Pakistan’s Perennial Militarism

Since Pakistan’s birth out of the bloody partition of British India on August 14, 1947, its political history can be summed up as a story of coups followed by protracted periods of military government, briefly punctuated by elected civilian rule. Until 2012, Pakistan did not experience even one democratic transfer of power from a democratically elected government that had completed its tenure to another. All of its previous democratic transitions have been aborted by military coups.

In May 2013, however, Pakistan broke its seemingly permanent authoritarian curse when the left-of-center Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government completed its five-year tenure and the right-of-center opposition Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) led by Nawaz Sharif won the parliamentary elections to form a new government. This successful transition was made possible in good part by the lessons that politicians appear to have learned during exile, or during incarceration at the hands of the military under General Pervez Musharraf’s authoritarian rule (1999–2008). For instance, Sharif resisted the temptation of knocking on the garrison’s door on several occasions when the PPP government was vulnerable to a military meddle. If taken to its logical conclusion, Sharif’s decision to allow and pursue Musharraf’s trial for treason (punishable by death) under Article 6 of Pakistan’s constitution will likely act as a further deterrent to military coups. But that is much easier said than done.

The military may have left power, but only conditionally so. While it outwardly tolerates democracy, the military has little or no confidence in the capacity or will of politicians to address Pakistan’s domestic political or national security problems. Hence, the generals continue to limit the authority and autonomy of elected governments to protect its institutional pride, privileges, and policies. For instance, the military has contested Sharif on both Musharraf’s trial and his declared policy of normalizing trade relations with India, by mobilizing right-wing politicians. At the moment, democratic institutions are less likely to be swept away via a blunt military coup. Instead, Pakistan might be heading toward an unstable authoritarian accommodation wherein civilian supremacy serves as a façade for military dominance over national security policies. In other words, this would constitute a situation, similar to posttransitional settings in the Southern Cone of Latin America, in which the military does not seize direct power but formally insinuates its nondemocratic privileges into the functioning of democracy.

Scholars like Michael Desch have argued that external danger provides a powerful stimulus for internal unity by strengthening group consciousness, creating a civil—military consensus and focusing the military outward as long as civilians provide them with the necessary resources.^{Footnote 3} But as Lewis Coser pointed out decades ago, “when cohesion is weak, when there is little willing acceptance of authority because of the weakness of internal solidarity,” conflict is unlikely to have an integrative effect on society.^{Footnote 4} In other words, the unifying effect of conflict with out-groups may depend on some degree of prior internal cohesion, integration, and identification with the state. In the absence of national solidarity, especially at the early stages of state formation, external conflict is less likely to unite elites in defense of the nation and keep the military away from politics because some institutions or groups may perceive the threat differently than others do.

Under such conditions, elites in control of the state will have the incentive to resort to repression in order to achieve regime or state consolidation, thus creating early precedents for justifying actions that violate democratic political procedures, which undermine state legitimacy and make achieving national cohesion even more difficult.^{Footnote 5} In fact, as discussed later in this review essay, ethnic divisions between Pakistan’s two wings, West and East Pakistan, limited the prospects of a unified response to external danger, which raised fears among the dominant West Pakistani civilian and military elites that external enemies could exploit internal disunity, which spurred the imposition of emergency measures to maintain what they perceived to be national security, which in turn alienated the Bengalis and ultimately led to the breakup of the state in 1971. It would be reasonable to argue that had Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders not followed these myopic authoritarian policies and managed to hold on to East Pakistan by democratically accommodating Bengali grievances, the country’s political history would have been quite different.

In fact, Pakistan’s pattern of political development more closely resembles Harold Lasswell’s Garrison State, which posits that external crises or a preoccupation with warfare “can subdue the civilians and pass all power to the generals.”^{Footnote 6} The perceived “existential” threat from India in the east, complicated by Afghanistan’s irredentist claims on its northwestern Pashtun-majority region in the west, provided a similar impetus for the early militarization of the Pakistani polity. From the inception of the state, the military became too closely linked to state survival, thus making it difficult for civilians to set aside its views and demands and granting it autonomy in preparing for warfare. This privileged treatment endowed the generals with a significant degree of influence over national-security decision making at a time when institutions of civilian oversight were still inchoate.

Over time, successive coups and military rule entrenched the military’s dominance over defense and security issues. Driven by deep insecurity and antipathy toward India, the military has come to exercise de facto control over the state’s most important external security interactions with India, Afghanistan, the United States, and China. In the process, the military arrogated to itself the right both to exclusively define threats to national security and to choose the means of responding to those threats, including the use of radical Islamist militants to compensate for India’s military superiority and to revise the status quo in Indian Kashmir. Even as the blowback from these failed security polices have created internal instability and rising insecurity, caused heavy losses of life and resources, and isolated Pakistan diplomatically, the military has refused to change course. The three books under review help us understand why.

