Makkah Accord and Iran’s Positive Response

In the winter of 1979, a neighbour’s house caught fire. The Soviet Union had marched into Afghanistan, and the flames of war were licking at the walls of Kabul. From across the ocean, a distant power arrived at Pakistan’s door. It did not come with soldiers. It came with money, guns, and a promise: *”Let us fight this fire together. Use your roof. Use your roads. We will stand with you. We will not let the fire reach your house.”* Pakistan opened its door. What else could it do? The Soviet army sat on its western border. The world was divided into two camps, and neutrality was a luxury no frontline state could afford. For ten years, Pakistan became the staging ground for a war that was not its own. It hosted three million refugees. Its cities swelled. Its tribal areas became training grounds for fighters armed and funded by outside money. Weapons arrived by the shipload through Karachi. Pakistani officers coordinated strategy. Every bullet fired at a Soviet convoy in the Hindu Kush passed through Pakistani hands. The distant power paid the bills. It sent the Stinger missiles. It called the resistance fighters “freedom fighters” and Pakistan a “frontline state.” But the war was never truly about Pakistan’s safety. It was about bleeding the Soviet Union in a distant mountainside, using Pakistani soil as the operating theatre and Afghan bodies as the currency. Then, in 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew. The fire in the neighbour’s house went out. And the distant power that had promised eternal friendship turned its attention elsewhere. The billions dried up. The diplomatic interest evaporated. Afghanistan, the battlefield, was left to warlords who turned the weapons on each other. Pakistan was left with three million refugees who would not go home, a Kalashnikov culture that would not disappear, and a border that would never again be quiet. The weapons that had been given to fight the Soviets did not rust. They remained. They moved into streets, into disputes, into corners of the country where the state had never fully reached. The guest who had brought the fire extinguisher had started a blaze that spread to the host’s own house — and then moved to a new neighbourhood. The distant power won its strategic objective at the cost of Afghan and Pakistani soil, then walked away. Its own cities were never bombed. Its own children never became refugees. Its economy never staggered under the weight of someone else’s war. Pakistan, which had signed no formal treaty of alliance but had acted as an ally in every meaningful sense, was left holding the pieces. This is what happens when alliances are forged in the middle of a fire. The stronger partner does not need your victory. He needs your usefulness. He needs you to hold the front, to absorb the blow, to stand in a place where he does not wish to stand. And when the war ends, he will shake your hand and go home — while you remain amid the embers, wondering why the fire you helped extinguish has reignited in your own courtyard. History records a curious pattern. The alliances that have endured — the ones that outlasted their founders and shaped the world for generations — were almost never built while the house was burning. NATO was forged in 1949, not because the bombs were falling on Paris, but because the memory of war was still fresh and the desire to prevent it was shared. The parties had time to read the text, to negotiate the terms, to build institutions that could survive a change of government on either side. An alliance born in the middle of a fire is a different creature entirely. It is an emergency measure. And emergency measures have a way of becoming permanent arrangements that no one planned and no one fully controls. When you sign while the heat is at your back and the smoke is in your eyes, you do not have time to ask who owns the hose, who pays for the water, and who walks away when the flames are out. The Afghan episode is not ancient history. It is in our own lifetime. It is written in the smoke that still rises from our western border. And it is written in the simple fact that the weapons once aimed at a northern invader eventually turned inward, because no one had written a clause for what happens after the guest leaves. Pakistan has every right to defend itself. Pakistan has every right to seek friends in a dangerous world. But history offers a quiet observation for those who are listening: **the strongest alliances are built in peacetime, not borrowed in panic.** The fire is real. The neighbour’s house is burning. Yet the hand that offers protection in the middle of a war is holding a different ledger than the hand that offers partnership in the middle of calm. That is not a warning against friendship. It is simply what the record shows.

Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the government will place the National Flood Protection Plan IV before the Council of Common Interests for approval. The price tag is now Rs 700 billion. The same plan was approved by the CCI in 2017 at roughly half that amount. The minister was candid: the previous governments failed to implement it, and the 2022 floods forced a revision. Nearly a decade and a half after the plan was first conceived after the 2010 floods that devastated the country, we are back where we started, except the bill has grown by Rs 360 billion. But there is a problem with the numbers, and it is not a small one. In November 2025, Secretary Water Resources Syed Ali Murtaza testified before the Senate Standing Committee on Water Resources that NFPP-IV comprised 375 schemes with a total cost of Rs 824.493 billion. The provincial component alone stood at Rs 746.961 billion, while the federal share was only Rs 77.533 billion. He told the committee that provinces had refused to contribute their shares, escalating the matter to the CCI. Eight months later, the same plan is being presented at Rs 700 billion with a 50-50 federal-provincial split. The total has been trimmed by roughly Rs 124 billion despite inflation and rising cost of construction, and the provinces’ burden has been halved. A plan that shrinks by fifteen percent despite the increased costs and flips its cost-sharing formula in eight months is not rigorously costed. It is still being negotiated politically, not finalized technically. After the 2022 floods, international donors pledged $11 billion for reconstruction and flood protection. Three years later, Pakistan had utilized less than $3 billion. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb admitted that Pakistan failed to prepare a single credible, bankable project to access the funds. The money sat in files while the people sat in mud and water. It is one thing to lack funds. It is quite another to hold the funds and lack the institutional capacity to spend them. So when the government now asks for Rs 700 billion, the question is not whether we need the plan. We do. The question is whether we have earned the right to spend it, or are simply paying compound interest on a decade of negligence. In 2017, When the CCI approved the National Flood Protection Plan in 2017, the Punjab Assembly had already passed the Flood Plain Regulation Act of 2016. That Act designated flood plains, mandated annual surveys, prohibited all construction without written permission, and criminalized unauthorized building. Section 20 gave it overriding effect over all other laws. It was a good, careful law. And for ten years, we ignored it. Then came the 2022 floods, killing more than 1,700 and displacing 33 million. The 2023 Punjab Irrigation Act, strengthened the framework further. . Then came the Infrastructure Audit Programme of January 2026, promising to inspect and certify every embankment before the rains. The NDMA had warned in November 2025 that the 2026 monsoon would bring 22 to 26 percent above-normal rainfall. In May, Chairman Lt Gen Inam Haider Malik was briefed the Emergency Response Committee. The warnings were not classified. They were reported in media across the country. And still, on July 31, as the Sawan rains continue and Bhadoon approaches, we are told that a Rs 700 billion plan is about to be placed before the CCI. The human cost of this incompetence is measured in lives, not spreadsheets. Between June 26 and July 25, 2026, NDMA recorded 97 deaths and 297 injuries in rain-related incidents. House and roof collapses were the leading cause, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reporting the highest toll, followed by Punjab. The authority evacuated 3,841 people. These are not abstract figures. They are preventable losses and deaths in a country that had years to prepare. Meanwhile, last year’s federal budget slashed water sector allocations by 27 percent, from Rs 184.6 billion to Rs 133.4 billion for the water sector. Even the flagship Diamer-Basha Dam saw reduced priority. The message is clear: politically visible projects win funding; invisible embankments lose it. We are also building vulnerability into the landscape faster than we are building protection. The hundred-arch bridge near Shahdara was designed a century ago to let Ravi floodwater pass freely. In September 2025, the M5 motorway near Jalalpur Pirwala collapsed after the Sutlej River breached its banks, blocking natural channels with inadequate culverts. Modern infrastructure is failing where century-old engineering succeeded because hydrology is no longer part of the design brief. Every stakeholder knows what needs to be done. District officials know where encroachments choke flood channels. Engineers know where embankments need reinforcement. Satellite imagery can map floodplains with precision. Yet these tools are shelved while development authorities continue to approve new roads, schools and BHUs for permanent dwellings that should not have been there to begin with.  