Note: At the time of writing the pricing petrol/diesel data might have shifted given the volatility in the market.
If Pakistan stuck by the 1973 constitution it would have definitely become a middle power. It still can if it course corrects before losing everything.
Giovanni Botero, writing in the sixteenth century when the concept was still new enough to require definition, described a middle power as a state with “sufficient strength and authority to stand on its own without the need of help from others.” Pakistan, in June 2026, is running its twenty-third IMF program. The current one, a $7 billion Extended Fund Facility approved in 2024, is the reason Pakistan did not default. The previous one, the one before that, and the one before that each carried the same condition: raise the tax-to-GDP ratio, broaden the base, reduce the deficit, demonstrate that the state can fund itself. The ratio has not moved in any durable sense in thirty years. The programs keep coming because the alternative, a nuclear-armed state of 240 million people on the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China collapsing under its own debt, is a problem no one in Washington, Beijing, Riyadh, or Geneva is prepared to manage. Pakistan is not standing on its own. Pakistan is being held up by the collective anxiety of everyone who would have to deal with it if it fell.
This is what Islamabad’s foreign policy establishment has learned to call strategic leverage. What it actually is, is the geopolitical equivalent of being too large to foreclose on. The bank keeps rolling the loan not because the borrower is creditworthy but because the bank cannot absorb the loss. Pakistan’s diplomatic relevance, including the much-discussed mediation role in the 2026 US-Iran conflict, the Saudi defense pact of September 2025, the shuttle diplomacy between Washington and Tehran in which the current army chief sat through twenty-one hours of failed direct talks, rests entirely on this calculus. Remove the nuclear arsenal and the geography and you have a state that no major power would return a call from. That is not influence. That is indispensability through catastrophe-prevention, and the distinction matters enormously for what the country is and where it is going.
The middle power claim is not just analytically wrong. It is the language the Pakistani establishment uses to avoid the harder conversation about what it has built, who benefits from it, and what the people living inside it are owed. It is the vocabulary of institutional self-congratulation deployed to paper over a fiscal architecture that consumes its own future, a security apparatus that owns its own economy, a political system that performs democracy without practicing it, and a periphery, four of them now, that has run out of patience with arrangements designed for someone else’s benefit. Before the claim can be properly buried, it has to be properly understood.
The academic literature on middle powers built its framework on a specific set of assumptions so obvious they were never stated. Canada defined itself as a middle power in the 1940s and built its foreign policy identity around peacekeeping, multilateral institution-building, and what scholars came to call “good international citizenship.” Australia did the same, projecting influence through regional architecture, trade frameworks, and a domestic base stable enough that its diplomatic commitments meant something because they came from a government that could actually execute them. Brazil’s claim to middle power status rests on the largest economy in Latin America, a democratic system that, however imperfect, produces governments with popular mandates and the institutional capacity to honor agreements across electoral cycles.
The precondition in every case is a functioning domestic base. A tax system that generates the revenue to fund state activity without permanent recourse to external programs. Institutions that execute rather than perform. A political settlement stable enough that the government negotiating today can make credible commitments about what the government in office three years from now will do. Harvard’s Belfer Center, updating the framework in 2025, defined middle powers as states with “the capacity to influence at regional and global levels” on issues where they have a “recognizable stake.” Capacity is the operative word. It implies the domestic architecture to translate interest into sustained action.