The Sticky Origins of “Martial Rule”

To put Pakistan’s political development in context, I begin the review with Jalal’s eloquently argued Struggle for Pakistan. An admirable example of fine-grained process tracing that many qualitatively oriented political scientists use to identify the causal mechanisms underlying their theories, the book offers a macrohistorical overview of the country spanning more than seven decades, from the end of British rule in India to the contemporary globalized context. Its ultimate goal is to “explain the reasons for military supremacy,” which, the author correctly observes, is “the most salient and enduring feature of Pakistan’s postcolonial history” despite repeated attempts at creating “the rudiments of a functioning democracy” (pp. x, 3).

Jalal is an eminent historian of South Asia, who has typically focused on the big and important questions of the subcontinent’s modern history. This book is based on her previous scholarship on the partition of India, the impact of colonial legacies on state formation in Pakistan and India, and the dependent militarization of Pakistan’s political economy. But it also represents her conscious response to what she calls the “presentist turn” in the scholarship on the country since it became a front-line state in the Bush administration’s War on Terror. Acknowledging that rising religious extremism and terrorism rightly worry the international community about the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons technology could fall into the wrong hands (p. 5), she cautions us to resist accepting the tempting but “facile and defective” descriptions of Pakistan as a failed or imminently failing state. In its place, she sets out to offer an interpretation of its political trajectory that is sensitive to contingency, complexity, and content (pp. x, 9).

Drawing on her earlier work on the origins of Pakistan’s political economy of defense,^{Footnote 7} Jalal also rejects “pre-conditionist” perspectives that explain the country’s consistent failure to consolidate democratic institutions as the product of a feudal social structure or cultural attributes, such as the Muslim faith of its majority. Instead, she contends, it was the historically conditioned combination of domestic politics, regional rivalries, and Cold War imperatives that tipped the balance firmly in favor of the “nonelected institutions of the state” during the critical juncture following independence (pp. 3, 60–61, 64, 384).

From the very start, Pakistan’s founding nationalist movement, the Muslim League, led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, feared perpetual hostility from a “Hindu” India controlled by its political nemesis, the Indian National Congress, with whom it had fought a bitter political battle over the right to represent India’s Muslims in the lead-up to the partition. Their sense of insecurity was exacerbated by the early onset of a war over the disputed princely state of Kashmir at a time when Pakistan’s military was poorly equipped. Subsequent Indian military mobilizations on the country’s eastern borders as a result of communal tensions between the two sides convinced the Pakistan elites that the only way to survive was by building a strong military.

Pakistan also faced the monumental challenge of nation-state building from scratch, in sharp contrast to India, which inherited the British colonial state with all its symbolic and institutional accouterments. There was also its unique physical geography, that is, its division into two noncontiguous wings (West and East Pakistan) separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. To make matters worse, the country’s territorial bifurcation mapped neatly onto its ethnic geography. Ethnic Bengalis, who constituted 54% of the population, were territorially concentrated in East Pakistan. West Pakistan was ethnically diverse (with ethnic minorities like the Pashtuns, Baloch, and Sindhis) but with a Punjabi (24% of the population) majority. To create a nation-state reflective of its identity as the homeland of the Muslims of the subcontinent, Jinnah and his lieutenants overemphasized national homogenization, rather than democratic accommodation and inclusion.

Jalal believes that Jinnah’s actions, including his choice of becoming the governor general with authoritarian emergency powers, unlike Jawaharlal Nehru who became India’s prime minister, was driven by the urgent need for coherent administration over a sprawling and fragmented territory. However, she tends to underplay the disastrous consequences of Jinnah’s viceregalism for national integration and democratization. For instance, Jinnah’s decision to impose Urdu—which was the language identified most closely with the Muslim League but was spoken by less than 7% of the population—as the sole national language when 98% of East Pakistan spoke Bangla delegitimized the central government in the eyes of the majority Bengalis, and sowed the seeds of state—region conflict between West and East Pakistan that ultimately culminated in a civil war and the formation of the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971.

