Reforming Command Without Weakening It - Part 1
Command, Culture, and the Path Pakistan Has Not Yet Tried
That sentence will annoy people on both sides. Some will read it as excusing overreach. Others will think it ignores Pakistan’s political and security reality.
But the point is simpler.
Pakistan needs an Army that is stronger at the work an Army is supposed to do: defend the country, adapt under pressure, give honest professional advice, learn from mistakes, and carry out the elected government’s lawful direction with discipline.
It also needs an Army that helps create the conditions in which civilian institutions can finally do their own jobs properly, instead of repeatedly being pulled back into roles that should not be permanent military responsibilities.
That is
not anti-Army. If anything, it is the strongest long-term argument for a professional Army.
Outright -
here is the value of this proposal and will be repeated at the end:
The three-part reform agenda does not assume Pakistan can reform its way out of hostile geography. India will remain a powerful rival. Afghanistan will remain a complex and vital neighbour. External intelligence activity, economic pressure, and regional competition will remain facts of life.
But reforms can reduce how much those pressures are able to exploit.
- A more adaptive Army is harder to surprise.
- Better joint planning makes deterrence more credible.
- Honest internal reporting reduces strategic mistakes.
- Stronger provincial governance reduces militant recruitment space.
- Local benefit-sharing makes infrastructure harder to sabotage.
- Clear civil-military roles reduce confusion during crises.
- Transparent delivery makes disinformation less persuasive.
- Defined review points prevent useful emergency measures from becoming permanent institutional dependencies.
Pakistan’s senior military leadership has often said it wants a strong, competent, accountable civilian government.
Fair enough. Most people would agree with that goal.
So why does Pakistan still look like a system where the military has such a large role in politics, security, foreign policy, economic coordination, and crisis management?
The answer is not just, “The Army wants power.” That is part of the story, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Institutions protect their interests, budgets, authority, reputation, and influence.
But that is not the whole story either.
A Quick Overview:
Pakistan’s civilian institutions have repeatedly failed to become strong enough to manage difficult problems on their own. Political parties are personality-driven. Bureaucracies are politicized. Local government is inconsistent. Courts are slow. Provinces often do not pass enough authority or money down to districts. When something breaks, everyone looks toward the one institution that can still move quickly, coordinate nationally, and enforce decisions.
That is how military involvement becomes normal.
Not necessarily because every officer wants it, but because the rest of the state keeps leaving a vacuum.
Academic work on Pakistan’s civil-military relations generally points to the same mix: colonial institutional inheritance, weak political parties, civilian institutional fragility, geopolitical pressure, and the military’s own institutional interests.
So this is not a one-villain story.
It is a system problem.
Why “the Army must go” is not realistic reform
A lot of political discussion in Pakistan stops at slogans.
“The Army must go back to the barracks.”
“Civilians should be supreme.”
“The establishment is the problem.”
Some of those arguments point to real issues. But they do not explain what happens the day after a military role disappears.
Who takes over counterterrorism coordination in a district where police are understaffed?
Who runs emergency logistics after floods or earthquakes?
Who protects a major project when local administration cannot manage security?
Who handles a crisis if civilian ministries cannot coordinate with each other?
If the answer is just “civilian government should do it,” that is not a plan. It is an idealistic wish at best.
The question that should be asked is:
How do you reduce permanent military dependence without creating a security or governance vacuum?
That requires reform inside the Army and outside it.
Political Realities:
Pakistan’s parties did not develop into strong, policy-driven institutions competing mainly on performance.
They developed around personalities, families, patronage networks, landowners, electables, biradari structures, and local power brokers.
That is not unique to one party.
PPP has dynastic politics. PML-N has dynastic politics. PTI presented itself as an alternative to that system, and for a while it genuinely looked like one. It tapped into urban middle-class anger, anti-corruption frustration, and a feeling that the same political families had rotated power for too long.
It still relied heavily on electables in 2018. It absorbed the same local power brokers it had criticized in other parties. It did not build strong internal candidate-selection rules, local party institutions, or a policy apparatus that could function independently of Imran Khan.
In short, PTI replaced dynastic personalization with charismatic personalization.
That does not make PTI uniquely bad. It makes it Pakistani!
The deeper problem is that parties often depend on one person, one family, or one informal network. When that happens, they struggle to build institutions that can survive pressure. And when political institutions struggle, the military becomes more relevant by default.
That is not an excuse for military intervention. It is the structural reason civilian politics keeps failing to push it back sustainably.
Where Criticism of the Army goes too far:
Pakistanis often talk about “the Army” as if it has been one unchanging institution since 1947.
That makes emotional sense. It does not always make analytical sense.
