Rawalpindi
Pakistan's real power centre: the Army GHQ sits in Rawalpindi while the civilian capital operates next door in Islamabad — twin cities functioning as a colonial siphonophore.
Pakistan's army headquarters sits not in the capital but in the city next door — and that geographic separation tells you everything about how power actually works in the country. Rawalpindi, known colloquially as Pindi, is Pakistan's fourth-most populous city with over 2 million residents, physically adjacent to Islamabad and jointly forming a metropolitan area of 5.7 million. When Pakistan needed a capital after independence in 1947, General Frank Messervy established the Army's General Headquarters at Rawalpindi because the British Indian Army's Northern Command was already there.
When a new purpose-built capital was constructed at Islamabad beginning in the 1960s, the civilian government moved; the army stayed. The GHQ, the Joint Staff Headquarters, and Nur Khan Airbase remain in Rawalpindi. The result is a twin-city system where civilian governance occupies one city and military power occupies the adjacent one — formally separate, functionally inseparable, with a large proportion of Rawalpindi's workforce commuting to Islamabad and Islamabad's Large Tax Unit collecting 20% of all federal revenue.
Since 2017, the Pakistan Army has been slowly relocating to Islamabad to integrate with the other services, but the process reveals how institutional inertia operates: seven decades of embedded infrastructure, officer housing, cantonment economies, and supply chain logistics resist relocation far more powerfully than any policy directive commands it. Rawalpindi's economy is service-based and interlinked with Islamabad's, functioning as the older, grittier half of a dyad where one city provides the legitimacy of democratic governance and the other provides the actual centre of gravity. The biological parallel is the Portuguese man-of-war: not a single organism but a colonial siphonophore — four separate organisms fused into a functional whole where each component performs a distinct role.
Rawalpindi (military function) and Islamabad (civilian function) are separate organisms that present as one entity, with the component that appears subordinate often directing movement.