Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Stephen Peter Rosen

The possibility that widespread social unrest in Pakistan might have implications for the security of Pakistani nuclear weapons has always been discounted by those who point, correctly, to the highly professional character of the Pakistani Army. In a set of interviews released late this fall, General Musharraf tried to reassure Americans about the safety of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The weapons were safe, he argued, as a result of cooperation with the United States government to set up special security forces, the personnel of which were carefully screened to exclude soldiers with extreme Islamist sympathies. This reassurance presupposed that the military chain of command remained intact in Pakistan, even if the civilian government was in disarray.

But no army can be entirely separated from the sympathies and ties that are generated within the host society from which it comes. The American military has a long and strong tradition of professionalism, but American soldiers of African-American origin fighting in the Vietnam War were distressed by the urban rioting in the United States in the late 1960s, according to Charles Moskos. PLA soldiers from western China, of non-Han origin, were reportedly brought in to suppress the Tiananmen Square political movement, presumably because local troops might not have obeyed orders violently to suppress the movement.

If the rioting sparked by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto persists and grows more widespread, will Pakistani troops be brought in to quell the riots? If they are brought in, will they obey orders to use force? And, if they do not, what conclusions about the overall reliability of the Pakistani Army should be drawn by India? By the United States? And by countries that could be affected by a breakdown of control over the soldiers that guard the nuclear weapons of Pakistan?