The Copycat Republics: Iran, Pakistan, and the Military Theatre of Power
How military-clerical systems in Pakistan and Iran use religion, fear, exile, and national security to protect themselves from the awakening of their own people.
Authoritarian systems do not only govern. They perform. They build ceremonies around fear. They dress violence in uniforms. They hide corruption behind sacred language, national security, sacrifice, destiny, and emergency. They copy one another not because they are strong, but because they are spiritually empty. They have no living relationship with the people, so they borrow gestures from other frightened regimes. Parades. Missiles. flags. explosions. bodyguards. secret police. martial songs. controlled crowds. sacred slogans. sudden arrests. forced confessions. staged loyalty. luxury hidden behind the language of poverty. Men who speak of sacrifice while sacrificing everyone except themselves.
And this is what makes Pakistan’s recent appearance as a mediator between the United States and the Islamic Republic so morally absurd. What kind of mediator is a state whose own military establishment has spent decades protecting itself from civilian awakening? What kind of honest broker is a system that benefits from the survival of the very model it claims to be helping contain: a security state wrapped in religion, armed with national-security mythology, and terrified of its own people becoming politically adult? Pakistan may carry messages between powers, but it cannot be treated as neutral in the deeper civilisational question. A free Iran would not only threaten Tehran’s clerics. It would raise dangerous questions for Islamabad’s generals.
This is why the connection between Pakistan’s military order and the Islamic Republic in Iran deserves serious study. They are not the same country. They do not have the same history. They were not born from the same wound. Pakistan was created in 1947 after Partition, with Islam becoming central to its national identity, while Iran is an ancient civilisation whose memory reaches far beyond the arrival of Islam, beyond modern borders, beyond clerics and kings, into poetry, language, myth, gardens, fire, mourning, and philosophical imagination. Pakistan was born from separation. Iran was captured by a revolution that claimed to purify it. Pakistan’s military became one of the strongest institutions in a newly formed state that was still searching for unity. Iran’s Islamic Republic built a parallel military-religious state on top of an older civilisation, as if a clerical faction could replace the soul of a nation.
Yet the two systems recognise each other because both understand the same method of control. Pakistan’s military has repeatedly dominated civilian politics, most decisively through the long rule of General Ayub Khan from 1958 to 1969 and later through General Zia-ul-Haq, whose rule from 1977 to 1988 pushed Pakistan much deeper into state Islamisation. Zia’s period linked military power, religious legitimacy, and the political use of Islam in ways that still shape Pakistan’s institutions and society. His government promoted Islamisation through legal and administrative change, including the creation of Shariat-linked judicial structures and the wider use of religious ideology as a state instrument.
Iran’s Islamic Republic was formed differently, but it learned the same lesson: the ruler must not depend only on the ordinary army, because an ordinary army may still remember the nation. The Shah had SAVAK, but SAVAK was not enough to save monarchy from collapse. Khomeini understood that a modern authoritarian system needed more than police. It needed metaphysical architecture. It needed a sacred office. It needed a ruler who was not merely president, king, or general, but guardian. The doctrine of velayat-e faqih placed the jurist above ordinary democratic sovereignty, and the post-revolutionary state created the Revolutionary Guard as a parallel force outside the traditional army, loyal not simply to Iran, but to the revolution and the Supreme Leader. The Iranian constitution gives the Supreme Leader sweeping authority over the military, judiciary, state broadcasting, and the direction of the system itself.
This is the copycat logic of authoritarianism. The uniform is not enough, so they add theology. Theology is not enough, so they add secret police. Secret police are not enough, so they add parallel militias. Militias are not enough, so they add propaganda. Propaganda is not enough, so they cut the internet. They do not trust the people because they know the people have not truly chosen them. They do not trust history because history is larger than them. They do not trust poetry because poetry belongs to the inner life, and the inner life is the one territory no regime can fully occupy.
Pakistan’s military system and Iran’s clerical-military system also share another wound: both have watched talented people leave. Millions of Pakistanis have migrated or built lives abroad because corruption, instability, poverty, class hierarchy, sectarian tension, and lack of opportunity make return feel impossible for many. Iran has suffered its own brain drain, intensified by repression, sanctions, ideological policing, economic collapse, and despair. The authoritarian state does not fear the departure of the talented as much as it fears their return with awareness. A talented person abroad sends money, gains education, adapts, survives. But a talented person returning home with civic imagination becomes dangerous. They may ask why the country has resources but not justice. Why the military expands while schools collapse. Why generals become wealthy while children lack opportunity. Why clerics speak of God while imprisoning the conscience of the people.