New high profile housing schemes are regularized in natural river basins. The National Water Policy, approved by the CCI in April 2018, promised real-time telemetry by the end of 2021 and a National Water Council chaired by the Prime Minister to meet annually. Seven years later, the Council has convened only once, in October 2018. The telemetry system is five years past its deadline. The unfinished cost of ongoing water schemes stands at approximately Rs 1.27 trillion. What would it take to believe this time will be different? Not more money. We have enough money to drown in. What we lack is accountability that lives on the riverbank. The Infrastructure Audit of 2026 must be opened to the public, if it was ever done. The names of every certifying officer who signed off on an embankment must be known, and if a structure fails, the officer must stand beside it and explain. And if not, we need to ask why not? The early warning system must learn to speak to the village, not the province. Alerts must name villages and localaties, expected water levels, and designated evacuation routes. They

Every age has its favourite political illusion. Ours is the belief that if a state redraws its map, it can redraw its destiny. The illusion is neither new nor uniquely Pakistani. Throughout history, rulers confronted with public discontent have often reached first for the cartographer rather than the reformer. Kingdoms were partitioned, provinces were multiplied and capitals were relocated with the promise that a new administrative design would produce a new political reality. Sometimes it did. More often, the map changed while the lives of ordinary people remained stubbornly the same. The road stayed broken. The school remained understaffed. The hospital still lacked medicines. Geography had moved; governance had not. Pakistan has once again arrived at one of those historical moments. The debate over new provinces has returned with renewed intensity. South Punjab, Bahawalpur, Hazara and, occasionally, urban Sindh have re-entered political discourse. Television studios debate new boundaries with remarkable confidence. Politicians promise administrative revolutions. Constitutional amendments are drafted, revised and forgotten. Yet beneath all these proposals lies a single assumption that Pakistan’s crisis is fundamentally geographical. It is an attractive assumption because geography is visible. A new province can be announced, celebrated and printed on official maps within months. Institutions do not yield so easily. Honest administration, competent bureaucracy, independent local government and accountable public service demand years of patient political labour. They produce fewer headlines than constitutional amendments, but they determine whether citizens experience the state as a servant or a burden. This is not an argument against creating new provinces. It is an argument against believing that new provinces alone can rescue a failing administrative culture. The debate deserves seriousness rather than slogans because the pressures giving rise to it are entirely real. According to the 2023 Population and Housing Census, Pakistan’s population has exceeded 250 million, making it the fifth most populous country in the world. Punjab alone contains approximately 127 million people—more inhabitants than almost every country in Europe. Balochistan stretches across nearly forty-four per cent of Pakistan’s landmass while containing only a small fraction of its population. Sindh continues to experience one of the fastest rates of urbanisation in South Asia. Such demographic realities naturally provoke questions about administrative efficiency, regional representation and equitable development. Communities demanding new provinces are therefore not merely inventing grievances. South Punjab has long argued that development has been disproportionately concentrated in central Punjab. Bahawalpur invokes historical identity and constitutional commitments made at the time of accession. Hazara has repeatedly asserted that its political priorities differ from those of the wider Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These demands arise from genuine perceptions of administrative neglect and unequal political influence. A mature federation should listen carefully before dismissing them. Yet listening carefully also requires asking difficult questions. If the existing provinces have themselves become highly centralised, why should another layer of provincial government automatically bring authority closer to the people? If citizens already struggle to persuade provincial bureaucracies to repair roads, improve schools or manage municipal services, why should replacing one provincial capital with another necessarily transform that experience? Is Pakistan’s principal challenge really the number of provinces, or is it the distance that has gradually grown between government and the governed? History offers reasons for caution. In 1955, Pakistan adopted the One Unit Scheme, merging the provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative entity. The stated objective was efficiency, administrative coherence and national integration. Instead, the policy deepened provincial resentments, weakened regional identities only in theory and