Pakistan funding for Indian students?

Bio: Hamza Tareen is a student at LUMS majoring in Political Science, with a keen interest in philosophy and theology. ‘I am utterly overwhelmed; the deluge of quizzes is beyond my capacity,’ my friend slowly sighed as his head drooped in exhaustion. Students across the country nurse dreams of pursuing higher education in premier institutes such as the likes of LUMS or IBA. They navigate the rigorous selection process, pay exorbitant fees and, when they finally clinch admission, little do they anticipate the stringently demanding atmosphere that would exact a heavy toll on their mental health. Those who get into these prestigious universities are students who have already demonstrated exceptional academic excellence, and, unsurprisingly, they formulate a highly ambitious criterion for defining success, i.e., consistently acing their courses. However, since the assessment follows a bell-curve distribution which evaluates performance relative to peers, the grading is highly competitive and only a small proportion land in the A/A- categories. This not only fails their expectations but plunges them into depression as they call into question their academic capabilities and self-worth. And, to top it off, peer pressure, which is ever pervasive in the culture, further complicates the problem. It would be tempting to label setting unrealistic expectations as the sole culprit; but the elephant in the room is something else. It is the culture that continuously pushes students to the brink of burnout and brands it as ‘academic rigor.’ From having interminable quizzes, assignments and mid/final exams to being expected to excel in four/five different courses simultaneously, the pressure is intense. And students are expected to somehow manage it all—along with carving out time for extracurriculars and social life. University is not all about academics, and there are a multitude of other problems that students steer through during the semester. But, to their dismay, they are assumed to carry through it all. Justified it would be to say that by the end of the term, they are sapped of all strength, teetering on the precipice of collapse. It is a well-researched—and unfortunate—fact that depression and mental health problems abound in elite universities. The aforementioned factors, coupled with other personal and social challenges that characterize this phase of students’ academic journeys, become a crucible of pressure for them. They stumble, totter, and fall into a shroud of uncertainty. And, lamentably, the stigma associated with seeking help or counselling multiplies the problem. Mental health is stigmatized as something alien, suited for the ‘feeble.’ Amidst these circumstances, the onus falls upon the administration. Supportive counselling sessions which help students in threading their way through university life and academics are crucial; dedicated mental wellness centers need to be introduced, encouraged and endorsed; and students should be empowered to zoom in more on learning than deriving their self-worth from grades alone. This does not mean exhibiting apathy towards academic performance, but a reorientation of priorities which do not impede their growth and self-esteem. Finally, a reconsideration and reassessment of balancing academic rigor with students’ well-being is indispensable on the part of the administration. Mental well-being will naturally translate into more productivity.

Post-Doctorate (Peace Education) International Islamic University Islamabad The trilateral relationship between Pakistan, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia represents one of the most significant geopolitical partnerships in the Islamic world, with the potential to reshape regional dynamics and contribute meaningfully to global peace and stability. These three nations, each wielding considerable influence in their respective spheres, share common interests rooted in Islamic solidarity, strategic cooperation, and mutual security concerns. As the world navigates increasingly complex challenges including terrorism, economic instability and geopolitical tensions, the collaboration between these three countries offers a pragmatic pathway toward addressing regional conflicts and fostering sustainable development. This essay examines the historical foundations of this trilateral relationship, analyzes the contemporary opportunities and challenges facing these nations, and proposes a comprehensive vision for how Pakistan, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia can work collectively to promote peace, stability, and prosperity in their regions and beyond. The relationship between Pakistan, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia is deeply rooted in shared Islamic heritage and Cold War-era strategic alliances. Pakistan and Türkiye have maintain diplomatic relations since Pakistan’s independence in 1947, with both nations viewing themselves as guardians of Islamic values while navigating the complexities of secular governance and regional stability. Saudi Arabia, as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites and a major regional power, has historically served as a financial and ideological anchor for both Pakistan and Türkiye. These connections intensified during the Soviet-Afghan War when all three nations collaborated to support Afghan resistance movements, establishing patterns of military cooperation and intelligence sharing that persist today. The geographical positioning of these three nations makes their cooperation particularly valuable. Pakistan serves as a bridge between the Middle East and South Asia, Türkiye controls critical waterways and straddles Europe and Asia, while Saudi Arabia dominates the Arabian Peninsula and maintains substantial economic influence globally. Together, they represent a population exceeding 250 million people and combined GDP that makes them economically significant actors in the Islamic world. Their combined military