Recent years have been tumultuous in Pakistan’s politics. Even by the standards of the country’s tortuous history and its record of instability, the turmoil and political turbulence that has been witnessed in the post-2018 years is unprecedented.

New fault lines were added to more longstanding ones, generating challenges, both complex and daunting. For the first time, Pakistan confronted a polycrisis — several crises that converged to reinforce each other and create an overall challenge tougher to deal with than any single crisis.

A political crisis, often with constitutional implications, raged through much of these years, the economic crisis in 2020-2024 was the most severe Pakistan ever experienced, the worst climate-induced floods in the country’s history tested national resilience in 2022, and a resurgence of terrorist violence revived threats to security.

Meanwhile, governance challenges multiplied. They included daunting problems of solvency, mounting energy and water shortages, climate change, and an increasing youth bulge in an environment of economic stagnation. But never before did the country confront these problems in such a divided and fractured state.

How did Pakistan get here?

Pakistan confronts many complex and daunting challenges, and various political, constitutional, economic, security, geopolitical, demographic, ecological and governance crises currently plague the country. The collection of essays Pakistan: Search for Stability, published by the Oxford University Press, takes stock of these issues. In her piece, former ambassador and political analyst Maleeha Lodhi explores the longstanding fault lines on which these challenges have been superimposed. Eos presents, with permission, an excerpt from the book…

A HISTORY OF CRISES

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the country has, over the decades, lacked a stable and predictable environment to solve the country’s growing problems. It has not been able to establish a viable political order or evolve a political consensus on strategic priorities that could be translated into policy.

It is not experimentation with political systems — parliamentary, presidential — that is responsible for its elusive quest for political stability. Presidential systems were, in any case, a façade for military rule and little more than vain efforts to ‘civilianise’ political interventions by the army.

Most of Pakistan’s political history has been about governance failures and missed opportunities. Political instability has been endemic, with the country alternating between military interventions and civilian rule. Reforms that could have transformed the country and placed its economy on a sustained high-growth trajectory were repeatedly postponed, as they would have threatened the ruling elite’s privileges and hold on power.

Complicating the quest to address persistent economic, governance and security challenges was the impact of global and regional geopolitics, which drove the country’s rulers to constantly focus outside rather than deal purposefully with festering domestic problems. External overreach and internal underreach became a repetitive pattern.

History, it has famously been said, often repeats itself as tragedy. This has also been the case in Pakistan. Current challenges have been superimposed on a long-familiar set of fault lines. First, then, a review of those that have persisted through the decades.

There are six mostly overlapping major ones that have shaped the political landscape and contributed to the country’s chronic instability: 1) unstable civil-military relations and the power imbalance between political and non-political institutions; 2) a political culture of clientelist politics; 3) the reliance by an oligarchic elite on ‘borrowed’ economic growth and overseas bailouts to address the country’s chronic financial crises and its resistance to reform; 4) uneasy or confrontational relations between the centre and provinces; 5) the interplay between efforts to ‘leverage’ geography in pursuit of national security and foreign policy goals and the role and interests of outside powers; and 6) the appeasement of the religious right and tolerance of militant outfits.

CIVIL-MILITARY IMBALANCE

The military’s preeminence in the country owed itself to managing the bloody and turbulent aftermath of Partition and early hostilities with India, especially over Jammu and Kashmir. Impelled by the chaotic birth of a new country, the imbalance was also rooted in the colonial legacy that gave primacy to order over everything else. This meant that the ‘steel frame’ of civil-military state institutions easily established their dominance over weak political institutions.

Pakistan’s party of independence, the Muslim League, did not have a strong and popular leader to steer the newly independent nation, because Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah died so soon after Partition. As the League’s leadership in the early years came predominantly from India, it could not compete with indigenous political elites without enlisting the support of the........

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