Islamabad’s carriage ride

In early April the grain stood stacked by the roadside in Sahiwal, DG Khan and Bahawalnagar, harvested and bagged, waiting for a buyer the system had promised but never delivered. Three months later the buyer arrived. Not the state purchasing from Pakistani farmers, but the state purchasing from foreign suppliers, paying in scarce dollars. Pakistan’s 2025-26 wheat production is estimated at 29.31 million tonnes against consumption of roughly 31.9 million. The gap is real. This import, however, is not the product of a harvest failure. It is the product of a procurement failure. The wheat existed. What did not exist was the institutional will to buy it at a price that reflected its value while it was still in the farmer’s hands. Private intermediaries bought at Rs 2,900-3,200 per 40 kilograms from farmers who had loans falling due and no storage. Those intermediaries held the grain and watched the open-market price climb to Rs 4,600 by July. The middleman’s profit was the farmer’s loss. The state, having refused to spend rupees in April, must now spend dollars in August. The invoice, compiled from months of evasion, comes due all at once. The cycle was predictable. After the 2022 floods the administrative reflex became “import.” In 2023-24 the country allowed large duty-free private imports into a market already carrying record stocks. That was 3.44 million tonnes at a cost of $1.005 billion. In 2024 and 2025 the Minimum Support Price was first ignored and then abolished under IMF conditionality linked to a $7.1 billion Extended Fund Facility. This happened years ahead of the phased timeline the Fund had allowed until FY2026. In October 2025 the government reversed course and restored the price, but the supporting machinery never materialised. In January 2026 the aggregator model collapsed. Punjab set a procurement target of three million tonnes, but by late May, with partial procurement continuing into June, total procurement fell far short of the target. Three seasons, three frameworks, one recurring failure: the system arrives after the price has already been set. The old procurement system was deeply flawed. It captured only about a quarter of production and skewed toward large landholders and politically influential actors. According to a Competition Commission of Pakistan analysis, the top 40 per cent of farmers in Punjab sold 84 per cent of their wheat to official buyers, while the bottom 40 per cent sold only 6.4 per cent, forced to accept below-benchmark prices from private traders. Abolishing it overnight without private storage, warehouse-receipt financing or functioning commodity exchanges did not liberate the small farmer. It exposed him to cartels he could not match. The state was weak when farmers needed a floor. It is assertive now that consumers need a ceiling. That is not food security. It is political timing. The cost will be paid in November. Punjab’s wheat acreage has already fallen sharply. It fell by roughly 5.5 per cent between 2023-24 and 2024-25, a reduction of close to a million acres, according to official crop reporting data corroborated by independent assessments. The decline has continued into 2025-26. Farmers are not abandoning wheat out of ideology. They are doing arithmetic after three years of suppressed returns, delayed buyers and policy uncertainty. Many are moving into canola and mustard. These are thinner markets with less infrastructure, no public benchmarks and highly concentrated private buyers. Unlike wheat, which benefits from a massive state-backed consumption floor and established procurement infrastructure, edible oils face different demand elasticities and lack the same strategic reserve backing. If oilseed acreage expands faster than processing capacity, the same distress-sale pattern will simply be exported to a new crop. Climate stress amplifies the risk. The 2025 floods were the worst in Punjab in four decades, and the 2026 harvest lost further volume to heat and storms. Rising temperatures and erratic rainfall are no longer background noise; they are actively cutting yields. Yet the deeper threat remains institutional. A farmer who repeatedly experiences losses without protection responds rationally. He reduces acreage. He shifts crops. He exits. And once he exits, he does not return. Sovereignty does not lie only in borders or foreign reserves. It also lies in the ability to buy, store and release grain when the market fails. By that measure the import announcement is not a solution. It is the price of a failure we chose. The 2027 harvest window opens in November. Not in April when the crop arrives. Not in July when the state panics, but in November when the farmer stands in his field and decides what to plant. On that morning he will not be thinking about policy frameworks or export targets or buffer stocks. He will be thinking about what the last three seasons cost him and whether the state that failed him in April, imported in July and abandoned him after harvest has given him any reason to trust it again. That is the only question that matters now. That is the question that must be answered before he plants.

