After Chagai-Pakistan's next mission

Every May, Pakistan returns to the mountains of Chagai. In the minds of Pakistanis, the image is familiar: the desert hills in a deserted part of Baluchistan turning white, an announcement from Islamabad, the surge of public pride, and a country telling itself that it has shifted history and secured its geography.

Pakistan was no longer merely asking to be heard in the world. It had forced the world to listen. For Pakistanis, the nuclear tests were about more than the weapons. They were about the fear that a state created through sacrifice could be pressured, punished, dismembered or dictated to by stronger powers.

Nuclear tests were about India, the region’s dominant military power, and the need to ensure that Pakistan would never again face strategic humiliation. So it built a credible deterrence. This is why the Chagai hills of Baluchistan and May 1998 still matter in the collective consciousness of the nation.

Pakistan’s nuclear capability gave it something no alliance or diplomatic assurance could provide: a military parity with India at the highest level of national defence. It did not make Pakistan richer. It did not make its politics wiser. It did not fix its institutions. But it did change the strategic equation.

It reduced the possibility that Pakistan could be treated like a disposable state, invaded or broken under the logic later applied elsewhere in the Muslim world – remember Iraq and Libya. In that sense, the bomb was never an act of aggression.

For Pakistan, it was an insurance policy written in the language of survival. Pakistan’s nuclear status placed it in a different category. It did not make the country immune from pressure, sanctions, covert interference or internal destabilisation. But it made the option of treating Pakistan as a state to be casually coerced, invaded or dismantled externally far more dangerous.

But anniversaries should never be merely ceremonial. They should also be treated as a time to be critically honest. If Pakistan’s nuclear tests secured the country’s outer wall, they could not fortify the house within.

The months after Chagai exposed the other Pakistan as economically vulnerable, institutionally divided, diplomatically isolated and internally fragile. Sanctions followed. Foreign exchange pressures intensified. Powerful segments of society could use means to transfer their wealth abroad. Confidence fell.

Karachi, the country’s commercial artery, was already suffering under the weight of violence, extortion, political militancy and a collapsing sense of civic order.

The nuclear state had arrived. The self-reliant state had not. A nation can possess the bomb and still lack clean water. It can command deterrence and still fail its children in schools.

It can defend its borders and still allow corruption in govt ranks, patronage, and provincial resentment to hollow out it’s one nation one country ideology. It can be strong enough to deter invasion and weak enough to lose its brightest citizens to despair, exile or violence.

This is where the memory of the most upright citizen of Pakistan – Hakim Mohammed Said – still matters. His assassination in Karachi, just months after Pakistan had achieved nuclear parity with India, can be read as one of the first major blows against the country from within.

If the nuclear tests had secured Pakistan’s external deterrence, the killing of our national treasure, a modern-day reformer similar to Sir Syed and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, exposed the vulnerability of its internal order.

It suggested that the next battlefield would not necessarily be at the border, but the city streets, the economy, the institutions and the national mind. What followed over the years reinforced that fear. The onslaught did not end with his murder or one political crisis.

Violence, lawlessness, corruption, sectarianism, ethnic militancy and institutional mistrust continued to damage Pakistan’s confidence and economic potential.

The country had achieved strategic security, but it struggled to break the cycle of internal anarchy that kept weakening the promise of 1998.

Pakistan has already done the hardest strategic thing. It built a nuclear capability under pressure, against resistance, with limited resources and extraordinary determination. That achievement showed what Pakistanis can do when national purpose, scientific excellence and state commitment align. The question now is why the same seriousness cannot be applied to education, exports, energy, technology, justice, local government, policing and public health.

The country does not need to choose between defence and development. A secure Pakistan should now have the confidence to invest in development precisely because its core territorial deterrent is established. The purpose of national security is not to live in a bunker forever. It is to create a vibrant society in which citizens can study, work, trade, debate, innovate and build lives of prosperity and dignity.

Pakistan must now seek parity not only with India in military terms, but with serious states everywhere in economic competence, institutional maturity and civic discipline. Nuclear status should not be the ceiling of national ambition. It should be the foundation for a more self-reliant republic.

This means a ruthless commitment to merit. Jobs should not belong to biradari, party workers, relatives or patrons. They should belong to whoever demonstrates qualification and competence. Universities should not be degree factories. They should become engines of research for industry and national problem-solving.

Civil and military services should not be a ladder to power and privilege. It should become a delivery machine. Politics should not reduce citizens to Sindhi, Punjabi, Balochi, Pashtun, Mohajir or Kashmiri voting blocs. It should persuade them that they are all equal shareholders in the state of Pakistan.

For Pakistan to attain true strategic success, this should be the next national mission. Are Pakistanis up to the challenge? The world is watching.