Pakistan's Army Is Writing Itself Into the Constitution, Not Just Seizing Power

Pakistan's Army Is Writing Itself Into the Constitution, Not Just Seizing Power

TAN's position: Pakistan's military establishment under General Asim Munir is no longer content with the old playbook of periodic coups - it is pursuing something more durable: institutionalising its dominance within the constitutional framework itself, so that army supremacy no longer needs a coup to survive a change of government.

The reasoning Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi's declaration that Pakistan's governance system has "collapsed" is not, on its own, an unusual statement from a struggling democracy.

What makes it significant is who is saying it and what is reportedly on the table: breaking up existing provinces, shifting fiscal federalism toward the Centre and vesting greater authority in army leadership and its preferred technocrats.

Four military rulers - Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf - interrupted Pakistan's constitutional order through outright coups, each time restoring at least the appearance of civilian rule once international and domestic pressure mounted.

General Munir's elevation to Field Marshal in late 2025, with sweeping authority written into constitutional amendments, suggests a different logic: rather than seizing power and later handing it back, the military is trying to make its dominance the settled constitutional baseline, immune to the political cycle.

A coup can be reversed by the next government. A rewritten federal structure is far harder to undo. >> The pattern that enables this is not military strength alone - it is civilian self-sabotage. In 2006, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif signed the Charter of Democracy, recognising explicitly that democracy would survive only if civilian parties stopped inviting the army into their rivalries.

That understanding did not outlast the moment. The Pakistan People's Party and Pakistan Muslim League soon reverted to seeking tactical advantage over each other and Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf later repeated the same mistake, benefiting from military patronage before becoming its target.

Each cycle of civilian infighting has handed Rawalpindi fresh justification to intervene.

The strongest counter-argument The obvious objection is that Pakistan still has a missing ingredient the rest of South Asia possesses: a Gen Z-scale mobilisation capable of forcing the military back regardless of what civilian parties do. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka show that youth-led movements can bypass exhausted party structures entirely. Pakistan has the same demographic weight and arguably deeper economic grievance. If that anger finds an organising spark, it could render the civilian-party argument moot altogether - this would be a story about generational rupture, not elite failure.

Why the

position still holds The counter-argument assumes youth anger converts into mobilisation on its own. It has not and the reason is structural, not accidental: the army has actively prevented that conversion, through the instrumentalisation of religious nationalism and expansive control over civil society and information space that Bangladesh's and Nepal's militaries never possessed to the same degree.

A Gen Z movement needs space to coalesce - space Pakistan's military has spent decades foreclosing precisely because it recognised this exact vulnerability. Until that structural constraint changes, the burden of resistance still falls on civilian political actors, who have shown three separate times since 2006 that they will trade collective defence of democracy for short-term partisan advantage.

TAN's position stands: absent a change in either civilian behaviour or the army's grip on civic space, constitutional entrenchment - not another episodic coup - is now the more durable threat to Pakistani democracy.