Pakistan Leadership Institute · Foundations · 12

Who Really Changes
Pakistan’s Governments?

The Military, Washington, and the Question of Responsibility. Every time a Pakistani government has fallen, the decisive instrument has been domestic. This is the historical record, case by case, weighed against the comparative evidence.

The question worth asking

Ask almost anyone on the streets of Lahore or Karachi who decides which government rules Pakistan, and a familiar answer comes back: America. The United States, the story goes, has been engineering regime changes around the world for more than half a century, and Pakistan is just one more entry on a long list. It is not a baseless claim. Washington really has overthrown elected governments, the declassified record proves it, and Pakistanis are right to be suspicious of a superpower that has treated their country as a Cold War chess piece for seventy years.

But the popular narrative usually stops one step too early. The interesting question is not whether outside powers interfere—they do, everywhere, all the time—but who actually pulls the trigger when a Pakistani government falls. And here the historical record points somewhere uncomfortable: every single time a government has been removed in Pakistan, the decisive instrument has been domestic, and it has almost always been the same institution—the Pakistan Army.

This article weighs the two theses against each other. Is America the prime mover of regime change in Pakistan, or is the military? Then it compares Pakistan to other countries the US has tried to flip—both the successes and the failures—to test a structural claim: that no external power can change a government from outside unless a domestic instrument, usually the military, is willing to do the actual work.

Defining the term

“Regime change” gets used loosely. It is worth separating three different things:

Pakistan has experienced all three. The analytical task is to figure out, in each case, where the causal weight actually sits.

The Pakistani record, case by case

1958 — Ayub Khan. Pakistan's first coup was a purely internal affair. President Iskander Mirza, having lost the confidence of the political class, abrogated the constitution and turned to his army chief, General Ayub Khan, for muscle. Twenty days later Ayub pushed Mirza himself out and exiled him. The United States welcomed a stable, anti-communist strongman and an ally in CENTO and SEATO—but the contemporaneous record does not show Washington orchestrating the takeover. Jawaharlal Nehru, in a note to his own foreign ministry on 31 October 1958, wrote that he did not think the generals had obtained the specific approval of the American government, only that they “must have assured themselves in some way” that Washington would not object; and the American embassy's cables from Karachi that month, printed in the Foreign Relations of the United States series for 1958–1960, read as after-the-fact assessment of a coup that had already happened rather than as the traces of a plan. That is acquiescence, not authorship. It accepted a fait accompli engineered in Rawalpindi.

1969 — Yahya Khan. When mass protests forced Ayub out, he did not hand power to the constitutional successor. He handed it to the next army chief, Yahya Khan, who imposed martial law. Again: an internal transfer within the institution.

1971 — the breakup. The loss of East Pakistan was a military and political catastrophe, not a “regime change” in the engineered sense, though it ended Yahya's rule and discredited the army badly enough to let a civilian—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—take charge.

1977 — Zia overthrows Bhutto. This is the case Bhutto himself blamed on America, and it is the most genuinely ambiguous. Bhutto's relationship with Washington had soured badly, largely over Pakistan's nuclear program; he claimed in his death-cell writings that an “elephant” (a thinly veiled reference to the US) had decided to remove him. But the man who actually removed him was General Zia-ul-Haq, the chief Bhutto had personally promoted over more senior officers. The army moved amid a genuine domestic crisis—a disputed election and a collapsing opposition agitation. Whatever American hostility existed, the instrument was, once again, the Pakistani military. Zia then had Bhutto hanged in 1979.

The 1980s — Zia and the Afghan jihad. Here the relationship inverts in an instructive way. Far from trying to remove Zia, Washington showered his military dictatorship with billions in aid and weapons to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The US did not weaken the Pakistani military during this period; it enriched and entrenched it. This matters for the responsibility question, as we will see.

The 1990s — the dismissal decade. Between 1988 and 1999, four elected governments (Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, twice each) were dismissed before completing their terms. The legal lever was Article 58-2(b), which let the president dissolve the assembly—but the hand behind the lever was the “establishment,” the army–presidency–intelligence nexus. These were domestically engineered removals with essentially no American authorship.

1999 — Musharraf overthrows Sharif. When Nawaz Sharif tried to dismiss army chief Pervez Musharraf, the army deposed Sharif instead. A textbook internal coup. The US, notably, condemned it and imposed sanctions—the opposite of orchestration—only warming to Musharraf after 9/11 made him useful.

