DEVELOPMENT: PAKISTAN’S UNRAVELLING AID SECTOR

Naimatullah Sawand

Published July 13, 2025 

DAWN

 

Relief workers taking part in rescue efforts during the 2022 floods in Pakistan 

| Welt Hunger Hilfe


For the last seven years, Amanullah Dayo had been part of a project on tuberculosis (TB) control of the Sindh Rural Support Organisation (SRSO) in Sukkur. “I built my life around this work,” says Dayo, who was serving as a coordinator until the project was abruptly halted. “Over 135 employees lost their jobs overnight,” Dayo tells Eos.

Mohammad Dittal Kalhoro, the executive director of SRSO, says they were forced to shut down “all three of their US-funded health initiatives.” It included the one on TB, another on climate-smart agriculture, valued at $24 million, and the third on building healthy families — part of an $86 million nationwide project, called the Integrated Health Systems Strengthening and Service Delivery Initiative.

Further south in the small town of Matiari, four out of eight projects on domestic violence, run by the Legal Aid Society, had to be put on hold, says Muhammad Asif, who works as a protection officer. A vocational training project for women in Mirpurkhas met the same fate, as did another on community mobilisation in Umerkot.

At the other end of the country, in the merged tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a project to improve governance and administrative systems valued at $40 million has also been halted. Another one, for the rehabilitation of Mangla Dam, valued at $150 million, went the same way.

Pakistan’s humanitarian workers spent years preaching resilience to vulnerable communities. But when the US pulled the plug on their fundings, they discovered their own sector had none…

In each instance, the shutting down of the project resulted in dismissals, including mass layoffs such as the one carried out by SRSO.

“Three years of work experience, various trainings and nothing today, not even a reference letter,” one disgruntled youth officer from Umerkot tells Eos. “It’s as if we were disposable,” he adds.

OVERNIGHT FREEZE

The abrupt project closure and mass layoffs are a result of an order by US President Donald Trump — made soon after his return to office in January this year — to cut funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which officially closed its doors earlier this month. According to official data, the USAID’s budget in 2023 was around $40 billion, with the vast majority of it spent on Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

The heavily criticised decision has had global ramifications and, according to a warning published by researchers in the Lancet medical journal, the aid cuts could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.

In Pakistan, the decision led to the suspension of 39 major projects across sectors, worth $845 million. At the same time, the UN began a global downsizing of its operations. For years, donor-backed programmes served as a lifeline for communities vulnerable to disasters and poverty. But now, they are vanishing. Programmes focused on women’s rights, healthcare, education for girls and income support for climate-hit communities have come to a halt.

A BLEAK FUTURE

In Sindh, the pain is concentrated. The Christian Workers’ Solidarity Association had to let go of 32 staff members. Organisations like HANDS and the National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) have made sweeping staff reductions.

The brunt of this collapse is falling on women, who make up a large part of the humanitarian workforce in Sindh. Female project officers, nutrition experts, disaster preparedness trainers and community workers — many serving in far-flung areas — are now jobless, dragging entire families back into hardship. According to one former employee, 70 percent of those laid off by SRSO were women.

Meanwhile, the UN system is also shrinking. Restructuring within the UN is cutting into offices in Karachi and rural Sindh, weakening coordination and service delivery. For a province already battling poverty and climate-related displacement, this couldn’t come at a worse time.

After the floods of 2010, and again in the wake of the 2022 climate emergency, the development and relief sector opened doors. For many young graduates — especially women — these programmes were more than just jobs. They offered a pathway to financial independence and social recognition.

Now, the very professionals trained to support vulnerable Pakistanis have themselves become victims of decisions made far beyond their control. This is more than just a story about job losses. It is a story of broken hopes, abandoned services and lives left hanging in the balance. In Pakistan, when those who help others are in need themselves, there is no safety net to catch them.

THE RESILIENCE PARADOX

There’s a bitter irony in this unfolding crisis. For years, international agencies and NGOs urged communities to “build resilience”— to diversify income, prepare for future shocks and cope. But when the crisis struck the aid sector, it exposed a painful truth: it had failed to build any resilience within.

When the US cut aid and the UN slashed budgets, there were no safety nets for those on the front lines. Many were laid off without warning or support. How can institutions preach resilience to villages if they themselves collapse under pressure? The sector remains tied to a narrow donor base. When funding stops, entire programmes vanish. Careers, hopes and the livelihoods of thousands — especially women and youth — disappear with them.

There has been little investment in internal strength: no local fundraising, no contingency plans. This gap between policy and practice is now eroding trust.

The cracks run deeper than budget cuts. USAID alone provided nearly 20 percent of global humanitarian funding managed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The abrupt halt of over $845 million and sweeping job cuts in UN agencies reveal just how fragile the sector truly is.

The tragedy is not only in the loss of services, but in the gap between what’s preached and what’s practised. This disconnect is not just operational; it is ethical. Trust is breaking down inside organisations and across communities.

The 2025 crisis is not the first. A similar funding shock occurred in 2018, when the US decided to hold back $300 million in aid to Pakistan. Yet, many UN agencies and NGOs were again caught off guard this time. Why didn’t they prepare?

There were no back-up plans, staff protections or efforts to diversify donors. The entire sector remains vulnerable to politics abroad. What’s needed now is change. Aid organisations must support their staff, create emergency plans and find more stable local funding. If not, the next foreign policy shift will again leave workers — and the people they serve — without support.

The writer is a development practitioner working with SRSO. He can be contacted at naimatullah@iba-suk.edu.pk

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 13th, 2025

TECHNOLOGY: THE SILENT CONTROLLERS

Lisa Schirch 

Published July 13, 2025 

Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values and emotional states.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behaviour.

Social media platforms are bringing massive changes to how people get their news, and how they communicate and behave. For example, the “endless scroll” is a design feature that aims to keep users scrolling and never reaching the bottom of a page where they might decide to pause.

I’m a political scientist who researches aspects of technology that support democracy and social cohesion, and I’ve observed how the design of social media platforms affects them.

Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed

Democracy is in crisis globally and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimise their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control.

There are alternatives, however. Some companies design online platforms to defend democratic values.

Optimised for profit

A handful of tech billionaires dominate the global information ecosystem. Without public accountability or oversight, they determine what news shows up on your feed and what data they collect and share.

