Tweeting from his prison cell, Pakistan’s cricketing hero and former prime minister Imran Khan described the country’s de facto leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, as a mentally unstable, cruel dictator driven by a lust for power. Munir’s spokesman responded by calling Khan a mentally ill narcissist who believes he stands above the state. Their bitter exchange captures a power struggle that has lasted more than seven years. It also reflects its decisive outcome.
Last November, Munir forced through a constitutional amendment that keeps him in power until 2035, with lifetime immunity from prosecution. Khan, now 73, was sentenced to seventeen years in prison last December in the latest of a series of flimsy corruption cases. The former prime minister’s political movement remains popular, but the army has established a degree of dominance that previous military leaders could only have sought.
This account, published by the London Review of Books, describes a Pakistan in which the question is no longer simply who governs. Under Munir, the more consequential question is how a military commander with unprecedented authority will use it.
There is an unexpected element to Munir’s rule. Pakistan has become a mediator between the US and Iran. A country accustomed to being treated as a source of international conflict now sees its army presented as a contributor to global stability. For many Pakistanis, that has brought surprise and relief.
Yet the consolidation of military power has transformed the country’s political system. Civilian leaders have spent Pakistan’s history attempting to limit the army’s influence. Khan appeared to have the popular support and political opportunity to succeed where his predecessors had failed when he became prime minister in 2018. Instead, he lasted less than four years before the army removed him.
The contrast with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is revealing. Erdoğan eventually prevailed over Turkey’s generals through patience and political calculation, taking a decade to assert civilian control. Khan, by contrast, was melodramatic and imprudent. The army had once placed its hopes in him, making the speed of its reversal particularly striking. His reluctance to take orders was one problem. The generals also regarded him as louche and unconventional, including because of his third marriage to Bushra Bibi, an Islamic mystic in whom he placed total faith.
What initially looked like another episode in Pakistan’s familiar cycle of military intervention has proved different. The army installs civilian governments and removes them before their terms are complete. But today’s arrangement goes further. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif accepts that the army has total control, while Munir dominates policy despite holding neither the presidency nor the premiership. As Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz’s brother and a former prime minister, said in 2020, the army had been evolving from a state within a state to a state above the state. Today, the army is the state.
The generals argue that civilian governments brought this upon themselves. Pakistani politicians have long been accused of corruption, while successive civilian administrations have avoided difficult problems and left them to the military. The example of ghost schools is revealing. In 1998, administrators were found creating bogus paperwork to obtain public money for schools that did not exist. Even counting the real schools in a district proved beyond the capacity of a dysfunctional and corrupt bureaucracy. Nawaz Sharif therefore asked the army to conduct the survey.
The military’s responsibilities expanded further in the former tribal areas. After 9/11, the semi-autonomous borderlands became a haven for jihadists. Their constitutional status was changed in 2018, bringing them into mainstream Pakistan and under federal law. But civilian administrators remain reluctant to live there, partly because the region is poor and offers fewer opportunities for bribery, and partly because jihadists continue to regard officials as assassination targets. Soldiers, unlike many civilian officials, will carry out the tasks assigned to them.
But the argument that the military merely performs functions civilians cannot or will not undertake has never fully explained its power. It has always controlled Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and Pakistan-US relations. Under the post-Khan political order, however, military authority has spread into almost every sphere.
The transformation is particularly visible in the media. Foreign journalists once dealt largely with press officers when applying for visas. Today no journalist’s visa can be issued without explicit military or Inter-Services Intelligence approval. Foreign correspondents may criticise civilian politicians, but criticism of the military can jeopardise future visits.
Domestic media faces still greater pressure. Officers can determine which stories television channels lead with and which words broadcasters use. Khan’s name has effectively been banned, with broadcasters referring to him instead as the ‘founding chairman of the PTI’. Even footage of Pakistan’s 1992 cricket world cup victory can be shown without Khan lifting the trophy.
The suppression of independent journalism has a deadly history. In 2006, journalist Hayatullah Khan published a photograph showing that a US drone had been used on Pakistani soil, contradicting the military’s public denials. He was murdered. Nearly a hundred more journalists were killed in targeted assassinations during the following decade. As direct violence gave way to subtler pressure, media owners became the focus. Today military instructions can arrive through WhatsApp, while only designated retired officers are permitted to speak to journalists.
The army’s reach extends beyond politics and journalism. Business executives who once approached ministers to secure roads for factories now simply ask the army.
Munir’s personal history offers clues to the kind of leader he has become. Raised in a modest family in Rawalpindi, he attended a basic school where forty boys shared classrooms without furniture, with filthy bathrooms and no running water. He later joined the army, won the sword of honour and trained in Malaysia and Japan, learning Japanese during two years abroad. He speaks Arabic, trained Saudi soldiers in Riyadh and learned the Quran by heart in his spare time. He has held the army’s highest positions, including director general of military intelligence and the ISI.
