Oscar
Moderator
Why "Hybrid" Is Not Automatically the Problem
In part 1 I talked about the first set of reforms - intake, training, promotion to further streamline and upgrade the internal culture of the institution. But internal culture reform alone will not resolve Pakistan's civil-military question, because the deeper issue is not merely how officers are trained. It is what role the Army occupies in the state's economic, foreign policy, and security architecture, and whether that role is structured as a temporary crutch or a permanent, unaccountable co-ownership arrangement.
Recently, the current defence minister has publicly described the current arrangement as "co-ownership of the power structure," stating plainly that "there is no superimposed system... which dictates" the Prime Minister, but that he is "in regular consultation with the establishment on all levels," and that joint platforms like the Special Investment Facilitation Council now allow military and civilian leadership to "sit together and decide about the business." This is a genuinely unusual admission and something not to be dismissed or tiraded against endlessly under the guise of standing up to hegemony and injustice. This structure has been slowly in the works even with the former government. It describes a real institutional design choice Pakistan has made, whether by consensus or default.
Pakistan Does Not Need a Military Withdrawal. It Needs a Better Civil-Military Settlement
Regardless of idealism and political alignment or plain personality based emotional outbursts - An abrupt and complete military withdrawal from economic and security coordination is not realistic. In the short term, it might not even be stabilizing.
The more useful question is:
How can Pakistan turn the current arrangement into a genuine equilibrium rather than allowing it to become permanent, unreviewed military primacy?
That distinction matters because permanent political ownership is not even aligned with the Army leadership's repeatedly stated interest in a stable, capable, and functional civilian state.
A serious reform argument should resist the reflex to treat every military role in economic or security policy as automatically illegitimate.
The Army chief's public and strategic portfolio now reaches into trade, economic development, mines and minerals, energy, technology, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and other areas traditionally led by civilian ministries. That expansion creates legitimate concern among Pakistanis who worry that opportunity depends on proximity to powerful institutions, and among investors who need predictable rules, clear authority, and continuity beyond individual relationships
This matters especially in a young country. Pakistan's youth need to believe that professional success, entrepreneurship, and public service are available through transparent institutions and not only through connections, patronage, or proximity to the state’s strongest institution.
But the concern is not that the military has any involvement in these sectors. Militaries in many countries have infrastructure functions, strategic-resource responsibilities, engineering capacity, and security roles that interact with the economy. That alone does not amount to authoritarian capture.
The real question is simpler:
The debate over command extensions shows why Pakistan needs more nuance:
The standard criticism is that every extension of senior military tenure is automatically institutionally harmful. That is too simple. Pakistan has faced periods of acute economic pressure, domestic violence, regional tension, and international uncertainty. In those circumstances, continuity in senior command can have a rational security case.
Recent analysis of the current period argues that General Asim Munir consolidated authority and formalized a stronger military role, but places this development within an unusually difficult economic and security environment rather than presenting it as an isolated act disconnected from circumstance. A separate study of military influence and democratic outcomes between 2010 and 2024 reaches a similarly mixed conclusion: the effect of military centrality is not fixed. It changes with security conditions, economic stress, and the actual capacity of civilian institutions.
The important point is not that every extension is good. It is that an extension should be judged by its justification, safeguards, and review—not by automatic praise or automatic condemnation.
A security-driven extension during a defined crisis is one thing. An exceptional arrangement that becomes permanent merely because nobody revisits it is another.
The same principle applies to the Army's role in infrastructure and welfare through bodies such as the Frontier Works Organisation and Fauji Foundation. Critics often point to these entities as evidence of “Military Inc.” That criticism cannot simply be ignored. These organizations create real questions around economic influence, competition, transparency, and the long-term boundary between military and civilian work.
But the picture is more complicated than either side often admits.
Research on Pakistan's military presence in development sectors finds that the institution often sees itself as responsible for nation-building where civilian capacity is weak: difficult-terrain infrastructure, disaster response, logistics, and service delivery in under-administered areas. This role can be genuinely useful and, in many cases, popular with communities that have seen promises from civilian governments go unfulfilled.
