Aqil Shah’s excellent analysis of the fate of Imran Khan includes this important point:
“The military has defied any suggestion of its fractiousness. It has maintained its cohesion to systematically repress the PTI and reclaim its domination of Pakistani public life. . . . the army is still united, in lockstep with directives from its leaders, and bent on stamping out the challenge posed by Khan. . . . the civilian government’s collusion with the military has dashed the faint hope that democracy in the country had a fighting chance”
Ahsan Butt, Dann Naseemullah, and I made a related point in a data-focused piece on the Pakistani military in the Journal of Strategic Studies. It took some twitter criticism for seeming to be laudatory of the Army – because it highlighted its internal cohesion and professional-seeming internal processes – but I thought we were pretty clear that in fact this was a huge problem for democratization in Pakistan because of how the Pakistan Army combines a high degree of internal cohesion with ongoing external politicization and intervention. Most political militaries becomes factionalized, split between hard- and soft-liners, and pulled into party politics and social cleavages. That’s why quantitative analyses show that military regimes tend not to last compared to single-party regimes.
Pakistan’s military has managed to finesse that tendency by continuing to hold itself together during transitions in and out of direct rule and in shaping politics while ostensibly back to the barracks (Myanmar and Egypt are other cases with echoes of this power). It would be much better for meaningful democratic transition if there were in fact major rifts within the military (note: that could cause other problems, of course) that could establish stronger, more consistent civilian bargaining power able to consolidate a transition.
Paul Staniland 