Pakistan’s tax-to-GDP ratio reached 12.3% in FY25, the highest since at least 2000, a fact the government has presented as vindication. The IMF’s third review of the current program, completed May 8, 2026, set the FY27 target at a further 0.3 percentage points, to be raised through provincial agricultural and services taxes worth roughly Rs400 billion. Read the two halves of that sentence together. After three decades of programs demanding the same structural reform, after a tax base so narrow that agriculture, 24.6% of value added, carries an effective rate of 0.3% while petroleum products are taxed at 166%, the ask has shrunk to three tenths of one percentage point, collected provincially, where the same landholding interests that dominate the federal parliament also dominate the provincial assemblies that must legislate it. This is not a country closing in on fiscal sovereignty. It is a program and a government that have both concluded the larger ask was never going to be met, and have agreed on a number small enough that failing to meet it will not require anyone to explain why. The IMF’s own late-2025 governance diagnostic put a number on what the larger failure costs: elite capture of state resources by political, corporate, and military interests consumes roughly 6% of GDP, a figure the UNDP separately priced at more than $17 billion a year. The Fund that documents the capture is the same Fund that keeps lending around it. The feudal landholding class in Punjab and Sindh that dominates the parliament pays almost nothing on agricultural income. The military’s commercial empire, more than 100 subsidiaries spanning fertilizer, cement, banking, sugar, real estate, logistics, and construction, operates under tax exemptions and without meaningful civilian financial oversight. The retail and trading economy runs overwhelmingly in cash, undocumented, unassessed. What gets taxed is the salaried middle class and the formal corporate sector, both of which are shrinking, because the people who could expand the base have written the laws that protect their own exclusion from it.
Debt servicing consumed Rs8.21 trillion in FY2025-26, 47 cents of every budget rupee before the state spent a rupee on anything else. The federal health allocation for 240 million people was Rs32 billion, or $113 million. The Higher Education Commission budget was cut by 35%. The defense budget rose by 20%, to Rs3.292 trillion including military pensions. This is not a government making difficult choices between competing priorities. This is a government executing the preferences of the institution that actually runs the country, and those preferences are clear and consistent and have been for seventy-eight years.
The cleanest way to understand what Pakistan actually is requires setting aside the constitutional architecture, the parliamentary debates, the Supreme Court judgments, and the election results, and asking a simpler question: who gets to decide, and who benefits from the decision? The answer is not the parliament. It is not the prime minister. It is not the finance minister, who in the current government is implementing an IMF program written for an economy the institution he serves has already captured.
The Fauji Foundation was established in 1954, three years after the country’s founding, ostensibly as a welfare organization for retired military personnel. By 2026 it operates 36 subsidiaries including Fauji Fertilizer Company, one of the largest in South Asia, Fauji Cement, Askari Bank, oil and gas exploration, food production, and power generation. The Army Welfare Trust runs 25 or more enterprises covering banking, insurance, real estate, manufacturing, sugar mills, and textiles. The Defence Housing Authority dominates urban real estate in every major Pakistani city, developing land acquired through government allocation at below-market rates and selling it at market rates, capturing the spread. The Frontier Works Organization builds roads and infrastructure under military management, competing with private contractors on projects it helps design the terms of. The National Logistics Cell manages the country’s trucking supply chain.
The SIFC, the Special Investment Facilitation Council, launched in 2023 and presented to foreign investors as a one-stop shop for cutting Pakistani bureaucracy, is the newest instrument in this architecture. It placed senior military officers at the decision-making center of every significant economic negotiation in the country. Chinese companies seeking CPEC project approvals learned to call GHQ, not the relevant civilian ministry. Gulf sovereign wealth funds negotiating entry into Pakistani real estate and agriculture went through SIFC, where the relevant authority sat in uniform. The $65 billion CPEC corridor runs under army-managed coordination. Critics described SIFC as handing control of Pakistan’s economic assets to the military. That is not quite accurate. The military already had control. SIFC formalized and expanded it.
This parallel economy operates on a specific logic: the institution that controls coercive power in the state uses that control to also capture economic surplus, which it then deploys to fund the coercive apparatus and distribute benefits to its own personnel, further deepening the loyalty structure that sustains its dominance. It is internally coherent. It is also, for the 240 million people who live outside the institution, an arrangement that produces declining public services, collapsing educational quality, a healthcare system with fewer resources than many sub-Saharan African states, and a government that raises the defense budget 20% in the same fiscal year it cuts the higher education budget by a third.
A middle power’s military serves the state. Pakistan’s state serves the military. These are not symmetrical arrangements, and no amount of mediation diplomacy changes which one Pakistan has.
The word “unrest” implies deviation from an equilibrium. What is happening in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan is not deviation. It is the accumulated consequence of a federal arrangement that was designed to extract and concentrate, and that has been extracting and concentrating for so long that the people inside it have done the arithmetic and arrived at a conclusion the center is not prepared to hear.
