WHEN soldiers, sailors and airmen become symbols instead of fulfilling their protective duty, when legal ambiguity becomes prophecy, a republic loses its moral bearing. It’s time to reform our security institutions — not to placate critics abroad, but to reclaim dignity at home. Justice demands that only the uniform not be made the scapegoat for the failures of judges, politicians, and bureaucrats — for accountability is a debt owed by all.
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The whispering gallery of conscience
I HAD promised myself silence. After leaving the Navy in 2023, I took a modest private job — not for ambition, but for subsistence. I told myself I had done my part; the country could now run without my voice. When I came to Waltham, I thought I’d finally earned a small reprieve — the kind of peace that smells of pine and warm bread, not of gun oil and grief.
But for those who have ever worn a uniform, silence is never peace. It is only a ceasefire with memory.
And one morning, the quiet shattered. The headlines screamed from the screen: thirteen former and nine serving army officers face arrest warrant over cases of forceful disappearance. The words looked surgical; the reality was not. These were not faceless men. They were my juniors, my seniors — men who once stood under the same flag, now accused of becoming instruments of fear.
The metallic chill of my morning coffee mingled with the distant echo from Quantico, where the Secretary of War and the US President had once declared their own citizens ‘enemies within’. The spectacle was familiar. Every empire eventually rehearses its own tyranny. America had found its authoritarians in suits; we had found ours in fatigues. Across oceans, the contagion was the same — power devouring its conscience. The eternal argument between uniform and morality is this: can one defend a republic without surrendering one’s soul?
In the midst of this unease came the controversy over our own army chief’s remarks — a dry, academic observation on the scope of ‘aid to civil power’, instantly twisted into political theatre. It was never about the law; it was about trust. Trust — that most fragile alloy of faith and fear — has long corroded in our republic.
And yet, amid that corrosion, one moment still glimmers. Between the twilights of August 5, 2024, when Bangladesh teetered at the edge of collapse, General Waker-Uz-Zaman chose calm over command, neutrality over impulse. That single act of disciplined restraint salvaged the dignity of the uniform, if only for a moment.
But moments are not enough. The ghosts of unpunished crimes — the disappearances, the denials, the complicity — now feed the bitterness of those few disgruntled ex-officers who roam social media like digital deserters, staining the very cloth they once wore. Their venom is not rebellion; it is decay made public. It is the final warning that when institutions refuse to reckon with their own sins — when the past misdeeds and the mishandling of perpetrators are allowed to fester — they become haunted by them.
This battle, fought between the vengeance of the virtual world and the current military leadership’s singular, essential act of non-partisan intervention, is the core struggle for the Republic’s soul.
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The illusion of military sanctity
RECENT outbursts of public frustration regarding accountability within the armed forces rightly question the notion that a military establishment can remain ‘above controversy’. The argument — that only a few ‘bad apples’ at the top are responsible for institutional rot — is a convenient but ultimately facile illusion.
When the ‘fish rots’, the decay certainly begins at the highest command level, but the resulting corruption soon permeates the entire structure. The issue is not one of mere individual failure; it is one of systemic enablement.
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The arrogance of empire and the memory of 1/11
IN QUANTICO, a familiar theatre of obedience was being restaged. I read of Trump’s madness: ‘The true war is not abroad — it’s against enemies within.’ This isn’t an American anomaly; it’s a universal pathology. Soldiers recognise it instantly: the slow corrosion of duty, the seduction of power dressed as patriotism.
This American descent is a mirror for us, because we in Bangladesh have walked this road before. We called it ‘stability.’ We called it ‘aid to civil power.’ And this mirror reflects back the spectre of Tarique Zia during the infamous 1/11 period.
That time, 2007 to 2008, was the purest expression of the military stepping out from behind the constitutional curtain. It was a crisis framed as a solution, a ‘clean-up’ operation that targeted the political elite, including Tarique Zia. His arrest, the subsequent allegations, and the ensuing political vacuum were all justified by the premise that civilian democracy had failed and the military was the only impartial force capable of intervention.
I insist that this episode, which scarred a generation of politicians and citizens alike, is the ultimate proof that the military cannot interpret or execute civilian law without violating its own professional neutrality. The military-backed regime’s actions — however intended — established a dangerous precedent: the uniform, when mobilised for domestic cleansing, becomes a tool of political suppression, regardless of the ethical intentions of its commanders.
