The Delusions of Liberal Democracy: Imperialism and Militarism in Pakistan

Rather than being an aberration, the evidence clarifies that liberal democratic regimes throughout the history of capitalism have repeatedly paved the way for the far right to thrive.¹ At the current conjuncture, there is a clear correlation between the rise of “illiberal” authoritarianism and the protracted, interrelated crises of global capitalism, including unbridled financialization, brazen class war against the mass of the world’s people, perpetual war, and an ever-worsening planetary ecological “death spiral.”²

Writing at the dawn of the new millennium, during the height of capitalist triumphalism associated with neoliberal globalization, Samir Amin argued that in the dominant (neoliberal) discourse “market and democracy are credited with such a strong unity it almost appears impossible to separate the two.” The result, Amin incisively asserted, is “low intensity democracy” in which voting is “no longer of any importance, let alone effect, because [the voter’s] future as worker (or as an unemployed person) will be decided elsewhere, in the ‘market.'”³

Referring specifically to the Third World, and the “erosion of societal, national popular projects” that thrived from the time of formal decolonization until the 1980s, Amin warned ominously: “The process of political democratization had hardly gained momentum before it quickly lost legitimacy in the eyes of the popular majority. What can be expected of this fancy pluralism, electoral travesty and the weak powers they produce? Does the escalation of religious fundamentalism and ethnic strife not already prove that disaster is not far away?”⁴

Amin’s prescient analysis is today borne out in many parts of the global periphery, including Pakistan, a society wracked by both religious fundamentalism and ethnic strife, in which liberal democratic institutions and bourgeois political parties have operated under the perpetual shadow of a militarized state apparatus and Western imperialist powers. Ruled directly by Washington-backed army generals for almost half of its existence, Pakistan’s polity, economy, and society were further militarized during the so-called War on Terror, the cloak of liberal democracy at best serving to reinforce the power and profits of the military, big business interests, and various shades of the reactionary right wing.

The military’s stranglehold over Pakistan appeared to reach its zenith in 2018, when former cricketer turned politician Imran Khan was elected to the prime minister’s office. Khan was plucked from relative obscurity and thrust onto political center stage in 2011 by the then head of the most powerful spy agency in the country. For the next few years, the corporate media built up Khan’s mystique, actively helping him gain the support of a predominantly young population increasingly alienated from Pakistan’s entrenched political dynasties. Like other emergent right-wing demagogues around the world, Khan played up his image as an outsider courageously exposing a corrupt domestic political sphere, and, further, as a born-again Muslim willing to defy Western hegemony.

The military backed Khan’s ascent to power, but a pandemic-induced economic downturn and longer-term fallouts of Pakistan’s militarized and imperialized political economy led to a rupture between Khan and his erstwhile patrons. The bourgeois old guard, led by the Sharif and Bhutto families, who have been the major civilian players in Pakistan’s military-centric power structure for decades, was brought back into the saddle through an engineered parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022. Khan was seemingly cast back into the political wilderness—or so the generals thought. Out of power, Khan became an even larger-than-life figure to his ever expanding and youthful social base, as the Sharif-Bhutto governmental coalition presided over unrelenting inflation and rampant unemployment connected to suffocating austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Crackdowns on an already emaciated media and intense repression of Khan supporters only added to deepening anti-incumbency and pro-Khan sentiment.

By early 2024, Khan had been convicted in a series of trumped-up political cases, disqualified from electoral competition, and jailed. But candidates affiliated with his Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party nevertheless won the most seats in the country’s lower house of parliament in the February 2024 general election. Blatant post-poll rigging, backed by the top brass of the military and segments of the superior judiciary, allowed the Sharifs and Bhuttos to cobble together a weak coalition government. However, Khan’s appeal has reached feverish proportions, and the specter of his return to power remains.⁵

Pakistan exemplifies the crisis of contemporary liberal democratic polities largely controlled by a military-industrial-media establishment. Undergirded by a nexus of state and capital, the liberal democratic project is synonymous with highly exploitative and often violent processes of accumulation which exacerbate burgeoning class, ecological, and other contradictions, thus perpetually providing the basis for right-wing iconoclasts to flourish. Unless otherwise alienated masses are won over to a genuine anticapitalist alternative, Pakistani society—like the world at large—faces a rapid descent into barbarism.

