Justice delayed & wrongdoers’ profitability

Artificial Intelligence is transforming the world at an unprecedented pace. From healthcare and agriculture to finance, education, and manufacturing, AI is changing how people work, learn, and solve problems. Countries across the globe are redesigning their education systems to prepare students for a technology-driven future. They are investing in coding, robotics, digital literacy, critical thinking, and innovation. Outdated Curriculum, Untrained Teachers, and Obsolete Classrooms Are Holding Back the Nation’s Future Pakistan, however, appears to be moving at a much slower pace. While developed nations are preparing children for careers that may not even exist today, millions of Pakistani students continue to study from outdated textbooks, rely on rote memorization, and learn in classrooms equipped with little more than blackboards and chalk. This growing disconnect raises an important question: How can Pakistan expect its youth to compete globally when they are being educated with a curriculum designed for the past? Education is the engine of economic growth and national development. Every successful nation has built its progress on a strong education system that evolves with changing times. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s school curriculum has not kept pace with technological advancement or the demands of the modern labour market. Although some reforms have been introduced over the years, many textbooks still contain outdated examples, obsolete concepts, and teaching methods that fail to develop analytical thinking and creativity. The world no longer rewards students simply for memorizing information. Search engines and AI can provide facts within seconds. What employers increasingly value are skills that machines cannot easily replace critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, leadership, emotional intelligence, and the ability to solve complex problems. Yet our examination system still rewards memorization more than understanding. One of the biggest weaknesses of Pakistan’s education system is the gap between classroom learning and market needs. Universities and employers frequently complain that graduates lack practical knowledge and workplace skills. Many young people spend years earning degrees only to discover they are not prepared for modern careers. This mismatch contributes to unemployment despite rising educational qualifications. School curricula should therefore be redesigned around future skills. Coding, artificial intelligence, robotics, data literacy, entrepreneurship, financial education, climate science, environmental sustainability, cybersecurity, and digital citizenship should become part of mainstream education. These are no longer luxury subjects reserved for elite schools; they are becoming basic requirements for the global economy. Equally important is the way children are taught. Modern education encourages students to ask questions, conduct experiments, work in teams, debate ideas, and solve real-life problems. Unfortunately, many Pakistani classrooms continue to rely on one-way lectures where students quietly copy notes from the blackboard. Such methods may help children pass examinations, but they do little to prepare them for innovation or leadership. This is why teacher training deserves urgent national attention. Teachers cannot be expected to teach twenty-first-century skills using twentieth-century training. Continuous professional development should become mandatory for all teachers. They should receive regular training in digital learning, classroom technology, student-centred teaching, project-based learning, and modern assessment methods. A well-trained teacher can transform even a modest classroom, while an untrained teacher may struggle despite having excellent textbooks. Technology must also become an integral part of learning. Around the world, interactive digital boards, multimedia presentations, educational software, virtual laboratories, and online learning platforms are making classrooms more engaging and effective. In contrast, many government schools in Pakistan still depend on blackboards, chalk, and outdated teaching aids. There is nothing inherently wrong with blackboards they have educated generations of students. However, they cannot be the only teaching tool in an era when digital technology dominates every profession. Students who have never interacted with computers, digital content, or smart classrooms are already at a disadvantage before they enter higher education or the job market. Modernizing classrooms does not necessarily require replacing every blackboard overnight. Pakistan can adopt a phased approach. Schools should first be provided with reliable electricity, internet connectivity where possible, projectors, computers, and digital learning resources. Low-cost technology can significantly improve learning outcomes if combined with trained teachers and updated curricula. Education must also become more relevant to Pakistan’s own challenges. Students should learn about water scarcity, climate change, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, disaster management, public health, financial planning, and responsible citizenship. Such knowledge not only strengthens the economy but also helps communities solve local problems. The government must increase investment in education. For many years, Pakistan has allocated a relatively small share of its national resources to education compared with what experts recommend for developing countries. Without sustained investment in schools, teacher development, educational technology, and curriculum reform, meaningful progress will remain difficult. Parents, educators, policymakers, universities, and the private sector all have a role to play. Education should not be shaped solely by examination boards. Industry leaders, technology experts, researchers, and experienced teachers should contribute to curriculum development so that what children learn reflects the realities of today’s world. Pakistan’s greatest resource is not its minerals or natural wealth, it is its young population. Millions of talented children possess the intelligence, curiosity, and determination to succeed. What they need is an education system that unlocks their potential instead of limiting it. Artificial Intelligence will reshape every sector of society during the coming decades. Countries that prepare their children today will lead tomorrow’s global economy. Those that continue teaching outdated syllabi will struggle to keep pace. The choice before Pakistan is clear. We can continue relying on obsolete textbooks, examination-driven learning, blackboards, and chalk while the rest of the world embraces AI and digital innovation. Or we can modernize our curriculum, invest in teachers, equip classrooms with appropriate technology, and prepare our children for the future. The future cannot be built with yesterday’s education. If Pakistan truly wants its youth to compete on the global stage, the time to reform our schools is not tomorrow it is today.