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The decadence of discourse and the public’s scar
THE trauma of 1/11 is the ghost haunting the recent spectacle in Dhaka. When our army chief’s academic remarks on legal ambiguities under CrPC 127–132 were twisted into a defence of impunity, the panic was instant. It was the collective memory, not a single hashtag, that erupted.
The military’s defence — that the chief merely cited existing law providing for immunity in good faith (Section 132) — misses the deeper truth: Legality is not the same as legitimacy. The nation, scarred by decades of intervention, no longer trusts the silence of uniforms.
Furthermore, the decadence of our internal discourse — where a retired officer, fuelled by personal vendetta, leaks and warps professional remarks — is a profound institutional decay. While the decorated US Generals maintained silence under Hegseth’s humiliation, our failure to maintain that professional composure indicates that personal grudges are being prioritised over the integrity of the institution.
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The cautionary symmetry: exile and aspiration
BETWEEN Quantico’s howling arrogance and the stillness from London — Tarique Rahman’s interview — lies a cautionary symmetry. One speaks of a democracy turning its guns inward; the other, of a political figure who learned the price of institutional blurring firsthand.
Tarique Zia’s years in exile represent the cost of that civil-military blur of 1/11. Whether one judges his conduct or not, his political fate was decided not by the ballot box, but by a military-backed state structure. His current composure, speaking not of cheap vengeance but of a return to a civilian order, stands as a reminder that a democracy must learn to disarm its ghosts and respect the separation of power.
The uniform’s highest purpose is to defend the Constitution, not to interpret it, and certainly not to act as a crutch for civilian failure. We must finally ask: Who aids whom, and at what cost? The silence of the military’s top brass should be a mark of their professionalism and constitutional loyalty, not a forced quiet born of humiliation or political pressure. The uniform’s ultimate duty is to the nation’s survival, and that demands a permanent return to the sanctity of the barracks.
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The republic’s mortal wound: a failure of uniform and conscience
I REMEMBER a different season of turmoil — not the cheap theatre of today, but the genuine terror of the 1970s, where every dawn brought the metallic scent of another coup. In that abyss, Ziaur Rahman achieved something quietly radical: he saved the army by insisting it stop trying to save the nation.
He taught a simple, savage truth: a soldier’s legitimacy is found not in his proximity to power, but in his disciplined distance from it. He rebuilt command through merit, not the poisoned patronage of the political class, proving that the might of the uniform lies not in intervention, but in restraint.
That discipline, so brutally earned, is now bleeding away — not through rebellion, but through moral exhaustion. The soldier today is not mutinous; he is weary of being the republic’s last excuse. I recall my own long nights at sea, where command was a covenant of accountability, not a leash. Zia’s legacy was precisely this: the understanding that power is a trust, and the army serves the constitution, not the ruler’s whim.
The problem is that the ghosts Zia exorcised — of partisanship and impunity — are drifting through the corridors again. He knew no military can serve two masters: the constitution and the clique. Yet, under the long shadow of the last regime, loyalty became a political investment, and the barracks an extension of the party office. The institution that was supposed to be the nation’s unblinking shield was forced to become its blind servant.
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DGFI: from strategic necessity to institutional power
THE Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) was established in 1972 under the General Staff Branch of the Bangladesh Army, drawing inspiration from the British model of military intelligence. Born in the aftermath of a devastating war, its founding purpose was clear and functional — to safeguard the sovereignty of a fragile, newly independent nation through timely intelligence and operational vigilance.
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The evolution of mission and mandate
DURING the formative years under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, DGFI remained modest in scale and scope, serving primarily as a defensive instrument of the armed forces. However, it was under the stewardship of President Ziaur Rahman that the agency began its institutional expansion. Zia recognised that intelligence was not merely a tool of defence but a mechanism of strategic control — both over threats to national security and to regime stability.
This marked the beginning of DGFI’s transformation from a purely external intelligence service into a comprehensive national security organ, integrating political and internal dimensions of surveillance.
