Owen Bennett-Jones: Munir’s Victory

Owen Bennett-Jones on Pakistan

Under Munir Pakistan has become a mediator between the US and Iran. Pakistanis are used to their country being treated as a source of international conflict and the idea that their army could be seen as contributing to global stability is a surprise – and a relief. Throughout Pakistan’s history its civilian leaders have wanted to limit the army’s power. Khan’s deep and often fanatical support base gave him an opportunity to succeed in this where his predecessors had failed when he became prime minister in 2018. But it turned out that he isn’t a very good politician. It’s instructive to compare his record to that of another charismatic politician, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While Erdoğan prevailed over Turkey’s generals by being patient and clever, Khan was melodramatic and imprudent. It took Erdoğan a decade to assert civilian control. Khan held on to power for less than four years before the army kicked him out. Given that the army had once placed its hopes in Khan, the swiftness of the turn against him was striking. It didn’t help that Khan was reluctant to take orders, but there were other issues. The strait-laced generals found him louche and unconventional. It wasn’t just the stories about drugs and womanising, but his third marriage, to an Islamic mystic called Bushra Bibi, in whom he placed total faith.

Most Pakistanis saw all this as just another turn in the familiar cycle of Pakistani politics. The army installs prime ministers and then, before their term has ended, removes them. But in fact Khan’s rise and fall marked the start of something new. The current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, accepts that the army has total control. Although he isn’t president or prime minister, Munir reigns supreme in all areas of policy. In 2020 Nawaz Sharif – the former prime minister and Shehbaz’s brother – said the army was evolving from being a state within a state to a state above the state. Today the army is the state.

The generals argue that this has happened because civilian governments have consistently failed to do their job. They have a point. Pakistani politicians are so corrupt that, in the top echelon, their reported wealth is measured in billions. For decades they have shown little interest in addressing difficult issues, ceding such tasks to the military. Take the problem of ghost schools: in 1998, it was revealed that administrators had been creating bogus paperwork to secure public funding for schools that didn’t exist. Counting the actual number of schools in a district would seem to be a simple task, but Pakistan’s civil bureaucracy is so dysfunctional and corrupt that it couldn’t be done. Instead, Nawaz Sharif, prime minister at the time, asked the army to conduct a survey.

More recently, in the s0-called tribal areas in the north-west of the country, administrative functions have again been surrendered to the army. The semi-autonomous borderlands became a haven for jihadists after 9/11. In 2018, in an attempt to pacify the territory, its constitutional status was changed to make it part of mainstream Pakistan and subject to federal laws. So far so good. But the transfer to civilian administrators is not complete. Civil servants, judges and other officials don’t want to live there: partly because the area is so poor there’s little opportunity to make money from bribes, but also because it still contains jihadists who consider civilian administrators assassination targets. Even if deployed there, many officials fail to report for work, and so the army has ended up carrying out basic administrative tasks. Unlike civilians, soldiers will do what they’re told is required.

But the army’s claim that it has carried out merely the tasks that civilians couldn’t or wouldn’t do was always only partly true: it has always controlled the nuclear weapons programme and Pakistan-US relations, areas of policy where it felt civilians weren’t to be trusted. Under the post-Khan political dispensation, the areas managed by the military have expanded to include virtually everything. Foreign journalists covering Pakistan are well aware of this shift. Twenty years ago, when applying for a journalist’s visa, I would have a chat with a press officer at the High Commission in London and then be on my way. Ten years ago I had to ask someone in the Interior Ministry to push through my application. On one occasion a minister took advantage of the fact that the military-appointed intelligence officer seconded to the ministry was away for a few days to get my visa signed off. Today no journalist’s visa can be issued without the explicit approval of the military or the country’s chief intelligence agency, the ISI. Foreign journalists can criticise civilian politicians in the harshest terms, but any disobliging remarks about the military could put paid to future visits.

