To be fair, they do have "a parliamentary democracy with elected MPs". It's just that those elected MPs have some fairly strict limits on what they are allowed

To be fair, they do have "a parliamentary democracy with elected MPs". It's just that those elected MPs have some fairly strict limits on what they are allowed to govern (anything that does not involve the military, which in Pakistan is not a lot). Of course it doesn't help that the elected MPs have almost exclusively belonged to the same class of robber barons, Imran Khan being one notable exception. Pakistan actually has a pretty vibrant and critical media, in contrast to (other) military dictatorships. They have a lot of great political satire (that, again, stops short of criticizing the military).