Social media companies say they are in the business of connecting people, but they make most of their money as data brokers and advertising firms. Time spent on platforms translates to profit. The more time you spend online, the more ads you see and the more data they can collect from you.

This ad-based business model demands designs that encourage endless scrolling, social comparison and emotional engagement. Platforms routinely claim they merely reflect user behaviour, yet internal documents and whistleblower accounts have shown that toxic content often gets a boost because it captures people’s attention.

Tech companies design platforms based on extensive psychological research. Examples include flashing notifications that make your phone jump and squeak, colourful rewards when others like your posts and algorithms that push out the most emotional content to stimulate your most base emotions of anger, shame or glee.

Optimising designs for user engagement undermines mental health and society. Social media sites favour hype and scandal over factual accuracy, and public manipulation over designing for safety, privacy and user agency. The resulting prevalence of polarising false and deceptive information is corrosive to democracy.

Many analysts identified these problems nearly a decade ago. But now there is a new threat: some tech executives are looking to capture political power to advance a new era of techno-autocracy.

Optimised for political power

A techno-autocracy is a political system where an authoritarian government uses technology to control its population. Techno-autocrats spread disinformation and propaganda, using fear tactics to demonise others and distract from corruption. They leverage massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence and surveillance to censor opponents.

For example, China uses technology to monitor and surveil its population with public cameras. Chinese platforms such as WeChat and Weibo automatically scan, block or delete messages and posts for sensitive phrases such as “freedom of speech.” Russia promotes domestic platforms, such as VK, that are closely monitored and partly owned by state-linked entities, that use it to promote political propaganda.

Over a decade ago, tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and now Vice President JD Vance, began aligning with far-right political philosophers such as Curtis Yarvin. They argue that democracy impedes innovation, favouring concentrated decision-making in corporate-controlled mini-states, governed through surveillance. Embracing this philosophy of techno-autocracy, they moved from funding and designing the internet to reshaping government.

Techno-autocrats weaponise social media platforms as part of their plan to dismantle democratic institutions.

The political capture of both X and Meta also have consequences for global security. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg removed barriers to right-wing propaganda and openly endorsed President Donald Trump’s agenda. Musk changed X’s algorithm to highlight right-wing content, including Russian propaganda.

Designing tech for democracy

Recognising the power that platform design has on society, some companies are designing new civic participation platforms that support, rather than undermine society’s access to verified information and places for public deliberation. These platforms offer design features that big tech companies could adopt for improving democratic engagement, that can help counter techno-autocracy.

In 2014, a group of technologists founded Pol.is, an open-source technology for hosting public deliberation, that leverages data science. Pol.is enables participants to propose and vote on policy ideas using, what they call, “computational democracy.” The Pol.is design avoids personal attacks by having no “reply” button. It offers no flashy newsfeed, and it uses algorithms that identify areas of agreement and disagreement to help people make sense of a diversity of opinions. A prompt question asks for people to offer ideas and vote up or down on other ideas. People participate anonymously, helping to keep the focus on the issues and not the people.

Taiwan used the Pol.is platform to enable mass civic engagement in the 2014 democracy movement. The UK government’s Collective Intelligence Lab used the platform to generate public discussion and generate new policy proposals on climate and health care policies. In Finland, a public foundation called Sitra uses Pol.is in its “What do you think, Finland?” public dialogues.

Barcelona, Spain, designed a new participatory democracy platform called Decidim in 2017. Now used throughout Spain and Europe, Decidim enables citizens to collaboratively propose, debate and decide on public policies and budgets through transparent digital processes.

Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa founded Rappler Communities in 2023, a social network in the Philippines, which combines journalism, community and technology. It aims to restore trust in institutions by providing safe spaces for exchanging ideas and connecting with neighbours, journalists and civil society groups. Rappler Communities offers the public data privacy and portability, meaning you can take your information — such as photos, contacts or messages — from one app or platform and transfer it to another. These design features are not available on the major social media platforms.

Tech designed for improving public dialogue is possible — and can even work in the middle of a war zone. In 2024, the Alliance for Middle East Peace began using Remesh.ai, an AI-based platform, to find areas of common ground between Israelis and Palestinians, in order to advance the idea of a public peace process and identify elements of a ceasefire agreement.

Platform designs are a form of social engineering to achieve some sort of goal — because they shape how people behave, think and interact — often invisibly. Designing more and better platforms to support democracy can be an antidote to the wave of global autocracy that is increasingly bolstered by tech platforms that tighten public control.

The writer is Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in the US

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 13th, 2025

From colonialism to AI: How the Global South became the world’s inequality hotspot

Over a century after Pareto’s observation, the Global South remains trapped in a cycle of concentrated wealth and entrenched class divisions that shape its social and economic realities.

Muhammad Mehdi 

Published July 11, 2025 

PRISM/DAWN

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto made a striking observation: 80 per cent of Italy’s wealth was owned by just 20pc of its population. Startled by this imbalance, he formulated what would later become known as the Pareto Principle — or the 80/20 rule — suggesting that a small percentage of causes are responsible for a large part of the results. Though it began as an anecdotal insight, the principle eventually found its way into boardrooms, business schools, and self-help manuals.

More than a century later, the Global South stands as living proof that Pareto wasn’t far off. If economic inequality had a modern poster child, this part of the world would be it.

Once a loosely defined term for ‘Third World’ countries, the ‘Global South’ has evolved in recent years into a more meaningful label. Policymakers, academics, and journalists now use it to describe nations — many of them former colonies — that are part of the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc of roughly 120 countries committed to principles such as sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and self-determination.

But such ideals don’t always pay the bills. The Global South is home to 85pc of the world’s population, yet it generates only 39pc of global GDP. This is the textbook definition of economic imbalance. And the future doesn’t look too bright either. According to the World Bank’s 2024 annual report, over the next decade, 1.2 billion young people in the region will step into working age. Yet the job market is expected to create just 424 million new positions. That’s not a gap — it’s a gaping chasm.

While one half of the world is busy riding the wave of the AI revolution — racing to patent algorithms, train billion-dollar generative models, and automate the future — the other half is still waiting for something as basic as electricity. Nearly 600 million people in Africa remain without reliable access to power — that’s almost half the continent’s population, and more than 80pc of the global electricity access gap. It’s a sobering contrast. One side teaches machines to outthink humans; the other side lights candles to chase away the dark. In an era of satellites, AI, and trillion-dollar tech empires, this scale of inequality is dangerous.

