New provinces or stronger local governments?

The preceding parts of this series have gradually separated concepts that modern banking has merged. Money used for payments is not the same thing as investment capital. A current account is not economically identical to funds deliberately committed to enterprise. Commercial-bank money creation is not automatically riba, but neither should monetary privilege remain beyond scrutiny. Once these distinctions are accepted, an obvious question arises: how will productive activity actually be financed? No modern economy can function merely by condemning interest. Farmers require seasonal finance. Manufacturers need machinery and working capital. Exporters must bridge the period between production and receipt of foreign proceeds. Families need housing. Governments require infrastructure. Entrepreneurs need capital before their businesses begin earning revenue. A serious alternative to riba must finance all of these activities (see the model of Robobank). The answer is not to replace every conventional loan with musharakah. Nor is it to rename a predetermined financial return as “profit”. Islamic commercial jurisprudence developed several different contractual forms precisely because economic transactions differ. Sale, lease, partnership, advance purchase and manufacturing contracts perform different functions and allocate ownership and risk differently. The real task is to connect financial return with an identifiable economic basis. A useful starting principle is simple: money should not generate a guaranteed return merely because money has been advanced. Return should arise from trade, ownership, service, productive participation or genuine exposure to commercial risk. This does not mean that every legitimate return must fluctuate. A trader may sell an asset for a fixed profit. A landlord may agree a fixed rent. A contractor may charge a predetermined price. A manufacturer may agree in advance to produce goods for a specified consideration. The prohibition of riba does not abolish prices. What matters is what stands behind the price. State Bank of Pakistan itself explains murabaha as a sale rather than a loan: the seller acquires a commodity, discloses its cost and sells it at an agreed profit. SBP similarly recognises mudarabah, musharakah, ijarah, salam and istisna as distinct Islamic financing structures. Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) maintains separate Shariah standards for murabaha, ijarah, salam, istisna and musharakah precisely because each represents a different legal and commercial relationship. The distinction is fundamental. Consider machinery required by an industrial enterprise. A conventional bank may lend Rs.100 million and require repayment of principal plus interest. Under a genuine murabaha structure, the financier purchases identified machinery, assumes ownership during the relevant period and subsequently sells it to the customer at an agreed deferred price. The return is then legally attached to a sale. This difference has substance only if the financier actually acquires what it claims to sell. Ownership cannot be reduced to a momentary paper entry while every risk, liability and practical responsibility remains with the customer from beginning to end. The same principle applies to ijarah. A financier that purchases machinery, vehicles or other productive assets and leases them to a business may legitimately earn rent because it owns an asset whose use is being transferred. Ownership, however, carries obligations. Structural ownership risks cannot simply be transferred wholesale to the lessee while the financier retains only the right to receive money. The issue is thus not whether rent happens to resemble an interest payment in amount. Economic prices often converge. The decisive issue is whether a genuine lease exists. Housing illustrates the point particularly well. Diminishing musharakah has become one of the major financing techniques used in Islamic banking. Under its proper conception, the financier and customer acquire a property jointly. The customer pays rent for the financier’s share and progressively purchases units of that share until sole ownership is achieved. State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has long maintained specific Shariah standards governing Sharikat-ul-Milk and diminishing musharakah. This can provide a defensible alternative to an interest-bearing mortgage. Its legitimacy, however, depends upon genuine co-ownership. If the customer bears every cost and risk from the first day, if the bank’s capital is effectively guaranteed irrespective of what happens to the asset, and if the entire arrangement merely reproduces principal plus benchmarked return, the partnership becomes increasingly formal rather than substantive. The same scrutiny is required in agriculture. Agriculture is ill-suited to rigid debt repayment because its returns depend upon weather, crop disease, market prices, water availability and timing. A farmer may incur losses despite diligence and competence. Classical