After Jinnah’s early death in 1948 and the subsequent assassination of his deputy, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, in 1951 (which Jalal attributes somewhat tendentiously to his resistance to a Cold War alliance with the United States sought by the generals), the military assumed center stage as the guarantor of internal order and external security. Military dominance worsened ethno-regional divisions because the army officer corps was 77% Punjabi due to a legacy of skewed colonial military recruitment from among the warrior or “martial” races of northwest India (such as the Punjabis and Pashtuns) to the exclusion of the “nonmartial” Bengalis (who were less than 5% of the officer corps).^{Footnote 8}

The main priority of the West Pakistani—controlled state was to build its military capabilities to balance against India. Internally, the central government privileged development over defense and relied on the coercive extraction of resources from the provinces—a process that further alienated the Bengalis and other excluded ethnic minorities. On the external front, the military leveraged the country’s geostrategic location to acquire security and economic aid from the United States in return for joining its “northern tier” containment alliance against the Soviet Union (p. 146). However, the uncertainty of electoral politics, especially a Bengali alliance with non-Punjabi ethnic groups in West Pakistan, posed a danger to the state’s India-centric defense policy buttressed by rents from Washington (pp. 87, 92, 96). Ultimately, as Jalal notes, “the military bureaucratic alliance in West Pakistan” terminated even the formal democratic process and established military rule in 1958 to deny the Bengali majority’s right to rule (p. 75). In this context, “the carefully cultivated nexus between the top echelons of the military and the civil bureaucracy in Pakistan and the centers of the international system in London and Washington was of tremendous significance” (p. 92). In 1971, East Pakistan ultimately seceded after a civil war and an Indian military invasion to form the independent state of Bangladesh.

Extending the narrative to subsequent decades, Jalal carefully traces the evolution and hardening of a warped civil—military relationship dominated by the generals. For example, one key element of continuity has been the military’s ability to uproot democracy at a low cost by projecting itself as useful to American strategic interests, such as by acting as the CIA’s main partner in running the agency’s covert anti-Soviet “jihad” in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The military’s most recent expedient incarnation has been as the bulwark against Islamist militancy and terrorism in the region, even as it loses its monopoly over coercion due to the blowback from its misguided policy of using violent nonstate actors against India (pp. 5, 372).

For Jalal, the deadweight of history is not destiny though. Repeated coups and military authoritarian rule—1958–71, 1977–88, 1999–2008—have clearly weakened civilian institutions, corrupted the electoral process by providing civilian opportunists shortcuts to power, and depoliticized sections of civil society. However, as she repeatedly reminds us, any rendering of Pakistani history would be incomplete without recognizing regional democratic struggles (such as those waged by the Bengalis and the Baloch), or the local and regional cultural counternarratives that have periodically emerged to challenge state-led Islamization and militancy. Moreover, military governments have proven vulnerable to societal resistance and contentious politics, such as the “Lawyers’ Movement” that helped unseat General Pervez Musharraf in 2007–8, which challenges any notion of total acquiescence to authoritarianism. Since that last transition to democracy, in fact, the emergence of new actors within a changing international context, such as an assertive judiciary and newly independent broadcast media, have opened the possibility of a broader coalition of state and civil-society actors that can reconfigure civil—military relations. Military rule has also become globally anachronistic, and many in Pakistani political and civil society recognize that military dominance is a liability that could fatally impede Pakistan’s chances of successful integration into the global economy (pp. 392–93). Moreover, Pakistan’s first democratic transition of power in 2013 may turn out to be the proverbial straw that breaks the military camel’s back, in part because it represents a solidifying democratic consensus among Pakistan’s traditionally fractious political elite. No less encouraging was the 55% voter turnout (the highest since 1970) despite violent terrorist attacks in the run-up to the election, and the continuing threat of terrorism from the Pakistani Taliban (see pp. 372–83).

While Jalal’s arguments are compelling, her view of Jinnah and the role of “great men in history” leaves much to be desired. As political scientist K. B. Sayeed, Allen McGrath, and other others have shown, the founding father’s policies and behavior set dangerous antidemocratic precedents for his successors, like Governor General Ghulam Mohammad (1951–55) and President Iskander Mirza (1955–58). Curiously, Jalal is much more critical of their supposed venality and “self-serving exercise of authority” (p. 93) than Jinnah’s. While she expresses her skepticism of the “Great Man” thesis, her treatment of Jinnah indicates that she seems to believe that he truly was the “Quaid-e-Azam” (or great leader). She sums up her take on Jinnah’s role in the country’s political development by endorsing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view that a great man is one who “inhabits a high sphere of thought” and is less prone to error than ordinary people (p. 55).