By General Ghulam Mustafa (Served in different staff and command assignments, commanded a Corps, raised and commanded Army Strategic Force Command) & Engineer Arshad H Abbasi, Co-founder, Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and Engineering University Peshawar, International Transboundary Water Expert We are not screenwriters, and this is not the plot of some Hollywood picture about killer robots. We write this together as two men who came to the same conclusion from two different directions — one of us a soldier who has stood post and commanded troops, the other a mechanic and engineer who has spent his life with his hands inside machines, the kind who can tell you what’s wrong with an engine by the sound it makes before it ever fails. Between us, we have spent the last two years doing the same thing every serious military professional on earth has been doing: watching. Watching Russia and Ukraine grind through the third year of a war that has quietly buried the twentieth century. Watching the United States and Israel fight Iran through the spring and summer of 2026 in a conflict that opened with a strike on a supreme leader and closed, for now, with tankers stacked outside a blockaded Strait of Hormuz. We have not been watching for drama. We have been watching for the future, because the future is what these two wars have been showing us, in plain daylight, for anyone willing to look. In these two wars, our role has not been that of commentators cheering for one flag or another. It has been closer to that of historians standing over wreckage — the unglamorous, unsleeping work of the crash investigator rather than the war correspondent. Every video of an intercepted missile over the Gulf, every geolocated frame of a naval drone striking a Russian hull, every leaked spec sheet of a downed quadcopter over the Black Sea or a jammed loitering munition over the Iranian coast, has to be logged, timestamped, and cross-checked against the next one. That is what wreckage analysis actually is: not excitement, but discipline — recording what a piece of equipment was asked to do, and what it actually did, until the pattern becomes undeniable. Two years of that discipline, applied to two very different wars fought six thousand kilometres apart, keeps returning the same verdict. Here is what we have seen. The age of the tank column, the massed infantry advance, the fighter squadron duel, and even the aircraft carrier as the ultimate expression of national power — that age is closing. Not because these machines have become useless overnight, but because a battlefield now watched by satellites, saturated with cheap sensors, and swarmed by thousands of low-cost drones has no room left for anything large, slow, or expensive to hide in. Ukraine, a country with no serious blue-water navy, used naval drones costing a fraction of a warship to cripple roughly 40 percent of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and force the rest to retreat from Crimea’s shores. In the Iran war, American carrier strike groups sat further offshore than doctrine once assumed necessary, and the campaign’s real damage was done by long-range strike, electronic warfare, and a naval blockade — not by tank divisions crossing a border, because there was no border to cross. The lesson repeats itself in both theatres: mass a large, valuable, human-crewed asset in the open, and you have built an expensive target. The war has moved to the phone in a soldier’s hand and the joystick on a folding table a hundred kilometres from the front. That is the second thing the two of us keep coming back to, and we believe it is right: future wars will be fought on mobile phones, controlling drones and robots. A robotic aircraft or ground vehicle can turn harder, dive faster, and sit still for longer than any pilot or driver, because it carries no pulse, no fear, no fatigue, and no family waiting at home. It needs no food. It needs no rest. It bleeds nothing when it dies except budget. Robots are already taking on the jobs that used to cost human lives — clearing minefields, hauling ammunition across exposed ground, flying reconnaissance into airspace too dangerous for a manned cockpit, making split-second targeting decisions with artificial intelligence faster than any human crew ever could. Armed drones and robotic ground vehicles now engage targets without risking a single pilot or driver. And because production, not stockpiling, decides who wins a prolonged war, the country that can build the most machines the fastest — not the country with the largest inherited arsenal — will hold the advantage. That is why the truest weapon in this new age is not a missile or a jet. It is the strength of a nation’s economy: its factories, its chip supply, its ability to iterate a drone design in weeks instead of years. Nowhere is this arithmetic more urgent than on the roof of the world, along the disputed frontier between India and China. China is not merely testing drones there; it is one of the most important production engines in the world for both, and it has been pouring resources into robotic ground systems, sensors, and autonomous platforms specifically postured along the Line of Actual Control, at altitudes where a human soldier struggles simply to breathe, let alone fight. Every one of those machines can be commanded from a warm room in Beijing, thousands of kilometres from the mountain. It needs no oxygen tent, no field ration, no medical evacuation. It can occupy a ridge and simply wait there, indefinitely, with a precision no human sentry can match, and it costs Beijing nothing but electricity and silicon when it is destroyed. Against that, India fields one of the largest land armies on the planet — an active strength of roughly 1.25 million soldiers, organized into seven operational commands and fourteen corps of holding and strike formations, built on a tradition of sacrifice, discipline, and sheer human

