Pakistan at Eighty: The State That Became Its Own Security Dilemma

Praetorianism, Strategic Dependency, and the Unfinished Promise of 1947

On the occasion of Pakistan’s eightieth year of independence · 14 August 2026

Dr. Maheep

A state may possess nuclear weapons, command armies, cultivate great powers, and still fail the most elementary test of sovereignty: educating its children, employing its youth, and protecting its citizens. When the state is secure but its people are not, sovereignty has become an instrument of the state rather than a guarantee of the nation.

— A recurring conclusion of critical scholarship on Pakistan

The view from the eightieth year

Consider a girl in a resettlement colony on the edge of Quetta in the summer of 2026. Her family survived the floods that swept through Balochistan, was verified as eligible for a resilient home under a multi-billion-rupee reconstruction programme, signed the undertakings, and then watched the promised financing evaporate. The World Bank recorded the arithmetic with unusual bluntness: housing support capped at 62,966 first-tranche beneficiaries, leaving 119,049 verified and eligible households without identified financing, the money redirected towards roads and irrigation, the reputational damage noted, the poverty deepened. She lives in the richest province of a nuclear-armed state, above copper and gold and gas, and she does not have a roof. Her country, at the national level, has watched its poverty headcount climb from 18.3 per cent to 25.3 per cent of the population in the space of two years, and by the World Bank’s higher poverty line a far larger share of Pakistanis subsist below the threshold of a decent life. This is the ground truth against which the eightieth anniversary must be read.^1,2

Now widen the frame. The state to which this girl belongs possesses nuclear weapons and a professional military of considerable competence. It commands one of the most consequential geographies on earth: an Arabian Sea coastline, a warm-water gateway coveted by great powers, land borders with China, India, Iran and Afghanistan, and a hinge position between South Asia, Central Asia and the Gulf. It holds vast mineral wealth, a youthful population of the kind demographers once called a dividend, and eight decades of diplomatic relevance during which Washington, Beijing, Riyadh, Ankara and Tehran have each, in turn, found it useful. By any conventional ledger of assets, this should be a country of rising fortunes. It is instead a country in its twenty-fourth engagement with the International Monetary Fund, ranked first in the world on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, and governed under a constitutional settlement that has just written military primacy into its founding text.^3,4,5

The Pakistan confronting its eightieth anniversary is not an accidental accumulation of contemporary crises. It is the historical outcome of institutional choices made, reproduced, and defended across generations.

That sentence is the argument of this essay, and everything that follows is an attempt to prove it: historically, institutionally, economically, diplomatically, sociologically and strategically. The claim is deliberately precise. Pakistan’s predicament is a story of assets converted into liabilities by design rather than by accident. Strategic opportunity became structural vulnerability. External relevance became external dependence. National security became internal insecurity. Resource abundance became extraction. Geopolitical connectivity became coercive connectivity. Formal sovereignty became constrained strategic autonomy. Each conversion served a domestic purpose, preserved a domestic order, and enriched a domestic elite. The citizen paid. To understand why, one must begin not with the wound but with the founding.

1947: The Promise, the Paradox, and the Path Dependency

Pakistan was born into insecurity, and this is where sympathy must begin, because a fair diagnosis is a rigorous one. The state of 1947 inherited a truncated bureaucracy, a divided army, a treasury it had to fight to receive, a demographic catastrophe of Partition that killed perhaps a million people and displaced many millions more, and a founder in Muhammad Ali Jinnah who would be dead within thirteen months. It inherited two wings separated by a thousand miles of hostile territory, no agreed constitution, and an unresolved war over Kashmir before its first winter. A young state facing these conditions would reasonably prioritise survival. The security dilemma was real, and no honest account denies it.

The analytically decisive question is different, and it is the hinge on which this entire essay turns. At what point did insecurity cease to be merely a condition confronting Pakistan and become an organising principle of the Pakistani state? A condition is something a state responds to. A principle is something a state is built around. Pakistan did not simply inherit insecurity in 1947. Over the following decades it institutionalised insecurity, converting a temporary emergency into a permanent architecture, and the institutions that grew up inside that architecture acquired an interest in its persistence.

The mechanism is best understood through path dependence. Early choices, made under duress, created institutions. Those institutions developed constituencies, budgets, doctrines and self-justifications. Each subsequent decision was then made not on a blank slate but within a landscape already sloped by the last. The Objectives Resolution of 1949 fused religious identity to constitutional identity and narrowed the space for a purely civic nationalism. The early ascendancy of the bureaucratic and military establishment over a fractured political class set a template of unelected tutelage over elected weakness. The first Kashmir war validated the centrality of the army to the national project. None of these was foreordained by geography. Each was a choice, and each raised the cost of choosing differently next time. By the time the first constitution was promulgated in 1956, only to be abrogated in 1958, the slope was already steep. Pakistan did not inherit its security state. It built one, defended it, and then mistook it for the nation.

The Security Dilemma That Became a State Form

Trace the loop that has run through Pakistani history like a groove worn into stone. External threat perception justifies military centrality. Military centrality confers institutional autonomy. Institutional autonomy funds security-sector expansion. Security-sector expansion crowds out civilian capacity. Civilian weakness invites political intervention. Political intervention normalises security-first budgeting. Security-first budgeting imposes opportunity costs on human development. Underdevelopment breeds grievance. Grievance breeds instability. Instability confirms the original threat perception, and the loop closes, tighter each time.

This is the point at which realism and its neoclassical variant explain a great deal, provided they are used as instruments rather than displayed as ornaments. A structural account tells us that a state facing a larger, hostile neighbour will balance internally through arms and externally through alliances. Pakistan did both. But structural realism alone cannot explain why the balancing effort consumed the balancer from within, why the pursuit of security produced a state that was strong against its neighbours and weak before its own society. For that, one needs strategic culture: the durable, identity-laden worldview of the institution that came to dominate the state. The Pakistan Army, in the reading advanced most rigorously by C. Christine Fair, does not treat the contest with India as a problem to be solved but as a purpose to be sustained. An institution defined by a permanent adversary does not seek victory, because victory would dissolve its reason for primacy. It seeks the perpetuation of the contest at a manageable intensity. This is why demonstrable failures, from 1971 to Kargil to the Afghan reversal, have not revised the doctrine. The doctrine is not a hypothesis about the world. It is an identity, and identities are resistant to evidence.¹²

The theoretical machinery should remain beneath the surface, and so it will here. What matters is the observable result. A poor country chose, repeatedly and across regimes of every stripe, to fund control over its periphery and balancing against its neighbour ahead of the education, health and productive employment of its citizens. Interest expenditure alone consumed trillions of rupees in a single fiscal year while schools, clinics and nutrition programmes were treated as negotiable. That ordering of priorities is the security state’s signature, and it is a choice, renewed annually, not a fate.

