In Pakistan, the Military Is Still Running the Show

Pakistani voters want change. On February 8, they delivered a surprising rebuke to the powers that be in national elections. Independent candidates aligned with the imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) won a plurality of parliamentary seats, dealing a blow to the incumbent Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and its allies, as well as to the military, which supported the PML-N in the runup to the voting. Since then, the PML-N and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) have come together to form a coalition government, with Shahbaz Sharif of the PML-N elected to serve a second term as prime minister on March 3. Whatever government emerges, observers saw last month’s election result as a verdict that went beyond the jockeying of rival political parties: in huge numbers, they claimed, Pakistanis were rejecting the implicit arrangement that allows the military to be the country’s de facto rulers.

They did so with the odds stacked against them. As happens in many election cycles, the military worked to ensure that the vote was not an entirely fair one. It undermined the PTI’s chances through legal actions against its leadership, arrests of its workers and supporters, and restrictions on media coverage. In a decision upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, the Election Commission of Pakistan also announced that the PTI would no longer be able to use its electoral symbol. Election symbols enable voters to identify the candidates’ party affiliations on paper ballots. Forcing PTI-aligned candidates to run without their symbol weakens support for them and deprives the party of reserved seats for women and minorities that are allocated in proportion to the seats that parties win in the general election. Moreover, cellphone and mobile Internet services were shut down—ostensibly for security reasons—on polling day, depriving voters of information and the ability to coordinate. Despite these conditions, the PTI-aligned candidates won 101 of the 336 seats in the National Assembly, Parliament’s lower house, far more than anybody expected and certainly far more than the ruling establishment wanted them to win.

Yet it would be risky to read too much into this seeming democratic success. All of Pakistan’s major political parties, including the PTI, keep an implicit bargain with the military whereby they tolerate, and indeed rely on, its interference in politics so they can take power and survive in office. This undergirds the country’s hybrid regime, in which political parties may genuinely compete but the winner ultimately serves as a junior partner to the military. Until the parties recognize that their interests are no longer served by embracing Pakistan’s military, even momentous elections like February’s vote will fail to deliver real change.

TROUBLE AT THE POLLS

Even a month after the election, the results remain contested. The PTI, citing rigged counts in several constituencies, is pursuing legal challenges and mounting popular protests. The party’s complaints seem credible: the independent Free and Fair Elections Network reported that its representatives were prevented from observing the compilation of results in several constituencies. The PML-N, which is now back in favor with the military, was once sensitive to questions of electoral interference. Indeed, in 2018 it ran on the slogan “Vote ko Izzat Do” (“Respect the Vote”). But this time around, it has been the beneficiary of the alleged interference in vote counts in several constituencies across the country.

The scale of the vote for the PTI is being heralded by some analysts as an antiestablishment protest. Yet the PTI came to power with military backing. Many of the tactics deployed against the party in the lead-up to the 2024 election—including politically motivated legal cases against its leaders, arrests of its workers, and inducements to candidates to switch sides—were deployed in its favor against the PML-N before elections in 2018. Moreover, while in office, the PTI-led government supported the kind of actions against dissidents and opponents that are now being used against it. This included an amendment to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in February 2022 that criminalized defamation of authorities, including the military and judiciary. The amendment was later struck down as unconstitutional by the Islamabad High Court.

The military was in fact essential to Khan’s coming to national power in 2018. In response to the alleged rigging of that year’s elections, opposition parties including the PML-N and the PPP banded together under the banner of the Pakistan Democratic Movement in 2020 when a worsening economic crisis created an opening. The parties released a 26-point resolution and expressed “extreme concern” over the establishment’s role in distorting domestic politics. By 2022, however, Khan had lost the confidence of the generals, who supported his ouster in a vote of no confidence led by members of the PDM in parliament. The PDM’s president at the time, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, confirmed last month that Khan’s ouster was engineered with guidance and support from the military, including General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who was then the army chief of staff. Rehman claimed that Bajwa and the former director general of Pakistan’s intelligence services, Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, were in direct contact with the PDM about the vote of no confidence. Rehman has since partly retracted these remarks, but the PDM government has certainly reversed its earlier stance on the military. Since coming to power in April 2022, the government has passed bills amending the Army Act and Official Secrets Act in ways that broaden the military’s powers.

POWER OVER PRINCIPLE

Every major political party in Pakistan is willing to shift its position on the military if it helps it win office. This is a problem. When a democracy functions as it should, parties are accountable to voters and have an incentive to respond to their concerns. That is the way to win power. When the military controls the pathways to political power, however, as it does in Pakistan, democratic commitments matter less, and the parties’ connection with voters grows weaker. This means that Pakistani parties often behave in ways contrary to common-sense electoral imperatives. For example, parties do not invest in their internal organizations and regularly fail to introduce the policies that voters want.

That is why Pakistani parties are weak by international standards. In the recent election, the PML-N did little to mobilize its own base. The national voter turnout in February was 48 percent, down from 51 percent in 2018. Notably, constituencies in the Central Punjab region—the PML-N’s traditional stronghold—registered the lowest turnout, 49 percent, within the province. Turnout in North, South and West Punjab was 52, 53 and 54 percent, respectively. This is unsurprising given the relatively lackluster campaign run by the PML-N. The PTI’s success in this election is certainly a reflection of Khan’s enduring popularity, the commitment of the party’s workers and supporters, and the party’s creative use of social media and digital technology to circumvent repressive restrictions on traditional modes of campaigning in the months leading up to the election. But at least in Punjab, it is just as much a story of the complacency of the PML-N.