Militarized Neoliberal Accumulation

While military-centric palace intrigues have been an ever-present feature of Pakistan’s political economy, Khan’s emergence must be situated in an analysis of the militarized neoliberal accumulation regime that took shape after the end of the Cold War. Fire-sale privatization, trade, and financial liberalization, along with other signature Washington Consensus policies, were initiated by weak civilian governments in the 1990s under IMF diktat. But it was the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf (1999–2008) that opened the neoliberal floodgates.

The Washington-backed dictatorship sold off public assets at gunpoint, facilitated free entry and exit of hot capital in highly lucrative sectors such as real estate, incentivized the issuing of unrestricted cheap credit by commercial banks, and took billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for mega-infrastructure projects, which fed the growing demand of a mythically large population of middle-class consumers.⁶

The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and IMF acted as financial patrons to Pakistan in accordance with the country’s status as a frontline state for Washington’s so-called War on Terror in neighboring Afghanistan. At the bilateral level, the U.S. government disbursed approximately $18.5 billion in military aid between 2002 and 2010, propping up the Musharraf regime just as Washington had sponsored the military dictatorships of General Ayub Khan (1958–1969) and General Zia ul Haq (1977–1988) during the Cold War.⁷

The blank check given to the Pakistani army by the United States and other Western powers facilitated the expansion of the state’s coercive apparatus in the service of capital. Land, water, forest, and mineral grabs by army personnel and domestic and foreign capital became pervasive in both rural peripheries and metropolitan centers.

The expropriation of already vulnerable ecologies simultaneously played out as class war against landless and smallholding peasant farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous communities, and slum dwellers under the guise of infrastructural, real estate, and other forms of development. This process of violent accumulation showcased both legacies of colonial statecraft and untamed commodification of nature under conditions of globalized neoliberalism.⁸

Not only did Pakistan’s utterly venal militarized ruling class and its foreign patrons devastate the environmental landscape and force dispossessed millions to migrate toward already densely populated towns and cities where they were spatially ghettoized, they also demonstrated no concern about the longer-term implications of resource grabs and debt-fueled growth.⁹

By the 2010s, Pakistan’s emergent demographic profile, like the rest of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, featured a massive youth bulge, with 65 percent of the country’s 250 million people below the age of 25.¹⁰ An accumulation regime based on geostrategic rents, mega-infrastructure binges, unrestrained financialization, and conspicuous consumption offered no prospect of gainful employment or the other requirements of dignified life for youthful working people.

Favorable geopolitical winds would eventually dissipate due to the convulsions associated with the global financial crisis. By the end of the Musharraf years, energy shortages, and a massive spike in global commodity prices emaciated the working masses, thus setting the stage for an increasingly alienated youthful mass to be won over by a charismatic, authoritarian personality.

The Rise of Imran Khan

Musharraf was forced from the presidency in 2008, coinciding with a strategic retreat of the military from public life. However, the military top brass continued to exercise influence behind the veneer of liberal democracy. With the established bourgeois parties floundering in the face of interrelated demographic, economic, and ecological crises, the army and its various ideologues in the media and intelligentsia started projecting Khan as a patriotic hero who could deliver freedom, justice, and self-respect to a populace fed up with entrenched political fiefdoms concerned only with self-aggrandizement.

From 2011 onward, Khan invoked the ire of young, working masses against a proverbial Other who could be blamed for intensifying socioeconomic hardship and other daily indignities. Khan’s major polemical targets were the Sharif and Bhutto families, but not necessarily the trader-industrialist segments, real-estate tycoons, and rural landed class that the Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League and Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party represent. Even more glaringly, Khan’s rhetorical attacks against the bourgeois old guard were absent of any mention of the military top brass who had consolidated a vast corporate empire, deeply integrated with various fractions of domestic and global capital.¹¹

Khan also lashed out at the “West” in purely cultural terms, projecting a Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” in which he vowed to defend “Islamic” Pakistan with all his might. Khan played up the same “us versus them” binary mainstreamed in Pakistani society for decades by the religious right. The latter was of course supported by U.S. imperialism as an anticommunist bulwark during the Cold War, only to later be transformed into an existential enemy of Western “civilization” in the War on Terror conjuncture.¹²

Khan tapped into deep anti-Western sentiment within Pakistani society, but without a deeper historical interrogation of imperialism’s role. Accordingly, there was no articulation of a meaningful program to at least regulate foreign capital or redistribute wealth domestically, and thereby transform Pakistan’s militarized political economy.