That usefulness is exactly why the role becomes hard to reverse. An openly political intervention can be challenged easily because the line is clear. A road, a bridge, a hospital, disaster relief, or an engineering project is harder to challenge because it solves a visible problem.
So the correct question is not whether military-supported development should exist at all. It is whether such roles are linked to a clear civilian-capacity plan, transparent performance standards, and a review process that asks whether a civilian body is now ready to take the lead.
The goal of this article then is to propose exactly that missing feature and not a demand for immediate withdrawal, but a case for converting today's coordination into a rules-based partnership with defined review points.
The Core Design Problem: No Exit Ramp
Pakistan's current arrangements in economic coordination, command continuity, security-led development, and infrastructure involvement simply do not usually contain a clearly defined point at which the country asks:
Are the conditions that justified this arrangement still present?
The problem is not military influence by itself. The problem is that the influence has no agreed conditions under which it recedes.
A joint economic platform may be necessary during an investment crisis. A command extension may be justified during an active security transition. Military engineering may be essential where a civilian agency lacks the ability to operate safely or effectively.
But none of these should continue forever simply because they worked once.
The earliest structural cause predates any specific military ambition. At independence, Pakistan inherited a colonial "diarchic" governance system in which bureaucracy and the military, not elected representatives, were designed as the central administrative pillars. Civilian political leadership chose to continue this arrangement rather than dismantle it, which laid the groundwork for what scholars call the "Troika system" — a power-sharing arrangement between the president, the military, and civilian government that became entrenched in Pakistani politics after 1972. That was a civilian institutional choice, not a military imposition, and it built permanence into the system from the very start rather than any temporary arrangement with a defined end.
Political parties share responsibility as well.
Research on Pakistan's military disengagement shows that openings for a reduced military role have often appeared during moments of political change or crisis. However, civilian parties often failed to consolidate those openings. Instead of jointly building rules that would restrain every actor, rivals sought institutional backing against each other.
That is the basic trap: politicians often prefer temporary advantage over rules that would restrict them later.
A party that wants military support against its opponent will not build an independent system. A party that gains power through informal support will not easily create rules that make such support impossible in the future. The result is that civilian actors repeatedly ask the institution they criticize to help manage the crisis created by civilian political competition.
This is important not because the military blocked it, but because rival civilian factions repeatedly calculated that inviting continued military involvement against a domestic opponent was more useful than building a lasting constraint that would apply to them as well.
None of this removes the Army's institutional interest in economic influence, security policy, or strategic direction. It does mean that Pakistan's lack of a civil-military “exit ramp” was jointly created over decades by military actors, civilian politicians, courts, constitutional arrangements, and the inherited state structure.
That matters because the solution must also be joint. It cannot be achieved through the Army acting alone, Parliament acting alone, or political parties acting alone.
The same approach from Part 1 applies here: build on structures that already exist rather than pretending the entire system can be rebuilt overnight.
Three reforms would make the current model more stable, more legitimate, and easier to adjust over time.
Rather than arguing that SIFC should disappear, the better question is whether its mandate should include:
This is not radical. Sunset clauses and scheduled review are standard legislative tools designed to prevent emergency or special-purpose bodies from continuing by inertia. Comparative research finds that sunset mechanisms force affirmative reconsideration: an institution can be renewed, changed, consolidated, or closed, but it cannot simply become permanent because nobody revisited it.
For Pakistan, each sector under joint coordination should have specific civilian “graduation” requirements. These could include:
But jointness works only when each service retains the ability to provide its independent professional judgment.
Analysts have raised concerns that a more integrated command structure could reduce the independent planning autonomy of individual services if safeguards are not built in. This is not an accusation against any current officer or service. It is a design issue faced by militaries everywhere.
The United States faced comparable problems during its own jointness reforms. The Goldwater-Nichols Act succeeded not simply because it created more integration, but because it established clear roles, planning processes, and statutory responsibilities for the services.