The numbers say it all

When it comes to measuring income inequality, few tools are as widely recognised as the Gini Index. The scale runs from 0 to 1, or 0pc to 100pc, where 0pc means perfect equality and 100pc means total inequality (all wealth concentrated in a single pair of hands). According to World Bank data drawn from recent years, South Africa tops the list with a staggering Gini Coefficient of 63pc, while Slovakia sits at the other end with just 24.1pc. For comparison, the United States clocks in at 41.3pc and China at 36.7pc. In South Asia, Pakistan stands at 29.6pc, India at 32.8pc, and Bangladesh at 33.4pc.



But here’s the catch: the Gini Index tells us how income is distributed, not how much wealth there is to go around in the first place. A country could have near-perfect distribution but still be grappling with widespread poverty.

Still, when mapped globally, the Gini Coefficient reveals a clear pattern: countries in the Global South consistently show higher inequality, exposing the structural gaps that income or wealth distribution alone can’t fully explain.

Another way to grasp the depth of income inequality is by looking at who holds what share of a country’s income — the bottom 50pc, the top 10pc, and the top 1pc. National income, after all, is simply the total of what a country’s residents earn in a year, but how it’s divided tells a much bigger story.

According to the World Inequality Database 2024, which tracks income data from 216 countries over two centuries, the picture is incredibly lopsided. The top 10pc of earners control more than half of global income, while the bottom 50pc barely scrape together 10pc. Zoom in by region, and the divide becomes even sharper. Europe stands out as the least unequal, while Latin America, Middle East, and North Africa show the most extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 10pc. In other words, geography still shapes destiny, and in much of the Global South, the odds remain stacked in favour of the few.

The global map of inequality tells a familiar tale — the top 10pc hold a disproportionate share of income, and this imbalance is most stark in the Global South.

A world of haves and have-nots

In Asia, a study focused on India reveals something striking. The ‘Billionaire Raj’ is now more unequal than the colonial British Raj ever was. Since the early 2000s, inequality has soared. The top 10pc in India saw their income share jump from 40pc in 2000 to 58pc in 2023.

The real drivers? The top 1pc, whose slice grew from 15pc to 23pc, while the middle 40pc lost ground, shrinking from 39pc to 27pc. The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Multidimensional Poverty Index 2024 adds another layer. Out of 112 countries surveyed, 1.1 billion people out of 6.3 billion are living in poverty. India alone accounts for 234 million people living in poverty — more than the total populations of at least 29 smaller Asian nations combined.

In Indonesia and Pakistan, the top 10pc claim 46pc and 42pc of national income, respectively — a quiet confirmation that this is no regional fluke, but a structural feature of inequality across the South.

Latin America remains the world’s most unequal region. Here, the richest 10pc earn 12 times more than the poorest 10pc. In countries like Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay, just 1pc of the population controls between 37pc and 40pc of total wealth. The bottom half? They’re left with barely 10pc.

In Africa, the story grows more complex. While economic growth is occurring, it remains unevenly distributed. A joint report by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and the World Bank reveals that between 1980 and 2016, the richest 1pc of Africans captured 27pc of total income growth. In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa — home to just 16pc of the world’s population — carries 67pc of the world’s extremely poor.

The takeaway is clear — economic growth may lift national economies, but it does not guarantee equitable outcomes.

This stark disparity across the Global South can largely be traced back to colonial legacies. Under colonial rule, land and resources were concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, entrenching class divisions that continue to shape social and economic realities today. Even after independence, low social investment, unequal access to education, weak tax systems, and the enduring influence of powerful elites in policymaking have all worked to reinforce these imbalances. And so today, we have a system that not only tolerates but sustains inequality — not just in Latin America, but throughout the Global South.

Even advanced economies like the United States aren’t immune to the rising tide of inequality. A recent survey found that, after immigration, income inequality ranked as the second most pressing concern for Americans, with many hoping Trump would address it within his first 100 days in office. It’s not hard to see why.

Consider this: the collective net worth of America’s top 12 billionaires now exceeds $2 trillion. Between March 18, 2020, and December 3, 2024, their combined wealth soared by $1.3 trillion — a 193pc increase. If evidence of deepening inequality is needed, the pandemic offers it in plain sight. Covid-19 did a lot more than disrupt lives; it supercharged billionaire fortunes, widening an already vast wealth divide.

A 2022 study co-authored by Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu highlights another powerful driver of inequality: automation. By replacing human labour in industries like retail, manufacturing, and customer service, automation alone accounted for 50–70pc of the growing income gap between more-educated and less-educated workers from 1980 to 2016 — a sobering reminder that technology, without the right policies in place, can entrench inequality rather than alleviate it.

Now, what about the future? In 2024, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sounded the alarm, expressing “profound concerns” over labour disruptions and rising inequality as economies begin to adopt generative AI at scale. The Fund warned that generative AI could amplify the market power of already-dominant firms, accelerating the shift toward winner-takes-all dynamics and further concentrating capital in the hands of a few.

Here’s what Pakistan needs to do

For countries in the Global South like Pakistan, the moment has arrived for a fundamental shift in development strategy. The obsession with short-term growth at the expense of inclusive development has only deepened systemic imbalances. Yet Pakistan holds immense potential to chart a different course by leveraging its vast natural wealth, including minerals, coal, crude oil and natural gas.

Geological surveys estimate the value of the country’s untapped mineral reserves at over $6 trillion. However, true progress cannot be measured by extraction alone. It will be defined by how equitably the resulting wealth is distributed and how effectively it contributes to uplifting the lives of ordinary citizens.

To address the persistent disparities in economic opportunity, Pakistan must begin to reorient its policy framework toward broader public welfare and inclusive governance. This requires building a culture rooted in meritocracy, holding institutions accountable, eliminating inefficiencies, and dismantling the bureaucratic red tape that stifles innovation. Only then can economic growth translate into meaningful, shared prosperity.

