To fault General Pervez Musharraf for getting himself into a royal mess is to imply that he could have avoided it. That’s a poor understanding of the structural dynamics of the system currently in place in Pakistan. Consider.

Whatever the minutiae of a political system, and they vary from state to state, there is a common denominator in coups d’état: the military intervenes to make corrections in the system. That effort can range from a complete overhaul to major reconfiguration to chiselling the system’s supposed rough edges.

Be that as it may, all coups, including the well-intentioned, subvert the principal-agent framework. The coup-maker argues that he is temporarily violating the second order of agency (from the collection to the government machinery) to protect the first (from the individual to the collective). The argument is premised on the claim that the civilian leadership has violated the first order of agency and repairing that primary relationship demands that the secondary administrative relationship must be broken as well.

The subversion of the principle-agent framework is a structural problem that is a constant regardless of what theoretical design one might use to try and understand the nature of military interventions — whether in general terms or in specific cases.

It has consequences, the first being that by breaking the order of agency the coup also subverts the legal-normative framework so essential to the “art of associating” which underpins all social, political and economic activity. Being an external actor using its monopoly of the state’s coercive apparatus — even when the coups are bloodless, the gun is never far from one’s temple — the military thus undermines the constitutional arrangements.

... contd.