The Praetorian State and the Failure of Civilian Supremacy

The visible history is a rhythm of uniforms: Ayub Khan’s decade, Yahya Khan’s catastrophe, Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamised autocracy, Pervez Musharraf’s managed liberalisation, and then the subtler arrangement that scholars call hybrid rule, in which elections occur but outcomes are shaped, and civilians govern but do not command. To describe this as an army that interferes in politics is to mistake the symptom for the disease. The deeper reality is an army that has captured the commanding heights of the state and the economy, and has learned that it no longer needs to seize the presidency to rule the republic.⁷

The decisive contemporary evidence arrived in late 2025. Through the Twenty-Seventh Constitutional Amendment, signed into law by President Asif Ali Zardari on 13 November 2025 after a swift passage through both houses of parliament that the opposition boycotted, Pakistan created the post of Chief of Defence Forces, conferred it upon Field Marshal Asim Munir alongside his existing command as army chief, granted the office authority over the National Strategic Command and therefore the nuclear chain, preserved the rank of Field Marshal as a lifetime dignity, granted lifetime immunity, and curtailed the powers of the Supreme Court through a new Federal Constitutional Court. What generations of generals achieved through coups, this settlement achieved through legislation. Military primacy is no longer an interruption of the constitutional order. It has become the constitutional order.⁶

This is why the central question of Pakistani politics is not why the army intervenes but a sharper one. Why has Pakistan repeatedly produced civilian governments without ever consistently producing civilian supremacy? The answer lies in a self-reinforcing architecture: constitutional engineering that entrenches the establishment, intelligence agencies that manage the political field, judicial dynamics that ratify the outcome, economic conglomerates that give the military an independent revenue base, media influence that sets the boundaries of the sayable, and a fragmented civilian class whose leaders have too often preferred the establishment’s patronage to one another’s partnership. Each civilian actor, seeking short-term advantage, has strengthened the very structure that keeps all civilians subordinate. Democracy in Pakistan has not merely been weak. It has been engineered into a managed hybrid, and the engineering has now been notarised in the constitution itself.

The Security State and the Citizen

Set two words against each other, because the distance between them is the distance between the Pakistani state’s self-image and its citizens’ experience. National security. Human security. The first asks whether the state can defend its borders and deter its enemies. The second asks whether a human being can live free of fear and free of want: whether she can eat, learn, work, seek a doctor, speak, and sleep without dread of the knock at the door. A state can succeed spectacularly at the first while failing comprehensively at the second, and Pakistan is the standing demonstration of that possibility.

The United Nations framework of human security is the useful starting point, but the Pakistani case requires a sharper instrument, which is the distinction between citizen security and regime security. The security state has progressively conflated three things that ought to be kept separate: state survival, regime survival, and national survival. When these collapse into one another, a threat to the ruling arrangement is presented as a threat to the nation, dissent becomes sedition, the demand for accountability becomes a security problem, and the machinery built to defend the country against external enemies is turned inward against citizens who ask uncomfortable questions. The mother in Kech marching for a disappeared son is treated not as a citizen exercising a right but as a node in an enemy network. That is the tell. When a state’s security apparatus experiences its own people as the threat, it has ceased to secure the nation and begun to secure itself.

A state can win every argument about national security and still lose the trust of the citizen it claims to protect. Pakistan has done exactly this.

India and the Construction of Permanent Insecurity

No account of Pakistan’s strategic culture is honest if it denies the reality of the rivalry with India, and none is rigorous if it stops there. The wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971, the frozen confrontation at Siachen, the misadventure at Kargil, the unresolved dispute over Kashmir, and the mutual acquisition of nuclear weapons are facts, and Pakistani anxieties about a larger neighbour are not manufactured out of nothing. A responsible analysis grants the legitimacy of security concern before it examines what was done with that concern.

What was done with it was construction. Over decades, India ceased to be one policy problem among many and became the constitutive Other of Pakistani identity, the fixed point against which the nation and its guardian institution defined themselves. This is where constructivism and securitisation theory earn their place. Threats are not simply given by the material world; they are spoken into political centrality by actors who benefit from their centrality. When an external adversary becomes the organising principle of national identity, national security stops being a policy instrument and becomes an institutional identity, and an institutional identity generates its own demand. Ask the political-economy questions and the picture sharpens. Who benefits institutionally from permanent Indo-Pakistani rivalry? Whose budgets expand? Which institution acquires unquestionable legitimacy? Which domestic failures vanish behind the language of the eastern threat?

The argument here is careful, and the care is the point. India did not cause Pakistan’s institutional failures. Pakistan’s elites did. But the India-Pakistan rivalry became embedded within an institutional structure that consistently rewarded securitisation, that converted every domestic embarrassment into an external emergency, and that made the manufacture of threat a profitable enterprise for those who manufactured it. There is a tragedy folded inside this, and it deserves to be named plainly. India today is the friendly possibility that Pakistani strategic culture cannot permit itself to imagine. Indian software engineers, scientists, educators and entrepreneurs have carried a certain idea of South Asian capability across the world. Ordinary Pakistanis, in their affection for Indian cinema, music and cricket, quietly acknowledge a kinship that their state forbids as policy. Two peoples who might have been each other’s largest markets, closest cultural partners and natural collaborators in science and commerce have been held apart by a trust deficit that serves institutions rather than citizens. The wall is not built of civilisational difference. It is built of interests that require the wall.