A progressive tax system, in its true spirit, is essential — one that fairly distributes the fiscal burden across all segments of society, rather than disproportionately weighing on salaried workers. Revenue, once mobilised, should be invested where it counts most: education, health and social protection. With nearly 64pc of Pakistan’s population under the age of 30, targeted spending on education is no longer optional, it’s imperative. This demographic presents a unique opportunity; only an educated, skilled, and empowered youth can steer the country toward inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

Equally important is the expansion and depoliticisation of social safety nets. Conditional cash transfer programmes, especially those tied to education and nutrition, can lift millions out of poverty if implemented with transparency and fairness. Targeted subsidies that empower small entrepreneurs and marginalised communities, rather than inflating the profits of the elites, can unleash Pakistan’s true economic potential and drive grassroots development.

These are not just prescriptions for Pakistan, they are imperatives for any country in the Global South wrestling with the scourge of entrenched inequality. Real development is not measured by growth alone, but by the inclusivity of that growth. Until economies are restructured to empower the many rather than enrich the few, progress will remain superficial. The numbers may impress on paper, but the lived reality for millions will continue to tell a far bleaker story.

The future demands inclusive progress

While rising economic inequality is a global crisis, its effects are felt far more acutely in the Global South. Here, the absence of robust social safety nets and underfunded welfare programmes amplifies the disparities, standing in stark contrast to the well-funded and designed welfare systems of the West, supported by effective tax policies and the capacity to absorb national debt.

Meanwhile, as billions are funnelled into military spending and the technological arms race — ranging from Artificial Intelligence to quantum computing and supercomputers — the chasm between North and South threatens to grow even wider. Unless global leaders confront this economic divide with urgency and vision, the Pareto Principle will ring truer than ever, with a small elite controlling an ever-larger share of the world’s wealth and opportunity.

Header image created with generative AI

In Balochistan’s Dasht, staying in school is an act of rebellion in itself

In this forgotten stretch of Balochistan, where addiction is chronic and infrastructure lacking, a class of 49 students is defying the odds one lesson at a time.

Hazaran Rahim Dad

PHOTO ESSAY

Published July 10, 2025
PRISM/DAWN


Every morning, as the sun rises over the dust-swept hills of Achanak Bazar in Balochistan’s Dasht tehsil, Shareefa wraps herself in a chaddar, gathers her four children, and begins the long walk to school. There are no schoolbags slung over their shoulders, no uniforms, no books — it is not the children who will sit in class, but their mother.

The journey starts from a mud-walled house in one of the area’s scattered villages, situated approximately 40 minutes from Turbat city. Inside a small classroom at one of Dasht’s last standing primary schools, Shareefa takes her place on the bench.

Her children roam freely in the schoolyard, tumbling over one another in games that sometimes erupt into fights. When one of them cries, she rises quietly, calms the chaos, and returns to her seat. The chalkboard has already moved on to the next math question. The teacher never questions the interruptions; she never needs to.

Students of all ages sit inside a classroom at a boys primary school in Dasht.

When Shareefa first arrived to enrol, she was clutching the hand of her youngest child, and carrying eight years of silence. She had dropped out after the fifth grade, not for lack of will, but because there was no schooling beyond that in her village. Girls like Shareefa, who could not afford to move to Turbat, stayed behind. Early marriage followed, then motherhood.

“If you allow a woman with four children, I will study,” she had said softly. The teacher nodded, and so began her second chance at life.
Life in Dasht

Tucked in the rugged terrain of Kech district in sourthern Balochistan, Dasht is a scattered region comprising several remote settlements, each more isolated than the other. The people here have long depended on farming, but the drying local dam has snatched that livelihood too. With water now rationed by number, farmers have to wait days for their turn, ultimately forced to give up altogether.

In search of work, many of them have crossed over to the other side of the border into Iran, while others have moved into darker trades.

Residents of Dasht rely on farming for their livelihoods.

But that isn’t all of what is plaguing Dasht. The area lacks fundamental infrastructure — schools, hospitals, clinics. In times of emergencies, there is nowhere to go. Literally.

“A [sick] person has to die in Dasht … or wait,” a resident tells Dawn.com. Pickups leave for Turbat only once a day, typically before 11am, and if you miss it, you wait another day. Those without a vehicle of their own have little to no choice.

However, what Dasht suffers from the most is addiction.

The remainder of what agricultural land is left in Dasht.

“Here, drugs are like sweets,” says Salma, a widow from Sangai Dasht. “Some powerful men come, ask our men to cut wood, and in return, they hand them crystal meth. That’s how I lost my husband. That’s how many other women are losing theirs.”

Hence, survival in the area often rests on the backs of women. They farm what little land remains, sew intricate embroidery for mere pennies, and walk miles to fetch water from deep, uncovered wells. There’s no reliable mobile network, no electricity, and the only internet is patchy fibre WiFi, accessible only to those who own farmland, not the families working it.

Amidst the mess, it is education that remains the most neglected.

According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2024-25, unveiled just days earlier, the country’s cumulative expenditure on education — including the federation and provinces — remains a meagre 0.8 per cent, with the literacy rate a little above 60pc. Balochistan tops all the provinces in terms of out-of-school children, with a majority of them being girls.

The condition of schools that do exist is a completely different issue altogether. The survey shows that Balochistan consistently lags behind when it comes to access to electricity, water facilities, and toilet access

The education epidemic

“There is no schooling after the fifth grade,” says Sanji, a young mother. “Even that exists only on paper. Teachers take their salaries but never show up.” Salma scoffs, recalling the time when she tried to enroll her daughter in the sixth grade in Turbat. “They told me she’s not even fit for the first grade. And they were right. Our kids hardly see a teacher’s face. How can they read?”

At government schools in Dasht, if a teacher appears at all, they arrive at 8am and leave within an hour. There are no peons, no inspections, no accountability. “No officer has ever visited our school,” claims Sanji. “Why would they? They get paid either way.”

“Teachers who are posted here from Turbat often don’t come themselves,” she continues. “They find someone local, hand them half their salary, and never set foot in the school again.” The locals assigned in their place, she adds, have only seen a blackboard from afar. “How are they expected to teach?”

It’s in this forgotten stretch of Balochistan, where silence and survival go hand-in-hand, that a class of 49 students, ranging from 11-year-old boys to 25-year-old girls, have gathered under a short-term, accelerated learning project supported by UNICEF.

The white board in the class.