The scale of departure should be made visible, not as cold numbers, but as a map of broken trust. Pakistan’s Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment says more than 10 million emigrants have been registered for overseas employment since 1971. This is not only migration; it is a national survival system. Remittances have become a pillar of Pakistan’s economy, with overseas workers sending back tens of billions of dollars each year. In Iran, the diaspora is harder to count because exile is layered: political refugees, students who never returned, workers, dissidents, women escaping restriction, families fleeing repression, and second-generation children of the revolution. Recent public estimates often range from several million to as high as 4–7 million Iranians abroad. But the emotional difference matters. Many Iranians in exile still speak of return as a wound, an unfinished sentence. Many Pakistanis abroad, especially those who left for work under poverty and corruption, often speak of return as impossible because the system gives them no confidence that talent will be respected at home.
This is where Pakistan and Iran become mirrors, not identical twins, but mirrors. Pakistan’s military establishment benefits from presenting itself as the permanent guardian of a fragile state. The Islamic Republic benefits from presenting itself as the permanent guardian of a sacred revolution. Both systems tell the people: without us, you will collapse. Without us, enemies will destroy you. Without us, religion will vanish. Without us, the nation will disintegrate. But this is the oldest language of abusive power. The abusive parent tells the child, “You cannot survive without me,” while quietly ensuring the child never learns freedom.
Pakistan’s poverty must not be treated as an accidental background to military power. It is part of the moral indictment. The World Bank has warned that Pakistan’s earlier poverty reduction has reversed under repeated shocks, weak structural reform, inflation, floods, and a fragile growth model. Its assessment projected poverty at about 25.3% by 2023–24, after earlier progress had stalled and reversed. This means that while military spectacle, nuclear pride, and national-security theatre continue to dominate the imagination of the state, roughly one in four people may be living below the national poverty line. Iran carries its own poverty wound. The World Bank’s April 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief projected Iran’s poverty rate to rise to 20% in 2025–26. A state that can display missiles, uniforms, sacred slogans, and national-security theatre while a quarter of Pakistanis and one fifth of Iranians live below national poverty lines is not proving strength; it is exposing a civilisation wound.
There is another moral contradiction that must be placed beside the parades and the poverty lines: the number of religious institutions compared with the number of people left without secure shelter. Iran Open Data has reported at least 54,770 mosques in Iran, more than fifty times the number of hospitals identified in the same comparison. In Pakistan, there is no single clean national count that can be used with full confidence, but one province alone, Punjab, has been reported to have more than 73,000 registered mosques, and broader national estimates often place Pakistan’s total far higher. Yet in the same moral landscape, Pakistan is reported by humanitarian organisations to have millions of people homeless or precariously housed, many living in temporary accommodation, refuges, slums, or on the street. Iran’s housing crisis has also produced visible and hidden homelessness, from street sleeping to families crowded into insecure shelter. The point is not to attack prayer, faith, or ordinary worshippers. The point is to ask what happens when clerical and military systems train the poor to endure earthly hardship by promising heavenly compensation, while money, buildings, authority, and emotional energy continue to flow into religious control, ideological expansion, and sectarian power. A society needs places of prayer, but it also needs roofs, hospitals, schools, dignity, clean water, and work. When religion becomes a machinery that consoles the poor without confronting the structures that keep them poor, heaven is no longer a spiritual promise; it becomes a political sedative.
In Pakistan, the inherited wounds of caste, class, colonial administration, feudal hierarchy, religious nationalism, and militarised politics did not disappear after Partition. They were rearranged. Pakistan may have separated from India, but separation did not automatically create social equality. Hierarchies survived under new flags. Meanwhile, Iran before Islam had its own inequalities and empires, and we must not romanticise any ancient civilisation as pure. But Iran’s cultural memory carried something different from the ruling ideology that later captured it: a civilisation of poetry, ethical kingship myths, Zoroastrian moral imagination, philosophical grief, reverence for language, and a long memory of women, gardens, fire, and renewal. The Islamic Republic did not simply govern Iran badly. It wounded Iran at the level of meaning. It forced an old civilisation to speak in the narrow vocabulary of clerical obedience.
That is why the Iranian wound is not only political. It is civilisational. When Khomeini claimed guardianship, he did not merely create a government. He created a structure in which one man and then one office could stand between the people and their own spiritual maturity. The idea of awaiting the Twelfth Imam, which in religious imagination could have remained a symbol of justice, humility, patience, and moral incompleteness, was transformed into a political instrument. As if recognising and preparing for hidden justice were a full-time bureaucratic job. As if a clerical state could appoint itself the guardian of divine absence while imprisoning every living possibility of justice arising from the people themselves. In this sense, the regime does not protect the possibility of the Mahdi. It suppresses it. It makes sure no moral awakening, no young woman, no poet, no student, no worker, no grieving mother, no unknown voice from the street can rise and say: the awaited justice was never yours to monopolise.