Pakistan can take the principle without copying the model.
A balanced system would ensure:
Many of these links are real. Energy security affects defense readiness. Critical minerals affect technology. Cybersecurity affects both state and private networks. Strategic infrastructure requires protection.
But if every important economic issue becomes a security issue, then security institutions will eventually have a reason to sit in every major policy forum.
That is not necessarily because anyone intends permanent expansion. It happens because “national security” is an elastic term. Once a sector is considered strategically important, it becomes hard to argue that security institutions should have less involvement.
Comparative research on national-security powers repeatedly finds that emergency or security-based authority tends to endure and broaden unless its scope is narrowly defined and regularly reviewed. The earlier a state writes down the boundary, the easier it is to enforce later. Waiting until the definition has already expanded makes correction far harder.
Pakistan should therefore define, through law and policy, which economic domains require formal joint civil-military coordination. A narrow initial category could include:
The point is not to push the Army out of genuine security concerns. It is to prevent the definition of “security” from expanding until it means everything—and therefore limits nothing.
Concluded in part 3
In part 1 I talked about the first set of reforms - intake, training, promotion to further streamline and upgrade the internal culture of the institution. But internal culture reform alone will not resolve Pakistan's civil-military question, because the deeper issue is not merely how officers are trained. It is what role the Army occupies in the state's economic, foreign policy, and security architecture, and whether that role is structured as a temporary crutch or a permanent, unaccountable co-ownership arrangement.
Recently, the current defence minister has publicly described the current arrangement as "co-ownership of the power structure," stating plainly that "there is no superimposed system... which dictates" the Prime Minister, but that he is "in regular consultation with the establishment on all levels," and that joint platforms like the Special Investment Facilitation Council now allow military and civilian leadership to "sit together and decide about the business." This is a genuinely unusual admission and something not to be dismissed or tiraded against endlessly under the guise of standing up to hegemony and injustice. This structure has been slowly in the works even with the former government. It describes a real institutional design choice Pakistan has made, whether by consensus or default.
Pakistan Does Not Need a Military Withdrawal. It Needs a Better Civil-Military Settlement
Regardless of idealism and political alignment or plain personality based emotional outbursts - An abrupt and complete military withdrawal from economic and security coordination is not realistic. In the short term, it might not even be stabilizing.
The more useful question is:
How can Pakistan turn the current arrangement into a genuine equilibrium rather than allowing it to become permanent, unreviewed military primacy?
That distinction matters because permanent political ownership is not even aligned with the Army leadership's repeatedly stated interest in a stable, capable, and functional civilian state.
Why “The Army Must Go” Is Not a Reform Plan
A serious reform argument should resist the reflex to treat every military role in economic or security policy as automatically illegitimate.
The Army chief's public and strategic portfolio now reaches into trade, economic development, mines and minerals, energy, technology, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and other areas traditionally led by civilian ministries. That expansion creates legitimate concern among Pakistanis who worry that opportunity depends on proximity to powerful institutions, and among investors who need predictable rules, clear authority, and continuity beyond individual relationships
This matters especially in a young country. Pakistan's youth need to believe that professional success, entrepreneurship, and public service are available through transparent institutions and not only through connections, patronage, or proximity to the state’s strongest institution.
But the concern is not that the military has any involvement in these sectors. Militaries in many countries have infrastructure functions, strategic-resource responsibilities, engineering capacity, and security roles that interact with the economy. That alone does not amount to authoritarian capture.
The real question is simpler:
- Is military involvement clearly defined?
- Is it accountable to a lawful framework?
- Is it reviewed regularly?
- Is there a realistic plan for civilian institutions to take over functions they can perform?
- Or does the arrangement keep expanding because it is useful in the short term and nobody defines when it should narrow again?
The debate over command extensions shows why Pakistan needs more nuance:
The standard criticism is that every extension of senior military tenure is automatically institutionally harmful. That is too simple. Pakistan has faced periods of acute economic pressure, domestic violence, regional tension, and international uncertainty. In those circumstances, continuity in senior command can have a rational security case.
