Strongmen are not discarded because they become brutal. Brutality is often the job description. They are discarded when brutality stops delivering. That is why the Financial Times’ recent scrutiny of Field Marshal Asim Munir matters. After years in which much of the Western press handled Pakistan’s authoritarian order with the discretion normally reserved for intelligence assets, covert arrangements and embarrassing allies, one of the world’s most influential establishment newspapers has finally begun examining the machinery behind the medals. The timing is revealing. Empires do not suddenly discover constitutionalism. They conduct performance reviews. The article, titled, “The grand designs of Pakistan’s strongman,” does not prove that Washington has turned against Munir. The Financial Times is not an imperial dismissal notice, and Western foreign policy has never been burdened by excessive morality. But elite journalism often functions as advance weather reporting for power. It tells us which doubts have become respectable, which questions are now printable and which supposedly indispensable client may be approaching his expiration date. For more than two years, Munir’s value rested on a familiar proposition: he could deliver Pakistan without consulting Pakistanis. Elections were untidy. Parliament was tiresome. Civilian legitimacy was an administrative inconvenience. Here, apparently, was a disciplined general who could imprison the country’s most popular politician, crush his movement, discipline the courts, intimidate the media, manage China, reassure the Gulf monarchies, flatter Washington and market the entire arrangement as “stability.”

In the vocabulary of empire, stability usually means that the correct people are frightened and the incorrect people are armed.

In the vocabulary of empire, stability usually means that the correct people are frightened and the incorrect people are armed.

Munir understood the bargain.........

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