This article was written by Saeed Shah in Islamabad, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 23rd July 2010 17.53 UTCPakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, emerged as a greatly strengthened figure today after the fragile civilian government bowed to pressure to extend his tenure by an unprecedented three years.
Kayani, a chain-smoker who previously headed the shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is now poised to forge Pakistan’s foreign policy at a crucial moment in neighbouring Afghanistan, where the army is manoeuvring to forge a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban insurgency.
The announcement that he will serve an extra three years caused widespread surprise. Most observers expected the general, who is due to retire in November, to get an extension of service, but few thought it would be so long.
The sudden move underscores the army’s strength over the democratically elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari, which has been racked by political turmoil. Kayani will now outlast the prime minister and the president and is likely to oversee the next general election.
In a late television address yesterday, the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said Kayani had to stay because Pakistan’s anti-Taliban “military operations are at a critical stage and successful continuation of these operations required continuation in military high command”.
Considered a “soldier’s soldier”, Kayani is respected for his professionalism and found favour in the west for leading the army into serious battle with the Pakistani Taliban for the first time last year. He is also credited with keeping the 2008 elections – which restored democracy to Pakistan after nine years of rule under his former boss, General Pervez Musharraf – relatively clean. But Pakistanis are also mindful of the fact that the military, the country’s most powerful institution, has a long record of manipulating politics and ousting civilian governments. Its main tool of influence is the ISI, which is feared by politicians and public alike.
But the army chief also commands more than 600,000 men, the sixth largest army in the world, and an officer corps that controls sizeable business and property interests.
“The army is so powerful that to give them another inch is to give them 10 miles,” said Kamran Shafi, a leading newspaper columnist and former army officer. “To give three years at a time is unheard of. It’s just a craven government.”
The ruling Pakistan Peoples party has no love for the military. The party’s founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 by an army chief who had staged a coup, while two governments led by his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, were removed through military interventions in the 1990s. Many in the party, now headed by Bhutto’s widower, Zardari, blame the military for her 2007 assassination.
Some government figures had wanted to give a maximum one-year extension to Kayani. But democracy remains fragile and his case was quietly backed by the US military. Opposition politicians have remained silent on the issue.
“This shows that democracy has not taken root. The decision was taken on the basis of obvious pressure from the military. It just shows who’s in power, who’s pulling the strings,” said Asma Jahangir, Pakistan’s leading human rights lawyer and former chairman of the human rights commission of Pakistan. “Every time politicians have promoted someone out of turn, democracy has suffered.” Former prime ministers Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 and Nawaz Sharif in 1999 were both ousted by army chiefs that they had hand-picked by breaking the promotion norms.
So far, Kayani has tried to steer clear of political controversy, commanding with a deft touch. He secretly intervened to defuse a political crisis in March 2009, when civil rights activists were marching on Islamabad to try to restore the ousted chief justice to office. Kayani demanded that the chief justice be reappointed, an order that was then carried out in the dead of night.
Kayani’s military runs Pakistan’s security policy and has resisted all attempts by civilians to exercise control over it. The military headquarters in Rawalpindi also controls sensitive areas of foreign policy, meaning relations with India, Afghanistan and the US.
Before Kayani took charge of the army, Pakistan’s military operations against its home-grown Taliban insurgents were half-hearted. In April 2009, he launched the first concerted offensive against the extremists, routing them in the Swat valley in the north-west, before starting the continuing operations in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal area, which runs along the Afghan border.
Famously a man of few words, Kayani rose from humble origins – his father was an ordinary soldier.
He is a favourite of the west despite the fact that he led the ISI from 2004 to 2007, exactly the period when the Taliban staged their comeback in Afghanistan, allegedly with the agency’s support. Now Kayani is leading the Pakistan military’s efforts to cement a new regime in Kabul that is pro-Pakistan, which means including representatives of the Taliban.
• This article was amended on 26 July 2010. Due to an editing change, the original referred to General Ashraq Kayani. This has been corrected.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
