shiv wrote:Nutrition levels are definitely down in the areas from which the Paki army is recruiting. From the video in the page above I did screen grabs of a RAPE class reporter who gets plenty to eat and is pumping iron. Compare with the scrawny biceps and forearms of a soldier in the same video.
Great observation. Combined with C Fair's data showing that TSPA officer recruitment has gone up in non-Punjabi, non-Pashtun areas, this leads me to posit the following theory:
Until 2001, TSPA recruited afsars almost exclusively from select districts of NWFP and Punjab. This was partially due to the martial race theory and its legacy of tradition, but ALSO due to the fact that
pre-2001, TSPA only ever had to fight wars of choice. When you only fight at the time and place of your own choosing you have the luxury to pick your afsars from preferred classes and ethnicities because typically your afsars are not going to die in battle. Who did the TSPA fight before 2001? Baluchi and Bengali civilians, by choice. Unarmed Palestinians in Jordan, by choice. Every time they came up against a real army, saying "one momeen equals ten kufr"... that was also by choice, but an unwise choice, because we know what happened. Yet overall, from 1947-2001 the attrition of afsars was relatively low.
After 2001, and especially after 2007 with GOAT spilling over into TSPA operations against TTP, the TSPA found itself fighting out of compulsion rather than choice for the first time in its history. GUBO meant that they HAD to send TSPA troops out to be killed, or else face bad consequences as a deep-state institution: the loss of aid, the levying of sanctions or worse.
In this situation afsars, especially JCOs/Laftans/Kaptaans etc. started to die in significant numbers, and more had to be promoted from the ranks in the field. Now the TSPA could not afford to be choosy about whom it recruited into the officer corps; in fact, the top brass (still Pakjabi and Pashtun) preferred to recruit junior cadres from the other parts of Pakistan because those junior cadres faced a significant risk of death in a civil war of compulsion. Better a SDRE Baluch or Sindhi or Seraiki to lead the Paltan in FATA, than one of their own sons... "officerdom" was no longer a short-hand for kababs and whiskey at the club.
So we have to look at C Fair's numbers again (she speaks broadly of "officer" recruitment) and see... how many of the non-Punjabi, non-Pashtun TSPA officers are actually JCOs who got promoted in the field during the GOAT operations, or were recruited only after the post-2001, post-"war of choice" era?
C Fair says that the recruitment of officers from non-traditional regions of Pakistan holds out some hope that TSPA may become eventually more rational and less Islamized (to reach this conclusion she presents other data showing that the traditional regions of recruitment, Punjab and NWFP, were also the most inveterately Jihadized, anti-India, and anti-Western while Pakis of all ethnicities from the other parts of Pakistan tended to be more "liberal").
In fact I am wondering if the non-Pashtun, non-Punjabi, thin-armed, SDRE-looking, mine-clearance-mission-leading, IED-fodder junior officers in today's TSPA are increasingly aware of what's going on... that they are being made cat's paws, that they have been "elevated" to officer-capable classes only so that they can die in a civil war initiated by the jihadi fantasies of the traditional, 100% pure martial race TFTA old guard. I wonder what sort of organizational stressors this is placing on the TSPA as an institution.
If that is the case, then the fun will start once a significant number of these low-caste Paki afsars reach Karnail or higher rank (probably many will hit a glass ceiling at Karnail). Karnails' Koops are not unheard of in garrison states.