Today’s officers operate under different threats, different economic constraints, different technology, different public expectations, and different international realities from officers serving under Ayub, Yahya, Zia, Musharraf, or even the early years of the war on terror.
That does not erase institutional history. It does not erase harm done under earlier periods. It does not mean current officers should be immune from criticism.
It means reform has to leave room for change.
If every generation of officers is told that it will be judged exactly the same regardless of what it does differently, then there is no incentive to behave differently.
A better approach is:
- Be honest about the Army’s institutional role in politics
- Be honest about civilian failures
- Stop treating criticism as treason
- Stop treating every officer as personally responsible for 70 years of history
- Build reforms that current leadership can actually adopt without being asked to publicly humiliate itself
That is the spirit in which the rest of this article is written.
What Reform actually looks like:
If the goal is a more professional Army and a stronger civilian state, reform cannot just be a speech about democracy.
It has to start with how officers are selected, trained, evaluated, and promoted.
Simple idea:
Senior leadership sets the objective, legal limits, and non-negotiable boundaries. Junior officers are trusted to adapt to reality on the ground and report honestly upward.
Military professionals know this as mission command.
It is not indiscipline.
It is not junior officers ignoring orders.
It is not “Western liberalism” being imported into Pakistan.
It is centralized intent, decentralized judgment, and disciplined execution.
It would be inaccurate and disrespectful to the officers who built it - to suggest Pakistan's promotion system is primitive or without merit. Selection boards for Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel already review service records, staff and command experience, professional courses at institutions like Command and Staff College Quetta and the National Defence University, and Annual Confidential Report performance, with identity concealment used up to Brigadier rank specifically to reduce personal bias.
But even good systems can have blind spots.
Where there is strain and how to scaffold it:
Both through written accounts by retired veterans and sporadic articles show that even well designed selection processes are not immune to informal pressure. Officers have publicly alleged that Central Selection Board outcomes were influenced by unverified intelligence based assessments, and a court has ruled that officers cannot be denied promotion on the basis of such assessments without being informed of the specific allegations and given a genuine opportunity to respond. This example is not specific to the Army, but it illustrates a pattern that any honest reform proposal has to reckon with directly: a selection process that looks objective on paper can still be shaped by informal signaling that never appears in any written record.
The solution is not to remove standards. It is to make them clearer.
Intake and selection should test explicitly for the ability to distinguish disagreement from disrespect, the capacity to revise a judgment after new evidence, and decision-making under incomplete information, alongside the physical and character standards already in place. This does not mean selecting for rebellion. It means selecting officers confident enough that a question does not register as an insult.
However, this is where the previous paragraph's aspect has a direct implication for anything resembling a "candour" or "openness" evaluation criterion. If poorly designed, such a criterion could be quietly turned into the opposite of its intent. Historically there are recorded pretexts Where an officer who was simply doing his job by raising a hard question, is penalized by dressed up reports as a judgment about his "attitude" or "reliability." That risk is real, and any credible version of this reform has to build in the same kind of procedural safeguard the courts have already required elsewhere: clear written criteria, disclosure of specific concerns, and a genuine right to respond before any evaluation affects a career. Without that safeguard, a red-team or structured-dissent mechanism becomes theater at best, and a new tool for retaliation at worst. It has to be protected by design, not by good intentions alone.
A good officer should be able to say:
- “This operation achieved the immediate objective, but local resentment is increasing”
- “The intelligence picture is weaker than the briefing suggests”
- “The civilian department has not followed through after the operation”
- “This development project is creating local tension”
- “The plan needs changing because conditions on the ground changed”
That does not mean officers get to ignore final decisions.
It means the chain of command gets a better picture before making those decisions. A force that hides bad news from itself eventually pays for it in the field.
There is good news..
Training Infrastructure Is More Ready Than Skeptics Assume:
There is documented institutional appetite for exactly this kind of shift and it does not need to be imported as an external idea.
Existing curriculum-development discussions among Pakistani defence planners already identify gaps around low-intensity conflict, decentralized operations, and preparing junior leaders for complex, non-linear environments. In other words, the institution's own internal planning literature has already flagged that junior officers need more structured practice in autonomous decision-making - not less. This suggests that a mission-command and structured-critique curriculum addition would be building on a gap the institution has already identified for itself, rather than imposing an unfamiliar external standard
Pakistan's officer corps also has real, if uneven, exposure to allied mission-command doctrine through international training exchanges but that exposure is currently contingent on external political relationships rather than a stable internal pipeline, but it demonstrates that the institution can absorb and apply this kind of training when the opportunity exists. The task is to make that capability internally generated and consistent, rather than dependent on the state of a particular bilateral relationship in a given year.
A commander who gets results by creating fear, punishing questions, and rewarding flattery may look effective in the short term. But he leaves behind officers who are afraid to think independently.
