 "How Pakistan’s nuclear-terror nexus enters its most dangerous phase under Munir’s dictatorship")
Pakistan has been here before, though perhaps never quite so nakedly. In 1977, General Zia-ul-Haq toppled a weakened civilian government and proceeded to recast the state in his image, institutionalising Islamisation at home and weaponising jihad abroad. It was Zia who fused Islamic ideology with militancy, turning Pakistan’s western frontier into a launchpad for the Afghan jihad and its eastern border into a pressure cooker of India-focused proxy terror groups. His legacy of military absolutism cloaked in divine sanction still haunts the nation.
Nearly five decades later, self-styled Field Marshal Asim Munir appears determined to finish what Zia started. But where Zia seized power through a coup, Munir has achieved something more surgical and far more enduring. He has engineered a constitutional overhaul that formalises the military’s supremacy with the veneer of parliamentary approval. The 27th Constitutional Amendment, rushed through Pakistan’s National Assembly on November 12, 2025, amid opposition boycotts and sporadic nationwide protests, marks an unprecedented consolidation of military power.
In a country long governed under the shadows of military generals, this amendment brings the shadows of military control into the broad daylight. It erodes the last pretences of civilian authority, dismantles judicial independence, and most alarmingly, it places Pakistan’s nuclear strategy firmly into the hands of one man.
The result is a disturbing evolution of what many military analysts call Pakistan’s “nuclear terror fusion” doctrine that is a volatile blend of tactical nuclear signalling and state-sponsored terrorism aimed at coercing New Delhi into resumption of bilateral dialogue by internationalising the Kashmir issue.
By engineering the latest constitutional amendment, Asim Munir has not just fortified military supremacy, but he has become the architect of a nuclear strategy that blurs deterrence, brinkmanship, and proxy warfare and binds them into a single highly combustible doctrine.
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View AllConverting a Hybrid State into a Uniformed Autocracy
Pakistan’s democracy has always been a brittle compromise between the civil government and the military. It has been more of a hybrid construct in which civilians occupied the office while the military held the power. The 27th Amendment strikes at the heart of even this fragile arrangement.
The amendment has rewritten the legislation’s key constitutional articles, most notably Articles 175 and 248, which grant lifetime immunity to a sweeping category of officeholders, in particular to Asim Munir himself. It shields him completely from the civil and criminal proceedings, effectively granting him perpetual protection for the past abuses and carte blanche for the future ones.
The amendment also reengineers the judicial architecture by dismantling the fragile buffer that once allowed courts to occasionally challenge military overreach. The Supreme Judicial Council is recast to give military-aligned judges expanded influence over appointments and dismissals, while a new “national security clause” empowers the military leadership to intervene in cases deemed sensitive. Two Supreme Court justices resigned in protest, calling the changes “an annihilation of judicial independence”.
In earlier eras, the military operated from behind the curtain, quietly ushering out disobedient prime ministers, engineering fragmentations in political parties, or leaning on courts to preserve its primacy. With the 27th Amendment, those sources of leverage no longer require subterfuge. They are now constitutional powers largely in the hand of one man, Munir himself.
Asim Munir’s Political Coronation
Asim Munir’s meteoric rise has been carefully self-choreographed, just like General Zia’s. His self-appointment as the second Field Marshal in Pakistan’s history, next to Ayub Khan, followed the defeat of Pakistan in Operation Sindoor earlier this year. Despite the glaring weaknesses in Pakistan’s defence infrastructure that stood totally exposed after India knocked out most of its airfields and air defence sites during the operation, the skirmish was spun by the Pakistan army as a triumph that showcased Munir as a “strategic genius”.
The 27th Amendment completes his transformation from army chief to Pakistan’s uncontested supreme authority. It does so by abolishing the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and merging its authority with that of the Chief of Army Staff, thereby creating the new and vastly more powerful role of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF). As a result, all defence, intelligence, and nuclear decisions now flow directly through Munir.
Civilian oversight, already feeble, has become essentially irrelevant. Parliament has been reduced to a ceremonial echo chamber, and provincial governments exist at the mercy of the military’s intelligence apparatus. The media, placed under aggressive censorship regimes, is unable to report freely on the implications of this transformation.
Opposition leaders are either imprisoned or silenced, and protests across major cities such as Lahore, Karachi, and Quetta have been met with harsh crackdowns and sweeping sedition charges. For the first time since General Zia, Pakistan is effectively a one-man military state, but now with a constitutional framework designed to make this centralisation of power permanent.
The Darkest Chapter
The most consequential aspect of the 27th Amendment lies not in the domestic politics but in its perceived regional security. Under Munir’s CDF office, the reforms grant its military virtually total control of the National Command Authority (NCA), the body responsible for Pakistan’s nuclear policy. This centralisation accelerates a dangerous trend within Pakistan’s strategic thinking by bringing the fusion of tactical nuclear signalling with proxy warfare.