commercial law contains an instrument remarkably suited to this problem: salam. Under salam, the purchaser pays the price in advance for specified goods to be delivered later. The farmer obtains working capital before harvest. The purchaser acquires a commercial claim to the future crop and assumes the market risk associated with buying it in advance. This is not charity. It is trade. Properly developed agricultural salam markets could provide farmers with liquidity without forcing them into compounding debt when crops fail. Warehousing, quality certification, crop insurance or takaful, commodity exchanges and transparent market information would be necessary to make such financing scalable. Istisna can similarly serve manufacturing, construction and infrastructure. A textile mill, irrigation facility, industrial machine and housing project need not be forced into one universal debt contract. Partnership financing becomes important where future returns are uncertain. Musharakah permits parties to combine capital and share results. Mudarabah separates capital from enterprise: one party provides funds and another skill and management. Return is connected with actual economic performance. Their difficulty is equally obvious. Profit-and-loss sharing cannot work where accounts are unreliable, sales remain hidden, related-party transactions are opaque and litigation takes years. A financier unable to determine actual profit will naturally prefer a fixed receivable. Financial reform requires credible accounts, meaningful audit, digital documentation, effective insolvency laws, reliable registries and quick commercial adjudication. Risk sharing cannot flourish where information itself cannot be trusted. There is, however, another question we rarely ask: why must productive finance remain concentrated in a few large banks? History offers an instructive example. Rabobank did not begin as the international institution known today. Its origins were local Dutch farmers’

For eighteen years, I have made a quiet, sometimes lonely case: that technology, not more paperwork and more offices, is the only honest path to good governance in Pakistan. I did not arrive at this conviction from a textbook. I arrived at it from a desk inside the Planning Commission, watching a system that was designed — on paper — to deliver development, and instead delivered delay, opacity, and grievance. Anyone who has sat through the sanctioning of a Public Sector Development Program (PSDP) project knows the ritual. The feasibility study is glowing. The PC-1 is approved with confident projections. Committees nod. Funds are released. And then the project disappears into the machinery of provincial implementation, where oversight thins out and accountability evaporates. What was promised on paper and what is delivered on the ground are, more often than not, two entirely different stories. I watched this happen again and again, and each time the gap between sanction and delivery was not explained by a shortage of money or expertise. It was explained by bureaucracy — a system built not to serve citizens but to preserve itself. This is not an abstract observation. It is the root of a very real and very dangerous problem. A significant part of the unrest we see in Balochistan, in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not simply about resources or geography. It is about the absence of transparency and the absence of governance that people can see, question, and trust. When a citizen cannot find out where a development fund went, when a project sanctioned in Islamabad never materializes as promised in a district headquarters, when the only visible authority is a bureaucrat with a stamp and a discretionary signature, resentment grows. People do not rebel against distance from the capital. They rebel against being governed by a system that treats them as subjects to be managed rather than citizens to be served. And here is the tragedy that too few are willing to name plainly: the bureaucratic architecture we still operate under was never designed to serve the governed. It was designed by the British Raj to control a colonized population — to extract revenue, maintain order, and ensure that authority always flowed downward from a distant center, never upward from the people. Files, layers of clearance, and the personal discretion of an officer were features of a colonial control system, not instruments of democratic accountability. We inherited that machinery at independence and, astonishingly, kept it largely intact. The tool built to pacify a colony has been repurposed, with barely a redesign, to govern a republic. It should trouble us deeply that a structure engineered to keep a colonized people in check is now one of the principal reasons that Pakistan’s most marginalized regions distrust their own government. So when the conversation turns, as it periodically does, to creating new administrative units — carving out new divisions, new districts, new tiers of provincial machinery — as the answer to Balochistan’s or KPK’s grievances, I feel