2022 — Imran Khan and the cipher. This is the modern test case, and the one driving the current debate. Khan was removed by a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in April 2022 and immediately blamed a US-backed conspiracy, pointing to a diplomatic cable (the “cipher”) describing a meeting between Pakistan's ambassador and US Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu. The leaked text, published by The Intercept, has Lu expressing displeasure at Khan's neutrality on Ukraine and suggesting that relations would improve if the no-confidence vote succeeded—language easily read as a thinly veiled push for removal.

But the cipher cuts both ways. Subsequent reporting indicates the cable was an eleven-point summary of a wider diplomatic conversation, most of it routine trade and bilateral matters, and that Khan's own government kept engaging cordially with Lu and other US officials in the weeks afterward. What is on the public record is institutional rather than personal: on 14 April 2022 the army's spokesman, Major General Babar Iftikhar, told a press conference that the word “conspiracy” did not appear in the National Security Committee's finding and that what had been protested was interference, and on 22 April 2022 a further Committee meeting attended by General Bajwa and the other service chiefs recorded that the security agencies had found no evidence of a conspiracy. Even on the most damning reading, what the cipher documents is American preference and pressure—a foreign official signaling who he would rather see in power. It does not document American capability to remove a Pakistani prime minister. That capability sat, as always, with the institution that had by then withdrawn its support from Khan: the military.

The analytical verdict: the military as the indispensable instrument

Lay the cases side by side and a pattern is unmistakable. The Pakistani military has removed governments many times with no American involvement whatsoever. The United States has never removed a Pakistani government without the military. In fact, in none of the cases set out above did Washington remove a Pakistani government over the army's objection: each time, the army either did the removing itself or had already withdrawn its support.

This is the heart of the structural argument, and it is a strong one. In the language of causation, the military is a necessary condition for regime change in Pakistan, and very often a sufficient one—it can and does act alone. American pressure, by contrast, is at most a contributing factor in some episodes and entirely absent in many. Pressure without an instrument is just noise. A foreign power can signal its preferences, dangle aid, withhold loans, and lobby disgruntled politicians—but unless the people with the guns and the constitutional leverage decide to move, nothing happens.

There is also a deeper, more uncomfortable point here. Pakistan's military is not a junior partner that foreign powers activate like a tool. It is the dominant institution of the state—a self-financing economic empire, the arbiter of foreign and security policy, and the ultimate veto player in domestic politics. When the army aligns with an external power's wishes, it is usually because doing so serves the army's own interests, not because it is taking orders. The causal arrow more often runs the other way than the popular narrative assumes: the military uses its foreign relationships to legitimize and resource itself, rather than foreign powers using the military as a puppet.

Comparing Pakistan to the classic cases

To see why the “instrument” matters more than the “instigator,” look at the cases everyone cites as proof of American regime-change power. The striking thing is that in nearly all of them, a local security establishment did the decisive work.

Iran, 1953. The CIA and British intelligence (operation TPAJAX) helped remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iranian oil. But the operation only worked because pro-Shah officers in the Iranian army were willing to move. Historians now debate how decisive the CIA's role actually was versus domestic royalist forces—precisely because the local instrument was real and independently motivated.

Guatemala, 1954. The CIA's PBSUCCESS toppled the elected Jacobo Árbenz after his land reforms threatened American business interests. Yet the operation hinged on psychological warfare and, crucially, on elements of the Guatemalan army abandoning Árbenz. When his own officers wavered, he fell.

Congo, 1960. Patrice Lumumba was removed and later killed in a coup led by his own army chief of staff, Joseph Mobutu, with Western backing. Again—the instrument was domestic.

Chile, 1973. The US worked for years to destabilize Salvador Allende, but the coup itself was carried out by the Chilean military under Augusto Pinochet. Washington created a permissive environment; the Chilean armed forces did the deed.

Brazil 1964, Indonesia 1965. Same template—the local military as the agent, the US as an encouraging and enabling outside hand.

The lesson is consistent: American “regime change” almost never means Americans changing the regime. It means Americans finding, funding, and encouraging a domestic faction—overwhelmingly the military—that is already willing to act. Pakistan is not an exception to this pattern. If anything, it is the pattern in its purest form, because the Pakistani military is more autonomous and powerful than the Iranian, Guatemalan, or Chilean militaries of those eras. It needs less encouragement, not more.

The cases that prove the rule: when there is no instrument

The most powerful evidence for the structural argument is what happens when the US wants regime change but has no willing domestic instrument. These attempts fail, often humiliatingly.

The contrast is the whole argument. Where a domestic military defects, the government falls and outsiders can claim credit. Where the military holds, all the superpower pressure in the world bounces off. The decisive variable is never the foreign power's desire—it is the domestic instrument's willingness.