These minor issues aside, Jalal’s Struggle for Pakistan represents the culmination of her ambitious body of work, now pressed into the service of correcting a cookie-cutter narrative that shapes policy thinking on Pakistan but invokes fear and panic rather than an informed understanding. The study, therefore, demands the attention of both the policy and scholarly communities interested in South Asian history, democratization, military politics, and regional security issues.

The Weak Warrior State

Like Jalal’s study, Paul’s The Warrior State seeks to explain Pakistan’s persistent military praetorianism. More specifically, it asks why the country remains a garrison state “when former military ruled states in Asia and Africa have embraced democracy and reaped the dividends of free trade and globalization” (p. 2).

Most political scientists agree that political behavior is a product of both agency—actors’ motivations, interests, and ideas—and the constraints and opportunities that flow from the domestic or international structure in which they operate. In his analysis of Pakistan’s political development, Paul rightly emphasizes both of these dimensions. The main domestic actors in his story are the country’s civilian and military elites with ideational preferences (although he mostly uses the generic term “elites” without specifying their political or institutional affiliations) that determine why they choose certain strategies or agendas over others (p. 23).

In his view, these elites are motivated by a “hyper-real politick,” Hobbesian ideology. In other words, they see the world in zero sum terms, assume the worst about their adversaries, and conceptualize international politics as “the war of all against all” (p. 24) (although there is nothing excessive in these assumptions since they are based on standard realism). Moreover, their perceptions of warfare and enmity are rooted in the idea that Pakistan was built for the protection of the Muslims of South Asia against “Hindu” India’s hegemony, which is why they see other Muslim countries as natural allies and “strive for the protection of Islamic ideas” (p. 25). Pakistan’s elites, in other words, are both uber-realists and religious zealots rolled into one.

The structural opportunity comes from the perceived danger posed by India and Pakistan’s associated search for “strategic parity” with its larger neighbor, as well as the contested border with Afghanistan. Given this strategic environment, broadly shared, Islam-tinged “hyperrealist” ideas motivate the elite to pursue a ruinous military-first approach to security, dedicated to territorial revisionism in Kashmir, regardless of its costs for the country’s social and economic development. This “warrior state” is aided and abetted in its ruinous policies by American geostrategic rents that further obviate the ruling elite’s need to pursue either democracy or development (pp. 3, 5, 18, 26–28).

There is nothing really new in these claims. Paul’s study echoes many of the themes raised by scholars like Jalal and Fair (discussed next), such as the impact of elite preferences or ideas, the strategic security environment, and geopolitical alliances on both domestic politics and external behavior. However, The Warrior State explicitly explores the relevance and influence of two prominent variables, warfare and the resource curse, on Pakistan’s political development.

First, it draws on the influential thesis on the role of war in the creation and development of nation-states in the European context exemplified in the work of Charles Tilly. As Tilly memorably put it, “war made the state, and the state made war.”^{Footnote 9} In essence, he argued that “within the limits set by a state’s external environment, the extraction and competition over the means of war have created the central organizational structures of states.”^{Footnote 10} The causal logic is straightforward: War spurs state development because raising armies to fight external enemies requires resource mobilization and taxation, which forces ruling elites to establish and expand the state’s extractive capacity.

Political scientists would expect that preparation for war should have similarly conducive effects on state building in other contexts. However, warfare and national state consolidation have been conflicting rather than complementary logics in Pakistan. As Paul notes, the country’ heavy investment in the military for more than six decades has brought it neither security nor prosperity. This paradoxical outcome leads the author to infer that in the case of developing countries, there is no straightforward link between war and state development. In fact, military threats can induce military-heavy strategic outlooks that are likely to cause political and economic stagnation. Citing “similar conflict situations” in externally insecure East Asian tigers South Korea and Taiwan as paradigmatic cases, Paul contends that developing states can still harness the salutary effects of war on national development but only if they can “control or compartmentalize” it while they focus on internal development and external trade (pp. 15, 175–80). The key here is for elites to show “restraint and refrain from a hypersensitive approach” that can lead to “excessive war making efforts” that divert scarce resources from development to defense (p. 2, 15, 157, 188–89).

Similarly, comparing Pakistan to Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt, Paul shows that even Muslim-majority warrior states can become strong states (and in the first two cases, even democracies) if their leaders can tone down their hyperrealism and make smart and reasonable choices (pp. 152–75). For instance, he cites the Egyptian leadership’s rational decision to end its rivalry with Israel in 1979 as a potential turning point that has created the conditions for the country’s development, if civilians can control the military and democratic institutions can find roots in society. Unfortunately, in Paul’s view, Pakistan’s elites have been inherently “devoid of prudence” and a “developmental outlook” (p. 4). Hence, they have opted for the unrestrained pursuit of militarized security rather than economic advancement, which has turned Pakistan into “a geopolitical nightmare for its neighbors, other states, and not least, itself” (p. 15).

