Pakistan’s Army Chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is unusually busy on the diplomatic front. In the span of just two months, Munir has made two visits to the United States. In July 2025, he made a high-profile trip to China. This back-to-back travel to Pakistan’s two most consequential international patrons is telling. Not only does it reveal Islamabad’s foreign policy priorities, but it also lays bare the internal architecture of power in Pakistan, particularly in the post-2022 era.

These successive visits are not just routine military diplomacy. With the Army Chief becoming Pakistan’s principal emissary, it demonstrates how Pakistan’s foreign policy, especially on issues involving its patrons, has become deeply militarized. In most functioning democracies, such strategic overtures would be spearheaded by the civilian head of government or foreign minister.

In Pakistan’s case, however, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has neither met U.S. President Donald Trump since Trump’s return to office for a second term, nor visited Beijing in over a year. The writing on the wall is clear: when Pakistan’s most important bilateral ties are at stake, it is the general in khaki — not the ‘elected’ premier — who takes the lead.

The asymmetry between Munir’s diplomatic hyperactivity and Sharif’s absence from equivalent arenas is symptomatic of a deeper civil-military imbalance that has been steadily entrenched in Pakistan’s governance model since the hybrid regime experiment of the late 2010s. What was once a behind-the-scenes role for the military establishment — shaping security policy, resolving political disputes, and influencing electoral outcomes — has now become an absolute and overt dominance over the political establishment. Since Asim Munir took over as the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) in November 2022, even the fictitious veil of civilian primacy no longer exists.

This new dynamic is not entirely unprecedented in Pakistan’s case. The country’s history has witnessed many military leaders dominating civilian governments overtly and covertly throughout its existence........

© News18