In March 2010, while suicide bombers and gunmen were killing Pakistanis in Swat, Waziristan, Quetta, Peshawar, and Karachi at a rate that the United States State Department would later tabulate as exceeding two thousand fatalities for that year alone, the Chief Minister of Punjab stood at a seminar in Lahore and addressed the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan with an argument that belonged not to the vocabulary of counterterrorism but to the vocabulary of real estate. The PML-N, Shehbaz Sharif said, had opposed Pervez Musharraf’s alliance with the United States and rejected foreign dictation; if the Taliban were fighting for the same cause, they should not conduct acts of terror in Punjab, where his party governed. He did not extend this request to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, then still called the North-West Frontier Province, where families were being displaced by the tens of thousands, nor to Balochistan, where disappearances and killings had become routine, nor to Karachi, where sectarian and political violence was woven into the city’s daily commercial life. He extended it to the province that housed Lahore, Rawalpindi, the country’s military headquarters, the largest share of its population, and the decisive bloc in its National Assembly. He asked the men who were killing Pakistanis to consider a provincial boundary as a line of exemption.

The condemnation was swift. Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab and a member of the PPP, said publicly that the statement had embarrassed the province and would embolden both sectarian and Taliban elements. Shehbaz later issued a clarification, saying his remarks had been taken out of context and that he had always supported the victims of terrorism, including those in the frontier provinces. The clarification mattered less than the original statement, because the original statement had articulated a principle that required no supplementary context. It said, in the plainest terms available to a chief executive, that the obligation of a provincial government was first to its own electoral territory, and that the violence consuming the rest of the country was a condition from which Punjab might negotiate a separate exemption. That was the logical content of the sentence, not an interpretive error committed by journalists.

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The coalition produced by the disputed 2024 election wants to rewrite Pakistan’s rules before the country has settled whether that coalition won the right to govern.

Form 45 is the scorecard of a Pakistani election. At every polling station, officials count the votes in front of candidates’ agents, record the result on that sheet and sign it. Every const…

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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 anthem, quote Iqbal and Jinnah, talk about sacrifice and tell them that this country was created so its people could live with dignity. I want to believe eve…

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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 crossed an invisible line or when another son from a poor district is needed for a war, and yet the same state becomes confused when a child needs a classr…

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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 construction in the hills east of Quetta for years, and when it is finished it is supposed to pipe water into a provincial capital whose aquifer has been failing sin…

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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 quiet of order. It is closer to the silence after a public argument has been postponed too many times, when everyone in the room knows that the furniture is sti…

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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 of foreign capital in its modern history. It was fueled by post-9/11 strategic rents, the rescheduling and partial forgiveness of crushing external debt, a…

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The sovereign default of a nation is rarely a sudden event: it is an administrative choice disguised as a financial crisis. In Pakistan, this choice has been made twenty-six times since 1950, with the latest seven-billion-dollar stabilization program from the International Monetary Fund acting as the modern framework of governance. The common narrative …

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A special report on the constitutional machinery that keeps a self-governing promise permanently subordinate, and the charter of demands the state met with a proscription order, an internet blackout, and live ammunition.

Eleven people are dead in Rawalakot. Seven were protesters. Four were security personnel, three from the AJK police and one from the Fr…

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On 1 November 1947, the Gilgit Scouts arrested the Maharaja of Kashmir’s governor, Ghansara Singh, marched him out of the political agency, and ended Dogra rule in Gilgit without waiting for instruction from anyone. Within a fortnight, local leaders had acceded to Pakistan. The Pakistani flag went up because the people of Gilgit wanted it there, not bec…

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There are cities that exhaust you because they move too fast, and there are cities that break your heart because they move too slowly. Karachi does both at once. It is a city where the road to work can become an armed encounter, where a glass of water can require patronage, cash, or luck, where a short drive across town can feel like an endurance sport,…

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Ikhtiar Hussain was a senior ticket inspector at Quetta Railway Station. He was 47 years old when he arrived for work on the morning of November 9, 2024, at 8:25am local time. Seconds after he reached the platform, he heard the explosion and fell to the ground. Shrapnel from the blast hit his right cheek. He was taken to Civil Hospital Quetta with wound…

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Every government Pakistan has had since 1958 has borrowed money and called it a victory. The denominations change. The performance does not. A syndicated loan becomes proof of international confidence. A Eurobond becomes evidence of reform. A Panda Bond, structured around multilateral guarantees that exceed the face value of the bond itself, becomes a n…

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This is not a favor but an act of war which goes against Article 54 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1977 and accepted as customary international law binding on all states regardless of ratification, prohibits attacking, destroying, removing, or rendering useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian…

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Ghulam Mustafa has held a savings account at National Bank of Pakistan for twenty-two years. He is sixty-one years old and works the morning shift at a private security firm near Clifton. He does not know that in August 2023, the federal government transferred its majority shareholding in NBP into a legal structure called the Pakistan Sovereign Wealth F…

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Muhammad Zeeshan Ali is a name Pakistan learned on Wednesday. So is Khurram Daud. Two men, now known to the country primarily through a China Manned Space Agency press release, through ISPR’s endorsement of that press release, and through a photograph circulated on the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s official Facebook page. Before Wednesday, …

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Guest Writer

No country in the world is navigating the 2026 Iran war on as many simultaneous fronts as Pakistan. It is a diplomatic broker and a domestic powder keg. An energy crisis victim and an active belligerent on its own eastern front. A nation with a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, a nine-hundred-kilometer border with Iran, a restive Shia minority…

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On the morning of April 11, as Pakistani and American officials prepared the Serena Hotel in Islamabad for the highest-level direct talks between Washington and Tehran since 1979, Pakistan Air Force jets landed at King Abdulaziz Air Base in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. The Saudi Ministry of Defense announced the deployment. The Pakistani side did no…

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A Commentary …

The morning after Pakistan’s army chief spent the night brokering a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesperson was asked to confirm that any of it had happened. “We do not comment,” Tahir Andrabi said, “on these individual, specific incidents.”

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A country’s army chief worked the phones until dawn, …

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There is a version of the Gulf that its governments prefer to present: a civilisation conjured from desert and oil revenue through the vision of its rulers, its towers and highways and hospitals the expression of a sovereign ambition made material. This version is not entirely false. The oil was real, the ambition was real, and the money was spent. What…

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