Hearings in the Indian Supreme Court

 

The Only Function of Economic Forecasting Is To Make Astrology Look Respectable

 Tim Harford in The FT 

Economist Ezra Solomon once quipped that “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”. I’m not sure if the astrologer “Mystic Meg” was ever respectable, but she was certainly much loved. “Britain’s most famous astrologer by a million miles,” said her agent, after her recent death prompted an outpouring of affectionate recollections about her campy image and her arch forecasts about the National Lottery, praised both for their brilliant accuracy and sheer absurdity. 

It seems hard to imagine that an economic forecaster will ever earn such valedictions. But many economic pundits seem to have been taking lessons from astrologers. Consider this horoscope: “The balance of risks remains tilted to the downside, but adverse risks have moderated . . . On the upside, a stronger boost from pent-up demand in numerous economies or a faster fall in inflation are plausible. On the downside, severe health outcomes in China could hold back the recovery . . . ” 

That pretty much covers everything: good news, bad news, more inflation, disinflation. In case you’re wondering, it’s the latest World Economic Outlook from the IMF. But that sort of “rainbow forecast” is typical of the genre. 

Forecasting expert Philip E Tetlock, in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgement, noted that expert pundits had a tendency to make vague forecasts, and to excuse error as “erring on the side of caution” or being wrong only on timing. 

If so, those experts are treading a well-worn path. Consider the following statements: “You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.” “You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.” “While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.” 

They sound like the kind of thing a clairvoyant might say after gazing into a crystal ball, but these statements are from an academic paper, “The Fallacy of Personal Validation”, published in 1949 by psychologist Bertram Forer. 

After getting his students to fill out a diagnostic questionnaire, Forer handed each of them a written assessment of their traits. The students believed the assessments were uniquely tailored on the basis of the questionnaire. But, in fact, each student got the same list of 13 statements, including the three above. The students felt the diagnostic had done an excellent job, and the vast majority agreed with at least 10 out of 13 statements. When the deception was revealed, wrote Forer, “they burst into laughter”. These “Forer statements” — also sometimes called “Barnum statements” after showman PT Barnum — can feel uncannily specific. Most people don’t realise that they are almost universal. 

In defence of economic forecasters, including the IMF, Barnumesque verbiage is traditionally accompanied by specific falsifiable numerical predictions. Surely, the real incorrigibles are the economics columnists. We’ll blithely hand-wave about risks and opportunities which may or may not manifest. And like Mystic Meg, we’re kept around only because people find our prognostications entertaining. 

The parallels should be no surprise. Walter Friedman’s history of economic forecasting, Fortune Tellers, explains that clairvoyants and economic forecasters started from a similar place. Evangeline Adams and Roger Babson were near contemporaries, born in the US in 1868 and 1875 respectively. Both offered investment advice in general and stock market forecasts in particular. Both were in high demand, and both died rich. The chief difference was that Adams was an astrologer, while Babson offered data-driven forecasts inspired by ideas from physics. 

Babson’s forecasting ideas look very strange today. He was a huge fan of Isaac Newton: he purchased and moved the parlour of Newton’s house from London to Massachusetts, funded research into antigravity, and his forecasting ideas are full of misappropriated Newtonian physics. His “Babsonchart” was built around the Newtonish idea that each boom above the trend was followed by an equal and opposite bust below. With hindsight, this was true by definition when Babson plotted the trend line in the right place. Alas, it offered little predictive power beyond generalities. 

Still, generalities will get you a long way. Babson’s reputation as a forecaster was secured when, on September 5 1929, a few weeks before the great crash, he opined, “sooner or later a crash is coming which will . . . cause a decline of from 60 to 80 points in the Dow-Jones Barometer”. Impressive. 

What is less impressive is that those gloomy forecasts began years earlier, in 1926, after which the Dow more than doubled. The crash was vastly bigger than Babson had predicted, and it continued long after Babson started predicting a recovery. 