Domestic media is, unsurprisingly, worse affected. Officers sometimes decree which stories the ‘independent’ TV news channels should lead their bulletins with and even which words can be used on air. Khan’s name has effectively been banned: he is now referred to as the ‘founding chairman of the PTI’ – Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party he set up in 1996. Producers wanting to relive Pakistan’s victory at the 1992 cricket world cup can show the match, but not Khan lifting the trophy.

The subjugation of the media began in earnest in 2006, when the journalist Hayatullah Khan published a photograph showing that a US drone had been used on Pakistani soil – something the military had publicly denied. He was murdered, and over the next decade nearly a hundred more journalists were killed in targeted assassinations. Even though few of these killings led to arrests, it was almost universally believed that the state was responsible, so the military moved to a subtler tactic: it focused on media owners. Many of them had bought TV channels in the first place because they brought access to senior officers, bureaucrats and politicians who could advance their business interests. These owners soon discovered that it wasn’t quite so simple. Now, when the military wants stories covered or suppressed it messages the owners on WhatsApp, telling them what to do. Once, retired military officers could talk freely to the media. Now only designated retired officers are allowed to speak to journalists, on or off the record. The few who are cleared for this are encouraged to appear regularly on TV, to ensure the military’s perspective is always included in political chat shows.

Of course, government press officers all over the world try to do similar things. Western political parties try to ensure that party officials who reflect the view of the leadership are interviewed by friendly journalists. Access is traded for favourable coverage in the US just as it is in Pakistan. During the Obama administration, Vanity Fair was prevailed on to agree to White House officials vetoing Obama’s quotes – including accurate ones – retrospectively. But for all the similarities, there is an obvious difference: spin doctors in Washington and other Western capitals aren’t armed.

It isn’t only the media: the military exercises its power in all areas of Pakistani society. Business executives say that if they needed to get a road built to service a new factory, they used to bribe a minister, involving the military only as a last resort. Today they just ask the army.

The question that faces Pakistan today is no longer ‘Who governs Pakistan?’ It’s ‘How will the field marshal use his power?’ Munir’s personal history gives some clues. His religiously conservative father was a prayer leader in a Rawalpindi mosque and headmaster of the local school. The family didn’t have much money. Munir senior travelled by bicycle – he couldn’t afford a motorbike until the end of his life. The school where he worked, and which Munir himself attended, was basic. A fellow pupil recalls that the boys, forty of them to a class, had to sit on the floor because there was no furniture; the bathrooms were filthy and there was no water in the taps. This was the era of the Islamist dictator General Zia and each lunchtime the boys lined up to recite their prayers.

After two years in a sixth-form college in Rawalpindi, Munir joined the army. He won the sword of honour, marking him out for great things. Typically, high-flying Pakistani officers go for a spell of training in the US or UK. But in the late 1990s exchanges between the American and Pakistan armies were limited and Munir went instead to military colleges in Malaysia and Japan, which required him to spend two years learning Japanese. He also speaks Arabic, and trained Saudi soldiers in Riyadh. In his spare time there, he learned the Quran by heart. He has held all the top jobs in the army, including director general of military intelligence and the ISI. He has as full an understanding of the inner workings of the Pakistani state as anyone.

Military figures who have worked with Munir and who are authorised to speak to foreign journalists are guarded when discussing him, partly because they’re nervous and partly because they don’t really know much: he has always been self-contained and now works with a very small group of trusted advisers. Retired officers who have raised issues with him say he can be irascible; politicians who have interacted with him say that he tends to see things in black and white and likes to make rapid decisions. He is a disciplinarian, ruthless with those who cross him, and – like all leaders in Pakistan – surrounded only by admirers. ‘He is an incredible man,’ one official told me. ‘When he speaks in meetings, I think molecules stop moving.’ Unlike some senior officers he doesn’t have a reputation for being corrupt.