capabilities, particularly Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Türkiye’s advanced defense industry, provide them with considerable strategic weight in global affairs. The three nations face remarkably similar security challenges that necessitate coordinated responses. Terrorism, particularly extremist groups operating across borders, poses a persistent threat to all three countries. Pakistan has struggled with militant organizations such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Türkiye faces challenges from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and various Islamist extremist groups, while Saudi Arabia confronts threats from Al-Qaeda affiliated organizations and Iranian-backed militias. A coordinated counterterrorism strategy that shares intelligence, coordinates military operations, and implements joint training programs could significantly enhance the security of all three nations while reducing opportunities for terrorist organizations to exploit jurisdictional gaps. Beyond security concerns, these nations share substantial economic interests. The growing middle class in Pakistan, Türkiye advanced manufacturing sector, and Saudi Arabia’s renewable energy ambitions create complementary opportunities for trade and investment. Regional infrastructure projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the proposed Middle Corridor connecting Central Asia to Europe through Türkiye, offer avenues for economic cooperation that could benefit all three countries. Additionally, all three nations recognize the importance of energy security in an increasingly multipolar world, creating opportunities for cooperation in renewable energy development, particularly given Saudi Arabia’s commitment to transitioning away from oil dependency and Türkiye strategic location for energy transit. Recent developments demonstrate growing momentum toward deeper trilateral cooperation The Economic Cooperation Organization, which includes all three nations along with others on the region, has emerged as a platform for discussing trade facilitation and infrastructure development. Pakistan and Türkiye have strengthened military-to-military ties through joint exercises and defense cooperation agreements, while Saudi Arabia has increased its defense: e procurement from both countries and hosted significant diplomatic summits bringing the three nations together. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization also provides a forum where these nations increasingly coordinate on regional security matters. Cultural and educational exchanges have expanded considerably, with increasing numbers of students from all three nations studying in each other’s universities and growing tourism facilitating people-to-people connections. Turkish media has gained significant popularity in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while Pakistani cultural products have found audiences in the other two countries, creating soft power synergies that strengthen bilateral ties. These cultural connections help build constituencies within each country that support deeper cooperation and mutual understanding. However, challenges remain in translating political will into concrete outcomes. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, trade barriers, and inconsistent policy implementation have hindered some cooperative initiatives. Additionally, each nation faces domestic political pressures that sometimes constrain their ability to fully commit to trilateral projects. Pakistan’s ongoing economic challenges, Türkiye internal political dynamics, and Saudi Arabia’s regional rivalry with Iran create competing priorities that sometimes divert attention and resources from trilateral initiatives.

A man’s hand emerges from a moving car window on Lahore’s Ferozepur Road, opens, and lets go, garbage tumbling onto the road like something the city never asked for. He drives on, does not look back. Nearby, another man treats a red light as inconvenience, not command, and guns through it because the road, for one careless breath, looks empty, not realizing a motorcyclist is already crossing into that emptiness. Neither would call himself careless. Ask them, and they will say, with the confidence of the unexamined life, that they are decent, law-abiding citizens, and narrowly, they are not wrong. Neither has broken a law that will ever find them. What they are missing is something smaller than law and, in the end, far heavier: civic sense. Civic sense is a phrase worn smooth by overuse and rarely defined. It is not patriotism, that loud, flag-waving thing. It is not obedience, that bowed, fearful thing. It is, instead, a kind of seeing, the awareness that one’s actions ripple into rooms one will never enter: the neighbour’s wall, turned dumping ground; the footpath, swallowed by parked motorcycles, leaving the pedestrian nowhere to stand but the road; the river downstream, carrying someone else’s filth to a family that never asked for it. It is the quiet discipline of behaving as though other people exist and matter, even when no policeman stands at the corner. Pakistan is not short of laws. Karachi’s bylaws on waste disposal would look entirely respectable in any city hall in the world. Islamabad’s traffic regulations are detailed enough to please the most exacting planner. What is missing is not ink on paper but something beneath the skin: the private sense that a rule is worth keeping even when no one is watching. This is why civic sense cannot be legislated into being, however many statutes are stacked atop one another. You can fine a man for littering. You cannot fine him into loving the street he lives on. Take something as unremarkable as a queue. Anyone who has stood at a bank counter, a railway window, a hospital OPD here knows the choreography by heart: the line exists as an idea until someone decides their time outweighs everyone else’s, and it dissolves like sugar in water. This was never really about queues. It is about a deeper assumption: that public space belongs to no one