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Musharraf's Military Reaches Deep Into Pakistani Society
Pakistani paramilitary soldiers and police patrol during a general strike last month in Karachi. Soldiers are generally a rare sight in the streets, but the military has wide influence in the bureaucracy and through its business interests.
(By B.k. Bangash -- Associated Press)
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But the main reasons are domestic. For Pakistani professionals -- particularly highly trained lawyers, doctors and professors -- the movement has become a chance to decry intrusions in their fields by less educated military men. Civil society, they say, has badly atrophied during Musharraf's tenure.
For the poor, meanwhile, the military has become an obvious outlet for anxiety over growing income disparities and fast-rising prices.
In Rawalpindi, the teeming garrison town just down the road from Islamabad, retired and active-duty officers live in sparkling new gated communities that feature luxury homes, tree-lined streets and grassy parks. Mohammed Shafiq, a 36-year-old clerk, can see one such development from the weedy field in front of his old, squat brick home.
"Before, people had good opinions of the army," he said. "Now they are afraid. If soldiers come, we think they are coming to take our land."
Land is one of the military's most prized assets, distributed as a perk to top officers, with major generals getting at least 50 acres apiece. The military's total land holdings are worth upward of $12 billion, according to Ayesha Siddiqa, a British-trained scholar who last month published an academic study that chronicles the military's extensive business network.
Through affiliated foundations and subsidiaries, Siddiqa wrote, the military has captured a dominant position in the economy, making many of its top officers rich in the process. The effect, she argued, has been to stunt the growth of every other facet of Pakistani society while tightening the military's grip on power.
"This is what we call legal corruption," she told an audience that had crammed into a small, airless office for her book launch last month.
The venue for the launch had been switched at the last minute because the swanky, government-run Islamabad Club canceled her reservation. No hotels would host the function, either. Later, Siddiqa's calls were mysteriously dropped, and plainclothes agents visited her home town to question her employees. Feeling threatened, she recently left for London.
Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the military's best efforts, the book has become a bestseller.