obligated to push back, loudly. Before we draw a single new administrative boundary, we must confront the core disease, not multiply its symptoms. New units will not dilute bureaucratic power; they will replicate it. Every new administrative tier is another office, another set of discretionary signatures, another opportunity for the same colonial-era logic of gatekeeping to entrench itself further. For the aggrieved citizen in Turbat or Muzaffarabad or Bannu, a new secretariat is not relief. It is simply a new address for the same unaccountable authority. We would be handing the bureaucracy — an institution that has shown a consistent instinct for self-preservation — more territory to govern, not less power to abuse. Real relief requires shrinking the space in which discretion operates unchecked, not expanding the number of desks where it can be exercised. This is precisely why the moment for AI-enabled local governance has arrived, and why Pakistan can no longer afford to treat it as a distant aspiration. Around the world, and notably across India, urban local bodies and municipalities are moving beyond basic digitization toward what might be called algorithms of accountability — systems purpose-built to increase transparency, limit human discretion where it invites abuse, and protect citizen data. These frameworks generally rest on a few consistent pillars: ensuring that automated public decisions on things like welfare disbursement or tax assessment can be audited and challenged rather than buried in a file; protecting citizen data through clear legal safeguards; requiring any private vendor supplying government technology to disclose how its systems work; and actively checking automated tools for bias against marginalized communities. The Indian experience offers concrete, transferable lessons. Municipal bodies in cities like Delhi and Bengaluru now use satellite imagery and mapping systems to flag unauthorized construction and property tax discrepancies — but critically, they pair this with a human-verification step, so an algorithm’s flag is only ever an advisory alert, not a final punishment, creating a documented trail a citizen can actually contest. States such as Telangana and Maharashtra have deployed multilingual citizen chatbots to handle civic complaints, built with data-masking safeguards that strip personal information before it ever touches a broader system. Smart-city command centers in Surat and Pune operate under strict data retention rules, so surveillance footage is automatically deleted unless tied to an active investigation, preventing the machinery from becoming a permanent surveillance state. And where facial-recognition attendance systems have been used to track municipal staff, unions pushed successfully for dispute mechanisms so that a technical glitch never costs a worker their wages. None of these systems eliminate human judgment. What they eliminate is unaccountable, invisible, discretionary human judgment — the exact currency the colonial bureaucracy was built to trade in. That is the reform Pakistan needs at the local government level: not another administrative layer, but a transparent, auditable, citizen-facing system that makes it structurally difficult for a project to vanish between sanction and delivery, and structurally easy for a citizen in the

Development is the process of creating lasting improvements in the lives of people by addressing their genuine social, economic, and public needs and not merely constructing new infrastructure, completing projects, impressive photographs, or utilising the allocated public funds. In a true sense, the real measure of development is whether the real problem has been solved, and whether the interventions have created sustainable public value and an evident change in social or economic conditions of the society. A project should begin with a clearly defined problem and public need. Its vision, goals, activities, and measurable indicators should follow the problem. In professional project management practices, all these elements are recorded in the planning and design phase. In Pakistan, we have mastered the art of reporting these elements without achieving any meaningful results. Imagine a public park surrounded by a steel fence. Children and families using the park are visible from the road. If funds are available and privacy is the genuine concern, the executing agency can add steel sheets, plant trees, or use temporary screens. Each solution is inexpensive and retains the existing structure. However, if the focus is primarily on expenditure, the agency may remove the functioning fence and replace it with a new brick wall. This may have a longer life, but is not necessarily the most economical or appropriate solution. Considering Pakistan’s fragile economic outlook, many major development projects are financed through foreign loans. Such funds are eventually repaid, often with interest. Money spent on an unnecessary intervention is no longer available for genuine public need. This is a recurring weakness in Pakistan, where success is measured by the money spent, not by the effectiveness of the solution. This recalls Peter Drucker’s observation. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” The continued existence of infrastructure built during the Mughal and British periods is in contrast with contemporary projects, which deteriorate within years. This might be a romantic comparison, influenced by the fact that we see only the structures that survived, but durability and long-term public value are not central to our project culture. The same mindset is evident in urban beautification schemes. Imagine a local government installs a 15-foot-high statue. The project is indeed beautiful and will produce attractive photographs for official reports, but if the same statue is mounted on thoughtfully designed columns, the shaded seating can be utilised by daily wage workers who gather at bus stops, on footpaths, and in other public spaces because no designated facility is available. This is not an encroachment issue, but a planning failure. Planners and designers should use one intervention to achieve multiple objectives. Imagine a decades-old roundabout, with a working fountain surrounded by grass. During hot afternoons, labourers and children visit the site to cool themselves in the fountain’s spray. Officials might consider this behaviour undesirable and wish to block access. They can barricade it through small trees or shrubs, but the typical response will be to uproot the entire structure, construct a new fountain, and replace the grass with artificial green carpet. The public behaviour may reflect the unavailability of affordable recreational areas or public bathing facilities. Yet, the official solution destroys a functioning public asset, removes a natural green area, and spends substantial funds without addressing the underlying need. Needs assessment appears in project reports, but they are rarely conducted with sufficient depth. Imagine a posh housing society, where tubewells were eventually replaced by private borewells. Residents have spent a considerable amount to arrange their own water supply. Now, if any government agency has received funds for water distribution, they should spend it in areas where the people are still digging borewells or have no access to clean drinking water. However, again the typical response will be to spend millions in this posh area, where households have already arranged their own water supply. The fall of the water table is the real problem, which in this case will persist after spending millions. Pakistan has an extensive planning structure, which includes the federal and provincial bodies, planning departments in government organizations, consultants, and project management units. In 2025-26 alone, the National Economic Council approved the national development portfolio of 4.224 trillion. Such substantial expenditure should produce visible and lasting improvement in people live. The problem, therefore, is not insufficient funding, but how projects are identified, designed, approved, and evaluated. The same problem is visible in education, health, and administrative projects. Consider a basic health unit or education facility with a leaking roof. The available funds should be directed to fix the roof. However, funds are allocated to boundary wall, new signage, and in some cases, for an entirely new building. Similarly, for decade, government departments are trying to digitise their operations. For a quick solution, these departments procure specialised softwares, which has high licensing costs, and inadequate training mechanisms. After years of implementation, enforcement, and expenditure, the same departments revert to paper files or to a new software. The first step should be, to strengthen the capacity of all relevant staff in problem identification and root cause analysis. Every project initiation document should clearly identify the problem, public need, examine alternatives, and link the proposed intervention to public value. These elements should always be in quantifiable terms. Moreover, the project indicators should measure the extent to which the problem is solved and the post-completion evaluation should validate the visualized public benefits. Institutions move energetically, spend heavily, and report extensively, but bypass the original problem. Pakistan does not simply need more projects; it needs projects to solve problems; it needs interventions that respond to genuine needs, preserve what already works, and provide sustainable public value. The true measure should not be the amount spent but the resolution of the problem. Unless problem-solving becomes central to planning and evaluation, fund utilisation will continue to be mistaken for development and detour away from progress we seek. Writers  Dr. Sikandar Bilal Khattak  Academician with Research Interest in Sustainable Systems Can be