No matter. Shortly after the crash began, Babson ran an advert in The New York Times announcing that “Babson clients were prepared” and he still gets credit for predicting the crash. Aficionados of clairvoyancy will recognise some similarities here. If you want to be admired for your forecasts, temper your bold claims with vagueness and be sure to trumpet the successes and downplay the failures. 

No sooner had Mystic Meg’s death been announced than The Sun, which published her column, was explaining that her final horoscope was a “sweet prediction” that she would be reunited in the afterlife with an old flame who died in a car crash in 1977. “Leo: It can be the most routine of routine journeys that takes you towards your soulmate.” 

For those readers willing to swallow the idea that death itself is “the most routine of routine journeys”, it’s a startling piece of prescience. For the rest of us, it’s audacious silliness. Mystic Meg would have been proud.

Imran Khan has Pakistani army ducking & defending. Why it’s a historic moment for the subcontinent

Shekhar Gupta in The Print

Since its founding, Pakistan’s army has built a consistent record of launching wars on India and losing. It is a record of unblemished consistency. There is, however, another battlefield where it has an equally consistent record of winning. Which is where it is staring at defeat. We will elaborate on this in just a bit.

On fighting and losing wars with India, there will obviously be some nitpicking. The tough fact is, after so many wars, this army has lost almost half of Pakistan (Bangladesh), destroyed its polity, institutions, economy and entrepreneurship, and driven out its talent. Finally, it has even less of Kashmir (think Siachen) than it started out with.

So where is it that its record of winning has been equally consistent and it is now on the retreat?

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Check out this entire press conference by Lt Gen. Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, the serving chief of the almighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which vanquished the Soviet and American powers, the KGB and the CIA, in Afghanistan. Chaperoned by Lt Gen. Babar Iftikhar, the chief of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), he has spoken for nearly an hour and a half. All of this was invested in defending himself, the ISI, his chief and the army.

Now, never mind that Elon Musk has stolen that metaphor for posterity, please allow us also to use it: Let that sink in. This is the ISI that all of Pakistan both loved and feared, loved and loathed, that friend and foe held in awe. It only had to wink, nod and sometimes nudge, and most of the Pakistani media would fall in line. If you didn’t, you might end up in jail, exile, a corpse in a gutter or in a strange land. In some cases, all of these. Think Arshad Sharif, the former ARY anchor. He was fired and exiled, as was his boss. Sharif turned up dead in Kenya, apparently shot by the police in a matter of mistaken identity. If you believe that, you must be high on something totally illegal.

Now, we had the ISI chief, institutionally among the most powerful men in the world at any time, at a press conference with a hand-picked friendly audience (most of the respected publications were excluded). Usually, his word and his chief’s were an order for Pakistan’s media, politicians, and often also the judiciary. The chief of ISPR was his constant messenger.

Now, both of them, speaking on behalf of their institution, were claiming victimhood. When the Pakistani army goes to the media complaining about a political leader who they evidently fear, you know that its politics has taken a historic turn.
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Pakistan’s army is brilliant at scrapping with its political class and winning. Now it fears defeat at the hands of its politicians too. To that extent, Imran Khan might be on the verge of a victory that would mean even more in political terms than his team’s cricket World Cup win in 1992. If the Pakistani army can finally be defeated by a popular, if populist, civilian force, it’s a history-defining moment for the subcontinent.

It’s history-defining because an institution that was never denied its supreme power except for a few years after the 1971 defeat is now seeking public sympathy with its back to the wall under a mere civilian’s onslaught. Its word used to be a command for any government of the day. It could hire, fire, jail, exile, or murder prime ministers serving, former and prospective. To understand that, you do not have to go far.

In 2007, it looked as if Benazir Bhutto was on the ascendant, after her return from her second long exile (the first return was in 1986, which I had covered in this India Today cover story from Pakistan). She was assassinated despite so many warnings that her life was in danger. Nobody has been punished yet. It’s buried in Pakistan’s history of conspiracies and eternal mysteries like so many others. Her party’s government was kneecapped and her husband subsequently reduced to an inconsequential, titular president.

