As it fights on four separate but connected fronts, Pakistan's military is employing more force and less tolerance for public dissent. The result is not strength, but instead a widening set of vulnerabilities that will undermine Pakistan.
Pakistan’s military is fighting on four fronts, each increasingly entangled with the others and feeding into the next. Across all of them, its response has followed a familiar pattern: more force, tighter control, and less tolerance for political resistance and public dissent. To outside observers, this approach may look like a show of resolve, but the army's efforts to impose control on one front have often fueled instability on another. The result is not the strength Pakistan's army seeks to project, but a widening set of vulnerabilities that Washington would be unwise to overlook.
One front is a struggle over political power in Pakistan. The army has suspended an elected provincial administration and backed efforts to pull authority away from the provinces toward Islamabad and, ultimately, its own headquarters in Rawalpindi. Another battle features a brutal insurgency at home, spearheaded by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and a motley collection of separatist Baloch factions, whose reach now extends across nearly all of Pakistan. A third is a dangerous confrontation with Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, whom Pakistan accuses of sheltering militants responsible for cross-border attacks. The fourth is Pakistan’s expanding defense commitment to Saudi Arabia, a partnership that could drag Pakistani forces deeper into the conflict surrounding Yemen and Iran.
While these four fronts may appear distinct, they are no longer unfolding in isolation. They are increasingly converging, with each compounding the pressures generated by the others. At their center is Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military ruler, whose ambitions for control are outpacing the military’s ability to deliver it or manage the consequences. The resulting strain on Pakistan has become harder to hide, especially as the country’s financial resources dwindle, the army’s public legitimacy erodes, and its room to engage narrows. Yet Munir seems to approach each crisis as another test of his outsized authority, when together they expose the limits of his military rule and threaten to deepen the very instability the army claims to be containing. In this respect, Munir’s Pakistan now bears an unsettling resemblance to Afghanistan next door, where the Taliban’s supreme leader has concentrated power in his own hands. Munir appears to be moving in a similar direction, effectively casting himself as Pakistan’s own supreme leader and seeking to subordinate the country’s entire political order to his personal will.
One recent illustration of this approach came on October 11, when Pakistan’s president declared an emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the restive province bordering Afghanistan. The move removed the provincial government run by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, and was followed by the arrest of its chief minister. A governor and advisory council were installed to assume control for an initial six months. Islamabad defended the intervention by accusing the provincial leadership of “deliberate disengagement” from Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts. In reality, the emergency came as thousands of PTI supporters prepared to march on the capital to demand Khan’s release, following weeks in which authorities had sealed Islamabad with shipping containers. Within days, arrests and roadblocks brought the march to a halt. A PTI spokesperson denounced the intervention as “a coup disguised as emergency.”
Pakistan’s actions invite two competing explanations. Either the terrorist threat has become so severe that the army-backed government in Islamabad can no longer manage it, or the threat is being used to justify a wider consolidation of military power. Both explanations are plausible, and neither is reassuring. But what makes the situation particularly troubling is that the military’s own conduct has made the two difficult to tell apart. Although the emergency falls short of traditional “martial law,” it reflects the same impulse to bring political life under direct military control. Pakistan’s generals have learned, at least in part, that governing openly comes with costs, not least the accountability for failures that civilian leaders might otherwise absorb.
The army’s answer has been to perfect a so-called “hybrid” system, in which they keep elected governments in place so long as they do not challenge the military’s authority or decisions. The KP emergency, however, lays bare the limits of that arrangement. When managing civilian leaders from behind the scenes is no longer enough, the army is prepared to move against those who refuse to defer to its will. At the same time, it is tightening its hold through a brand of military nationalism that cloaks the army in patriotism, effectively equating obedience to the institution with loyalty to Pakistan and criticism of its authority as disloyalty to the country.