Every few months, someone declares that people no longer need literature. The argument usually sounds convincing enough. We live in a world of instant news, endless social media, podcasts, and artificial intelligence. Information arrives faster than ever before. Why spend days with a novel when an opinion can be delivered in mere seconds? Yet the strange thing is that the more information we have, the more relevant literature seems to become. Hand someone a novel written a century ago, and they might discover their own world reflected in its pages, including many of the same fears and uncertainties they face today. That is more than a coincidence. It is literature doing exactly what it has always done, peering beyond the moment in which it was written. Literature offers more than a compelling story and reminds us why it continues to resonate till date. Many admire literature for its alluring language and craft. Others value it for the evolutionary nature and futuristic tendencies. That’s the side this leans toward. Literature stays with us because it explains the world we’re still trying to make sense of. Every generation believes its experiences are unique. Pandemics feel unprecedented, propaganda seems like a modern invention and the world today evolves at a pace that feels unlike anything before it. Yet long before any of this dominated the headlines, writers had already imagined it, warned about it, or lived through versions of it themselves. Literature does not simply reflect its own era. It reaches far beyond it, exploring aspects of human nature that continue to surface despite changing circumstances. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, thousands of readers picked up a novel from 1947 and discovered echoes of the present. Albert Camus’s The Plague, set in the Algerian city of Oran, seemed to describe their own lives with strange precision; the empty streets, the panic-buying, the denial before the lockdowns, and that eerie numbness that emerged as the crisis dragged on. Camus never saw a pandemic like this coming. What he understood, decades before any of us lived through one, was how people respond when disruption takes hold. George Orwell did something similar, except his warning arrived even earlier. Nineteen Eighty-Four gave us words we now use so casually and forget they came from fiction: surveillance, doublethink, thoughtcrime. Orwell imagined a state where truth could be manipulated and every move was watched. Decades later, in a world run by data and constant tracking, his descriptions still feel eerily familiar. Pakistani writers were making this same point long before it became the world’s concern. Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh imagined a man stranded between two countries decades before the world started talking about refugees and border crises. Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag Ka Darya traced the same cycle of displacement and rebuilding that we’re still watching today, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Afghanistan, revealing how human beings survive conflict no matter which war or which century it happens to be. What makes literature so accurate over time is not mysticism. Writers were not fortune-tellers. They were keen observers of human nature. They sensed that while the world keeps reinventing itself, people rarely do. A writer who understands these instincts deeply enough, produces literature that seems to anticipate futures it was never meant to witness. That same power demands caution. Literature can expose hidden truths just as easily as it can be used as a tool of persuasion. Throughout history, poems, novels, and stories have been used to shape how people think, feel, and behave. Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden is a reminder of how easily powerful narratives can turn domination into duty. It shows how persuasive language can make unequal power structures appear virtuous and troubling ideas sound noble. The same dynamic persists today, whenever power seeks a more palatable language to conceal itself. The Soviet Union promoted an entire genre known as socialist realism, where literature was not expected to explore human complexity but to glorify the state and inspire loyalty. Even something as ordinary as a school curriculum works the same way. The books chosen for students are never just neutral stories. They are early lessons that shape young minds, teaching them which histories to trust and which values to hold onto. This is the quiet, manipulative side of literature that doesn’t need to announce itself, yet still decides how an entire generation views the world. Literature deserves more than passive consumption. The same stories that broaden our understanding can also be used to influence and persuade. That makes reading critically, asking who wrote something and why, not just an academic skill, but a way of navigating a world built on narratives. What keeps literature alive is not tradition, nostalgia, or academic praise. It is the moment of recognition it still delivers. When a writer long gone can describe anxieties, conflicts, and dilemmas that feel unmistakably current, how many of our modern concerns are merely old questions in new disguises?