In Balochistan, the arithmetic is about gas. The province sits on Pakistan’s largest natural gas reserves. The pipelines run north. The royalties return south as conditional federal transfers, the conditions set by the government in Islamabad, the transfers contingent on political compliance. The question of genuine provincial autonomy over resource revenue has never appeared on any negotiating table because GHQ’s answer to it is always no, and GHQ’s answer is the one that determines outcomes. ACLED documented separatist violence in 2024 at roughly twice the level of the previous year. Operation Herof 2.0, launched January 31, 2026, produced a military claim of 216 militants killed in a week-long operation. HRCP documented 1,355 enforced disappearances in 2025 alone. When the US-Israel war on Iran forced the closure of border trade at Taftan in March 2026, food prices in Balochistan doubled. The people absorbing that price shock are the same people whose gas heats the rest of the country. They have noticed.
In Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the June 2026 Rawalakot crisis produced eleven dead, four security officials and seven protesters, seventy or more wounded, seventy-two organizers arrested, the JAAC proscribed under the Anti-Terrorism Act, and internet access cut across the Poonch sector. The JAAC’s sixteen-point charter was entirely economic. Electricity billed at production cost, not the Rs40-plus per unit charged back to communities generating hydro power at roughly Rs3 per unit. Wheat subsidies. An end to free vehicles and fuel for ministers and judges. These are not radical demands. They are the demands of people who have looked at the ledger and understood, with complete clarity, that the arrangement they live under was designed for someone else’s benefit and maintained, when challenged, with someone else’s guns. What the sequence around the crisis shows is that the arrangement could not have been changed even if Islamabad had wanted to change it: the October 2025 Muzaffarabad Agreement, which had already conceded the wheat subsidy and the capped tariff, collapsed months later because it violated the IMF program’s energy-sector cost-recovery benchmarks, conditions set in Washington that no AJK cabinet has the authority to renegotiate. On June 6, a day before the worst of the killing, the AJK Supreme Court ruled the twelve refugee assembly seats, the mechanism that has delivered Islamabad’s chosen government in Muzaffarabad in every cycle since 1975, constitutionally protected and amendable only by a two-thirds vote of the assembly those seats control. The federal savings from honoring the wheat subsidy: zero rupees. The cost in lives, and in the closing of the last legal channel for reform: already entered into the record.
In Gilgit-Baltistan, residents are taxed by a federal government in whose national assembly and senate they hold no seats. The 2018 GB Order replaced the 2009 framework while keeping ultimate authority concentrated in Islamabad. Protests through 2025 and into 2026 centered on land appropriation for CPEC infrastructure, federal taxation imposed without representation, electricity shortages in a region that sits on rivers the rest of Pakistan depends on, and the documented fear that Chinese companies are extracting Gilgit-Baltistan’s mineral wealth under terms negotiated without meaningful local consent. The June 7, 2026 assembly elections were scheduled and held without resolving the underlying constitutional status question, which means the vote addressed nothing that the protests were about. Islamabad has found this ambiguity administratively convenient for seventy-eight years.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the TTP strengthened in multiple districts through 2025 while the PTM, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, was banned in October 2024. The PTM’s primary activity was documenting extrajudicial killings of Pashtun civilians by security forces and demanding accountability for them. Amnesty International described the ban as a violation of rights to free expression and assembly. The ban stands. The killed civilians remain in the record.
Four provinces, four distinct legitimacy crises, sharing a single structural root: a federal arrangement that concentrates decision-making authority and economic surplus in the center while distributing coercion to the periphery. A middle power’s provinces want to be there. Pakistan’s periphery is asking, with increasing urgency and decreasing patience, why it should be.
In 2025, roughly 750,000 Pakistanis emigrated. Among them were approximately 4,000 to 5,000 doctors, 11,000 engineers, and 13,000 accountants, figures that Gallup Pakistan, LinkedIn data, and Pakistan’s own Bureau of Emigration confirmed at record levels. The doctor-to-patient ratio, already below WHO recommendations at 1:1,300 against a recommended 1:1,000, got worse. Hospitals that were already understaffed lost more staff. The nurses migration rate increased 2,144% between 2011 and 2024, a number so extraordinary it sounds like a typographical error and is not.