1971: The Historical Warning Pakistan Could Not Afford to Forget

Everything the security state refuses to learn, the year 1971 already taught. In its eastern wing, Pakistan held a majority of its own population, a Bengali people with their own language, culture and rising political consciousness. That majority was governed as a periphery: economically drained by the western wing, under-represented in the army and bureaucracy, and told that its language and identity were secondary to an ideology defined elsewhere. When the Awami League won a national majority in the 1970 election, the establishment refused to transfer power. What followed was Operation Searchlight, mass violence of a scale that constitutes one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century in South Asia, a vast refugee flow into India, Indian intervention, and the birth of Bangladesh. A state that had claimed to be the homeland of a religious community discovered that shared religion could not hold together a polity that denied its majority political dignity.⁸

The lesson of 1971 is a single sentence, and it is the most expensive sentence in Pakistan’s history: territorial sovereignty cannot permanently compensate for political exclusion. A state may hold a territory by force and still lose it, because loyalty is not a natural resource to be extracted but a relationship to be earned. Here is the difficult question that the eightieth anniversary forces. Did Pakistan learn the military lesson of 1971 while failing to internalise its political lesson? The evidence suggests it learned to fight secession more effectively and never learned to prevent it, that it studied the tactics of the tragedy and ignored its cause.

One must reason with care here, because false equivalence is intellectually cheap and analytically useless. Balochistan is not East Pakistan; the former tribal agencies are not Bengal; the demographics, the histories and the international contexts differ. The claim is not equivalence but recurrence of a structural pattern: a centre that treats a periphery as a resource and a security problem rather than as a constituency of citizens, that answers political demands with coercion, and that mistakes the suppression of symptoms for the resolution of causes. The pattern that dismembered the state in 1971 has been reproduced, with variations, in the territories that follow.

Balochistan: Extraction, Exclusion, and Contested Sovereignty

Balochistan is where the political economy of the Pakistani state stands most nakedly exposed. The province is the largest by land, the richest in resources and the poorest in outcomes, a combination that theory names precisely. Beneath its soil lie the Sui gas that fired Pakistan’s industrialisation from the early 1950s, the copper and gold of Reko Diq, and the deep-water promise of Gwadar. Above that soil live communities that campaigned for decades to receive the gas extracted from beneath their own homes, that watched a port rise on their coast without delivering the employment they were promised, and that record a poverty rate approaching seventy per cent in the richest ground in the country.

The analytic is a triangle: extraction, exclusion, escalation. Resource wealth flows to the centre. Political and economic inclusion does not flow back. Grievance accumulates, and where grievance is met with coercion rather than representation, it hardens into insurgency, which invites further coercion, which deepens grievance. Resource-curse theory, rentier logic, the concept of internal colonialism and the sociology of relative deprivation all converge on the same diagnosis: extractive institutions that transfer wealth outward while transferring insecurity inward do not buy stability. They finance their own contestation.

The contemporary record is stark and documented. The redirection of World Bank flood-housing funds in 2026 left 119,049 verified and eligible households, some eighty-four per cent of them classified as ultra-poor, without identified financing for the homes they had been promised, the money moved towards roads and irrigation, the World Bank’s own country director warning that the decision would deepen poverty, heighten disaster risk and erode trust. Human-rights organisations and Pakistan’s own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances continue to record cases on a persistent cadence, a machinery of raids and incommunicado detention that the Baloch movement has marched against for years. In June 2026, the physician and activist Mahrang Baloch, who had led women in a long march against these very disappearances, was herself sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court in Quetta, a verdict that United Nations experts called a travesty of justice. When the state answers a doctor who counts the missing by adding her to the count, it has confessed the nature of its problem.^9,10

Intellectual honesty requires a second edge to the knife. The armed groups that claim to fight for the Baloch have themselves killed, targeted labourers and civilians, and offered no plausible route to the dignity they invoke. Romanticising insurgency is as much an evasion as excusing repression. The moral and analytical centre of this section is neither the state’s uniform nor the militant’s gun but the civilian caught between them: the student who disappears, the labourer killed on a road, the mother who marches, the girl without a roof. A politics that begins from her security, rather than from the state’s control or the insurgent’s cause, is the only politics that can end the cycle. That the Pakistani state has chosen force over inclusion for half a century, and calls the result stability, is the measure of its failure in Balochistan.

Pakistan-Administered Jammu and Kashmir: The Politics of Dependent Sovereignty

In the territory Islamabad styles as Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the word azad, meaning free, has become an unintended irony that the region’s own residents have voiced in the streets. The protest movements that have swept these areas have not been about grand questions of accession. They have been about electricity tariffs in a region that generates hydropower for others, about the price of flour, about taxation, about political representation, about the reach of Islamabad’s authority into local life. The grievance is quotidian and therefore revealing: it is the grievance of a people who supply a resource and pay a premium, who carry a name that promises freedom and live a reality of dependence.

The honest question is this. What does political freedom mean when a territory remains structurally dependent on a larger state for its economic lifelines, its security decisions and its political ceiling? This is an inquiry into sovereignty, representation and agency, not a territorial slogan, and it must be kept distinct from India’s constitutional arrangements in Jammu and Kashmir, which are a separate matter of a different legal order. The point that belongs to this essay is internal to Pakistan’s own governance: a periphery administered as a dependency, its economy structured for the centre’s benefit, its politics permitted only within limits the centre sets, discovering that the language of freedom and the fact of subordination cannot indefinitely coexist without protest. It is the 1971 pattern in a minor key, and the state appears no more able to hear it now than it was then.

The Intelligence State and the Institutionalisation of Covert Power

The role attributed to Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus, and to the Inter-Services Intelligence in particular, is one of the most consequential and most difficult subjects in any analysis of the state, and difficulty demands discipline rather than either credulity or denial. The disciplined approach separates four things that polemic collapses: documented fact, credible allegation, scholarly interpretation, and official denial. Much of what is asserted about intelligence operations sits in the second and third categories, and an analyst who presents allegation as proven fact forfeits authority. So this essay will not affix a lurid label. It will pose a structural question instead, which is more damaging because it is more precise.