strengthened them in practice. By 1970, the experiment had collapsed. The map had changed twice within fifteen years, but governance had not become more responsive. The lesson was clear enough for anyone willing to see it— political legitimacy cannot be manufactured by administrative engineering alone. The framers of the 1973 Constitution attempted a different approach. They recognised Pakistan as a federation in which diversity would be accommodated rather than erased. Decades later, the Eighteenth Amendment significantly expanded provincial autonomy, transferring important subjects—including health, education and culture—from the federation to the provinces. Many constitutional scholars rightly regarded it as one of the most consequential democratic reforms in Pakistan’s constitutional history. Yet an uncomfortable paradox remains. If greater provincial autonomy was expected to produce more responsive government, why do so many Pakistanis still experience the same frustrations in their daily dealings with public institutions? Why do overcrowded hospitals, deteriorating municipal services, inadequate schools and inaccessible bureaucracies continue to dominate public complaints? Perhaps because Pakistan decentralised authority from Islamabad to provincial capitals but never completed the journey from provincial capitals to the people themselves. That distinction lies at the heart of the present debate. The real question before Pakistan is therefore not whether the federation should eventually have four provinces, six provinces or eight. Every federation evolves with changing demographic, political and economic realities. The more fundamental question is whether power should continue to accumulate in increasingly distant capitals or finally begin to reside where citizens actually live—in districts, municipalities, towns and villages. Before Pakistan redraws another map, it must first decide what government is supposed to do. A state exists not to administer territory but to serve people. Maps are only instruments; institutions are the purpose. When governments forget that distinction, they begin to mistake the appearance of reform for reform itself. The debate over new provinces is therefore important. But it is important for a reason larger than cartography. It compels Pakistan to confront a more profound constitutional question, does the country require more provinces, or does it require government that is finally prepared to come closer to its citizens? History possesses an inconvenient habit of refusing to validate political shortcuts. Nations that confuse administrative rearrangement with institutional reform usually discover, sooner or later, that maps can change more quickly than governments. The temptation to redraw boundaries is understandable because it promises visible action. Yet the record of history suggests that boundaries alone seldom transform the quality of governance. Pakistan’s own constitutional evolution illustrates this truth. At independence in 1947, the new state inherited

By Ali Haider In a statement, former FBR Chairman Shabbar Zaidi said that Pakistan’s economy would improve if it severed trade ties with China. He asserted that China has inflicted more damage on the Pakistani economy than the United States ever did. He further stated that he had opposed CPEC from day one, noting that the public was misled by the “game changer” narrative while the country was driven to ruin through the implementation of exorbitantly expensive power projects. The total trade volume between Pakistan and China during the 2024-25 fiscal year stood at approximately $25.23 billion. Of this, Pakistan imported goods worth $20.43 billion from China and exported products valued at $2.84 billion. Additionally, Pakistan makes annual payments of around $1 billion to China for services, loan repayments, and profit repatriations related to CPEC projects. Consequently, Pakistan’s overall trade deficit with China stands at approximately $18 to $19 billion, a figure exceeding the total funding Pakistan receives under a full IMF program. Since over 90 percent of trade between Pakistan and China is conducted in US dollars, this deficit has a direct impact on the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Pakistan sources approximately 28 percent of its total imports from China. In 2025, China remained Pakistan’s largest trading partner. Major imports from China include machinery, electrical machinery, organic chemicals, textile raw materials , and solar panels. Conversely, just four items account for 60 percent of Pakistan’s exports to China: cotton yarn, rice, seafood, and leather products. In other words, our exports are not only limited in scope but also consist primarily of raw materials and agricultural commodities. Trade with any country is beneficial only when exports exceed imports, or at the very least, match them. However, in Pakistan’s case, for every dollar of exports, we are importing goods worth 7.2 dollars from China. This trade imbalance becomes even more critical when Pakistan imports goods from China that are already being manufactured domestically. The textile and garment sector serves