Pakistani Army chief Syed Asim Munir, widely considered the most powerful person in his country’s government, is now at the peak of his career. This month’s fighting with India, which brought the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of a full-fledged war, burnished his reputation (not least because it ended with Washington offering to help resolve the Kashmir conflict, much to the irritation of policymakers in New Delhi).
Last week, Munir was promoted to the position of field marshal, making him the only active chief of army staff in Pakistan’s history to earn the rank. “I am deeply thankful to Allah Almighty for this honor,” Munir said in a statement.
The promotion culminates a turnaround in Munir’s public reputation. It’s not just that Munir was a cultural outsider to Pakistan’s military establishment, with his personal religiosity as a devout Muslim setting him apart from an army that has long been socially more moderate. Until recently, Munir was primarily identified by the Pakistani public with a spate of unpopular policies, like the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and a crackdown on workers of Khan’s political group, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which included trials for protesters in military courts rather than under the civilian judiciary.
The most recent fighting with India changed all that. In early May, as India struck territory deep inside Pakistan—in what it said was a retaliation against a Pakistan-sponsored terror attack in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir in which 26 people were killed—Munir’s fortunes revived overnight. An armed conflict with India is just what he needed, four Pakistani experts told Foreign Policy.
“All of a sudden, Munir has become the most popular, unifying figure in Pakistan,” said Raza Ahmad Rumi, a New York-based Pakistani author. According to a recent poll, the estimation of Pakistan’s army improved among 93 percent of respondents following the conflict. In contrast, the civilian government in Pakistan stood at 73 percent.
This marks a stark turnaround from when Munir was organizing the crackdown on Khan’s civilian government and its supporters. On May 9, 2023, as Khan was placed under arrest on corruption charges, massive protests erupted in Pakistan. Khan’s supporters alleged that Munir, as army chief, was settling a score that dated back to when Khan fired him as chief of the country’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in 2019. The protesters attacked military installations including the residence of a top military commander and raided the military headquarters in Rawalpindi.
“Without any doubt, the military is behind my arrest,” Khan said a week after the protests. “Pakistan is now being run by the army chief. The crackdown on us is by the army chief,” he said, in reference to Munir. “The military is above law; the ISI is above law,” he added. “They can pick up people, detain people, disappear people. They try and influence judges; they clamp down on the media. There’s no accountability for the institution.” It was among the only times that Pakistanis were publicly challenging the army’s hegemony.
For Munir it was a red line. He said there “can be no compromise” with the architects of the “black day.” Khan was sentenced to 14 years in prison and his supporters forced on the run. Meanwhile, Munir, the most powerful—even if disliked—man in the country, was then accused of purging Khan’s supporters, even those in the army. “A lot of retired personnel were openly rooting for Khan,” Rumi added in a phone conversation with FP.
Adil Raja, a retired major in the Pakistan Army and now a U.K.-based journalist, was among them. “The ISI raided my mother’s place in Rawalpindi. Later, my assets were frozen and my nationality was revoked, all at Asim Munir’s behest,” he told FP. “Why? I spoke against Munir and the military rule in Pakistan on my YouTube channel and supported Khan.” Raja claimed he had accessed an official list with names of Pakistani dissidents abroad that he said Munir was harassing.
“Everybody in the army is not on board with Asim Munir on how he dealt with Khan,” Raja added. “Secondly, he is an outsider, not blue blood, not like others who were born and raised in army families. He had a religious, fundamentalist upbringing, and now he is trying to fashion the army after his own ideology.” Unlike his predecessors, Munir is a product of Pakistan’s Officers Training School rather than the more prestigious Pakistan Military Academy. His father was a teacher, and he came from a religious family with humble means.
Munir is also different from his predecessors in more fundamental ways. After India hit inside Pakistan and the Pakistani government claimed it had struck five Indian fighter jets, some saw it as an off-ramp for Pakistan to claim victory in front of the domestic audience and avoid escalating the conflict. Munir, instead, was seen as trigger-happy.