There is a common perception among experts that a new world order usually emerges after a world war or a major geopolitical event. Wars are caused by the irrational behavior of existing powers, illegal resource capture, and opposition to rising powers. These factors make the peaceful transition difficult. Thucydides’ Trap further explains the phenomenon. In modern history, World War I and World War II are often quoted as examples.   World War I began after Germany’s exponential growth and emergence as a new economic and global power. Germany’s efforts to enhance its influence further complicated the situation for existing powers such as the British Empire. It threatened them, and they started to conspire against Germany, especially after the launch of the Berlin-Baghdad railway line. The Berlin-Baghdad railway was considered a game-changing initiative for Europe and the Middle East. The British Empire negated it and built alliances with France; Russia, and later on, the USA helped them. World War II is considered a byproduct of the 1930s economic recession, Germany’s reemergence, Britain’s declining power, and the USA’s emergence as a new economic and global powerhouse.   World War I resulted in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Germany. It laid the first stone of the new empire, the USA. President Wilson tried to build on the fallen Empires and create a new world order through the League of Nations, but it could not sustain itself and ended with World War II. World War II ended with the collapse of Germany and the end of the two empires, the UK and Japan. After World War II, the USA emerged as a global empire and began crafting a new world order. Fortunately, it had the support of the USSR and China, which helped it create a new world order. However, after building a new world order, the USA turned against the USSR, and China laid the foundation of the Cold War Era.   The new system was built to continue the exploitation, but with new tools and strategies. With the end of World War II and the rise of freedom movements, the Western powers realized that the age of occupation and colonization had passed. It is not possible to enslave people physically. Thus, they pondered what new ways of controlling people should be. They identified the economy as a leading tool. Hence, they began devising tools to control the global economy. In the beginning, they leveraged the West’s production capacity to dominate the global economy. With the advent of globalization, they introduced tools to control supply chains and dominate markets by exerting absolute control over intellectual property rights, market rulemaking, and non-tariff barriers such as human rights, democracy, and the environment.  It led to the weaponization of the economy.   Simultaneously, they initiated the process to strengthen control over the financial system. The Bretton Woods institutions helped the USA and the West to dominate the global financial system. The US$ further consolidated its dominance as the leading global currency of global trade and reserves. Unfortunately, they also weaponized the global financial system.   However, with the dawn of the 21st century, they started to realize that new economic, technological, and trade powerhouses are emerging. These will challenge their dominance and exploitation. The rapid development and trade progress of the Global South further deepened their fears. China’s advances in technology and innovation made them worry about their future. However, China’s emergence as an alternative economic, trade, and technological power, challenging Western dominance in these areas, antagonized them.  After the launch of global initiatives such as GDI, GSI, BRI, GCI, GGI, AIIB, CIIE, and CIFTIS, among others, the West took off its gloves and began openly opposing China.   The West is opposing China, especially its BRI and technological aspects, just like the British and other powers opposed Germany’s rise and the Berlin-Baghdad railway line just before World War I. Therefore, many experts believe that the world is living under the threat of a looming third world war.   However, another school of thought claims the world is already in World War III, with different parameters. This time the battlefield would be trade, technology, and financial systems, as mentioned by an expert from Russia, Ms. Daria Para.   According to this theory, the world is already at war. President Trump has already intensified the trade war. He is using it as a tool to extract maximum benefit and consolidate the USA’s dominance over the global economic system. The USA is also not allowing any country to surpass it in the field of technology. First, in the late 90s and early 2000s, it compelled Japan to give up its dream of technological leadership. Now, the USA is doing everything to undermine Chinese advancements. It is sanctioning Chinese companies and compelling other nations to cut or restrict relations with China. Even the USA is creating challenges for Chinese students, as it considers them essential to technological development. Hence, admissions have dropped significantly. The USA has also weaponized the financial sector and is using it to penalize countries.   The war in these areas is deeply impacting humanity. It is aggravating inequality, food insecurity, and human suffering. This time, people are dying of malnutrition, unsafe water, poverty, and lack of opportunities for livelihoods, not with bullets or bombs. It is more painful and leaves lasting impacts on those who survive. Unfortunately, the war is intensifying in these fields. It is feared that soon it will lead to a hot war. First glimpses are already visible from the Iran-USA conflict, Russia-Ukraine conflict, regime change in Venezuela, blockade of Cuba, and conflicts in many other countries.   However, China and the Global South are still making every effort to avoid a third world war and create a new world order through reforms. The demand for reforms is rational and genuine, as due to flaws and inefficiencies of the existing order, inequality and poverty are on the rise and the world is facing the existential threat of climate change.

