Former finance minister Miftah Ismail has said the time was right to reimagine Pakistan and to privatise the Pakistan army.
“It’s not as if we don’t spend money on the military,” he said, while speaking at an event. “No, we spent Rs 1.53 trillion last year alone on the defence budget. But all this defence spending amounts to nothing much.”
“The ‘48 war was barely fought by the army and it was the tribes doing most of it. We lost ‘65 despite what we teach kids in textbooks, we clearly lost ‘71 and that we can’t work our way around, even in textbooks. Then we lost Kargil,” he said.
“But the strategy of strategic depth or whatever it is, has caused us more losses than those wars: we’ve lost more than 80,000 lives in the war on terror, not to mention that it was all for nothing, since we have a hostile government in Afghanistan now. Previous Afghan governments wouldn’t have been hostile had we cooperated with them, but how can we cooperate with the current government more?”
“And add to that the military’s insistence on running subsidised business organisations which they can’t make profitable even despite all that subsidy?”
“I say, let’s keep the airforce because they at least seem to know what they’re doing,” he said.
“Let’s hire mercenaries for protecting the country,” he said. “In fact, we could even start looking at the tribes. Let’s not throw good money after bad and cut our losses.”
