Political scientists have never provided particularly satisfactory explanations of the army’s domination of politics in Pakistan, because they have always regarded military rule as a distasteful exception to the much more attractive civilian norm. Their initial reaction to each coup — Ayub’s, Yahya’s, even Zia’s — was to hope that it was a temporary affair. The army only intervened in times of crisis, after the politicians failed to reconcile conflicting classes and regions; and it only intervened to pave the way for the reintroduction of civilian rule. Once order was restored, the soldiers ‘went back to barracks’. This device — stressing the ephemeral nature of military rule — fell foul of the generals’ longevity. Ayub and Zia clung to power for more than a decade, so their regimes had to be explained away. The 1962 constitution was one pretext. With its provisions for ‘guided democracy’ it turned Ayub into an ‘essentially civilian’ ruler. He wasn’t really a field marshal dependent on the backing of the army; he was the leader of a political party with a positive programme — a programme of modernisation. He co-opted all sorts of élites — bureaucratic, landowning, professional, business — and won a presidential election with their assistance. Zia was engaged in a similar ‘search for legitimation’ through ‘the articulation of powerful elements in Pakistan into the institutional structure’ when he fell out of the sky.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-11556-3_11
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