Pakistan’s Chief Problem

U.S. President Joe Biden described Pakistan as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world” at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraising dinner on October 13. He corroborated those remarks with the claim that the country has “nuclear weapons without any cohesion.” Biden’s comments sparked a backlash from both the government and the opposition in Pakistan, with the U.S ambassador in Islamabad summoned for explanation.

The American curveball came at a time when Pakistan’s leadership is preoccupied with its most far-reaching decision: appointing the chief of its all-powerful military. As General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s term comes to an end this month, the entirety of Pakistan’s political narrative, along with the correlated conflicts and paradoxes, is centered around who his successor is going to be. 

Among those who retorted to the U.S. president last month was former Prime Minister Imran Khan. This was despite the fact that Khan himself in April, a week after he had been ousted via a no-confidence motion, had said Pakistan’s nukes “aren’t safe under the new government,” prompting a strong reaction from the military. Khan, like the military, has demonstrated no qualms in pushing the country under the bus for his own perceived benefits. And today, it is Khan and the military that are the two epicenters of Pakistan’s multipronged political incoherence, which manifests in the discourse surrounding the army chief’s appointment and the global skepticism surrounding Pakistan’s security.

In the seven months since Khan’s ouster, he has been at loggerheads with the military establishment, which continues to orchestrate its cycle of churning civilian leaders in and out of power. The central government, led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which itself was a victim of the military’s engineering in 2018, is currently tasked with doing the military’s bidding so as to reaffirm the army’s hegemony.

“The involvement of the establishment in politics throughout our history is known to all. Things remain stable only when [the military] remains in its limits and accepts civilian leadership,” Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Central Vice President Ejaz Chaudhary told The Diplomat. 

“[The military establishment] wasn’t willing to accept Imran Khan and the PTI at all. That’s why they participated in a conspiracy – which has both foreign and local agents – to remove our government through horse-trading of parliamentarians. That has prompted an unprecedented backlash among the people,” he added.

Immediately after his ouster Khan, himself a recent beneficiary of the military’s machinations, claimed that his ouster was the result of a U.S.-led conspiracy in which the army leadership is complicit. There is no hard evidence backing that claim, and Pakistan’s national security establishment has rejected the conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, Khan’s assertions, which have mainstreamed an anti-army narrative considered a political taboo throughout the country’s history, are only adding to his support among the masses, as demonstrated by the PTI’s resounding by-election wins in July and October. 

The PTI’s persistent popularity comes despite the establishment deploying age-old tactics of using the judiciary to target Khan via court cases, and leaking audio recordings that suggest his claim of a “foreign conspiracy” was a manufactured hoax. The party’s successive triumphs suggested that Khan’s return to power after upcoming polls might be inevitable – at least until Pakistan’s Election Commission ruled he was ineligible to hold public office for five years, a move denounced by Khan’s supporters as politically motivated. 

Khan’s critics insist that his narrative, which doubles down on absolutist populism, is destabilizing the country, despite the military’s historical maneuvers safeguarding the institution’s own interests.

“Imran has massively destabilized Pakistan by making the appointment of the next chief controversial by saying that any chief not appointed by him personally would not be acceptable to his party and supporters who constitute a very significant section of the voting population,” former Punjab chief minister and political analyst Najam Sethi, the author of “Trial of Democracy,” told The Diplomat. 

Despite the army’s customary insistence on being apolitical, and the claim that it is not picking sides, Sethi believes it might be impossible for the military leadership to remain away from politics. “The country is severely divided and every faction is bound to run to the military to mediate conflict and, failing a positive response, bound to lambast the umpire,” he said. 

The manner in which all political parties, regardless of their narratives or parliamentary strength, unite in succumbing to military orders was visible in the unanimous extension granted to Bajwa when his first stint as chief of army staff came to an end in 2019. Now on the verge of completing his second three-year term, Bajwa has been making last-ditch moves that betray a continued interest in consolidating power.

Over the past 12 months, Khan and Bajwa have come full circle. Today, Khan’s assertion that the incumbent government delayed the next elections so as to “appoint the army chief of its choice” is rooted in his own clash with Bajwa over the appointment of the country’s spymaster last year. 

On October 6, 2021, the army issued a notification over the appointment of former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed as Peshawar corps commander, and Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum as his replacement, even though the spymaster’s appointment is the prime minister’s prerogative. The Prime Minister Office’s notification of the new ISI chief’s appointment didn’t come until October 26, 2021, underlining the first tangible sign of a Bajwa-Khan fallout, which eventually led to the latter’s ouster in April. And at the heart of the question over the ISI chief’s appointment last year was the question of the army chief’s appointment this year.

Hameed, the displaced ISI chief, has been among the frontrunners to become the next chief of army staff. The clash over his fate appeared to indicate that Bajwa might be vying to get a further extension into his term as the army chief, or at least seeking someone aligned with him as his successor. The emergence of Hameed and Bajwa “camps” within the army further signaled the rise of an unprecedented turf war within the institution: Even disgruntled senior army officers of the past, who have seen their juniors rise beyond them to the chief of army staff rank, traditionally limit their frustration to post-retirement memoirs. 

However, military sources insist that the ongoing tussle within the army isn’t personal, and is more a scrimmage over contrasting interpretations of institutional supremacy.

“Anyone can tell that Imran Khan has a leaning toward General Faiz [Hameed] and the general likes Khan. This has prompted disagreements [within the army], but there has been an understanding between General Faiz and General Bajwa that [the former] had to do certain things as per institutional requirements not owing to any personal ambitions,” a senior military officer tells The Diplomat. 