Recent analysis of the current period argues that General Asim Munir consolidated authority and formalized a stronger military role, but places this development within an unusually difficult economic and security environment rather than presenting it as an isolated act disconnected from circumstance. A separate study of military influence and democratic outcomes between 2010 and 2024 reaches a similarly mixed conclusion: the effect of military centrality is not fixed. It changes with security conditions, economic stress, and the actual capacity of civilian institutions.
The important point is not that every extension is good. It is that an extension should be judged by its justification, safeguards, and review—not by automatic praise or automatic condemnation.
A security-driven extension during a defined crisis is one thing. An exceptional arrangement that becomes permanent merely because nobody revisits it is another.
The same principle applies to the Army's role in infrastructure and welfare through bodies such as the Frontier Works Organisation and Fauji Foundation. Critics often point to these entities as evidence of “Military Inc.” That criticism cannot simply be ignored. These organizations create real questions around economic influence, competition, transparency, and the long-term boundary between military and civilian work.
But the picture is more complicated than either side often admits.
Research on Pakistan's military presence in development sectors finds that the institution often sees itself as responsible for nation-building where civilian capacity is weak: difficult-terrain infrastructure, disaster response, logistics, and service delivery in under-administered areas. This role can be genuinely useful and, in many cases, popular with communities that have seen promises from civilian governments go unfulfilled.
That usefulness is exactly why the role becomes hard to reverse. An openly political intervention can be challenged easily because the line is clear. A road, a bridge, a hospital, disaster relief, or an engineering project is harder to challenge because it solves a visible problem.
So the correct question is not whether military-supported development should exist at all. It is whether such roles are linked to a clear civilian-capacity plan, transparent performance standards, and a review process that asks whether a civilian body is now ready to take the lead.
The goal of this article then is to propose exactly that missing feature and not a demand for immediate withdrawal, but a case for converting today's coordination into a rules-based partnership with defined review points.
The Core Design Problem: No Exit Ramp
Pakistan's current arrangements in economic coordination, command continuity, security-led development, and infrastructure involvement simply do not usually contain a clearly defined point at which the country asks:
Are the conditions that justified this arrangement still present?
The problem is not military influence by itself. The problem is that the influence has no agreed conditions under which it recedes.
A joint economic platform may be necessary during an investment crisis. A command extension may be justified during an active security transition. Military engineering may be essential where a civilian agency lacks the ability to operate safely or effectively.
But none of these should continue forever simply because they worked once.
The earliest structural cause predates any specific military ambition. At independence, Pakistan inherited a colonial "diarchic" governance system in which bureaucracy and the military, not elected representatives, were designed as the central administrative pillars. Civilian political leadership chose to continue this arrangement rather than dismantle it, which laid the groundwork for what scholars call the "Troika system" — a power-sharing arrangement between the president, the military, and civilian government that became entrenched in Pakistani politics after 1972. That was a civilian institutional choice, not a military imposition, and it built permanence into the system from the very start rather than any temporary arrangement with a defined end.
Political parties share responsibility as well.
Research on Pakistan's military disengagement shows that openings for a reduced military role have often appeared during moments of political change or crisis. However, civilian parties often failed to consolidate those openings. Instead of jointly building rules that would restrain every actor, rivals sought institutional backing against each other.
That is the basic trap: politicians often prefer temporary advantage over rules that would restrict them later.
A party that wants military support against its opponent will not build an independent system. A party that gains power through informal support will not easily create rules that make such support impossible in the future. The result is that civilian actors repeatedly ask the institution they criticize to help manage the crisis created by civilian political competition.
This is important not because the military blocked it, but because rival civilian factions repeatedly calculated that inviting continued military involvement against a domestic opponent was more useful than building a lasting constraint that would apply to them as well.
