It would be an understatement to say that the six-year stint of Qamar Bajwa as Pakistan’s army General was eventful. Bajwa’s role as arguably Pakistan’s most powerful man included four prime ministers and several political crises, ending with the army’s carefully polished reputation over decades in tatters.

He was not the first army commander to wield a disproportionate political influence. Pakistan’s political economy is geared in such a way that even a self-effacing army commander has political clout. However, it was during Bajwa’s stint that the army’s prestige in Pakistani society hit a low perhaps only matched by the division of Pakistan over fifty years ago. More than anything else, Bajwa’s stint symbolizes the limitations of the army as a political actor.

It is something of a tired cliché by critics and rival states, that in Pakistan the military has a country rather than vice versa. Certainly, as defenders point out, the Pakistani military has usually abstained from the pattern of postcolonial counterparts in Arab and Muslim states of a  totalitarian grip on political life. Repression for the most part has been more selective than in other military-dominated countries. Indeed, the military is perhaps the only Pakistani state institution that functions more or less professionally. Periods of civilian rule, as in the 1950s, 1990s, and 2010s have often been marked by either factionalism, autocracy, or corruption. Finally, the very real threat posed by India particularly, though not exclusively, since the fascist Bharatiya Janatiya Party first came to power in the 1990s – means that a certain amount of military prerogative is almost unavoidable.

The problem for both its institutional integrity and for Pakistani political culture is that being “too big to fail” for Pakistan’s survival, the military has grown quite comfortable in its role as a political umpire. The very fact that the military is the only functioning national institution imposes upon it responsibilities for the remainder of the system. Rarely has the military been slow to accept those responsibilities, but it has been far more begrudging in accepting the consequences – particularly when these involve subjecting itself to the jurisdiction of civilian bodies.

The same civilian parties that officers regularly lambast as either feudalist or corrupt are usually the very same parties that the military itself buttressed at some point or other. Zulfikar Bhutto, whose People’s Party would become such a bane for Rawalpindi in future decades, cut his teeth under Pakistan’s first military regime. Nawaz Sharif’s Noon League (PML-N) was heavily bolstered as a counterweight to the People’s Party by another military regime, before biting the hand that fed it. Other regional or ideological parties, such as the ethno-nationalist Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Islamist Jamaat-i-Islami, have similarly oscillated between enmity and alliance.

Taken against this backdrop, Imran Khan’s Tehreek -e- Insaf Party ( PTI) might be seen as its critics have long alleged, as another backfired project of the military establishment. Imran Khan himself hails from Pakistani aristocracy; his uncle, Wajid Burki, was a key lieutenant to Pakistan’s first military ruler Ayub Khan, whose grandson Umar was also a PTI minister. Asad Umar, Imran’s widely respected right-hand man, is the son of Ghulam Umar, who served as security advisor to Ayub’s successor Yahya Khan. PTI heavyweights Jahangir Tareen, a tycoon who served as an influential secretary-general, and Shaukat Tareen are nephews of Akhtar Abdul-Rahman, the top lieutenant of a third military dictator, Mohammad Ziaul-Haq, under whom Pakistan’s intelligence agencies cut their teeth. And much of Imran’s cabinet – including Mohammad Soomro, Abdul-Razak Dawood, Shaikh Rasheed, and Zubaida Jalal – served as ministers in the kitchen cabinet of the most recent military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who had unsuccessfully invited Imran to head that cabinet. In retrospect it is now quite clear that Qamar Bajwa also viewed Imran, like the People’s Party and Noon League leaders, as a tool that could be manipulated and discarded; some PTI leaders such as Jahangir duly played along in turning on the party during its ouster from power in April 2022.

But it would be a mistake to view the PTI as another project of the “establishment”. The party came to power through mass appeal, which has been even clearer in the days since Imran’s ouster, particularly after his credible claim that the United States triggered his removal. Enormous rallies in favour of the party and its call for an election have taken Pakistani streets by storm to an extent quite unthinkable a year ago when Imran’s popularity had taken a hit from economic troubles. Repression and a considerable amount of media manipulation, not least by media heavyweights whose historical tensions with the military suddenly vanished in spring 2022, have failed to quell this surge in popularity, and few dispute that as of autumn 2022 PTI is the most popular party in the country – hence the rejected calls for an election.