What happens to democratic sovereignty when coercive capabilities operate beyond meaningful civilian transparency and accountability? The scholarly literature offers a vocabulary for the condition without needing to prove any single operation: covert statecraft, the democratic accountability deficit, the principal-agent problem in which the agent captures the principal, shadow governance, deep-state politics, and institutional impunity. The concern is not any particular action but the systemic fact that a state within the state, empowered to act in secret and shielded from oversight, corrodes the very idea of civilian sovereignty on which democratic legitimacy rests. Where domestic political management, the shaping of media, the engineering of electoral fields and the conduct of security policy can proceed without transparent civilian control, the citizen’s vote governs a smaller and smaller portion of the real state. That is the accountability deficit, and it is structural whatever one believes about any specific episode.

Afghanistan: Strategic Depth Becomes Strategic Blowback

The doctrine of strategic depth was among the most consequential ideas in the history of Pakistani statecraft, and it delivered, with almost mathematical precision, the opposite of what it promised. The logic was to secure a pliable Afghanistan as a rear area against India, and the instruments were the militant networks nurtured during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, when American and Gulf money flowed through Pakistani hands to Afghan fighters, and later the Afghan Taliban whose rise Pakistan facilitated. The strategist imagined depth. What the strategist built was a reservoir.

The reservoir has drained back across the border. Since the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021, Pakistan has experienced not the insulation it sought but a surge of exactly the violence it exported. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, sheltering in Afghan sanctuaries and emboldened by the victory of its ideological kin, has driven the country’s terrorism toll to its highest level in over a decade. Pakistan ranked first on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, with 1,139 terrorism deaths recorded in 2025, a sixth consecutive annual increase. Border clashes with the very Afghan government Pakistan helped install have become routine; Islamabad now issues demarches to Kabul and reserves the right to strike across a frontier it once treated as its strategic backyard. Strategic depth became strategic blowback.^4,11

The general lesson transcends the particular case, and it is the moral of the security state entire. A state cannot indefinitely externalise insecurity through proxies without eventually internalising the consequences. Violence cultivated as an instrument does not remain an instrument. It becomes an ecology, with its own logic, its own recruits and its own momentum, and that ecology does not respect the intentions of those who seeded it. Pakistan built a garden of proxies to shelter behind and is now being consumed by what grew there.

Religion, Radicalisation, and the Politics of Identity

Religion must be handled here with the seriousness it deserves and the precision the subject demands, and the first act of precision is a distinction. Islam as a faith, the private and communal devotion of hundreds of millions, is one thing. The political instrumentalisation of religious identity by a state in search of legitimacy is an entirely different thing, and only the second is the concern of this analysis. To criticise the manipulation of religion for power is not to criticise the religion. It is to defend it from those who would reduce it to an instrument of statecraft.

The instrumentalisation has a history and a cost. Under Zia-ul-Haq, a programme of state Islamisation fused religious legitimacy to political authority, expanded a madrasa sector that in too many cases substituted ideology for education, and cultivated jihadist narratives as tools of foreign and domestic policy. The consequences compounded across generations: sectarian violence, the weaponisation of blasphemy accusation, the narrowing of pluralism, and a supply of radicalised recruits for the very militant networks that now turn their guns on the state. When religious legitimacy becomes intertwined with state legitimacy and with the competition for power, the sacred is conscripted into politics, dissent is recoded as heresy, minorities become suspect, and the mobilising energy of faith is redirected toward the fracturing of the nation it was invoked to unite. A state that plays this game for tactical advantage discovers that it cannot easily stop playing, because it has taught a generation to see politics through the lens of the absolute.

Youth: The Squandered Demographic Dividend

Pakistan’s young are its greatest asset and its most comprehensively wasted one, and the waste is a policy outcome rather than a natural fact. A youthful population is not automatically a dividend. It becomes a dividend only when institutions convert aspiration into education, education into skills, skills into employment, and employment into mobility and dignity. Where that conversion machinery is built, demography is destiny in the happiest sense. Where it is absent, the same demography curdles into pressure, and the arithmetic runs the other way: youthful population, then educational deficit, then joblessness, then alienation, then, for a minority who find no other door open, radicalisation.

The stereotype must be refused as firmly as the complacency. The madrasa student and the unemployed graduate are not problems to be managed but citizens who have been failed by structures they did not design. The point is not that Pakistani youth are prone to extremism; the overwhelming majority are not. The point is that a state which under-invests in schools while over-investing in control, which treats young men from the tribal peripheries as a recruitment pool for its security contests rather than as a generation to be educated, and which cannot generate growth much above its own population growth rate so that per-capita income stagnates year upon year, has manufactured the conditions in which despair becomes exploitable. To treat the young as expendable, as fuel for the machinery of proxy and coercion, is not only a moral catastrophe. It is a strategic one, because a nation that consumes its own future has mortgaged the only asset that could have redeemed it.

A country that spends its youth as ammunition has confused its arsenal with its inheritance.

Women, Children, and the Social Contract

The security of a nation is not measured only at its borders. It is measured in its homes, its schools and its streets, in whether half the population can move, learn, work and live without fear, and in whether its children are protected rather than preyed upon. This is not a soft addendum to the national-security argument. It is the argument, viewed from the ground, and feminist analysis of international relations has long insisted on precisely this: that the everyday security of women and children is the truest test of whether a state secures its people at all.

Measured against that test, the record is grave. Women’s political and economic participation remains constrained, gender-based violence persists as a routine hazard of ordinary life, mobility is policed by custom and sometimes by law, and where early or forced marriage is documented it forecloses futures before they begin. Children carry their own burden: in the first half of 2026 alone the national press recorded well over a thousand cases of child abuse, and countless more go unreported, while labour that should be schooling and education systems that fail the young compound the harm. The health of the youngest is its own indictment. Pakistan remains one of only two countries on earth where wild poliovirus is still endemic, its eradication campaigns obstructed by the same militancy the state’s own policies helped incubate, with vaccinators killed and children missed in the border provinces. A state that cannot deliver two drops of vaccine to a child, because it cannot protect the worker who carries them, has revealed the true reach of its security. The question answers itself. A polity cannot claim strategic strength while a substantial share of its citizens remain structurally insecure within their own homes, institutions and communities.¹³

Minorities and the Erosion of the Common Citizenship

A republic is tested by how it treats those it could most easily neglect, and Pakistan’s religious and sectarian minorities, its Ahmadis, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Shia communities, along with its ethnic minorities and displaced populations, have borne the cost of a majoritarian drift that narrows the meaning of citizenship. The analytic frame is not a catalogue of individual abuses, which would be both endless and beside the deeper point, but the structural consequence of exclusion. When constitutional identity is fused to a single confessional majority, minority belonging becomes conditional, and conditional belonging is not citizenship at all.