Perhaps this explains why in 2019, when Munir was running the ISI, he complained to Khan that his wife was allowing people around her to make money corruptly. Khan was so offended he dismissed Munir from the ISI. When Munir was appointed chief of army staff in November 2022, a few months after Khan was ousted following a no confidence vote, he got his own back. On 9 May 2023, PTI supporters, enraged by Khan’s arrest on corruption charges two months earlier, attacked a number of military installations. Khan was hugely popular, not least among the children of army officers, many of whom shared his Islamist and nationalistic outlook. Munir broke all the normal rules by detaining some of these young men and women, despite their fathers’ military status. He also broke new ground in his treatment of General Faiz Hamid, who took over from him at the ISI and is now, like Khan, in prison.

One retired senior bureaucrat told me that Pakistan now has a Trump in uniform. There are differences: Munir avoids cameras, for example. But there are also parallels, which go beyond Munir’s use of rough language and his treatment of opponents. He has also taken strong action against illegal immigration: police officers have been told they face disciplinary action if they fail to help deport Afghans found in their district. And like Trump, he hasn’t hesitated to use force abroad: Munir has ordered Pakistan’s air force to attack targets in Iran, Afghanistan and India, always with the same message: Pakistan will assert its sovereignty.

In May 2025, Munir impressed millions of Pakistanis by downing several Indian jets. The four-day crisis was triggered by a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir in which 26 civilians were killed. India said this was a cross-border raid sanctioned by Islamabad and responded with drone strikes on the headquarters of several militant groups in Pakistan. Then Munir took action. Throughout Pakistan, May 2025 is seen as a major personal victory for him and even pro-democracy politicians grudgingly accept that he deserves some credit.

Even though Munir has been more militarily assertive than most of his predecessors, Pakistan still faces frequent attacks from militants based in neighbouring countries, whose governments support rebels inside Pakistan, especially in the north-western provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which together make up 56 per cent of the country. Ever since 1947 a significant number of Baloch have seen Pakistan as a colonial power which took over where the British left off. Their main grievance is that Balochistan remains the poorest part of Pakistan, despite sitting on massive gas reserves that power the rest of the country. The current phase of the Baloch rebellion has rumbled on since the early 2000s, and despite successive campaigns by Pakistan’s army in which thousands of people have gone missing, the conflict is intensifying. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which monitors press reports of the insurgency, the number of military deaths in Balochistan rose from 315 in 2024 to 751 last year. In one spectacular attack in 2025, insurgents hijacked a train and held more than four hundred passengers hostage.

The insurgency used to be led by tribal leaders, who have sweeping powers in their local areas. They decide all legal cases – sometimes relying on trial by fire or water. But over the last decade the tribal fighters have been joined by middle-class Balochs and – remarkably, in an area where women are routinely murdered in honour killings – there is now a trend for female suicide bombers. The army, with good reason, claims that the Baloch insurgency is being supported by India.

The situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is more complex. In the 1980s, the province was a staging ground for the US and Saudi-backed jihadists – then known as mujahedin – who defeated the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan. After 9/11 the next generation of jihadists – the Afghan Taliban – ran a similar campaign against the Americans. At the same time, an allied group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, made significant advances, at one point holding territory a few hours’ drive from Islamabad. The Pakistani state showed extraordinary lassitude in the face of this threat, allowing the TTP to become entrenched. Eventually, after gruelling battles between 2008 and 2014, the army forced the militants to flee to Afghanistan, but at a high price: tens of thousands of soldiers, civilians and militants were killed.

Since then two things have happened. First, in 2021, US forces withdrew from Afghanistan, allowing the Afghan Taliban government to turn on its former protectors in Pakistan. And then, in an astonishingly bad decision, TTP fighters who had found sanctuary across the border were allowed back into Pakistan in 2022. Officials managing the issue were given photocopied chapters of Jonathan Powell’s Talking to Terrorists, but everyone on the ground knew the militants would take up arms again. Army officers now acknowledge the decision was a mistake, but they make the fair point that it wasn’t only an army policy. Khan also favoured contact with the Taliban – in his case in the naive belief that if you were good to them they would reciprocate. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are now so bad that Islamabad has carried out multiple air strikes in Kabul and Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, has said they are in a state of open war.

