Military as Diplomatic Anchor: Pakistan’s 2025 Defence Reforms and External Engagement Patterns

1. The Strategic Interlocutor

External actors have long been engaged with Pakistan through its defence establishments. With the creation of a Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) and the resetting of service chiefs’ tenures, the 2025 reforms formalised what foreign governments had already recognised: the military remains the most stable avenue for diplomatic interaction and strategic authority.

In a system defined by recurring political volatility, foreign governments have recognised Pakistan’s military as its one stable and predictable institution for decades. Aquil Shah, in his book, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan, documents how, until 2013, Pakistan had not experienced a single democratic transfer of power between two elected governments that each completed their tenure. All previous transitions were terminated due to military intervention, although the military establishment has maintained a consistent command structure throughout (Shah, 2014, p. 18).

Following the 9/11 realignments, this view was further maintained in practice since military-to-military channels played a vital role in US-Pakistan relations. As documented by the US Congressional Research Service (2023), this was especially true for counter-terrorism cooperation, crisis management, and intelligence exchange.

Christine Fair, in her 2014 book, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, has also noted that the Pakistan Army has exercised significant control over foreign and defence policy, particularly its India policy, while also continuing its security posture and influencing tactical choices even as political leadership has remained evolving (Fair, 2014, pp. 20–24). It is this institutional continuity that helps explain why external actors, such as the USA, have treated the military as the primary security interlocutor.

However, this pattern is not confined to Washington; Fair (2014, p. 45) notes that Saudi Arabia has been among Pakistan’s major security partners – a relationship cultivated as part of the army’s larger strategy of building external alliances to meet its institutional security needs. These are ties anchored in defence cooperation rather than civilian diplomatic frameworks.

According to a Carnegie Endowment analysis of US-Pakistan relations (Grare, 2013a), strategically important collaborations persisted around shared goals despite political challenges, underscoring that defence cooperation is the very foundation of such bilateral ties. This developed into a preference for using the Pakistan military as the ‘trustworthy’ channel for strategic dialogue.

The 27th Constitutional Amendment and the formal appointment of Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) in December 2025 place this situation within a statutory and legal framework. By institutionalising a system through which key foreign partners choose to engage with the state, Islamabad has not only centralised its tri-service authority but also stabilised leadership tenure. The impact of this shift surpasses managerial efficiency. While foreign actors continue to prioritise Pakistan’s defence channels in strategic dialogue, its external representation still reflects institutional permanence rather than political variability. This shift carries consequences for both civil-military relations and regional signalling.

1.1 A Longstanding Diplomatic Reality

The defence establishment has historically exercised decisive control over Pakistan’s security and foreign policy architecture. Shah (2014, p. 20) notes that 'although civilian governments exercise constitutional authority, the military has retained major influence over national security decision-making'. This is especially true for domains pertaining to India, Afghanistan, and internal stability. Such a configuration has limited civilian control over key portfolios.

In a similar vein, Fair (2014, pp. 20, 24) goes further in her argument that Pakistan’s strategic culture is effectively interchangeable with that of the army, provided that the army has set the country’s key foreign and domestic policies for most of its history – a pattern that was sustained across both military and civilian administrations. As she further notes, civilian governments have primarily gone through the motions of policy inputs while being substantially cut off from the decisions themselves (Fair, 2014, p. 39).

The US Congressional Research Service (2023) has documented that, in US-Pakistan cooperation post-9/11, the understanding has been used effectively by external actors, notably through heavy reliance on security institutions for operational coordination in counterterrorism and for logistical access arrangements. Instead of managing shifting civilian coalitions, Washington often established its engagements through institutional defence channels that could maintain policy continuity. ​

This rationale, however, goes beyond the United States. China’s partnership with Pakistan under the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) tends to reflect a similar logic. Small argues that the China–Pakistan relationship was designed primarily ‘as a shield to protect their traditional security interests rather than a bridge to lead to common prosperity’ – with thousands of Pakistani security personnel deployed to protect Chinese workers and Chinese officials explicitly establishing CPEC’s effectiveness on security conditions across the state and not just in designated project zones (Small, 2015, pp. 115, 133).