When he eventually ascended to the prime minister’s office in 2018, Khan doubled down on the rhetoric while largely pandering to class, state, and imperialist power, especially after lockdowns and other pandemic-induced shocks badly affected young, professional segments in outsourced industries, and working masses in precarious daily-wage occupations even more so. His government haplessly acceded to IMF conditionalities as Pakistan’s external debt burden ballooned to $120 billion. Unwilling to announce meaningful redistributive policies, including rationalization of the military’s corporate empire, Khan effectively reinforced economic austerity through regressive taxes, rollback of subsidies, and the defunding of already limited public services.¹³

Meanwhile, expropriation of vulnerable ecologies proceeded apace with the announcement of a series of lavish development projects, including a fantastical new city spread out over one hundred thousand acres on the banks of the Ravi River in the Lahore metropolitan region. The so-called Ravi Riverfront Water Project was marketed as an idyllic middle-class gated community of ten million people, with limitless supplies of energy, water, and entertainment alongside.

The grand imaginary betrayed the fact that the Ravi River, like many of Pakistan’s natural water systems, is in a state of utter disrepair, in large part due to colonial-era water infrastructure, the likes of which continue to be promoted by multilateral donors. Pakistan’s energy needs are increasingly met, as in the case of the planned Riverfront Project, through coal-fired power. Last but not least, the lands required for the project were to be obtained by forcibly dispossessing many smallholding farmers through application of a British-era land acquisition act promulgated in 1894.¹⁴

Beyond metropolitan Pakistan, the rapid expropriation of resource-rich ethnic peripheries like Balochistan, Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Sindh continued under the PTI government, with intensifying levels of state repression against any and all forms of peaceful resistance. Baloch youth in particular were increasingly dehumanized through the dastardly practice of enforced disappearances, exacerbating the disaffection that continues to provide oxygen to a two-decade old insurgency.¹⁵ The radicalization of Baloch youth is not by chance: The Baloch peripheries have been subject to violent resource grabs since the discovery of massive gold, copper, and other mineral deposits at the turn of the century. Multinational mining corporations collude recklessly with Pakistani army-run companies and local politicians while ecologies, economies, and cultures are laid to ruin.¹⁶

In a nutshell, while in government, Khan and the PTI carried on with business as usual, leaving untouched annual subsidies of $17.4 billion shared by multinational capital, the military’s corporate empire, and the bourgeois old guard.¹⁷ Despite his anti-Western posturing, Khan made no attempt to delink with U.S. imperialism, in fact dragging his feet on projects that had earlier been approved as part of the $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor.¹⁸ He also reinforced reductive culturalist stereotypes till his last days in office. In August 2021, he described the Taliban retaking Afghanistan after the departure of U.S. troops under the terms of the Doha Agreement as Afghans “breaking the shackles of slavery.”¹⁹ His grand claims are not borne out by the ongoing militarization and expropriation of Pashtun-majority areas on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Beyond the Liberal Democratic Horizon

The motif of slavery would reemerge after Khan’s unceremonious departure from the prime minister’s office in early 2022 after falling out with his uniformed patrons. Insisting that his government was undermined as part of a U.S.-led regime change operation, he implored his followers to fight for genuine freedom from the slavery being imposed upon them by Western powers and their domestic lackeys, including a small coterie of army officers who oversaw his removal. In the face of significant repression of his supporters, Khan’s call did not trigger prolonged street protests at the time, the crest of which could have propelled him back to power. But it did translate into pro-PTI voters making their presence felt at the ballot box almost two years after Khan’s government was deposed, and while he himself was languishing in jail.

The election result was a substantial rebuke to the military, which has generally remained unaccountable and faced minuscule public scrutiny in comparison to Pakistan’s bourgeois political class. The fallout between Khan and the current top brass certainly represents a coming of age for a wide cross-section of young, working people in Pakistan’s dominant province of Punjab, among whom Khan enjoys considerable appeal. Time will tell whether fledgling anti-establishment sentiment can be extended beyond Khan’s person by a critical mass of social forces that can take on anti-imperialist color.

To be sure, Khan’s rhetorical attacks against the West and imperialism’s local collaborators carry weight with the increasingly alienated and struggling mass of working people in a geopolitically significant, but still peripheral, country. U.S. imperialism has conspired with military usurpers throughout Pakistan’s history to effect coups, suppress progressive social forces, and prosecute endless wars. Moreover, rising Islamophobia in many Western societies through the War on Terror conjuncture has understandably enraged the mass of people in Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan.

