Last year’s military confrontation with India delighted us with something Pakistan rarely experiences: a unified national response. One voice and one direction from a collective will that held under pressure. We have the same reaction, at a smaller scale, during a cricket match against India. And then we watch as it dissolves.
A pressing question lies behind this pattern. It is one I have asked for ten years on my podcast and in private conversations. I have asked people from the corridors of power, the circles of military brass, the layers of our Establishment, and the captains of industry. I have asked four Prime Ministers, Generals, CEOs. I have asked them all the same thing, on the record and off it: how do we fix Pakistan?
Their answer is almost always the same. We know the problems. We often know the solutions. So why, after a decade of these conversations, does nothing change?
We only unite when there is an enemy
Pakistan’s capacity for collective action is not a myth.
It exists and activates reliably in the presence of an external threat. The question of whether this country can sustain collective purpose without an enemy has never been seriously answered.
Malaysia, Singapore, and China executed multi-decade transformations by treating development as an existential project rather than an electoral one. In each case, the long-term strategy was insulated from short-term political cycles. Leadership made a bet on the future and built institutions designed to outlast individual governments. Pakistan has not made that bet. Not credibly. Not yet.
Nobody talks about the issues
During the 2024 general elections, I interviewed PPP’s Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the then-caretaker premier Anwaarul Haq Kakar, Jamaat-e-Islami’s Sirajul Haq, and a long list of other senior politicians. I asked each of them the same question: if you come to power, how specifically are you going to change the situation?
Every answer was a variation of nothing. A manifesto document was used as a prop during the campaign and was never mentioned again. Slogans in place of substance. Not once did any of them say: here is the problem, here is my actual plan, and here is how you will know in three years whether I delivered.
What makes it worse is that few television channels or journalists hold them accountable afterwards. Nobody goes back and asks: you said this, what happened?
The same politicians, when out of power, give you the most precise and articulate solutions. They say exactly what needs to be done clearly and confidently. And then you remember they had their chance. They did not take it.
The same person. Two versions.
There is a version of Pakistani politicians that exists on television and then there is a version of them that exists in real life.
Members of rival political parties, who you watch battling it out on prime time television, appear to be in fundamental opposition but are often found together in the same Islamabad cafes in the evening. Laughing. Relaxed. Completely unbothered. The conflict, it turns out, is largely a performance.
But here is what makes my view of this picture more than cynicism. Sit across from many of these same politicians after the cameras are turned off, and the picture changes. Not always, but the ones in important positions are often sharp, educated at international universities, running successful businesses and fully aware of the problems. They are capable of giving you a surprisingly coherent analysis of exactly what needs to change.
That gap is what is truly unsettling. If this person can manage a private enterprise successfully and articulate precisely what the country needs, what is the obstacle? The answer is certainly not ignorance. It means one of three things: they do not want to fix it, because dysfunction is navigable if you know how; the system is architecturally broken and consumes capable people before they can act; or the cost of hard decisions exceeds what they are willing to pay.
Pakistan has run the technocrat experiment several times in its lifetime. Seasoned executives from international organisations, former officials of multilateral banks, professionals with genuine credentials, were brought in precisely because the supposition held that the hurdle was capability. The results have been consistent with this approach. These individuals either grew politicised within months, found the system structurally impenetrable, or left. The system did not change them. They were changed by the system.
Pakistan has never lacked capable people. It has always lacked a system willing to let them work.
The problem is also us
There is a tendency in these analyses to focus solely on Pakistan’s political elite and exempt the electorate from scrutiny. That exemption is not earned.
We are among the most polarised societies in the region, and increased access to digital media has not produced a more deliberative public. It has deepened fault lines. The political marketplace does not reward politicians who speak carefully about policy. It rewards those who speak to identity, grievance, and anger. This is not an accident. It is a direct reflection of what the electorate, in aggregate, demands.
A significant proportion of Pakistani voters has never received a formal education. It has not been taught to evaluate a political programme or interrogate a promise. In much of rural Pakistan, voting behaviour follows local patronage networks, not policy preference. Issue-based politics struggles to exist where the basic conditions for it have not been built.
The uncomfortable question this raises is one of sequence. Did the politicians shape this electorate, or did the electorate shape the politicians? My answer is both, simultaneously, over decades in a broken, self-reinforcing loop. The average Pakistani caught inside it does not need a theory of governance. They need food, shelter, safety, and a credible future for their children. The system’s persistent failure to deliver these basics is not a technocratic problem but a question of political will—and political will responds to incentives that are currently pointing entirely in the wrong direction.
But we built an atomic bomb…
Any serious treatment of this question must contend with the most powerful counterargument presented: Pakistan built a nuclear weapons programme.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, under international sanctions and sustained external pressure, with limited indigenous scientific infrastructure, Pakistan executed one of the most complex long-term state projects of any developing nation in that era. It required decades of consistent institutional purpose, sustained across multiple governments of different ideological orientations, insulated from ordinary political interference.
The capability has always existed. The nuclear programme demonstrated that Pakistan can build something genuinely difficult on a long-term horizon without stopping halfway. The question it leaves open is why that model has never been replicated for civilian institutions?
The answer is that the nuclear programme benefited from a consensus that cut across political competition. National security was treated as categorically separate from everything else. The challenge is whether Pakistan can construct a similar consensus around, for instance, the rule of law, basic administrative function, or primary education.
What if we applied the same model to something else? A body insulated from politics, given one mandate: fix the five structural problems that are killing this country. Digitisation. The police. Local governance. Education. Basic infrastructure. And one rule—no matter which government comes or goes, this body continues. Untouched and uninterrupted.
These are not ambitious targets. They are the minimum conditions for a functioning state. That they feel radical in Pakistan’s current political climate is itself the diagnosis.
The window is closing
As we grapple with Artificial Intelligence and accelerating digital transformation, the window for structural reform is narrowing faster than most policymakers appreciate. The nations that do not make foundational investments in the next decade will spend the following three decades in permanent catch-up. Pakistan is running out of the time it does not believe it is running out of.
The ambition required here is not grand. We do not need to become a superpower. We need a Pakistan where a poor woman can rely on the government. Where the police function. Where basic departments work. Where political and economic stability are not radical propositions. That is the entire ask. And somehow, in this country, it feels like asking for the moon.
Every election cycle that passes without a structural shift is not a neutral outcome. It is a compounding deficit in institutions, in public trust, and in whatever window of opportunity remains. The question I have been asking for ten years has not changed. Neither do I have the answers I keep receiving.
We know the diagnosis. We have always known it. The harder question, the one nobody in power seems willing to answer, is whether anyone is actually prepared to pay the cost of the cure.
Header art by Obair Khan
