Strongmen have followed the playbook of “divide and rule” since antiquity, and Pakistan’s most powerful man is no exception. Field Marshal Asim Munir, the Pakistani military chief who wields real power despite a nominally superior president and prime minister, may be planning to break up the country’s four provinces into a dozen or more, according to a report by The Economist.
The rationale sounds reasonable, but the motive, critics suspect, is less so. The Economist report points out that there are two major reasons to be wary of Asim Munir’s plans. “Punjab and Sindh, a southern province centred on the country’s commercial capital, Karachi, are the fiefs of two long-lived parties, the PML(N) and the PPP, respectively. Even under military dictators, they have preserved alternative centres of power, up to a point. “He has partly co-opted the PML(N) and the PPP, whose de facto leaders now serve as a weak prime minister and an even weaker president. He has thrown Imran Khan, the leader of the third main party, into jail. Protests in support of Mr Khan, a former cricketing superstar and the country’s most popular politician, are met with bans and barricades. TV channels dare not mention his name,” it noted. Rather, it was more likely that the move would make politicians more malleable to the demands of Munir.
The divided new mini-polities are likely to be ruled by elected chiefs, or by provincial or district assemblies, or by nominees of “the government” — which is essentially the Field Marshal himself, according to The Economist report. The first, the report said, is the country’s very limited pluralism, making the big provinces an essential counterweight to the centre. No doubt that is why the field marshal has them in his sights,” it said. So, the report said it was unlikely that any plan to divide Pakistan by Munir was about empowering provincial governments to help Pakistanis.