The United Nations agency’s 18-month initiative focuses on providing access to education for out-of-school children through the establishment of middle-level Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) centres. They educate children who have either never enrolled in school or dropped out, enabling them to catch up academically and transition into the formal education system at the middle-school level.

According to Faiz ur Rehman, Unicef’s Kech district project coordinator, the programme was launched in Tehsil Dasht on March 12, 2025, with a syllabus designed by the Bureau of Curriculum, Balochistan. “It’s different from the regular classroom syllabus,” he noted, “and is specifically tailored for children aged nine to 15.”
A second chance

The class gathers each morning in the lone room of a crumbling government boys’ primary school in Kont-e-Dar, one of Dasht’s few remaining functional school buildings. Here, under one roof, students from four distant pockets of Dasht — Kont-e-Dar, Jangol ay Mehtag, Merani Dem Mehtag, and Achanak Bazar sit shoulder to shoulder.

Some walk up to 40 minutes on foot to reach the school. Boys often hop onto the back of passing pickups. Girls, in pairs or alone, walk dusty roads under the unforgiving sun — Kech is known for being one of the hottest regions in the province — with their books wrapped in cloth.

Girls walk long distances to get to school in Dasht.

These long walks are not a rarity in other areas of Balochistan, where schools are few and far, with limited resources to reach them. The distances between settlements are vast. “In this heat, it feels like the head is boiling by the time we get to school,” says Ghani, a 12-year-old student.

“Whenever a biker or a pickup stops to give us a lift, it feels like the happiest day. When they don’t stop … we just send a pitiful curse their way.”

At the school, the classroom space is tight. The heat is unforgiving. There’s no electricity, no solar power. The washroom is nonfunctional. Children take breaks just to splash water on their faces before returning to class, their clothes soaked in sweat. The desks, small and few, strain to hold both the young boys and grown women. The students sweep the classroom floor themselves.

“Sometimes our hands ache,” says Shamsi, who just enrolled without ever having had a pause in her education, “but that doesn’t trouble us.”

“In winter, it becomes worse. When the cold wind hits us, we shake, we keep trembling. Sometimes, on our way, we stop at a villager’s kitchen just to warm up in front of the fire, and then go back to school… only to find the teacher absent,” she scorns.

But what now troubles them is something else entirely: the fear that this opportunity might vanish after 18 months. “What happens after that?” the children ask. It’s not a question about the syllabus. It’s a question about continuity.

For many in the room, this isn’t the first time their education has stopped, and they fear it won’t be the last. In most parts of Dasht, schooling ends at the fifth grade. The children who once dropped out for lack of options now fear another long wait. Another lost decade.

Sangeen, 22, sits at the far end of the classroom. A widow with no children, she walks nearly 30 minutes from Jangol Mehtag each day. “There’s nothing for me at home,” she says. “After school, I do embroidery to survive.” She had passed the fifth grade seven years ago. “I don’t know with what hope I’m studying now.

“Maybe just because they say education opens your eyes.” She pauses, then laughs. “But if this project ends, will I have to wait another seven years?”

Usman is 13, his skin sunburnt from days of walking under the scorching sun. A hat shields his face. “It protects me from the sun,” he grins. Each morning, he joins the class and learns what everyone else learns, but often leaves early as there’s work to be done — he is a shepherd and must tend to his goats. The little he earns from collecting grass and watching over the herds, he hands to his mother.

When asked what his father does, he smiles with blank eyes. “Mani pith, mani pith ady cryshtal kasheeth (my father uses crystal meth),” he says.

Usman and his mates sit on benches inside the classroom.

What will he do after the project ends? Usman shrugs and looks over at the girls in the class, many of whom returned to school after years. “I’ll wait another seven years,” he laughs. The chuckles follow, reverberating through the school’s weak walls. But the silence returns the next moment, heavy and unspoken.

Maryam returned to school this March after a gap of five years. She had once completed fifth grade, yet couldn’t spell her own name. “Now I can,” she says, a hint of pride tucked behind her shy smile.

She recalls those early school days with a dry laugh. “The teacher would show up early, stay for an hour, and then vanish. We’d be thrilled, we could go home!” Maryam pauses. “We thought that was happiness. Now we know it was not.”

The current project offered her another chance. But with only 18 months promised, uncertainty looms again. “If this ends,” she says, “I’ll ask the whole class to stage a dharna (protest). But I don’t know where we’d even go. No one listens anyway.”
Against all odds

Only two teachers run this middle-school-level class in Dasht: Mahwish, who travels from Turbat city, and Shabeena, a local from Dasht. Each day, Mahwish makes the bumpy journey to Kont-e-Dar, often passing children walking alone or in clusters along the dusty road.

“Sometimes I give them a lift,” she says. “They come from different bazars, and when they see my car, they start running. They know the teacher is here.”

Their rush, she adds, carries a history. “Maybe it’s because they’ve grown up not expecting teachers to show up. So when one actually does, they run not to miss it.”

The classroom at Kont-e-Dar has students across ages.

At 22, Ganjatoon is married and back in school after a six-year hiatus. She doesn’t speak in abstractions. Her words are blunt. “Ma zaalbol eda barbaady (we women here are suffering),” she says in Balochi.

In her part of Dasht, she says, it feels like there are no men left. “Most are addicted. Some sell drugs openly. If anyone dares to complain, the naib arrests them, but then a phone call comes, and the drug seller walks free.”

She traces the suffering back to the shoulders that carry everything. “We women do it all,” she says. “From farming to embroidery, to fetching water, we have to, because the men are lost to addiction.”

Their struggle doesn’t end with work. Ganjatoon says their homes, made of mud, collapse into crisis every time it rains. “When it pours, water drips from the roof until the house is soaked from top to bottom,” she says. “After the rain, another struggle begins, of drying, rebuilding, just surviving.”

Young boys attend class in Dasht.

She is aware that the odds are stacked against her. “I won’t get a job because I’m studying,” she says. “That post will go to someone who will never show up to teach.” But still, she shows up every day.

“I will study so that at least I can teach the children in my bazar when this project ends. I want to keep them away from nasha.”

Promises or distant echoes?

Aurelia Ardito, chief of education at Unicef Pakistan, acknowledges both the progress and persistent gaps.

“Kech is among the top-performing districts in Balochistan, second only to Quetta,” she notes, citing Education Management Information System 2022–23 data showing over 86,000 enrolled students. Girls’ enrollment rose by 30 per cent in recent years, and progression rates surpass provincial averages.

