Former chief of army staff Gen Mirza Aslam Beg has said he was one of a group of army officers trained by the CIA in the 1950s as a “stay-behind organisation” that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet Union overran Pakistan. Gen Beg was interviewed by Elizabeth Rubin for a report headlined ‘In the land of the Taliban’ in the New Work Times’ Sunday magazine.
Rubin writes that “one thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South America’s dictatorship-era military elite. They control most of the country’s economy and real estate, and like President Musharraf, himself a former general, they do not want to relinquish power.”
She notes that although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it has been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army’s inception in 1947. She quotes Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times, who told her that military officers often have “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans, and they still bear a grudge against the United States for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad and, more recently, for sanctioning Pakistan over its nuclear programme. The standard army phrase about the Americans was, he said, “They used us like a condom.” |