ABSTRACT
The presence of the military in the development sector is not new. The discourse on the subject though has shifted positions over the years depending on the global political scenario. This chapter establishes how the Pakistan military has internalised its non-defence role and how it manoeuvres this to its own advantage. The chapter begins with academia’s position on the role of the military as an instrument of ‘development’ in the general sense. This provides a brief contextual background. The next step is to contextualise the Pakistan’s military’s developmental role. The first coup in Pakistan coincided with the Cold War when militaries were favoured as engines of modernisation. Military regimes in developing countries were supported by transnational aid agencies. Pakistan too was a beneficiary of such aid, and the imposition of martial law by General Ayub was called the ‘decade of development’. Over the years, the post-Cold War narrative on the world stage has shifted in favour of participatory democracy. The Pakistan military, however, has successfully retained its status as a development actor. This chapter traces the evidence in the existing literature on how the military manoeuvred its presence in the development sector to emerge as the only possible candidate for public service delivery.