So who is more responsible?

A fair verdict has to be tiered rather than binary.

Primary responsibility — the Pakistani military. In every actual instance of a Pakistani government being removed, the military or the establishment it dominates has been the proximate, decisive, and often sole agent. It has done this repeatedly with no foreign involvement at all. Any honest accounting of why Pakistani democracy keeps failing has to put the institution that keeps interrupting it at the center. The popular “America did it” narrative, whatever its emotional appeal, often functions to absolve the domestic actor that is actually pulling the trigger—which is convenient for that actor.

Contributing and enabling responsibility — the United States and external powers. This is real but secondary and episodic. Washington has signaled preferences, applied pressure, rewarded compliant generals, and in some periods clearly preferred a pliable military to an independent civilian government. In specific moments—1977 perhaps, 2022 arguably—American hostility formed part of the backdrop against which the army acted. But “part of the backdrop” is not “the cause.”

Structural responsibility — the deeper American role. Here is the most sophisticated version of the case against Washington, and it deserves to be stated fairly. The single biggest American contribution to the subversion of Pakistani democracy may not be any individual coup, but the cumulative effect of seventy years of alliance. By bankrolling and arming the Pakistani military through the Cold War, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, and the War on Terror, the United States poured resources and prestige into the very institution that dominates the state. It is hard to build civilian supremacy when the army is the favored partner of a superpower and the pipeline through which billions in aid and weapons flow. In this sense, America's responsibility is less about removing particular governments and more about building and sustaining the instrument that removes them. That is a heavier charge than the “cipher” debate, and a better-founded one.

The bottom line for Pakistan

Put it plainly. The United States is a great power that pursues its interests, sometimes ruthlessly, and Pakistanis have every reason to distrust it. The cipher episode shows Washington was not a neutral bystander in 2022. The historical record shows it has cheered, funded, and occasionally nudged the removal of governments it disliked.

But the question was who is more responsible, and the comparative evidence answers it clearly. Foreign powers can want, pressure, and enable—but they cannot execute regime change in a country whose military refuses to cooperate, and they do not need to lift a finger in a country whose military is happy to act on its own. Pakistan is firmly the second kind of country. The military is the necessary instrument, the recurring agent, and the dominant institution. Washington has, at most, been a contributing and structurally enabling actor—and the most damning thing it has done is not to topple Pakistani governments, but to spend seventy years strengthening the institution that does.

The uncomfortable conclusion, then, is this: a foreign hand can only reach into Pakistani politics through a door that is opened from the inside. For most of the country's history, the people opening that door have worn the same uniform.

From diagnosis to action: what can people actually do?

If the analysis above is right—if the military is the primary and recurring author of regime change, and external powers are at most enablers—then the responsibility, and the remedy, sits closer to home than the “blame America” narrative suggests. That is the empowering part of the argument. You cannot do much about decisions made in Washington. You can do something about the norms, institutions, and incentives inside your own country.

The good news is that this is not guesswork. Many countries have moved their militaries out of politics, and political scientists have studied closely what worked. The picture that emerges is consistent. None of it is fast, none of it is a single dramatic act, and all of it depends on ordinary citizens changing what they treat as normal. Here is the evidence-based menu—emphatically a menu of peaceful, lawful, democratic action, because the historical record also shows that violent resistance to the military almost always strengthens it.

1. The single most important shift: stop inviting the umpire

In every chronic-coup country, including Pakistan, the deepest enabler is not the army alone—it is that politicians and the public welcome military intervention when it removes their rivals. The opposition cheers when “the establishment” sidelines the government; then the roles reverse, and the other side cheers next time. As long as half the country celebrates each intervention, the military will always have a domestic invitation to act.

This is what the comparative scholarship argues, though with more variation than “unanimous” would suggest. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan's 1996 work on democratic consolidation set the standard test, and it is not about the size of the army: a democracy is consolidated when it becomes the only game in town—when no significant actor, in or out of uniform, seriously tries to overthrow it, and when everyone accepts that political change must come through democratic procedure. Aqil Shah's The Army and Democracy, published in 2014, applies that test to Pakistan and finds it unmet, arguing that the army's interventions are driven less by material interest than by its own tutelary beliefs and norms, formed in the insecurity of the founding years, and that it has yet to treat democracy unconditionally as the only game in town. Others weight the causes differently—Ayesha Siddiqa's Military Inc., published in 2007, emphasizes the unaudited military economy she calls Milbus, and T.V. Paul's The Warrior State, published in 2014, the foreign rents that keep a garrison state solvent—but none of them puts the decisive constraint outside Pakistan. In a consolidated democracy a coup is not so much illegal as unthinkable. Nobody asks what the generals want when an election is contested, because it is not their business.

