This chapter extends the analysis in Chapter 6 by examining the origins and consequences of national security institutions in Pakistan from 1947 to 2015. Unlike India, the persistent threat of bureaucratic punishment prevented the emergence of integrated institutions, despite the salient international threats faced by its political leaders. Instead, Pakistan has cycled between siloed and fragmented institutions, with civilian leaders tending to adopt the former and military rulers tending to choose the latter. The chapter argues that the reason for this pattern stems from differences in political agenda. Military leaders have historically pursued ambitious programs to transform Pakistan’s society and economy, which would allow the military to return to the barracks. A medium-n analysis of Pakistan’s institutional performance suggests that siloed and fragmented institutions tended to perform poorly relative to India’s integrated institutions. Process tracing of the 1999 Kargil War illustrates that this poor performance can be attributed to low-quality bureaucratic information upon which Pakistan’s leaders based their choice for conflict.

As Pakistan emerged from military rule upon the death of General Zia in a plane crash in 1988, it underwent a new governmental experience marked by tussles between unsettled elected governments, a constitutionally empowered civilian presidency and a military establishment that covertly exercised considerable power. Chapter 6 unveils how the superior courts utilised the available political space to engineer a dramatic expansion of public law and carved a role for themselves as an important institution of the state. As the civil state’s machinery became the turf of power struggles, safeguarding its independence and ensuring its rule-boundedness emerged as a key pillar of the superior courts’ Writ jurisdiction. The superior courts also began to develop a more robust jurisprudence of rule of law and fundamental rights, while the Supreme Court utilised its Original jurisdiction for the first time to institute Public Interest Litigation. Nonetheless, recurrent involvement in matters of pure politics and governmental change resulted in direct confrontations between the judiciary and elected governments, and ultimately the politicisation of judicial review.