1.2 Formalising the Command Architecture

In December 2025, what had long operated in practice was formalised by Pakistan through its 27th Constitutional Amendment, which replaced the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), with the newly created Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), thereby consolidating tri-service authority under a single leadership banner. Though this was presented as a ‘modernisation mechanism’ to address the requirements of ‘contemporary warfare ', its implications extend beyond administrative reform (Government of Pakistan, 2025).

In the past, the CJCSC was more of a coordinating than a unified command, with the Chief of Army Staff often exercising de facto primacy in decision-making (Shah, 2014, p. 170; Fair, 2014, p. 21). The establishment of a CDF formalises oversight across the army, navy, and air force and reduces concerns over hierarchies within the tri-service.

Notably, attempts to manage military tenure had been tried before. As Shah (2014, p. 141) mentions, ‘Bhutto fixed the service chiefs’ tenure at four years and prohibited extensions specifically to prevent any officer from using a prolonged command to build political influence, as Ayub Khan had done, yet these constraints proved insufficient without broader institutional rebalancing.'

The two security environments differ, but India's establishment of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) in 2019 raised similar concerns about coordination and tactical coherence. Although Pakistan's move toward a unified command corresponds to the broader area-wide trend of defence centralisation, the difference lies in the institutional context. Pakistan’s military has historically exercised notable political influence; therefore, this constitutional consolidation bears implications beyond tactical optimisation.

Politically, this reform codifies a single defence interlocutor at the apex of the defence establishment while recalibrating leadership tenure norms by expanding and regularising command tenures, consequently reducing uncertainty about succession, which has historically been a sensitive issue in Pakistan’s civil–military balance.

As a result, the defence structure represents the existing patterns of engagement by foreign actors through a centralised, longstanding military authority rather than through varying political leadership.

2. The External Security Representative

2.1 Reinforcing Military Authority

While foreign governments do not design another state’s institutions, their patterns of engagement tend to reinforce certain centres of power. For Pakistan, decades of security-first engagement and diplomacy have made its defence channels the primary line for crisis management, intelligence cooperation, and, often, regional coordination.

Washington has specifically looked to military interlocutors who have offered stability during periods of civilian volatility or during counterterrorism operations in Pakistan (Congressional Research Service, 2023; Fair, 2014, p. 24).

Similarly, Gulf partners depended on training exercises and sustained defence cooperation based on strategic ties that transcend electoral cycles (Karim, 2025). For Beijing, on the other hand, protecting its CPEC investments also meant security assurances that required sustained coordination with Pakistan’s defence establishment (Small, 2015, pp. 115, 133).

There is nothing ideological about these choices; they are practical decisions made while dealing with a nuclear-armed state rife with internal instability, in which foreign governments are prioritising institutional durability over rapid political transitions.

As a result, a self-sustaining cycle is created in which foreign actors engage the military because it is stable, and that very engagement continues to reinforce its stability.

2.2 Civil–Military Balance and Democratic Implications

Equal consideration must be given to the domestic trajectory of this trend, as Pakistan’s civil-military imbalance predated the 2025 reforms. The International Crisis Group (2010) has documented significant structural flaws across Pakistan’s parliamentary review mechanisms and the civil service. In this light, the codification of its defence command merely formalises this asymmetry. Legal analysts and political parties recently criticised the 27th amendment for granting the CDF lifetime tenure and requiring a two-thirds parliamentary majority to remove the CDF, which is more than the two-thirds majority needed to remove a sitting prime minister (Farooq, 2025). Shah (2014, p. 172) argues that to achieve true civil-military balance172) argues that to achieve true civil-military balance, formal constitutional authority is just as important for civilian actors as effective institutional capacity. Should that capacity be underdeveloped, constitutional reforms risk cementing existing power structures rather than distributing or reordering them. Despite its functional rationality, the CDF structure establishes a single apex authority whose tenure stability and mandate may limit the scope of civilian foreign policy, especially in the areas where the military has historically opposed civilian recalibration, for instance, the Afghanistan and India policy (Fair, 2014, p. 24).

When foreign governments choose military channels over civilian diplomatic counterparts, they reinforce constitutional imbalances already present in Pakistan. This external signalling also has domestic repercussions. Grare (2013a) observed that Pakistan’s counterterrorism posture was strongly influenced by the military’s political interests rather than by any consistent civilian policy—a factor that would not be altered by a unified command structure.

