Rabia Akhtar
Recent analysis by Haleema Sadia and Ali Mustafa on Pakistan’s 27th constitutional amendment has framed the reform as a dangerous inflection point, one that allegedly accelerates authoritarianism and imperils nuclear stability in South Asia.
While concerns about legal alignment, jointness, and institutional clarity merit serious discussion, prevailing analyses risk overstating the dangers while under-theorizing Pakistan’s historical experience with nuclear governance and institutional adaptation. The result is an argument that conflates political critique with nuclear alarmism and treats organizational reform as synonymous with strategic recklessness.
Central Claim and its Limits
The core claim advanced by critics is straightforward: by elevating the army chief as chief of defense forces and introducing a new commander of the National Strategic Command, Pakistan has undermined the delicate civil-military equilibrium that once safeguarded its nuclear arsenal. This restructuring, it is argued, collapses redundancy, marginalizes the navy and air force, and introduces dangerous ambiguity into nuclear decision-making.
This interpretation, however, rests on three analytically weak assumptions: first, that Pakistan’s previous nuclear command structure functioned as a genuinely balanced interservice system; second, that transitional ambiguity in command structures inherently produces nuclear instability; and third, that centralized authority is uniquely dangerous in Pakistan’s case.
None of these assumptions withstand close scrutiny.
The Myth of a Neutral Pre-Amendment Equilibrium
Much of the authors’ critique relies on idealizing the pre-27th Amendment command architecture, particularly the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), as a stabilizing interservice counterweight. In practice, the CJCSC has historically been a coordinating figure with limited institutional leverage rather than a decisive arbiter of nuclear authority.
Pakistan’s nuclear governance has always been centralized, disciplined, and military-led, even as it retained civilian oversight at the apex. The army’s dominance within this system predates the current reform by decades and did not emerge as a result of the 27th Amendment. Suggesting that the CJCSC meaningfully prevented service dominance risks mistaking procedural inclusion for substantive power.
The stability of Pakistan’s deterrent since 1998 was not produced by symmetry among services but by layered controls, organizational routines, and consensus-based decision norms within the National Command Authority. Those features remain intact.
Ambiguity Does Not Equal Breakdown
Authors’ place heavy emphasis on legal misalignment between the new constitutional framework and the National Command Authority Act of 2010, warning of parallel chains of command and crisis-time paralysis. The concern is not illegitimate, but it is exaggerated.
Nuclear command systems rarely evolve through perfectly synchronized constitutional and statutory reform. Transitional ambiguity is not unique to Pakistan, nor is it inherently destabilizing. Pakistan itself has navigated major institutional transitions, in 1998, 2000, and 2010, without breakdowns in command integrity or loss of control.
Moreover, nuclear command and control is governed less by public-facing statutory language than by classified procedures, standing operating practices, and institutional memory. The absence of immediate legislative alignment does not imply discretionary chaos, particularly in a system that has consistently privileged caution over impulsivity.
Centralization is a Norm, Not an Outlier
The critique also rests on a selective application of normative standards. Centralization of nuclear authority is treated as inherently suspect in Pakistan while being implicitly normalized elsewhere.
Most nuclear-armed states consolidate nuclear decision-making at the highest military or political level precisely to avoid fragmentation during crises. The concern, then, is not unity of command per se but the perceived lack of trust in Pakistan’s institutions to exercise restraint. That is a political judgment, not a structural diagnosis.
If unity of command is acceptable in other nuclear contexts, the burden of proof lies with the authors’ to demonstrate why Pakistan’s case is categorically different, beyond general references to civil-military imbalance.
Strategic Context Matters
Analyses that portray Pakistan’s reforms as self-generated pathologies also underplay the strategic environment in which they occur. India’s evolving military doctrines, counterforce debates, ISR expansion, and integrated theater commands are treated as background noise rather than active drivers shaping Pakistan’s security calculations.
Deterrence does not exist in a vacuum. Organizational reforms in Pakistan must be assessed as part of an interactive security environment, not as isolated constitutional experiments divorced from regional dynamics.
The Professional Competence Argument: Valid but Incomplete
Concerns about joint professional military education and cross-domain expertise deserve attention. However, these arguments are often deployed as disqualifiers rather than design challenges.
Many nuclear states developed joint cultures after centralizing authority, not before. Institutional learning frequently follows reform rather than precedes it. Treating Pakistan’s current jointness deficit as a reason to avoid reform risks circular logic: reform is discouraged because jointness is weak, yet jointness cannot mature without structural incentives.
The appropriate response is investment in professional integration, not alarmist predictions of nuclear failure.
A More Grounded Assessment
None of this is to argue that the 27th Amendment is beyond critique. Legal alignment with the National Command Authority Act is necessary. Clear delineation of roles among the chief of defense forces, the CNSC, the SPD, and civilian leadership is essential. Joint education and interservice consultation must be strengthened.
But framing the reform as a destabilizing rupture misreads both Pakistan’s nuclear history and the nature of institutional change. Pakistan’s deterrent has endured because it has been conservative, procedural, and consensus-driven not because it perfectly mirrored Western joint command models.
Alarmism obscures that record rather than illuminating it.
Conclusion
The risk in this article is not that it raises questions, but that it answers them too quickly.
By collapsing political critique into nuclear fear, it narrows analytical space and reinforces stereotypes about Pakistan as an inherently unstable nuclear actor.
A more credible assessment would recognize that institutional reform carries risk, but so does stagnation. Nuclear stability is not preserved by freezing structures in time; it is sustained by adaptation grounded in restraint, learning, and context.
Pakistan’s challenge is not that it has restructured command but whether it aligns law, doctrine, and professional capacity with that structure.
That question remains open, and it deserves analysis rather than alarm.
Rabia Akhtar is the Editor of Pakistan Politico.
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