Jilani was a junior officer in the Indian Army and served with distinction in the Second World War, then with the independence of 1947 opted for Pakistan and took a leave of absence to join the fighting in Kashmir as an irregular.

During 1971 he was with the Pakistani forces fighting Bangladeshi independence which suffered painful defeats at the hands of the Indian Army.

[3] In February 1979, he led a Military Goodwill Delegation to the People's Republic of China, where he had discussions with Chairman Hua Guofeng and Vice Premier Li Xiannian.

[11][12] Jilani remained at the Ministry of Defence until 1 May 1980, when he was appointed to succeed General Sawar Khan as Governor of the Punjab Province,[3] a powerful post which he retained until the end of the Military administration in December 1985.

Among these was Nawaz Sharif, an industrialist to whom Jilani gave his first political appointment, as Finance Minister in the Punjab provincial government.

[15] When the Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang visited Pakistan for talks in June 1981 it was Jillani who greeted him at Lahore airport.

[16] On 31 July 1981 an express train from Karachi to Peshawar crashed near Bahawalpur with more than thirty dead, and Jilani announced the same day that he suspected sabotage.

[18] In January 1984, as Governor of the Punjab, Jilani was concerned by intelligence that refugees from Afghanistan were buying land in Pakistan and gave instructions to his district administrators to prevent such sales.

[20] Jillani occasionally wrote on military subjects, and on 5 June 1999, not long before his death, the newspaper Pakistan published an article under his name which analysed the conflict in Kashmir in terms of the region's strategic roads.

Ghulam Jilani Khan is honoured every year at the Chand Bagh School's Founder's Day celebrations.

At the ninth such occasion, on 26 February 2011, the main speaker was Yousaf Raza Gillani, Prime Minister of Pakistan, who said I salute the vision of the School's founder late General Ghulam Jilani Khan, which created opportunities for the deserving students of the less privileged sections to acquire quality education in the school like Chand Bagh.