Gen Asim Munir is the new Army Chief. He is well spoken of, and one hopes he will also be spoken well of when he retires. I say this because, with the mantle that has fallen on him, he has been handed a chalice more poisoned than any of his predecessors was. The difficulties he faces are great to say the least. And some of these difficulties come so laden with shame that I shrink from tabulating them. Because the very act of enumerating them again, condemns one to relive each one of them.
But the handicap which crowns all his others is that he has been muscled into place by the suspect motives of an arch criminal absconding from the reach of the law, who is loathed by a better part of the army the General is due to command.
Let him have absolutely no doubt on this. And should anyone be trying to create such a doubt, let him be assured that the person concerned wants to sink him. But let him also know that he can shrug this handicap off by a snap of his fingers. All he needs to do is to repose faith in the fact that he has been elevated not by human manipulation, but by divine decree. And thus, he owes nothing to anybody.
And then he must play the part that this belief requires of him. His first duty is to do everything possible to stabilize his badly rocking country. If Pakistan is not there, nothing else matters; not its generals, not its judges, not its “elites”, not its army, not its constitution.
Everything becomes irrelevant when the state ceases to exist. And never have things been so near the boil as to threaten the very existence of the state as they are today. As people cannot live without nourishment, neither can states.
To get there he will need every bit of his credibility to remain unimpaired. And the very moment his command is given the feeling that he has begun returning favors in return for the favour done to him, that very moment he will have undermined himself beyond the possibility of redemption. He must be fully conscious of the extreme sensitivity of those over whom he has been placed. These people have shared all the unearned abuse heaped on the generals due to their shenanigans.
And there are just two areas of his command he needs to pay close attention to.
The first is to identify and throw out the senior most among his colleagues guilty of brazen wealth extraction.
And the second is to ensure that prime among national security imperatives should be to block raids on the national treasury. With a treasury robbed of its assets no army can hope to take the field and sustain battle.
He must begin by setting his sleuths to determine how, from 1947 to 2008 [fifty years] when our national debt was Rs six trillion, did it rise to Rs thirty trillion in just ten years from 2008 to 2018. Only if it is first determined how small leaks widened into open floodgates can a repetition of this assault on our treasury, and thus our national security, be avoided in the future. And if this is not done, it is not just that his army will be incapable of fighting a war, but the Pakistan for which such wars may have to be fought, will itself cease to exist.
So, if Gen Asim Munir can just desist from dishing out favours for a favour received; begin cleaning the dross in the army, beginning from the top; and has the national security imperatives redefined and procedures put into place for their implementation, he will be remembered as the Chief who achieved more for his country than all the others combined. But let him be warned. If he takes his eye off the ball, he will end up like all the rest [with two honorable exceptions] –and that will be a very sorry place to be.