Migrant remittances indirectly sustain Pakistan’s opaque military-business economy

Evidence

Moreover, the dominance of the military in Pakistan has created an unusual class structure in which civilian wealth is bu√ered by a military class. Capital is absorbed into an invisible economy in Pakistan that creates independent wealth for members of the military, especially after they have returned to civilian life (Siddiqa 2007). So-called milbus (military business) not only channels resources toward the military class; it also obscures how those resources are concealed in the corporate sector. Military capitalism is self-contained and is not transparent. It provides privileged access to assets for a select group of beneficiaries who dominate the marketplace and, in turn, perpetuate the need for a military-industrial economy. Within this system, even remittances from transnational workers, spent in the artificially inflated domestic real-estate and consumer-goods markets, guarantee the capital growth that keeps milbus functioning and dominant in state and domestic a√airs. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 513

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on how institutions channel capital; milbus is a concrete case of a self-contained extractive elite parallel to cartel structures in the diamond trade.