None of this makes Pakistan’s security crisis any less real. Even by the country's grim standards, militancy has surged, with the sharpest rise in violence this year involving the Pakistani Taliban and Baloch insurgents. The question is where the army is choosing to fight and what its approach is likely to cost. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is overwhelmingly Pashtun, home to the ethnic community from which much of the Pakistani Taliban and its Afghan counterparts draw their support. The province is also PTI’s political stronghold, where the provincial assembly has previously voted against army operations. That opposition reflects deep-seated distrust of the army among Pashtun communities that have lived through displacement, curfews, and civilian casualties for over two decades. While the army may read such resistance as their unwillingness to confront militancy, local communities have heard the military declare their areas cleared time and again, only to find the opposite.
That history lies at the heart of Pakistan’s current dilemma. The military’s success depends not only on its ability to defeat militants, but also on whether local communities believe the army is protecting them or treating their areas as enemy territory. Senior Pakistani leaders have described districts across Pakistan where residents are afraid to leave their homes and police stations stand abandoned after dark, an alarming indication of just how badly security has deteriorated. Yet the army has removed the very provincial leadership that could have helped lend its campaign local credibility. In doing so, it has turned its fight against militancy into a confrontation with a popular political opposition.
Munir has now made the campaign’s outcome a test of his own authority. Civilian casualties could hand the TTP and Baloch separatists’ new grievances to exploit, reinforcing their narrative that the Pakistani state treats Pashtun areas as occupied territory rather than as part of the country. A successful campaign would allow the military to claim credit on its own terms, but a failure would leave few civilian leaders to shoulder the consequences. In the process, the army has turned counterterrorism into an extension of its broader struggle for control, blurring the line between countering militancy and suppressing dissent.
What the military’s conduct also exposes is a deeper weakness in Pakistan’s hybrid system. Traditionally, the system has relied on maintaining some separation between an adventurous military that wields power and the civilian leaders left to answer for its failures. That separation is now becoming harder to maintain. In fact, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governor’s effusive praise for Munir in his first remarks makes the shift difficult to miss. If anything, Munir's own decisions have drawn him deeper into the political fallout, leaving him personally exposed and more directly responsible for what comes next.
Pakistani leaders, for their part, accuse the Taliban government of tolerating Pakistani militants, a charge the regime denies. But Pakistan's generals may be overestimating the leverage they can gain by making the Afghan Taliban the focus of its campaign. Despite their ideological ties to the TTP, the Afghan Taliban have little incentive to force the group to disarm or leave Afghanistan if doing so risks alienating their own ranks. In their view, such pressure could push some Taliban members toward the TTP or, more dangerously, drive elements of both groups into the arms of ISIS-K, the regime's most formidable rival. Pakistan’s reliance on military pressure only heightens that danger, where efforts to weaken one militant threat could end up strengthening another, with consequences on both sides of the border.
Focusing on Afghanistan also allows Pakistan to avoid harder questions about its own security failures, particularly the breakdown of local policing and the TTP’s resurgence in major cities. Afghan sanctuaries may be part of the problem, but they cannot fully explain how Pakistani militants have rebuilt networks deep inside Pakistan, seemingly beyond the reach of its powerful intelligence services. Nor can military pressure compensate for the absence of local political settlements Pakistan need to secure the trust and cooperation of communities in affected areas.
Cross-border strikes may punish the Afghan Taliban, but they also harden the regime’s resistance to working with Islamabad. Far from isolating the militants, the strikes have fueled sympathy for them among affected areas and elevated local Taliban commanders as heroes resisting Pakistani aggression. More importantly, by trying to force cooperation through military pressure, Pakistan risks closing off the very diplomatic path needed to address the threat.
What’s more, that army’s overreach becomes even clearer when these developments are viewed alongside a parallel effort to redraw Pakistan’s administrative map. In July, Pakistan's interior minister Mohsin Naqvi declared that the system ordinary Pakistanis live under “has collapsed,” while also likening them to cockroaches. “If these cockroaches come together, they can flip everything upside down,” he told an audience. As a stopgap measure to address people’s urgent needs, Naqvi proposed creating new provinces. The military’s spokesman subsequently endorsed the idea, describing it as an “administrative reset” that could fundamentally reshape how Pakistan is governed. Since then, proposals have ranged from carving the country’s four existing provinces into 12 to 16 smaller ones to replacing the current structure with around 160 district governments.
