The myth of the soldier
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Daily Times, Pakistan
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
insight: Ejaz Haider
If a state is faced with an existential threat, and knowing as we do that we cannot find an army of our choice but have to make do with the one we have, would it serve us better to help recreate the myth or highlight the ugly truths?
Nasir Abbas Mirza has written an incisive article in these pages and raised many points. (“Taking care of myths”, Daily Times, June 1) Without challenging his arguments, because I agree with him for the most part, let me consider his broad thrust since he mentioned an article written by me.
Mirza opened his article thus: “In military matters, myths and perceptions are more important than reality. This may be in conflict with our ideals of truth-seeking and truth-telling, but this order must not be disturbed at any cost. Otherwise the results can be, and have been, regretful.”
Without going into the issue of “truth-seeking and truth-telling” because that is tangential to this discussion and offers its own complexities, let me say that myth-making is not just a phenomenon that preserves religion and the profession of soldiering. It is the essence of collective life. Without myths, states and societies can neither be built nor sustained.
Mirza knows this. Hence his contention that “this order [myths and perceptions] must not be disturbed at any cost. Otherwise the results can be, and have been, regretful”. He then goes on to find fault with the military as an institution that has failed to nurture these myths, allowing instead “ugly truth” and “reality” to creep in.
There is a litany of charges beyond this point and I agree with all. For instance, he is dead right in arguing that “The military [in Pakistan] has never encouraged institution building” which is why “Today, the island of excellence needs support of other institutions that are not there”.
I would go a step further and say that the military itself, as an institution, has shown remarkable deterioration and I state this in support of Mirza’s contention that “It is foolhardy to be smug about the fact that the military can remain an island of excellence in a sea of morass”.
Yet, here’s the problem. If a state is faced with an existential threat, and knowing as we do that we cannot find an army of our choice but have to make do with the one we have, would it serve us better to help recreate the myth or highlight the ugly truths that have now become a staple of our drawing room chatter?
When I wrote the article in support of what Ayeda Naqvi had written (“Where is our yellow ribbon?”, Daily Times, May 5), I had to choose between using the institutional framework to put down the army and focussing on the man who goes down fighting to save others. I chose the latter because while it makes eminent academic sense to do the army — or any other institution — to death, it does not serve much purpose as part of addressing a threat.
In my article, I did not dismiss the institutional failures of the military. In fact, I made clear that the military (I would rather say the army) has much to answer for. It would require a book to deal with the issue and because this is exactly the issue I was researching in 2002-3 as a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, I can safely say that there is much embarrassment in its details for the army.
Therefore, within the framework he has used, Mirza is spot on. Why should the people stand up for the army when the institution has not allowed itself to remain a “misfit in our world”, a brilliant observation incidentally.
If the institution is to be challenged, as it should be, I will be the first to hold accountable the army for the deaths of and injuries to officers and men cleaning up Swat for us because the policies that have created the current monster gestated in the womb of the GHQ.
From that perspective, need I say that the soldier is getting the worst of his own institution — and he is paying for it with his blood? My mention of The Charge of the Light Brigade had a reason. As I wrote, “That charge is a good reference to make the point. It should not have been made. Whoever planned it screwed it up. That must be debated and criticised. But equally, the men who went in and carried it out must be honoured.” Let me add, more so, because they knew “Someone had blunder’d”.
Fighting also involves the myth of the just cause. Who is to decide what cause is just? But is that the question to which any man can provide an honest answer when facing the barrel of a gun? Even so, Mirza’s arguments, in the long term, we can only dismiss at our own peril. And they go beyond the institution of the army to the nature of the state itself.
Frantz Fanon talked about the state as “merely the corporeal incarnation of the national spirit” in what Pheng Cheah describes as Fanon’s “biogenetic schema for understanding the relationship of the nation-people to the state”: hence the reference to a “mechanism awaiting animation”.
There is of course much literature on the post-colonial state. From the lines I have quoted above, it should be clear that most of it is so dense and abstruse that one begins to understand the complexity of the issue at hand by the very fact that it cannot be rendered into any known language.
But leaving that aside, on the simpler side, Benedict Anderson did us all much good by arguing that a nation is an imagined community “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.
This is only sustainable through myths and the process of myth-making and selective rendering of history is nothing if not that. Intellectuals don’t like it, as they shouldn’t. But the paradox is that if they were asked to construct something in place of nations and nation-states, they couldn’t come up with anything. Indeed, for the most part, many have ended up creating, or helped create, the worst states.
Small wonder that the post-colonial peoples get down to the task of building nation-states and remain stuck instead with “the anticlimactic betrayal of the promise of freedom in decolonisation, in which, as a result of its consummated marriage to the postcolonial state, the nation-people becomes subordinated to particularistic state imperatives”.
In English this means the dream gone sour; instead of the people forming a state organic in nature and representing them and their interests, they now have a monster that forces them into obeying it for reasons that increasingly begin to seem external to the interests of the very people who are supposed to be represented by the state.
That is where the problem lies. It is not so much the issue of the Pakistan Army having a country but the identity of the state itself and what and whose interests it represents. Of course one can pull in theorists of state and make the issue even more complex by trying to define the state itself and figuring out where it is situated in relation to society. One can even invoke Foucault and go into an eternal cycle of despair. But the fact is that it is to avoid these very doubts that myths are created. They are meant to keep things simple and infuse some certainty, arguably artificial, into individual and collective life.
Heck! Even families have myths. In this fight, we need the myth of the soldier.
