Pakistan’s Governance Crisis

In the digital era, crime has drastically transformed. These days, planned disinformation operations, hate speech, deepfakes and misinformation spread more quickly than traditional crimes, eroding public confidence, escalating tensions within communities and, in severe situations, inciting actual bloodshed. Police must change to protect the information environment as well, since Pakistan’s digital footprint keeps growing. Acknowledging the evolving security environment, Regional Police Officer (RPO) Sohail Akhtar Sukhera has established a Cyber Patrolling Cell in District Jhang as a pioneer model for the Faisalabad Region. By keeping an eye on dangerous online content, spotting emerging digital risks, recording evidence and organising prompt responses through legal processes, the initiative represents a shift from reactive policing to intelligence-led prevention. The framework emphasises adherence to existing legal safeguards while providing clearly defined monitoring categories, reporting channels and escalation procedures. The significance of this initiative extends beyond the boundaries of the Faisalabad Region. It reflects a reality increasingly recognised by law enforcement agencies worldwide: the internet has become an operational domain of public safety. Within hours, a fake video, manipulated image or coordinated disinformation campaign can generate fear, inflame sectarian tensions, undermine institutional legitimacy or provoke violence. Preventing harm in both physical and digital environments has therefore become an essential responsibility of modern policing. Cyber patrolling has already been integrated into contemporary law enforcement in several countries. The European Union’s Digital Services Act requires major digital platforms to mitigate systemic risks arising from coordinated misinformation and illegal content, while Europol strengthens cross-border cyber intelligence. Singapore, through the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), combines legal intervention with public digital literacy campaigns to counter online deception. The United Arab Emirates employs AI-driven cybercrime teams and real-time threat intelligence to combat online extremism and hate speech. In South Asia, Kerala Police’s Cyberdome demonstrates how collaboration among law enforcement agencies, cyber security professionals and academic institutions can strengthen cyber threat intelligence, digital forensics, online fraud investigations and disinformation monitoring. By identifying rumours, verifying information and reducing public panic during emergencies, Cyberdome has emerged as one of the region’s leading cyber policing models. Against this international backdrop, the Cyber Patrolling Cell established by RPO Sohail Akhtar Sukhera represents an important step towards institutionalising digital policing in Pakistan. While still evolving, it demonstrates an understanding that policing must anticipate threats before they materialise rather than merely responding after damage has occurred. However, technology alone cannot counter disinformation. International experience demonstrates that successful cyber patrolling depends upon robust institutions, specialised expertise and public trust. Pakistan should therefore consider several complementary reforms. First, dedicated Digital Threat Intelligence Units should be established within police organisations, integrating cyber investigators, OSINT analysts, digital forensic experts and behavioural analysts capable of identifying coordinated online influence operations. Second, law enforcement agencies should invest in artificial intelligence-assisted monitoring systems capable of detecting bot networks, coordinated disinformation campaigns, multilingual hate speech and AI-generated deepfake content while ensuring meaningful human oversight over enforcement decisions. Third, closer institutional collaboration is essential. Provincial police, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, universities, technology companies and civil society organisations should operate through an integrated digital information-sharing mechanism. Cyber threats rarely respect institutional or provincial boundaries. Fourth, specialised partnerships with universities and research institutions should support continuous officer training in cyber intelligence, digital forensics, artificial intelligence and data analytics. Institutions such as NUST, FAST, Information Technology University Lahore and other research centres possess expertise that can strengthen law enforcement capacity. Fifth, transparent oversight mechanisms are indispensable. Periodic public reporting, independent legal oversight and clearly defined operational protocols can ensure that cyber patrolling remains lawful, proportionate and fully consistent with constitutional guarantees relating to freedom of expression and privacy. Effective cyber policing should enhance democratic resilience rather than weaken it. Finally, equal attention should be given to digital literacy. Citizens who can verify information, recognise manipulated content, identify deepfakes and report online abuse become active participants in protecting the information ecosystem. Public resilience remains the strongest defence against organised deception. The strategic importance of the information domain has surpassed that of physical infrastructure. Just as police patrol streets to deter conventional crime, responsible cyber patrolling has become essential to protecting democratic institutions, social cohesion and national security. Digital policing has become a fundamental responsibility of contemporary law enforcement, and Pakistan can no longer afford to treat it as an optional function. The Cyber Patrolling Cell established under the leadership of RPO Faisalabad Sohail Akhtar Sukhera should be viewed not merely as a regional initiative but as a policy experiment capable of informing Pakistan’s broader digital policing strategy. Strengthened through advanced technology, specialised training, transparent oversight and interagency cooperation, it offers a practical road map for developing a nationally integrated cyber patrolling framework that safeguards both public security and democratic resilience in the digital age.

When Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, Europe was not prepared for Nora Helmer’s final act, where she left her husband. The sound of a woman shutting the door on her husband and children became one of the most controversial moments in literary history. To nineteenth-century society, the idea that a wife could leave an unhappy marriage was not merely immoral; it was considered an attack on the very foundation of civilization itself: the marriage. The reaction was so intense that German theatre managers forced Ibsen to change the ending. In the revised version, Nora looks at her sleeping children, collapses emotionally, and stays in the marriage. Society wanted the family preserved at all costs. Marriage was sacred. Separation was shameful. A woman’s identity was expected to remain tied to sacrifice, endurance, and silence. More than a century later, something similar is unfolding in Pakistan, particularly in Islamabad. According to recent reports, family courts in Islamabad are facing an unprecedented rise in khula and maintenance cases. More than 45,000 khula-related cases have reportedly already been filed this year, with over 300 new cases emerging daily. The number of family disputes continues to rise, reaching 100,000 cases in 2025. Alongside this trend, court marriages have also increased significantly, many ending in disputes soon after marriage. This phenomenon is often discussed only through statistics or social criticism. Yet beneath these numbers lies a deeper sociological transformation, one that history has witnessed before: a doll’s house. The most striking aspect is not the increase in divorce. It is the change in social attitudes toward marriage itself. Pakistan today appears to be experiencing debates that Europe confronted more than one hundred years ago. In traditional Pakistani society, much like Victorian Europe, marriage has long been treated as sacred, permanent, and socially untouchable. Previous generations often viewed separation as failure, dishonour, or rebellion against family values. Women were expected to tolerate emotional hardship, neglect, incompatibility, and sometimes even abuse for the sake of preserving the household structure. This is precisely the social environment that Nora challenged in A Doll’s House. At the time, audiences were horrified not because Nora committed a crime, but because she chose herself over an unhappy domestic life. Society could forgive a flawed husband more easily than it could accept a woman leaving the marriage altogether. Her departure symbolized individual dignity over social expectation. Today, in Islamabad’s family courts, one can observe echoes of the same historical transformation. Increasingly, people, particularly women, are refusing to remain in marriages they perceive as emotionally unbearable, unequal, or destructive. Whether one agrees with this shift or not, it represents a visible social reality. This does not necessarily mean that society has abandoned the institution of marriage. Rather, it may indicate that expectations from marriage are changing. Earlier generations often prioritized endurance and collective family reputation. Modern generations increasingly prioritize emotional compatibility, respect, mental peace, and personal autonomy. The pace of this transition, however, varies across societies. Europe underwent these debates gradually through industrialization, feminism, legal reform, and changing gender roles over decades. Pakistan, by contrast, is witnessing social change at a much faster pace due to urbanization, education, digital connectivity, economic pressures, and shifting cultural narratives. Ideas that once took generations to spread now travel instantly through social media, television, and global interaction. This is why the comparison with Ibsen’s drama becomes deeply relevant. History does not repeat itself in identical forms, but human societies often move through similar psychological and cultural stages. The same fears once expressed in nineteenth-century Europe, that family systems would collapse, morality would disappear, and social order would weaken, are now frequently heard in discussions within Pakistan. Yet it is important to approach this issue carefully and honestly. Recognizing this social transformation does not automatically mean celebrating divorce, nor does it mean condemning marriage. It simply means acknowledging that societies evolve, and that concepts once considered absolute eventually become contested. The sanctity of marriage remains deeply important for millions of families in Pakistan. At the same time, increasing numbers of individuals no longer believe that preserving a marriage at any cost is always the highest social virtue. Perhaps the real lesson from A Doll’s House is not about encouraging separation, but about understanding how societies react when individuals begin demanding dignity, identity and personal autonomy within family life. More than a century ago, Europe feared Nora’s door slam. Today, Pakistan is hearing similar sounds, not from theatre stages, but from courtrooms and homes. Whether this transformation strengthens or weakens society remains a question for future generations. But one thing is undeniable: social change, once it begins, rarely moves backward.

