Pakistan’s new army chief: A reality check
To many in Pakistan, Qamar Javed Bajwa is an unknown soldier. Yet on Tuesday, he’ll become arguably the country’s most powerful person when he’s sworn in as its next army chief.
Testimonials about Bajwa are overwhelmingly positive. Those who know him say he’s a proponent of strong civil-military relations — the main reason, according to one account, why Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a man who has often sparred with the army, selected Bajwa for the job.
He’s not seen as reflexively hostile to India, and he once served under an eventual Indian Army chief while on a United Nations mission in Congo. He’s regarded as low-key and camera-shy, yet also congenial and accessible.
This all sounds great. Still, it pays to be skeptical in our expectations, and for two reasons.
One is institutional interests.
When it comes to Pakistan’s army, the institution is stronger than the individuals that lead it. When a new army chief enters the scene with relatively moderate views about India and a desire for civil-military comity, these sentiments won’t necessarily lead to major attitudinal or policy shifts.
The other reason is the reality on the ground. This shapes the thinking and actions of the military more so than the views of its leader.
Early in his 2007-2013 term, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani said that domestic terror in Pakistan required more “immediate attention” than the threat from India. Initially, this position appeared to have impact on the army’s thinking. In 2013, an official army doctrine reportedly accorded unprecedented importance to internal militancy.
However, by the end of Kayani’s term, India-Pakistan ties were struggling again after a brief détente. Kayani himself stated that India remained Pakistan’s core threat, at one point admitting that the military remained an “India-centric” institution, thereby undercutting his earlier arguments.
This was a case of the military’s institutional interests trumping the individual ideas of its leader. The military justifies its outsize role in the state on the need to defend the country from the threat of India. If India is no longer seen as a threat, or even as a lesser threat, then this justification is undercut.
Now consider Raheel Sharif, who served from 2013 to 2016.
Here, the disconnect between personal views and institutional interests is even starker. Before he became army chief, military colleagues described him as a “moderate” who believed Islamist militancy was a threat as important as that of India. Observers also noted that he was less senior than those he had competed with for the army chief position — suggesting Prime Minister Sharif saw him as less of a threat to his own power.