For years, the military’s doctrine of “full-spectrum deterrence” has been interpreted by analysts as a euphemism for using the threat of low-yield nuclear weapons to shield the state-sponsored terror activities against India. Under Munir, this doctrine mutates into something much sharper, riskier, and more personalised.
First, the amendment empowers the CDF to “pre-emptively deploy strategic assets in scenarios posing existential threats,” effectively granting Munir unilateral authority to mobilise battlefield nuclear weapons, such as the Nasr/Haft-IX, without any civilian consultation or oversight. This institutionalises a first-use nuclear posture and formalises the blurring of conventional and nuclear boundaries.
Second, it entrenches a more aggressive integration of proxy warfare (exporting terrorism) with nuclear brinkmanship. After the Operation Sindoor crisis, during which Pakistan is rumoured to have experimented with the idea of dispersing tactical nuclear missiles, Munir has moved to normalise a strategy in which terror attacks in India, followed by aggressive nuclear deployments, and calibrated escalatory messaging work in tandem. This approach represents a dangerous escalation beyond the jihad-era policies of Zia. Zia relied on terrorists as instruments of covert warfare, wherein Munir is weaving nuclear signalling directly into the operational fabric of terror networks.
Third, the amendment magnifies the probability of miscalculation. India, increasingly reliant on pre-emptive counterforce strategies, now faces a Pakistan whose nuclear chain of command is centralised in the hands of a single military leader prone to escalatory doctrines. Even a seemingly local incident, like a drone strike along the LoC or a terror attack in India, has the potential to set off a spiralling confrontation with catastrophic consequences for both nations. Military analysts warn that even a tactical nuclear exchange between the two nations could result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities within minutes.
Finally, the amendment carries profound implications for global non-proliferation efforts. By granting lifetime immunity to top military leaders and proliferator networks, it effectively seals off any domestic scrutiny of illicit nuclear activities. International trade partners, including the European Union, have already expressed concerns that Pakistan’s actions could jeopardise its preferential trade status under GSP+, a critical lifeline for its economy.
Zia’s Playbook in a Nuclear Age
The trajectory of Asim Munir’s rule mirrors the authoritarian instincts of General Zia-ul-Haq, but with far more dangerous tools at his disposal. Zia sought to legitimise military supremacy through Islamisation, reshaping Pakistan’s identity and launching the Afghan jihad to establish regional leverage.
Munir, by contrast, relies on constitutional engineering to institutionalise military dominance while embedding nuclear brinkmanship into Pakistan’s strategic doctrine.
Zia suppressed political forces and censored dissent to maintain control, whereas Munir criminalises opposition, curtails media freedoms, and uses a fully militarised judicial apparatus to entrench his power.
Most critically, while Zia’s autocracy emerged in a pre-nuclear era, Munir presides over a battlefield with a nuclear arsenal and a doctrine that dangerously intertwines exporting terrorism with nuclear signalling. The similarities are unmistakable, but the stakes under Munir are exponentially higher.
Economic and Social Rupture of Pakistan
The domestic fallout is already visible. Trade bodies warn that Pakistan’s preferential GSP+ trade benefits are at imminent risk due to democratic backsliding. International financial institutions such as the IMF have grown increasingly uneasy about Pakistan’s governance decay and the military’s capture of economic policymaking. Civil society groups fear prolonged dark times of enforced disappearances, sedition cases, and sweeping digital surveillance measures designed to quash any dissent.
Youth activists who played a pivotal role during the 2022–23 political mobilisations now argue that the amendment leaves no meaningful avenue for civilian oversight or constitutional accountability. Pakistan’s democracy, fragile and flawed from its inception, has collapsed into a militarised political order with no remaining institutional checks.
Conclusion: Pakistan’s Dangerous New Chapter
The 27th Constitutional Amendment is not merely another turn in Pakistan’s long dance with military rule. It is a structural overhaul of the state, the one that places absolute authority in the hands of Field Marshal Asim Munir, who many within Pakistan describe as a megalomaniac, and institutionalises a doctrine that fuses nuclear brinkmanship with proxy warfare.
On one end, for India, this represents a new phase of strategic unpredictability, while on the other end, for South Asia, it magnifies the spectre of an accidental or intentional nuclear escalation. As for Pakistan’s citizens, this amendment extinguishes the last embers of democratic oversight.
The world can no longer treat Pakistan’s internal politics as a domestic affair. With this amendment, Pakistan has entered a perilous era in which a single man wields constitutional, military, and nuclear authority, yet he is unbounded by any accountability, law, or restraint.
The danger is not abstract, but it is structural and immediate for the entire globe. And unless Pakistan’s society, along with the judiciary on one end, coupled with international partners like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the other, confronts it, the country risks triggering an Armageddon that can have catastrophic consequences for the entire globe.
(Raja Muneeb is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets @rajamuneeb. The views expressed in this article are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.)
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