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.

The effects of the defence agreement between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were witnessed by the entire world during the recent US-Iran-Israel war. At the same time, there was continuous speculation about whether the scope of this defence agreement could be expanded in the coming days. For years, the defence of major Middle Eastern countries has largely depended on the United States. However, during the recent conflict, the US appeared unable to fully protect either these countries or even some of its own military bases in the region. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Pakistan immediately issued a strong warning, stating that if Iran wanted to protect its own territorial integrity, it should avoid any aggression against Saudi Arabia; otherwise, Pakistan would honour its defence commitments. Soon afterwards, the world witnessed a different situation in areas where Pakistani forces were present. While attacks continued in various parts of the region, areas protected by Pakistani forces experienced a markedly different security environment. Against this backdrop, international newspapers began suggesting that the United States’ influence in the Middle East could be entering a period of decline. As the poet famously said: “Insha Ji, get up and leave now; What is the point of becoming attached to this city?” The peace talks between Iran and the United States, hosted by Pakistan and referred to as the “Islamabad Accord”, created further diplomatic momentum. Shortly after the first meeting, discussions surrounding the Pakistan-Saudi defence agreement began attracting global attention. Influenced by these developments, other countries in the region also started exploring the possibility of joining or cooperating with the defence arrangement. Pakistan is the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority country. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most influential oil-producing states and holds immense religious significance for Muslims worldwide. Türkiye, meanwhile, has established a strong reputation for its drone technology and non-nuclear missile capabilities. The combination of these three countries could have significant strategic consequences for the region. Their growing defence cooperation is unlikely to be viewed favourably by either the United States or Israel. Even before the reported expansion of the defence arrangement, statements from the United States and Israel indicated growing concern. The role of American military bases and radar systems located in several Muslim-majority countries has also come under greater scrutiny, particularly over their alleged role in supporting Israel during the conflict. One US think tank reportedly described the emerging regional landscape as involving two major blocs: a Sunni alliance and a Shia alliance, with Israel and the United States potentially prepared to confront both. Such assessments could be interpreted as an indication of changing strategic dynamics and a possible reduction in American and Israeli influence across parts of the region. As mentioned earlier, several other countries are reportedly watching the development of the Pakistan-Saudi defence partnership closely. Egypt is also said to have participated in preliminary discussions, and its potential inclusion in the future cannot be ruled out. If Egypt joins the arrangement, the strategic balance could become even more significant. Egypt controls the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important maritime trade routes on which a substantial portion of global commerce depends. It also possesses one of the region’s strongest naval forces and a large fleet of military aircraft. Access to Egyptian territory and strategic waterways could therefore have major implications for the Middle East, Israel and Europe. With Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and potentially Egypt forming a broader strategic group, the combined military capabilities of these countries, supported by Saudi Arabia’s enormous energy resources and financial strength, could create a formidable regional bloc. This is one reason why the emerging defence arrangement is increasingly being compared with Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Under Article 5, an armed attack against one NATO member is considered an attack against all members, triggering a collective commitment to assist the country under attack. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history following the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. In the coming days, countries such as Egypt, Bangladesh, Kuwait and Jordan could potentially become part of broader defence cooperation, although their formal participation would depend on future diplomatic and strategic decisions. At present, Israel, the United States, India and Iran all appear to have concerns about the potential consequences of such an alliance. However, the coming months will reveal its actual structure, scope and strategic impact on the region.