Pakistan’s parliament is expected to debate these proposals, which could do far more than redraw administrative boundaries. Press reports suggest the changes could limit the provinces’ claims to federal revenue while bringing land, natural resources, public spending, and the channels through which local communities have a say under greater central control. While such changes might make it easier for Islamabad or Rawalpindi to issue orders, it does not guarantee that provinces will accept or implement those decisions, much less that governance will improve. Without local consent, the overhaul risks becoming another exercise in imposing control from the center rather than addressing the grievances that have weakened the Pakistani state.
The proposals are already running into political resistance. Sindh’s chief minister, whose Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) governs the province, has warned that “except for Allah, no one has the power to divide Sindh.” The party's chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has likewise said his party was not formally consulted, a striking omission given that the country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, is Bilawal’s father and a senior party leader.
These tensions point to a larger contradiction in Field Marshal Munir’s approach, where efforts to redesign Pakistan’s provincial map from Rawalpindi could provoke the very cross-party resistance that any acceptable political settlement would need to overcome. The proposal also faces a further constitutional hurdle. Creating a new province requires a two-thirds majority in the affected provincial assembly. But with the KP assembly’s powers now being exercised by Pakistan's parliament, it remains unclear whether the emergency also removes this constitutional requirement for dividing the province.
As Pakistan struggles to manage its domestic and regional challenges, it is also taking on a new security commitment that could stretch its military even further. In August, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye signed the Mecca joint defense pact, born of the regional turmoil that followed the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran. On October 5, after weeks of Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia, the three countries activated what they called “collective deterrence measures” and reportedly agreed to deploy forces to the kingdom.
Islamabad has been careful to portray Pakistan’s role as a supporting one, rather than as direct participation in the fighting. Defense Minister Khawaja Asif has said Pakistani forces will contribute to joint weapons production and intelligence sharing, while Saudi forces do the fighting. Some have also argued that the pact — whose Saudi-based secretariat is currently headed by a retired Pakistani general — does not require direct military engagement over “pre-existing conditions” and is intended to address only future tensions.
Last week, senior officials from the pact's signatories, including Munir himself, traveled to Iran, possibly to clarify the agreement’s scope. In an interview shortly afterward, Iran’s national security adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, described how the visit revealed a shared concern among the pact’s members over Israel’s regional ambitions. He quoted Saudi Arabia’s defense minister as warning that, after its war with Iran, “Israel would go after Turkey and then Saudi Arabia.” He likewise recounted Field Marshal Munir’s warning about growing India-Israel ties, portraying the relationship as an alignment between “Hindus” and “Jews” against Muslims and Pakistan.
Yet the line between providing support and becoming directly involved in combat may prove difficult to maintain for long. Pakistan already has some 8,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, along with Chinese-supplied JF-17 fighter aircraft and an HQ-9 air defense system. Pakistani officials say their military advisers are working with their Saudi counterparts to support pro-Saudi Yemeni forces. Some press reports have even claimed that Pakistani jets have participated in strikes on Houthi positions, which Islamabad has denied. Meanwhile, reports of a possible larger deployment, ranging from 40,000 to 80,000 Pakistani troops, suggest that Islamabad’s supposedly limited supporting role could quickly become a substantial military commitment.
