The history of Pakistan is less than a century old, yet across its brief and turbulent dawns, it has remained in a perpetual state of emergency, a twilight of crises cultivated primarily by its erring, inept and cardinally corrupt armed forces.
Soon after the country's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah's untimely death barely a year into existence, the army, trained and schooled by their British colonial masters to serve the interests of the foreign rulers, the newly adopted ranks reneged from its sacred duty of standing sentinel against external threats to courting shadows instead.
Since then, the military has done everything but its prime duty. As a result, Pakistan has faltered in every realm. Despite being well armed and possessing good human resources, the army cannot fight a ragtag group of militias - from the Baloch insurgents to the Tehreek Taliban militants. Both these groups, together with other Islamist or nationalist groups would not exceed a few thousand. Yet, dozens of military operations in the past two decades have failed to subdue them.
These operations are often named after Qura'nic or Arabic terms to provoke some religious sentiment among the populations barely literate to signify religious nature of the war and demand acquiescence.
But due to the rampant allegations of corruption fuelled by the opulent lifestyle of the generals’ post-retirement and lack of any parliamentary oversight on the military-run business empires, there are whispers in public square that the military top brass lacks any motivation to go and engage the so-called terrorists in the field. Rather, they prefer Baloch renegade groups patronised by the army to fight and die unceremoniously alongside their junior ranks.
In the latest operation on Tirah in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the army ordered thousands of civilians to leave their homes amid biting cold and snow. When the public outcry over their conditions grew, the army, rather than apologising, claimed they never ordered the exodus.
The Fauji Commercial Enterprise
That the Pakistan Army can't fight is now openly being discussed and people attribute it to their businessman-like institutional upbringing. The army has woven itself into the very fabric of commerce, finding an unending list of gainful diversions that keeps on growing as the country falters.
Beyond the parade ground that has become laden with meaningless ceremonies aimed at provoking awe and fear among its own citizens, it tends fields of enterprise: manufacturing the morning’s corn flakes, the builder’s cement, the household’s milk, and the nation’s telecommunications. It has mastered the alchemy of turning wild, sovereign land into gilded housing communities.
But this is merely the respectable façade.
The latest is the controversy involving the once coveted national airline carrier - Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) - that served as the template for several national airlines in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. When the auction for PIA was recently initiated, the Fauji Fertilizer, a military-run business, was a top contender, only to quit last minute, after the public outcry. However, it plans to rejoin the winner once it is decided.
PIA's glory might now be relegated to shame, but the army will reap the benefits of the forthcoming fire sale. This shall provoke some nostalgic table talk among the military elite of yesterday, a sizeable chunk of which revels in luxury, while their less fortunate countrymen live in disgrace and die in abject anonymity, not even worthy of making it into drab and ignoble statistical logbooks.
Cross-border Smuggling
In the unforgiving climate of Balochistan's endless and ever shifting landscape of contrasts, a darker commerce thrives. The personnel are alleged artisans of smuggling, moving precious stones, drugs, and a river of black gold—millions of barrels of Iranian petroleum—across porous borders. The scale suggests they are more than mere allegations floated to tarnish the image of the Pakistan military.
Balochistan is totally under the jackboot of the Pakistan army; it controls all the ingress and egress points and deploys heavily across the territory. This ‘oil smuggling’ from Iran is so large-scale and conducted in broad daylight that thousands of motorcycles and pickup trucks cannot pass when the military is on high alert to thwart ‘terrorists’ and their movement. The operation conjures hundreds of millions of US dollars, a clandestine treasury that quietly whispers across the Arabian Sea to the UAE aboard nimble launch boats.
Beyond negotiating the tides at the high seas, the men in mufti run the dominion on the streets and have turned the chaos into a perpetual stream of hard cash. Military commanders, in their satrapies, actively collude with politicians, to patronise local criminal networks – ‘ghosts’ who snatch phones, lift cars, orchestrate the planned kidnapping of wealthy businessmen, and takeover vacant plots of government land to build flats or commercial premises. The latter is called ‘qabza mafia’, a defuse term that hides the real perpetrators from public scrutiny.
The story of Asim Munir, the current army Chief who crowned himself a Field Marshall through a pliant civilian factotum government run by inept and discredited politicians, is no different. During his time in Karachi as Corps Commander, some of his actions that came to public attention were beyond his job description. In one such incident that came to light, he was accused of demanding a king’s ransom, over 500,000 USD, from Sheikh Mahmood Iqbal, the CEO of Master Tiles.
Iqbal etched his despair into a detailed letter to then-Prime Minister Imran Khan, dated June 5, 2021, a parchment describing the meeting with the Lieutenant General and the subsequent, chilling demand for ninety crore rupees—a testament to impunity wearing a uniform. Munir allegedly offered him safe routes for smuggling his produce to central Asia, which could result in hundreds of millions in saved taxes and other duties. While Iqbal’s claims are no proof that the real crime took place, the silence and inaction of the government gave rise to suspicion and has since been used to further discredit the army.
Collaborators and Doomsday Narrative
From the peaks of politics to the deep marrow of business, and across the fertile plains of social and political thought, the Pakistan Army commands the landscape. A fraction of its largesse feeds a manufactured chorus—an army of local journalists, opinion-makers, and mullahs, from flashy wheeler-dealers to humble village preachers. They are goaded to deliver sermons on the hitherto hidden and magical qualities of the military chief, weaving a mythology of indispensability, duly picked up by the pliant journalists in order to manufacture consent.
During the time of Munir’s predecessor, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, a media clip on social media went viral showing an imam at a ramshackle village masjid claiming that Bajwa was a pious man who prayed five times a day, and had never watched an Indian movie.
To its credit, the military-run establishment has crafted a comprehensive, capillary network within almost all groups: political parties, religious assemblies, and the very guilds of discourse like journalists' associations. This machine generates an unending supply of narratives—glorious or grim—designed to captivate, confuse, and ultimately divide the people’s attention and energies, keeping them lost in a labyrinth of manufactured crises.
The perennial refrain, in drawing rooms and on television screens, has always been that Pakistan is forever on a precipice. In Urdu, this state of perpetual jeopardy has been memorialised by the now-famous, sorrowful line: ‘Mulk ek nazuk morh say guzar raha hai’—the country is negotiating a critical, delicate bend in the road.
This euphemistic doomsday mantra served as a command for correction and a tool for expectation management, conditioning people to believe their so-called ideological fortress was under eternal siege. The sacrifice demanded was always their own: lowered dreams, forfeited rights, and the possibility of a fair life endlessly deferred.
This incantation worked so perfectly for so long that it hardened into gospel truth within the garrisons themselves, among personnel often raised in a rigid, rustic rationale that venerates obedience and discourages the treacherous spirit of inquiry.
Yet, after Imran Khan’s ouster as the Prime Minister, a new air stirs. The seasons have turned. The population, younger and wired to a wider world, is no longer receptive to the old tales of the "nazuk morh." The spells are breaking.
Everything from brute coercion to midnight kidnapping has failed to restore the old enchantment. But in the high offices, Asim Munir, a disciple of the old liturgy, insists on reciting from the faded script, even as the audience has left the theater and the stage creaks under the weight of its own crumbling illusions.
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