Walk into any classroom and everything seems perfectly normal. Students are taking notes, chatting before class, and waiting for the lecture to begin. No one is arguing, no one is fighting, and everything appears calm on the surface. Yet for many students, there is a side of campus life that often goes unnoticed: bullying. For years, bullying has been treated as just a normal part of growing up, and honestly, many people will still argue that it is. Plenty still see it as harmless teasing, or worse, some rite of passage every student is simply expected to survive. The common response is often, “ignore it,” or “everyone deals with it, get over it,” as if that settles the matter. But ask the person actually on the receiving end, and it rarely feels harmless at all. What one student brushes off as a joke can leave another feeling embarrassed, isolated, and like they don’t belong anywhere in that room. The moment passes, but the hurt from it usually doesn’t, it lingers quietly while everyone else has already moved on. A student who gets mocked enough times eventually just stops raising his hand, or talking at all. Someone left out again and again stops trying to be included and stops showing up for activities.  Confidence is often the first thing to suffer, and academic performance also follows, when a student’s energy goes into avoiding attention rather than engaging in the class. By the time anyone notices, the damage is usually already done. Many would agree that this is because it does not appear all at once, it builds gradually and people mistake it for a bad mood, a phase, or anything but what it really is. As a student myself, this isn’t just something I’ve read about, I’ve seen how it feels to watch someone go quiet, to sit in a room that should feel safe and doesn’t. What I believe makes bullying so difficult to address is that it does not always look the way people expect. When people hear the word “bullying,” they often imagine physical confrontations. That’s not always how it turns out, though. In many cases, it is far less obvious and therefore much easier to overlook. It can take the form of repeated jokes at someone’s expense, hurtful nicknames, deliberate exclusion from social groups, or rumours spread behind a person’s back, things many of us have seen or experienced at some point. These behaviours are often considered as “just joking,” so a student ends up laughing along anyway, just to avoid seeming too sensitive, even when the comment is genuinely hurtful.  Emotional bullying is another common form including constant criticism, manipulation, or certain behaviours that slowly damages a person’s confidence and sense of belonging. This is probably the one most of us have gone through at some point in our student life, quietly, without ever really talking about it. And these days, it doesn’t even need a classroom to happen in. Social media, group chats, and anonymous messages have given it a whole new stage, extending its reach far beyond the campus walls. There is also a less-discussed form of bullying that affects some students whose parents work at the same school or college. These students are assumed to receive special treatment regardless of their actual performance. Their achievements may be dismissed as favouritism, and their hard work can be unfairly questioned. I admit it sounds strange, but it is a reality many students live with. While this may not involve insults or physical intimidation, constantly feeling judged for something beyond your control can be frustrating and humiliating. So why does bullying continue? Part of the answer is that mostly people underestimate its impact. A comment that seems minor to one person may stay with someone else for days or weeks. When unkind behaviour is overlooked, it can become normalized. What starts as a joke can slowly turn into a pattern. Worth asking too, is what drives a bully. Often, it is not insecurity but the confidence that comes from believing there will be no consequences. When nobody challenges the actions, it becomes a way of gaining attention, influence, or social status. That does not excuse the harm, but it helps explain why simply telling victims to ignore it doesn’t solve the problem. Now, the good part is that bullying is not inevitable. Small actions can make a meaningful difference. Teachers who recognize warning signs and students who choose to speak up when they witness unfair treatment all help create a better environment. Educational institutions should also make it easier for students to report problems without fear of embarrassment or retaliation. Perhaps most importantly, students themselves have more influence than they realize. A kind word, an invitation to join a group, or simply refusing to laugh at someone can change the atmosphere of a classroom.  Creating a respectful environment isn’t really about rules on a wall. It just needs one person willing to say something when everyone else stays quiet.