How can we explain this PTI success? The fact is that PTI’s popularity, however much Bajwa and other establishment figures might have tried to coopt it, always rested on elements that were widely popular in Pakistani society. These included a broad appeal to Islam, and thus the repeated references to Prophetic Medina; rallying against corruption, opposition to India, particularly over its treatment of Kashmir and Muslims more broadly; and a wariness of foreign subservience which in the past two decades has mainly meant subservience to an intrusive and tactless Washington since it occupied Afghanistan.

Opposition to American airstrikes in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, and more general criticism of the pointless Afghan misadventure, was particularly important in launching Imran’s political appeal during the early 2010s; his party remains particularly strong in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwala, which bore the brunt of this policy. Except for the generally ineffective Islamists, Pakistan’s other parties largely played along with the same American misadventure, thus losing support that instead went to PTI.

Moreover, these are not only sentiments popular in Pakistani society, but also in the military that hails from the same society. The military has long portrayed itself as a guardian of Pakistan, Islam in at least a broad sense Muslims in the region. It would be easy to write this off as opportunistic insincerity, which it no doubt was in many cases, but it was still taken seriously by a large amount of the officer corps since at least the 1980s and is eminently compatible with, if not outright traceable to the “Islamic nationalism” of the original Pakistan movement. Pakistan’s entrance into the nuclear club as its only Muslim member and the widespread influence of religious organizations, particularly the Tablighi Jamaat, in the officer corps helped to cement the idea, which survived Pakistan’s entrance into a war on terrorism that was widely seen as having been forced on it.

Yet side by side, and in increasing tension with this trend, was Islamabad’s longstanding links with a Washington that no longer needed Pakistan as a Cold War buffer, and increasingly veered toward India. Washington’s benign indulgence of India’s nuclear buildup stood in stark contrast with its hostile reception to Pakistan’s response; New Delhi’s strategic and economic interests were almost always prioritized over Pakistan’s; when the war on terrorism began, this took on an ideological dimension as well, with Pakistan pathologized as a hotbed of nuclear risk and terrorism. Musharraf’s answer to this conundrum was to preempt India by ingratiating himself with Washington; ultimately, this failed and led to his ouster, with the People’s Party and Noon League returning to the political centre stage.

Contrary to the promises of democracy, the following decade of 2008-18 saw an initial return to the pre-Musharraf status quo, with the important qualifier of pressure by the United States, which played off the tensions between the civilian political parties, of which the People’s Party was especially favored in Washington, and the military, which fell in line because of its vulnerability to the insurgency in northwest Pakistan. This insurgency had largely sprung from the same alliance with Washington, which had prompted Musharraf to send several performative but disruptive incursions in the region, and stoked the pot for the spread of genuine extremist influence; a cycle began that locked Pakistan into a dependence on the United States.

To this end the military increasingly looked the other way, if not outright making excuses, when the United States bombarded the northwest; civilian prime minister Yousuf Gilani was even more supportive, trying to obtain American support against the military establishment. Much of this flew in the face of public sentiment in Pakistan and the military’s self-image; to bind itself to a United States that was increasingly blatant in support of emboldened India. Indeed, the American-encouraged détente with India, pursued by both military and civilian regimes, backfired miserably; by the 2010s an emboldened New Delhi was backing secessionist movements in Pakistan, cracking down anew in Kashmir, and engaging in a sustained misinformation campaign against its own Muslims, Islam generally, and the Pakistani state in particular. When India annexed Kashmir in 2019, Pakistan could offer scant response except largely ignored appeals, largely delivered by the civilian government rather than a historically pro-Kashmir military, to the international community.

This was a far cry from the independent, however reckless, streak of the 1980s and 1990s, and thus it is no surprise that the fiercely independent streak displayed by Imran, whether in opposition to American campaigns in the region or to India’s in Kashmir, found clear sympathy in a military whose tasks were increasingly at odds with the institution’s long-polished self-image. Nor is it a surprise, in such an environment, that military promotion increasingly favoured status-quo figures such as Bajwa who stuck loyally to the contrived, and very American-friendly, canard that terrorism was a bigger threat to Pakistan.