This is the other arithmetic Pakistan’s knowledge class has done. Eighty-three percent of departing doctors cite salary levels as their primary reason for leaving, according to the Pakistan Medical Association’s own surveys. A junior doctor in a Pakistani public hospital earns a salary that does not keep pace with the inflation rate the IMF program’s austerity measures produced. The doctors who remain are the ones who could not leave, or chose not to, or have not yet found the visa. The ones who left are, by the structure of emigration, the most qualified, the most mobile, the most networked internationally, and the most capable of building the institutions the country needs. Pakistan trains them at public expense, often subsidized by a state that cannot afford the subsidy, and exports them to British hospitals, Gulf clinics, and American engineering firms. The remittances they send back, $38.5 billion in FY25, a record, are presented by Pakistani economists as evidence of the diaspora’s continued attachment to the homeland. They are also evidence that the homeland cannot retain the people it most needs to retain.
Thirty-seven percent of the population, in surveys, says it wants to leave. Among the educated, the number is higher. The knowledge class is not leaving because it is anti-Pakistan. It is leaving because it has concluded, from direct experience, that the state is not organized for their benefit and has no realistic path to becoming so. When more than two-thirds of doctors surveyed express no intention of returning, that is not a preference. It is a verdict.
Pakistan ranked 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index in 2025. Eleven journalists were killed in 2024, the highest documented annual total in the country’s history. In December 2024 alone, 150 journalists received arrest warrants under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act for covering the November 26 PTI crackdown in Islamabad. The charges included “glorification of terrorism,” “anti-state propaganda,” and spreading “false narratives” about security agencies. The state’s definition of a false narrative about a security agency is, in practice, any accurate one.
The 2025 PECA amendments, passed in January, gave authorities what the International Press Institute described as “close to absolute discretion” to target journalists. Ahmad Noorani, one of Pakistan’s most respected investigative reporters, had his YouTube channel blocked, his brothers abducted, and new PECA charges filed against him in March 2025 for reporting on the current army chief. Farhan Mallick, founder of Raftar, was arrested in March 2025, previously detained in December 2024. Dawn News, the oldest English-language newspaper in the country, faced a government advertising ban in 2024 for print and 2025 for television and radio, a soft financial stranglehold that does not require a single arrest warrant. Pakistan ranks twelfth on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Impunity Index, meaning it is the twelfth-worst country in the world for prosecuting the killers of journalists.
A middle power that cannot be reported on accurately is not governing. It is performing governance for an audience it controls. The press freedom collapse is not incidental to the middle power question. It is definitional. States that do not tolerate accurate documentation of their own conduct cannot be accountable to their own citizens, which means they cannot be accountable to their foreign interlocutors either, which means their diplomatic commitments are as durable as the current army chief’s patience with the current political arrangement, no more and no less. Every foreign minister who sat with Pakistan’s representatives in 2025 and 2026 knew this. The meetings happened anyway, because the geography and the warheads require it, not because anyone at the table believed the commitment would outlast the calculation.
Pakistan contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It ranks among the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change consequences. In 2025, monsoon floods destroyed more than 1.3 million hectares of cropland, inundated 4,500 villages in Punjab during the peak harvest period, killed more than a thousand people, displaced 2.7 million in Punjab alone, and pushed 7.5 million into acute food insecurity by early 2026. The 2022 floods, which submerged a third of the country and caused $30 billion in damage, left infrastructure unrepaired that the 2025 floods then destroyed again. The glacial lake outburst floods accelerating across the Hindu Kush and Karakoram are not a future risk. They are a current operational reality for the communities in their path, communities that have no insurance, no government savings program, and no realistic expectation that the state will repair what the next flood removes.
The climate crisis compounds every other structural vulnerability. Food insecurity makes provincial grievances harder to manage and coercion more likely to produce the opposite of the intended effect. Flood displacement adds to the pressure on cities already struggling to absorb internal migration. Agricultural loss reduces the rural income base and accelerates the departure of working-age people to Gulf labor markets that absorb Pakistani bodies and return remittances that keep the rupee alive. The state’s response to the climate emergency has been institutionally coherent with its response to everything else: announce a National Resilience Plan, accept international aid without reforming the distribution architecture, and continue building a defense budget that crowds out the adaptation investment the country actually needs.
