Three features mark the military budget every year. First, the actual spending has almost always exceeded the budgeted figure. During the on going fiscal the actual military spending was 241 billion as against the budgeted figure of 223 billion. The actual expenditure at the end of the next financial year is almost certain to exceed the budgeted 250 billion rupees. Second, in the thousands of pages of budget documents the justification for spending 250 billion is made tersely in just one line; “to defray salary and other expenses”. Third, a significant portion of the actual military spending is wrapped as civil expenditure. At the end of current debate the opposition members in the Parliament will routinely submit motions proposing cuts in military spending. The presiding officer will put the motions to voice vote and ask the members favouring the motion to say “aye” and the opposition members will yell “aye”. Those who reject the motion may say “nay”, the presiding officer will then ask and even before the MPs respond, almost mechanically give the ruling, “The nays have it, the nays have it”.

The Parliament would thus have endorsed 250 billion rupees for the defence not knowing what is the tri-service allocation let alone how each service spent the allocated budget. Questions about balance between enhancing defence capability and promoting welfare activities would remain unanswered. In the evening the MPs will be invited to a dinner by the Speaker and Chairman to celebrate the passage of the budget and the supremacy of the parliament. Defence of the country is a sacred issue and must not be trivialised. It has however been trivialised when the Parliament is totally bypassed without even a hint of what is the total outlay in the name of defence and how it is spent.

What is total outlay is a matter of how one looks at the figures. The Public Accounts Committee was recently informed that military pensions of over 35 billion rupees were paid in one year. But this is shown as civil and military’s spending. Several billions are allocated for the Rangers, Civil Armed Forces, educational institution in the cantonments, and coastal guards and the special areas of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission out of the civilian budget, all shown as part of the civil budget.

In addition, it is not known how the big defence purchases are funded. Several new purchases are on the cards. On May 24 the cabinet approved the purchase of AWACS for the Pakistan Air force reportedly at a cost of one billion dollars. During the visit of Chinese Prime Minister to Pakistan in April last a contract for the purchase of four state-of-the-art Frigates was signed. The defence ministry statement said “these frigates will be equipped with organic helicopters, especially designed for anti-submarine warfare, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles along with associated self-defence systems,” but did not say how much would it cost and how it would be financed.

Earlier this year it had also been reported that Pakistan had decided to purchase 24 F-16 aircrafts from the United States. The building of another GHQ is Islamabad announced in December last is yet another important military project that must involve considerable expense. Put together all these projects must cost several billion dollars over the next three or four years. Will the cost of these projects be met out of the normal defence allocation? Addressing post budget press conference on Tuesday Advisor to Prime Minister Dr Salman Shah is reported to have said that weapons' purchase would be from normal defence allocation. If Shah has been correctly reported then why equally huge outlays were made during previous years when no such weapons purchases were being made. If he has been wrongly quoted the question is wherefrom the additional allocations will come.

Not only vital information is withheld the Parliament has even been misinformed. During Senate debate on the earthquake on November 22 last year the government claimed that expenses on petrol, vehicles, helicopters and troops movements for rehabilitating the earthquake victims had been met out of the defence budget. But soon it turned out that instead of paying out of its own budget the defence ministry had actually sent a bill to the Prime Minister’s secretariat for the services it had provided during the relief and rehabilitation. Unfortunately all of this demonstrates lack of trust in the Parliament and has not helped in building bridges between the military and civil society.

The allocations demanded by the defence establishment may be justified and the nation must pay for genuine security needs. That is not the issue. The core issue is how much is actually allocated, how it is allocated and how it is spent. It is in the interest of the armed forces to build bridges of confidence by submitting to scrutiny and accountability if they wish to invoke and retain the trust of the people and ward off growing criticism.

Failure to build bridges has attracted widespread criticism both nationally and internationally. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on May 10 Lord Patten, former EU Commissioner for external relations and Chairman of the International Crisis Group said: “Pro-dictatorship voices regularly argue that those parties were highly corrupt and that it was their corruption that justified the 1999 coup that brought Gen Musharraf to power. But they refuse to condemn or even acknowledge the military’s large-scale, institutionalised corruption. So much has been grabbed by the military that it will take years just to catalogue it. The military has acquired vast tracts of state-owned land at nominal rates; its leaders dominate businesses and industries, ranging from banking to cereal factories”.

Last year the British High Commissioner in Islamabad publicly stated that military’s strident inroads in business, economy and industry had affected the poverty reduction programme that attracted the ire of the Foreign Office. Such harsh criticism by foreign commentators is most unfortunate.The defence expenditure during the outgoing fiscal was scaled up to 241 billion whereas the public sector development programme (PSDP) was scaled down to 228 billion thus making the military expenses exceed the development budget. With such lopsided expenditure and so many unexplained features, it is necessary to build bridges of trust and confidence between the defence establishment and the Parliament.

Chinese sage Confucius has identified three critical pillars of the state as military, economic development and mutual trust. According to Confucius a country could survive without the military but not without the mutual trust. Today’s papers have reported that on Wednesday General Ahsan Hayat addressed the Navy War College on the challenges before the military. Ahsan is known for making perceptive comments while economising on words. I fervently hope that the security establishment recognises that building trust is also a great and real challenge. To build trust it needs to demystify military spending.