3. The Regional Power Broker

3.1 Crisis Management and Escalation Dynamics

The link between military authority and crisis diplomacy predates the reforms of 2025. The 1999 Kargil conflict showed that the Pakistani military could direct the course of interstate engagement without regard for the civilian leadership, even as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was seeking to build diplomatic rapprochement with India through the Lahore Declaration (Fair, 2014, p. 33). Kargil was not a unique historical event, but it set an early precedent for the military’s centrality in dealing with strategic crises, a pattern that would continue in later crises.

In a region identified by nuclear deterrence and recurring crises, institutional transparency is meaningful. This was made evident by the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis. Following the Pulwama attack and India’s subsequent airstrikes, external actors—most notably the US and the UAE—engaged Pakistan’s military establishment to directly manage the escalation, hence circumventing any civilian diplomatic avenues (Kronstadt, 2019). The de-escalation was mediated through defence channels rather than foreign ministries, and it demonstrates the precise rationale this article has explored: in periods of crisis, foreign governments default to the interlocutors they regard as authoritative.

With the establishment of a single, constitutionally recognised defence authority, the 2025 reforms have given foreign governments a clear and permanent point of contact in times of crisis, thereby removing any ambiguity about who holds operational command and who calls the shots in a nuclear-armed state. External actors assessing resilience might see this as a way to strengthen stability.

The regional implications are therefore twofold. While a unified command can improve the coherence of deterrence and reduce internal friction during escalations, it also risks undermining the consolidation of the defence establishment as the primary interface for regional diplomacy, thus limiting the space for civilian actors to pursue independent foreign policy initiatives, especially toward India, where the military has traditionally opposed civilian recalibration (Fair, 2014, p. 24).

3.2 Post-Reform Developments and External Engagement Patterns

The preceding sections have illustrated that Pakistan’s military has historically been a central player in the country’s external engagement architecture. The developments in the first half of 2026 offer an opportunity to assess whether the constitutional establishment of the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) merely formalised existing practices or led to observable changes in Pakistan’s external representation. Rather than appraising the reforms solely on their legal provisions, the following developments analyse how the office of the CDF was subsequently employed in practice.

As Cottey and Forster have argued, ‘military entities are increasingly assuming diplomatic roles that extend far beyond the traditional norms of defence administration, most notably in states facing ongoing security challenges’ (Cottey & Forster, 2004).

This shift was most visible in the negotiations on the interim agreement between the United States and Iran in June 2026. Traditionally, diplomacy has been the domain of civilian foreign ministries, but in the final stages of the negotiations, the Chief of Defence Forces of Pakistan played a major role as an intermediary, facilitating communication between Washington and Tehran, with Pakistan serving as a mediator and witness to the agreement. The significance of this episode lies less in the substance of the agreement than in the institutional channel through which engagement took place. Pakistan’s main external representative in one of the region’s most important diplomatic deliberations was its senior military leadership, not its civilian diplomatic establishment. This reflects a broader trend of military institutions increasingly serving as instruments of tactical diplomacy, supporting Cottey and Forster’s argument that defence diplomacy now includes political engagement, confidence-building and calculated communication in peacetime, in addition to traditional military responsibilities (Cottey & Forster, 2004; Reuters, 2026a; Reuters, 2026b; Associated Press, 2026a).

The evolving diplomatic role of the CDF was also seen in Pakistan’s regional security engagement outside the Iran crisis. Military-led consultations were a key part of the first half of 2026, focusing on instability along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and trilateral engagements with China to boost regional security coordination. These discussions centred on border security, counterterrorism cooperation, and mechanisms to de-escalate cross-border tensions, with security institutions playing a central coordinating role instead of traditional diplomatic channels (Associated Press, 2026b; Associated Press, 2026c; Associated Press, 2026d).

Though these policies addressed pressing regional security concerns, they also confirmed the broader institutional pattern observed throughout this study: the military leadership in Pakistan was increasingly serving as the state’s main strategic partner in regional security diplomacy.