By General Ghulam Mustafa & Arshad H Abbasi  We have stood together at the foot of the Great Wall of China more than once at different times, but today a thought has returned to both of us, unspoken until now. The Wall runs some 21,196 kilometres across dynasties and deserts, built stone by stone over centuries to secure a civilization’s frontier. Pakistan’s own most dangerous frontier — the Durand Line separating us from Afghanistan — runs roughly 2,625 kilometres, barely an eighth of that length. If a civilization on the scale of China could raise a barrier of that magnitude with the tools of the third century BC, then securing a border less than an eighth as long, with the tools of the twenty-first century, cannot be beyond the reach of the partnership Beijing and Islamabad have built. We do not ask China to build us a wall of stone. We ask Beijing to help us build something sturdier: a wall of enforced accountability against the militants using Afghan soil to bleed Pakistan dry. That bleeding is not a metaphor. Since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Kabul, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has operated with a freedom of movement across our western border that it never enjoyed before. Balochistan burns. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa buries its soldiers and its schoolchildren in the same week. And now the shockwaves have reached Punjab, the country’s demographic and economic core. Every honest accounting of this violence traces back to the same source: sanctuary, training, and logistical freedom on Afghan soil, tolerated or unchecked by an administration in Kabul that owes its survival, in no small part, to Chinese patience and Chinese capital. This is why we write to Beijing, and to Beijing specifically, rather than to Washington, Brussels, or Moscow. Survey after survey inside Pakistan finds that well over eight in ten of our citizens consider China, not any Western power, to be Pakistan’s true friend. Our leaders have called this friendship higher than the Himalayas and deeper than the ocean, and we do not repeat that line as ceremony. We repeat it because it is the only frame in which Beijing can hear what we are about to say plainly: no other country on earth holds the leverage over the Taliban that China holds, and no other country has more to lose from squandering it. Consider what China has already built in Afghanistan without formal recognition of its government. The Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company signed a twenty-five-year contract to develop the Amu Darya oil basin, committing roughly $150 million annually and scaling toward $540 million over three years. State-backed firms continue to negotiate the long-stalled Mes Aynak copper concession, one of the largest untapped copper deposits on earth, alongside serious interest in Afghan lithium and iron ore. Beijing has cut tariffs on 98 % of Afghan imports. An active Chinese embassy operates in Kabul today, accepting Taliban-appointed diplomats, even as formal recognition is withheld. This is not incidental engagement. This is the deepest economic relationship any major power currently has with the Taliban administration, and it gives China something no airstrike or sanction regime has ever given anyone: the ability to make continued investment conditional on results. We are asking Beijing to use that leverage with the same discipline it has already shown in defending its own security interests. China has made clear, repeatedly and without apology, that it will not tolerate the Turkistan Islamic Party or East Turkistan Islamic Movement fighters operating from Afghan territory against Xinjiang. We are asking only that China extend that identical, non-negotiable standard to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its allied networks operating against us. If Kabul can be made to understand that Chinese mining contracts, Chinese tariff relief, and Chinese diplomatic cover all depend on a genuine, verifiable crackdown on TTP sanctuaries, this insurgency does not need years to end. It needs a Kabul administration that finally has more to lose from harbouring militants than from disowning them. But security pressure alone will not hold, and here we want to be honest about what Afghanistan actually needs from its neighbours, China chief among them. Afghanistan’s national literacy rate stands at just 37 % — 52 % among men, a mere 27 % among women — and UNESCO reports that more than nine in ten ten-year-olds in the country cannot read a simple sentence. Two point two million adolescent girls remain locked out of secondary school entirely, the only country on earth to enforce such a ban, at a projected cost to Afghanistan’s own economy of nearly $9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066. No pipeline, no copper mine, and no railway line will stabilize a country where the next generation cannot read the contracts, safety manuals, or engineering plans that would let them run these projects themselves. It is China’s duty, as the neighbour with the deepest economic stake and the clearest long-term interest in a stable Afghanistan, to make literacy, vocational training, and the reopening of girls’ education a hard condition of its investment — not out of charity, but because an illiterate, disenfranchised population is the same population the TTP and ETIM recruit from. Afghanistan does not need a foreign army. It needs classrooms, teachers, and a workforce equipped to build the country’s own future, backed by an investor patient and disciplined enough to insist on it. Every failed intervention in Afghanistan’s modern history has shared the same flaw: outsiders who came to fight a war, not to build a neighbour. Britain came and left. The Soviet Union came and left, at ruinous cost to itself. NATO and the United States spent two decades and did not leave functioning institutions behind them. China is different in the one respect that matters most: China is not leaving. It shares a border with Afghanistan. Its investments are measured in decades, not electoral cycles. And it has, through the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, already built the template for what real