Nawaz Sharif came back with a comfortable majority. He too grew “delusional”, from his army’s point of view, in beginning to believe that he was a real prime minister. By 2018, this army, under a chief he had appointed, had conspired and contrived to get rid of him, jail and exile him. It ensured that his party didn’t get a majority in the election that followed. In the process, they also built, strengthened and employed Pakistan’s most regressive Sunni Islamist group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik.
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Imran Khan was then the army’s candidate, and does it matter if he fell short of a majority? The army and the ISI collected enough small parties and independents to give him a comfortable majority. Albeit at their sufferance. A majority was no issue for one seen as the boy of the boys.

Until, this ‘boy’ also began to believe that he was a real prime minister and was causing ‘discomfort’ at the army GHQ.

Worse, his delusions weren’t just domestic. He was now seeing himself as the new leader of the Islamic Ummah, a 21st-century Caliph of sorts in his own right. He was talking in shariat terms, bringing a Quranic curriculum, building a new agenda that was as Islamist as it was anti-West. Both of these alarmed the army.

In the same state of political ‘high’, Imran started to believe he now bossed the army. That’s how the first, and decisive, fights broke out over top-level appointments. The first was over the appointment of the new ISI chief. The army chief had his way with Nadeem Anjum and Imran lost out over his insistence on continuing with Lt Gen. Faiz Hameed. This fight was, however, like a crucial league match before the final — the appointment of the new chief in November.

Think about what is the one thread that’s common to this entire ugly story of intrigue, betrayal, and now it seems, assassination too? General Qamar Javed Bajwa has been the army chief through all of these years. Appointed by Nawaz Sharif who he later fired and exiled, given a three-year extension by Imran Khan who he first created and then got fired, and now challenged by him.

Over the past five decades, two great political families have fought for democracy in Pakistan in their own patchy ways, although mostly by keeping the army GHQ on their sides. Both, the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) are now tired and spent forces. One because of its shrinking footprint from Punjab, and the other because its only popular leader, Nawaz Sharif, is hesitant to leave the safety of exile in London and join the fight at home. Both are counting on the army to save their throne and skins.

This used to be business as usual. If the army was on your side, the world was yours in Pakistan. The reason these aren’t usual times is that today it is the army that’s staring at the greatest, scariest existential threat to its power and stature. This threat has come from a populist, riding democratic power. So what if it’s that often nutty and deeply flawed Imran Khan. Did we ever argue democracy is perfect?

The New Neutrality of Pakistan's Army

Basil Nabi Malik in The Dawn

I HAVE been closely following the extremely insightful commentary and discourse on the no-confidence motion and the legalities that surround it. I have read riveting articles on Article 63A of the Constitution of Pakistan, which offer ‘bendy’ and creative interpretations that could put a gymnast to shame. I have also witnessed a titillating discussion on the voting timeline for the no-confidence motion, a discussion that has seen so many permutations and combinations that any mathematician could die proud.

I have read about how Prime Minister Imran Khan’s days are numbered, how his political career has ended, how autocracy has been defeated and how the joint opposition has delivered a master stroke. One side is telling me that democracy is in danger, whilst the other is celebrating democracy’s triumph. One side condemns the opposition as being part of an international conspiracy, and the other targets the government, accusing it of working on a Jewish agenda.

Be that as it may, in this polarised debate on the no-confidence motion, Imran Khan’s political future and the opposition’s democratic credentials, it is safe to say that we are losing the plot so to speak, or in other terms, losing sight of the real questions that deserve attention. What questions, you may ask. Well, for starters, what has suddenly changed that has resulted in the current state of ‘no-confidence’? Is this parliament’s final act of expressing no confidence in Imran Khan’s leadership, or does this lack of confidence in him stem from somewhere else? Even otherwise, are these events cause for celebration?

