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On May 20, 2025, for the in Pakistan’s 77-year history, a serving army chief obtained the exalted rank of field marshal. For General Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah, this elevation is the crowning achievement of his ambitions. However, the act was also a symbolic reaffirmation of military supremacy amid a fragile political order. 

has long been a textbook praetorian state: a polity where political institutions are too weak to contain or guide the power of the military and where the latter, being the only cohesive force, steps forward repeatedly to impose order. It is a pattern not borne of accident but of a state whose institutional DNA was forged in colonial centralism and whose political evolution was arrested before democratic norms could take root.

to field marshal is not merely the ascent of a soldier but the coronation of a system. His career—spanning leadership of both Military Intelligence and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)—epitomizes the fusion of surveillance, religious narrative, and strategic command that now defines the Pakistani military. It is a force that has never seen its primary duty as just guarding the country’s borders; instead, it has seen itself as the guardian of Pakistan’s . In his of April 16, General Munir’s focus was Partition, Nazaria-e-Pakistan (“idea of Pakistan�), the two-nation theory, and, in his eyes, the eternal battle between Hindus and Muslims.

Founded as a democracy, the new country’s founding elite maintained and embellished the architecture of colonial authority. The increasing emphasis on institutional equilibrium would see Pakistan’s trajectory as one where the military’s organizational coherence filled a vacuum left by weak political parties, entrenched bureaucracy, discredited legislatures, and a politicized judiciary.

For the last 77 years, the Pakistani army has masked every intervention—direct or indirect rule—as the salvation of the existing order. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf—each iteration refining the art of martial governance. Even now, under a nominally civilian government, the locus of power resides not in Islamabad’s Parliament House but in the garrisoned halls of Rawalpindi, where the army is headquartered. Pakistan is built on this contradiction—unstable and unsustainable—where legitimacy is claimed by one center but exercised by another.

The military’s legitimacy is contingent on the illusion of order and stability. By projecting an image of disciplined control and national purpose, the military has insulated itself from accountability even as the institutions around it wither. What the military has forgotten, or chosen to ignore, is that a state needs different institutions working together in a system. The military cannot and will not be able to run everything in Pakistan, even if it has tried to do so at regular intervals, sometimes overtly, always covertly. 

The excessive interference of the military has not made Pakistan a strong state; a better term may be a brittle state. Pakistani society is fragmented along ethnolinguistic lines. Its polity is hollow and radicalized, with an economy in the doldrums. 

The title of field marshal itself is an echo of Ayub Khan, the archetypal soldier-statesman whose reign marked the overt institutionalization of military rule. But whereas Khan declared his authority with bluntness—he became army chief in 1951, president via a coup in 1958, and ruled until he resigned in 1969—Munir’s power lies in its opacity. The modern Pakistani military does not overthrow civilian governments—it manufactures them. It does not abolish elections—it engineers outcomes. It does not censor overtly—it orchestrates narratives. The tragedy lies not in rupture but in continuity disguised as reform.

The military’s attitude towards internal dissent remains the same, whether it is the insurgency or and demands for their rights. All of these are viewed not as understandable demands within an ethnolinguistically diverse country but as treasonous acts supported by foreign actors, namely or Afghanistan.

The military’s response to any sign of dissent is not engagement but elimination—legalized now through the Supreme Court’s of military trials for civilians, an alarming normalization of authoritarian jurisprudence. This judicial co-optation is part of a broader pattern: Munir’s tenure has witnessed expanded military intrusion into the press, the courts, and the . In this climate, there is a redefinition of sovereignty itself: not as legal supremacy rooted in law, but as political supremacy rooted in force.

In any country, the state is the only entity with a monopoly on the use of force. Once a state allows non-state actors to use arms, it trades legitimacy for short-term interests. Since 1947, but especially since the 1970s, the Pakistani military establishment has on jihadi groups as instruments of its regional foreign policy, vis-à-vis and Afghanistan primarily. 

Fearing that Pakistan would not be able to maintain conventional military superiority over India, especially after 1971, the Pakistani military added two layers to its deterrence policy: nuclear and sub-conventional or proxy war. While terror attacks by Pakistan-based groups inside India have caused the loss of innocent lives and damage, the blow-back on Pakistan and Pakistanis has been worse. However, as then US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton her Pakistani counterpart in 2011: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them to only bite your neighbors,â€� underlining the fatal delusions of nations ruined by the monsters they themselves create. 

The military’s gambit, leveraging proxies for regional depth, has turned into a strategic liability. In the eyes of many around the world, Pakistan is a state that harbors terrorists. While the domestic narrative inside Pakistan may dismiss this as Western or Indian propaganda, sooner or later, the narrative will have to face reality.

History, if it teaches anything, reminds us that nothing is preordained. Nations have faltered, sometimes disastrously, only to find within themselves the capacity for renewal. Seventy-seven years after it was founded as a democracy, Pakistan’s policymakers must reconsider the path forward. They can march deeper into military rule or return to constitutional federalism.