On September 29, U.S. President Donald Trump stood at the White House beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and unveiled a sweeping 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza. In the middle of outlining this vision, Trump paused to name two leaders he said were backing the proposal: Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief.
It was a brief moment but a significant one nonetheless. Their mention reflected not just Trump’s new appreciation for Pakistan but also the political landscape of the country. In one breath, the American president cast Pakistan’s civilian premier and its most powerful general as equals—a clear recognition of the fact that even as Sharif nominally runs the country, real power resides with Munir.
Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the country has vacillated between civilian and military rule. The last coup occurred in 1999, when the army chief Pervez Musharraf unseated then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (Shehbaz’s brother). Pakistan transitioned back to civilian rule in 2008, and a succession of civilian governments have run the country since then, operating with some real independence from the military and able to set parts of the country’s domestic agenda and contest free elections. That is no longer the case. Without any overt coup, the generals now rule, and the civilians serve as window dressing.
Call it the Munir model: military control within the husk of a democratic system. It is the sharpest restructuring of Pakistan’s state since the end of direct military rule in 2008. In this system, the army no longer pulls strings from the shadows. It governs alongside civilian institutions in full public view—drafting policy, directing diplomacy, and steering the economy—while retaining its traditional dominance over security and intelligence matters. This consolidation of authority has now moved from practice into law. In November, the parliament approved a constitutional change that elevates Munir to the head of all branches of the military. It also grants him lifetime legal immunity and a renewable five-year tenure, effectively formalizing an expanded command structure around the army chief and meaning that he could serve up to 10 years in the post.
Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, put it bluntly to me in an interview earlier this year: the political system is now a hybrid one in which the military and the civilian government have “co-ownership of the power structure.” He added, without apology: “The hybrid arrangement, I think, is doing wonders.”
The army chief’s backers would certainly point to the “wonders” of the past year. Under Munir’s watch, Pakistan secured new IMF loans, revived diplomatic channels with the United States, and opened high-level lines of engagement with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and China that have unlocked fresh investment commitments. The military-led Special Investment Facilitation Council has become the government’s central vehicle for fast-tracking foreign investment, particularly in energy, agriculture, and mining. In the view of its supporters, this more centralized, military-anchored governance model has brought coherence to a state long hobbled by political volatility and bureaucratic paralysis.
But with the military now de facto in charge, the generals also have nowhere to hide. They will be held responsible not only for the country’s successes, but also for its failures.
SWALLOWING THE STATE
In April 2022, then Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted in a parliamentary vote of no confidence. At the time, few doubted the army had helped orchestrate his fall. The government that followed, led by Shehbaz Sharif, relied entirely on military support, its authority underwritten by the generals. The military would manage the country’s hardest problems—stabilizing a collapsing economy, controlling political unrest, overseeing counterterrorism operations, and steering critical foreign relationships—while civilians supplied the optics of parliamentary rule.
That dynamic was confirmed by the February 2024 election. Khan’s party, banned by the election regulator, could get on the ballot only by running its candidates as independents. It still won the plurality of seats, but it could not assemble a majority. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party returned to the head of a fragile coalition stitched together with its longtime rival, the Pakistan Peoples Party, and several smaller parties. Although the new government could draw legitimacy from this arithmetic in the National Assembly, it relied just as much on the military’s patronage. The military shapes the political landscape by controlling key security institutions, influencing judicial and administrative outcomes, and mediating between rival parties. That leverage allows it to decide which civilian coalitions can take office and how far they can govern.
The civilians pursued this course because, as one minister in Sharif’s cabinet told me in 2023, “We know we can’t get rid of Imran Khan without the army.” Khan was arrested in August 2023 after being convicted for failing to disclose income from the sale of state gifts he had received while in office, a requirement under Pakistani law. He has remained in jail since. Despite his incarceration, he is still the country’s most popular politician by a wide margin. Confronting him, the minister suggested, was not a fight civilians could win alone. The military’s control of the security apparatus, intelligence services, and key state institutions gave it the ability to contain Khan’s political movement, weaken his party’s organizational space, and shape the political field in ways civilians could not. A tactical alliance between Khan’s opponents and the generals metastasized into a structural transfer of authority.
Two years on, Khan is still behind bars, largely invisible to the public, ensnared in legal proceedings that few Pakistanis believe are fair. The original rationale for removing Khan in 2022 and stabilizing a crisis-ridden political system has receded. But the authority ceded to the military during that moment of civilian weakness has not been recovered. It has only expanded. What started with one man ended with swallowing the state.