as the prime example of this; although Pakistan is among the world’s major cotton producing nations, a large portion its clothing imports, including both summer and winter garments, comes from China. This situation is primarily driven by the exorbitant rise in electricity tariffs in Pakistan. Currently, the cost of a single commercial electricity unit exceeds 60 rupees, and high gas prices further exacerbate the situation; consequently, the production cost of a standard jacket made in Pakistan reaches 10,000 rupees. In contrast, a Chinese made jacket of comparable quality is sold in the market at or even below that production cost. Due to this uneven playing field, dozens of garment units in Karachi, Lahore, and Faisalabad have shut down. Between 800 and 1,200 textile mills have closed over the last decade; Kasur, which was Asia’s largest leather industry hub in 2001, now lies desolate, as 40 percent of its tanneries have completely shut down and another 30 percent have become seasonal operations. The footwear industry has also suffered severe damage; in Punjab alone, there were over 350 large shoe manufacturing factories, of which 20 percent have shut down and 15 percent have seen a decline in production. This is largely because Chinese shoes, slippers, and sandals available in the market are not only cheaper but also more appealing to young generation in terms of design. Consequently, local manufacturers report that their production has dropped by 40 percent over the past three years. The steel sector is also grappling with this same challenge. Following the closure of Pakistan Steel Mills, the country imports 70 percent of its steel requirements. In 2025, steel and iron products worth $1.5 billion were imported from China alone; these included construction rebar, sheets, and pipes. Although Pakistan possesses reserves of iron and coal, high electricity costs prevent local production from competing effectively in this tough market. Another concerning aspect is the import of machinery. In 2025, Pakistan imported industrial machinery worth $2.6 billion from China; however, this import was not accompanied by investment. Chinese companies profit from selling the machinery and then leave, without opting to set up manufacturing plants within Pakistan. If the government were to mandate that every major machinery import be coupled with a requirement for the Chinese company to establish a factory in Pakistan with a 30 percent equity stake, it would generate employment and enable Pakistan to achieve self-reliance in technology. It is simply not possible for Pakistan to completely halt trade, as a significant portion of solar panels, mobile phone components, pharmaceutical raw materials, and agricultural machinery is imported from China. If these imports were halted tomorrow, many factories would shut down, and inflation could surge by 30 to 40 percent. It would take the economy at least ten years to fully recover from such a shock. The solution lies in “smart protection.” The first step is to impose phased regulatory duties on goods currently being manufactured in Pakistan. Protection can be immediately extended to three sectors: clothing, footwear, and certain types of construction steel. The second step is to make the import of machinery conditional upon investment. The third and most critical step is to reduce production costs; until electricity and gas become cheaper, “Made in Pakistan” products will not be able to compete with Chinese goods. On the other hand, the government must also work on boosting exports. Pakistan’s total exports increased by 48.7 percent during the first five months of 2026, with copper, rice, and halal meat playing a significant role. Access to the Chinese market can be expanded by incorporating agriculture, IT, and minerals into the second phase of CPEC. The target should be to increase exports to China from $3 billion to $10 billion over the next three years. Amidst all these issues, it is crucial to understand that China is not Pakistan’s enemy; it is the world’s largest manufacturing hub, producing goods tailored to the purchasing power of every nation. The real problem lies in imbalanced trade and high production costs. Pressure on foreign exchange reserves

In the story of Pakistan’s creation, certain names shine with a brightness that time cannot dim. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah stands as the founder of the nation, but standing quietly, resolutely, and often invisibly beside him for over two decades was his younger sister, Fatima Jinnah. History remembers her as Madar-e-Millat, the Mother of the Nation, a title she earned not through political office or public spectacle, but through an entire life of sacrifice, loyalty, intellect, and quiet strength. She was a woman decades ahead of her time, a qualified dental surgeon, a fiercely independent thinker, a stylish and modern presence in gharara and sleeveless blouse, and a woman who chose singlehood not out of misfortune but out of conviction. Her life offers Pakistani women today a template of dignity, purpose, and self-possession that remains as relevant now as it was in the twentieth century. Born