Whoever is to blame, the result is that having defeated the Taliban once, Pakistan now needs to do so again. Thanks to the military’s control of the media, there is relatively little reporting of the conflict, but the figures suggest that, just as in Balochistan, it is becoming more violent. Today there are 4500 Taliban fighters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan. Other groups, including branches of al-Qaida and Islamic State, number a few thousand more. The TTP killed more than 1400 people in Pakistan last year. The army says that, partly because of improved intelligence, it is getting better at killing militants. In 2021 there were three soldiers’ deaths for every militant death. By 2025 one soldier was killed for every two militants.

Nonetheless, the TTP remains a formidable enemy. It is armed with Nato weaponry left behind by the Americans, some of it more sophisticated than the Pakistani army’s equipment. Army officers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa say that the militants’ acquisition of American rifles with night vision has been a game-changer. The jihadists are also deploying quadcopters to fly over military posts and drop explosives on soldiers. Having learned the lesson of past campaigns, the TTP is no longer jeopardising its support among the population by targeting civilians and is focusing on killing soldiers and police.

Those who live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were forcibly removed from their homes during the first anti-Taliban campaign and are now being moved again. They have grown weary of the state’s promises: little of the development money promised after the last round of fighting has been delivered. Even though most people in the province don’t want Taliban rule, some feel bound by tribal ties to provide the jihadists with shelter. The security problem is made worse by a political problem: Khan’s PTI controls the provincial government and won’t publicly support the military operations against the TTP. A senior officer in Peshawar told me that it will be ‘close to impossible’ to defeat the TTP without political unity. Most Pashtuns blame the situation on the army’s history of supporting jihadists. At one level, this is one of the few ways Khan can still resist the army. But he has long flirted with the jihadists himself. When the Afghan Taliban defeated the Americans, he said they had ‘broken the shackles of slavery’.

There is now an information war on social media platforms in both Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. To the frustration of the military’s media managers, Meta, X and Google don’t have offices in Islamabad, so there is a limited amount Pakistan can do to get militants’ accounts suspended. As one officer put it to me, ‘the social media apps have no obligation towards the state of Pakistan.’ The TTP and Baloch rebel groups both turn out hundreds of videos every week pushing the idea that the army is killing Muslims on behalf of the West, which wants Pakistan’s mineral resources. Other videos are designed to show the TTP in control. It only takes a few minutes to set up a road block, film two to three cars being stopped and then move on. The TTP has honed its message, playing down religious issues and appealing to a sense of Pashtun identity – the idea that it is resisting a colonial army. The army has access to Israeli technology which enables it to hack into phones, but some of its tools lack finesse. It can deny access to whole platforms, and for a while blocked YouTube. But with tens of millions of young Pakistanis wanting to use social media this was highly unpopular and all the main platforms are now available. The army also tried to install a Chinese-style firewall, but Pakistanis, like the Chinese, use VPNs and create new accounts to circumvent the restrictions. The latest indications are that the army may be improving its performance, learning how to throttle rather than block sites and persuading some social media companies to suspend accounts.

The insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are a serious issue for Munir. There is a real possibility that India could launch an attack in Kashmir while simultaneously encouraging the Baloch rebels and the TTP to tie down Pakistani troops on the western border. Pakistan would then be encircled. For all that, many Pakistanis see the insurgencies as a sideshow. They figure that the Pakistani state has shown before that it can defeat the TTP and contain the Baloch rebels, and want Munir to focus instead on the economic and social challenges the rest of the country is facing.