Yet Khan embodies a self-righteous rage that characterizes the forces of reaction across different geographies of the world. The fallout from neoliberal globalization and incessant imperialist wars has generated a dialectic that fuels the global right. Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment has been exploited by the far right in the Western heartlands of global capitalism, and anti-Western sentiment has been instrumentalized by reactionary forces in peripheral countries like Pakistan.²⁰

Both the liberal centrists and right-wing reactionaries obfuscate reality rather than illuminating the complex workings of contemporary capitalism. Instead of naming and challenging the globalized material logics of class, imperialism, and the ever-worsening metabolic rift, reactionaries foreground racist, sexist, and other personal attacks while perpetually invoking reductive cultural stereotypes. Liberals, in contrast, resort to a vacuous identity politics while lamenting the hateful rhetoric of the right.

While the myths peddled by reactionaries are exposed whenever they acquire the reins of government on account of their refusal to confront class, state, and imperialist power in their various guises, the most conspicuous feature of the current conjuncture is the consistent and staunch defense of the increasingly violent rule of capital by the liberal establishment, which deepens systemic crises, thus providing fertile ground for demagogues to resurrect themselves and make more or less successful attempts to retake governmental power.

Beyond the liberal mainstream and “illiberal” authoritarian figures, social movements that resist the dominant and violent regime of accumulation underline potentialities for a genuinely anti-imperialist politics to unite working masses across core and periphery. Even in heavily militarized Pakistan, youthful working masses are aligning with internationalist and progressive causes that call attention to and could ultimately challenge the rule of capital.

Vibrant popular struggles against dispossession, expropriation, and state repression have taken root in Pakistan’s long-suffering ethnic peripheries. The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement has challenged the totalitarian logics of the so-called War on Terror in the ethnic Pashtun region that borders Afghanistan, as well as land and mineral grabs by civil and military personnel. In a similar vein, young Baloch women have led a popular uprising against Pakistani intelligence agencies’ heinous and torturous practices of enforced disappearances, while also calling attention to resource grabs by the local state-capital nexus as well as foreign patrons.²¹ Popular movements around class and ecological issues are also gaining ground in Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Sindh.

The historical social base of militarism is metropolitan Pakistan, especially the province of Punjab, home to 60 percent of the country’s 250 million people. It is here that the repression faced by the PTI and Khan after being deposed in April 2022 has generated major shockwaves in the form of burgeoning antimilitary sentiment. Deepening this sentiment, laying the foundations for a meaningful class politics, and making common cause with popular movements in ethnic peripheries that challenge the material bases of militarized neoliberal accumulation, could ultimately precipitate a mass alternative, one that eschews both the established bourgeois parties and the messianic visions of strongmen like Khan.

The imperative of such a mass politics is even more pronounced in the face of Pakistan’s ever-worsening challenges of climate change. The utter failure of the Western-dominated liberal world order to arrest the planetary ecological death spiral is most evident in massive climate breakdown events such as the 2022 flash floods that left large parts of Sindh and Balochistan—totaling a third of Pakistan—under water, with more than thirty million people displaced from their homes. Alongside hugely fluctuating climactic conditions, Pakistan faces a plethora of ecological crises, including permanent glacier melt in its mountainous highlands, deathly winter smog in metropolitan areas, and, ultimately, rising temperatures and desertification that will make many lowland areas uninhabitable in the long run. Yet reckless infrastructural and consumptive growth logics of profiteering remain the modus operandi for the militarized state-capital nexus that rules Pakistan with the backing of imperialism.

Against this backdrop, a meaningful anti-imperialist politics in peripheral countries of the capitalist world-system must reject development hedged on the ideology of endless growth to feed hedonistic “middle-class” populations—the illusory notion that everyone can aspire to and ascend to “middle class” status has, in any case, been repeatedly exposed under the militarized neoliberal accumulation regime. In contrast, massive wealth redistribution and the decommodification of land and other natural resources can provide the material bases to meet the basic needs of young working masses in search of dignity, while also opening up possibilities for a developmental regime to regenerate vulnerable ecosystems.