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Operational contributions and strategic relevance
DESPITE its politicisation over time, DGFI’s operational significance has been undeniable. It played a decisive role in counter-insurgency operations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where intelligence coordination was pivotal to military success. The agency also contributed critically to border security operations, particularly along the Naaf River during the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar — operations that demanded real-time situational awareness and precision intelligence.
In both peace and conflict, DGFI has remained the ‘initial eyes of sovereignty,’ serving as the armed forces’ principal intelligence support mechanism for operational readiness, counter-terrorism, and regional stability.
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Institutional reflection
AS WITH any intelligence institution, power carries inherent risks of distortion. The DGFI’s journey reflects a broader tension within post-liberation Bangladesh — the balance between safeguarding the state and serving the regime. Yet, despite these tensions, its strategic role within the national defence architecture remains indispensable. The challenge ahead lies in reaffirming its original mandate: defending sovereignty without compromising institutional integrity.
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The machinery of fear
By the time HM Ershad was in power, the DGFI had become the essential, unseen scaffolding of military rule. Intelligence ceased to be about security; it became pure leverage. Files replaced arguments. Fear became the lingua franca of governance, replacing the obsolete currency of faith. The state learned to see everything and, therefore, trust no one. Its reach was total, stretching from the barracks to the classrooms, from the newspaper offices to the silent courtyards of the mosque. It recorded, categorised, and neutralised — a process of administrative violence executed always in the name of order, always in the shadow of authority. The return of democracy in 1991 altered nothing but the names on the stationary. Civilian leaders inherited the machinery of control and used it with the same calculated zeal. Both Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina saw the DGFI as an extension of their political survival mechanism. The 2007–08 caretaker regime stripped away even the pretence; it was governance executed through the DGFI’s invisible hand, deciding who would fall and who must disappear.
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The digital gaze and institutional decay
IN THE years since, under Hasina’s prolonged tenure, the agency perfected its form, entering the digital age. Its eyes are electronic, its reach total. Under the banner of counterterrorism, it monitors not merely actions but emotions. It patrols the public speech and the private anxieties of cyberspace. The DGFI became the most loyal soldier of the ruling order — disciplined, efficient and unseen. This narrative is not unique; across South Asia, the pattern is predictable — ISI, RAW, DGFI — each born to defend the state, each learning instead to define it. The deeper their gaze, the darker the republic becomes. When the state sees everything, truth becomes dangerous, and silence becomes patriotic.
This descent reveals a fatal dichotomy: Zia had once re-forged the uniform through principle after the chaos of the mid-1970s. Today, we watch it dissolve through complicity. The tragedy is that the soldier who refuses to cross the moral line risks being branded timid, while the one who obeys without question is damned by history. The republic has yet to learn that the uniform’s honour is measured by the orders it refuses to obey. The DGFI’s history is the mirror held up to Bangladesh’s political soul: it reveals how protection mutates into a machinery of fear. The final tragedy is not that the intelligence service watches too much — it is that its citizens have learned to look away.
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The fragile space we call democracy
THE new generation — the ones who filled the streets in the monsoon months of 2024 — carry no memory of coups, yet they inherit the unease of a nation that never truly demilitarised its politics. They learned, under tear gas and blackout, a truth older than the republic itself: the truest strength of an army lies in its ability not to fire.
When the regime turned its weapons inward, the soldiers did not become executioners, nor saviours — they stood still. That stillness was not fear. It was restraint — the most disciplined form of resistance. For a fleeting moment, Bangladesh glimpsed a rare kind of strength: a uniform that remembered its oath.
But revolutions that pause without reform decay quickly.
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The blurring of battle lines
THE Bangladeshi soldier has long lived in contradiction — liberator and law enforcer, guardian and scapegoat. To the politician, he is muscle; to the citizen, the last refuge of hope. Between these two illusions, the uniform has lost its moral compass.
A force born to defend sovereignty has been turned inward — tasked to enforce obedience instead of liberty. Generals today preside not over strategy, but over flyovers, conglomerates and bureaucracies. The ethic of the warrior — violence restrained by honour — has been replaced by administrative fatigue. The uniform, once sanctified by sacrifice, now risks becoming an emblem of impunity.
The uproar over the army chief’s recent remarks was never about legal phrasing — it was about faith. A nation unsure whether its guardians still serve the law, or merely the government that writes it. When soldiers are made to enforce political order rather than constitutional duty, the republic begins to rot from within.