A commander who maintains discipline while allowing professional questions creates a stronger unit over time.
Possible evaluation categories could include:
- Quality of mentorship
- Willingness to accept professional challenge
- Accuracy of reporting
- How junior officers perform after serving under that commander
- Whether after-action reviews lead to actual learning
- Whether the command climate rewards initiative within lawful limits
A Honest reality check:
This is where the proposal has to be most careful, because overpromising here would undermine its own credibility. Pakistan's Army is one of the largest standing forces in the world, and officer intake at PMA Kakul happens at genuine scale. Selecting for traits like tolerance of ambiguity or the capacity to revise judgment under new evidence requires trained assessors and validated tools. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources Pakistan does not currently have widely documented, specialized psychometric infrastructure for these specific traits at mass-intake scale. Publicly described selection criteria emphasize physical fitness, academic performance, and background and security vetting rather than structured cognitive-flexibility assessment.
Recognizing this constraint changes the sequencing of the proposal, and makes it considerably more realistic. Rather than attempting to retrofit new psychometric assessment into mass officer-cadet intake immediately which would inevitability strain assessor capacity and risk becoming a superficial checklist.
The best place to pilot these reforms is at Command and Staff College and National Defence University, where officers are more experienced, cohorts are smaller, and serious professional reflection is already part of the environment.
Pilot:
- Structured dissent exercises
- Red-team planning
- Decision-making under incomplete information
- After-action reviews focused on learning
- Scenario-based assessment of judgment and adaptability
- Training on how to challenge a plan professionally without undermining command
Then test whether it works.
If it does, refine it. Build assessment capability. Train instructors. Only then consider adapting parts of it for earlier-career development and eventually PMA-level intake.
What This Would Mean in Practice
Put together, a credible and properly sequenced version of this reform would involve:
- Adding candour, mentoring quality, and command-climate outcomes as formal evaluation categories within the existing Selection Board process for Lieutenant Colonel and above which is not a parallel or new bureaucratic structure.
- Building explicit procedural safeguards into any new "openness" criteria, modeled on existing legal precedent requiring disclosure and a right to respond, so the mechanism cannot be repurposed as an informal loyalty test in either direction.
- Piloting structured-dissent and red-team training first at Command and Staff College and National Defence University level, where the institution has already identified curriculum gaps and where smaller cohorts make careful evaluation possible.
- Treating any change to PMA-level intake as a longer-term, second-phase objective, contingent on validated assessment tools developed through the senior/mid-career pilot instead of an immediate mass rollout.
- Maintaining full discipline, chain of command, and legal authority throughout: none of this proposes any reduction in command authority, only an addition to how professional judgment is trained, evaluated, and rewarded once lawful decisions are made.
In simple terms - Before a major operation, development project, or security decision, a red team asks:
- What are we assuming?
- What could go wrong?
- What local response are we underestimating?
- What would an adversary exploit?
- What information would prove this plan is failing?
- What are we not hearing because people are afraid to say it?
This is useful in war. It is useful in counterterrorism. It is useful in disaster response. It is useful in planning major infrastructure projects. AND the ARMY ALREADY DOES THIS IN WAR GAMES AND EXERCISES.
Why This Serves the Institution's Own Stated Goals
None of this asks any serving officer, at any rank, to compromise loyalty, discipline, or professional judgment about operational security. It asks the institution, deliberately and over a generation, to build the internal habits that would make its own repeatedly stated preference : a strong, competent, self-sustaining civilian government. This makes it genuinely achievable rather than a phrase repeated across successive tenures without structural follow-through.
An officer corps trained from selection onward to distinguish a valid question from a challenge to authority is also an officer corps less reflexively inclined to treat civilian oversight itself as a threat to institutional competence. That shift does not happen through a single policy announcement, and it will not happen if today's leadership is treated as merely the next chapter in an unbroken, unchanging story rather than as a potential partner working under real constraints inherited from decisions made long before their own service began.
Pakistan's civilian institutions carry an equal, and in many respects larger, share of the work still required such as rebuilding parties around policy and internal democracy rather than personality or family, professionalizing a bureaucracy that has been politicized for generations, and building parliamentary and judicial capacity strong enough to make constitutional boundaries something more than a phrase in a speech. That work is not the Army's to do alone, and no honest version of this argument suggests otherwise.
But if the institution's own leadership, across successive tenures, has genuinely wanted a Pakistan where strong civilian government does not require a permanent guarantor — this is what building toward that outcome would actually require: not less discipline, but discipline extended further into the habits of learning, honest reporting, and institutional self-correction that any professional force ultimately depends on to remain effective over the long term.
End of Part 1
