Pak Army officers see terrorists as a bigger threat than India
A younger generation of Pakistan Army officers tends to consider home-grown terrorists, an enemy they have personally fought, a more significant threat than India, according to a new study by an elite Pakistani training school for senior officers who go on to man the upper echelons of the force.
They are forced to keep their views to themselves though, to private dinner parties and smaller conversations, and away from older officers, who are senior and seek to enforce the traditional anti-india narrative to safeguard and perpetuate their own legacy, the study says.
The Quetta Experience, written by retired US Army colonel David O Smith, an alumnus of the Command and Staff College in Quetta, and published by the Washington-based Wilson Center, offers an inside look at Pakistan’s middle-level and senior officers.
Smith interviewed US Army officers who attended the Quetta institution, which counts Indian Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw among its alumni, under a long-term US programme from 1977 to 2014, on what they saw there and heard from Pakistani classmates.
The study was completed in 2014 but a decision was taken then not to distribute it, fearing adverse impact on US Army officers serving at the Quetta facility. The US cancelled the programme in 2016 and Smith felt confident enough to publish it after he was told in late 2017 that it would not be resumed.
In the section on India, Smith charts changing attitudes of Pakistani officers based on accounts of their American classmates going back to 1977.
According to the report, a US student from the 2009-2010 batch noted a “generational divide” between old and long-time Pakistani officers clinging to their long-held anti-india bias and the young crop of officers who were the “complete opposite”.
But the key factor was the experience of junior and midlevel army officers who served in the erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the historically lawless northwestern area bordering Afghanistan, and tended to view terrorism as a much more immediate threat to Pakistan than India.
The report states: “These officers, he said, had spent the bulk of their military careers fighting this new threat, had seen their brother officers and soldiers killed and wounded by the groups, and watched their friends and their families’ lives shattered forever.”