By Aflatoon
Pakistan has a new position. It is called the Commander National Strategic Command. It was created by the 27th Constitutional Amendment, which also abolished the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, which was the previous position. The new Commander cannot be challenged before any court. He serves three years, renewable for three more. He is appointed by the Prime Minister on the recommendation of the Chief of Army Staff and the Chief of Defence Forces — who, as it happens, is the same person who is Chief of Army Staff, because Field Marshal Asim Munir holds both roles.
The new Commander is General Aamer Raza, previously the Chief of General Staff. He was, until today, one of Pakistan’s most senior army officers. Now he is something different. He holds a position that did not exist before 2025, commanding a structure that was not there before 2025, and doing so in a manner that no court can review.
I find myself wanting to know what, exactly, the National Strategic Command commands.
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The old Chairman JCSC was a joint position — nominally a coordinator between the three services, a buffer between the services and the civilian government, a chair for the committee that approved joint operations and, in the nuclear context, a participant in the deliberations of the National Command Authority. The CJCSC was not, in the formal legal sense, in the chain of nuclear command. But he was in the room.
The National Strategic Command is described as overseeing “strategic military operations across Pakistan’s defence forces.” This is language that could mean many things. It may mean nothing that was not already happening. Or it may mean that the nuclear stewardship structure — which in Pakistan has always been a matter of considerable discretion — has been restructured in a way that concentrates decision-making further upward, beyond any judicial review, at the moment when Pakistan is mediating between the United States and Iran over a conflict that has pushed oil above $100 a barrel and is one miscalculation away from involving Pakistan’s own interests directly.
I am not saying anything alarming is happening. I am saying I find the timing interesting.
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The constitutional and legal architecture around Pakistan’s nuclear programme has never been transparent. This is, to be fair, true of every nuclear-armed state. There is no democracy in the world that publishes the precise decision tree for who authorises a nuclear launch under what circumstances. The nuclear programme is, by design, a matter of controlled opacity.
But there is a difference between controlled opacity and the removal of judicial review.
When the 2025 legislation specified that the Commander National Strategic Command’s appointment “cannot be challenged before any court,” it was making a specific legal choice. Not a novel one — similar language appears around the extension of the military’s jurisdiction in other domains — but a choice nonetheless. The choice was: this position is beyond the reach of the courts.
At the same time, the position of Chief of Defence Forces — a new role also created in 2025, held by Field Marshal Asim Munir — is above the Commander NSC in the recommendation chain. One person recommends the appointment. One person holds the roles that frame that recommendation. The civilian Prime Minister approves it.
This is, on paper, a civilian appointment. PM Shehbaz signed it. But the architecture that produces the appointment is military all the way down.
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I want to be careful here. Pakistan’s civil-military relationship has never been what the constitution says it is. The formal document describes civilian supremacy. The operational reality has, for most of Pakistan’s history, involved a more complex arrangement. I am not describing something new. I am describing something being written into law that was previously unwritten.
What changes when the informal becomes formal? It becomes harder to change back. Informal arrangements can be renegotiated. Constitutional amendments require supermajorities. Legislation requires parliamentary will. When you write something into the 27th Amendment, you are doing something different from simply continuing an existing practice.
The Commander of Pakistan’s National Strategic Command now holds a constitutional position. It is insulated from judicial review. It was created during a period when Pakistan’s regional environment is the most volatile it has been since 1998, when Pakistan last tested a nuclear weapon and the world was briefly paying attention.
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General Aamer Raza is, by all accounts, a capable and distinguished officer. His career record — from the 6th Lancers to IV Corps to Chief of General Staff — is exactly what you would want in someone holding this position.
But the question is not whether the individual is capable. The question is what the position is, who it answers to, and what it has replaced.
The Chairman JCSC reported to the Prime Minister through a committee structure that included all three service chiefs. The Commander NSC is appointed on the recommendation of a single individual who holds two of the most powerful military positions in the country’s history simultaneously.
That is a structural change. It has been made constitutional. It cannot be challenged in court.
I do not know what the National Strategic Command commands.
I think we should be asking.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