To return to the inimitable Amin, history is always in the process of being written, and the subjects of history, both dominant and dominated, are perennially embroiled in struggle. Today, as in the heyday of decolonization, a national-popular developmental project that recognizes the historically dominated masses of the imperialized zones of the capitalist world-system as the subjects of history—rather than followers of bourgeois political entrepreneurs and messianic strongmen—is imperative. This is the only pathway to transcending the liberal democratic horizon and defeating imperialism, militarism, and the forces of reaction.

Notes

1. ↩ Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2023).
2. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1–24.
3. ↩ Samir Amin, “Economic Globalism and Political Universalism: Conflicting Issues?,” Journal of World-Systems Research 6, no. 30 (2000): 582–622.
4. ↩ Amin, “Economic Globalism and Political Universalism: Conflicting Issues?”
5. ↩ In October 2024, almost eighteen months after Khan was jailed, the legitimacy of the parliament was further eroded by the passing of a constitutional amendment that weakened segments of the higher judiciary who threatened to take up legal challenges to the February 2024 election and offer at least some resistance to the increasingly rapid militarization of the state. In late November, the PTI mobilized thousands for a march on the capital Islamabad calling for a repeal of this amendment, Khan’s release from prison, and reasserting the party’s claims about the rigged general election. The march was ruthlessly and violently suppressed, with a number of PTI supporters killed. Actual casualty figures remained unknown due to a cover-up by the military-backed government.
6. ↩ Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, “Privatization at Gunpoint,” Monthly Review 57, no. 6 (November 2005): 26–32.
7. ↩ Akbar S. Zaidi, “Who Benefits from US Aid to Pakistan?,” Economic and Political Weekly XLVI, no. 32 (2011): 103–9.
8. ↩ Mubashir Rizvi, “From Terrorism to Dispossession: Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act as a Means of Eviction,” Anthropology Today 34, no. 3 (2018): 15–18. In November 2024, the military-backed government introduced new amendments to the antiterrorism act, which effectively provide a carte blanche for enforced disappearances perpetrated by intelligence operatives.
9. ↩ While the United States has been and remains the major sponsor of Pakistan’s militarized ruling class, the Gulf kingdoms and China have also become important patrons, providing a growing percentage of foreign aid, acquiring significant stakes in the economy, and largely reinforcing logics of exploitation and expropriation.
10. ↩ United Nations Development Programme, Unleashing the Potential of a Young Pakistan: Pakistan National Human Development Report (Islamabad: United Nations Development Programme, 2017).
11. ↩ Ateeb Ahmed, “The Rise of Military Capital in Pakistan: Military Neoliberalism, Authoritarianism and Urbanization,” Geoforum 146 (2023): 103846.
12. ↩ Samir Amin, “Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism,” Monthly Review 59, no. 7 (December 2007): 1–19.
13. ↩ Shahbaz Rana, “Pakistan’s Debt Mounts to Rs. 53.5tr,” Express Tribune, May 21, 2022.
14. ↩ Ahmed Rafay Alam et al., “Remaking a River: Land and Profit along the Ravi,” DAWN, June 13, 2021.
15. ↩ Somaiyah Hafeez, “In Balochistan, Families Demand Answers for Enforced Disappearances,” The Diplomat, December 12, 2023.
16. ↩ Maqbool Ahmed, “Magic Mountains: The Reko Diq Gold and Copper Mining Project,” Herald, September 29, 2017.
17. ↩ Asad Hashim, “Elite Privilege Consumes US$17.4bn of Pakistan’s Economy: UNDP,” Al-Jazeera, April 13, 2021.
18. ↩ Ameena Tanvir, “PTI and CPEC: A Complicated Relationship,” South Asian Voices, January 13, 2021.
19. ↩ Zia ur Rehman, “One Year Later, Pakistan’s Taliban Rule Hopes Put in Check,” Voice of America, August 10, 2022.
20. ↩ Khan and Trump got along famously while both were in office. Their July 2019 summit in Washington marked a relatively high point in recent U.S.-Pakistan relations and was followed by two further high-profile meetings. Immediately following Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris in November 2024, PTI media talked up the prospect of a Trump presidency, compelling the top brass in Pakistan’s military to release Khan from jail, a bona fide volte face from Khan’s earlier position that Washington was itself behind his ouster.
21. ↩ This uprising has crystallized in organizational forms such as the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons and Baloch Yekjehti Committee (Baloch Solidarity Committee).