This institutional evolution is indicative of wider trends in contemporary defence diplomacy. Cottey and Forster contend that military institutions are no longer exclusively used as instruments of deterrence or warfighting but are increasingly employed as mechanisms for strategic engagement, conflict prevention, military cooperation, and regional security management. Defence diplomacy is therefore an extension of the state’s diplomatic toolkit and not a substitute for traditional diplomacy. What distinguishes Pakistan’s post-reform trajectory is that these functions are exercised through a constitutionally recognised military office whose authority extends beyond defence administration to encompass the broader domain of external representation. The 2025 constitutional reforms did not create an entirely new position but rather institutionalised an arrangement in which military diplomacy remained an explicit part of the architecture of Pakistan’s foreign and security policy (Cottey & Forster, 2004).

The aftermath of the Pahalgam attack and India's subsequent Operation Sindoor provides the strongest empirical confirmation of this argument. Despite broad political rhetoric and diplomatic involvement following the crisis, escalation management and the eventual ceasefire were ultimately achieved through direct communication between the Directors General of Military Operations (DGMOs) of India and Pakistan. This result remains analytically important because it shows that, even in one of the most serious crises between the two nuclear-armed neighbours in recent years, the crucial channel for de-escalation was military-to-military communication, not traditional formal talks. The episode therefore reinforces the central proposition of this study: constitutional recognition of the CDF did not essentially change Pakistan's external engagement architecture but codified an institutional reality in which military organisations remain the state's most authoritative interface for crisis management, strategic communication and external security engagement (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025; Peri, 2025).

Taken together, these developments indicate that Pakistan’s 2025 defence reforms should be seen as an aspect of a broader evolution in the practice of contemporary diplomacy. While foreign ministries continue to perform indispensable diplomatic functions, the increasing integration of military institutions into external engagement reflects the growing importance of defence diplomacy as an instrument of statecraft in an era characterised by persistent interstate competition, hybrid threats and recurring regional crises. Pakistan represents an unusually pronounced example of this evolution. The creation of the Chief of Defence Forces did not simply reorganise the country's defence establishment; it institutionalised an existing pattern whereby military authority and diplomatic representation increasingly converge within a single strategic office.

4. From Recognition to Entrenchment

Pakistan’s 2025 defence reforms are best seen as a codification rather than a change in direction, as they integrate into a formal constitutional framework what foreign governments have long treated as operational reality: that Pakistan’s defence establishment is its most effective and definitive strategic counterpart. Hence, they resolve any sense of uncertainty in engagements while also widening the existing asymmetry in domestic civil-military relations.

That said, the consequences for India are direct. The May 2025 Pahalgam attack and the subsequent Operation Sindoor revealed that, even in the gravest crises with Pakistan in decades, a ceasefire was ultimately agreed upon between the two countries’ directors general of military operations, rather than via diplomatic back channels or civilian foreign ministries (Peri, 2025). The precise pattern this article has traced historically was once again the operational reality: in periods of crisis, it is the military establishment that negotiates, communicates, and inevitably determines outcomes. The constitutional establishment of a CDF does not create this dynamic; it definitively institutionalises it.

For New Delhi, the implications are strategic, as India cannot engage with Pakistan’s civilian government on questions of terrorism, escalation management or bilateral integration or expect those negotiations to prevail because civilian governments simply do not control those domains. As Fair (2014, p. 39) states, civilian governments have mostly performed policy-input procedures while being excluded from the decisions themselves.

​Hence, the larger question is whether this entrenchment promotes or undermines regional order.

The evidence presented in this research implies that the answer is neither absolute nor mutually exclusive. Institutionalised military authority may enhance strategic coherence and facilitate prompt decision-making during crises, particularly in a nuclear environment where unified command structures can reduce uncertainty and improve escalation management. At the same time, the concentration of authority within military institutions narrows the space for civilian diplomatic initiatives, which may limit the flexibility needed for sustained political normalisation and long-term conflict resolution.

The Pakistani foreign policy architecture in which the military is constitutionally the official spokesperson also means that civilian-led avenues, i.e., trade, people-to-people contact, and diplomatic interaction, will continue to be restricted by institutional actors whose threat perceptions are, as Shah (2014, pp. 24-25) and Fair (2014, pp. 20-21) both document, structurally resistant to change. For India, dealing with Pakistan, therefore, means engaging its military establishment, not as a workaround but as the only channel that actually exists.

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The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of CNAWS.

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