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk
Source
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
insight: Ejaz Haider
If a state is faced with an existential threat, and knowing as we do that we cannot find an army of our choice but have to make do with the one we have, would it serve us better to help recreate the myth or highlight the ugly truths?
Nasir Abbas Mirza has written an incisive article in these pages and raised many points. (“Taking care of myths”, Daily Times, June 1) Without challenging his arguments, because I agree with him for the most part, let me consider his broad thrust since he mentioned an article written by me.
Mirza opened his article thus: “In military matters, myths and perceptions are more important than reality. This may be in conflict with our ideals of truth-seeking and truth-telling, but this order must not be disturbed at any cost. Otherwise the results can be, and have been, regretful.”
Without going into the issue of “truth-seeking and truth-telling” because that is tangential to this discussion and offers its own complexities, let me say that myth-making is not just a phenomenon that preserves religion and the profession of soldiering. It is the essence of collective life. Without myths, states and societies can neither be built nor sustained.
Mirza knows this. Hence his contention that “this order [myths and perceptions] must not be disturbed at any cost. Otherwise the results can be, and have been, regretful”. He then goes on to find fault with the military as an institution that has failed to nurture these myths, allowing instead “ugly truth” and “reality” to creep in.
There is a litany of charges beyond this point and I agree with all. For instance, he is dead right in arguing that “The military [in Pakistan] has never encouraged institution building” which is why “Today, the island of excellence needs support of other institutions that are not there”.
I would go a step further and say that the military itself, as an institution, has shown remarkable deterioration and I state this in support of Mirza’s contention that “It is foolhardy to be smug about the fact that the military can remain an island of excellence in a sea of morass”.
Yet, here’s the problem. If a state is faced with an existential threat, and knowing as we do that we cannot find an army of our choice but have to make do with the one we have, would it serve us better to help recreate the myth or highlight the ugly truths that have now become a staple of our drawing room chatter?
When I wrote the article in support of what Ayeda Naqvi had written (“Where is our yellow ribbon?”, Daily Times, May 5), I had to choose between using the institutional framework to put down the army and focussing on the man who goes down fighting to save others. I chose the latter because while it makes eminent academic sense to do the army — or any other institution — to death, it does not serve much purpose as part of addressing a threat.
In my article, I did not dismiss the institutional failures of the military. In fact, I made clear that the military (I would rather say the army) has much to answer for. It would require a book to deal with the issue and because this is exactly the issue I was researching in 2002-3 as a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, I can safely say that there is much embarrassment in its details for the army.
Therefore, within the framework he has used, Mirza is spot on. Why should the people stand up for the army when the institution has not allowed itself to remain a “misfit in our world”, a brilliant observation incidentally.
If the institution is to be challenged, as it should be, I will be the first to hold accountable the army for the deaths of and injuries to officers and men cleaning up Swat for us because the policies that have created the current monster gestated in the womb of the GHQ.
From that perspective, need I say that the soldier is getting the worst of his own institution — and he is paying for it with his blood? My mention of The Charge of the Light Brigade had a reason. As I wrote, “That charge is a good reference to make the point. It should not have been made. Whoever planned it screwed it up. That must be debated and criticised. But equally, the men who went in and carried it out must be honoured.” Let me add, more so, because they knew “Someone had blunder’d”.
Fighting also involves the myth of the just cause. Who is to decide what cause is just? But is that the question to which any man can provide an honest answer when facing the barrel of a gun? Even so, Mirza’s arguments, in the long term, we can only dismiss at our own peril. And they go beyond the institution of the army to the nature of the state itself.
Frantz Fanon talked about the state as “merely the corporeal incarnation of the national spirit” in what Pheng Cheah describes as Fanon’s “biogenetic schema for understanding the relationship of the nation-people to the state”: hence the reference to a “mechanism awaiting animation”.
There is of course much literature on the post-colonial state. From the lines I have quoted above, it should be clear that most of it is so dense and abstruse that one begins to understand the complexity of the issue at hand by the very fact that it cannot be rendered into any known language.
But leaving that aside, on the simpler side, Benedict Anderson did us all much good by arguing that a nation is an imagined community “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.
This is only sustainable through myths and the process of myth-making and selective rendering of history is nothing if not that. Intellectuals don’t like it, as they shouldn’t. But the paradox is that if they were asked to construct something in place of nations and nation-states, they couldn’t come up with anything. Indeed, for the most part, many have ended up creating, or helped create, the worst states.
Small wonder that the post-colonial peoples get down to the task of building nation-states and remain stuck instead with “the anticlimactic betrayal of the promise of freedom in decolonisation, in which, as a result of its consummated marriage to the postcolonial state, the nation-people becomes subordinated to particularistic state imperatives”.
In English this means the dream gone sour; instead of the people forming a state organic in nature and representing them and their interests, they now have a monster that forces them into obeying it for reasons that increasingly begin to seem external to the interests of the very people who are supposed to be represented by the state.
That is where the problem lies. It is not so much the issue of the Pakistan Army having a country but the identity of the state itself and what and whose interests it represents. Of course one can pull in theorists of state and make the issue even more complex by trying to define the state itself and figuring out where it is situated in relation to society. One can even invoke Foucault and go into an eternal cycle of despair. But the fact is that it is to avoid these very doubts that myths are created. They are meant to keep things simple and infuse some certainty, arguably artificial, into individual and collective life.
Heck! Even families have myths. In this fight, we need the myth of the soldier.
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk
Source
Labels: Extremism, Militancy, Military Operation, Soldier, Swat Operation, Taliban, Terrorism
posted @ 10:57 AM,
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