The contours of Pakistan's "bureaucratic-authoritarian" state emerged soon after independence in 1947, as the challenges of nation building threatened to overwhelm the modest resources of the newly created country. Almost overnight, enormous social dislocations arising from partition, pressing defense requirements, and the need to assert authority over newly acquired and disparate territories confronted the state machinery with demands it could not meet.Partition had yielded Pakistan 18 percent of the population, 17.5 percent of the financial assets, less than 10 percent of the industrial base, and slightly over 7 percent of the employment facilities of an undivided India. Organizational machinery was inadequate - particularly in the regions the regime acquired - and the largely migrant political leadership had little direct contact or rapport with the indigenous population of the lands it inherited.The pressing need to consolidate territory and defend the nation prompted a rapid expansion of administrative machinery and wholesale adoption of the colonial British "vice regal" system of administration and resource management. This system had been long geared to maintaining law, order, and the collection of revenues on behalf of the British Empire. It included a professional civil service with a deep knowledge of local conditions as well as great access to and influence over provincial populations. It was an effective tool - and one readily available to the new Pakistani regime - for augmenting state revenues and financing burgeoning defense budgets.Military influence within the society expanded apace. The outbreak of war with India over the northern princely state of Kashmir only months after independence, lingering doubts over provincial loyalties to the newly formed state, and the internal dislocations and communal conflicts that attended independence all gave the military a critical role in the creation and maintenance of the state. D...