Those who have worked with him describe a guarded, self-contained figure who can be irascible and decisive. He is regarded as a disciplinarian, ruthless towards those who cross him and, unlike some senior officers, not known for corruption. One official told the author: ‘He is an incredible man. When he speaks in meetings, I think molecules stop moving.’
Their history with Khan is personal as well as political. In 2019, while Munir was running the ISI, he complained to Khan that his wife was allowing people around her to make money corruptly. Khan dismissed him from the ISI. When Munir became army chief in November 2022, after Khan’s ousting, the balance of power shifted dramatically.
On 9 May 2023, PTI supporters attacked military installations after Khan’s arrest on corruption charges. Munir detained young men and women connected to army families, breaking with established practice. He also acted against General Faiz Hamid, his former ISI successor, who is now in prison.
A retired senior bureaucrat described Pakistan as having ‘a Trump in uniform’. Munir avoids cameras, but he has adopted a forceful approach to immigration and foreign policy. Pakistan’s air force has attacked targets in Iran, Afghanistan and India, with the same stated message: Pakistan will assert its sovereignty.
The May 2025 confrontation with India strengthened Munir’s standing. After a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 civilians, India accused Islamabad of responsibility and struck militant targets in Pakistan. Munir responded, and Pakistanis widely regard the four-day crisis as a major personal victory for him. Even some pro-democracy politicians grudgingly acknowledge his role.
Yet military success has not resolved Pakistan’s deeper security problems. Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remain affected by insurgencies. The Baloch rebellion, rooted partly in the province’s poverty and its enormous gas reserves, has intensified despite years of military campaigns. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, military deaths in Balochistan rose from 315 in 2024 to 751 last year. In 2025, insurgents hijacked a train and held more than four hundred passengers hostage.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa presents an even more complicated challenge. Pakistan fought the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan between 2008 and 2014, forcing militants into Afghanistan at the cost of tens of thousands of soldiers, civilians and militants. But after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban deteriorated, while TTP fighters were allowed back into Pakistan in 2022. Army officers now acknowledge that decision was a mistake.
The consequences are severe. There are now 4500 Taliban fighters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan, alongside other militant groups. The TTP killed more than 1400 people in Pakistan last year. Militants have access to Nato weapons, including American rifles with night vision, and use quadcopters to drop explosives on military positions.
At the same time, the conflict has become an information war. TTP and Baloch rebel groups produce hundreds of videos each week portraying the army as an instrument of Western interests. Pakistan’s military has attempted to restrict social media platforms, but young Pakistanis have circumvented restrictions through VPNs and new accounts.
Munir has nevertheless gained international support. Donald Trump, who once suspended nearly $900 million in security funding to Pakistan, called Munir his ‘favourite field marshal’ in 2025. Munir co-operated on security matters and swiftly extradited Mohammad Sharifullah, a suspect in the 2021 Kabul airport attack that killed thirteen American soldiers. Trump later hosted Munir at a private White House lunch in June 2025, the first such invitation by a US president to a Pakistani army chief.
Munir has also secured a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia and promoted closer economic links. Pakistan signed an agreement to explore using World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin for cross-border payments, following meetings between Munir and Zach Witkoff, co-founder of the Trump family crypto business.
At home, however, the economy remains uncertain. Inflation has fallen from 38 per cent in 2023 to 6 per cent, Pakistan has recorded its first current account surplus in fourteen years and reserves have reached their highest level since 2022. Yet major international corporations, including Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, Shell, Microsoft, Uber and Yamaha, have left the country.
The military hopes investment from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, together with mineral resources, can transform Pakistan. Munir heads the Special Investment Facilitation Council, but the IMF has questioned whether its opaque decision-making resembles previous failed initiatives. The treatment of independent power producers has also raised concerns about investor confidence. When the government renegotiated power contracts in 2025, foreign investors were summoned to military offices in Rawalpindi. The World Bank and other international institutions warned that non-consultative renegotiation could undermine long-term development and discourage private investment.
Ultimately, Munir faces a political problem that military power cannot easily solve: Imran Khan remains extraordinarily popular. Independent observers estimate his support at 60 per cent or more. His cricketing fame, nationalism, Islamism, defiance of authority and identification with ordinary Pakistanis have created an emotional bond that is difficult for the military to reproduce.
Pakistanis remain divided in their attitudes towards the armed forces. Many take pride in its efficiency, nuclear weapons and military successes. Others resent its dominant role in political life. The army’s fight against jihadists has also produced an uncomfortable question: why did the military help create the militants it is now fighting?
For the moment, Munir does not need to answer that question politically. The civilian opposition is fragmented, PTI has failed to mount major street protests since November 2024, and the country’s principal political parties have accepted military dominance.
Civilian politicians have traditionally drawn strength from their ability to meet voters, hold rallies and take personal risks. Khan remains a symbol of that kind of politics, even from prison. Munir represents something different. He is more feared than loved, but the army can, for now, live with that.
