1 WAGING WAR, BUILDING A NATION
The military’s political ascendance became a distinguishing feature of civilian politics in Pakistan within the fi rst decade after independence. Thus any interpretation of the military’s repeated and relentless interventions must reckon with that foundational juncture, “during which the state [institutional] structure was cast into an enduring, even rigid, mold.”1 Pakistan was not originally destined for military intervention in politics. At independence, the Pakistani military was little more than a rump of the British Indian Army (BIA). Consumed by the process of organizational rebuilding in the wake of the BIA’s partition into the two armies of India and Pakistan, the relatively young and inexperienced members of the officer corps were hardly in a position to mount a collective challenge to the nationalist leadership. In fact, almost the entire high command was British, and there was only one Pakistani army officer of the rank of two-star major general.2 Because of the political and constitutional nature of the nationalist struggle for independence, the Pakistani military—unlike the armies of Turkey and, later, Algeria and Indonesia—had not participated in a war of liberation. In Morris Janowitz’s terms, it was an 31