The costs radiate outward and land, in the end, on the state itself. Minority insecurity corrodes social cohesion, because a society that ranks its members cannot ask them all for loyalty on equal terms. It damages international reputation, because the treatment of the vulnerable is watched. And it undermines internal stability, because every excluded community is a fracture line along which a stressed polity can split. The security state, obsessed with threats beyond its borders, has been remarkably careless of the solidarity within them, and solidarity is the one form of security that cannot be bought with weapons or borrowed from patrons. It must be built at home, by making every citizen genuinely a citizen, and this Pakistan has conspicuously declined to do.

China: From Geographic Connectivity to Asymmetric Dependence

The relationship with China deserves precision rather than caricature, and caricature runs in both directions. It is neither the boundless friendship of official rhetoric nor the simple debt trap of lazy commentary. The honest method is to test the debt-trap hypothesis against the evidence and to describe what the evidence actually shows, which is subtler and, for Pakistan, arguably worse than a melodrama of predation.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was sold as transformation: energy to end the shortages, infrastructure to unlock trade, industry to employ the young, Gwadar to make Pakistan the pivot of regional commerce. What it has substantially delivered is a structure of asymmetric interdependence in which the weaker partner’s bargaining power steadily erodes. Chinese-financed power projects came with capacity payments that Pakistan must honour whether or not the electricity is consumed, feeding the circular debt that strangles the energy sector. The promised industrial dividend for ordinary Balochistan has largely not materialised, while resentment over land, employment and extraction has grown, and attacks on Chinese personnel have made security itself a recurring bilateral irritant. The port at Gwadar has not turned Pakistan into a commercial hinge. The corridor, in short, has not transformed Pakistan’s productive capacity so much as it has deepened Pakistan’s dependence and added a new creditor to whom relevance must continually be demonstrated. This is dependency theory confirmed not by rhetoric but by cash flow: a state that offers its geography as a permanent rent, and in doing so converts a partnership into a hierarchy.¹⁴

Multi-Alignment as Multi-Dependence

Pakistan’s foreign policy in the multipolar age has been presented as strategic sophistication: the simultaneous cultivation of Washington, Beijing, Riyadh, Ankara and Tehran, a state too useful to too many to be abandoned by any. The presentation mistakes being needed for being strong. Under conditions of fiscal fragility and civil-military imbalance, the cultivation of many patrons has not produced strategic autonomy. It has produced a political economy of dependence in which Pakistan remains useful to others while extracting little durable strength for itself.¹⁸

The mechanism is the deepest trap in this entire diagnosis, and it deserves to be stated exactly. External relevance repeatedly postpones internal reform. Each time crisis looms, a bailout arrives, a friendly deposit is parked in the central bank, a strategic partner extends a lifeline, and the arriving relief substitutes for the tax effort, the elite sacrifice, the productivity gain and the institutional change that alone could end the cycle. The rent of strategic location becomes an alternative to the hard work of building a productive economy. Twenty-five IMF programmes across the country’s history are not twenty-five accidents. They are the recurring signature of a state that has learned it can be rescued, and has therefore never been compelled to reform. Relevance is the enabler of stagnation. The very thing Pakistani strategists count as their greatest asset, their indispensability, is the mechanism by which their citizens are kept poor.

To be useful to everyone and sovereign to no one is not a strategy. It is a condition, and Pakistan has mistaken it for a policy.

The Political Economy of Stabilisation Without Transformation

Beneath every crisis described so far runs a single fiscal fact: a state that reliably finds money to service its debt and expand its defence budget, and reliably treats investment in health, education and social protection as negotiable. The numbers of the mid-2020s tell the story without embellishment. Interest payments alone consume the largest single share of the federal budget; the poverty headcount rose from 18.3 per cent to 25.3 per cent of the population between the 2022 and 2024 fiscal years before edging down as inflation eased; and circular debt in the gas sector alone reached 3.4 trillion rupees, some 2.7 per cent of national output, by the end of 2025. Growth reached around three per cent in FY25, barely above the rate of population increase, which means per-capita gains remain slight while a youthful population swells the ranks of those needing work.¹⁵

The pathology has a name: stabilisation without transformation. Each crisis is managed and none is resolved. Austerity and external support restore the macro numbers to a semblance of order; the underlying structure that produced the crisis is left untouched; and so the next crisis is scheduled. Elite capture is the engine of this stasis. A landmark United Nations Development Programme estimate put the privileges accruing to Pakistan’s most powerful groups, corporate, feudal, political and military, at several per cent of national output, a sum that could fund the schools and clinics the state declares unaffordable. The tax base stays narrow because those with the power to broaden it are those who benefit from its narrowness. Circular debt in the power sector, fed by capacity payments and inefficiency, crowds out development spending year after year. The fundamental choice is never made, because the people empowered to make it are the people it would cost. This is not a failure of knowledge. Every diagnosis in this essay is available to Pakistan’s own economists and is often written by them. It is a failure of will, and the will is absent because the incentives of those who hold power point the other way.¹⁶

Water, Fire, and the Governance of Catastrophe

There is a cruelty in the arithmetic of Pakistani vulnerability that the security state cannot answer with any weapon in its arsenal, because the threat it most spectacularly fails to meet arrives not from across a border but from the sky. Pakistan contributes a negligible fraction of global greenhouse emissions and stands among the most climate-exposed nations on earth, a country repeatedly named in the front rank of the world’s climate-vulnerable states. The floods of 2022 submerged roughly a third of the country and inflicted losses estimated at some thirty billion dollars; further monsoon disasters in 2025 and 2026 again killed and displaced on a scale the authorities described in the language of national emergency. Disaster is no longer an interruption of normal life in Pakistan. It has become the rhythm of it.¹⁷