Second, Paul attributes Pakistan’s thwarted political development to the “easy money” or external rents that it receives because of its geostrategic importance to great-power interests (p. 21). Why else, he asks, would Pakistan get a pass from the United States despite its well-known record of proliferating nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya? Why, despite playing “double games” in the War on Terror (cooperating with the United States in capturing Al Qaeda terrorists while collaborating with others like the Haqqani network that kill American troops in Afghanistan), would it remain one of the largest recipients of U.S. assistance? But as advantageous as Pakistan’s geopolitical location may seem, it has also put a curse on the country. This “geostrategic curse” works much like the well-known natural resource curse: Abundant resources such as oil can give elites access to independent windfall profits, which they can use to coerce and co-opt the populace without extending political rights or investing in productive economic activities (pp. 3, 15, 18–23, 33). In return for serving (and at times, undermining) American security interests, Pakistan’s elites have had access to strategic rents, which has discouraged them from adopting a developmental state strategy even to achieve the economic strength required for maintaining the security competition with New Delhi (pp. 18–23).

While generally persuasive, The Warrior State is problematic on several grounds. First, its empirical foundations are razor thin, which puts question marks over its theoretical claims, especially when these are not borne out by the historical evidence. For example, a close analysis of recently declassified Pakistani government documents indicates that the country’s founding elites were, in fact, acting in line with the predictions of realist theory. At least in the years following independence, they were balancing against India because they were concerned with ensuring the country’s physical survival in the face of an “imminent threat of war,” not because they were acting out some historically distant fantasy of restoring Muslim supremacy in the subcontinent.^{Footnote 11} And as Lewis Coser put it, “If men define a threat as real, although there may be little, or nothing in reality to justify this belief, the threat is real in its consequences.”^{Footnote 12} Hence, the Hobbesian ideas and actions that Paul ascribes to Pakistani elites flowed from structural threat imperatives and were not a simple matter of “policy choice” driven by religiously tainted “paranoia,” as he asserts (p. 4). Similarly, Paul’s claim that the Pakistani military’s strategic policies are driven by its “deep attachment” to “radical Islamist thinking” is based on just two indirect quotations from the Pakistan Army Green Book of 1991 and 1994 (p. 76), even though several new additions of this official publication, which contains essays by senior and junior officers, are publicly available.

Second, Paul’s claim that both South Korea and Taiwan faced the same threat environment as Pakistan is doubtful. And if this contention is accepted on its face value, his main argument boils down to an essentialist claim that Pakistan’s elites were genetically reckless compared to the inherently circumspect elites in those comparative cases. Besides, he fails to explore the “inconvenient fact” that both of these states were better placed to prioritize development over defense, at least in part, because of the robust presence of the American military on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Straits, which deterred North Korea and China, respectively. Third and related, both were also homogenous societies, unlike ethnically divided Pakistan, which ultimately facilitated their transitions to democracy by insulating them from the vexing challenge of peacefully accommodating ethnic diversity in a precarious geostrategic setting.

Fourth, even though Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel gave the country respite from external crises and war, it is hardly a model for either democracy or development. While the revolution of 2011 got rid of Hosni Mubarak’s prolonged dictatorship, Egypt is back to square one, having succumbed to coercive military rule in 2013 when the military overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammad Morsi. And neither Turkey nor Indonesia was even half as insecure as Pakistan, and their main security threats were internal. Hence, as Paul himself concedes, neither had the need to overspend on defense or develop the tools—such as the use of nonstate actors or nuclear weapons—needed to fight a much stronger external enemy (p. 165).

Finally, while intuitively persuasive, the “rentier state” thesis leaves one question unanswered: Why did Pakistan’s elites not undertake political and economic reforms when the strategic rents dried up, for example, from 1965 to 1980, and 1990 to 2001? Paul alludes to the path-dependent nature of ideas, or how they grow resistant to change by becoming embedded in institutional structures (p. 23), but does not further develop this theme. A more theoretically fruitful approach would have been to view civilian and military elites as “boundedly rational” actors who make sense of their external environment and respond to perceived threats in ways they consider most appropriate. Seen this way, what seems more plausible on closer analysis is that the elite beliefs did not appear ex duex machina but are products of the military’s formative institutional experience under conditions of external insecurity and internal divisions, and have since developed a life of their own because they have become ingrained over time in the military’ socialization processes. (Fair makes a similar path-dependent argument to show the origins and ossification of the military’s strategic culture.) Seen in this light, it would be reasonable to infer that even in the absence of American military aid, the misdirected strategic assumptions of Pakistani elites continued to fog their view of the world and caused them to choose suboptimal policies.

