The war on terror and beyond : a critical assessment of Pakistan's political cost

Abstract

This thesis explores the political costs that Pakistan paid for being a part of the United States (U.S.)-led the War on Terror following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Pakistan's involvement in the campaign was not a strategic choice that the state voluntarily made, but a forced decision imposed through direct external coercion, taken without parliamentary authorization, and in opposition to public sentiment. It is the asymmetry in this decision-making context, a situation in which decisions about strategy were made by a military elite and the costs thereof internalized by the citizenry and the civilian institutions. Furthermore, this research is using a rational choice model to calculate the cost analysis. The qualitative methodology is used, based on the secondary analysis of peer-reviewed academic works, official documents of the government and parliament of Pakistan, and legitimate sources of policy analyses. The findings suggest that the political costs borne by the state have exhibited structural, compounding and institutionally anchored patterns over the course of time. Although, the notion of political cost is defined operationally and empirically in different distinct but intertwined dimensions of political costs: electoral legitimacy and ideological polarization; civil-military dynamics, internal security, and social fragmentation; and securitized governance, state autonomy, and strategic dependence. In this study, the term "War on Terror and Beyond" is employed as an analytical designation to extend the conventional periodization of the War on Terror as it defined in academic literature as spanning from 2001 to 2021 and through to 2025, thereby capturing the full scope of political costs borne by Pakistan beyond the conflict's formal conclusion. Although, This article makes two contributions: it provides an empirical analysis of Pakistan's War on Terror experience by offering an empirically rich case of externally coerced counterterrorism alignment and it developing the Political Cost theory by extending the Rational Choice Theory, through a formally rigorous model of political cost distribution in coerced alignment regimes.