The Iran-Iraq war further complicated this wound. The Iranian army fought in defence of the country against Saddam Hussein’s invasion. Many ordinary soldiers served from national duty, not ideological fanaticism. They defended land, families, borders, and memory. But their sacrifice was captured by the Islamic Republic and folded into the mythology of the revolution. The regime learned to convert national defence into ideological ownership. Blood became propaganda. Martyrdom became administrative capital. The dead were used to silence the living.
Pakistan’s military establishment has used a different but related strategy. It presents itself as the defender of the nation against India, terrorism, instability, foreign pressure, and internal disorder. Some of those threats are real. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state in a dangerous region, with a complex border with Iran and Afghanistan, a long rivalry with India, and serious internal security pressures. But authoritarian systems always hide behind partially real dangers. They do not invent every threat. They inflate threats into permanent permission. They transform danger into inheritance. They say: because the border is dangerous, democracy must remain weak. Because enemies exist, accountability must wait. Because religion matters, dissent is betrayal. Because the state is fragile, the people must remain children.
This helps explain why Pakistan’s current mediation role between Iran and the United States is so politically significant. In recent months, Pakistan has been reported as a mediator or channel in indirect U.S.–Iran diplomacy, alongside others such as Qatar. Al Jazeera reported in May 2026 that Tehran and Washington were exchanging proposals through Pakistan while military escalation threatened the process. The Guardian also reported that indirect talks had involved Pakistan and Qatar. Iran’s later reported suspension of some indirect message exchanges with the United States, and conflicting claims about whether talks were continuing, show how unstable and strategic this mediation environment remains.
Pakistan may present itself as a stabilising mediator, and perhaps in narrow diplomatic terms it may help prevent wider war. But the deeper question is not only whether Pakistan can carry messages between Washington and Tehran. The deeper question is what kind of state benefits from preserving the Islamic Republic as a regional actor. Pakistan’s military establishment does not necessarily want the Iranian people to create a successful model of post-theocratic civic awakening next door. A free Iran, led by citizens rather than clerical-military networks, would not only change Iran. It would ask dangerous questions of the entire region. It would ask why Muslim-majority societies must choose between military guardianship, clerical control, corruption, exile, or chaos. It would ask why religion has been used to keep people obedient rather than morally awake. It would ask why talented young Pakistanis, Iranians, Afghans, Arabs, Kurds, and others must leave their homelands to breathe.
This is why corrupt systems often prefer migration to reform. Let the talented leave. Let the angry leave. Let the imaginative leave. Let the women who cannot breathe leave. Let the writers leave. Let the scientists leave. Let the youth leave. Let them become doctors in London, engineers in Toronto, nurses in Dublin, academics in Berlin, entrepreneurs in Dubai. Let them send remittances home. Let them build other countries. Let them carry private grief. But do not let them return as a civic force. Do not let them rebuild the homeland. Do not let them ask why the generals own the future and the children inherit only dust.
The Islamic Republic did this to Iran in another form. It pushed millions into exile, silence, prison, poverty, addiction, despair, and internal migration. It brutalised uprising after uprising. It killed resistance and then called the dead foreign agents. It fractured trust between neighbours, between families, between generations, between faith and conscience. It made the people afraid of speech. It made mothers afraid of their children’s courage. It made fathers afraid of the knock on the door. It made students afraid of their own brilliance. It made women’s hair into a battlefield because it could not bear women’s minds.
The greatest danger to both systems is not invasion. It is awareness. Not shallow social media anger, but disciplined awareness. Historical awareness. Civic awareness. Religious awareness. Psychological awareness. The moment people understand the pattern, the sacred theatre weakens. The ruler becomes visible as a man. The general becomes visible as an administrator of fear. The cleric becomes visible as a politician in religious clothing. The secret police become visible as frightened servants of a dying myth. The missile parade becomes theatre. The explosion becomes noise. The bodyguard becomes evidence of fear. The luxury becomes theft. The speech about sacrifice becomes confession.
Pakistan does not belong to its generals. Iran does not belong to its clerics. Islam does not belong to fanatics. National security does not belong to secret police. Martyrdom does not belong to propagandists. God does not need prisons. A civilisation does not need a supreme leader to have a soul.
The real confrontation is not between Iran and Pakistan, or Islam and the West, or East and West. The real confrontation is between living societies and dead power. Between people who want to build and systems that want to command. Between mothers who want their children alive and rulers who call children necessary sacrifice. Between poets and propagandists. Between memory and spectacle. Between the quiet dignity of a people and the loud machinery of men who cannot sleep unless someone is afraid of them.
This is the pattern we must study. This is the pattern we must name. And once it is named, it begins to lose its spell.
And perhaps this is the final imponderable: why would the world ask a militarised state that has not freed its own people from permanent guardianship to mediate the fate of another people trapped beneath clerical guardianship? Why ask one architecture of control to help negotiate another? The mediator is not outside the pattern. The mediator is part of the pattern.
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