Pakistan's Energy Dependency Was Not an Accident

Six decades of offshore failures, deferred exploration, and a circular debt that now sits at Rs 4.9 trillion, the story of how a country turns a manageable problem into a permanent condition.

On the morning of March 10, 2026, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif appeared on national television to announce that Pakistan was in an energy emergency. The United States and Israel had struck Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, through which more than twenty percent of the world’s seaborne oil and sixty percent of Pakistan’s imported energy passes, had effectivel…