Today marks seventy-nine years since Pakistan became independent, and you may raise the flag over your home, watch your children pin a green-and-white badge to their clothes, stand for the national a…

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Pakistan wakes each morning to a state that knows exactly where its citizens live when taxes are due, when an electricity bill must be recovered, when a protest must be stopped, when a journalist has…

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July 2026 was the deadliest month of the year in Pakistan, and the state supplied most of both columns of the ledger. The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies counted 606 people killed nationwide during the month, a monthly toll unmatched in more than a decade: 112 security personnel, 74 civilians, 19 members of civilian peace committees, and 401 militants the security forces say they eliminated. In Azad Kashmir, the government banned the civil rights coalition that had spent two months demanding electoral reform, and the defence minister told reporters he now placed its members in the same bracket as India. Pakistan Rangers personnel then shot dead a night school caretaker named Muhammad Nasir Khan in front of his neighbours in a village called Gehl Topi, the first of what a local editor would eventually count as more than a hundred deaths in a single district. In Balochistan, 42 people died in eight days of coordinated attacks on police checkpoints and a dam project meant to end Quetta’s water shortage, and the operation that followed killed dozens more, with the state’s own published toll rising from 42 to 102 to 109 inside a week. Islamabad never acknowledged that the country was in crisis, and yet the finance minister spent the same week in Washington telling the IMF that revenue targets were on track and Pakistan’s reform programme was ahead of schedule.

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On August 15, 2020, Sohail Sakhi stood alone at Darkot Pass, 4,703 meters above sea level. The crossing joins the Broghil Valley in Chitral to the Yasin Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan. Sakhi had walked t…

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I.

The police post that was overrun in Ziarat on the night of July 6 was guarding a dam. Not a garrison, not a cantonment, not a nuclear facility. A dam. The Mangi Dam project has been under construct…

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A woman waits beside a commercial road in Defence and a car slows beside her. That is the part Karachi sees. It sees the lowered window, the few …

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Tourism in Pakistan is not being driven by roads and resorts alone. Increasingly, it is run through the digital algorithms of booking platforms as they become the industry’s front doors, connecting v…

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This article aims to document independent press reporting on provincial events that remain largely unknown to the Pakistani public and mainstream news media as well as investigative journalists.

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PIA is part of a larger shift in how Pakistan is handling public assets under the current government. The stated aim is to reduce losses and bring in private investment. The recurring concern is that…

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There is a quiet that settles over Islamabad when the men who have long spoken in the voice of the state begin to discover that their voice no longer carries as far as it once did. It is not the quie…

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On June 20, Fazian Rehman stood outside the third closed petrol station he had visited in Muzaffarabad, holding an empty bottle. His motorcycle had run out of fuel while he was taking his wife to hospital. Markets had been shut, public transport was off the roads, internet service remained suspended, and a political dispute over twelve legislative seats had entered the ordinary machinery of a family trying to reach a doctor.

That bottle was June’s most accurate economic indicator.

Pakistan’s federal government presented a Rs17.1 trillion budget built around 4.1 percent growth and 8.2 percent inflation. The stock exchange ended a powerful fiscal year. Remittances again supplied the foreign currency that domestic production did not. Yet consumer prices in June were 11.1 percent higher than a year earlier, terrorism killed civilians and security personnel from Peshawar to Karachi, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir spent much of the month under a communications blackout after its government classified a mass civic movement as a terrorist organisation.

The government described these files separately: fiscal consolidation, public order, counterterrorism, migration management and climate preparedness. Pakistanis encountered them together. A higher petroleum levy enters the same household that pays a larger electricity bill. A communications shutdown stops the same trader whose taxes the budget intends to document. A security operation and a militant attack close the same road. A 51°C day arrives in the same country whose finance ministry says one average natural disaster could add 1.5 percent of GDP to the fiscal deficit.

June was not a collection of sixty unrelated headlines. It was one governing system meeting the consequences of its own choices.

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Pakistan is drowning in a crisis it built for itself and simultaneously being strangled by a neighbor exploiting the vulnerability that decades of Pakistani misgovernance created. Both truths are rea…

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Will Pakistan leverage its diplomatic success to secure a future for all Pakistanis, or just for the military and political elite?

Between 2001 and 2008, Pakistan experienced one of the largest surges…

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Overview

Pakistan is in the midst of a deepening child labor crisis. Recent estimates from the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF and Pakistan’s own human rights institutions indicate tha…

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Note: Names have been changed for security reasons.

The June 12 federal budget allocated Rs500 million for HIV, AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. The Global Fund’s cut to Pakistan’s TB allocat…

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For 25 years the government borrowed to pay its debt, used inflation to quietly erase it, and called the accounting trick revenue. The salaried worker, the shopkeeper, and anyone paid in cash took th…

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The Pakistani state banned a civil society coalition on June 5, 2026, listed it under anti-terrorism law, cut the internet across an entire territory of four million people, and then waited three days for the protests to come to it. When they did, it shot them.

What follows is not a reconstruction of events that happened somewhere else to someone else. This is Azad Jammu and Kashmir, a territory Pakistan has administered for seventy-eight years and has never permitted to govern itself. The people who came out in their tens of thousands to march toward Muzaffarabad were not asking for independence. They were asking for electricity tariffs they could afford, for reserved assembly seats to stop being used as patronage instruments for mainland Pakistani parties, for agreements already signed by the government to be honoured. The state’s answer was to call them terrorists and to begin shooting.

Everything that follows is either documented, attributed to named sources, or flagged explicitly as unverified. The communications blackout imposed since June 5 makes the distinction critical.

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The Ministry of Finance published two documents on June 12. The budget speech puts total federal expenditure at Rs 18.77 trillion. The Annual Budget Statement, released the same day, puts gross feder…

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How the Benazir Income Support Programme, audited for billions in irregularities, took 4.5 percent of the FY27 budget while the country’s schools took 0.8 percent of GDP

Muhammad Aurangzeb stood in th…

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The most honest sentence written about Pakistan’s FY27 budget did not come from the finance minister. It ran beneath the masthead of Business Recorder, the country’s paper of finance and business, as…

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