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The erosion of objective control: when intelligence became intrigue
THE decay is clearest in the intelligence apparatus. The documented involvement of five former DGFI chiefs in unlawful political operations marks not isolated misconduct, but a collapse of professional doctrine. Once, men like Major General Mohabbat Jan Chowdhury and Major General MA Halim embodied the ideal of objective control — loyal to the constitution, not to any party. They navigated politics without surrendering professionalism.
Their successors — those who rose under the long twilight of 2009 and after — did not inherit that creed; they sold it. What was once an intelligence service guarding the nation’s borders was refashioned into an instrument of domestic fear. ‘National security’ became the alibi for political espionage, and with every coerced whisper and midnight knock, they dismantled the one thing a military cannot survive without: the trust of its own people.
This corrosion cannot be excused as loyalty. It is treason against the profession itself. The government’s failure to draw a legal boundary between political power and military intelligence ensures not just the corruption of officers, but the slow extinction of the armed forces as a functional institution.
A military that spies on its citizens eventually forgets how to defend them.
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The gloom behind the uniform and psychological cost
THE final, fatal corruption in uniform does not begin with money; it begins with confusion. The officer who hesitates before an unethical order is branded timid; the one who obeys is later condemned by history. Between the two grows a quiet, corrosive fatigue. Many young officers now lie awake wondering whether they served the nation — or merely a ruler. That doubt, whispered but unspoken, is the most dangerous mutiny of all: the one fought inside the conscience.
The Commission on Enforced Disappearances has done what few dared — it ripped open the silence. Its findings have turned whispers into evidence, rumour into record. The truth they unearthed is not an attack on the armed forces; it is a desperate attempt to salvage their soul. They gave the disappeared a name, and the perpetrators — often cloaked in uniform — a face.
But what shocks me, as a naval veteran, is not the darkness they revealed — we knew parts of this already — but the deafening stillness that followed. Fourteen months have passed, and not a single service branch has begun its own investigation. Not one board of inquiry, not one public acknowledgment. If they were not willing accomplices, why this silence? Why this cowardice dressed as discipline?
Every day the services hesitate, they lose more of the only currency that makes a soldier different from a gunman: credibility. The uniform does not sanctify crime; it amplifies it. When those who wear it murder or make people vanish, and their peers look away, the institution itself becomes complicit. The oath loses its weight. The flag becomes theatre.
Zero tolerance must mean exactly that — not token retirements, not quiet transfers, but open trials under civil law. No ‘internal inquiry’ can wash away blood; only justice can. Those who ordered or executed disappearances must face courts, not conferences. Rank cannot be an amnesty. A uniform cannot be a shield.
And to those who lead now — in khaki, white, or sky-blue — hear this clearly: justice delayed is mutiny deferred. The younger officers already know it. They speak of it in the quiet of the barracks. They crave reform, not revenge. If the services do not purge themselves, history will. The next generation will call today’s silence by its rightful name — cowardice.
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The fatal calculus of command
TO UNDERSTAND why so many officers appear complicit, one must grasp the rigid, often brutal, logic of the Top-Down Command Structure. The military is not a debating society; it is, at its core, an apparatus of obedience.
When senior officers, the supposed guardians of institutional integrity, issue an unethical order or tacitly encourage corruption, the junior officer is presented with a fatal calculus. For many, a military career is not an abstract service but the singular guarantor of their family’s economic survival. Hailing often from precarious economic backgrounds, their choice is stark: silent compliance or career annihilation. This structure does not reward principle; it automatically penalises dissent. The silence we observe is not always consent; it is frequently the prudent, though regrettable, act of self-preservation.
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The military as society’s mirror
THE most difficult truth to face is that the armed forces are not a separate, pristine caste. They are recruited from, and remain bound to, the society they serve. The lack of moral courage and integrity observed within the uniform is, sadly, only a mere mirror of the ethical erosion and political expediency prevalent in the wider civilian administration and public life.
To demand the forces purge themselves of corruption while the society from which they draw personnel remains compromised is to chase an impossible ideal. The ‘cancer’ requires deep structural ‘surgery’, yes — but the success of that operation depends entirely on the quality of the ethical tissue available for transplant. And currently, that societal pool leaves much to be desired. The forces must be held accountable for every transgression, but the true overhaul requires shifting the focus from individual recrimination to fixing the command culture that makes moral integrity a liability rather than a necessity.