in particular, and rules, somehow, are meant for other people. Multiply that across a city of ten million restless souls, and you get gridlock that swallows whole afternoons, bins overflowing like wounds left untended, and parks abandoned within a year of their own birth. There is a cost to all this, rarely counted honestly. Karachi bleeds away enormous productive hours each year to congestion worsened, not created, by drivers who treat lanes as suggestions and red lights as optional punctuation. Public health suffers when open drains and uncollected waste become nurseries for disease, an arithmetic residents of nearly every major Pakistani city have learned to expect each monsoon. None of this appears, tidy and legible, in a budget document. It appears in hospital wards, in wages lost to sick days, in a low-grade sense that public life is something to survive rather than inhabit. It would be convenient to lay the blame entirely at poverty or lack of schooling, and there is a grain of truth there; a person fighting daily to feed a family has little room left for civic virtue. But the explanation only carries so far. Plenty of well-off, well-schooled Pakistanis fling litter from car windows and treat public parks as private gardens annexed from the commons. Civic sense is not a simple function of income. It is a habit, built through repetition, example, and whatever a society quietly agrees to call normal. This is precisely where schools could do far more. Civic education in most Pakistani classrooms, where it exists at all, survives as a chapter memorized for an exam rather than a practice lived out. A child taught that littering is wrong, who watches the adults around her litter daily without flinching, will absorb the adults’ hands, not the textbook’s words. Civic sense must be modelled, not narrated: teachers who insist on a clean classroom, parents who do not fling wrappers from car windows in front of watching children, local governments that follow a complaint through to its end instead of letting it dissolve into some forgotten file. None of this demands grand reform. It demands a shift in what ordinary people find embarrassing. In cities where civic sense runs deep, a litterer feels a small, hot flush of shame, not because a fine is coming, but because it simply is not done, the way one does not spit at a wedding. That social pressure is more powerful, and far cheaper, than any enforcement machinery a government could design. Building it takes time, and begins small: a shopkeeper sweeping the pavement outside his door, a driver waiting his turn at a roundabout though no one would know if he cheated, a resident reporting a broken streetlight instead of learning to walk around the dark. Cities are not, in truth, built by planners and engineers alone. They are built street by street, choice by choice, by the accumulated decisions of the people who walk them. A country may possess the widest roads and tallest towers in the region and still feel chaotic if the people moving through them share no responsibility toward them. Civic sense is not a lesson for children, nor a slogan for a billboard. It is the invisible infrastructure, unseen and indispensable, that makes every other infrastructure actually work. The writer is serving as Director of the Institute of Humanities and Arts at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan.

A familiar and recurring phantom is once again haunting the political and intellectual horizon of Pakistan: the clamor for administrative redistribution and the carving out of new provinces. Whenever structural collapse, economic decay, and institutional governance reach their absolute nadir, the sanctums of power and the opaque enclaves of the establishment begin to chant a singular, predictable refrain. The root of all systemic malady, we are told, lies in the sheer geographical expanse of our existing provinces, and the ultimate panacea is the relentless division of the state. When one scrutinizes the subterranean motives, logical contradictions, and political expediencies governing this discourse, an uncomfortable truth starkly emerges. This persistent endeavor to shift the blame for chronic misgovernance and policy failure onto geographical boundaries, cultural entities, and ethnic identities is merely a resurrection of a time-worn colonial playbook—a deliberate diversion designed to distract the citizenry from real structural grievances while consolidating the apparatus of absolute control. History bears poignant witness to the reality that whenever ruling elites fail to mask their administrative ineptitude, systemic incompetence, and constitutional deviations, they seek refuge behind the seductive mirage of better governance, transforming the republic into an endless laboratory of reckless experimentation. One is compelled to ask: does any sound mind truly accept the medical wisdom of amputating a limb simply because a malignant ulcer has taken root in the arm? Are the pathologies of governance so superficial that merely redrawing cartographic lines will spontaneously engender distributive justice, institutional merit, the rule of law, and administrative transparency? A careful, unvarnished reading of pre-partition South Asian history reveals that this formula of administrative fragmentation was never a native or democratic innovation. Rather, it was a tested and ruthless instrument of British imperialism, rooted entirely in the cynical philosophy of “Divide and Rule.” In October 1905, when Lord Curzon partitioned the sprawling province of Bengal under the alluring and deceptive banner of administrative efficiency, improved governance, and better public service delivery, the official justification was identical to today’s rhetoric: that managing such a vast demographic mass from a single center was untenable. Yet history dealt a merciless blow to that colonial experiment. The people of Bengal rightly perceived the partition as a direct, existential assault on their linguistic, cultural, and political integrity, rising