Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

0 Frontline Pakistan
belonging to the Deobandi sect were appointed to work among the
troops. They were supposed to be the bridge for officers between the
westernized profession and the faith. Units were required to take noncombatant
mullahs with them to the front line. Soldiers were encouraged
to attend ‘Tablighi’ gatherings. The purpose was to indoctrinate cadets
and young officers with an obscurantist interpretation of Islam. Many
of those cadets later rose to positions of power and took control of
sensitive institutions, including the ISI.
The change in the social composition of the officer corps also led
to the ideological reorientation of Pakistan’s army in the 1980s. The
army officer corps, till the 1970s, was elitist in character and composition.
But the trend changed. In the past, members of the upper class
or the rural aristocracy had largely dominated the army ranks; now
the new officers mostly came from the lower and middle social strata.
The rank and file of junior officers since the 1970s had come, not from
prosperous central Punjab, but from the impoverished and relatively
backward northern districts where a fundamentalist religious ethos
prevailed. 19 Unlike their predecessors, the new officers did not come
from elite English-language schools, but were the product of modest
state-run educational institutions. The spirit of liberalism, common in
the ‘old’ army, was practically unknown to them. 20 They were products
of a social class that, by its very nature, was conservative and
easily influenced by Islamic fundamentalism. They were distinctively
less westernized.
Their narrow nationalist orientation and education, professional
training and culture made them very receptive to the influence of
Islamic groups, particularly to the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which freely
carried out propaganda work among the officers and circulated Islamic
literature. Most importantly, the JI’s propaganda among vast numbers
of troops was officially sanctioned by commanding officers on the
battalion level and above. That led to the evolution of a long-lasting
alliance between the military and the mosque. The main objective
of the JI was to penetrate the army and use it to seize state power.
The practice introduced by General Zia of sending combat officers to
universities in Pakistan, in which the JI often had pervasive influence,
facilitated the party’s objective.
The influence of the JI was particularly visible among officers from
rural and semi-urban backgrounds. They had a high level of religious
intolerance and held extremist views regarding ‘external enemies’ and
the threat to Islam. The number of officers sporting beards for religious