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Lessons from abroad
ACROSS the ocean, in the lecture halls of Quantico, American generals recently faced an order that struck at the heart of their republic — a call to ‘fight enemies within.’ They did not argue. They stood silent. That silence was not cowardice; it was a disciplined defiance. A refusal to turn the sword inward. They understood what our own history keeps trying to teach us: violence turned inward is national suicide by slow ceremony.
We, too, have learned that truth in blood — from the coups of the 1970s to 1/11’s midnight deals, to the exiles that followed. Every chapter tells the same story: when guardians forget the difference between protection and possession, a republic loses its soul.
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Reform, not retaliation
BANGLADESH’S security evolution has passed through three phases — survival, misuse, and now, the last chance: restoration.
Ziaur Rahman once rebuilt a broken military — not by patronage, but by principle. He restored discipline not through fear, but through distance. He knew that true loyalty required detachment from power. His warning remains timeless: ‘Discipline without justice is tyranny; justice without discipline is chaos.’
To reclaim that ethos, reform must be structural — not cosmetic.
The Rapid Action Battalion must return fully to civilian command.
The armed forces must withdraw gradually from domestic policing and commercial ventures.
Intelligence agencies must be placed under transparent, legal oversight — answerable to parliament through concerned ministries, not to party patrons or a single person.
Promotions must reward competence, not compliance.
A republic that fears its protectors has already surrendered half its freedom.
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Epilogue: the cancer behind the uniform
THE morning’s noise fades, but the echoes remain — from Quantico, from Dhaka, from the corridors of every barrack and ministry where conscience still whispers. Men keep mistaking obedience for virtue; nations keep mistaking control for order. I sit again before a blank page. My granddaughter laughs somewhere in the next room — unaware of the ghosts that shaped her country. I write not out of bitterness, but duty. The uniform I once wore taught me discipline. The republic it served taught me grief. Yet I still believe in both — because belief, in an age of cynicism, is the last rebellion left.
We have already paid the silent price of the uniform once — through disappearances, silenced voices, and a generation that learned to whisper where it should have spoken. The boundary between service and subjugation cannot be drawn by decree — it must be remembered, renewed and lived.
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The sacred shield and the hidden hand
THE truth is more tangled than our certainties allow. No hand is pure; no hierarchy unsullied. DGFI and NSI have been raised — religiously, almost — by successive governments into super-institutions, exalted regardless of their conduct. This sanctification is not innocent. It is a cloak.
We tell ourselves the army will not exceed the public’s expectations, that the uniform will never be lawless. Yet our culture prefers scapegoats. The uniform is convenient; it is visible and thus expendable. The real enablers — corrupt judges, complicit bureaucrats, political patrons — remain sheltered. You will not find the notorious magistrates brought to account; they are the architects of impunity. Many lists of the disappeared passed through the home ministry. Where are the bureaucrats on those lists? Their peers ensured their safety. The uniform bears the blame while the hands that wrote the orders go unexamined.
This systemic failure leaves us with insistent, impossible questions:
Does the uniform protect the citizen — or frighten them?
Does it serve justice — or convenience?
Does it stand apart from politics — or dissolve into it?
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The demand for absolute justice
WHAT I want — what any honest conscience should demand — is not symbolic redress but a full accounting. I do not ask for vengeance. I demand justice that is absolute and indiscriminate: no criminal spared because of rank, robe or patronage.
Let there be one forcible disappearance tried in such a manner that every official act and omission is exposed — that the chain of command, the paper trail, the political protections are all laid bare and judged. Let there be a prosecution that does not end at the foot soldier, but reaches into ministries, courtrooms and the corridors of power. Only then will the language of justice stop being a lie.
The salvation of this republic will not come in camouflage. It will come in conscience — in the courage to stand still when others shout for blood. The future of Bangladesh’s armed forces will not only be written in new weapons or budgets. It will be written in whether they can look into the mirror of justice and not flinch.
Because power in uniform is not the enemy. Until the day absolute justice arrives, we will keep cleaning the visible wound while the cancer thrives unseen.
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Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