The analytically important point is not that Pakistan suffers natural hazards, which no state can wholly prevent, but why natural hazards become social catastrophes there with such reliability. The answer returns to every theme of this essay. A hazard becomes a catastrophe where institutions lack the capacity to protect, or the political incentive to prioritise, the citizens most exposed. The floodwaters in Lahore reached both affluent and poor neighbourhoods; the wealthy were evacuated and the poor were left to tent settlements, because disaster does not distribute itself equally in a society structured by inequality. The verified ultra-poor of Balochistan lost their reconstruction funds to roads and irrigation. Unregulated construction, deforestation and the absence of resilient planning converted rain into ruin. Climate vulnerability, in short, is not an exogenous misfortune visited upon an innocent state. It is the point at which weak state capacity, elite indifference, extractive political economy and the neglect of the periphery converge and are paid for in lives. A state that can write military primacy into its constitution within weeks, yet cannot build a flood-resilient house for a verified beneficiary across years, has revealed with brutal clarity what it is organised to protect and what it is content to let drown.

The Managed Narrative: Information Control as Coercive Capacity

A state uncertain of its legitimacy will, sooner or later, attempt to govern what its citizens are permitted to know, and the treatment of Pakistan’s information space follows this logic with grim predictability. Press freedom has contracted, journalists who investigate the establishment face intimidation and worse, digital spaces are periodically throttled or shut, and the boundaries of acceptable speech are policed by an unwritten but well-understood code that every editor learns to read. The pattern is not incidental to the security state. It is intrinsic to it.

Read through securitisation, the mechanism is transparent. Where legitimacy is fragile, the management of narrative becomes an extension of coercive state capacity, because control over what can be said is control over what can be contested. Internet shutdowns imposed in the name of security also disable the coordination of dissent. The recoding of criticism as a threat to national cohesion places the critic outside the protection of citizenship, exactly as it places the Baloch mother and the disappeared student outside it. A free press is not a luxury that a stressed state may suspend until calmer times. It is the instrument through which a society corrects its own errors, and a state that disables that instrument has chosen to persist in its errors rather than to hear them named. The shrinking of Pakistan’s information space is therefore not a separate grievance to be filed alongside the others in this essay. It is the meta-pathology that keeps all the others from being addressed, because a citizenry that cannot see the machinery cannot dismantle it, and that is precisely the point of dimming the lights.

The Regional Ledger: Why Internal Fragility Is Not a Domestic Affair

The pathologies traced in this essay are often discussed as though they were Pakistan’s private misfortune, to be pitied or condemned from a distance. They are not. A nuclear-armed state of nearly two hundred and fifty million people, positioned at the junction of South Asia, Central Asia, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, cannot fail privately. Its internal fragility radiates outward into a whole regional security complex, and the ledger of consequences is regional and global rather than national.

Consider the entries. Militancy incubated for domestic and strategic purposes crosses borders into Afghanistan, Iran and India, and the blowback that now scars Pakistan’s own western provinces does not respect the frontier. The narcotics and illicit economies that flourish in zones of weak governance flow along the same routes as the migrants displaced by conflict and by climate. Instability on the Arabian Sea coast, where a Chinese-operated port sits amid a live insurgency, entangles great-power competition with local grievance in a manner that concerns every navy in the Indian Ocean. Nuclear stability itself depends on the coherence of a command structure now concentrated in a single unaccountable office. And the collapse of water security in the Indus basin, driven by glacial melt and mismanagement, is a slow emergency shared by every downstream population. Regional Security Complex Theory teaches that the security of neighbouring states is so interwoven that none can be analysed in isolation, and Pakistan is the case that proves it. This is why its trajectory matters to New Delhi, to Kabul, to Tehran, to Beijing, to the Gulf capitals and to Washington, and why the world’s recurrent instinct to stabilise Pakistan without transforming it is not generosity but a shared strategic gamble whose stakes rise with every passing year.

The Bomb and the Bargain: Nuclear Weapons as Regime Insurance

No account of the Pakistani security state is complete without the weapon that sits at its apex, because the bomb is not merely a deterrent aimed outward. It is, at least as importantly, an instrument aimed inward, an insurance policy for the arrangement of power that produced it. The public rationale for the nuclear arsenal is straightforward and, on its own terms, coherent: a smaller state facing a larger conventional adversary seeks in nuclear weapons the equaliser that conventional forces cannot provide. Read through structural realism, the acquisition is unremarkable, the predictable behaviour of a weaker power balancing a stronger one.

The internal function is where the analysis must go further. The bomb did three things to the domestic order. It elevated the institution that controls it, placing the guardian of the ultimate weapon permanently above the civilians who nominally govern, and the Twenty-Seventh Amendment’s transfer of the National Strategic Command to a unified military office merely formalised what was already true. It provided a shield of impunity behind which conventional adventurism and proxy warfare could be conducted at lower risk of decisive retaliation, the logic that made Kargil thinkable. And it converted the state into an object of permanent international management, too dangerous to be allowed to fail, which is a peculiar kind of leverage that rewards fragility. A nuclear-armed state in crisis commands a bailout that a conventional one would not, because its collapse is everyone’s problem. The arsenal, in other words, is woven into the same pathology as everything else in this essay: it entrenches the guardian institution, it enables the externalisation of insecurity, and it underwrites the dependence trap by making the world an involuntary guarantor of a state that will not reform. The weapon that was meant to secure the nation has helped secure the arrangement that fails it.¹⁹

Cash, Currency, and the Comparative Mirror

Consider a smaller episode that illuminates a larger truth, and set it beside a neighbour for scale. States under fiscal stress reach, periodically, for dramatic gestures against the informal economy: demonetisation, the withdrawal of high-value notes, the compulsion of transactions into visible channels. Such measures are sold as reform and frequently deliver disruption to the very citizens least able to absorb it, the daily-wage earner and the small trader whose lives run on cash. The gesture substitutes for the structural work, which is the broadening of the tax base and the curbing of elite exemption, and the structural work is avoided for the same reason it is always avoided: it would cost the powerful.

