If Pakistan’s troubled history reveals anything, it is that military power rarely announces itself with a bang. It creeps, consolidates, and then, suddenly, becomes irreversible. The year 2025 will be remembered as precisely such a moment, when Pakistan Field Marshal Asim Munir led the military establishment, stopped pretending to rule from behind the curtain, and instead rewrote the rules of the state to formalise its dominance.

While Munir’s consolidation of power did not begin in 2025, which started unfolding steadily since his appointment as army chief in 2022, the past year marked a decisive shift in speed, scale, and ambition. What had once been an incremental expansion of influence hardened into an overt military power grab, carried out through constitutional engineering, foreign policy usurpation, and the systematic erosion of civilian and judicial authority. By the end of 2025, Pakistan had crossed an institutional Rubicon: democracy remained in form, but not in substance.

The most visible marker of this dynamic has been Munir’s assumption of an overt role in shaping Pakistan’s regional policy, where the military has held dominance for decades. India’s Operation Sindoor in early May 2025, which exposed Pakistan’s strategic vulnerabilities and heightened regional tensions, can be described as its turning point. In its aftermath, it was the army chief who emerged as Pakistan’s principal broker with its major allies rather than the Shehbaz Sharif-led civilian government.

This was demonstrated by Munir’s multiple high-profile visits to the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia, which are Pakistan’s three most........

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