Several Pakistani leftist writers, most notably Hamza Alavi, advanced the concept of the “overdeveloped state,” identifying the military and bureaucracy as the defining institutions of Pakistan’s political order and tracing their predominance to the colonial state. Alavi’s concept was an important intervention in explaining the institutional imbalance inherited by many post-colonial states.
In Pakistan’s case, it remains a useful starting point for understanding why the armed forces repeatedly emerged as the country’s most powerful political institution. Pakistan’s post-colonial history, however, did not end in 1947.
The institutions of the state were continually reshaped by wars with India, the loss of East Pakistan, shifting relations with imperialism, changing patterns of capital accumulation, and the political struggles of successive governments. Any theory of the Pakistani state must therefore account for the historical processes through which that colonial inheritance evolved.
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar later sought to revise what he called Alavi’s “overdeveloped legacy,” developing a broader account of the Pakistani state, its political economy, peripheral oppression, and the growing role of China.
His work makes several valuable contributions, particularly in tracing the transformation of the civilian bureaucracy following Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s restructuring of the civil service.
Yet it also reproduces a common theoretical tendency across these otherwise distinct questions: state consolidation is understood principally as domination, national integration as homogenization, and large-scale development as dispossession. Each of these dangers can be real, but when treated as an “exhaustive” account, they leave little room for the historical tasks of state formation, industrialization, and sovereign development.
This limitation is already evident in Akhtar’s explanation of military predominance. Moving beyond Alavi’s emphasis on the institutional imbalance inherited from colonial rule, Akhtar argues that the subsequent fragmentation of the civilian bureaucracy contributed significantly to the military’s growing authority. This is a somewhat important observation, but it cannot serve as the primary explanation for the military’s consolidation.
The foundations of military predominance—rooted both in Pakistan’s post-colonial nature and in the prolonged political crisis that followed Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination—had already been laid by the late 1950s and were firmly established under Ayub Khan, well before Bhutto’s restructuring of the civil service in 1973.
Bureaucratic fragmentation may have widened the imbalance between the military and the civilian state apparatus, but it did not initially produce it. Akhtar’s limited engagement with Pakistan’s early political crises leaves a crucial stage in the emergence of military power insufficiently explained.
As Akhtar notes, Bhutto’s 1973 reforms abolished the insular Civil Services of Pakistan, introduced lateral entry, and subjected the civil service to greater political penetration. These reforms altered recruitment, promotion, and career structures, while politicized appointments and the movement of sections of the Westernized elite into the private sector further changed the character of the bureaucracy.
This raises a more fundamental question: if civilian politicians could restructure the bureaucracy, why could they not similarly restructure the military? Bhutto himself attempted to assert civilian control over the armed forces—most notably by creating the Federal Security Force as a counterweight and promoting officers he considered loyal—but these efforts failed.
The civilian bureaucracy formed part of the administrative machinery through which class rule was organized and reproduced. Its authority operated through ministries, regulations, appointments, revenue systems, and the implementation of policy, all of which could be reshaped by the political executive.
The military stood at the core of the coercive apparatus on which the state ultimately depended. Its chain of command, control over armed force, and role in territorial defense gave it a degree of continuity and autonomy that administrative institutions did not possess to the same extent. In Pakistan, war, insecurity, and repeated crises of state formation continually increased reliance on the armed forces and expanded their political weight.
Yet institutional autonomy alone does not fully explain the military’s strength. Its position also became intertwined with the imperatives of state formation in a nationally fragmented context.
For a state to endure, it requires “centripetal forces” linking people, territories, and socioeconomic and political processes within a common institutional framework.
In Pakistan, however, mainstream civilian politicians have often acted as—or aligned themselves with—centrifugal forces. Rather than constructing a durable national politics, they have often relied upon regional, ethnic, linguistic, or provincial identities in their struggles against the center.
This tendency becomes particularly pronounced when parties lose power federally or when provincial governments mobilize against policies emanating from the federal government or the military establishment. Variations of this pattern have appeared across party lines.
Since losing federal power, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has increasingly drawn upon provincial grievances in a manner reminiscent of earlier shifts by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
The military, by contrast, has consistently positioned itself as the institution that stands against fragmentation and preserves national unity. This is not exclusively a self-serving justification for military power, although it certainly serves that purpose. It also reflects a genuine structural reality.
In the absence of a civilian political bloc capable of or interested in constructing a durable national project, the military acquired the institutional space to present itself—and increasingly to function—as the principal custodian of national cohesion.
Its institutional strength cannot be reduced to what Akhtar describes as Pakistan’s “garrison inheritance”; it has also been reinforced by the failure of civilian politics to perform the centripetal function that states require. When parties that previously governed from the center pivot towards regional grievances after losing power, they deepen the fragmentation that provides military intervention with its political rationale.
Myanmar offers a useful post-colonial comparison where persistent ethnic conflict, regionalism, and the weakness of integrative civilian institutions enabled the armed forces to present themselves as the guarantor of national unity and territorial integrity.
In both cases, military predominance cannot be understood solely through institutional inheritance or corporate ambition; it must also be situated within a political order that has repeatedly failed to produce a civilian project of national integration.
This relationship is, of course, reciprocal—but it is not historically symmetrical. Periods of military rule have inevitably shaped the development of civilian politics, altering the incentives confronting political parties and the conditions under which national political organization develops. These effects should be recognized without treating military intervention as the original or sole source of Pakistan’s civilian fragmentation.
Regionalism was already deeply entrenched in Pakistan’s political order before the first period of military rule. The conflicts of the 1950s were shaped to a considerable extent by provincial and linguistic divisions, while opposition to Ayub Khan was itself organized through regionally differentiated forces and demands, held together primarily by their shared rejection of his rule. This fragile unity rapidly disintegrated following Ayub’s removal, as the underlying regional contradictions once again came to the fore.
