ON APRIL 16, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir delivered a speech to a gathering of Pakistanis who had come to Islamabad from different parts of the world. Even by the standards of the Pakistan army, what Munir said was provocative. The entire syllabus of ‘Pakistan Studies’—the country’s hagiography—was regurgitated in a few minutes. All the standard tropes, Hindus and Muslims being different, the ability of the Pakistan army to “fix” Baloch rebels, and the survival of Pakistan against all odds were outlined with gusto in the general’s speech. A week later, four terrorists killed 28 tourists in Pahalgam, India.
The link between the two events is unmistakable. The terrorists, two Pakistanis and two local proxies, are believed to belong to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist organisation incubated and nurtured by the Pakistani state. LeT has a long history of attacking India as a ‘deniable’ front of the Pakistan army, from the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008 to the Pahalgam strike. The Pakistan army has nurtured other organisations for these tasks as well, for example Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
In a normal country the army is tasked with a specific goal: defending it against external enemies and, when called upon by the government, to handle internal security challenges as well. In Pakistan, this paradigm broke very early, in 1958, when the army decided to assume the role of the government. As a result, over time, it became the sole arbiter of national life. The result was the militarisation of every aspect of life in Pakistan. From running fertiliser factories to tackling insurgencies and from keeping provinces in check to indulging in “election engineering”, the army has been everywhere. A single organisation to have multiple—and mostly conflicting—objectives is bound to get overwhelmed at some point. Those strains were visible in Munir’s speech.
Excerpts from "The Rogue Army That Owns Pakistan," by Siddharth Singh published in OPEN Magazine on 25 April 2025. Read the full article here: https://openthemagazine.com/cover-story/the-rogue-army-that-owns-pakistan/