These problems notwithstanding, Paul’s study makes several useful contributions. For one, he draws on insights from historical sociology, international relations, and comparative politics, including the resource curse, to make sense of the politics and geostrategic impulses of this important South Asian country. Second, his study advances the debate on the virtuous linkage between warfare and state building by making it more relevant to the experience of Pakistan in particular and developing countries in general.

The Greedy State

Fair’s Fighting to the End follows Paul’s emphasis on the abiding recalcitrance of Pakistan’s strategic policies, especially its military’s enduring revisionism vis-à-vis India despite repeated and high-cost failure in the past. For instance, the military has carried out several subconventional military campaigns to overturn the territorial status quo in Kashmir (e.g., 1948, 1965 and the 1999 Kargil war that took place under the shadow of overt nuclearization). All of these ended in abject failure, triggered wider wars, and in the case of Kargil, could have escalated to the nuclear level. As Fair correctly notes, the military’s stubborn attachment to a failed policy is even harder to fathom when one considers its reliance on violent nonstate actors to sustain its rivalry with India, which has eroded Pakistan’s international standing, has left it diplomatically isolated, and even poses a threat to its own survival as a state (pp. 227–32, 243–51).

This persistent revisionism leads Fair to wonder whether Pakistan really is a normal, rational, security-seeking state. Realist international relations theory posits that all modern states are rational actors who are concerned primarily with achieving physical security. Because states are rational, we should expect them to abandon or change policies that fail to achieve their objectives. Hence, she provocatively argues that Pakistan may be what Charles Glaser calls a “purely greedy state” that can never be satisfied with the status quo and will always try to aggrandize more territory or spread its ideology (pp. 4–5, 282).^{Footnote 13} According to Fair, the greedy behavior stems from the Pakistani military view of the conflict with India as “civilizational.” Hence, it has never interpreted losing a war as defeat. Instead, in the military’s lexicon, victory means the ability to continue “fighting to the end.” Paradoxically, it sees doing nothing to resist perceived Indian hegemony as the ultimate defeat (p. 7).

The author contends that the main reason why the military remains obstinately attached to its behavioral patterns is its strategic culture—or basic shared conceptions of its external environment—which influences how it interprets the threats from India and the instruments it has developed to tackle them (pp. 5–7, 34–38, 243). To be convincing, ideational arguments ought to explain not just how they influence political outcomes but where they come from and how actors produce and sustain them. Contra Paul who presumes elite ideas as a given, Fair persuasively traces the origins of the army’s strategic culture to its members’ formative experience and accumulated memory of perceived Indian perfidy during and after the partition of British India (see pp. 40–65). She also painstakingly combs through the Pakistani military’s underutilized professional journals and publications produced over the last six decades to show how it transmits norms and ideas to its members, and how it reproduces them over time via institutional rhetoric and practice. What emerges from her analysis is a professional discourse replete with self-serving falsehoods, myths, and historical distortions, in which “Hindu” India is depicted as an implacable enemy, and the army as the sole bulwark for protecting the physical and ideological frontiers of Pakistan (pp. 88–102, 154–86). The Pakistani military’s persistent revisionist behavior despite its costly failure is a damning confirmation of Fair’s thesis, and her study provides strong evidence that norms can become path dependent once they are ingrained in institutional environments.

Persuasive ideational explanations also need to account for normative change, however. So how might the Pakistani military’s sticky strategic culture change? Fair considers several potential endogenous and exogenous game changers in the penultimate chapter. For example, drawing on her earlier work with Shuja Nawaz, Fair argues that changes in the geographic distribution of the officer corps means that the army is now recruiting officers with a different worldview than their seniors who came from select districts of the Punjab province (pp. 269–74).^{Footnote 14} However, the salutary effect of broad-based recruitment on military attitudes faces the formidable obstacle of overcoming what Fair considers to be a hardened strategic culture. In other words, this internal source of change discounts the military institution’s capacity to socialize recruits into institutionally sanctioned norms and ideas by creating a break with the past, as well as the effects of continuous training and education throughout an officer’s career.