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

Nations, organizations, and individuals who rely on borrowed time never prosper. Vision of the future is paramount to growth. Stagnation leads to disaster. In a world driven by technology, only change is permanent. As a nation, we started off well. The founding fathers burnt the midnight oil not only to sustain but also to prosper. Early in the decade of the fifties, the entire development framework was put in place. For industrialization, PIDC (Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation); for water and power, WAPDA (Water & Power Development Authority); PAEC (Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission) headed by Dr I.H. Usmani; PCSIR (Pakistan Council of Science & Industrial Research) under Dr Salim-Uz-Zaman Siddiqui; PSI (Pakistan Standards Institution), now PSQCA (Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority); PIAC (Pakistan International Airlines Corporation). The father of the nation, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, himself inaugurated the State Bank of Pakistan in 1948. The discovery of natural gas at Sui in 1952 was a gift of nature. At 12 TCF, it was considered one of the largest deposits of its time, sufficient to meet the needs of the nation for a century. Future requires investment, both short and long term. It was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s vision to bring the Muslim population of the Sub-continent into the mainstream. Starting with schools, he moved on to colleges and finally the Aligarh University, which not only led the movement for the creation of Pakistan but also provided the manpower to sustain it. In the formative years of the republic, education was taken seriously both by the teachers and the taught. In my entire academic journey, I never once missed a class, even during my term as President of the departmental student union. The first-born free generation was being prepared to lead, not follow. Instead of buying time, the future was being built. In the 1973 constitution, literacy was declared a fundamental right. Under Article 25-A, every Pakistani had to be literate by the year 1985, but the target was not only missed, the entire effort was sidelined. The government of Muhammad Khan Junejo tried to narrow the gap by introducing the Nai Roshni program, which was shut down after his government fell. For meaningful nation building, education, employment and health are critical. The recent student uprising in India focused on professional education followed by employment. They demanded transparency and merit, which were being compromised. Modi’s shining India meant very little for them. Other countries have experienced similar protests (Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia). Pakistan needs a lot of catching up to do. It is back to the basics of nation building. Universal Primary Coverage is the starting point. Every five-year-old child should be in school this year. This will reverse the trend of the swelling out-of-school youth population. Once primary coverage is ensured, the next target should be to cover those who missed out. The country is blessed with a bulging youth population, which must be made productive. Despite all the challenges of governance, the informal sector continues to perform well by providing the needed goods and services. Confidence in the formal sector is needed for a meaningful and cohesive march forward. In the decade of the fifties, Pakistan was poised to emerge as the first Asian Tiger; now it seriously lags behind while other nations have grown, which includes China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia — the list goes on. Rightly said, this is the Asian Century. It is time to look inwards. The future belongs to educated and healthy nations who do not settle for short-term gains but instead focus on the future. Pakistan should not be a burial ground for those who build fortunes abroad. The homeland must come first. The best cannot be left for last.

The previous part VIII of this series concluded that a just tax system must satisfy more than the requirements of arithmetic. It must rest upon legislative competence, representative consent, rational classification, due process, protection against arbitrary deprivation, transparent expenditure and effective remedies. Parliament, while levying taxes cannot constitutionalise injustice merely by enacting it. Pakistan’s fiscal crisis will not be resolved by asking citizens to finance an unreformed state through increasingly coercive instruments. A recent book by Dr Hafiz A. Pasha, Fatima Malik and Hafsa Tanveer, Pakistan: Reforming an Inefficient and Inequitable Tax System, provides an appropriate opportunity to carry that argument forward. The volume is ambitious, data-rich and deserving of serious attention. Few recent studies attempt, within a single work, to map federal and provincial taxation, estimate tax gaps through different methodologies, examine incidence across income groups and sectors, evaluate fiscal incentives and finally present a quantified reform programme. Its central diagnosis is familiar but supported by extensive empirical work. Pakistan combines high statutory rates with a low tax-to-GDP ratio, excessive dependence on indirect taxation, pervasive evasion, severe sectoral disparities and weak provincial revenue mobilisation. The authors propose reforms that, in their estimation, can increase the national tax-to-GDP ratio by approximately three percentage points by 2027–28. The principal difficulty lies not in what the book measures. It lies in what