Every political leader is eventually defined not by promises but by performance under pressure. Pakistan has faced repeated political, economic and administrative challenges over the decades, and each crisis has demanded leadership with experience, patience and the ability to find solutions. In my view, Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif has established himself as a leader who understands governance, negotiation and crisis management. His journey from grassroots politics to becoming Chief Minister of Punjab and later Prime Minister of Pakistan has given him decades of experience in dealing with the practical realities of administration and public service. His reputation as a hands-on administrator comes from his approach to governance. During his tenure as Chief Minister of Punjab, he focused on reforms in education, healthcare, infrastructure and public service delivery. His fast-paced working style earned him the title “Shehbaz Speed”, reflecting his emphasis on implementation and results. I first met Shehbaz Sharif in 2005 at his flat in Avenfield House, London. Over the past twenty-one years, I have had the opportunity to observe his political journey closely. While journalism requires independence and critical analysis, personal observation also provides a unique perspective. Throughout this period, his commitment to Pakistan and his passion for public service have remained evident. During his years as Chief Minister of Punjab, I witnessed his determination to create opportunities for young Pakistanis, particularly through education reforms. Initiatives such as the Punjab Education Endowment Fund, Danish Schools, merit-based scholarships, laptop schemes for students and stipends for high achievers aimed to expand access to quality education. The policy of sending high-performing students abroad, including to the United Kingdom and other European countries, was designed to broaden their vision and expose them to international standards. These initiatives reflected a belief that education is the foundation for long-term national development. His reforms in healthcare and infrastructure also became a significant part of his governance record. Supporters believe that his focus on improving public services in Punjab provided a model of administrative delivery that he later brought to the national level. As Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif has faced one of the most challenging periods in Pakistan’s recent history. His supporters credit his government with helping stabilise the economy, restoring international engagement and steering Pakistan away from the risk of a deeper financial crisis. Although major economic challenges remain, they argue that difficult decisions have helped create a more stable foundation. One of the notable features of the current political landscape has been cooperation between state institutions. Supporters view the working relationship between Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir as an example of institutional coordination aimed at achieving national stability and economic progress. Pakistan has also sought a more active role on the international stage. Supporters point to its diplomatic engagement, including efforts to promote dialogue during periods of international tension, as evidence that Pakistan continues to play an important role in regional and global affairs. In my view, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to steer Pakistan through difficult circumstances. Based on my observations over more than two decades, I believe he has faced major challenges before and has the experience and determination to overcome them again. His strength lies in his understanding of governance, his ability to negotiate with different stakeholders and his focus on delivery. Whether dealing with political partners, institutions or international partners, his supporters believe his experience gives him an advantage in managing complex situations. However, Pakistan’s journey towards prosperity requires continued reforms. Economic pressures, inflation, unemployment and governance challenges remain serious concerns. The next phase must focus on ensuring that national progress translates into improvements in the daily lives of ordinary citizens. In my opinion, Pakistan also needs stronger administrative decentralisation. Whether through new provinces or more empowered administrative units, decision-making should be brought closer to the people. More effective local governance can improve accountability, strengthen public services and accelerate development across the country. Pakistan now needs consistency, stability and a collective commitment from all stakeholders. Political differences are part of democracy, but national progress requires institutions to work together and focus on the common goal of prosperity. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has built his political career around crisis management and public administration. His greatest challenge now is to convert stability into sustainable growth and lasting development. History will ultimately judge every leader by the impact they leave behind. For Shehbaz Sharif, the opportunity remains to transform difficult times into a period of economic recovery, institutional strength and a stronger Pakistan for future generations.