Let us not forget that Imran Khan had been making blunders from the very beginning, the opposition has been trying to oust him virtually from his first day in office, and the credibility of the defectors was never really beyond reproach — in other words, their loyalties were always questionable. And yet, he was going nowhere. So why is he going now?

Many say it is because of the establishment’s ‘neutrality’. Neutrality implies a lack of alliance with any particular side or a lack of preference for any one over another. It is always good for institutions to be considered neutral and to act as such as well. But a painstaking and consistent attempt to ensure one’s neutrality, along with efforts to emphasise it at every stage, also indicates something else.

It alludes to the fact that the new-found position of neutrality is exactly that: new-found. It appears in negation to the erstwhile policy of non-neutrality or, at the very least, the tolerance of partiality. Obviously, if I proclaim to be neutral today, it would be reasonable for someone to think, rightly or wrongly, that I am shifting away from a partisan position to an indifferent one. After all, if I were neutral from the beginning, why would I have to announce it every now and then?

Secondly, neutrality today does not mean there will be neutrality tomorrow. It may simply mean that in the totality of circumstances, in the prevailing situation of the country, it is better to stay aloof and do one’s job as opposed to getting caught up in the quagmire of political intrigue. But that ‘could’ change. For that matter, at some point in time, it may be felt that that ‘needs’ to change. In essence, this may simply be a temporary phase and not a ‘forever’ decision.

And there is reason to suspect that things are not actually turning a corner, but rather, coming full circle. Nothing has really changed since the last intervention. Our economy is still in the dumps, our currency is still losing value, no large-scale reforms have taken place, our politicians are still considered corrupt and incompetent, justice is still a pipe dream, our masses are still deprived of basic education and sustenance, and the power structures are still skewed in favour of the unelected and against the elected.

The game of musical chairs continues, our prime ministers continue to not complete their terms, our judiciary appears divided, our debts continue to soar, our internal divisions continue to increase, and our disdain and lack of respect for the role of our past in changing our future is palpable to the point of being disheartening. The puppets cheer for the new champions of democracy today and shall support their replacements tomorrow. In fact, they’d even cheer for the puppets who will eventually replace them. Sadly, it’s more of the same. We just fail to see it, again and again and again.

We seem to relish deluding ourselves and continue to live in the theatre of the absurd, where we do the same things over and over again and expect different results. Albert Einstein called this insanity, but we in Pakistan call it a ‘revolution’, or in some circles, the ‘presidential system’. You may chuckle or grimace on reading this, depending on your worldview, but sadly, there is truth to it.

Be that as it may, we should all hope for a better tomorrow when we actually awaken from our slumber and own up to our absurdities. A slumber so deep that we can’t even see how we are killing this country and its people with our own petty version of the game of thrones, and absurdities so absurd that even national interest now appears to be a national joke.

Let’s hope that when such a time comes, when we finally wake up and pledge to improve, when the clouds part miraculously and the sun shines down without a care in the world, we are willing and ready to seek the treatment we need to get better, get sane, and not, for heaven’s sake, to get even.

General Electric’s accounting tactics bared in SEC settlement

 Industrial powerhouse underlines risk of short-term, market-orientated approach to management writes Sujeet Indap in The FT 

In 2015, Larry Fink, the BlackRock founder and chief executive, released a public letter pressing fellow CEOs to eschew making business decisions based on short-term considerations. 

“It is critical, however, to understand that corporate leaders’ duty of care and loyalty is not to every investor or trader who owns their company’s shares at any moment in time but to the company and its long-term owners,” he wrote. 

One company that BlackRock was a major shareholder at the time was General Electric with a stake of nearly 6 per cent. Around then, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of GE, appears to have been overseeing just the kind of instant market gratification management effort that Mr Fink was condemning. 

