NEW DELHI: In May 2023, when protesters stormed military-linked installations across Pakistan following the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the aura of the country’s most powerful institution fractured in full public view. For chief of army staff, Asim Munir, early into his tenure, the moment marked a political and institutional low, with the army facing rare, direct anger and accusations of overt interference in civilian politics.
For the next two years, Munir operated from a position of constrained legitimacy. The military remained dominant, but its authority was contested. He was seen less as a strategic commander and more as a political enforcer presiding over a deepening confrontation with opposition forces. The traditional compact between the army and the public had weakened, and with it the ease with which the military could exercise power.
The inflection point came with the Pahalgam massacre in April 2025 that was engineered by Pakistan based institutions. The attack and the subsequent Indian escalation that followed reordered Pakistan’s internal priorities almost immediately. Security displaced politics as the organising principle of national discourse. The army, which had been under pressure, re-emerged as the central institution, and Munir’s authority rose in tandem aided by a well built narrative that Pakistan had won the war against India.
What followed consolidated that recovery in concrete terms. Pakistan secured billions of IMF tranche in the months after the attack, with a broader bailout programme continuing despite international pressure to condition assistance on accountability for cross-border territory. No such conditionality materialised. The absence of meaningful punishment, diplomatic, financial or strategic, for the Pahalgam attack was itself a signal, read within Pakistan’s establishment as confirmation that the costs of the current posture remained manageable.
A second, decisive layer to this rise came from outside Pakistan. United State President Donald Trump’s repeated public statements praising Munir’s role in regional crisis management, and the unmasked support extended by the Trump administration, pushed Munir beyond the confines of domestic power.
As regional tensions widened, particularly around Iran, he emerged as a key interlocutor for Washington, engaging directly in diplomatic channels that traditionally lie outside the visible remit of a serving army chief. In remarks over the past few days, Trump again described Munir as a “strong” and “reliable” partner in maintaining regional stability, comments that were amplified across Pakistani media and read domestically as reaffirmation of Washington’s backing. Trump’s framing of Munir as a stabilising force, articulated in remarks that circulated widely in Pakistani media, provided a form of external endorsement with direct domestic currency.
This external backing has translated into internal leverage. In Pakistan’s power structure, access to Washington has historically amplified domestic authority. Munir’s positioning within that framework has reinforced his standing, recentering him from a contested military chief into a central strategic actor whose influence spans both security and foreign policy domains.
The implications of this shift extend beyond individual stature.
The alignment of internal consolidation and external validation has altered the incentive structure within which Pakistan’s military leadership operates. A command structure that enjoys both domestic dominance and international access, and has navigated a major cross-border attack without absorbing significant diplomatic cost, is structurally better positioned to take calibrated risks than one constrained by internal dissent and diplomatic isolation.
In that context, a view has begun to take hold among analysts tracking the region that the current configuration could embolden Munir’s risk-taking behaviour, particularly in relation to India, as the perceived room for manoeuvre expands.
At the same time, the growing proximity between Trump and Munir has triggered a parallel concern.
The IMF’s continued engagement with Islamabad, proceeding without conditions tied to the Pahalgam attack, has reinforced the impression that the international community’s stated commitments on terror accountability do not fully translate into practice.
By repeatedly engaging and elevating Munir’s role in regional crisis management, Washington risks reinforcing a pattern in which individual military authority expands faster than institutional checks. External validation, in such a setting, feeds directly into domestic power hierarchies, accelerating the concentration of authority within the military establishment.
The concern now being expressed is that the continued reinforcement of this model could produce an outcome where the very actor being empowered will become harder to influence or restrain over time.
Munir, has emerged, effectively, as the Trump administration’s man in the region, anchoring a relationship where strategic utility has translated into influence abroad and authority at home, even as it raises new questions about the long-term consequences of that consolidation.