“We expect a very aggressive response from this army chief,” a Pakistani TV journalist who has followed and reported on many army chiefs in the country told FP on the condition of anonymity, a day after India’s strikes. “He is very aggressive.” That assessment is consistent with that of Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, who has considered Munir too “volatile” to have his finger on the nuclear button.
While Munir worked closely with his immediate predecessor, Qamar Javed Bajwa, when it came to India the two men had different approaches. Bajwa prioritized economic stability for Pakistan and hence displayed restraint in conflict with India. In 2019, when India retaliated against an attack on its military convoy in Pulwama that was claimed by the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed group, Pakistan’s army responded but avoided an all-out escalation, even agreeing to return a captured Indian pilot as a gesture of goodwill.
“Munir’s military strategy is very different from Bajwa’s,” Rumi added. “Bajwa talked about geoeconomics and was keen to reopen dialogue and start trade with India. I have been told by senior officials within the foreign office that Bajwa actually asked them to find ways to restart trade and talks.”
From an Indian perspective, there is no such thing as a good Pakistani army chief, since all are believed to back anti-India groups and violence in Kashmir. But some are worse than others—and Munir is on that list. While New Delhi hasn’t yet managed to show any direct evidence that linked the attack in Pahalgam to Pakistan’s army, Indian analysts pointed to Munir’s speech a few days before the attack as an indicator.
While addressing Pakistanis overseas on April 16, Munir called Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein” and seemed to be reinforcing the promise of support to anti-India militant groups when he said “we will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their historical struggle.”
Shekhar Gupta, an Indian journalist, wrote that while the talk over Kashmir is “a compulsory subject in Pakistani curriculum,” an army chief “had not made such a loud commitment on Kashmir for years.” Gupta argued Munir was worried about economic progress in Kashmir, which he said was reflected in “the tourist numbers steadily rising to 2.95 million in 2024, and estimated to go well over 3.2 million in 2025.”
And when Munir told the gathering that Hindus and Muslims couldn’t be more different, he revealed the thinking that is at the crux of the India and Pakistan dispute over Kashmir. For Pakistan, Muslim-dominated Kashmir should be a part of Pakistan, but dividing the country and people based on religion is anathema to India’s secular constitution and damaging to the social fabric of a nation with people from different religions and languages.
“Our religions are different, our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different,” Munir told the gathering to illustrate why partition was necessary. However, his emphasis on differences between Hindus and Muslims was seen by Indian, and even some Pakistani, analysts as “dog whistling”—a message to the attackers who hit largely Hindu Indian tourists six days later in Pahalgam.
And yet others pointed out that perhaps more than the ideological religious divide, Munir may be driven by generational trauma inflicted by the partition or guided by a cultural ethos at a subconscious level that may not be as different from his Indian counterparts as he believes.
“Punjabi pride was hit when India struck terrorist infrastructure deep inside Punjab in Pakistan,” Rahul Bedi, an Indian defense journalist, told FP. There is a saying in military circles in the subcontinent that the intractable conflict between the two neighbors is essentially a battle between two Punjabi brothers—united by culture and divided by territory.
Munir was born in a family of Indian Muslims that migrated from Jalandhar in Indian Punjab to Pakistan during the partition; he was born in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 1968. “A large number of Punjabis in Pakistan are migrants from India, with memories of lands lost, estates vanished, lives uprooted, and haloed lifestyles recounted through misty mythologies of memory,” wrote Manvendra Singh, a politician in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and chairman of the Soldier Welfare Advisory Committee in the north Indian state of Rajasthan.
Munir, he said, is “clearly carrying plenty of baggage,” and hence the cease-fire agreed upon between Pakistan’s army and India may well be a “pause,” unless enforced politically. Khan is serving a long sentence in prison while Munir is on the rise.
Last week, as Khan appeared for a hearing in the jail courtroom, he took a jibe at Munir on his X account and posted, “It would have been better if, instead of field marshal, he had given himself the title of king.”