Recent analysis in Foreign Policy magazine by Haleema Saadia and Ali Mustafa on Pakistan’s 27th Amendment has framed the reform as a dangerous inflexion point, one that allegedly accelerates authoritarianism and imperils nuclear stability in South Asia.
While concerns about legal alignment, jointness and institutional clarity merit serious discussion, prevailing analyses risk overstating the dangers while under-theorising Pakistan’s historical experience with nuclear governance and institutional adaptation. The result is an argument that conflates political critique with nuclear alarmism and treats organisational reform as synonymous with strategic recklessness.
Central claim and its limits: The core claim advanced by critics is straightforward: by elevating the army chief as chief of defence forces and introducing a new commander of the National Strategic Command, Pakistan has undermined the delicate civil-military equilibrium that once safeguarded its nuclear arsenal. This restructuring, it is argued, collapses redundancy, marginalises the navy and air force and introduces dangerous ambiguity into nuclear decision-making.
This interpretation, however, rests on three analytically weak assumptions: first, that Pakistan’s previous nuclear command structure functioned as a genuinely balanced interservice system; second, that transitional ambiguity in command structures inherently produces nuclear instability; and third, that centralised authority is uniquely dangerous in Pakistan’s case. None of these assumptions withstands close scrutiny.
The myth of a neutral pre-amendment equilibrium: Much of the authors’ critique relies on idealising the pre-27th Amendment command architecture, particularly the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), as a stabilising interservice counterweight. In practice, the CJCSC has historically been a coordinating figure with limited institutional leverage rather than a decisive arbiter of nuclear authority.
Pakistan’s nuclear governance has always been centralised, disciplined and has always retained civilian oversight at the apex. The army’s dominance within this system predates the current reform by decades and did not arise from the 27th Amendment. Suggesting that the CJCSC meaningfully prevented service dominance risks mistaking procedural inclusion for substantive power.
The stability of Pakistan’s deterrent since 1998 was not produced by symmetry among services but by layered controls, organisational routines and consensus-based decision norms within the National Command Authority. Those features remain intact.
Ambiguity does not equal breakdown: The authors place heavy emphasis on legal misalignment between the new constitutional framework and the National Command Authority Act of 2010, warning of parallel chains of command and crisis-time paralysis. The concern is not illegitimate, but it is exaggerated.
Nuclear command systems rarely evolve through perfectly synchronised constitutional and statutory reform. Transitional ambiguity is not unique to Pakistan, nor is it inherently destabilising. Pakistan itself has navigated major institutional transitions in 1998, 2000, and 2010 without breakdowns in command integrity or loss of control.
Moreover, nuclear command and control is governed less by public-facing statutory language than by classified procedures, standing operating practices, and institutional memory. The absence of immediate legislative alignment does not imply discretionary chaos, particularly in a system that has consistently privileged caution over impulsivity.
Centraliaation is a norm, not an outlier: The critique also rests on a selective application of normative standards. Centralisation of nuclear authority is treated as inherently suspect in Pakistan while being implicitly normalised elsewhere.
Most nuclear-armed states consolidate nuclear decision-making at the highest military or political level precisely to avoid fragmentation during crises. The concern, then, is not unity of command per se but the perceived lack of trust in Pakistan’s institutions to exercise restraint. That is a political judgment, not a structural diagnosis.
If unity of command is acceptable in other nuclear contexts, the burden of proof lies with the authors to demonstrate why Pakistan’s case is categorically different, beyond general references to civil-military imbalance.
Strategic context matters: Analyses that portray Pakistan’s reforms as self-generated pathologies also underplay the strategic environment in which they occur. India’s evolving military doctrines, counterforce debates, ISR expansion and integrated theatre commands are treated as background noise rather than active drivers shaping Pakistan’s security calculations.
Deterrence does not exist in a vacuum. Organisational reforms in Pakistan must be assessed as part of an interactive security environment, not as isolated constitutional experiments divorced from regional dynamics.
The professional competence argument is inadequate: Concerns surrounding joint professional military education and cross-domain expertise are misplaced and do not accurately reflect policy and operational needs. Contrary to the article’s assertion, it is neither necessary nor policy-relevant for all military officers to receive training in nuclear planning, crisis management or strategic communication.
From an institutional perspective, such specialised expertise is required only by a limited cohort of officers directly involved in nuclear decision-making and force management. These officers are appropriately trained within specialised structures, including the SPD and the three Strategic Forces. The appropriate response is already in place and does not warrant an alarmist prediction of nuclear failure.
A more grounded assessment: None of this is to argue that the 27th Amendment is beyond critique. Legal alignment with the National Command Authority Act is necessary. Clear delineation of roles among the chief of defence forces, the CNSC, the SPD and civilian leadership is essential. Joint education and interservice consultation must be strengthened.
But framing the reform as a destabilising rupture misreads both Pakistan’s nuclear history and the nature of institutional change. Pakistan’s deterrent has endured because it has been conservative, procedural and consensus-driven, not because it perfectly mirrored Western joint command models. Alarmism obscures that record rather than illuminating it.
The risk in this article is not that it raises questions, but that it answers them too quickly. By collapsing political critique into nuclear fear, it narrows analytical space and reinforces stereotypes about Pakistan as an inherently unstable nuclear actor.
A more credible assessment would recognise that institutional reform carries risk, but so does stagnation. Nuclear stability is not preserved by freezing structures in time; it is sustained by adaptation grounded in restraint, learning, and context.
Pakistan’s challenge is not that it has restructured command but rather whether it aligns law, doctrine and professional capacity with that structure. That question remains open and warrants analysis rather than alarm.
This article was first published in Politico Pakistan. The writer is dean of social sciences and director, Center for Security, Strategy & Policy Research at the University of Lahore.
