RAWALPINDI: For Pakistan’s first woman general, the journey to her three-star rank started off as an impossible dream in small town Swabi, a settlement in the conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the country’s northwest. With her army officer father, the girl who would be general traveled all over 1970’s Pakistan, living in big and small cities, and keeping her dream alive despite the odds.

But it is a dream, she says, that will not end with her as more and more women join the armed forces in recent years.

Back in the day, Lt. General Nigar Johar could only join the army as a doctor specializing in gynaecology. Today, she said, things were different with more women joining the army in different specializations and in different corps.

“Now we have women in so many areas in the army,” General Johar told Arab News.

“In education, in information technology, engineering, architecture. They are spreading and working everywhere.”

For her part, she has been a trailblazer in ensuring women in Pakistan get the right to join and lead within the military.

As a young officer, Johar’s dedication and professional excellence routinely captured the attention of her superiors who gave her positions of command and authority.

She landed her first real leadership role when she was asked to command an entire hospital as a brigadier, something she describes as the greatest challenge of her life.

“Since the formation of Pakistan, no woman was ever given command of any setup in the Pakistan army,” she said. “So I knew that I was there to make it or break it for the women who’d come after me.”

Not surprisingly, she made it. She believes her success with the hospital is the reason so many women got opportunities around her.

The road to her success began many years ago, when Johar would watch her father in his army uniform and idolize his every move as the family moved during military postings from place to place.

“I feel like I belong to the whole of Pakistan,” she said of her childhood. “All the provinces, the big cities and the small cities within.”

“My father was my ideal,” she said. “I had seen him in uniform from the beginning which influenced my decision to become a doctor and join the army.”

General Johar lost both her parents in a car accident in 1989, a few years after she graduated from army medical college. Subsequently, she became the only woman in the history of the powerful Pakistan Army to reach the rank of a three-star general and lead a corps.

Now, at the pinnacle of professional success, she says that even though she is often the only woman in the room, she doesn’t think others see her through a gendered lens.

“At this stage, you don’t look at things as male and female,” she said. “At this stage, you look at things as policies and improvements of the system.”

“When you have proved yourself to be in leadership at this highest level ... then people respect you for your work and what you have attained. They know you are here because you achieved... and because you earned this place.”