The industrial group “misled investors” and “violated antifraud, reporting [and] disclosure controls”, according to a recent US Securities and Exchange Commission order. In early December, GE agreed with the regulator to pay $200m to settle charges that it had misled investors about its financial condition in between 2015 and 2017.  

In statement, the company noted that no financial statements required correction and that it had neither admitted nor denied guilt as a part of the SEC settlement. 

Five years after Mr Fink’s letter, there has been a continued rise in “stakeholder capitalism” and investing for better environmental, social and corporate governance standards. But this coda to the GE saga of the 2010s is an ugly reminder of the world these new principles are attempting to replace. 

The SEC’s order alleged GE pulled forward future profits and cash flow and, separately, delayed reporting big losses in order to boost immediate results. Damningly, the SEC described how Wall Street pressure and undue attention to the company’s stock price appeared to drive the company’s actions. 

In 2015, GE announced that its once high-flying but controversial GE Capital unit would shrink by $200bn worth of assets. While highly profitable at times, the banklike entity was volatile and its heavy losses during the 2008 financial crisis had nearly sunk the entire company.  

Mr Immelt wanted to reposition GE as an industrial powerhouse with aviation, healthcare, energy and oil and gas units that were supposed to help the developing world become urbanised. In late 2015, the group would close its $15bn acquisition of France’s Alstom to boost its power plant business. 

The power division, according to the SEC, would become the home of accounting mischief. Maintenance contracts with customers that ran several years required estimates of costs and the reduction of such inputs allowed GE to boost its book profits. Separate alleged manoeuvres included selling receivables to GE Capital, allowing for commensurate gains in cash flow. 

The company had announced in 2015 that it would seek to hit $2 per share of earnings in 2018. It appears that precise and ambitious figure effectively became the central organising principle of the company. 

“GE was aware of investor and analyst concerns that its cash collections were not keeping pace with revenue and that its unbilled revenue was growing in its industrial business,” wrote the SEC. 

It said executives at GE Power and GE Power Services cited analyst reports when they discussed internally the need to show improved cash performance. In one 2016 presentation to GE senior management, the SEC said, one executive posited that GE’s stock price could reach $40 if operating cash flow performance improved. It averaged about $30 during that year.

At the same time, the pieces of GE Capital the parent company had retained would prove to be another time bomb. GE kept an interest in long-term healthcare insurance policies that had been sold decades earlier. Those policies proved to be more expensive than had been anticipated, a reality that became clear in 2015. 

In 2016, as it became evident that higher losses were going to need to be realised, one executive called the situation in the insurance business a “train wreck”. 

It seems GE only came clean with investors about its accounting practices in the power division in 2017 while also eventually taking a $22bn impairment to goodwill related to the Alstom buyout. 

And it finally took a $9.5bn charge related to insurance liabilities in 2018 and committed to plug another $15bn of capital into shoring up the GE financial services unit. 

A spokesperson for Mr Immelt said GE sought to comply with all standards for financial accounting. “To achieve this goal, it put in place strong processes with multiple checks and balances,” the spokesperson added. 

BlackRock continues to hold a stake of about 6 per cent in GE shares, which currently hover around $10. A recovery to the peak of nearly $33 seen in 2016 will undoubtedly require a very long-term orientation.

An 'extraordinary' situation in Pakistan

 

On Pakistan's historical hero - Muhammad bin Qasim

It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn’s was one of them

Seumas Milne in The Guardian


If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.

The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.

Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations

 But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.

But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.

The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.

At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.

But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.

It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.

But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.

The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.

That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.

That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.

Operation “Get Nawaz Sharif”

Najam Sethi  TFT Issue: 05 Sep 2014

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The “conspiracy” to get rid of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been exposed. Although the circumstantial evidence was compelling, no one, not even the government and parliament, had hard-core facts to prove who was doing what and why. That’s why the government’s political and administrative response to the unfolding crisis was confused, weak and vacillating. Then the Heavens parted and Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf President Javed Hashmi descended like an angel to “save” the government by making a clean breast of things. The story can now be stitched up safely.