He has the power to try. It helps that Munir has been smart enough not to give himself a political role, as previous military leaders have done. The capitulation of the Pakistan Muslim League (the Sharif brothers’ party) and the Pakistan People’s Party (the Bhutto family’s party) leaves Khan’s PTI alone in its resistance to military control. But while PTI activists are good at agitating online, the party has failed to mount any street protests since November 2024. Many PTI leaders, seeing little prospect of Khan being released, have effectively abandoned him (in some cases encouraged by the army’s willingness to drop corruption investigations in return for quiescence). If past practice is anything to go by, the military will find an alternative PTI leader to set up a rival version of the party, eroding Khan’s support base still further.

Khan’s supporters hope that he will be released and allowed to live in exile, where he could start working towards a political comeback. But this is unlikely to happen, and not just because Khan is so stubborn that he is unlikely to make the necessary deal: freedom in return for praise of the army. There are other factors at play. When Benazir Bhutto avenged the execution of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been deposed in a coup, by going up and down the country denouncing General Zia, she, like Khan, was jailed. But her supporters in the US – notably her old Harvard contemporary Peter Galbraith – lobbied for her release. Later, when Nawaz Sharif was imprisoned by General Musharraf, he could rely on Saudi Arabia, where he had businesses and was well liked. Riyadh pressed for his release and gave him sanctuary. Khan has no such friends, although several former cricketers (none from Pakistan) have written to Shehbaz Sharif to demand that he receive proper medical care, and his ex-wife Jemima Goldsmith has made the same request to Andy Burnham. As prime minister, Khan criticised the West in virtually every speech he gave. He also upset the Saudis, repeatedly making disparaging remarks about Mohammed bin Salman and selling off a limited-edition watch that bin Salman had given him as a gift (Khan denies this).

Munir has another advantage his predecessors lacked. Whenever the relationship between a civilian leader and the army deteriorated, there has until now been a debilitating civilian/military power struggle lasting months or years during which almost no attention has been paid to any other issue. The fact that civilian leaders have always been trying to anticipate the army’s next move against them has hampered policymaking in areas such as illiteracy, poverty and the threat of jihadism. Since Munir and Shehbaz Sharif are working together, that problem has gone away.

Munir has brought a surprising degree of clarity to the issue of violent jihadism. For decades senior officers saw jihadists as a strategic asset they could use to help achieve their foreign policy objectives in India, Kashmir and Afghanistan, and even deploy against domestic opponents such as the Baloch insurgents. Civilian politicians have been guilty of this too. Immediately after the 2014 school attack in Peshawar that killed 132 children and 17 adults, Nawaz Sharif gave a feeble speech in which he failed to mention the name of the group that had carried out the murders: the TTP. His counterparts in other political parties have been no better. Benazir Bhutto helped create the Afghan Taliban and Khan allowed state funds to be given to the seminary where many of them trained.

Munir has changed that. Gone are the days when Pakistani soldiers, confused about who was really fighting for Islam, would desert from the army to join the TTP. Munir frequently refers to the TTP as ‘Khawarij’, a derogatory term used to describe those who have strayed from the fold of Islam. He has characterised militants as antisocial elements whose actions lead to chaos, declaring that only the state of Pakistan has the authority to declare jihad and that only the state should be using guns. As for the Afghan Taliban, he has accused them of ‘spilling the blood of Pakistani children’ by harbouring TTP militants.

This stance has helped him internationally. In 2018, Donald Trump rebuked Pakistan for its lies and deceit and suspended nearly $900 million worth of security funding. In 2025, he described Munir as his ‘favourite field marshal’. Munir has spent lavishly on Washington lobbyists and has been co-operative on security issues. In the past Pakistan handed militants over to the US only when relations hit crisis point. Munir has adopted a different approach: when Trump asked for Pakistan’s help extraditing Mohammad Sharifullah, a suspect in a 2021 attack on Kabul airport that killed thirteen American soldiers, Munir didn’t hesitate. Sharifullah was sent to the US a few days later.