in fierce and unyielding resistance. Ultimately, the imperial master was forced into an ignominious retreat, revoking the partition of Bengal in 1911. That historical episode remains an enduring monument and a stark warning to contemporary rulers who imagine they can trifle with the collective historical memory, cultural affinity, and geographical unity of a populace under the intoxicating influence of unchecked power. From the very inception of Pakistan, the ruling classes consistently spurned the genuine principles of cooperative federalism, choosing instead to enshrine coercive and authoritarian centralism as the ultimate guarantee of their survival. During the formative decades of the republic, when the delicate question of distributing democratic rights among diverse constituent units arose, the dominant factions lacked the political maturity required for a pluralistic state. Instead, they forced all the western provinces and states into an unnatural straitjacket known as the “One Unit” scheme. That dark chapter of authoritarian engineering laid bare the callous indifference of the ruling elite toward the historical identities and rich diversity of the people, subjugating all societal bonds to the preservation of concentrated power. When that forced administrative edifice eventually fractured under the weight of unrelenting public resistance, the four-province federal structure was reluctantly conceded. Yet the true spirit of federalism was never allowed to breathe. The constitutional imperatives of provincial autonomy were systematically subverted, resources were inequitably distributed, and the unquenchable thirst for hegemony converted the federation into a fragile, crisis-ridden entity perpetually at war with its own constituent parts. Renowned scholars and theorists of public administration and cooperative federalism universally agree that when any sub-national unit exceeds optimal parameters in territory and population, it inevitably succumbs to bureaucratic inertia and administrative paralysis. According to global academic consensus, effective public service delivery demands a balanced proportional equilibrium between geography and demography, ensuring that the writ of the state and essential services penetrate even the most peripheral districts. However, the high-performing federal democracies of the world—such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Germany—do not achieve excellence in governance merely because their constituent units happen to be geographically compact. They succeed because they rigorously enforce the foundational principle of **Subsidiarity**, which dictates that governance decisions must always be executed at the lowest possible tier capable of addressing them, rather than being arrogated by a distant center or provincial capital. Conversely, the powerful elite who orchestrate policy from behind the veil in Pakistan remain profoundly detached from this philosophical prerequisite. The core issue here is not the mere physical size of a province; it is the centralization of coercive power, deep-seated fiscal distortions, and a bankrupt political intent. In a country like Pakistan, where provinces already depend abjectly on federal transfers through the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, attempting to carve out new provinces without addressing the fundamentals of fiscal federalism will only exponentially multiply the economic burden. If one merely replicates provincial capitals, bloated cabinets, and superfluous administrative secretariats without dismantling the underlying corruption, nepotism, and systemic incompetence, the public will find no relief from their miseries. Instead, the state will be pushed deeper into fiscal insolvency and bureaucratic suffocation. This brings us to the most fundamental and inescapable question: if four provinces were to be multiplied into eight, sixteen, or thirty-six administrative units tomorrow, would traditional political parties magically vanish? Would the actors occupying the corridors of power in these new provinces descend from another planet, or would they simply be the identical political dynasties and entrenched interest groups of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the Pakistan Muslim League, or Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf donning new nameplates? When the foundational structural architecture, the prevailing political culture, and the patronage networks of the elite remain utterly unaltered, how can the mere shifting of administrative borders dissolve the cancer of corruption, the

I grew up in Rawalpindi Cantt, where my father served as the principal of St. Mary’s Cambridge High School. Though my professional journey has carried me across continents and I now reside in the United States, my heart beats unyielding rhythm with the 260 million Pakistanis who are my true country fellows. Every night in my dreams, I walk the familiar streets of Rawalpindi. I graduated from Islamabad Model College, and to this day, the majestic Margalla Hills grace the screen of my laptop as a constant reminder of home. As a young student, I stood with pride to sing our National Anthem: “Pak sar zamin shaad bad, Kishwar-e-hasin shad bad, Tu nishaan-e-azm-e-ali shaan, Arz-e-Pakistan! Markaz-e-yaqin shaad bad.” That sacred pledge of resolve, faith, and devotion remains embedded in my soul, driving my lifelong conviction in the destiny of our homeland. Over a professional career spanning three decades across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and Russia, I have observed the mechanics of statecraft, economic transformation, and human capital under diverse political systems. Through these global experiences, one reality has become undeniably clear: the Pakistani nation possesses an extraordinary, high-caliber intellectual capacity that matches—and frequently surpasses—the finest minds anywhere in the world. From the scientific and medical sectors in Europe to the dynamic technology ecosystems of the United