The old guard in the military left behind by General Ashfaq Kayani – a master spy who occupied both high offices in ISI and GHQ by turns and fashioned the military’s strategic policies for over a decade – was unhappy with the proposed foreign policy initiatives of Nawaz Sharif towards India, Afghanistan, USA, and his stance on non-state actor “assets” and the war against the Pakistani Taliban. Mr Sharif’s choice of General Raheel Sharif as COAS, number three in the lineup and totally apolitical to boot, also queried their pitch. The dye was cast when Mr Sharif hauled up ex-army chief General Pervez Musharraf for treason because this move threatened to drag in General Kayani and many other senior military officers who had backed the coup maker. It was also feared that, come October 2014, when several key generals from the “Kayani guard” would face retirement, Mr Sharif would appoint another relatively apolitical general to the powerful DG-ISI post, thereby seizing the “national security” initiative from the military. It may be recalled that the fear was not unjustified: on two previous occasions as prime minister, Mr Sharif had taken exactly such steps when he sacked Lt Gen Asad Durrani in 1991 and appointed Lt Gen Javed Nasir as DG-ISI and when he appointed Lt Gen Ziauddin Butt as DG-ISI in his second stint as prime minister and later tried to make him COAS and triggered a coup by General Musharraf.

According to the Kayani doctrine, a serious “threat” of a coup is a better instrument of military policy than a coup itself because coups can be messy business in this day and age with a weak economy, an independent judiciary, ubiquitous media, obstreperous civil society institutions and bullying international state and non-state actors. Far better, they say, to pull strings via the military’s intelligence agencies from behind the political scenes and achieve the required objectives by pitting one actor against another and bringing things to such a pass that a coup seems like a real possibility. This is exactly how Gen Kayani brought the Zardari regime to heel on foreign policy and the war against terrorism on matters such as relations with India, USA and Afghanistan, Kerry-Lugar Bill, Memogate, etc. And this is exactly how his remnants wanted to deal with Nawaz Sharif when he threatened to disrupt or disown their doctrines.

Accordingly, a plan was hatched to oust Nawaz Sharif, with the threat of a coup, and before October when some of the key conspirators were due to retire. On the one hand, Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri, two desperadoes dying to become prime minister by hook or by crook, were roped in with the assistance of evergreen military “assets” like Sheikh Rashid, the Chaudhries of Gujrat and notorious elements in the media. On the other hand, potential oppositionists in the media like the Geo-Jang group were attacked and put down, while Supreme Court judges were scared off from interventionism by an attack from Imran Khan on ex-CJPs Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and Tassaduq Hussain Jilani and ex-CEC Fakhruddin G Ibrahim. The pretext of a “rigged and polluted” election was perfect because in one fell swoop all potential oppositionists were routed at the hands of the country’s leading “populist” forces in the shape of Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri. Unfortunately, both Geo and PMLN played into the hands of the conspirators by outraging the nation, the first by directly targeting the DG of an “esteemed national security institution” like the ISI and the second by precipitating a bloody crisis in Model Town, Lahore.

Fortunately, three things went wrong for the conspirators. First, the million-strong crowds didn’t materialize. Second, the scared government didn’t resort to further violent measures to stop the marchers, thereby denying a pretext for Mr Sharif’s head as in the case of Shahbaz Sharif. Third, just when things seemed to be slipping out of the government’s hand, Javed Hashmi came along to spill the beans, expose the mala fides of the conspirators and galvanise parliament and civil society to unite behind the prime minister.

Mr Sharif has made errors of judgment and policy that have weakened him considerably. Imran Khan has been exposed as a “match-fixer”. The conspiratorial rogues have been identified. Only General Raheel Sharif has come out looking reasonably good. Along with PM Sharif, he needs to help restore Geo and the credibility of all those unfairly targeted by the conspirators and build a trust-worthy civil-military relationship.