“But in Dasht, challenges remain — missing infrastructure, no toilets, no electricity, and serious teacher shortages.”

Students leaving the classroom.

The district education officer of Kech, Sabir Ali, confirms these struggles. “Most schools are single-teacher institutions,” he says. “If that one teacher is absent, the school simply can’t run.”

He says the education department is developing a 365-day plan for Kech — with reforms in teacher attendance, filling vacancies, and improving quality. Unicef, too, emphasises its commitment to supporting education in Balochistan and beyond.

But for the 49 students in this dust-walled classroom, the promises are distant echoes. They have already spent years watching schools remain locked, waiting on teachers who never came, and watching futures slip quietly out of reach. Whether this school will continue once the project ends — or slip back into silence — is a question that lingers like chalk dust in the dry air of Dasht.

Yet, the students of Dasht show up every day. Because hope, here, is not a policy. It’s the act of walking miles in the heat, of sitting on hard desks, of vowing to teach the next child even when no one is teaching you.

Header image: Students sit outside their classroom in Dasht. — all photos by author

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Better alone

Humaira Asghar Ali’s case is more fundamentally about how Pakistani society treats women who choose paths that diverge from the narrow values of many families.

Rafia Zakaria 

Published July 12, 2025 

DAWN

ON Tuesday, July 8, 2025, a few men from the Gizri police station arrived at a flat in DHA Karachi’s Ittehad Commercial Area. It was around 3.15 in the afternoon, and the men had been sent there on the orders of a local court to evict a tenant. When they knocked on the door, no one responded. This was the residence of 32-year-old model and actress Humaira Asghar Ali, who had been reported by her landlord for failing to pay rent for the past six months. When the police eventually gained entry, they found Asghar Ali lying on the floor of her bedroom. She was dead — and according to police officials, had been for some time.

The investigation is still ongoing. However, DIG South Syed Asad Raza told a TV news channel that there were no signs of forced entry. The doors to the apartment, including the one leading to the balcony, were locked from the inside — although this could have been done by someone with a key who exited and locked the door behind them. Police surgeon Dr Sumaiyya Syed said that the body was in an advanced stage of decomposition and that forensic and DNA analysis would be conducted. The post-mortem report has been reserved pending the results of toxicology and forensic testing.

In an interview with a media outlet, SSP South Mehzor Ali said the police had used the deceased’s phone to retrieve contact numbers for her next of kin.

Upon contacting them, the police were reportedly told by Asghar Ali’s parents that they had disowned their daughter and would not be collecting her body. However, her family members later collected the body and she was buried in Lahore on July 11. The SSP also noted that she had little contact with her neighbours. Some reported a foul smell emanating from the apartment. According to them, she wasn’t very friendly — though such comments should be taken with a grain of salt. In Pakistan, a young woman living alone is often treated with suspicion no matter how discreet or respectful she is. The scrutiny she faces is less about her conduct and more about the audacity of her independence.

Humaira Asghar Ali’s case is more fundamentally about how Pakistani society treats women who choose paths that diverge from the narrow values of many families.

Since the news broke, at least one actress, Sonia Hussain, had posted publicly, requesting the police entrust her with Asghar Ali’s body so she could perform her final rites as a fellow human being and Muslim sister.

Others celebrities have also begun posting statements about the crumbling of family structures and the wider apathy that permeates society. These observations contain some truth. But Asghar Ali’s case is more fundamentally about how Pakistani society treats women who choose paths that diverge from the narrow, conservative, and frequently misogynistic values of many families. Whether a woman seeks a career in show business, wants to be educated, works outside the home, or even just maintains a social media presence — all are treated as moral failures. The mere act of choosing the conditions of one’s own life is still, in many families, considered a crime for women.

Evidence for this was seen the very same day, in Rawalpindi, when a man named Ikhlaq Ahmed murdered his 16-year-old daughter, Mehak Shehzadi, for refusing to delete her TikTok account. According to reports, Mehak had been warned multiple times by her father. When he discovered that she had not complied, he reportedly took a weapon and shot her in cold blood. The family’s attempt to stage it as suicide only further underscores the deep shame and silence that surround these acts of honour-based violence. An FIR was eventually registered against the father.

These cases are not about “dying alone”; they are about the hatred directed at women in Pakistan who choose public lives. Just a month earlier, the murder of TikToker Sana Yousaf also made headlines. In her case, many believed — and still believe — that she deserved to die simply because she chose to be visible on social media. Whether it is disowning a daughter, refusing to burying her, killing her for her disobedience, or shaming her for existing online — these are all signs of a society saturated with misogyny.

It is painful to die alone, but only God knows the circumstances of our death. The circumstances of women’s lives, however, are shaped by society. In Humaira Asghar Ali’s case, we may never know what caused her death.

What Pakistan — and indeed the world needs — is a reckoning. Women often choose to live alone not because they want to, but because their “loved ones” make their lives a living hell. In many cases, it is better to live and die alone than to exist under constant fear, coercion, and emotional abuse — the conditions many men consider the “proper” way to “keep women in line.”

Women and girls have the right to choose their own paths in life. The ones to be pitied are not those who live or die alone — but those who cannot summon the basic decency to honour their humanity. It is not women’s solitude that should frighten us — it is the callousness of a society where such solitude is often the only refuge from humiliation and harm.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2025

Poverty & extremism

Mohammad Ali Babakhel 

Published July 12, 2025

DAWN

The writer is author of Pakistan: In Between Extremism and Peace.

“As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.” — Nelson Mandela

POVERTY is frequently cited as a cause of growing extremism, but proving it is not as easy as portrayed. While Pakistan’s ranking on the Human Development Index (HDI) and poverty index confirms that poverty is a contributing factor, internal strife and socioeconomic polarisation are also significant drivers. Poor states often attribute extremism to poverty and religious misinterpretation, but by focusing solely on these two factors, they may be avoiding the need to address the demand for fair distribution of resources, as well as ethnic, sectarian, so­­ciocultural, economic and political issues.