the framework of measurement necessarily leaves outside its calculations. The usefulness—and limits—of the tax-gap lens The organising idea of the book is the tax gap. Through cross-country regressions, a representative-tax-system approach, monetary estimates of evasion and bottom-up calculations, the authors conclude that Pakistan possesses the potential to collect approximately three percent of GDP more in taxes. This is analytically valuable. It also risks converting a constitutional and political problem into an accounting exercise. A tax gap is not necessarily a reservoir of revenue waiting to be collected. Parts of it may reflect privileges protected by influential groups. Other parts arise from low productivity, fragmented enterprises, unemployment, weak financial inclusion and the regulatory costs created by the state itself. Informality is not always a voluntary choice made for the purpose of evasion; it can also be a survival strategy in an economy where formalisation invites multiple taxes, withholding obligations, inspections and compliance costs without ensuring reliable public services. Citizens also judge taxation in relation to expenditure. Their reluctance cannot be understood solely as non-compliance when additional revenue appears likely to finance debt servicing, administrative expansion, elite concessions, loss-making state enterprises and politically negotiated subsidies rather than education, healthcare, transport, security of property and equal economic opportunity. The decisive question is consequently not only how much more can be collected. It is who controls the state, who bears its burdens, who receives its rents, and why technically sound reforms repeatedly fail. Public finance asks how the gap should be closed. Constitutional Political Economy asks why the beneficiaries of the existing arrangement would permit it to be closed fairly. The selective fiscal state The book repeatedly recognises the presence of powerful vested interests. It identifies the under-taxation of property, agriculture, wholesale and retail trade, real estate and parts of the services sector. At the same time, it finds a disproportionate burden upon large-scale manufacturing, banking and formal businesses. Its estimate that industry bears taxes equivalent to 23.8 percent of its value added, with the incidence on large-scale manufacturing exceeding 36 percent, is particularly revealing. These figures demonstrate that Pakistan does not suffer from a uniformly low-tax equilibrium. Pakistan has created a selective fiscal state: coercive towards visible and organised taxpayers, accommodating towards politically protected or administratively difficult constituencies. This conclusion should change the design of reform. Where political influence determines the tax structure, another catalogue of proposed rates and bases cannot alter the equilibrium by itself. Reform must address the rules through which fiscal choices are made, concessions are granted and enforcement is selectively applied. A technically perfect proposal remains politically irrelevant when those who must enact it derive power from the arrangements it seeks to dismantle. Withholdingisation is not income taxation The book correctly notes that withholding and advance taxes generate overwhelming part of total income-tax revenue and have failed to eliminate evasion. It also recognises the distortions created by presumptive/mimum taxation and the fragmentation of income into separately taxed blocs. The consequences are more serious than those of an imperfect collection technique. Withholdingisation represents the gradual abandonment of income taxation as a levy on net accretion to economic power. Banks, utility companies, telecom operators, employers, import authorities, registrars and purchasers have been converted into unpaid tax collectors. Gross transactions are taxed without determining actual income, allowable expenditure, losses or the taxpayer’s real capacity to contribute. The revenue authority obtains money without developing the institutional capacity to examine accounts, conduct intelligent audits and establish taxable income. Compliant businesses suffer liquidity costs and wait for adjustments or refunds, while informal and influential sectors remain beyond meaningful assessment. The reform of income taxation must restore the return, assessment and audit as its foundations. Withholding should remain confined to situations where it is a genuine advance payment—principally salaries, dividends, profit on debt and payments to non-residents (mostly covered under tax treaties). It should remain fully adjustable against the final liability. A system based upon extracting money from every visible transaction may achieve collection targets. It cannot be described as a coherent income tax. Contradictions within the reform programme The book advocates broad-basing and criticises presumptive taxation, but later recommends restoration of a one-percent fixed tax on export proceeds. It supports neutrality while proposing a general five-year tax holiday for investment, enhanced deductions for energy costs and other selective allowances. These proposals arise from genuine concerns. Pakistan’s investment rate remains dangerously low, exporters face high energy and financing costs, and industry competes under an unstable exchange-rate and tariff environment. The proposed remedies nevertheless risk recreating the same exceptionalism that has made Pakistan’s tax system discriminatory, unpredictable and vulnerable to lobbying. A fixed tax on export proceeds is not a tax on income. It taxes turnover