Green Books, red herring and the LoC war

 

PRAVEEN SWAMI

  

Photo: PTIFOCUS: India must become aware that a more muscular response to Pakistani aggression on the LoC will come with a price that probably isn’t worth paying. The picture is of commanders of the Indian and Pakistani Armies at a flag meeting in Poonch recently.

 

Pakistan’s military literature makes clear that its generals are seeking to provoke a crisis. India is pushing itself into their trap

Late one night in the summer of 2009, four improvised 107-millimetre rockets arced over the Pul Kanjari border outpost in Punjab, and exploded in the fields outside the village of Attari. For the first time since the war of 1971, there was an attack across the India-Pakistan border. In September that year, four more rockets were fired; then, in January 2010, there was a third assault.

Now, as Indian and Pakistani troops trade fire along the Line of Control (LoC), it is more important than ever to understand the significance of those events. The rocket attacks, believed to have been carried out by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, represented a glimpse into a grim future that India’s policy of strategic restraint has been designed to avert — a war of attrition waged by jihadists that would turn India’s western frontiers into a kind of nuclear-fuelled Lebanon.

Ever since January 2008, two months after General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani took over as chief of the Pakistan Army, clashes along the LoC have escalated. India reported 28 ceasefire violations in 2009, 44 in 2010, 60 in 2011, and 117 last year. The traditional explanation — that these clashes are linked to terrorist infiltration across the LoC — borne out by the data: during this period, Jammu and Kashmir has become significantly less violent, not more.

New doctrine

Pakistan’s military literature provides some insight into what is going on. The country’s generals, it shows, hope heightened tensions with India will help rebuild their legitimacy, extricate themselves from a domestic insurgency they are losing, and push jihadist groups now ranged against the Pakistani state to turn their energies eastwards. India, driven by a barrage of ill-conceived war polemic, is pushing itself into this trap.

Earlier this month, reports emerged that Pakistan had amended its doctrinal manual, called the Green Book, to include a chapter identifying internal insurgent forces as the country’s principal national security threat. No one, though, has quoted as much as a single line from the Green Book in question — one of several reasons to suspect it might just be a red herring. Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, in a January 4 address at the National Defence University, called on the armed forces to “redesign and redefine our military doctrine” to fight terrorism. It seems reasonable to infer that, on that date, he at least was unaware of a new doctrine.

C. Christine Fair, a Georgetown University scholar who is the preeminent authority on the Pakistan Army’s internal doctrinal literature — and the first to bring the Green Book series to light — is in little doubt that is the case. “This talk of a new doctrine is rubbish,” says Dr. Fair, “I think a lot of people who really ought know better have let themselves be talked into buying snake-oil.”

The Green Book isn’t, in fact, a doctrinal testament — or even, in fact, one book. For the last two decades, as first reported in The Hindu in 2011, the Pakistan Army’s general headquarters has published collections of essays by senior officers, with the name assigned to the series. The 2010 Green Book, on information warfare, only became available last year; the next in the biennial series only became available in 2011.

Suspicions of India

From the very first essay in the current Green Book, it becomes clear the Pakistani officer corps’ maniacal suspiciousness of India hasn’t stilled. Brigadier Umar Farooq Durrani’s “Treatise on Indian-backed Psychological Warfare Against Pakistan,” asserts that the Research and Analysis Wing “funds many Indian newspapers and even television channels, such as Zee Television, which is considered to be its media headquarters to wage psychological war.” The “creation of [the] South Asian Free Media Association a few years back,” Brigadier Farooq claims, “was a step in the same direction.” Even the eminent scholar Ayesha Siddiqa’s work, he insists, is “a classical example of psychological war against Pakistan.”

“The most subtle form” of this psychological war, the Brigadier states, “is found in movies where Muslim and Hindu friendship is screened within [sic.] the backdrop of melodrama. Indian soaps and movies are readily welcomed in most households in Pakistan. The effects desired to be achieved through this is to undermine the Two National Theory [as] being a person obsession of [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah.”

