Absolute civilian supremacy is a fine ideal. It is also, almost everywhere, a myth.
Even the “motherships of democracy” have deep states, security establishments, and military bureaucracies that shape outcomes from behind the curtain. The United States has never passed a full Pentagon audit; in 2023, auditors could not verify roughly 61 percent of the Department of Defense’s reported USD 3.5 trillion in assets, and decades of audits have flagged hundreds of billions in unsupported adjustments. Generals have boxed in presidents on war strategy, as when senior commanders’ leaked assessments narrowed the White House’s choices during the Afghanistan surge. The point is not partisanship; it is power.
Britain celebrates parliamentary control, yet practice can differ. In 2006, the Army Chief, General Richard Dannatt, publicly challenged the government’s policy in Iraq, violating the norm of quiet military advice. The Chilcot Inquiry later laid bare a policy process in which military preferences and planning assumptions steered civilian decisions toward a maximal invasion posture.
Germany’s postwar architecture is designed to prevent such overreach. Still, the NSU neo-Nazi terrorism affair exposed a disturbing reality: domestic intelligence ran paid informants, withheld information from police, destroyed files, and even had an agent at a murder scene. Accountability bent before institutional self-protection. But it is okay because it is Germany, eh!
France’s military is formally under a strong presidency, yet a 2021 open letter from retired and some serving officers warned of “civil war” and implied that the armed forces might have to “maintain order” if leaders failed, an overt challenge to civilian authority. India’s Army calls itself disciplined and professional, but it has effectively vetoed internal security legislation; repeated calls to repeal AFSPA have stalled because the services have insisted on retaining it. Add to that the 2012 anxiety over unusual troop movements toward New Delhi, officially dismissed but revealing of mistrust, and the pattern is clear. Everywhere, unelected security organs can and do shape policy.
If this is true in long-standing democracies, Pakistan’s record should surprise no one. The establishment’s imprint runs from coup to whisper. In 2014, the 126-day Islamabad dharna fronted by Imran Khan and allies tested the sitting government’s writ. Ministers later alleged that former ISI chiefs had midwifed the mobilization. As protestors occupied the capital and even stormed the state broadcaster, the Army warned the government against the use of force and cast itself as “mediator.” The “umpire’s finger” metaphor migrated from cricket to politics, and the Prime Minister finished the crisis evidently weaker than when it began. A hybrid arrangement took hold: the cabinet held office; General Headquarters held the initiative.
Three years earlier, Memogate had already shown where the red lines lay. After the Bin Laden raid, an alleged back-channel memo seeking US help to forestall a coup triggered a high-stakes confrontation. The ISI Chief traveled abroad to collect “evidence” on his own; the Ambassador resigned; the civilian presidency endured only after months of pressure. The message was unmistakable: on national security, the uniform decides who answers to whom.
In 2017, the Panama Papers case achieved through litigation what tanks did not need to attempt. A Supreme Court-mandated Joint Investigation Team included serving officers from ISI and Military Intelligence, even though the inquiry’s core questions were financial. The Prime Minister was removed on a technical omission that convinced many Pakistanis that law had become a lever, not a level. The label “soft coup” stuck because it explained the mechanics better than euphemism.
The older, darker precedent still shadows everything. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s 1979 execution, now widely remembered as a judicial murder, remains the moment when a dictator’s will and a compliant bench extinguished the life of an elected leader. Decades later, the judiciary itself has conceded that Bhutto did not receive a fair trial.
That is not history; that is instruction.
Even farce has taught lessons. In 2019, the extension of the Army Chief’s term became a national spectacle when the government repeatedly misdrafted its own notification, forcing the Supreme Court to grant a six-month conditional reprieve while Parliament retrofitted the law. The perception that the Chief had to nudge the process along only reinforced the reality: the civilian ship of state sails best when the quartermaster in khaki approves the chart.
However, one may disagree and peddle counter-theories, but none of this denies the possibility of improvement. Since 2022, the military’s public posture has been lower, the Director General ISPR is not sermonizing about “Tabdeeli ka Saal,” and serving generals are not freelancing on television as surrogate ministers. The services appear more focused on professional lanes, and high-visibility political messaging from Rawalpindi has diminished. That is a corrective worth noting. It is also an opportunity to think more honestly about Pakistan’s political operating system.
Critics and beneficiaries alike deride the current arrangement as “hybrid,” as if the word itself were disqualifying. What if hybridity is a stage, not a stigma?
If an absolute civilian supremacy has rarely existed even in the West, why demand it as Pakistan’s immediate baseline when institutions, incentives, and history point elsewhere?
The relevant test is simple: does a civ-mil balance deliver stability, economic traction, and incremental institutionalization without inviting the authoritarian excesses of past martial rules? If yes, then the scarlet letter fades. If it fails, then the indictment is earned not because the model is indigenous, but because it is ineffective.
There is a broader global context. The Anglophone canon treats liberal democracy as a universal doctrine. Yet China has delivered decades of growth and social uplift under a one-party state, and the Gulf monarchies have achieved high living standards and internal order within their monarchical systems. One can reject their politics and still concede the empirical point: governance forms are plural; performance matters.
Western democracies themselves have drifted toward gatekeeping by unelected institutions, from central banks to courts to security bureaucracies. The ideal persists; practice diverges. Pakistan’s elites know this, not least because many of them have prospered in both civilian and military dispensations. Principles often end where personal patronage begins.
Pakistan will not import its way to a perfect constitution of power. It will have to evolve one. That argument is not a license for coercion or a permission for impunity. It is a call to structure what already exists, divide labor transparently, narrow the shadow space, and, step by step, move toward more accountable civilian capacity. Stephen P. Cohen insisted that the cure for flawed democracy is better democracy, not incompetent military rule. Anatol Lieven observed that Pakistan is a hard country, resilient because it adapts through its own social logic rather than blueprints from abroad. These are not contradictions; they are complementary truths. They say: build civilian competence deliberately, constrain the military’s political role pragmatically, and do both without wishful thinking.
King Abdullah II once said that democracy has different meanings for different countries. Pakistan should take that as permission to define one that fits its history and hazards. If the present balance can quieten the system, protect the economy, discipline the use of force, and keep unelected power out of the limelight, then call it what you will. Let outcomes, not optics, judge it. Absolute civilian supremacy may be a destination. It has rarely been a starting point.
In the meantime, a Pakistani blend of civilian authority that grows by doing and military influence that recedes by design may be the only path from where the country is to where it wishes to be. The principle is simple: legitimacy by performance, not by label.