The comparative mirror is instructive and, for Pakistan, uncomfortable. Across the eastern border, a digital-payments architecture has moved hundreds of millions of ordinary people into the formal economy through interfaces of striking simplicity, has expanded financial inclusion at a pace few states have matched, and has done so while the software engineers, entrepreneurs and technologists of that country have risen to lead firms and institutions across the world. The contrast is not offered to wound but to instruct. Two neighbours began within a few years of one another from a shared colonial inheritance and a common civilisational stock. One has built platforms that the world studies; the other returns, again and again, to the same lender. The difference is not talent, for the talent of Pakistan’s people is not in question and is amply demonstrated wherever they are permitted to flourish, most visibly in a diaspora that thrives abroad precisely because it has escaped the structures that constrain it at home. The difference is the structure. A state that invests in its people, protects its institutions, and lets its economy be productive rather than extractive will compound its advantages across a generation. A state that invests in control will compound its deficits across the same span. The mirror shows Pakistan not a rival to be feared but a path it declined to take.²⁰

The talent of Pakistan’s people is not in doubt. It is demonstrated everywhere except where the Pakistani state has jurisdiction over it.

A Note on Naming: Neither Rogue Nor Innocent

It is tempting, from an Indian vantage that has absorbed the costs of cross-border terrorism, to reach for the label rogue state, and the temptation should be examined rather than either indulged or dismissed. The term carries analytical content only if it names something precise: a state that flouts international norms, sponsors violence beyond its borders, and defies the constraints that bind ordinary members of the system. Pakistan’s record on the export of militancy gives the charge more purchase than its defenders admit. Yet the label, deployed as an epithet, obscures more than it reveals, and a serious assessment should prefer precision to invective.

The more exact description is a composite, and each component has been earned in the preceding pages. Pakistan is a praetorian state, in which the military is the permanent sovereign and the civilian a tenant. It is a rentier-security state, which monetises its geography and its dangerousness in place of building a productive economy. It is a hybrid regime, which stages elections without conceding supremacy. It is a fragile state in its peripheries and a hard state in its coercion, capable of disappearing a citizen but not of housing a flood victim. And it is, in a specific and consequential sense, a conflict-producing state, whose strategic culture has repeatedly externalised violence that then returns home. Rogue is too crude an instrument for this diagnosis, and innocent is a fiction its own citizens would not recognise. The truth is more useful than either: a state whose institutional architecture reliably converts capacity into harm, most of all against the people it governs. Naming that architecture precisely is the necessary preface to imagining its reform.

The Reversal: What Genuine Sovereignty Would Require

An honest diagnosis owes an honest prescription, and the prescriptions that follow are not idealistic wishes. They are the logical conclusions of the analysis itself, the mirror image of each pathology named above, and they converge with the consensus of the most serious critical scholarship on Pakistan. They are offered in the same spirit as the whole essay: with rigour, without euphemism, and without malice toward a people who deserve far better than the state they have been given.

Restore genuine civilian supremacy

The foundational reform, without which every other reform is cosmetic, is the subordination of the military to democratic authority rather than the reverse. Hybrid arrangements have been tried for the better part of eighty years and have reproduced the crisis each time. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment moved the country decisively in the wrong direction, and the direction must be reversed: constitutional and institutional change that places security policy, foreign policy and the economy under accountable civilian control. Sovereignty begins at home, with the citizen’s vote governing the whole state and not merely a permitted fraction of it.

Place the citizen at the centre of security

The security paradigm must shift from kinetic dominance and enforced disappearance to human security, from the protection of the regime to the protection of the person. In Balochistan and the other peripheries this means political inclusion and resource-sharing in place of collective punishment, dialogue in place of the raid, and accountability for the machinery of disappearance. A periphery secured by consent is stable. A periphery held by force is a rebellion deferred, as 1971 proved at the cost of half the country.

End the subsidy of failure

External support, whether from the Fund, from bilateral patrons, or from corridor financing, should cease to function as a substitute for reform. The rent of strategic location must stop being treated as permanent income. The way out of the dependence trap is to make relief conditional on the reforms it currently allows the state to avoid: a broadened tax base, an end to elite exemptions, the restructuring of the energy sector, and genuine elite accountability. Strategic relevance can buy time. It cannot buy transformation, and a state that keeps spending it on delay will run out of both.

Invest in the young and the whole society

The single most durable counter to radicalisation, demographic pressure and long-run decline is a massive, sustained investment in quality public education, health and skills. This is the affirmative core of any Pakistani renewal: to convert the demographic pressure back into a demographic dividend by giving the young the education, the employment and the dignity that alone can redeem them. To immunise every child, to school every child, to give every young person a door other than the gun, is both the moral imperative and the strategic one. A nation that invests in its people acquires the only security that lasts.

Choose the friendly neighbour

And there is the reform that Pakistani strategic culture forbids itself even to contemplate, which is precisely why it belongs at the end. Pakistan would be immeasurably served by an amicable relationship with India. The trust deficit that its establishment cultivates is a cost imposed on both peoples for the benefit of institutions on one side of the border. Two nations that share a civilisation, a cuisine, a cinema and a cricketing passion, whose peoples quietly admire one another even as their states rehearse enmity, could be each other’s largest markets and closest partners in the very sciences and technologies where the subcontinent is beginning to lead the world. India is not the permanent adversary that Pakistani strategic culture requires it to be. It is the friendly possibility that a different Pakistan could choose. Choosing it would not diminish Pakistan’s sovereignty. It would, for the first time, make that sovereignty serve its citizens.

Coda: A Small Epoch in a Long History

Return, at the last, to the girl in Quetta without a roof, because a diagnosis that forgets her has failed however elegant its arguments. She is not a statistic and not a symbol. She is a citizen of a state that possesses nuclear weapons and cannot build her a house, that commands one of the great geographies of the earth and cannot immunise her against a disease the rest of the world has defeated, that cultivates five great powers and cannot educate her, that has written the primacy of its guardians into its constitution and cannot secure her the simplest security of all, which is a life free of fear and free of want.