Stockholm Resilience Centre defines resilience as the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop. System can be an individual, a forest, a city or an economy. In simple words, resilience refers to the ability of an ecosystem to deal with disturbances and returns to its former state. When it comes to water resource management in Pakistan, unfortunately, we are not managing our water resource as sustainably as we should. WWF Pakistan points out a robust difference in water consumption between communities in Pakistan. Those who can afford uses 10 times more water than global average that stands at 10 gallons a day. On the contrary, poor lacks access to water in Pakistan. How sad it is that there exist two different water realities in Pakistan. On one hand, we have people that uses 100 gallons of water each day. On the other hand, we have masses that don’t even have access to water. We must put an end to existing water inequality in Pakistan. Water forms the backbone of our society and economy and without sustainable water management practices in place, we can neither have socially equitable society nor can we achieve sustainable economic growth for Pakistan. We must ensure that each person in Pakistan should have access to clean water regardless of geographical location and financial resources at disposal. If we really want to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for Pakistan, we must end water inequality in Pakistan. An access to clean water is a basic human right and thus it should be available to all in the country. It is important to mention here that each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is strongly coupled with how we manage water as a natural resource. If we mange water wisely (with tomorrow in mind), we can easily achieve all 17 SDGs for Pakistan. However, an unsustainable water resource management will act as Achilles heel and prevent us in realizing Sustainable Development Goals. We certainly need a paradigm shift in managing water as a resource in Pakistan. Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives (Government of Pakistan) highlights that at the time of independence, per capita water availability in Pakistan was over 5000 cubic meters each year. Unfortunately, today, per capita water availability in Pakistan is sharply reduced to roughly 1000 cubic meters per person each year. In other words, each person in Pakistan now only has 1/5 of the water available every year, when compared to 1947 (at the time of independence). Public policy makers in Pakistan must tackle decreasing per capita water availability in Pakistan with utmost seriousness and do all it takes to tackle it in the most sustainable manner. Before we head on to solutions, we must understand the root causes of decreasing per capita water availability in Pakistan. According to Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), population in Pakistan has increased 7-fold since independence in 1947. Naturally, when we distribute the same amount of water we have each year on 7 times more population, the per capita water availability in Pakistan would then sharply reduce. ACIAR then stresses on the fact that irrigated agriculture in Pakistan consumes 95% of surface water supply in the country. Another report from Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) highlights that irrigated agriculture consumes 93% of the available water resource and acts as the single largest sector of economy employing 44% of the labour force, generating 60% of the foreign exchange earnings and produces roughly a quarter of Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP). The already spoken report from PCRWR then points out that Pakistan waste 60% of water from canals to farm gates. Do you know that per capita water storage ability of Pakistan is roughly 159 m3? On the contrary, the per-capita water storage ability of USA and Australia is over 5000m3, followed by China with a per-capita water storage ability of 2200m3, Egypt 2362 m3, Turkey 1402 m3 and Iran with 492m3. PCRWR further indicates that inadequate water storage ability has forced Pakistan to lose 120 BCM of water during floods of 2010, 2012 and 2014. If Pakistan had ample surface water storage infrastructure in place, it could had saved at least half of 120 BCM of surface water that could then be used to increase per-capita water availability in the country. The remaining 60 BCM of floodwater could restore Indus River Delta where many species are fighting for their survival due to reduced river flow. There is a dire need for Pakistan to build small, medium and large dams to store surface water. Doing so, will increase surface water availability on year-round basis, decrease flood related damage to agricultural lands and infrastructure, increase per-capita water availability, reduce reliance on underground water, recharge aquifers and mitigate their depletion. We have what it takes to build a series of small, medium and large dams in Pakistan to harvest floodwater during monsoon season. Do you know that 1 billion cubic meters of water has 1 trillion litres of water? Now imagine, if 50 litres of water cost 1 USD, the price tag of 1 billion cubic meters (or 1 trillion litres) of water would be 20 billion USD. Thus, a cumulative cost for 60 BCM of floodwater would roughly be USD 1200 billion. Now, if we would sharply reduce the already spoken figure to its one-tenth, the cost would still be a whooping USD 120 billion for 60 BCM of floodwater. We must understand that this is just the price of water. It is crucial to mention here that water forms the basis of all sorts of social and economic development, and we must learn to manage water sustainably to ensure a resilient Pakistan for all. We must invest heavily in constructing dams of all sizes to increase surface water availability and to enhance per-capita water in Pakistan. Here is an example. Do you know that Sweden has roughly 10,000 dams to manage surface water. It is quite simple, the

