Pakistan Army

The Pakistan Army is depicted as the coercive center of Pakistan’s military government and as the institution that gains power from conflicts its leaders help create. In Lin’s account, generals exploit ethnic and religious grievances, arm rival extremists, and then deploy the army as the apparent guarantor of order. The result is a political cycle in which violence weakens communities while making the military seem indispensable—and strengthens its hold over the country.

Rule through engineered conflict

During Lin’s stay in Karachi, Pakistan is ruled by a military junta that seized power and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The generals maintain control by dividing the population, intensifying genuine grievances between ethnic and religious communities rather than resolving them. Rival groups include Sindis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis, as well as Mohajirs who migrated to Pakistan after Partition from India. The military secretly supplies extremists among competing groups with weapons, money, and carefully targeted favors.

The account presents the ensuing unrest as a managed sequence, not simply a breakdown of authority. Once riots erupt, the generals order police to open fire; public anger at the shootings is then contained by sending in army troops. The force that helped produce the violence can thus appear to be the force capable of restoring order and law. Each stage converts coercion into a claim of necessity, while concealing the military’s role in setting the conflict in motion.

Repression and the consolidation of power

The conflict spreads beyond riots. Massacres and retaliatory killings follow one another; kidnappings and torture become routine, and people seized by rival groups may die in captivity or disappear without their bodies being found. When one faction grows powerful enough to disturb the balance, the generals encourage violence within that same community. Extremists turn on their own, killing and maiming rivals. The strategy keeps opposition divided and makes the violence self-renewing.

Lin’s account identifies the political consequence as a steady concentration of power: whatever form of government appears or collapses, the army grows stronger and remains the only institution able to exercise real authority. Its power is therefore not shown merely through direct force. It also rests on the way engineered disorder narrows the alternatives available to the public, making military intervention seem like the sole route back to stability.

Karachi’s military economy

The same instability that makes Karachi dangerous also makes it a profitable place for arms trading and illicit business. Generals who have taken the country by force loot the treasury while assuring major powers and arms-producing nations that Pakistan’s armed forces are open to business. Arms-dealing parties arrive from the United States, Britain, China, Sweden, and Italy, among other countries. Black marketeers, gunrunners, freebooters, and mercenaries also gather in the city’s cafés and hotels, with crime and adventure drawing foreigners from dozens of countries.

The juxtaposition implicates international commerce in the domestic order the generals maintain. Karachi is not only a setting of political violence but a marketplace where official military power and unofficial profiteering converge. Lin recognizes himself among those who profit from the war in Afghanistan, yet finds the calculations of fellow foreigners dispiriting: they speculate about how many profitable years the war may have left and hope that the army will remain in control, preserving established channels of corruption. The army’s political dominance and the city’s commercial opportunities are presented as mutually reinforcing.

Afghanistan and the costs of power

In a discussion of the war in Afghanistan, Ahmed Zadeh describes Pakistan’s ambition as territorial: the country, he says, wants to combine the two nations into a greater state. He also links the Pakistani generals to American support and says fighters are being trained in religious schools, or madrassahs, across Pakistan. These fighters, called Talebs, are expected to enter Afghanistan after the existing war is won; he expresses uncertainty about what conflict may follow. The account therefore connects Pakistan’s military government not only to domestic factional violence but to the preparation of forces for a contested future beyond its borders.

The portrayal is not a neutral institutional history: it comes through Lin’s narrated encounters and conversations, including Ahmed Zadeh’s explanation of regional aims. Its critical force lies in the recurring separation between public justification and political outcome. The generals present themselves as the answer to disorder, while the narrative shows their power expanding through division, repression, and war. Against that machinery, the novel’s reflections on war emphasize how causes and principles can be submerged by survival, until the human stakes are reduced to protecting land and loved ones. The Pakistan Army’s significance in this portrait is thus not simply that it commands force, but that it turns conflict into a means of maintaining authority and enabling profit.