Long before he was in contention for the army’s top slot, Hameed was actively involved in the military’s contentious moves, rendering him a heavily politicized figure. As part of making Imran Khan’s 2018 election triumph possible, Hameed managed the rise of the Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), which dented the PML-N’s Islamist vote bank in Punjab. The radical Islamist TLP, which was declared a terror outfit last year, has demanded that the country’s nuclear bombs be dropped on France over satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. As ISI chief, Hameed was also the face of Pakistan’s masochistic support for the Taliban, having been caught on camera reassuring the jihadist regime after their Kabul takeover last year that “everything will be okay.”

Indeed, whoever becomes Pakistan’s next chief of army staff will be supervising the army’s jihadist superstructure, which has both regional and domestic utility for the military establishment. The jihadists have historically facilitated the army’s bid to maintain its influence by strengthening Islamist groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir, while radical Islamists function as pressure groups not only to dent political parties electorally but also to keep civilian regimes on their toes should they seek to assert themselves. These skewed policies, spanning over seven decades, have resulted in Pakistan’s structural implosion, with its perpetual economic crises as but one result.

Where no prime minister has completed their five-year tenure in Pakistan, the county has completed 23 International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs since its inception. In August, Pakistan received a much needed fiscal lifeline in the shape of another IMF bailout, continuing Islamabad’s vicious cycle of dependency on foreign financial support with the country on the brink of default. 

The Pakistani military has long ensured that, through geopolitical manipulation and control over regional jihadist groups, it would continue to be of sufficient utility to global powers, traditionally spearheaded by the United States and Saudi Arabia. However, given that such policies hold the country itself hostage, Pakistan has had to essentially compromise its ability to make its own money.

“Pakistan continues to be run like a neocolonial economy that is dependent on aid with unstable growth. And it is the nonfunctioning of the constitution in the fullest sense that has damaged the architecture of the economy,” said former member of Prime Minister’s Economic Affairs Committee Dr. Akmal Hussain. “As a result, the structural changes that needed to be made in the economy have not been made over the past 70 years. Because the economy is designed to function for the elite and not for the people,” he added.

The Pakistan army is the county’s most expansive business empire, valued at over $100 billion. Its projects range from housing to food processing, with the army’s encroachment expanding from the mineral-rich soils of Balochistan to the long-exploited farmlands of Okara. 

The empire has also maintained its realm as a security state, not only reaffirming its own stranglehold, but selling stakes to global powers like the U.S. and more recently China. Beijing has been happy to let the Pakistan army skew the economic balances in its favor at home, as long as it can protect Chinese interests in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and beyond. The civilian leadership, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy function as subordinate affiliates, where certain tasks have been outsourced for smooth functioning of the business, with the media being the military empire’s PR outlet. The chief of army staff is the veritable chief executive officer of this empire. 

“The military has, for the past 75 years, extended itself beyond the constitutional boundaries. Hence selecting the chief has become a thoroughly unprofessional exercise, because of the military’s involvement in external matters without any focus on the country’s interests,” argued Lieutenant General Talat Masood, former secretary of Pakistan's Ministry of Defense Production, in a conversation with The Diplomat. 

“The institution continues to be involved in politics and undermine the constitution. For instance, the army was supporting Imran Khan when their desires aligned, but now the army is not supporting him because he’s disturbing the status quo. So now they have decided to back the current government instead,” he continued.

While in power, Khan “disturbed the status quo” by expressing a desire to implement the prime minister’s constitutional right to appoint the country’s intelligence and military chiefs. Today, he is ruffling the feathers of the powers-that-be by rallying his followers, evidently a comfortable majority of voters, against the erstwhile omnipotent military establishment. This has led to a power crisis not seen in the recent history of Pakistan, with the country’s direction dependent on the critical appointment this month.

“[Since] the army chief is the de facto real executive in the Pakistani political dispensation, his appointment is so keenly watched by everyone,” noted political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed, the author of “Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947–2011).” Ahmed added, “Indeed, if the elected government is not the one which makes crucial decisions, but the army chief is,” then it follows that “political instability is aggravated” during any period leading up to the crucial appointment.

The questions surrounding the chief of army staff appointment have rekindled concerns about a de facto military coup in Pakistan in some quarters. However, others argue the ideal scenario for the army – which seemingly abandoned the idea of full blown military coups after 2008 – would be for the political parties to continue fighting among themselves, striving to become the democratic front of a hybrid regime, while letting the military have actual control, especially over security and diplomacy. 

“I really don't know what lessons [the military] has learnt [from the past] except not to directly take over power, but whether it is neutral to the ongoing political tussle in Pakistan is an open question. It seems it is at present willing to let the politicians continue banging their heads against one another,” said Ahmed.

In the ongoing dogfight among the politicians, there is only one winner. To challenge Imran Khan, his political opponents would need the entirety of the military’s engineering machinery, from judicial ousters to reshuffling of “electable” politicians to Election Day manipulation – spearheaded, indeed, by an army chief who is on their side. But another option for the military leadership could be to broker power between the army chief and Khan, especially since offering him power in 2018 had sufficed to see the PTI chief backtracking on his past position against military hegemony.

Even so, not only would a considerably more popular Khan demand considerably more clout, but his return to the prime minister’s office would effectively reward civilian insubordination toward the army and signal acceptance for the widespread dissent against the military. If the army chief’s absolute authority is challenged, it would inevitably pave the way toward a revamp of the entire politico-economic structure of the country, in turn unshackling Pakistan from the military’s totalitarian control. 

Letting democracy function, therefore, is the sole solution to the Pakistan’s longstanding existential problem. The next army chief has the opportunity to be the first to make a different choice when asked to choose between the interests of his institution and his country.