States, Pakistani professionals consistently perform at the highest echelons of innovation, corporate leadership, medicine, engineering, and public service. United States Presidents have repeatedly and publicly commended the invaluable contributions of the vibrant Pakistani diaspora to American infrastructure, economic vitality, and technological advancement. When placed within transparent, rule-of-law-based systems, Pakistani talent routinely excels. The foundational problem facing Pakistan today is not a deficit of human intelligence or natural resources, but a deep-seated structural crisis within its governing institutions. The primary obstacle preventing Pakistan from realizing its true global standing is systemic corruption, the deliberate destruction of meritocracy, and a reckless deficit of vision among its political leadership. For decades, the national political landscape has been dominated by self-serving figures who lack both statesmanship and the basic literacy required to navigate the twenty-first century. We live in an era defined by artificial intelligence, digital economies, and high-tech governance, yet the traditional political leadership remains largely ignorant of technologies like AI, machine learning, and modern public administration. Their approach to power focuses heavily on short-term patronage, wealth accumulation, and personal preservation, while ignoring the core developmental needs of the population. This total lack of strategic vision directly fuels the socio-political unrest observed across key regions, including Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The grievances in these areas are fundamentally economic and administrative, born from decades of neglect, broken promises, and predatory governance. Greedy political elites have consistently exploited local resources and suppressed institutional development, leaving local populations disenfranchised and impoverished. When regional populations are denied basic justice, modern infrastructure, quality education, and economic dignity, instability naturally follows. The issues facing these provinces cannot be resolved through superficial political arrangements or force alone. They demand genuine administrative devolution, economic fairness, and an absolute end to elite political exploitation. Pakistan’s growing population, rapid urbanization, and regional economic disparities further justify a serious evaluation of its overall administrative structure. Creating smaller, manageable administrative units or new provinces can bring government directly to the people. However, redrawing boundaries alone is not a magic solution. If corrupt practices, political interference, and weak institutional capacity persist, new administrative divisions will only multiply secretariats, ministries, and state expenditures without improving the daily lives of citizens. Any restructuring must be guided by objective criteria, rigorous economic planning, and transparent public participation, ensuring that power shifts completely down to local municipal and union council levels. To break the longstanding cycle of administrative decay, Pakistan requires an aggressive shift in its approach to governance and elite accountability. The country must adopt an uncompromising strategy similar to the Saudi Arabia model initiated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)—a decisive, systemic crackdown on institutional corruption and elite financial impunity. Every asset, real estate portfolio, and offshore account illegally acquired abroad by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and public officials must be systematically traced, frozen, and confiscated under international legal frameworks. Returning these stolen billions to the national treasury is not merely a moral imperative; it is an urgent economic necessity. A nation cannot thrive while its financial reserves are continuously drained to fund luxury lifestyles in foreign capitals. Achieving financial integrity and self-reliance is the essential prerequisite for building true national strength. History demonstrates that economic power is the absolute mother of military power and national sovereignty. No state can maintain a robust, modern defense apparatus over the long term without a self-sustaining economy, a strong currency, and a productive technological base. By recovering looted public wealth and redirecting it toward national infrastructure, energy independence, industrial output, and digital education, Pakistan can rapidly eliminate its dependence on foreign debt and assert its sovereignty on the global stage. True economic independence grants a nation unyielding leverage in international affairs. The path forward demands an urgent transition to AI-driven good governance and digital administration. Human discretion in public procurement, land record management, tax collection, customs clearance, and civil service recruitment must be systematically replaced with automated, algorithmic systems that eliminate bribery and political patronage. Artificial intelligence platforms can optimize public spending, track state resource distribution in real time, monitor civic projects, and guarantee complete transparency across every tier of government. When civil service recruitment, performance evaluations, and judicial tracking are governed by objective data frameworks rather than political influence, absolute meritocracy will return to state institutions. Furthermore, national development requires a structured investment in human capital. Establishing dedicated leadership academies and technical institutes will ensure that the next generation of public administrators is versed in high-tech policy design, data analytics, global trade dynamics, and financial management. Nations such as Singapore, South Korea, Estonia, and Rwanda have proven that rapid transformation does not require unlimited natural wealth. It demands disciplined execution, unyielding meritocracy, technologically integrated institutions, and transparent leadership.