What about a change induced by civil society or democratization? Fair is even less hopeful that civilian factors can make a difference. In her view, the military’s “ossified strategic culture, based on erroneous assumptions, permeates the national narrative, is inserted into education system, civil society, is not rational or empirical, and remains resistant to amelioration” (p. 11). The implication is that even if the military is weaned away from dominating strategic policy and decision making, civilian politicians are unlikely to challenge the generals’ faulty assumptions because they too have “thoroughly acquiesced to this reality” (pp. 21, 265).

While the military worldview, especially its worst-case assumptions about India, has indeed percolated into society and textbooks, the author may be a little too pessimistic about the potential role of civilian leadership in challenging military strategic preferences. In fact, the behavior of key political leaders indicates that they do not necessarily share the military’s pessimistic view of the bilateral conflict as unremitting. In fact, Nawaz Sharif (1990–93, 1997–99, 2013– ) and the late Benazir Bhutto (especially in her first tenure, 1988–90) sought to mend fences with India at significant political risk. For instance, Sharif’s peace overtures to India in 1999 irked then—Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf, who tried to scuttle it by sending troops into the Kargil sector of Indian Kashmir and ultimately overthrew Sharif in October of that year. To the military’s chagrin, Sharif has sought to normalize trade between the two countries since assuming power in 2013. Besides, in three of Pakistan’s four provinces—Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sind, and Balochistan—Kashmir is hardly a vote winner. And the fact that the PML-N’s main base of support is in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and electorally most significant province, shows clearly that resolving the conflict with India has a sizable domestic constituency. The military still has influential allies among political parties (like the ex-cricketer Imran Khan’s conservative Tehrik-e-Insaaf) and civil society (e.g., sections of the print and broadcast media), which it can use to browbeat governments that it considers soft on India. But if the PPP, the PML-N, and other parties remain united around the goal of maintaining democracy, Pakistan’s civil—military imbalance can shift in favor of the civilians through “habituation” to democratic practices and norms, thereby raising the likelihood that the country may forgo its revisionism and learn to live peacefully with India.

Ultimately, Fair’s finely argued book should be of interest to scholars of the Pakistan military, South Asian security, and comparative security studies, as well as journalists and policymakers trying to understand this complex and complicated country. The study does a commendable job of explaining the historical origins and the reproduction, persistence, and impact of strategic culture on Pakistan’s national security policy and its ramifications for regional and international security. However, scholars interested in examining the process and mechanisms of normative change will likely be disappointed by Fair’s conclusion that ossified norms and the policy preferences they spawn can become almost permanently resistant to change. The next step for any scholar of strategic culture, and persistently revisionist states, would be to explore the conditions under which existing norms and ideas change, especially when their underlying premises are challenged by changes in structural variables, both in the context of Pakistan’s powerful military and more broadly. The author has provided future researchers a firm basis for understanding what makes Pakistan’s nuclear-armed military tick.

Policy Implications

All three books under review are concerned about the future of Pakistan and give serious consideration to its implications for regional and international security, a welcome development since social scientists tend to shy away from policy prescriptions. Aware of the myriad internal and external challenges it faces, each of the three studies raises thoughtful questions about what Pakistan will look like in the future. Will the country succumb to authoritarianism or can it emerge as a vibrant democracy with civilian control of the armed forces? Will it continue to follow the disastrous strategic choices it has made in the past or is there any hope for a course correction? What can the international community, especially the United States, do or not do?

In wrestling with these difficult questions, Fair comes out as the most pessimistic of the three. She seems to have given up on Pakistan’s prospects of becoming a normal democratic state at peace with its neighbors and the rest of the world. She thinks that the best policy for dealing with Pakistan is to disconnect the methadone and let the addict deal with its fallout. In other words, there is no point in appeasing Pakistan by giving it more resources, concessions, or even security assurance because its revisionism is rooted in ideological avarice. Hence, the best that the United States and its allies can do is to decide how to contain the growing threat of Islamist militancy and terrorism emanating from Pakistan (pp. 281–82).

Paul is cautiously optimistic, and puts the ball squarely in the court of Pakistani elites. In his view, the impulse for transformation must come from within the country and will depend mainly on whether the governing elites can abandon the warrior strategy vis-à-vis India, and unconditionally commit to pluralism, democracy, and integration in the global economy. In concluding his study, Paul rightly notes that the garrison state has become an anachronism in a globalizing world, and earnestly urges Pakistanis to focus on invigorating internal development and external trade, building democratic institutions, and pursuing security policies that are in sync with the country’s capabilities and resources. However, he concludes on a rather alarmist note, warning that if Pakistan continues its warrior strategy and support for militancy and terrorism, it could eventually collapse, with disastrous consequences for regional and global security (pp. 196–97). In the end, though, his rather baffling policy prescription is that Pakistan should become a “quasi-Islamic” state (whatever that term implies), a view that seems rooted in the Hindu nationalist ideologue M. J. Akbar’s claim that theocracy is embedded in the country’s “DNA.”

