Punching for people

Is punching above our weight a good thing? The question goes to the heart of the debate bubbling beneath the surface of our foreign policy euphoria. Pakistan's high-profile mediation between Iran and the United States has raised our international profile and diplomatic stature, but the bitter reality of domestic ailments continues to gnaw at the foundations of our newfound success.

This is not good.

On the first anniversary of our victory over India, we should draw the right lessons from the events of the last one year. There is little doubt that Pakistan's stock as a middle power has risen dramatically since the Marka-e-Haq vanquishing of our alarmingly unstable eastern neighbour. Since then, as the cliché goes, one thing has led to another and today, in May 2026, we are celebrated from Washington to Beijing and from Riyadh to Dhaka. Peace may still be elusive in the Gulf, but Pakistan has already extracted many of the dividends of this facilitation and mediation. There's no real downside from here on.

The real problems though lie closer to home. The contrast between external validation and internal struggles will only get sharper with time. This is the hard truth which no amount of official 'spinning' can dilute.

The dual nature of these problems provides us the story arc of the challenge. The first is obvious: economic, social and governance failures. Look no further. Just in the last few weeks we are reminded by events of our acute vulnerability to energy shocks. The decaying and poorly managed power sector is bleeding Pakistani citizens dry. Reforms? Well, don't hold your breath. If there is a grand plan to restructure, reorganise and revitalise the entire energy sector - one of our most acute crises - that plan is clearly more secretly guarded than our national security matters. The shocking scale of the recently surfaced HIV outbreak in the country is also a grim reminder of the massive policy failures in the health sector. Economic reforms - hint: NFC - and other such well-debated items remain on the wish-list. We all know where such lists go to die.

The second aspect is equally problematic: the nature of our governance system. Hybridity is a term we seem to have internalised as a necessity of the times. It has delivered us one convenient election, one military victory and many diplomatic successes in the short span of a few years. Hybridity itself though is not a new phenomenon for Pakistan. In the 1990s it manifested itself in what was known as the 'Troika' (President, Prime Minister & COAS), and since the 2018 elections it has formalised itself as the informal system of governance in Islamabad. The justification for the system is that it recognises the unofficial official power matrix, brings the civil-military relationship into a closely coordinated system and delivers policy continuity as well as improved decision-making within a convoluted and archaic government machinery.

It may do all this, but it does so at a cost. This cost is measured in disturbed institutional equilibrium, enhanced political control, reduced public discourse space and diminished recourse to justice against state pressure. On the spectrum in which one end is marked by absolute liberal democracy and the other end absolute authoritarianism, Pakistan may find itself in the company of various countries somewhere in the middle. The model of prosperous and powerful totalitarian nations is often cited to explain the benefits of such a system. But this argument often tends to gloss over the terms of the social contract that such successful but authoritarian nations deliver to their citizens.

This other part of the social contract - when not delivered - becomes the biggest weakness of countries like ours. As the USA–led western model of governance weakens in the face of competition from China, many political scientists are re-looking at the future of political governance models. Political authoritarianism marked by strict meritocracy and free-market capitalism is a strange mix that China has made fashionable in the world of today. But this model offers efficiency, good governance and prosperity for its citizens.

What does not work is control without prosperity. When you take something away from citizens you have to give something back to them. Pakistani state does not do that. Not yesterday and not today.

The real challenge for our present system delivering foreign policy success is to figure out how it can deliver something equally dramatic at home. This can only happen if those in power realise that domestic success cannot come overnight. It will entail taking those difficult steps that this system is not built to do. The entire state structure is constructed on outmoded systems that have hardly ever delivered reform. How is it feasible for the same kind of people in the same institutions trained on the same archaic systems to suddenly become modern reformists?

Or can they?

There is never a better time to test this hypothesis. Supporters of the Punjab government claim real reformist governance is happening in the province. The Sindh government says it is trying. The other two provinces are nowhere near any significant reform that can bring meaningful improvement in the lives of their citizens. The federal government, for its part, does not have much to show for tax reform, privatisation, bureaucracy's remodelling or any other strategic reconstruction of governance.

So yes, punching above our weight is good because it shows us what we can do if we get our act together. But it also reinforces the fact that our weight remains far below what is needed to keep punching faster, harder, longer. And for our people.