THEY ARE FORCED TO KEEP THEIR VIEWS TO THEMSELVES AND AWAY FROM OLDER OFFICERS PROTECTING THE STATUS QUO
WASHINGTON: A younger generation of Pakistan Army officers tends to consider home-grown terrorists, an enemy they have personally fought, a more significant threat than India, according to a new study by an elite Pakistani training school for senior officers who go on to man the upper echelons of the force.
They are forced to keep their views to themselves though, to private dinner parties and smaller conversations, and away from older officers, who seek to enforce the traditional anti-India narrative to safeguard and perpetuate their own legacy, the study says.
The Quetta Experience, written by retired US Army colonel David O Smith, an alumnus of the Command and Staff College in Quetta, and published by the Washington-based Wilson Center, offers an inside look at Pakistan’s middle-level and senior officers, their thoughts, attitudes and angst as expressed in unguarded moments to or around their American classmates.
Smith interviewed US Army officers who attended the Quetta institution, which counts Indian Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw among its alumni, under a long-term US programme from 1977 to 2014, on what they saw there and heard from Pakistani classmates, the directing staff and faculty.
The study was completed in 2014 but a decision was taken then not to distribute it, fearing adverse impact on US Army officers serving at the Quetta facility. The US cancelled the programme in 2016 and Smith felt confident enough to publish it after he was told in late 2017 that it would not be resumed.
In the section on India, Smith charts changing attitudes of Pakistani officers based on accounts of their American classmates going back to 1977.
One US student heard a Pakistani officer describe India to his child as “evil”, another officer recalled widely held contempt for the Hindu religion. But changes were under way. And so it stayed for most of the 1980s.
According to the report, a US student from the 20092010 batch noted a “generational divide” between old and long-time Pakistani officers clinging to their longheld anti-India bias and the young crop of officers who were the “complete opposite”.