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook 2024, Burkina Faso is ranked 16th among the world’s poorest countries and ranks first on the Global Terrorism Index. Pakistan is the 50th poorest country and ranks second on the GTI. Syria and Afghanistan rank high but have unstable political conditions, making economic assessment difficult. Mali (15th poorest) ranks fourth on the GTI; Niger (sixth poorest) is fifth; Nigeria (46th poorest) is sixth; Somalia (11th poorest) is seventh. Israel, ranked 157th among poor countries, is eighth on the GTI, while Cameroon (40th poorest) ranks 10th. These rankings show a mixed picture. In some cases, there is a direct link between poverty and extremism, while in others — such as Israel — it is historical and expansionist designs that drive extremism.

The 2025 Human Development Index underlines this link. Burkina Faso ranks 186th out of 193 countries and is first in the GTI. Pakistan is 168th in HDI, and second in GTI. Syria is 162nd and third, Mali is 188th and fourth, Niger is 187th and fifth, Nigeria is 164th and sixth, and Somalia is 192nd and seventh. Israel, by contrast, ranks 27th in HDI and eighth in GTI, Afghanistan ranks 181st and ninth, while Cameroon is 155th and 10th. This suggests that, with the exception of Israel, the top 10 GTI countries fall between 155 and 192 in HDI rankings, which indicates a strong correlation between low development and terrorism.

Poverty is not the only factor behind violence.

Adult literacy rankings show a similar trend. Except for Israel (86th), the top GTI-listed countries fall between 110 and 162 on adult literacy indices. This demonstrates the need to increase allocations in education.

In practice, militant groups exploit poverty for recruitment, offering money, food, or a sense of purpose. When poverty is compounded by poor governance and ideological appeals, such areas become fertile for extremism. States must ensure school education and skill development to attract young talent instead of leaving them vulnerable and unskilled.

According to the World Bank’s global poverty threshold of $4.20 per person per day, around 44.7 per cent of Pakistan’s population now lives below the poverty line. The Bank defines poverty as the inability to meet minimum living standards. Besides ideological reasons, poverty directly or indirectly fuels crime, violence and terrorism. Recruitment patterns of militant groups in Africa and parts of Asia confirm that poverty is a prime driver, especially when people are told their natural resources are being plundered by the elite. This sense of grievance can lead to violent resentment.

Unemployment, coupled with poverty and emotional manipulation, plays into the hands of extremist organisations. Yet, these groups don’t only attract the uneducated. Many also require educated talent well-versed in technology. A study by Charles Russell and Bowman Miller of over 350 militants from Latin Ame­ri­­ca, Europe, Asia and the Middle East (1966 to 1970) found that two-thirds were graduates. If poverty alone caused terrorism, billions would have turned to violence, yet the reality is otherwise.

Indeed, some of the poorest countries — Sudan, Burundi, Cen­tral African Republic, Congo and Mozam­bique — are not in the top 10 in the GTI. Ideology, identity crises, authoritarianism, lack of political freedom and human rights abuses, foreign occupation, drone strikes, online radicalisation, and perceived historical injustices also fuel extremism.

Efforts to reduce poverty and improve education, healthcare, and governance, youth employment programmes, community engagement, transparency, accountability and public services can reduce the appeal of extremist groups. Promotion of literacy and civic education can be instrumental in the prevention of extremism as it will enable individuals to critically assess extremist narratives and explore economic opportunities. Community-based literacy programmes may also include and promote human rights, tolerance, and conflict resolution, enabling individuals to challenge extremist ideologies through dialogue.


X: @alibabakhel

Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2025

No red lines

Editorial 

Published July 13, 2025 

DAWN

THE US’ move to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, marks a chilling new low. By targeting a UN official, the US has sent a disturbing message to the world: even independent investigators are not safe if they dare to call out Israeli abuses. This is not simply an attack on one expert, it is quite clearly an attempt to intimidate all those who defend human rights globally. Albanese, an Italian academic and lawyer, has been an outspoken critic of Israeli conduct in Gaza.

 In her latest report, she claimed that Israel was engaged in a genocidal campaign and recommended arms embargoes and the severing of financial ties. While this unsurprisingly drew sharp criticism from Tel Aviv, Washington has reacted unexpectedly. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s justification — that her work prompted “illegitimate prosecutions” of Israelis at the ICC — is absurd to say the least. As a special rapporteur, Albanese has no prosecutorial authority. Her job is to report on human rights violations, not to pass legal judgment or launch cases. By punishing her for doing just that, the US has crossed a line that until now was unthinkable.

The implications are grave. Sanctioning a UN rapporteur weakens the already shaky trust in global human rights institutions.It discourages engagement with human rights mechanisms and emboldens states accused of violations to dismiss scrutiny as politically motivated. More worryingly, it sets a precedent: today Albanese, tomorrow perhaps anyone who dares to speak out. Shockingly, she is the first UN official to be placed under US sanctions — a move that the UN and EU have criticised in strong terms. It also raises serious questions about Washington’s commitment to international norms and holding violators accountable. Human rights defenders across the world must rally in solidarity and reject this dangerous overreach. As Albanese herself noted, “there are no red lines anymore.”

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2025

Another rat race

Muna Khan 

Published July 13, 2025 

DAWN

WHEN I moved to the US in 2016 for graduate school there were two things I struggled with: understanding how health insurance works and understanding why I had to list my race on all kinds of forms. I understand the US government collects racial data for census purposes and to create policies or ensure (ahem) racial equality but it was really fascinating how often it showed up. One time, at a Chicago food festival, a member from the organisation asked me to answer some questions about their event which ended with “how do you identify?”

I was two months into the programme so I’d say Asian before they completed the question.

“You don’t look Asian,” he told me.

“What do I look like?” I asked — a perennial favourite question of mine to people who have a certain image of what Pakistanis look like.

“You look Middle Eastern,” he replied after some thought. I asked what he identified as; he said he was LatinX — this was the trend that year to describe Latino with an X — so I said someone the day before had asked if I was Hispanic.

Mamdani’s victory reflects a seismic shift in Democratic politics.

“Oh yeah, I guess you could be Hispanic, too. That’s white. So is Middle Eastern,” he explained.

This was how I learned the complications of race identification. In the classroom I learned how Arab Christians who arrived in the US in the 19th century won legal battles to change their racial classification from Asian to Caucasian. The Middle Eastern and North African category was only added in 2024.