on July 30, 1893, in Karachi, Fatima Jinnah grew up in a household that valued learning, even when it was unusual for girls of that era to pursue higher education. She enrolled at the University of Calcutta and earned a degree in dental surgery from Dr. R. Ahmed Dental College, becoming one of the first Muslim women in South Asia to qualify as a dentist. In 1923, she opened her own dental clinic in Bombay. This was no small achievement. At a time when most women of her class and background were confined to domestic roles, Fatima Jinnah built a professional identity through her own intellect and discipline. Her clinic flourished, and she earned both financial independence and social respect as a successful, self-made professional woman. She was, in every sense, a pioneer of women’s participation in modern professions in the subcontinent. Fatima Jinnah’s life took a defining turn following the death of Ruttie Jinnah, the Quaid’s wife, in 1929. Ruttie’s passing left both Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his young daughter Dina in a state of profound grief and vulnerability. It was at this moment that Fatima made a choice that would alter the course of her own life entirely, she closed her thriving dental practice and moved in with her brother to manage his household, raise Dina, and become his constant companion and confidante. This decision deserves to be understood not as a passive act of familial duty, but as a deliberate and enormous personal sacrifice. She was a woman who had built something of her own, a career, an income, an identity outside of any man’s shadow, and she set it aside willingly. From that point onward, she devoted herself entirely to supporting her brother’s political mission, managing his correspondence, organizing his household, accompanying him on tours across India, and providing the emotional steadiness that allowed him to focus on the arduous struggle for Pakistan. She sat beside him in All India Muslim League sessions, engaged with women’s wings of the movement, and became, in effect, his closest advisor on personal and even political matters. Few sacrifices in the history of the Pakistan Movement are as understated yet as consequential as this one. Fatima Jinnah’s devotion did not waver even after Pakistan was achieved. She remained with her brother through the exhausting, health-depleting years of his final illness. As the Quaid battled tuberculosis while simultaneously trying to steer a fragile new nation through its most turbulent infancy, it was Fatima who nursed him, traveled with him to Ziarat in his final days, and stayed resolutely at his bedside. When Muhammad Ali Jinnah breathed his last on September 11, 1948, Fatima Jinnah was there, not as a bystander, but as the one who had walked every step of that difficult journey with him. Her presence at his deathbed was the culmination of nearly two decades of unwavering companionship, sacrifice, and quiet strength. What makes Fatima Jinnah’s legacy even richer is the manner in which she carried herself. She was educated, articulate, and thoroughly modern in her outlook, yet she remained rooted in her cultural identity. She was famously elegant in her choice of dress, often seen in a gharara paired with a sleeveless blouse, a look that exuded both grace and quiet confidence. She wore her modernity with the same ease with which she wore her dupatta, never feeling the need to choose between tradition and progress. In photographs from that era, she appears composed, dignified, and utterly self-assured, a woman entirely comfortable in her own skin. Equally striking was her decision never to marry. In a society where marriage was, and often still is, treated as the singular measure of a woman’s worth and completeness, Fatima Jinnah chose a different path, not out of compulsion or circumstance, but by her own free will. She dedicated her life to her brother, to her country, and to her own principles. Later in her life, she also emerged as a formidable political figure in her own right, contesting the 1965 presidential election against General Ayub Khan and becoming a symbol of democratic resistance for a generation of Pakistanis. Fatima Jinnah’s life is not simply a chapter in a history book; it is a living lesson for Pakistani women today. She demonstrated that a woman could be professionally accomplished and personally devoted, modern in appearance and deeply principled in character, unmarried by choice and yet utterly complete as a person. She showed that sacrifice does not diminish a woman’s strength, it can, in fact, define it. In an age where women are still often measured by narrow societal expectations, Fatima Jinnah’s example urges us to reclaim our own definitions of dignity, purpose, and self-worth. As Pakistani women, we owe it to ourselves to emulate not merely her style, the elegant gharara, the graceful bearing but the substance behind it; her education, her independence, her unwavering integrity, and her refusal to be defined by anyone else’s expectations. Madar-e-Millat did not simply stand beside the founder of a nation; she stood as a model for what a Pakistani woman could be, then, and now.