Across the world, a quiet but powerful realization has taken hold among policymakers, educators, and security experts alike: the battle against extremism and terrorism cannot be won through force alone. It must be won in classrooms, community centers, sports fields, and digital spaces where young people spend their formative years. Youth, who make up more than half the population in many developing nations including Pakistan, represent both the greatest vulnerability and the greatest opportunity in this struggle. When disenfranchised, unemployed, and disillusioned, young people become easy targets for radical recruiters who promise purpose, belonging, and revenge for perceived injustices. But when engaged, educated, and empowered, that same demographic becomes the most formidable wall against violent ideologies. The logic is simple yet often ignored by policymakers fixated on military and law enforcement solutions. Extremist organizations have long understood that idle, aggrieved youth are their most fertile recruiting ground. Poverty, lack of education, unemployment, and a sense of alienation from mainstream society create psychological vacuums that radical narratives rush to fill. Counterterrorism strategies that ignore this reality and rely solely on kinetic operations may eliminate individual militants but do nothing to stop the conveyor belt producing new recruits. A zero-tolerance approach to extremism must therefore be twofold: uncompromising against violence itself, while simultaneously investing heavily in prevention through youth engagement. Several nations offer instructive models. Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, faced a serious extremist threat in the early 2000s following the Bali bombings. Rather than relying exclusively on security crackdowns, the government partnered with religious scholars and civil society organizations to run De radicalization programs specifically targeting young former militants and at-risk youth. These programs combined vocational training, religious counter-messaging, and psychological support, helping thousands reintegrate into society while simultaneously building a broader national narrative of moderate, tolerant Islam that appealed to younger generations disillusioned with violent rhetoric. Denmark’s Aarhus Model, developed to address the flow of young citizens joining the Islamic State in Syria, similarly emphasized rehabilitation over pure punishment for youth who had not committed serious crimes. Mentorship programs paired returning young people with community figures, psychologists, and former extremists who had themselves walked away from radical ideologies. The approach recognized that shame and exclusion often push vulnerable youth further toward extremist communities that offer unconditional acceptance, whereas structured reintegration paired with firm legal consequences for actual violence creates pathways back to mainstream society. The United Kingdom’s Prevent strategy, despite facing criticism over profiling concerns, demonstrated the value of embedding counter-extremism awareness within schools and universities, training teachers to recognize early warning signs of radicalization and intervene before ideological commitment hardens. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s response to Boko Haram insurgency increasingly incorporated youth-focused economic empowerment programs in the northeast, recognizing that widespread poverty and lack of opportunity in the region had been ruthlessly exploited by militant recruiters promising financial incentives to jobless young men. For Pakistan, which has paid an enormous price in blood and treasure fighting terrorism over the past two decades, these international examples carry urgent lessons. The country’s youth bulge, with a median age below 23, is simultaneously its greatest asset and its greatest vulnerability. Regions historically affected by militancy, including parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, continue to suffer from inadequate educational infrastructure, high unemployment, and limited access to vocational training, conditions that extremist networks have historically exploited with alarming success. A national strategy that couples uncompromising military and intelligence operations against active terrorist networks with sustained, well-funded investment in youth education, sports programs, technical training, and civic engagement could fundamentally alter the recruitment landscape over a generation. Digital literacy must also become a central pillar of this strategy. Extremist recruitment has migrated substantially online, where algorithms on social media platforms can inadvertently funnel vulnerable young users toward increasingly radical content. Countries that have invested in digital counter-narrative campaigns, training young social media influencers and content creators to actively challenge extremist messaging with authentic, relatable content, have seen measurable success in disrupting online radicalization pipelines. Pakistan’s own vibrant youth culture, increasingly connected through smartphones even in remote areas, could be harnessed similarly if government and civil society organizations invest in training a new generation of digital counter-extremism voices. Ultimately, the fight against terrorism cannot be sustained through security operations alone, however necessary those remain against active threats. Zero tolerance for violence must be matched with zero tolerance for the conditions that breed it: poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness among the young. The examples of Indonesia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria demonstrate that no single formula guarantees success, but all share a common thread, treating youth not as suspects to be monitored but as partners to be invested in. For a nation like Pakistan standing at a demographic crossroads, the choice is stark and urgent: empower this generation of young people as guardians of peace, or risk watching extremist networks continue to recruit from among society’s most overlooked and underserved.