Book: How Pakistan Transformed as a Deep State: Power, National Interest and National Security
By Moonis Ahmar
Ethics International Press, UK, 2026. 214pp.
There is a particular kind of Pakistani book that can only be written at a particular moment, and Moonis Ahmar's new study is one of them. He tells us as much in the preface. When he first began writing columns on the theme of Pakistan as a deep state, the space for such an argument was narrow but survivable — democracy was formally functional, the media had not yet been fully disciplined, and the establishment was still content to operate as a senior partner without a written mandate. By the time he sat down to turn those columns into a book, the 26th and 27th amendments had been pushed through parliament, and the exercise had become, in his own understated phrase, an uphill task filled with enormous risks. That he proceeded anyway is worth acknowledging before anything else is said about the book.
The argument itself is announced in the title and pursued with considerable consistency across five chapters. Ahmar's claim is that Pakistan's transformation into a deep state is best understood through what he calls the triangulation of power, national interest and national security — three concepts that the ruling elite has defined narrowly, guarded jealously, and deployed to foreclose democratic contestation. Power was never used for the welfare of citizens; national interest was reduced to the interest of those who matter; and security was collapsed into military security, leaving the human security of 250 million people as a residual concern. Once these three definitions were settled in the formative decade, everything that followed — the delayed constitution, the abrogation of 1958, the loss of the eastern wing, the three subsequent martial laws, the hybrid arrangements of our own time — becomes less a series of accidents than the working out of a logic.
Chapter Two takes the discussion abroad, with case studies of Turkey, Egypt, Russia and the United States. Chapter Three, the heart of the book, is a decade-by-decade account of Pakistan's own trajectory. Chapter Four looks ahead, surveying the failure of democratic movements, the erosion of constitutional democracy, the state of civil-military relations, and the condition of the media, judiciary and academia. The concluding chapter asks whether any of this can be reversed before 2047.
Ahmar is at his most assured when he stays close to the Pakistani material. His account of the 27th Amendment is careful and thorough, and it will be valuable to readers who have followed the constitutional changes only through headlines. He walks through the creation of the office of Chief of Defence Forces, the winding up of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, the tenure and immunity provisions, and the establishment of the Federal Constitutional Court, and then sets these against the earlier interventions of 1958, 1969, 1977 and 1999. The comparison yields an observation that is genuinely illuminating: those earlier moments suspended or abrogated the constitutional order, whereas the present arrangement has been written into it. Whatever one makes of the merits of the changes, that distinction is a real one, and Ahmar is among the first to examine it at length.
He is equally even-handed about the politicians, and this is where the book earns much of its credibility. It would have been easy to write a study that placed the entire burden on the men in uniform. Ahmar declines. The PPP, PML-N and MQM appear here not as bystanders to constitutional engineering but as participants in it, willing to underwrite the amendments and the arrangement that produced them in order to keep the PTI at bay. He revisits the February 2024 elections and the arithmetic that followed with a clear eye, and notes that while several judges resigned over the 27th Amendment, the parties that call themselves democratic did not. The account of the proposed 28th Amendment — the move to revisit the 18th Amendment's guarantees of provincial autonomy and the NFC share — extends the argument into the present and suggests that the process is still unfolding.
The book is generously sourced. Aqil Shah, Hasan Askari Rizvi, Husain Haqqani, Stephen Cohen, Hasan Zaheer and Rounaq Jahan all appear, and Ahmar uses them well. Rizvi's work on political and constitutional engineering serves as something of a spine for the whole study, and the debt is openly and graciously acknowledged.
If I have reservations, they are matters of emphasis. The triangulation framework, announced with some fanfare in the introduction, is a useful organising device but does less analytical work than the opening pages promise; that power, national interest and national security have been narrowly defined by a small elite is amply demonstrated, and the formal apparatus adds less to it than the demonstration itself. The comparative chapter is the most exposed, leaning on quoted commentary rather than sustained analysis, particularly on the American case, where the cited authorities are for the most part arguing with one another about whether the term applies at all.
The one gap I would emphasise concerns economics. The Defence Housing Authorities and the Army Welfare Trust appear in the acronym list and in passing, but the wider phenomenon of milbus — the land, the housing schemes, the cement and cereals and insurance, the parallel commercial economy — receives little sustained attention. Ahmar's deep state is a structure of ideas, constitutional provisions and institutional habits. It is also a structure of assets, and the assets may prove the more durable of the two. A future edition would be richer for a chapter on it.
The conclusion holds two thoughts at once. Ahmar wants to end on the youth — sixty-five per cent of the population, and the constituency that the proposed raising of the voting age would neutralise — and he is right that this is where any reversal would have to begin. He also concedes that there is little present indication that the next two decades will produce civilian supremacy. Both statements are probably true, and it is to his credit that he resists the temptation to resolve them artificially. The honesty is more useful than false comfort would have been.
Ahmar has produced the first sustained scholarly treatment of the 26th and 27th amendments within a longer historical frame, and he has done it from Karachi, under conditions that make such work harder every year. That last fact is not incidental to the argument; it is a demonstration of it. A country in which the writing of a book about the deep state requires courage has already gone some way towards answering the question the book sets out to ask.
For students of Pakistan's civil-military relations, and for anyone trying to understand how the events of November 2025 became possible, this is a necessary and timely study.