For ordinary Pakistanis, the arrangement leaves a basic question unanswered: where does defending Saudi territory end and fighting in Yemen begin? This distinction likely matters, particularly given that Pakistan’s parliament refused to join the earlier Saudi-led campaign in Yemen in 2015. At the time, the decision reflected concerns that military involvement would alienate neighboring Iran, as well as the risks of deepening sectarian tensions in a country with a large Shia community. Islamabad has long sought to avoid being drawn into a Saudi-Iranian confrontation and those concerns are no less relevant today. Iranian hardliners have already questioned Pakistan’s credibility as a mediator between Washington and Tehran. Any Pakistani participation in offensive operations against the Houthis would only deepen those doubts, reinforcing Tehran’s suspicion that Islamabad’s mediation role cannot be separated from its military commitments.
That is why the dangers Pakistan faces across these four fronts are cumulative and their consequences could compound quickly. The gravest scenario would see a violent political confrontation in Islamabad unfolding alongside renewed military operations against domestic militants and an expanded Pakistani role in Saudi Arabia that pulls its forces into direct combat in Yemen. Such a convergence may not be the most likely outcome, but it remains a real possibility that would place an already overstretched military under even greater strain.
Meanwhile, worsening relations with the Taliban government would further complicate counterterrorism cooperation, domestic repression would deepen public grievances, and commitments in the Gulf would divert resources and attention from Pakistan’s own security crises. The army’s ability to manage any one of these challenges increasingly depends on keeping the others in check, where a breakdown on one front could quickly set off a chain reaction across the rest.
Washington should resist the temptation to view these as four separate problems and instead see them as parts of a single story about Munir’s leadership. Judged individually, some of his actions may offer grounds for short-term optimism in Washington. Taken together, however, they reveal a pattern of decisions that has already placed Pakistan’s stability under serious strain.
Yet Washington risks losing sight of this broader reality in its own Pakistan policy, which has come to revolve largely around Munir himself. The general’s role as a backchannel intermediary with Iran has earned him goodwill in Washington, even as the practical returns of that engagement remain questionable. But placing too much faith in one military leader to deliver on several fronts leave American interests exposed to his miscalculations. It also risks tying U.S. policy to Munir's personal ambitions, which may already extend well beyond what Pakistan's military can realistically deliver.
The consequences of Munir’s decisions are perhaps most visible in his handling of Pakistan’s domestic politics. Whether emergency rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is lifted on schedule, and what becomes of the proposed redrawing of provincial boundaries, would say more about Pakistan’s political direction than any assurances of a return to normal. Washington should follow both developments closely and discourage the army from imposing either measure without broad local support.
In a nuclear-armed country of more than 240 million people, attempts to govern by decree risks deepening the very grievances that Pakistani militants have long exploited. It could also further complicate U.S. engagement with Pakistan and weaken the prospects for future agreements with the country. More immediately, when decisions are handed down from Islamabad and Rawalpindi, they leave local leaders with little incentive to persuade their communities to support the Pakistan's counterterrorism campaign.
Washington should also avoid mistaking Pakistan for a shortcut to restoring its influence in Afghanistan. A military struggling across multiple fronts is hardly a dependable platform for U.S. regional policy. Nor can Pakistan resolve Washington’s impasse with the Taliban regime on its behalf, much less substitute for a realistic American approach to Afghanistan. A more practical area of shared interest is countering ISIS-K, which threatens those countries and the United States alike. If pressure on the Pakistani Taliban drives fighters toward ISIS-K, it could strengthen a common enemy and make an already volatile region even more dangerous. For now, Washington would be better served by engaging directly with both countries to ease tensions, pursue shared security interests, and prevent another round of escalation.
Ultimately, Munir’s four-front gamble appears to rest on a familiar assumption that concentrating power will produce greater control, despite Pakistan’s troubled history since 1971 suggesting otherwise. Washington should look beyond Munir's willingness to cooperate on regional security and consider whether his leadership is strengthening or eroding the conditions for stability inside Pakistan.
So far, the evidence points in the wrong direction. Looking ahead, the real test for Munir and his generals is not whether they can suppress Pakistani militancy, but whether they can do so without sacrificing the public support on which Pakistan's security depends. By that measure, the generals are already failing and Pakistan stands to lose far more for this gamble than it gains.