A middle power shapes its region’s response to shared challenges. Pakistan cannot fund its own recovery from the floods. It cannot build the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline that would reduce its Hormuz exposure because it has never had a civilian government independent enough to override the combination of US pressure, FATF threats, and institutional inertia that blocks it. The pipeline has been under discussion since 1995. The gas has not moved. The Strait of Hormuz remained the route for 85% to 99% of Pakistan’s oil and LNG imports when the US-Israel war transformed it into a war zone in early 2026. By late April, the weekly oil import bill had risen 167%, from $300 million to $800 million, and crude imports for that month alone hit an all-time high of $964 million, the prime minister’s own office confirmed. The petrol price at the pump, Rs377.78 per liter as of June 6 after a modest cut, sits well above pre-war levels and is one Brent spike away from rising again, and the families paying it are the same families the 2025 floods made food insecure.
Pakistan has elections. The February 2024 election was managed so visibly that even the Election Commission struggled to paper over it. Imran Khan ran his candidates from a prison cell, assembled through independents after his party was barred from using its electoral symbol, won the largest block of seats, and watched the results arranged afterward into a coalition that produced the government GHQ required after the previous political experiment went wrong. The prime minister who took office in February 2024 had served in the same role before, under different circumstances, and was returned to it under circumstances that differed from the previous ones primarily in the degree to which anyone bothered to pretend otherwise.
The current government’s mandate is not popular. This matters for the middle power question in a specific technical sense. Middle power diplomacy requires credibility: the capacity to make commitments that foreign states can trust will survive domestic political transitions because the system producing those commitments is legitimate. When Pakistan mediated between Washington and Tehran in the 2026 Iran conflict, every party at the table understood that Islamabad’s role was contingent not on popular mandate, not on parliamentary authorization, not on any mechanism of civilian accountability, but on the current army chief’s strategic calculation that mediation served GHQ’s current interests. The moment that calculation changes, the mediation ends. You can build a negotiation on that. You cannot build an alliance. You cannot build a trade framework. You cannot build the durable multilateral relationships that distinguish a middle power from a state that happens to be useful in a particular crisis.
PEMRA, the broadcast regulatory authority, is headed by retired military officers. The PECA amendments give the state close to absolute discretion over digital speech. The Rs101.4 million secret fund distributed to journalists, documented and still classified, is the financial architecture of a press that does not investigate what it is paid not to investigate. The LIMS and WMS surveillance infrastructure makes private journalist-source communication operationally impossible. The system does not need direct orders to produce compliance. It produces compliance by making non-compliance existential. Every journalist who covers the military’s commercial empire does so knowing what happened to Ahmad Noorani. Most of them choose to cover something else. The system counts on this, and the system is correct.
Islamabad’s 2022 National Security Policy gave this whole posture a name: cooperative geo-economics. The pitch is that Pakistan stops being a security client and becomes a connectivity hub, sitting astride the routes that link China, Central Asia, the Gulf, and South Asia, drawing investment from Washington and Beijing simultaneously because both need the corridor to work. CPEC alone is pitched at $62 billion in committed investment across energy, infrastructure, and special economic zones, with $30 billion already disbursed. On paper this is the most coherent thing the Pakistani state has produced about itself in decades.
Run the numbers next to each other. The vision requires a tax-to-GDP ratio capable of funding the roads, the rail links, the port upgrades, the customs digitization, the regulatory predictability that make a transit corridor more attractive than the alternative. Pakistan’s ratio sits at 12.3%, the highest in a generation, achieved by raising agricultural and services levies worth roughly Rs400 billion, a sum smaller than a single year’s increase in debt servicing. The vision requires an export base diverse enough to give China, the Gulf, and Central Asia a reason to route goods through Karachi and Gwadar rather than around them. Pakistan’s export-to-GDP ratio is 8.4%, against India’s 19% and Bangladesh’s 15%, and high-technology products make up 2% of what little it sells abroad. The vision requires a state that can guarantee the safety of the workforce and infrastructure foreign capital is meant to flow into. Twenty-one Chinese nationals have been killed or injured in attacks since 2017, mostly by a group whose stated objective is severing the Pakistan-China relationship, and the state’s answer has been to refuse Beijing’s request for its own security presence while offering no alternative that has stopped the attacks.
