's U-turn policy into early retirement. But this was not enough. Well-placed sources maintain that cases of indiscipline and defiance were so rampant after the South Waziristan operation on the Afghanistan border this year that the government decided to deal with the situation with an iron fist, and has adopted a new modus operandi to deal with problem. Under the new strategy, all those who were officially assigned to government-sponsored military training camps in the past, in Afghanistan and Pakistani Azad (Free) Kashmir, are now viewed as a threat to the government, and the process of "cleansing" them from the army has already begun. This includes both commissioned and non-commissioned army officials. Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-12-22 |
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