Pakistan does not need an external adversary to explain its economic decline. It has one at home, operating out of two regulatory buildings in Islamabad: the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority and the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority, backstopped by a Ministry of Power and a Ministry of Petroleum that have spent two decades signing contracts, indexing tariffs, and deferring hard decisions in ways that now function less like national stewardship and more like a slow, self-administered dismantling of the country’s own industrial base. There is an old Urdu instinct for this kind of failure — “apne pairon par khud kulhari maarna,” to swing the axe onto your own foot — and it captures the pattern better than any conspiracy theory could. Nobody needs to have plotted Pakistan’s energy collapse. Two regulators simply kept striking the same foot, quarter after quarter, determination after determination, until there was nothing left to stand on. Start with NEPRA, and start with the number that should embarrass every member of its board. On August 10, 2026, the Authority approved a 30-year, 9.4-US-cent tariff for the 102 MW Gulpur hydropower project — a project whose tariff history is itself a case study in regulatory drift, having been revised in 2015, modified again in 2021 for exchange-rate relief, and delayed by force majeure claims for the better part of a decade before finally being settled this month, over the recorded dissent of one of NEPRA’s own members. Three weeks earlier, the same regulator had approved a tariff of just 3.0899 US cents for a 269 MW hybrid wind-and-solar project at Dhabeji.  A regulator capable of holding both of those numbers in its hands in the same month and treating them as equally acceptable outcomes is not pricing risk. It has simply stopped asking what things should cost. Then, in February 2026, NEPRA turned the same instinct on ordinary citizens. Its Prosumer Regulations 2026 dismantled the one-to-one net metering framework that had made rooftop solar a rational household investment, replacing it with net billing: excess power sold back to the grid at the National Average Energy Purchase Price of roughly Rs 10–13 per unit, while the same household buys grid electricity back minutes later at full retail rates. A citizen who financed their own panels, took on their own installation risk, and asked nothing from the state now effectively subsidizes the grid every time the sun shines. Compare that to Gulpur’s sponsors, who face none of that asymmetry and are guaranteed indexed returns for three decades. The Ministry of Power approved this framework and let it stand, even after the Prime Minister was reported to have ordered a NEPRA appeal to protect existing solar users — an appeal that, months later, has changed remarkably little for new applicants. OGRA, the sister regulator for oil and gas, has been just as busy inflicting damage of its own kind, and its failures deserve equal billing, because it is the gas sector, not electricity, that has produced Pakistan’s most persistent circular debt crisis. By July 2026, Pakistan’s gas circular debt had reached roughly Rs 3.44 trillion, and the country had missed an IMF deadline for a gas tariff notification that the Fund treats as a structural benchmark for the entire bailout program. OGRA’s own determinations tell the story: SNGPL and SSGC continue to report system losses well above the “unaccounted-for-gas” allowances built into their tariffs — 8.8 % actual against a roughly 7 % allowance for SNGPL, and a startling 13.6 % actual against an 8.2 % allowance for SSGC — with the gap simply passed through to consumers as cost rather than treated as the operational failure it is. In July 2026, when OGRA’s own recalculated prescribed prices should have lowered consumer gas bills, the federal government instead chose to keep tariffs unchanged and let SNGPL bank a projected Rs 44 billion surplus and SSGC a smaller one, rather than pass relief to the households and factories paying the bill. This is not regulation. It is bookkeeping in service of institutional convenience, dressed up as prudence. The consequence of all this — NEPRA’s mispriced generation contracts, its punitive treatment of rooftop solar, OGRA’s tolerance of chronic system losses, and both ministries’ shared unwillingness to force a reckoning — is a business environment where foreign direct investors cannot model their own electricity or gas costs five years out, let alone thirty. Industrial production stalls not because Pakistani manufacturers lack skill or ambition, but because no factory can plan around a power bill and a gas bill set by regulators who reward legacy contracts over least-cost technology and who treat circular debt as something to defer rather than solve. Pakistan’s Interior Minister recently said publicly that “the system has collapsed” — a remark aimed at governance and security, but one that describes the energy sector with uncomfortable precision, and one the security establishment has been strangely slow to connect to its own economic consequences. A country cannot out-negotiate a debt crisis it keeps manufacturing at the regulator’s desk every single quarter. None of this requires believing anyone set out to sabotage the country. It requires recognizing that an institution can do a slow version of the same damage through nothing more than inertia, misaligned incentives, and a persistent unwillingness to price energy the way the rest of the world now prices it — cheaply, competitively, and honestly. NEPRA and OGRA do not need another IMF-mandated hearing or another quarterly adjustment. They need leadership willing to admit that thirty years of axe-swings at the country’s own foot is enough, and that the next tariff determination should finally start asking what things should cost, not merely what precedent allows. So who actually chooses the people who run NEPRA and OGRA? This is the part of the story that gets almost no scrutiny, and it should. Both chairmen are selected by the federal cabinet from shortlists assembled by selection committees chaired by a serving federal minister — for NEPRA, historically the Minister for