Although mindful of the entrenched authoritarian legacies of its past and the pernicious security choices of its military elite, Jalal is the most hopeful of the three. For one, she does not think that Pakistan is doomed beyond redemption, or that state failure is the most likely future for the country. For instance, contrasting Pakistan with Egypt and other enduring authoritarian regimes, she believes (and rightly so) that the country’s democratic “spirit” is still alive and well and that its people and political parties have shown themselves capable of confronting illegitimate military governments in the past. Like the other two authors, Jalal sees terrorism as an existential problem afflicting Pakistan; terrorism, she thinks, can be overcome if the military is divested of its control over national strategic policy. Reflecting Paul’s view that Pakistan should sue for peace with India as a way out of its political and economic morass, Jalal argues that normalization and trade with India would open the space for redirecting civil—military relations. But she is realistic enough to understand that the military retains the ability to sabotage any peace process that threatens to marginalize its position in the Pakistani state and society (p. 389).

With regard to the United States, Jalal thinks that a potential severing of the dependent relationship in the wake of the American exit from Afghanistan, or due to differences in the Indian role in that country’s stabilization, could lead Pakistan to oppose U.S. geostrategic goals and “add immeasurably to Washington’s woes in the Middle East” (p. 387). However, she does not tell the reader what form this opposition could take and whether Pakistan has the capacity and resources to take on the world’s only superpower on whose military and economic aid it has long depended. She also contends that a freezing of relations between the two countries could be a blessing in disguise for Pakistan. In fact, it might push the country to reevaluate its existing security policies and pursue alternative options, including regional cooperation. Evidence on this potential change is questionable. The United States withdrew from the region in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, but that exit did not really make Pakistan’s military abandon its confrontation with India. And as both Paul’s and Fair’s studies make clear, there seems to be little indication that Pakistan’s military has learned any useful lessons from its past mistakes, or that the generals would heed the sobering advice on offer.

Political Science, Pakistan, and Deviant Cases

Given Pakistan’s defiance of theoretical expectations and empirical trends (e.g., the predicted positive effect of external threats on civilian control, or the entrenched nature of its militarized authoritarianism when most military-dominated polities in the world have made successful democratic transitions), the country deserves far greater attention in future social science research than it has received.

The scholarly neglect of Pakistan speaks to the broader tendency among political scientists to ignore or undervalue case studies as mere “story telling.” Cross-national analyses that have become the norm in the discipline rarely pay sustained attention to individual cases. Even qualitative writings generally tend to overlook or brush aside deviant cases (that is, cases with outcomes that challenge theoretical predictions)^{Footnote 15} on the grounds that all social science theories are prone to exceptions. Hence, anomalous cases like Pakistan (or even military-dominated Burma and Thailand) are typically seen as the sole province of historians or area-studies experts who are principally concerned with specific events and case peculiarities. But as both Arendt Lijphart’s landmark research on consociationalism in the Netherlands and Sheri Berman’s damning critique of Robert Putnam’s civil—society thesis in the context of associationally rich Nazi Germany testify, even one atypical case can challenge an otherwise robust theory. As Ronald Rogowski counseled us almost 20 years ago, rather than insisting on expanding the number of observations as the gold standard for increasing the validity of causal inferences, we should let theory be our guide in choosing a small number or even a single case that may challenge empirical regularities.^{Footnote 16} So rather than taking comfort in the exceptionalism waiver, we need to intensely study such oddballs to understand why they defy theoretical claims. In other words, qualitative deviant case studies can afford political scientists the opportunity to test the validity of theoretical assumptions and, in the process, generate new hypotheses or modify existing ones for accommodating such exceptions.

While political scientists can learn much from case studies of deviant cases, regional and country specialists, too, can enrich their own work by explicitly linking them to theoretical arguments. For instance, South Asianists can explicitly evaluate social science theories and concepts in light of their deep area knowledge, field experience, and data. A fine example is Fair’s Fighting to the End. which combines novel data with concepts from international relations theory (e.g., strategic culture, greedy state) to explain the puzzling persistence of Pakistan’s revisionist national security policy.

Beyond Pakistan’s theoretical and methodological import, its vital importance to regional and international security alone should solicit more scholarly interest in studying the country’s political dynamics. One can only hope that the three works under review represent the first step in that direction.