(Part 11)
America Has Embraced the Jinx of Pakistan
In geopolitics, a “jinx” forms when a system is so unstable that anyone who interacts with it gets damaged even without harm being intended. In Part 10 of the article it was argued that Pakistan’s geopolitical allies suffer in proportion to their intimacy with it.
Pakistan does not need to plan the destruction. It does not need to be malevolent. The damage flows automatically from proximity to a system whose instability is structural and self-reinforcing. Russia harms you intentionally. China competes deliberately. Pakistan harms you as a byproduct of its own internal disorder. The mechanism is contagion, not aggression.
Unfortunately, for people of USA, President Trump has embraced Pakistan in an unprecedented closeness. The reason is in its foreign policy formulated decades ago and articulated by Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger’s doctrine rested on one principle. States are instruments not partners. You use them for the objective then reshape them after. Nixon used Pakistan to open China in 1971. Pakistan helped facilitate that opening. Within months India dismembered Pakistan and Bangladesh was born. Pakistan was the instrument and simultaneously the price. Now the Pakistan is an ally in war against the Iran and it may pay the price of making greater Balochistan as per the map of Mackinder. In the meanwhile the Army Chief of Pakistan has been elevated to the same status as Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran.
Pakistan’s Ayatollah
Pakistan’s 27th Constitutional Amendment, passed in November 2025, grants Field Marshal Asim Munir significantly expanded powers, formalizing military dominance over civilian institutions. The amendment creates the new post of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), appointed by the Prime Minister but consolidating Munir’s control as Army Chief. He now commands the army, navy, air force, and nuclear forces, with authority over appointments, promotions, and operations. Thus, he replaces the Chairman Joint Chiefs role.
Munir retains Field Marshal rank and uniform for life, even post-retirement, with “responsibilities and duties” assigned by the President and PM. He gains presidential-level immunity from arrest and prosecution under Article 248, making removal nearly impossible without impeachment.
It is not very different from Ayatollah in Iran, at least in spirit. And this happened with the blessings of USA. The President of USA hosted Munir in white house on multiple occasions. The Prime Minister and CDF follow President Trump in every forum they are asked to attend.
Distinction Between Iran and Pakistan
Khamenei’s authority rests on a theological architecture built over centuries. Velayat-e-Faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, is a doctrine with deep roots in Shia jurisprudence. Even those who oppose Khamenei politically must engage with the theological framework he inhabits. His legitimacy, however contested, draws from a source outside the state itself.
Asim Munir has no such foundation. The Quran recitation is personal piety, not institutional authority. There is no Pakistani equivalent of Velayat-e-Faqih. There is no clerical hierarchy that has endorsed him. There is no theological doctrine that makes a Field Marshal the guardian of the nation’s soul. He is a soldier who has used constitutional amendments to acquire the structural position of an Ayatollah without possessing any of the legitimacy infrastructure that made the Iranian model internally coherent, however repressive.
Khamenei can survive political opposition because his authority transcends politics. Munir cannot. His power rests entirely on the amendment, the army’s internal loyalty, and American patronage. Remove any one of those three legs and the structure collapses. A man holding nuclear weapons with that kind of brittle legitimacy is a more unstable proposition than even Khamenei. His real recourse will always be raw violence.
Thus, the Pakistan has replicated the Iranian form without the Iranian substance. The result is already visible. While a few hundred were killed in Iran in the missile attack, 23 people lost their lives in Pakistan merely in protest over the strike.
Jinx
The USA poured billions into a military that was simultaneously harboring its enemies. Britain’s multicultural accommodation created parallel welfare-dependent communities. Britain got Pakistan’s people. USA got Pakistan’s geography. France and Germany got Pakistan’s contracts. China is still in the middle of finding out what it gets.
The jinx is not that bad luck rubs off. It is that engagement with a structurally broken system on its own terms makes you complicit in the breakage, and eventually the breakage reaches you. That is a falsifiable, mechanistic, non-supernatural jinx.
In that article it was argued that Pakistan exports its own epistemic dysfunction. Its founding requires denial of observable reality, the Two-Nation Theory versus the 1971 reality, the terrorism denial, the economic denial. Partners absorb that denial as a condition of engagement. USA has absorbed this epistemology or the lack of it.
In this article it was shown that intimacy with Pakistan predicts damage with remarkable consistency across six very different countries operating under very different political systems with very different strategic cultures.
Now the USA has created another Iran while declaring war on Iran. It is like digging a hole to fill another hole dug earlier.
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