Trump was impressed by Munir’s willingness to give him credit for resolving the military clashes with India in May 2025 and pleased when Munir also proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The field marshal’s reward came in the form of an invitation to a private White House lunch in June 2025 – the first time a US president had hosted a Pakistani army chief. Trump has described Munir as a great general, serious fighter and inspiring figure. So it was no surprise that in January this year Pakistan was one of the first countries to sign up to Trump’s Board of Peace. And there may be a few financial connections in play. Zach Witkoff, the son of the US special envoy Steve Witkoff and co-founder of the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, has been a regular visitor to Islamabad over the last year and has had several meetings with Munir. In January Pakistan said it had signed an agreement to explore using World Liberty’s stablecoin for cross-border payments in one of the first publicly announced tie-ups between Trump-linked crypto business and a sovereign state.

Munir has also secured a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia which includes a ‘Nato-like’ clause under which an attack on one country is seen as an attack on both. There are rumours that this extends to Islamabad giving Riyadh some form of nuclear umbrella. The army points to such achievements as evidence that Munir will succeed in making Pakistan thrive. But there are also reasons to think he will fail. Some of the challenges he faces have afflicted all his predecessors – the Pakistani state has so little capacity to implement policies that taxes will almost certainly remain uncollected, schools will not be built and jobs won’t be created. With high levels of illiteracy and widespread disrespect for the rule of law, there is no quick fix for these issues. But he also has problems of his own making.

Two former army chiefs have grudgingly accepted that with India determined to keep the parts of Kashmir it controls, it is not possible for Pakistan to achieve its objective of absorbing Kashmir. Musharraf tried to negotiate a compromise settlement only to be frustrated by Indian hardliners. Munir’s immediate predecessor, General Bajwa, told his corps commanders that if a policy had failed for more than seventy years it might be time for a rethink. But his fellow generals didn’t want to hear it and have been pleased to see Munir returning to Pakistan’s traditional hardline stance. ‘Kashmir is our jugular vein,’ Munir said in April 2025. ‘We will not forget it. We will not leave our Kashmiri brethren in their heroic struggle against the Indian occupation … We are different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life … We are two nations, not one nation … our forefathers have sacrificed immensely.’

I recently asked a retired senior officer what the point was of sticking to a policy if everyone knows it can’t work. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It is a matter of principle.’ The difficulty is that, even though the Kashmiris have a strong moral case against India, the issue is also a matter of principle for Delhi, which at some point will presumably want to avenge the May 2025 defeat. In these circumstances no one should expect Munir to back down. As one official put it, ‘Pakistan won’t be the one that takes de-escalatory measures.’ Such a line may be deeply appealing to nationalist sentiment, but the history of full-scale India-Pakistan wars is that Pakistan does not win them.

And then there’s the economy. There has been some good news. The reforms that came along with a $7 billion IMF deal two years ago, strong remittance income from the Pakistani diaspora and the rapid depreciation of the rupee have all brought notable gains. The annual inflation rate is now 6 per cent compared with 38 per cent in 2023. Pakistan has achieved a current account surplus for the first time in fourteen years and reserves have reached their highest level since 2022. There has been a series of press leaks about possible sales of Pakistan’s home-produced F-17 Thunder fighter jets to Libya, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia – deals that would be worth billions of dollars.

Officials say these gains are a result of the stability that has come from having a government led by a man, Shehbaz Sharif, who has always sought consensus and who is working with the army rather than against it. At the same time, there is clear evidence that international corporations don’t have much faith in Pakistan. Late last year Procter & Gamble pulled out of the country after 34 years, following Eli Lilly, Shell, Microsoft, Uber and Yamaha. Army officers and some economists say this is a result of internal restructuring rather than negative assessments of Pakistan’s prospects. The army hopes those investments can be replaced by ones from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, but it does give rise to uncertainty over Munir’s prospects of helping Pakistan achieve the goal it has set itself: leapfrogging over a dozen countries in terms of GDP by 2035.