None of this was inevitable, and that is both the indictment and the hope. Every conversion of asset into liability was a choice, and what was chosen can be chosen differently. Eighty years is a long time in a human life and a short time in the life of a civilisation. Measured against the deep continuum of South Asian history, this is a small epoch, a miniscule passage, and the passage is not yet closed. There is still time, in the long reckoning of history, for a state to decide that its citizens are the nation, that its security is their security, and that its neighbour might be its friend. The eightieth anniversary is not a verdict. It is a question, put to a people who have never lacked the capacity to answer it, only the leadership willing to let them. The promise of 1947 remains unredeemed. It does not, on that account, remain unredeemable.

❖ ❖ ❖

Dr. Maheep

Indian Perspective on Global Affairs (IPGA), New Delhi

Endnotes

Sources follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (Notes and Bibliography), with full citation at first appearance and shortened form thereafter. Where a claim is contested, the note distinguishes documented fact, credible allegation and official response.

World Bank, communication to the Government of Pakistan and Government of Balochistan on the Integrated Flood Resilience and Adaptation Project, reported August 2026; see “World Bank Unhappy over Fund Diversion from Balochistan,” Dawn, August 11, 2026, and “Redirected Funds,” Express Tribune, August 12, 2026. The World Bank recorded 119,049 verified and eligible households left without identified financing after housing support was capped at 62,966 first-tranche beneficiaries as of June 22, 2026, roughly 84 per cent of eligible beneficiaries classified as ultra-poor.
World Bank, Reclaiming Momentum Towards Prosperity: Pakistan’s Poverty, Equity, and Resilience Assessment (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025); International Monetary Fund, Pakistan: Third Review under the Extended Arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility, IMF Country Report No. 26/101 (Washington, DC: IMF, 2026). The poverty headcount rose from 18.3 per cent (FY22) to 25.3 per cent (FY24). The higher-line share of the population living in poverty is substantially larger.
On Pakistan’s long dependence on the Fund, see IMF, Country Report No. 26/101; the 37-month Extended Fund Facility was approved on September 25, 2024, and its third review completed in May 2026.
Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index 2026 (Sydney: IEP, 2026). Pakistan ranked first worldwide, with 1,139 terrorism deaths recorded in 2025, a sixth consecutive annual increase.
“Pakistan’s 27th Constitutional Amendment Moves It One Step Closer to Authoritarian Rule,” Chatham House, December 2025; “Pakistan Parliament Approves More Powers for Army Chief Asim Munir, Curbs Supreme Court,” CNN, November 13, 2025.
Chatham House, “27th Constitutional Amendment”; CNN, November 13, 2025. President Asif Ali Zardari signed the amendment into law on November 13, 2025; it created the post of Chief of Defence Forces, held concurrently by army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, granted authority over the National Strategic Command, conferred lifetime immunity, and established a Federal Constitutional Court curtailing the Supreme Court. Opposition members boycotted the vote.
Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (Harvard University Press, 2014), 3–14; Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics (Harvard University Press, 2014); Sumantra Bose, Secular States, Religious Politics; and Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (University of California Press, 1990). Scholarly estimates of the 1971 death toll vary widely and remain contested.
“World Bank Unhappy over Fund Diversion,” Dawn, August 11, 2026; “Redirected Funds,” Express Tribune, August 12, 2026.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN Experts Condemn Life Sentence against Baloch Woman Human Rights Defender in Pakistan as Grave Injustice,” July 8, 2026. On June 22, 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta sentenced Dr. Mahrang Baloch to two terms of life imprisonment in connection with a Baloch Yakjehti Committee protest; the defendant denied the charges and announced an appeal, and Pakistani authorities defended the verdict as the outcome of due judicial process.
Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Terrorism Index 2026; on strategic depth and its reversal, see Madiha Afzal, Pakistan under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), and Observer Research Foundation commentary on Afghanistan–Pakistan relations, 2025–2026.
C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford University Press, 2014).
“World Bank Unhappy over Fund Diversion,” Dawn, August 11, 2026, which reports 1,914 recorded cases of child abuse across Pakistan in the first half of 2026; on polio, see World Health Organization and Global Polio Eradication Initiative country data for Pakistan, 2025–2026. Pakistan remains one of only two countries where wild poliovirus is endemic.
On CPEC financing, capacity payments and asymmetric interdependence, see IMF, Country Report No. 26/101 (circular debt); and Dr. Maheep, “Balochistan at the Crossroads: Gold, Blood, and Contested Sovereignty,” European Times, July 2026. The debt-trap thesis is disputed; the analysis here rests on documented capacity-payment obligations rather than on that label.
International Monetary Fund, Country Report No. 26/101 and Country Report No. 25/109 (2025); gas-sector circular debt reached PRs 3.4 trillion (about 2.7 per cent of GDP) as of December 2025; real GDP growth reached three per cent in FY25.
United Nations Development Programme, Pakistan National Human Development Report 2020: The Three Ps of Inequality — Power, People, and Policy (Islamabad: UNDP, 2021), which estimated elite privileges at approximately US$17.4 billion, on the order of several per cent of GDP.
On Pakistan’s climate exposure and the 2022 floods (roughly one-third of the country inundated; losses estimated near US$30 billion), see World Bank and Asian Development Bank, Pakistan Floods 2022: Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (2022); subsequent monsoon disasters in 2025 and 2026 are documented in contemporary reporting.
Dr. Maheep, “Pakistan’s Multi-Alignment, Domestic Fragility, and the Multipolar Trap,” European Times, August 2026, developing the proposition that multi-alignment matures into multi-dependence under weak domestic state capacity.
On nuclear weapons, deterrence and civil-military relations, see Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2025 (Oxford University Press, 2025); and, on the strategic behaviour the arsenal enables, Fair, Fighting to the End. The characterisation of nuclear capability as “regime insurance” is the author’s interpretation.
The comparison of institutional trajectories draws on T. V. Paul, The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2014), and the author’s own “Multi-Alignment” and “Balochistan at the Crossroads,” European Times, 2026.

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