This was my first time as a student on a year-long programme in the US, which coincided with Donald Trump becoming president. It was the age of identity politics on campus, everything came with a trigger warning. It was also clear that there would be a fierce rejection to identity politics and something more dangerous in terms of ideological divides would emerge.

I was reminded of this while following the media coverage of Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive mayor of New York City. His victory is a fascinating insight to what an effective, clear-headed media strategy can do. Mamdani really was the dark horse — he was polling at 1pc in February — but he captured many New Yorkers’ imagination, especially with his anti-elite, anti-Zionist messaging. As a side note: I would really urge the PML-N government to read/watch all the pundits who have dissected Mamdani’s campaign and learn from it, because they need the help. To threaten to arrest Imran Khan’s sons, who I doubt planned to come to Pakistan, is the dumbest thing I’ve heard them say.

I digress. Mamdani’s victory reflects a seismic shift not just in Democratic politics but in left politics too. Of course it will cause discomfort and a story in The New York Times is evidence of how even legacy media is getting it wrong (again).

I’m referring to the (non) story about Mamdani identifying as both black or African descent and Asian in his 2009 college application to Columbia. He did this as a son of a Ugandan man and Indian mother. The application allowed him to choose the two options. That doesn’t seem to be the problem. The New York Times’ primary source was a stolen document from a hack at the university. It was provided to the paper by an intermediary known as Cremieux on Substack who, it emerged, is the social media alias of Jordan Lasker, a white supremacist. The paper offered him anonymity, referred to him as an academic and when his identity was revealed, updated the story to say Cremieux writes on race and identity.

It is highly unethical to use stolen documents as a source. Especially when earlier the NYT reported on how it chose not to publish Trump campaign documents about J.D. Vance as it said they were stolen by Iran-backed hackers. That was a bigger story than this. It is not the same as WikiLeaks, which sheds light on institutional corruption for the public good. The NYT story on Mamdani’s failed college application can hardly be described as a scoop. They published it because they did not want to be out-scooped by other reporters. It’s almost as if all the reporters just learned that people can identify with several racial identities. At least 33m Americans identified with two or more races in the 2020 census. Why was Mamdani treated differently?

We know the answer too well. He is a Muslim, for starters. He criticises Israel, the far right in India, billionaires and Modi. He says he will arrest Netanyahu. Everyone knows Israel is the US’ red line. Mamdani crossed it and still received support. The backlash and outcry to the story has been intense and hopefully will prompt all papers to rethink what is newsworthy and if fascists should be considered reliable sources.

The writer is a journalism instructor.
X: @Ledeing_Lady

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2025

Parallel wars

Fahd Humayun 

Published July 13, 2025 

DAWN

THE temptation to draw comparisons between the recent 12-day Israel-Iran war, and Pakistan’s encounter with India earlier this summer, is difficult to resist. Both conflicts demonstrated an erosion of the psychological barriers that may have once restrained or deterred states from striking each. Initiators in both conflicts seemed united in their belief that launching short wars is not only possible, but, in fact, politically desirable. Both conflicts saw the targeting of major cities, not just borders and hinterlands. And both conflicts underscored the imperative for targeted states to strike back to establish some form of deterrence.

But the parallels also have limits. Pakistan has a nuclear deterrent, hence the escalation dynamics in the India-Pakistan dyad are fundamentally different from those in the Israel-Iran dyad, at least for now. India and Pakistan are also near-military competitors, evenly matched for purposes of a short conflict (the fact that Pakistan could have resorted to using its cruise missiles to target Indian military sites in the most recent encounter, but chose not to, is a different subject). Finally, Pakistan and India are contiguous neighbours, with disputed borders, shorter flight times, and a historical precedent of ground incursions — characteristics not shared by Iran and Israel.

Laying out these differences may be useful, because of the risks that come with erroneously equating the two dyads, and drawing, somewhat uncritically, lessons from one theatre to the other.

What are those possible extrapolations?

Lessons can be drawn from two recent conflicts.

One is that because the world was largely acceptant of a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, the next conflict between India and Pakistan doesn’t have to be a short four-day confrontation. It could easily be a seven-day, 10-day or even two-week conflict. This inference will likely find ready audiences among constituents being fed a steady diet of claims that it was the ‘other side’ that was pressing for the May ceasefire.

The second is the utility of wide-ranging opening salvos, given the high premium on damage and terror inflicted in the earliest phases of a crisis or war. If Israel thought Tehran was fair game and Iran thought Tel Aviv was fair game, in a future India-Pakistan conflict, both Islamabad and New Delhi may now be tempting targets. This misappropriation dangerously discounts the risks of bringing the war to population-dense metropolises, not realising it forces the other side into responding in kind.

A third dangerous lesson lies in Israel’s opening volley, which saw the targeting of not just Iranian military assets, but also Iran’s decision-making leadership. If that playbook is attractive, it may lead some to believe that, in a future conflict with Pakistan, the deliberate or inadvertent removal of key military leaders would be a major psychological blow that could force Islamabad to yield. This would, of course, be an enormous miscalculation, and will likely have the opposite effect, but it is also clear that decision-makers and their domestic publics in South Asia are past the point of understanding the limits of what each side might tolerate.

A fourth lesson lies in Israel’s deep infiltration of Iranian systems, enabling Israel to identify and strike high-value targets, including key military and technical personnel. That kind of intelligence infiltration will likely be watched enviously by India, which for several years has been looking to expand its own foreign intelligence ca­­pabilities and ex­­ploit Pakistan’s in­­formational vulne­rabilities, parti­­cu­-­larly from Pakis­t­a­n’s western borders.

Finally, even though Pakistan established its capacity and readiness to decisively strike back, the Israel-Iran conflict has provided further credence to the idea that the notion of victory in modern warfare has changed, and much now rests on how not just your own population but the international community perceives the outcome of war, either through satellite imagery or drone footage. Better immediate battlefield damage assessment capabilities now have enormous currency, and so we should expect crisis actors to try to ensure they have every possible informational and PR advantage going forward.

On balance, these extrapolations from the Israel-Iran conflict — questionable as some of them might be — risk emboldening a more expansive, less restrained approach in the next crisis between India and Pakistan. For policymakers in South Asia, then, the challenge rests in anticipating and preparing for scenarios in which the adversary’s strategic calculus may be informed to a greater extent by someone else’s last war, not its own.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2025