The third part of this series demonstrated that tax policy is never politically neutral. Every exemption, rate differential, withholding provision and collection mechanism determines who will bear the burden, who will receive protection and who will remain outside effective enforcement. The next question is unavoidable. Why do reforms that appear technically sound on paper repeatedly fail in Pakistan? The usual explanation is weak implementation. Successive governments announce that the policy was correct, while administrative capacity, political resistance or taxpayer behaviour prevented its success. This distinction between sound design and deficient execution is comforting because it preserves confidence in the original prescription. It also conceals an important reality: implementation is not external to policy. It is part of policy. A reform designed without considering the incentives of legislators, administrators, affected sectors and enforcement institutions is not technically sound. It is technically incomplete. Pakistan’s fiscal history is filled with such incompleteness. Broad-based taxation is announced, followed by exemptions. Documentation is promised, followed by presumptive and final taxation. Value added taxation is introduced, followed by reduced rates, fixed taxes, special procedures and restrictions on input adjustment. Taxpayer facilitation is proclaimed, followed by additional withholding obligations, automated demands, coercive recovery and delayed refunds. Each deviation is described as temporary. Temporary arrangements acquire permanent beneficiaries and eventually become defining features of the system. The problem cannot be explained simply by lack of expertise. Pakistan has received technical assistance from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and other institutions for decades. Numerous committees, commissions and task forces have recommended broadening the base, reducing exemptions, simplifying rates, improving audits, integrating data and strengthening administration. The present IMF programme again calls for base broadening, rationalisation of tax expenditures, digital invoicing, risk-based audits and improved revenue administration. The prescriptions remain familiar because the institutional incentives producing the original distortions remain largely unchanged. Consider value added taxation. A genuine VAT is collected at successive stages of production and distribution, with tax paid on inputs allowed against tax charged on outputs. The mechanism creates a documentary chain because each registered purchaser has an interest in obtaining an invoice. Exemptions, fixed regimes and blocked input credits break that chain. Pakistan has retained the name of sales tax while repeatedly undermining its value added character. Multiple schedules, special rates, exemptions, extra taxes, further taxes, minimum value addition requirements and restrictions on input adjustment have converted a potentially coherent instrument into an intricate system of revenue extraction. The resulting complexity is then blamed upon taxpayers. Pakistan’s “innovation” has been to combine high statutory rates with a fragmented base, extensive concessions and aggressive collection from those already documented. The system punishes formalisation while expecting formalisation to expand voluntarily. The Tax Expenditure Report 2026 estimates revenue forgone during fiscal year 2024–25 through income tax, sales tax and customs concessions at approximately Rs. 2.353 trillion. This figure excludes the larger constitutional controversy created by keeping petroleum products outside the sales tax chain and collecting petroleum levy instead since March 2024. Sales tax concessions accounted for about Rs. 1.274 trillion, income tax concessions for Rs. 579.70 billion and customs concessions for Rs. 499.14 billion. The treatment of petroleum products reveals how implementation can defeat both tax design and constitutional distribution. Sales tax forms part of the divisible pool under Article 160 of the Constitution. Petroleum levy is a non-tax federal receipt outside that pool. Replacing sales tax on petroleum products with an ever-increasing levy therefore does more than alter the method of collection. It changes the distribution of fiscal resources between the Federation and provinces. A measure presented as revenue policy consequently modifies the federal bargain without formally amending the Constitution. Income taxation displays the same institutional pattern. A normal income tax determines taxable income after allowing legitimate expenses and then applies the appropriate rate. Pakistan increasingly taxes transactions, turnover and gross receipts without establishing real income. Withholding taxes, advance taxes, minimum taxes, final taxes and presumptive liabilities were initially justified as responses to weak enforcement. They gradually became substitutes for enforcement. The Revenue Division Year Book 2024–25 confirms the continuing centrality of withholding and advance collection within direct taxes. This model is administratively attractive. Revenue is collected through banks, employers, utility companies, registrars, import authorities and businesses without requiring the tax administration to investigate actual income. It also creates impressive collection figures before returns are filed and liabilities determined. The constitutional cost is rarely measured. Taxpayers become liable because they undertake transactions rather than because they earn taxable income. Private persons become unpaid collection agents. Refunds and adjustments remain blocked or delayed. Documented businesses carry the state’s administrative burden, while powerful informal sectors continue bargaining for concessions. Pakistan has even institutionalised the category of the “non-filer”. Instead of identifying income, making assessments and enforcing payment, the law imposes higher transaction-based rates upon persons whose names do not appear on the Active Taxpayers’ List. Non-compliance is monetised rather than eliminated. This is presented as behavioural taxation: higher deductions will supposedly encourage return filing. The state simultaneously acquires a fiscal interest in retaining non-filers because they yield higher collections. The instrument designed to eliminate a category becomes dependent upon its continued existence. No conventional textbook could have anticipated such an innovation. Retailer taxation provides another illustration. Every government announces that traders will be brought into the tax net. Every scheme begins with declarations of equality and documentation. Political resistance follows, negotiations commence, liability is diluted, and the final arrangement bears little relationship to actual income or turnover. The administration then turns to those who cannot collectively bargain: salaried persons, incorporated businesses, importers, banks, telecom users and consumers of electricity, fuel and essential goods. Agricultural income taxation has travelled a similar path. The Constitution assigns this field to the provinces. Provincial laws exist, returns may be filed and declarations may be recorded. Effective collection, verification and enforcement remain modest in comparison with the sector’s economic and political significance. The failure is not the absence of legal authority. It reflects the distribution of political power within provincial