More worrying was the fact that as the military’s focus turned inward, the definition of terrorism expanded. The Pakistani establishment had been queasy about selective repression, but after the war on terror, this steadily expanded to include heavy-handed air bombing, forced disappearances, torture, and assassinations to an extent unseen since the 1971 Bangladesh war. The fact that there was genuine propaganda – often by networks in league with India’s far-right regime or the United States’s plethora of non-governmental organizations – only added to this paranoia and served to valorize this repression as self-defense against “fifth-generational warfare”. Ironically, since Imran’s removal, this repression has been redoubled against PTI supporters, hitherto some of the fiercest defenders of Pakistan’s interests vis-à-vis India.

It should be noted that the removal of the economically incompetent Noon League on corruption grounds in 2017, which paved the way for PTI’s election win the next year, could not have occurred without the at least tacit acquiescence of Bajwa. Easy though it is to forget now, the army commander’s relationship with Imran was initially positive, with both publicly stressing that the army and government were at last on the same page. But what can be seen in retrospect is that whereas Imran wanted to comprehensively change the Pakistani political system, Bajwa sought to instrumentalize the prime minister’s popularity and use him as a figurehead to perpetuate the same system, which had been failing under the corruption and incompetence of his predecessors. Throughout 2018-21, it was the PTI’s opposition, foremost among them the Noon League, who lambasted the army for interference in politics. The difference was that while PTI genuinely advocated reforms – and has been the target of a violent crackdown after losing power – its opposition, who were treated with comparative kid gloves, openly advocated a return to the pre-2018 status quo. It was this desire for the status quo, including continued vassalage to the United States, that eventually brought them back on the same page as Bajwa.

Much has been made of the geopolitical aspect of the 2022 tumult. Certainly, Imran was not blameless; his trip to Moscow in search of an alternate energy supplier came on the same day as a long-awaited Russian attack on Ukraine and may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Six months earlier, the United States had been driven in ignominy from an Afghan occupation that Imran had long criticized, and there were rumours that the Prime Minister was planning to promote against Bajwa’s wishes the conspicuous spymaster Faiz Hameed, who had made a much-hyped visit to Kabul just as the Taliban emirate were consolidating their control. Certainly, in the months after Imran’s ouster PTI supporters viewed Hameed as a sympathetic alternative to Bajwa. But taken together, this was no more than tactlessness, and certainly within the remit of an independent government whose constituency was Pakistan, not the United States.

Bajwa’s rush to publicly distance himself from the Prime Minister can only be described as craven and the military’s tacit support of a gerrymandered no-confidence vote after a nudge from the United States is much worse. In one sense, it was a continuity of the status quo that has plagued Pakistan for decades – the military navigating between different political groups, ruthlessly snipping one that threatens to get out of line. In another and more important sense, however, it is very different – a regime change that was not merely tolerated or approved, but actively instigated, by a foreign power.

“I reached the actual leader of Pakistan, General Bajwa, with whom I had engaged many times…”     Mike Pompeo, Former US Secretary of State in “Never Give an Inch”.

Yet with this wilful abdication of Pakistan’s national interests – the economy has only spiralled into decline since Imran’s ouster. The military’s popularity has plummeted after it made common cause with the same networks that it once correctly derided as supportive of Indian misinformation in favour of short-term institutional interests; which is perhaps a natural result of longstanding military supremacy.  A common pattern in military-dominated countries, such as Egypt and Sudan, is that while earlier generals might have manipulated politics to protect perceived state interests, the habit kicks in and their successors prioritize military interests, as an end rather than a means, over the state. In the process, the military transforms from being a protector of national interest into a new, eminently unpatriotic, corrupt oligarchy whose primary enemy is perceived as domestic rivals rather than foreign enemies.

This pattern, which saw the “Free Officers” of Cairo turn into a dictatorial oligarchy decades ago, is now a very real prospect in Pakistan. And once that happens, both Pakistan and its army stand to lose.

Ibrahim Moiz is an occasional writer for the Ayaan Institute. The views expressed in this article are those of the writer.