For Pakistanis, this is the hardest and most important change, because it requires giving up the short-term pleasure of seeing the army remove a leader you dislike. The principle has to become: I oppose military intervention even against my opponents. That is a norm built one conversation, one program, one generation at a time—and it is the foundation everything else rests on.

2. Win the information war

A military's power to intervene rests heavily on a monopoly over the national story—on being seen as the selfless guardian above “corrupt” politicians. That narrative monopoly is breakable, and it is breaking. Independent media, documented history, and digital creators who explain how the system actually works—who pulled the trigger in 1958, 1977, 1999, 2022, and why—chip away at the legitimacy the institution depends on.

This is the most accessible front for ordinary people, and it is precisely where educational content matters. The goal is not outrage but literacy: helping citizens recognize the pattern, name the actual decision-makers, and refuse the convenient myth that “the foreigners did it.” A public that understands the mechanism is much harder to mobilize against its own elected governments.

3. Build civil society that doesn't depend on any party

Comparative research links durable civilian control to dense, independent civic life—bar associations, student bodies, unions, professional associations, journalist groups, neighborhood organizations. These matter because they can mobilize quickly and non-violently against intervention, they socialize the wider society into democratic norms, and they survive across electoral cycles regardless of who is in power. Lawyers' movements, free press bodies, and independent election-monitoring groups have all, at various points, raised the cost of overreach in Pakistan itself. The lesson is to invest in institutions that defend the system, not any one leader.

4. Raise the cost of intervention—peacefully

At bottom, a coup is a cost–benefit calculation: the military moves when it judges the benefits of acting outweigh the costs. Citizens cannot change the army's firepower, but they can change the cost side of that equation. The historically effective tool is large-scale, disciplined, nonviolent civil resistance—the kind that made juntas ungovernable in places like Serbia and elsewhere. When intervention reliably triggers mass non-cooperation, strikes, and sustained protest rather than passive acceptance, the calculus shifts. Crucially, this is the best-evidenced item on the whole menu: in Why Civil Resistance Works, published in 2011, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan examined 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006 that aimed at regime change, ending a foreign occupation, or secession, and found that the nonviolent ones succeeded about 53 percent of the time against about 26 percent for the armed ones—in large part because mass, low-risk participation is harder for a security establishment to answer with force, and makes defections from within it more likely. The caveat an honest account has to carry is that this advantage has narrowed sharply: on Chenoweth's own later count the success rate of nonviolent campaigns has fallen from a peak of around 65 percent in the 1990s to below 34 percent since 2010, as governments have grown better at controlling information and holding their security forces together.

5. Demand the institutional reforms that actually de-politicize an army

When a democratic opening comes, the abstract goal of “civilian supremacy” has to be turned into concrete, boring, structural changes. Indonesia after 1998 is the most relevant model for Pakistan—a huge, populous, Muslim-majority country that pulled a deeply entrenched military partway out of politics. The reforms that mattered there form a usable checklist:

6. The honest caveats

Three things have to be said plainly, or the project fails on contact with reality.

First, this is slow and generational. No country did it in one election. Indonesia is twenty-five years in and still arguing about it.

Second, it backslides. Indonesia's military is currently clawing back civilian roles it had given up. Gains are never permanent; they have to be defended continuously. That is the price of the system.

Third, it must stay nonviolent and constitutional, and it must not become a vehicle for one party. The moment a “civilian supremacy” movement is captured by a single leader or party, it stops being about the principle and becomes just another faction inviting its own preferred outcome—which is exactly the dynamic that keeps the military relevant.

The bottom line for an audience

The most useful thing educational content can do is reframe the question in people's minds. The conventional reflex is “who outside is doing this to us?” The more empowering—and more accurate—question is “what inside our own politics keeps making this possible, and what would it take to make it stop?” The first question leads to resignation, because foreign powers are beyond reach. The second leads to agency, because norms, narratives, civic institutions, and constitutional rules are things citizens can actually build. The uncomfortable flip side of “the responsibility is mostly domestic” is also the hopeful side: a problem made at home can, in principle, be unmade at home.

Note on sources: The 2022 cipher's contents are partly disputed—the leaked text and the fuller official account differ in emphasis, and no party has been able to independently verify every detail. The historical cases (1958, 1977, 1999, and the comparative examples in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, and Venezuela) rest on declassified documents and established scholarship, though the precise weight of US versus local agency remains debated by historians in several of them. An educational treatment should present these as contested where they are contested.