The class basis of these regional divisions also require closer attention. While Akhtar is correct to reject the image of Pakistan as a uniformly agrarian society dominated entirely by landlords, he understates the persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations across large parts of interior Sindh, southern Punjab, and the non-Pashtun areas of Balochistan. These regions encompass a substantial proportion of Pakistan’s territory and population and remain characterized by entrenched landlordism, tribal authority, and local patronage networks.
Marxist Leninists must recognize the relationship between the power of landed and tribal elites and the persistence of regionalist politics. Opposition by the PPP and several ethno-nationalist parties to the creation of new provinces, the construction of major dams, and other nationally coordinated projects has often combined legitimate distributive concerns with the defense of established provincial and local power structures.
Regional grievances are not necessarily artificial, but they are frequently appropriated by dominant classes whose authority depends upon preserving existing territorial divisions and patronage networks. Regionalism therefore cannot be understood only as a reaction to centralization; it must also be examined as a political form through which established class power is reproduced.
These struggles over regionalism are also inseparable from disputes over who directs development, how territory is integrated, and which class forces control the resulting infrastructure and investment. These questions become especially important in Akhtar’s analysis of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
Akhtar’s critique of CPEC begins from legitimate concerns about dispossession, ecological degradation, unequal compensation, and the exclusion of local communities. Yet his analysis shares an important limitation with the anti-extractivist approaches criticized by Max Ajl: the immediate harms of infrastructure and extraction tend to displace questions of sovereign industrialization, national integration, and anti-imperialist independence.
Akhtar subsumes CPEC within a “hegemonic developmental regime” and writes that it signals “what a prospective Chinese-dominated global order will look like.” He groups Chinese financing alongside lending by Western financial institutions without developing an adequate account of the qualitative distinction between them.
Western institutions have subjected Pakistan to structural adjustment, privatization, austerity, and political dependency.
Comparatively, Chinese investment has been concentrated in transport, ports, power generation, scientific and agricultural cooperation, and industrial infrastructure. The fact that both involve capital does not make them politically or historically equivalent.
CPEC creates a material possibility for reducing Pakistan’s dependence on Western finance and expanding the productive foundations of greater economic sovereignty, although that possibility remains constrained by Pakistan’s domestic class structure. By expanding energy production, transport capacity, and digital connectivity, it provides some of the essential foundations for industrial development.
Evaluating this infrastructure primarily through the categories of accumulation and securitization reproduces a broader problem that Max Ajl identifies within anti-extractivist scholarship: its failure to “engage industrialization and self-defense as part of national liberation.”
Such an approach fails to confront the consequences of infrastructural underdevelopment or the question of how roads, ports, power plants, and fibre-optic networks might be redirected towards sovereign industrialization.
Ajl’s central criticism is that anti-extractivism foregrounds the harms associated with development without advancing a viable alternative productive programme. Its proponents “have not offered any real vision or frameworks of ‘post-extractivist’ social formations” and provide little clarity about “industrialization and its role in peripheral futures.”
The absence of a concrete productive alternative is also evident in Akhtar’s vague appeal to a “universalist imaginary beyond dispossession, covetousness, militarism and ecological breakdown.” However desirable these principles may be, they do not explain how Pakistan should generate electricity, construct transport systems, manufacture machinery, create industrial employment, or overcome technological dependence.
Ajl instead recovers a Third World Marxist tradition that “rejected neither imported technology nor modernity” and sought “a bespoke popular and sovereign technology—imported, endogenous, and modified.”
From this perspective, the central question is whether foreign investment and technology can be incorporated into a sovereign national project and used to develop domestic productive capacities. This distinction also complicates Akhtar’s use of the language of internal colonialism.
As Ajl warns, “lambasting sovereign states as ‘colonial’ ignores the achievements of the anti-colonial struggles” and obscures the imperialist drive towards the “eradication of state sovereignty.”
Describing nationally coordinated development principally through the categories of colonialism and dispossession obscures the wider contradiction between a peripheral state seeking to expand its productive capacity and an imperial system that has historically restricted such development across the Global South.
Sovereignty does not eliminate internal class domination, but neither can development within a post-colonial state be equated with colonial accumulation without erasing the political significance of national independence.
A more defensible Marxist position would support CPEC as a strategically important opening for national development while struggling over the class forces directing it. This requires expanding public ownership, strengthening national industry, securing technology transfer, guaranteeing meaningful participation and adequate compensation for affected communities, and ensuring that the gains from development serve the people as a whole.
Akhtar’s treatment of CPEC ultimately reflects the same limitation that runs through his account of the Pakistani state. His framework pays insufficient attention to state formation, national integration, and the developmental imperatives confronting a post-colonial society. This weakens his explanation of both military predominance and national development, producing an emphasis on provincialism where questions of sovereignty, productive capacity, and state-building are central.
The post-colonial state must be understood through the contradictory functions it performs and the class struggle over how those functions are directed. A Marxist-Leninist theory of Pakistan must understand the state simultaneously as an instrument and terrain of class domination, an institutional framework through which national integration is constructed, and a principal means through which sovereign industrialization and development can be organized.
Revolutionary transformation should not be confused with the indiscriminate fragmentation of state institutions. Without an organized political force capable of assuming and transforming these functions, such disintegration does not advance socialism; it weakens national sovereignty and creates openings for imperialist intervention.
The task is to transform the balance of class forces within and around the state while building the power necessary to replace the rule of landlords and capitalists with a workers’ state.