THE SUMMER OF THE FIELD MARSHAL
The catalytic moment came in May 2025, during a brief but bruising war with India after a terrorist attack in Indian-held Kashmir that New Delhi blamed on Islamabad. After several days of fighting, both sides climbed down and the guns fell silent. Pakistan claimed victory, and the Pakistani public largely perceived it that way; India and its public did the same. More consequential than the competing narratives of the battlefield was the diplomacy behind the cease-fire: it emerged that the United States had worked directly with Munir, effectively sidelining the prime minister and his cabinet, to end the fighting. An old truth, that the ultimate power over war and peace resides with Pakistan’s generals, became an overt fact, plain to see for Pakistanis and foreigners alike.
The months that followed turned it into a governing principle. In June, Trump hosted Munir at the White House without civilian leaders, the first time a U.S. president received Pakistan’s army chief alone while an elected government was in place. According to the army’s own account, the agenda of the meeting ranged beyond security to include discussions about trade, energy, technology, cryptocurrency, and rare minerals. What once belonged to civilian ministries now sat squarely on the general’s desk.
By late summer, a new economic diplomacy was in motion, spearheaded by Munir. In July, Pakistani officials touted a reciprocal tariff framework with the United States, with Pakistan receiving one of the lowest U.S. tariff rates in the region, 19 percent. Pakistan also entered formal negotiations with the United States about cryptocurrency, mining, and energy projects.
With the military now in charge, the generals have nowhere to hide.
Each of these files now flows through the Special Investment Facilitation Council, a hybrid civil-military body created in 2023 to centralize oversight of foreign investment and strategic industries. Although chaired by the prime minister, the army chief is a member of the SIFC’s highest decision-making body, the Apex Committee, and a serving general is its national coordinator. It was through this new channel that landmark deals began to materialize. For instance, on September 8, Pakistan’s Frontier Works Organization, an army-run conglomerate, signed a $500 million agreement with Missouri-based U.S. Strategic Metals to export rare earths, a deal widely understood in Islamabad to have been overseen personally by Munir.
Then came another Oval Office encounter. On September 26, Munir returned to Washington, this time with Sharif, for a joint White House meeting; it was Munir’s second audience with Trump in a matter of months. The image that traveled furthest online was one of the army chief presenting a tray of Pakistan’s rare minerals and stones to an attentive Trump. A salesman’s prop, yes, but also a manifesto. In Pakistan’s new diplomacy, the army is guarantor, negotiator, and closer.
The contrast with the not-so-distant past is instructive. When Khan visited the White House in 2019, the army chief at the time, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, accompanied him in uniform but stayed in the background, appearing only sparingly in official photographs. In 2025, Munir was not in the room as a discreet minder. He was front and center as a co-architect of policy—exactly as one would expect from officials in a system that has stopped pretending where power lies.
Three days after the Oval Office meeting, Trump named both Sharif and Munir while touting his Gaza plan. The mention pleased Islamabad. It seemed to support the government’s geopolitical pivot, its attempt to position itself as a predictable partner for the United States when Washington is reassessing its bets in South Asia and the Middle East. At a moment of churn in relations between the United States and India, Islamabad can offer its long-standing ties with Gulf monarchies and its unique status as the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state, a combination that can help Washington manage regional crises, retain diplomatic reach in the Gulf, and preserve channels with actors it cannot otherwise influence directly. As a result, the United States now sees Pakistan as more useful than it has in years, a shift in Washington that vindicates the army’s insertion at the forefront of Pakistani diplomacy and dealmaking.
What once belonged to civilian ministries now sits squarely on the general’s desk.
This shift represents less a clean break with the past than a familiar pattern updated for a new era. U.S. presidents have long preferred Pakistani strongmen when strategy demanded speed: Ayub Khan in the 1960s as Washington sought reliable Cold War partners in Asia; Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed anti-Soviet jihad in neighboring Afghanistan; and Musharraf after the 9/11 attacks, when Pakistan became central to the war on terror. The difference today is that Munir, unlike all three of those leaders, has reached this prominent role without engineering a coup. Instead, the military has embedded its primacy inside Pakistan’s formal governing structure, chairing investment bodies, shaping foreign policy, restructuring command authority, and positioning the army chief as a decision-maker across civilian spheres. And many interlocutors abroad seem to prefer the clarity that comes with Pakistan’s men in uniform at the helm.
For the military, too, the embrace of the hybrid regime in full view makes sense. Munir is no ordinary chief. Elevated to the rank of field marshal (the first such promotion in almost six decades) earlier this year, granted a two-year extension to his tenure as army chief, promoted to chief of all the branches of the military, and now bestride the economy, domestic politics, and national security, he is the most powerful general in recent memory.
The paradox of his elevation is that the military had in recent years fallen in the eyes of the country; Khan’s ouster and the subsequent turmoil made millions of Pakistanis who had long backed the military begin to view it as a malign force. In May 2023, Khan’s supporters even attacked military installations, including the corps commander’s residence in Lahore, an unprecedented breach in a country where the army had long enjoyed near-sacrosanct status. The generals appear to have concluded there is little value left in staying in the shadows. Better to claim the role openly and flip the script: rather than being seen as the sinister puppet master, they now cast themselves as a stabilizing force, presenting the military’s grip on power not as an act of subterfuge but as a virtue and a strength.
