Pakistan's army has always known that it has friends in Washington
America's love affairs with the military in countries it has always had its sights on goes back decades. With slight interruptions, successive administrations in Washington have never failed to reassure ambitious soldiers in these countries that they have nothing to be worried about when it comes to keeping close links with Washington. The long periods of military rule in Latin America, the bloody take-over of the state by General Pinochet in Chile and the rise of General Suharto in Indonesia are happenings which are today part of history.
In recent weeks, if not months, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to make Pakistan's military happy. Pakistan's army chief, the newly anointed Field Marshal Asim Munir, was treated to a rare reception by the US President when he visited Washington not long ago. Munir was clearly there to solicit American support in Pakistan's perennial conflict with India, the most recent instance of which was precipitated by the Pahalgam attack and India's subsequent Operation Sindoor.
On a deeper level, though, Asim Munir was in Washington to convey the subtle message to Donald Trump that he, as the head of the army, mattered more than anyone else in Pakistan. In normal circumstances, the field marshal ought to have been hosted not by the US President but by the top brass in the US military and at the most by Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defence. But the enthusiasm with which Munir met Trump at the White House conveyed the ominous message that beyond and above the putatively democratic government in Islamabad, it is the army which continues to call the shots.
Munir's dominance in the Pakistani state structure was reinforced when he turned up at the White House yet again a few days ago, this time in the company of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. There was the field marshal seated in the Oval Office as Sharif conversed with the US President. Trump did not fail to show his courtesy to both men, terming them as good leaders. In other words, Asim Munir has graduated from being chief of Pakistan's army to being a leader of the country.
Pakistan's military has mattered in American policy-making since the early 1950s, when General Mohammad Ayub Khan took charge of the army as commander-in-chief. By the later part of the decade, Ayub had seized power through a coup d'etat and quickly endeared himself to the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. Pakistan was under martial law, with no indication of a path being cleared for the country to return to democracy. But for the Kennedy administration, which took office in January 1961, that was never a worry. On an official visit to Washington, Ayub had his ego massaged when he was invited to address a joint session of the US Congress.
Washington had little of worry about a growing movement for democracy beginning to gather pace in Pakistan. President Lyndon Johnson, having succeeded the assassinated John F Kennedy, made it known that Washington remained a friend for Ayub Khan and Pakistan's military. As Vice President, Johnson had made a happy trip to Pakistan. As president, he welcomed Ayub Khan to the White despite his reservations about Pakistan's overtures to China initiated by Ayub's young Foreign Minister Z A Bhutto. The election of Richard Nixon as US president in November 1968 was a moment of happiness for Pakistan's first field marshal, a rank Ayub had conferred on himself.
Ayub Khan considered Nixon, who had kept in touch with him in his years in the political wilderness, a friend. Barely two months after Nixon entered the White House, the field marshal, badly weakened by a mass movement against his regime in both East and West Pakistan, was forced to hand over power to the commander-in-chief of the army, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, in March 1969. And that marked the beginning of a new phase in America's fondness for Pakistan's military. President Nixon visited Pakistan soon after the Apollo-11 moon landing, to be treated to a grand welcome by the country's second military regime.
America's involvement with Pakistan's military assumed a firmer shape with the beginning of Bangladesh's War of Liberation once the Pakistan army launched its genocide in Bangladesh. Despite loud voices raised in the United States, including by such eminent political figures as Senator Edward Kennedy, against the atrocities perpetrated in occupied Bangladesh by the Yahya Khan junta, the Nixon administration did nothing that would upset Pakistan's generals. Throughout the Bangladesh war President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger (who would become Secretary of State in 1973) maintained their support for the Pakistan military. The US tilt toward Pakistan was also guided by Washington's gratitude to Yahya for facilitating the China opening for Nixon through the clandestine Kissinger trip to Beijing in July 1971.
The historical record is rather blank on the subject of American presidents demonstrating unhappiness with Pakistan's generals over their grip on politics. General Ziaul Haq may have been a pariah for Washington at the beginning of his dictatorial rule. But things changed soon enough with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Zia's fortunes changed, with President Jimmy Carter now regarding him as an ally in what would soon be a war aimed at driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
The arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House in January 1981 triggered a new phase of cooperation between the US and Pakistan's military, camaraderie marked by support for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen forces in Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan as refugees, but that did not worry either Reagan or Zia. Pakistan's soldiers were after all helping Afghans in their war to drive the atheistic Soviets out of their country.
In the Reagan years, no mention was made of Pakistan's need for democratic political change. No condemnation of Zia's harsh repression of society was heard. When the US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, died with General Zia in the Bahawalpur plane crash in August 1988, no serious investigations were undertaken into the causes behind the disaster. The Reagan-Zia partnership in Afghanistan was followed by a Bush-Musharraf entente once the need to free Afghanistan of the Taliban arose.
The Taliban, a force constituted through the support of the Pakistan military, especially its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), led President George W Bush into placing a forthright formulation before General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's fourth military ruler: You are either for us or against us. Musharraf and the army knew what needed to be done. They joined Bush's so-called war on terror.
Pakistan's army has always known that it has friends in Washington, that American presidents have never been concerned about democracy in Islamabad as long as they have its generals on its side. The soldiers also know that when they move in, to remove elected governments from office, Washington will conveniently look the other way.
This message was reinforced and reiterated through the welcome accorded to Field Marshal Asim Munir, twice in the space of a few weeks, at the Trump White House.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an author and writes on politics and foreign affairs.