Pakistani Military’s Shattered Image
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The myth of an all-powerful military in Pakistan has been smashed in public view.
The first cracks began to appear two years ago, when thousands of Pakistanis rallied alongside an ousted prime minister who had railed against the generals’ iron grip on politics. A year later, angry mobs stormed military installations and set them aflame.
Now comes another rebuke: Voters turned out in droves last month for candidates aligned with the expelled leader, Imran Khan, despite a military crackdown on his party. His supporters then returned to the streets to accuse the military of rigging the results to deny Mr. Khan’s allies a majority and allow the generals’ favored party to form a government.
The political jockeying and unrest have left Pakistan, already reeling from an economic crisis, in a turbulent muddle. The military — long respected and feared as the ultimate authority in this nuclear-armed country of 240 million people — is facing a crisis.
Its rumblings can be heard in the open, among a public that long spoke of the military establishment in coded language.
“Generals should stay out of politics,” said Tufail Baloch, 33, a protester in Quetta.
No one thinks that the military, with its lucrative business interests and self-image as the backbone holding together a beleaguered democracy, will cede power. And even after this election, in which Mr. Khan’s allies won the most seats in Parliament, the generals’ preferred candidate from another party will become prime minister.
But a swell of Pakistanis now view the military as a source of instability, analysts say.
The country is waiting to see how the army’s chief, General Syed Asim Munir, will respond.
“This is the biggest institutional crisis that the military has ever faced in Pakistan,” said Adil Najam, a professor of international affairs at Boston University. “It is not just that their strategy failed. It’s that the ability of the military to define Pakistan’s politics is now in question.”
In the days after the election, the military’s favored party of the moment, led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, announced that it had formed a coalition with the country’s third-largest party and others to lead the next government.
But as candidates aligned with Mr. Khan won the most seats, it proved to Pakistanis that there are limits to the military’s power to engineer political outcomes. And any social legitimacy that the military still had, analysts say, was eroded by widespread allegations of vote tampering to narrow the winning margins among Mr. Khan’s allies.
For now, most expect the generals to stay the course, hoping the uproar subsides. But in the months to come, they will need to rebuild public trust to stabilize the country. “What’s unfolding in front of us is something that will lead to a new model of the military’s relationship with politics and society,” Mr. Najam said.