Loss of 10 Generals in Crash Does Little to Change Power Structure : Pakistan’s Military Holds Nation Together in Crisis

The coffins started arriving with clockwork precision Thursday afternoon, and there were few tears on the tarmac.

With the efficiency and professionalism of a battle plan, the Pakistani armed forces brought home their dead.

But the human remains that arrived in a series of Pakistani air force C-130 transport planes were hardly mere war casualties. The pine coffins contained the bodies of the nation’s most powerful military leaders--among them Pakistan’s longest-serving military ruler, President Zia ul-Haq.

Doesn’t Miss a Beat

The midair explosion that killed Zia and 10 of his top generals Wednesday appeared on the surface to have decimated the senior command of the Pakistani armed forces. And yet, as Thursday’s return of the bodies illustrated, the military organization that has dominated Pakistan’s government almost since the nation’s inception in 1947 has not missed a beat since its leader’s death.

The army’s control of the operation was symbolic of something far more critical in assessing the aftermath of Wednesday’s air tragedy, Pakistani analysts and foreign diplomats here said.

It showed that, despite the smooth constitutional succession of power that made Pakistan’s Senate chairman, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the nation’s first civilian president in 11 years, it is the powerful Pakistani military that has held the nation together during the past two days of uncertainty.

“It is true that the new president does command very wide respect by both the military and the civilian leadership, and it is also true that Ghulam Ishaq Khan is certainly no pushover. But make no mistake, it is the army that is in control in Pakistan at the moment,” said Maleeha Lodhi, the editor of Islamabad’s prestigious and independently owned English-language daily, The Muslim.

“Zia has gone, but his system is still there. And his system has made the military the one truly unified and dependable institution in this country.”

Even America’s highly respected ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold L. Raphel, who was killed along with Zia and his top military commanders, said in an interview with The Times a few months before his death, “The one truism in Pakistani politics is that the military is the ultimate authority.”

It certainly was so in the critical hours after Wednesday’s explosion.

Ten generals had been killed but, within minutes of official confirmation that none of the 30 officers and men on board Zia’s plane had survived, the handful of generals who remained behind in Islamabad wasted no time in laying the groundwork that has kept the nation together.

At the center of that core group of general officers was Zia’s army vice chief of staff, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, a combat veteran who is widely respected among both senior officers and the army’s rank and file.

Cabinet Session Called

Beg and the chiefs of Pakistan’s air force and navy immediately convened Zia’s civilian Cabinet in an emergency session in the capital. After several hours, it was decided to allow the constitution to take its course and, soon after midnight, the paternal figure of President Ishaq Khan appeared on national television to vow in soft and reassuring tones that a civilian government was indeed in place and that it was committed to “the shining path of democracy.”

Ishaq Khan stressed that key legislative elections will be held as scheduled in November, and he took pains to cast the new government in a distinctly civilian hue.

But, in Pakistan, a nation in which power has changed hands more often in military coups than in elections, most Pakistanis remained skeptical.

For one thing, although the new president stressed democracy in his address, he also said Gen. Beg and the two other service chiefs would be members of a 10-man emergency ruling council, which he said would administer the affairs of the nation. He also said the council decided, as a precautionary measure, to declare a state of emergency in the country, and he announced the promotion of Beg to army chief of staff, the most powerful military position in Pakistan.

Seized Power in Coup

As army chief of staff, Zia himself seized power in a 1977 military coup that overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and, throughout Zia’s rule, he was always careful to put his military first.

Last May 28, when Zia suddenly dismissed his Cabinet and the National Assembly, diplomats and veteran Pakistan analysts said Zia had acted principally to prevent civilian Prime Minister Mohammed Khan Junejo from making public a report blaming three top generals for an ammunition dump explosion in Rawalpindi last April. More than 100 people were killed in the explosion.

Whenever Zia made a key decision, several senior Pakistani bureaucrats have said, it was an accepted fact that he would first consider its impact on the military.

And, in keeping with his long career as a shrewd military officer, Zia was most careful in selecting his political and military heirs.

Military analysts here said that Zia deliberately chose Beg as his deputy army chief of staff because Beg was a man who could be entrusted with the future of the armed forces.

Similarly, the analysts said, Zia personally selected Ishaq Khan, who was his closest civilian adviser, for the post of Senate chairman, the heir to the presidency, because he knew that Ishaq Khan respected the military.

“What you have in the country at the moment is a very delicate, yet deliberate, balance at the helm,” said one Western analyst here. “You have a civilian president who understands his military backers, and military leaders who respect the civilian president.”

Although editor Lodhi bluntly noted that Gen. Beg “is the man who is really running the country now,” she, too, added that the combination of the two leaders could have a positive and far-reaching impact.

“Having worked with the military for so long, he (Ishaq Khan) knows how the military mind works,” she said, adding that most independent political observers in Pakistan have viewed Ishaq Khan as a loyal and esteemed technocrat ever since the 1977 coup. “Out of all the civilians in the government, he is probably the one who knows the military mind the best.”

Lodhi added that the chemistry between Beg and Ishaq Khan lessens the short-term possibility of another round of martial law or a military coup. “There will be a tendency to try to huddle together to try and solve everything, at least in the near future,” she said.

There were signs on the tarmac of Islamabad airport Thursday that the tragedy may have sown the seeds for change in the longstanding mistrust between Pakistan’s civilian and military authorities.

The only sign of emotion came Thursday night, hours after the generals’ coffins had arrived, and just moments before the C-130 bearing Zia’s flag-draped casket had landed.

With the backdrop of a military honor guard standing at attention and stone-faced Pakistani soldiers forming a tight security cordon around the arrival site, generals were seen hugging Cabinet ministers and colonels kissed the cheeks of bureaucrats in the customary Pakistani tradition of sharing deep and genuine emotion.