In August 2022, satellite images showed the Indus River in Pakistan swelling to more than ten times its normal width, submerging a third of the country. Less than two years later, in early 2024, the same river system was running far below its seasonal average in its upper reaches, triggering emergency irrigation cuts in Punjab. Flood and drought extremes that once defined different eras are now defining the same decade. For the nearly 40 percent of humanity that lives in river basins shared by two or more countries, this volatility is turning a development issue into a security issue.   Water has always been political, but climate change is making it less predictable and less abundant at the moments when it is most needed. Three basins the Indus, the Nile, and the Mekong illustrate how historical treaties, new infrastructure, and a warming climate are converging to test whether water can be managed as a shared resource or will become a source of sustained confrontation.   The Indus: A Treaty Under Strain   The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank, is often cited as one of the most durable water-sharing agreements in the world. It survived two wars and multiple crises between India and Pakistan. Under its terms, the three eastern rivers Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej were allocated to India, and the three western rivers Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab to Pakistan, with limited rights for India to develop run-of-the-river hydropower upstream.   The treaty was designed for a different hydrological and political reality. It divides water volumes based on historical flows, with no explicit mechanism for climate adaptation. It also established a complex dispute resolution process involving a Neutral Expert and a Court of Arbitration.   Tensions have centered on India’s hydropower projects in Jammu and Kashmir, such as Kishenganga and Ratle. Pakistan argues that the design of these projects particularly pondage capacity and spillway gates violates treaty restrictions and could give India control over the timing of flows that are critical for Pakistani agriculture, which supports more than 80 percent of the country’s irrigated agriculture and employs a large portion of its workforce. India argues that the projects are within treaty allowances, are necessary for its own energy security and development, and that it has never interfered with Pakistan’s share.   Both governments have sought recourse through the treaty’s mechanisms simultaneously in recent years, leading to parallel proceedings that have raised questions about the treaty’s procedural resilience. Experts note that the underlying driver is not just engineering, but scarcity: glacier retreat in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya, altered monsoon patterns, and rising demand from growing populations on both sides are reducing the margin for error that allowed the treaty to function for six decades.   The Nile: Sovereignty Versus Survival   No river illustrates the clash between national development and downstream vulnerability more starkly than the Nile.   Ethiopia, where about 85 percent of the Nile’s water reaching Egypt originates from the Blue Nile, began construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, GERD, in 2011. With a capacity of over 5,000 megawatts, the dam is central to Ethiopia’s plan to expand electricity access still below 50 percent in rural areas at the start of construction and to become a regional power exporter. For Addis Ababa, the dam is a matter of sovereignty and economic transformation, financed domestically and built without external funding.   For Egypt, which depends on the Nile for approximately 90 percent of its freshwater, the dam is viewed as an existential risk. A reduction in flow during the multi-year filling period, or during future droughts if filling and operating rules are not agreed, could directly affect agriculture in the Nile Delta and drinking water for over 100 million people. Egypt has therefore insisted on a legally binding agreement on filling and long-term operation, including drought mitigation mechanisms.   Sudan sits between the two, potentially benefiting from regulated flows and cheap electricity, but also concerned about dam safety and its own water needs.   More than a decade of negotiations mediated by the African Union, the United States, and others have failed to produce a binding deal. Ethiopia has proceeded with filling the reservoir, arguing that this is a natural consequence of exercising its right to develop resources within its borders under the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization. Egypt has argued for the principle of no significant harm and historical rights. International water law, primarily the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, contains both principles, but leaves their balancing to negotiation.   The dispute has remained diplomatic rather than military, despite inflammatory rhetoric at times, and has spurred renewed discussion about benefit-sharing for example, linking power trade to water security rather than zero-sum volume allocation.   The Mekong: Upstream Control   In Southeast Asia, the Mekong River supports the food security of more than 60 million people. Its annual flood pulse drives one of the world’s most productive inland fisheries in the Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia and sustains rice cultivation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, which produces roughly half of Vietnam’s rice.   The construction of eleven large hydropower dams on the mainstream of the upper Mekong in China where the river is called Lancang and more than 100 tributary dams downstream, principally in Laos, has fundamentally altered that pulse. Data from the Mekong River Commission, an intergovernmental body of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, shows changes in seasonal water levels, sediment transport, and fisheries.   China, which is not a full member of the Commission but a dialogue partner, argues that its dams provide flood control and dry-season flow augmentation, and are essential for its clean energy transition. Data sharing has improved in recent years, with Beijing providing year-round water level and rainfall data.   Downstream countries offer a different perspective. Thailand and Cambodia have raised concerns about unpredictable releases affecting navigation and farming. Vietnam is particularly vulnerable: reduced sediment flow scientists estimate that dams have trapped more than half of the sediment

