The Field Marshal’s expiring warranty

Strongmen are not discarded because they become brutal. Brutality is often the job description. They are discarded when brutality stops delivering.

That is why the Financial Times’ recent scrutiny of Field Marshal Asim Munir matters. After years in which much of the Western press handled Pakistan’s authoritarian order with the discretion normally reserved for intelligence assets, covert arrangements and embarrassing allies, one of the world’s most influential establishment newspapers has finally begun examining the machinery behind the medals.

The timing is revealing. Empires do not suddenly discover constitutionalism. They conduct performance reviews.

The article, titled, “The grand designs of Pakistan’s strongman,” does not prove that Washington has turned against Munir. The Financial Times is not an imperial dismissal notice, and Western foreign policy has never been burdened by excessive morality. But elite journalism often functions as advance weather reporting for power. It tells us which doubts have become respectable, which questions are now printable and which supposedly indispensable client may be approaching his expiration date.

For more than two years, Munir’s value rested on a familiar proposition: he could deliver Pakistan without consulting Pakistanis.

Elections were untidy. Parliament was tiresome. Civilian legitimacy was an administrative inconvenience. Here, apparently, was a disciplined general who could imprison the country’s most popular politician, crush his movement, discipline the courts, intimidate the media, manage China, reassure the Gulf monarchies, flatter Washington and market the entire arrangement as “stability.”

In the vocabulary of empire, stability usually means that the correct people are frightened and the incorrect people are armed.

Munir understood the bargain. If legitimacy could not be earned at home, it could be rented abroad. Pakistan’s foreign policy has consequently begun to resemble a traveling military sales convention. Geography is offered. Intelligence access is offered. Mediation is offered. Troops are offered. Strategic obedience remains competitively priced.

Washington requires a facilitator? Pakistan is available.

Riyadh wants reassurance? Pakistan is available.

Kuwait seeks deeper military cooperation? The field marshal arrives with the brochure.

A state unable to guarantee electricity, justice, employment, education or medical care to millions of its own citizens remains miraculously prepared to guarantee security to every anxious palace between the Persian Gulf and the Potomac.

This is not grand strategy. It is regime survival in ceremonial uniform.

Every foreign handshake becomes a substitute ballot. Every defence agreement becomes an imported certificate of legitimacy. Every photograph with a president or prince is displayed as evidence that history has endorsed the man whom Pakistanis were never allowed to endorse.

But foreign applause cannot indefinitely drown out domestic collapse.

Pakistan’s political order has been gutted by repression, constitutional manipulation and the conversion of law into regime stationery. Imran Khan remains imprisoned while his movement is battered through arrests, intimidation and administrative warfare. The judiciary has been reorganised under amendments that deepen fears of executive and military domination. Media control, selective prosecution and enforced silence are no longer emergency measures. They are the operating system.

READ: Iranian President says Supreme Leader called for end to ‘neither war nor peace’ state as Pakistan pursues mediation efforts

Meanwhile, the state’s peripheries are not merely restless. They are testifying against the centre.

Balochistan burns with insurgency, militarisation, disappearances and accumulated rage. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa faces intensifying militancy and deepening estrangement. Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir simmer over land, resources, exclusion and coercive governance. The institution that has spent decades advertising itself as Pakistan’s sole source of order now appears increasingly proficient at manufacturing disorder.

Its answer to every political crisis is securitization, followed by a seminar on stability.

The economy completes the indictment. Pakistan remains dependent on international lenders, Gulf deposits and emergency rescues while its rulers celebrate “geopolitical relevance” as though relevance were edible. It is not. Children cannot be educated with strategic dialogues.

Hospitals cannot be repaired with military pageantry. Citizens cannot pay electricity bills with photographs of their field marshal seated beside Donald Trump.

This is why the Financial Times intervention may be consequential. Western powers tolerate authoritarian clients when those clients can impose order cheaply. Munir increasingly offers the opposite: repression without resolution, coercion without consent and military supremacy without national cohesion.

The trusted friend may still be trusted. The question is whether he can still deliver.

His energetic effort to market Pakistan’s armed forces as a regional security utility only sharpens the suspicion. A confident state exports influence. An insecure ruler exports usefulness.

There is also something obscene in a poor Muslim nuclear power offering protection to wealthy monarchies while Palestinians are slaughtered and Pakistanis themselves are denied dignity.

Pakistan possesses one of the Muslim world’s largest militaries, yet its coercive power is more readily imagined as insurance for palaces than as protection for the oppressed.

Apparently, Islamic solidarity becomes strategically impractical at precisely the moment it risks inconveniencing a creditor.

Munir’s real danger, then, is not that he is unpopular. Pakistani generals have survived contempt before. His danger is that he may become expensive.

Foreign patrons do not abandon strongmen for destroying democracy. They abandon them when the destruction fails to produce control.

The Financial Times may be recording the first tremor of that reassessment.

Munir still possesses the uniforms, the coercive machinery, the foreign applause and the comic grandeur of an invented marshalship. But externally rented power always comes with an expiration date. Once Washington begins asking whether its indispensable man has become the source rather than the solution of instability, medals start to resemble decorations on a sinking ship.

Pakistan’s tragedy is not merely that it is ruled by a field marshal without a battlefield mandate. It is that an entire country is being offered as collateral for one man’s continued usefulness.

And history’s verdict on Pakistan’s strongmen is brutally consistent: The imperial embrace is warmest just before the hands let go. 

OPINION: The nuclear leash: Washington’s deal to put Saudi Arabia back in its place

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.