None of this is a funding gap that the next disbursement closes. It is the same architecture the rest of this piece documents, restated as foreign policy. A government that cannot tax the agricultural income of the parliamentarians who sit in it is being asked to build the regulatory environment that makes Gwadar more attractive than Chabahar or the Malacca Strait. A military whose commercial arm runs cement plants and sugar mills under tax exemption is the same institution now sitting inside SIFC, brokering the foreign investment that the corridor depends on. The 2022 NSP did not describe a new direction. It described what the existing arrangement would need to become in order to be called something other than what it is, and then proceeded without becoming it.
The honest version of the connectivity pitch is not that Pakistan lacks the geography. It has the geography. It is that geography converts into a hub only through institutions Pakistan has spent seventy-eight years declining to build, and the establishment making the pitch is the establishment with the strongest material interest in the institutions never arriving.
The strongest version of the middle power case does not pretend Pakistan’s economics are functional or its democracy genuine. It concedes all of that and points to the warheads: approximately 170, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ 2025 estimate, with the arsenal modernizing and possibly growing toward 200 by the end of the decade. The argument is: no one lets this state fail. Therefore it has leverage. Therefore it has power. Therefore it is, by some meaningful definition, a middle power.
This is the most intellectually serious position available to Pakistan’s defenders, and it deserves to be taken seriously before it is demolished. The argument is true as far as it goes. Pakistan’s nuclear capability is the single most effective instrument its establishment has produced. It underwrites the Saudi defense pact, the US engagement, the Chinese investment, the Iranian diplomatic access, the Gulf financing that stabilized the rupee during the Hormuz crisis. Every major power’s Pakistan policy is organized around the proposition that the state cannot be allowed to fail, and the warheads are the primary reason for that proposition.
But here is what the argument concedes in the act of making itself: Pakistan’s indispensability is generated by its instability, not despite it. The leverage is not the leverage of a creditworthy borrower with growing influence. It is the leverage of a borrower whose default would be catastrophic for the creditors. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is how Pakistan’s establishment avoids the question of what the leverage actually produces for the people inside the country.
The leverage flows entirely to GHQ. It funds the commercial empire, the 20% budget increase, the pension obligations, the officer housing in Defence Housing Authority developments across Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. It does not flow to the 40% of Pakistanis living below the poverty lines the World Bank politely contests. It does not flow to the families in Rawalakot who pay Rs40 per unit for electricity generated at Rs3 per unit. It does not flow to the Baloch families filing FIRs for 1,355 documented disappearances in a single year, or to the doctors who calculated what their training was worth and boarded a plane to Manchester. It does not flow to the 7.5 million people in acute food insecurity after the 2025 floods destroyed the harvest, or to the students whose Higher Education Commission budget was cut by a third in the same year the defense budget rose by a fifth.
Giovanni Botero’s definition, which the Pakistani foreign policy establishment has never cited in their middle power discourse, required a state to stand on its own without the need of help from others. The Belfer Center’s 2025 update required the capacity to influence at regional and global levels. Every serious definition of middle power status requires some version of the same thing: the domestic coherence to translate geographic position and military capacity into sustained, institutionalized influence that compounds over time. Brazil has it. Indonesia is building it. South Korea built it. Pakistan has the geographic position and the military capacity and the nuclear deterrent and nothing of what is required to convert them into the influence the label implies.
What Pakistan has instead is a security state that has learned to perform diplomacy, hosted in a country that contains multitudes of its citizens’ talent and grief and aspiration and that the state has never been organized to serve. The army chief flew to Tehran for twenty-one hours. The talks failed. Petrol hit Rs458. Eleven journalists were killed the year before. Four thousand doctors left. Eleven people died in Rawalakot over an electricity bill. The Higher Education Commission budget was cut. The defense budget rose.
A middle power is one whose influence makes life better for the people inside it. That is not a sentimental standard, it is the only one worth keeping, and measured against it the word Pakistan’s establishment reaches for is the wrong one.
Accountable.