There is only one constant in the tragicomedy called Pakistan: the khaki dog-collar around its throat.
Everything else — the brief civilian interludes, the empty elections, the IMF bailouts, the peace overtures — is theatre. Pakistan is not a failed state. It is a hijacked one — held hostage by an army that has turned national dysfunction into both doctrine and business model.
The latest farce comes courtesy of General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff and part-time propagandist. Having spent most of his career cultivating silence, he has suddenly found his voice — and is using it to regurgitate long-dead ideologies.
His invocation of the two-nation theory — that discredited dogma used to justify Partition — is not just historically absurd, it is strategically suicidal. That theory died on the blood-soaked streets of Dhaka in 1971, when Bengali Muslims chose language, identity, and dignity over forced conformity to a Punjabi-Islamist blueprint masquerading as nationhood.
But logic has never been the Pakistani army’s strong suit. Its real specialty is delusion — on steroids.
Take the laughable incident where Munir gifted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif a 2017 photo from a Chinese military drill and passed it off as evidence of a successful “Op Bunyanum,” the offensive launched by Pakistan to counter India’s Operation Sindoor.
This is North Korea-level self-parody — the military equivalent of photo-shopping abs onto a beer belly. That a nuclear-armed state’s top general cannot distinguish between propaganda and reality should terrify not just Pakistanis, but the region and the world.
And yet, Munir is not an outlier. He is the culmination of decades of institutional rot. In Pakistan, the army doesn’t just defend borders — it defines identity, dictates foreign policy, manages the economy, runs business conglomerates, owns real estate, and now, apparently, moonlights as a fake-news factory.
It has colonised the state in the name of security, patriotism, and Islam — and delivered nothing but loss, humiliation, and bloodshed.
Let us count the disasters.
- It launched a tribal invasion of Kashmir in 1947 — and failed.
- It started wars in 1965 and 1971 — and failed.
- It engineered Kargil in 1999 — and failed.
- It created the Taliban and armed jihadists — and now lives in fear of them.
- It exported terrorism to India and Afghanistan — and imported global isolation.
For a military obsessed with “strategic depth,” it has achieved only strategic disgrace.
Its domestic legacy is equally damning. Balochistan is a killing field. Sindh simmers with discontent. Pashtuns are criminalised in their own land. Gilgit-Baltistan remains a constitutional orphan. And yet the army wraps itself in the green flag, as if wrapping a corpse in a shroud.
Worse, the generals have now reincarnated the Muslim League — this time with the latest avatar of rabid psychopath Hafiz Saeed’s political outfit, the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League.
This is not even subtle. It is a declaration of intent: the military wants a regime of clerics and killers, not reformers and rationalists. The only criterion for office is obedience to Rawalpindi.
Make no mistake: the Pakistan army is not a guardian. It is a racket. It consumes the lion’s share of the budget while the people starve. It hides behind Islam while violating every tenet of justice. It talks of honour while executing enforced disappearances. It wears medals awarded for surrender. It celebrates defeats as victories. And promotes a military mad mullah to field marshal after losing a conflict.
The solution is not reform. The solution is removal.
Pakistan’s people must rise — not just in protest, but in rebellion. The generals will not cede power voluntarily. They will have to be ousted. The question is whether this will happen through mass civil disobedience, or whether the region and global powers will be forced to intervene before Pakistan’s decay becomes a contagion.
Left unchecked, the military will drag Pakistan into a final abyss — one from which there will be no bailout, no brotherly Chinese loan, no miraculous geopolitical reset. A state cannot build a future when it is permanently manned by men obsessed with the past. And it cannot join the modern world if it remains chained to the fantasies of 1947.
This is not just about Pakistan anymore. It is about preventing the meltdown of a nuclear-armed Frankenstein state. If its people will not dethrone the military, others must help them do so — before another manufactured crisis spirals into catastrophe.
Because only in Pakistan does a general lose a war — and then promote himself to field marshal. That’s not nationalism. That’s military psychosis masquerading as patriotism. And it is also a grievous insult to the very Islam it pretends to protect.
Pakistanis need to wake up, and show these shameless leeches the door.
Or someone else will.