The calculation is clear: after the May standoff with India burnished their image, the generals recognized that if the economic diplomacy, investment deals, and other initiatives they once shaped from behind the scenes were to win public credibility, they needed to be pursued in the open. In other words, the military decided it wanted public credit for the very deals and negotiations it would previously have left to civilians while quietly steering the outcome. And so today, the military is not only consolidating power but also marketing itself as the country’s indispensable lifeline.
THE VISIBLE HAND
Pakistan has experienced military dictatorships before, but today’s arrangement is not simply a return to the eras of Ayub, Zia, or Musharraf. There has been no coup, no suspension of the constitution, no abrogation of parliament. What makes this moment different, and consequential, is that the military now operates inside the democratic structure rather than apart from it. The generals have functionally taken over the political system without formally replacing it. That blurs institutional boundaries in ways that could reshape Pakistan’s political life for years.
That the invisible has become visible matters. It affects the incentives of the major players, alters Pakistan’s institutions, and shapes the international environment in which the country operates. For one, making the arrangement explicit normalizes military supremacy. Political parties risk becoming administrative appendages rather than meaningful actors. Parliament functions as stagecraft and prime ministers as administrators of decisions made elsewhere. This is the price of the bargain struck to neutralize Khan.
Yet the military’s visibility also creates an unfamiliar kind of accountability. When the army openly sets policy, it inherits outcomes. If growth stalls, if investment sours, if security frays, the generals cannot credibly blame an incompetent cabinet. Power on display must answer for failure as well as success.
The generals have taken over the political system without formally replacing it.
This dynamic is already evident. The military leadership has repeatedly invoked public opinion polling, insistently defended its decisions in press briefings, and sought credit for economic and diplomatic gains. That suggests that the generals are newly sensitive to the risks of being held responsible when gains fail to materialize.
The military’s bypassing of traditional institutions could also be a double-edged sword. Take the Special Investment Facilitation Council, for instance. That it has placed matters to do with foreign investment, natural resources, and strategic industries under the military’s direction could speed decisions and reassure investors. But its consolidation of authority can also hollow out ministries, weaken civilian expertise and suppress the parliamentary scrutiny, media criticism, and opposition oversight that helps democracies self-correct. A state that centralizes competence in a praetorian core becomes brittle. Pakistan’s past military governments show this clearly; military regimes often deliver short bursts of stability, but once growth falters or crises hit, the absence of institutional buffers accelerates breakdown.
Khan’s two-year incarceration adds to the military’s predicament. Now that it governs in the open, it must eventually choose: either resolve his political future through a legitimate judicial or electoral process or enforce his exclusion indefinitely. Both paths are perilous. Rehabilitation could unsettle the new order, whereas endless repression corrodes its legitimacy.
Although some countries, including the United States and the Gulf states, seem happy to deal with a Pakistan led by the military, the army chief’s visible role as de facto leader could constrain Pakistani foreign policy in important ways. Dealings with India will become securitized, running through the military rather than the more conventional civilian bureaucratic channels, making dialogue harder and escalation risks more glaring. In the Middle East, where Pakistan recently signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia, a military-led Pakistan will be drawn deeper into the security calculus of other states, raising the risk of sharp policy divergence with Iran and entanglement in conflicts not of Pakistan’s choosing.
THE STAGE FULLY LIT
For decades, Pakistan’s invisible state allowed the generals to rule without responsibility while civilians absorbed the costs of failure. The Munir model reverses that bargain. By making military power public—putting the army chief in the White House, at the center of tariff policy and oil exploration, at the negotiating table with miners and tech firms—the generals promise efficiency and speed. The bargain also collapses the distance between the uniform and the republic. This is not a creeping coup. It is something slicker: strategic integration. The military has institutionalized its dominance rather than disguised it.
Ironically, Shehbaz Sharif now presides over a system his elder brother, Nawaz Sharif, once resisted. The elder Sharif famously clashed with the military each time he was premier. In 1998, when then army chief Jehangir Karamat proposed a constitutional National Security Council modeled on that in Turkey—a forum that formalized military input in governance—Nawaz saw it as overreach. Days later, Nawaz asked Karamat to step down, the first time a general, not the prime minister, paid the price in Pakistan’s political warfare. Under Shehbaz, the tables have entirely turned.
Strip away the polite language of “co-ownership” and “facilitation,” and the hybrid model is camouflage for an old truth made new: the generals run the show and civilians play along. The difference now is that the curtain is drawn open and the stage fully lit for all to see.
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