Pakistan is about to privatise three of its distribution companies — FESCO, GEPCO and IESCO — and call it reform. It is not reform. It is triage, dressed up by three institutions that have run out of the credibility to call it anything else. The government picked these three not because they are the future of Pakistan’s grid, but because they are the only ones healthy enough to survive being sold. Their transmission and distribution losses sit around 9–10 percent, low by Pakistani standards, and their books are clean enough to attract a buyer. That is not a privatisation strategy. That is a garage sale of the family’s least broken furniture while the roof still leaks — supervised by the very carpenters who let the roof rot. And look who is showing up to bid. Expressions of interest have come from a handful of Pakistani business houses — conglomerates looking for a new asset class. Not one of them has run a national distribution network at scale, with the theft, the political interference, and the feeder-level rot that defines an ex-WAPDA DISCO. We have seen this film before. It was called K-Electric. At the time of its 2005 privatisation, KE was drawing a subsidy of roughly Rs 8 billion. Two decades later, it needed a Rs163 billion tariff differential subsidy in the FY2026–27 federal budget just to keep its consumers’ bills from reflecting its own inefficiency. Twenty-fold growth in the subsidy bill is not what privatisation was sold as. If that is what “successful” privatisation looks like, Pakistan should be terrified of doing it two, or eleven, more times. The rot is institutional, and it has three addresses. NEPRA has spent years rubber-stamping tariff hikes, capitulating to circular debt, and failing to enforce performance standards on the DISCOs it already regulates — a ceremonial regulator that confuses notifying a tariff with governing a sector. CPPA-G, sitting at the centre of the power purchase and settlement system, has presided over a circular debt mountain that keeps climbing regardless of who is nominally in charge, and has never been made to answer for it. And the Ministry of Power itself has spent a decade approving capacity contracts, rejecting cheaper foreign offers, and rotating leadership through the same small circle of appointees who preside over one crisis and then the next. None of these three institutions has the standing left to supervise a privatisation of this scale. Handing FESCO, GEPCO and IESCO to private buyers while NEPRA still writes the tariff rules, CPPA-G still runs settlement, and the Ministry still calls the shots is not privatisation — it is a death sentence dressed in a share-purchase agreement, executed slowly, one quarterly tariff adjustment at a time, on the very consumers this reform claims to protect. A regulator that could not discipline a state-owned utility is not going to discipline a private one with dollar-indexed tariff protections and lawyers on retainer. Investors bidding for FESCO, GEPCO and IESCO are already demanding exactly that: payment guarantees in US dollars, contractual protection against future renegotiation, and freedom to slash staff. Pakistan is not privatising its grid. It is handing three of its most valuable state assets to whoever negotiates the toughest exit clause, under a regulator, a market operator, and a ministry with no track record of holding anyone to account. There was a better road, and Pakistan turned it down. In 2016, Chinese Smart Grid firms — brought to the table personally (Engineer Arshad H Abbasi) in that effort — offered to bring smart grid technology into Pakistan’s distribution network, the same technology that helped State Grid Corporation of China push national transmission and distribution losses down to roughly the mid-single digits in recent years. The proposal on the table was a shared-risk model: China would modernise the DISCOs into smart grids over a decade, splitting recovered losses fifty-fifty with the state. It would have cost Pakistan almost nothing upfront and aligned China’s incentives directly with reducing theft and technical loss — the two diseases actually killing Pakistan’s grid. The Ministry of Power and the Planning Commission rejected it. A parallel 2015 pitch to interconnect Pakistan’s grid with China’s has sat on the drawing board for over a decade. Meanwhile Pakistan built its way into the LNG and imported-coal trap that now drives the very capacity payments crushing consumers and taxpayers alike — a trap Chinese engineers, who have spent thirty years wiring one of the largest and most loss-efficient grids on earth, would likely have steered Pakistan away from. Compare the region. India already exports power to Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh and is deepening links with Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Bhutan alone hosts roughly 3,156 MW of Indian-financed hydropower capacity across five major projects — a model of a regional power partner investing in generation rather than merely trading finished electricity. Pakistan, by contrast, cannot even get its own national grid properly connected into Gilgit-Baltistan or Gwadar, a port city that still runs short of reliable power despite sitting at the centre of a multi-billion-dollar Chinese economic corridor. China already has more than 5,000 MW of committed CPEC power capacity inside Pakistan, selected and negotiated by the Planning Commission, and a demonstrated willingness to build hydropower in difficult terrain. It is time to stop pretending Pakistan can manage this alone. Invite China to finance and build the hydropower across GB, AJK and KPK the way India financed Bhutan, and let Pakistan’s surplus eventually be wheeled toward Afghanistan, toward India, even toward China itself — which still needs to retire coal capacity and would gladly take clean power off a friend’s grid. Because that is what China has been, in a relationship most Pakistanis do not need convincing about: a friend when the ledger was empty, a builder when nobody else would build, a partner sweeter than honey and, on the balance sheet of sixty years of cooperation, standing taller than Everest over every other option on the table. NEPRA and CPPA-G have failed