Ten years ago, the army was convinced that Chinese capital would transform Pakistan’s economic prospects at a stroke. Now that the punitive terms of China’s investments are clear, that argument has been dropped. Instead Munir has returned to well-worn policy ideas: exploit mineral reserves and seek aid from the Gulf. He has even suggested that the brain drain from Pakistan is a net benefit because it leads to higher remittance income. He heads the Special Investment Facilitation Council, a hybrid civil-military body tasked with attracting foreign direct investment. The IMF has suggested that the council is in the mould of previous failed initiatives, with opaque decision-making processes that tend to favour preferred investors. Investors have complained that the military has no idea what businesses need.

The fate of ‘independent power producers’ shows why doing business in Pakistan is hazardous. After his election victory in 2013, Nawaz Sharif’s government focused on producing more electricity, as the electorate had demanded. To attract investment, he promised that payments would be made to producers even if their electricity was surplus to requirements. The deal was so generous that billions flooded into the sector, much of it from abroad. This, combined with the rapid adoption of solar technology, meant that too much power was produced. In 2025 the government called in some IPP owners to military offices in Rawalpindi to discuss the matter. Apparently, a team of bureaucrats flanked by uniformed army officers threatened investors with investigations into their other business ventures, intimidating them into agreeing to new contracts on terms so harsh they were forced to shut down their energy production. Army officials say no coercion was involved, but as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and five other institutions politely put it in a joint letter, ‘We believe that renegotiating [power purchase agreements] in a non-consultative manner will be detrimental to the long-term development of the sector, undermining investor confidence and discouraging much needed future private investment.’

Military officers are unimpressed with such complaints. The IPPs, they say, were making ridiculously high profits and needed to be cut down to size. Some civilian officials agree, arguing that for once the army was using its guns for a good purpose. But for all that, there is a price to be paid for bullying foreign investors. When Pakistan attempted to privatise the chronically loss-making Pakistan International Airlines, private investors didn’t want to get involved until the army took a share in the new venture. They figured that the army’s involvement was insurance against their assets being expropriated.

Munir faces another problem. Khan’s charisma helped him create an emotional connection with the Pakistani people, particularly the young. The bond remains strong. Independent observers estimate his support remains at 60 per cent or more. And the numbers miss an important aspect of Khan’s appeal. His cricketing heroics, celebrity status, defiance in the face of authority, sympathy with the common man, Islamism and visceral pride in Pakistan combine to give him an almost cult-like following. In Pakistan and all over the world there are men and women who will weep as they declare their love for Khan. It is hard for Munir to match this.

Pakistan’s armed forces like to think there is an unbreakable bond between themselves and the people. In fact, most Pakistanis have mixed feelings about the military. Many take pride in its efficiency, nuclear weapons and military successes. Some respect the sense of order that military discipline brings to a country where, for many, rules exist to be broken. And if it were able to deliver peace and prosperity few Pakistanis would be worried about its disdain for democracy. But there is also resentment about its outsized role in Pakistani life, as illustrated by Khan’s imprisonment. Most Pakistanis think, with good reason, that even if Khan did sell off a few gifts from foreign leaders, he is far less corrupt than the politicians the army is currently working with, or for that matter some generals. And when officers complain that their fellow countrymen fail to appreciate the sacrifices of the officers and men who are fighting violent militants, they are faced with a question they struggle to answer: why did the army help to create those militants in the first place?

For all their many faults, Pakistan’s civilian leaders know how to connect with their fellow citizens. In election campaigns they take significant risks by holding rallies and meeting voters on the streets. Over the years, most senior politicians have faced assassins. Their courage impresses the public and, as Khan’s case demonstrates, Pakistanis admire the martyrdom of their imprisoned politicians. Asim Munir does not stir such emotions. The field marshal is more feared than loved. But, for the moment, the army can live with that.

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