Another failure common to all the mainstream parties is an underinvestment in mobilizing female voters. Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in voter turnout among democracies worldwide. This is due not only to the reality that politics remains an overwhelmingly male-dominated enterprise but also to societal constraints on women’s autonomy and mobility. Between 2018 and 2024, over 11 million women were added to the electoral rolls, narrowing the gender gap in voter registration. A party thinking strategically would try to reach out to newly registered women and secure their votes. Yet no mainstream party highlighted women’s issues in this year’s campaign or undertook targeted drives to get women to the polls. In a country with high levels of gender inequality, policies aimed at closing this gap could go a long way. As a female voter told me in a focus group in Lahore in 2018, “No one talks to women when it comes to asking for votes—all the persuading and luring tactics are used on men.” This has not changed, as the static gender gap in voter turnout in 2024 shows. Indeed, in several constituencies, the gender gap in turnout far exceeded the margin of victory. Choosing not to pursue potential voters—whether in core constituencies or undermobilized social groups—only makes sense in a system where the ballot box is not the primary pathway to power.

The route to national power in Pakistan goes through the most populous province, Punjab, which has the lion’s share of seats in parliament. The PTI, unusually, began as a grassroots-based party in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Without strong local networks in Punjab, the party ceased trying to build its organization in the lead-up to the 2013 elections, instead choosing to woo voters with military support and rely heavily on independent candidates who agreed to align themselves with the party. That strategy paid off with the PTI’s win in 2018. But the independent candidates it mobilized—many of whom were former ministers from other parties—starkly contradicted the party’s message of “change.” Although the party has since fallen out of military favor, the slate of PTI-affiliated candidates who emerged victorious last month still includes many of these luminaries, whom it would be absurd to classify as “antiestablishment.”

GREEN SHOOTS OF HOPE

Pakistani politics are stuck. No mainstream party can credibly claim to stand against the role of the military in politics, and many are convinced that doing so would be inimical to their political survival. Yet there are signs that this situation could be changing. The PML-N’s poor showing in 2024 shows that a complacent reliance on the military as kingmaker cannot guarantee a popular mandate. Although parties can neglect voter preferences under Pakistan’s hybrid regime, they ignore them at their own peril.

The military is still strong: it enjoys high levels of public trust and consistently better approval ratings than any other institution—including the judiciary, media, or government—in opinion polls. Widespread public dissatisfaction with the military has not been seen since the fateful elections of 1970, in which voters signaled their rejection of the military with a historically high turnout of 63 percent in Pakistan’s first direct elections since independence. The ensuing 1971 war, which culminated in military defeat for then West Pakistan, and the independence of Bangladesh, was followed by concerted, and largely successful, efforts to restore military strength and public image, including through increased defense spending. It is too early to say whether the vote supporting the PTI over the military-backed option in this year’s election reflects a sea change in public opinion toward the army or a resolve to start punishing parties for serving the military’s imperatives.

But analysts in foreign and local media outlets alike have highlighted anti-army protests that followed Khan’s arrest on corruption charges last year, as well as the 2024 vote, as evidence of exactly such a shift. Those developments may also signal a change of sentiment in Punjab, which is traditionally pro-military. Thus far, however, the PTI and its supporters remain wholly disconnected from the long-standing struggles and dissent against military excesses in Pakistan’s peripheries. The 2024 elections unfolded against a backdrop of mass protests over forced disappearances in Baluchistan Province, with convoys of demonstrators eventually reaching Islamabad. These forcible abductions and detentions, which violate international law, have systematically been used as a counterinsurgency tool by Pakistan’s security forces since the 1980s. Yet none of the parties vying for national office acknowledged the protesters or took ownership of the issue. As the human rights activist Mahrang Baloch wrote in February, “Not a single mainstream political party in this country has included the issue of missing persons in its political manifesto, because none of them want to offend the powerful army.”

AN UNLIKELY COALITION

All major political parties have lamented the military’s involvement in electoral politics at some point, only to benefit from it at another. None have taken seriously the grievances of those on the peripheries who have mobilized against the military’s excesses. Indeed, when in power themselves, parties tend to become complicit in repressing dissenting voices and all too eager to support security-based solutions that rely on the military and further entrench its role.

The PTI is currently seeking legal recourse and mobilizing popular protests against electoral rigging in constituencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh. The party leadership claims that it actually won more than 170 seats, enough to independently form a government, and vows to continue efforts to claim its rightful share. Meanwhile, parallel protests are being waged by Baluch and Pashtun ethnonationalist parties that also claim to have lost their rightful share of seats to vote rigging, although they receive far less media coverage. And tensions are high in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where electoral protests have been violently repressed. For example, the Pashtun nationalist leader Mohsin Dawar and fellow demonstrators were shot and wounded on February 10 in North Waziristan as they peacefully protested a delay in the release of local election results. If the PTI is truly willing to take a stand against the military, there is a real opening for building alliances with ethnonationalist parties and popular movements that have long been engaged in that struggle.

This is the kind of coalition needed to put democratically elected politicians in a position of strength vis-à-vis the military. A party that sees beyond the civilian-military power struggle at the center and capitalizes on the potential in popular movements on the periphery could shift the balance of power in Pakistani politics. Though there is little in any mainstream party’s track record to suggest that this is a real possibility, it is the only possibility for those who still believe in the potential of democratic politics. The Urdu phrase “Umeed par dunya qaa’im hai” (“The world rests on hope”) may sound trite in translation, but delivery is everything. When uttered with a wry laugh between Pakistanis, it is at once an indictment of the current situation, an inside joke, and a survival strategy.