Pakistan has just taken on a new kind of commitment, and it has caught people’s attention in a way that ordinary diplomatic announcements rarely do. Pakistan’s ties with Saudi Arabia go back decades, and its defence relationship with Türkiye has grown steadily closer in recent years, so cooperation between the three is not surprising on its own. What is new is the nature of the commitment: an attack on any one of the three countries is now to be treated as an attack on all three.   This is not really about whether Pakistan should be working with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye. It is about whether Islamabad has entered this arrangement with a clear enough sense of what it wants from it, and what obligations it may quietly be creating for the future.   It also helps to get the timeline right. This is not Pakistan’s first mutual-defence commitment with Saudi Arabia. Back in September 2025, the two countries had already signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, treating aggression against either as aggression against both. What is new in 2026 is the attempt to bring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye together inside one shared framework. Seen that way, this is less a first step and more a new layer added to a relationship that was already forming. An Alliance at a Complicated Moment The agreement comes at a difficult time. Pakistan sits right next to Iran and has a tense relationship with India, while both Saudi Arabia and Türkiye maintain strong economic ties with New Delhi. At the same time, Islamabad has to keep managing working relationships with Iran, China, the United States and its Gulf partners. Any defence commitment, then, has to be understood against several relationships that do not always move in the same direction.   Pakistan is also not entering this alliance from a position of comfort. The country is dealing with economic, security and political pressures all at once, along with instability on its Afghan border and a delicate Iran border to manage. That is a lot to balance already, which is exactly why the practical details of this new commitment matter more than the ceremony around its announcement. What Has Pakistan Actually Committed To? The basic idea is simple: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. But what does that actually mean in practice? What would genuinely trigger the commitment, and what military support would Pakistan be expected to give—or receive? And what happens if the three countries find themselves with different interests in the same crisis?   Pakistan’s own Foreign Ministry offered some sense of this in July 2026, saying that agreements of this kind mostly involve peacetime military cooperation, and that in an actual war, how far the commitment would go still needs to be worked out. If anything, that statement makes the case for more clarity, not less.   That uncertainty matters most in two situations close to home. If Pakistan faced another serious confrontation with India, would Saudi Arabia and Türkiye offer real support, given their own important ties to New Delhi? And if tensions with Iran escalated, would Pakistan be expected to take a position that could strain its relationship with its neighbour? Even the growing water dispute with India, one of Pakistan’s most basic security concerns, has not been publicly linked to any shared plan among the three partners. These questions remain open.   There is also a quieter concern worth sitting with. Saudi Arabia brings financial strength to the table, Türkiye brings a growing defence industry, and Pakistan brings manpower, real operational experience and nuclear deterrence. If these strengths are genuinely shared, all three countries could benefit. But if the load falls unevenly, with Pakistan carrying most of the manpower while its own position in a future India crisis stays unclear, the costs could end up outweighing the gains.   History offers a useful reminder here. In his 1983 book Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State, Tariq Ali examined Pakistan’s political system, its foreign policy, and the powerful role the military has long played within the state. The circumstances today are very different, but his broader question still feels relevant: can Pakistan turn its usefulness to other powers into lasting strength of its own?   Something else stood out alongside the agreement itself: the mood surrounding it. Governments naturally welcome diplomatic wins, but a defence pact carrying possible wartime obligations is a different kind of agreement than a trade deal. With so many practical details still unclear, the celebratory tone raises a fair question: is this a carefully thought-through long-term strategy, or mostly the excitement of the moment? Commitments this serious deserve a clear explanation before they deserve applause.   Pakistan must also make sure its growing ties with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye stay compatible with its long-standing relationship with China, and with the working relations it still needs with Iran and the United States. Strategic Relevance Is Not Strategic Autonomy Pakistan is becoming more important to other countries. Its military strength, its geography, its nuclear deterrence, and its relationships across very different global camps all give Islamabad real value in the eyes of others. But being useful to other countries is not the same as having a clear strategy of your own.   Strategic autonomy simply means that Pakistan knows what it wants and makes sure its partnerships actually serve that. It means asking not only what Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, China or the United States want from Pakistan, but what Pakistan wants from each of them in return. A country can be militarily valuable, geographically important and courted by several powers, and still have no defined national strategy behind it. That difference sits at the heart of this entire discussion.   Washington’s fairly quiet response also deserves attention. There is no evidence that the United States is deliberately setting a trap for Pakistan. But Islamabad should still think carefully about whether a closer Saudi-Pakistani security relationship could, over time,