Had the Green Books not been official publications, none of this ought to have been a cause of worry. There is, after all, no shortage of delusional paranoiacs on the eastern side of the India-Pakistan border either, in and outside the armed forces.

From the Pakistan Army chief himself, though, we know ideas like those of Brigadier Durrani are considered worthy of serious consideration. In his foreword to the 2010 edition, General Kayani asserts that the essays provide “an effective forum for the leadership to reflect on, identity and define the challenges faced by the Pakistan army, and share possible ways of overcoming them.”

The eastern enemy

Language of the kind that runs through the 2010 Green Book pervades earlier editions too. In 2002, as Pakistan faced up to the looming war between its armed forces and their one-time jihadist allies, theGreen Book focussed on low-intensity warfare. Brigadier Shahid Hashmat, typically, argued that the “threat of low-intensity conflicts should be considered as the most serious matter at [the] national level.” Thus, he went on, “all national agencies and resources must be directed concurrently for launching an effective and robust response against this threat.”

The blame for the crisis imposed on Pakistan by religious sectarian groups and jihadists, though, is firmly placed on India. Lieutenant-Colonel Inayatullah Nadeem Butt, using ideas near-identical to those in the current Green Book, asserted that “India has been aggressively involved in subverting the minds of youth through planned propaganda and luring them towards subversive activities.”

Even as they considered how to fight religious sectarian groups and revolutionary jihadists, the officers who contributed to the 2002 Green Book thus focussed on imposing punitive costs on India. Brigadier Muhammad Zia, for example, noted that “India is highly volatile on its internal front due to numerous vulnerabilities which, if agitated, accordingly could yield results out of proportion to the efforts put in.” In similar vein, Major Ijaz Ahmad advocated “that [the] Inter-Services Intelligence should launch low profile operations in Indian-held Kashmir and should not allow the freedom movement to die down.” “Linguistic, social, religious and communal diversities in India,” the officer continued, “should be exploited carefully and imaginatively.”

Put another way, even as they considered tactics to defeat insurgents in Pakistan, the officer corps also discussed sponsoring insurgencies in India, to tie down their arch-adversary. General Pervez Musharraf described the 2002 Green Book, as a “valuable document for posterity”; he was right.

Tough challenge

Like all forms of madness, the texts in the Green Book aren’t without method: crisis with India is, after all, a precondition for ensuring the Pakistan Army’s preeminent position in the country’s power structure. 26/11, it is surprisingly little remarked upon, almost did pay off for Pakistan’s Army. Less than a week after the attack, a senior Army commander was reported as calling the jihadist chief Baitullah Mehsud a “patriot.” The officer said the army’s war with the Taliban leaders like Mehsud was merely the result of minor “misunderstandings.”

There is plenty of evidence that jihadists in Pakistan are growing more powerful — and that organisations like the Tehreek-e-Taliban are seriously considering expanding their operations eastwards. “The practical struggle for a shari’a system that we are carrying out in Pakistan,” its deputy chief Maulana Wali-ur-Rahman said in a recently-released video, “the same way we will continue it in Kashmir, and the same way we will implement the shari’a system in India.”

It is self-evident that preventing a rapprochement between jihadists and the generals is in India’s best interest — one reason why Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh proved willing to pay the political price for a policy of strategic restraint. That the will to continue doing so is fraying in the build-up to the General Election is evident. India has, so far, punished Pakistani aggression with a variety of means, conventional and covert — but the seduction of grandiose gestures is growing. Indians must become aware, though, that a more muscular response to Pakistani aggression on the LoC, like all instant gratification, will come with a price that probably isn’t worth paying.

praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: India-Pakistan border tension, cross-LoC firing, Indian soldier beheading, Pakistan ceasefire violation, Indian Army, Green Book, Pakistan Army