(Disagreement is not Disobedience and Retirement is not a Muzzle) published in DJ October 2026 issue. Since Gen Tariq had also sent his response to Sarfaraz Khan Niazi, this was not submitted to DJ for publication. The response below is to set the record straight – (DJ).
(You published a critique mounted on my article by Sarfarz Niazi. Sadly he did not send you my response to the critique he had you publish. It completes the argument. Here it is):
Dear Sarfaraz,
Your note raises an important question, but I think you conflate three quite different things: disagreement, disobedience and complicity.
Let me be absolutely clear: I have never said, and would never say, that an officer should obey an illegal or unlawful order. In fact, I am proud to state that in my entire forty years of service, I never knowingly executed an unlawful order.
It is worth mentioning the Nuremberg Trials here and using them as a reference. The moral equation is precisely where Nuremberg is relevant. Its lesson was not that officers must resign whenever they disagree with their superiors. It was that “I was only following orders” is no defence for knowingly participating in manifest crimes. *Nuremberg established the limits of obedience; it did not abolish obedience.*
A lawful decision can be wrong, unpopular or deeply disagreeable. The professional duty is to advise frankly, argue one’s case through the chain of command and, once the lawful decision is taken, execute it. Otherwise the military ceases to be a disciplined institution and becomes a collection of competing personal mandates.
And there is a rather inconvenient piece of evidence against the suggestion that I spent forty years simply going with the flow. My dossier contains a long and rather lustrous trail of red ink — punishments and adverse entries for going against the grain. I don’t claim every disagreement made me right. But it does make the idea that I discovered dissent only after retirement somewhat difficult to sustain.
I was not always a comfortable subordinate. I was, however, a disciplined one.
Retirement does not erase responsibility, nor am I asking it to. But neither should rank alone establish responsibility for everything that happened during a person’s service.
Responsibility must follow actual authority, actual knowledge and actual conduct. Form, decency, propriety and institutional conventions, do not allow one to go into narrations of personal interactions with one’s colleagues or superiors – “he said, she said” stories trying to prove one’s position. I agree with this restriction but I also understand why most people, not familiar with the practice, are not impressed by it.
However, when one exercises authority one must also be held accountable, I believe, is the fair test — not retrospective assumptions about what a person must have thought because he wore a particular rank.
Respectfully,
Tariq Khan