None of this removes the Army's institutional interest in economic influence, security policy, or strategic direction. It does mean that Pakistan's lack of a civil-military “exit ramp” was jointly created over decades by military actors, civilian politicians, courts, constitutional arrangements, and the inherited state structure.
That matters because the solution must also be joint. It cannot be achieved through the Army acting alone, Parliament acting alone, or political parties acting alone.
Design Principles Adapted to Pakistan's Starting Point
The answer is not to import a foreign model wholesale. Pakistan needs a settlement based on its own security environment, institutional reality, and social needs.The same approach from Part 1 applies here: build on structures that already exist rather than pretending the entire system can be rebuilt overnight.
Three reforms would make the current model more stable, more legitimate, and easier to adjust over time.
1. Give Joint Economic Bodies a Defined Review Cycle
The Special Investment Facilitation Council is Pakistan's clearest example of joint civil-military economic coordination.Rather than arguing that SIFC should disappear, the better question is whether its mandate should include:
- A defined scope of authority
- A fixed review cycle
- Technical targets for civilian ministries to meet
- Parliamentary reauthorization after a set period
- A process for returning sectors to normal civilian management once capacity exists
This is not radical. Sunset clauses and scheduled review are standard legislative tools designed to prevent emergency or special-purpose bodies from continuing by inertia. Comparative research finds that sunset mechanisms force affirmative reconsideration: an institution can be renewed, changed, consolidated, or closed, but it cannot simply become permanent because nobody revisited it.
For Pakistan, each sector under joint coordination should have specific civilian “graduation” requirements. These could include:
- A functioning regulatory framework
- Qualified civilian technical staff
- A stable budget and procurement process
- A defined period of fiscal and security stability
- Independent performance evidence
2. Build Balanced Representation Into Any Joint Command Structure
Pakistan's new higher-defence structure seeks greater integration. That goal is sensible. Modern conflict requires coordination across land, air, sea, cyber, intelligence, logistics, and information systems.But jointness works only when each service retains the ability to provide its independent professional judgment.
Analysts have raised concerns that a more integrated command structure could reduce the independent planning autonomy of individual services if safeguards are not built in. This is not an accusation against any current officer or service. It is a design issue faced by militaries everywhere.
The United States faced comparable problems during its own jointness reforms. The Goldwater-Nichols Act succeeded not simply because it created more integration, but because it established clear roles, planning processes, and statutory responsibilities for the services.
Pakistan can take the principle without copying the model.
A balanced system would ensure:
- Independent service planning staffs
- Direct professional input from each service to the National Security Committee
- Transparent joint capability planning
- Protected service-level expertise in budgeting and procurement
- Joint appointments based on competence and operational need, not merely institutional weight
3. Defining the Boundary of "Security" and "Development"
Pakistan now treats a growing number of economic sectors as national-security questions: energy, minerals, artificial intelligence, cyber systems, cryptocurrency, food security, logistics, and strategic infrastructure.Many of these links are real. Energy security affects defense readiness. Critical minerals affect technology. Cybersecurity affects both state and private networks. Strategic infrastructure requires protection.
But if every important economic issue becomes a security issue, then security institutions will eventually have a reason to sit in every major policy forum.
That is not necessarily because anyone intends permanent expansion. It happens because “national security” is an elastic term. Once a sector is considered strategically important, it becomes hard to argue that security institutions should have less involvement.
Comparative research on national-security powers repeatedly finds that emergency or security-based authority tends to endure and broaden unless its scope is narrowly defined and regularly reviewed. The earlier a state writes down the boundary, the easier it is to enforce later. Waiting until the definition has already expanded makes correction far harder.
Pakistan should therefore define, through law and policy, which economic domains require formal joint civil-military coordination. A narrow initial category could include:
- Critical infrastructure with direct defense implications
- Strategic minerals with clear foreign-security exposure
- Cyber systems connected to defense and essential national infrastructure
- Emergency logistics during disasters or conflict
The point is not to push the Army out of genuine security concerns. It is to prevent the definition of “security” from expanding until it means everything—and therefore limits nothing.
Concluded in part 3
