Hussain Nadim on rebuilding a think tank from inside the system, the great-game read of Afghanistan, and why Joe Biden isn't calling

A 33-year-old at the head of a national-security think tank

Muzamil opens by orienting the audience around an unusual guest: someone who, on paper, looks like he should be twenty years older than he is. Hussain Nadim has a PhD in political science from the University of Sydney, a master’s from Cambridge, an undergrad from George Washington, a Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016, and a stint as Special Assistant to Asad Umar at the Planning Commission. He is now, at 33, the Executive Director of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute - IPRI - which sits under Pakistan’s National Security Advisor, Dr Moeed Yusuf.

The first question is the obvious one: why a think tank, and why this one, at this age? Hussain’s answer is two-part. The cultural argument: we are in what he calls the “ideas age” - the way earlier generations sat inside the agricultural age, then the industrial age - and the institutions that produce ideas are the institutions that will set the next reforms. Pakistan, in his read, has always had a think-tank culture; it has just been “securitised” - clustered around defence and politics - rather than oriented at the wider problem of producing usable ideas for the state.

The career argument is more personal. After Cambridge he wanted to come back to Pakistan and “didn’t want to bechni coke ya pani” - sell Coke or water in the corporate sector. The Planning Commission under Asad Umar was the first answer. The think tank is the second, on the same logic: change comes from ideas, and you can produce more of them with senior judgment from inside the state machinery than from outside it. An activist’s reach, he estimates, is 20 to 30 per cent. An academic’s, similar. A small change inside the government, by contrast, has a drastic impact. The trade-off is the well-documented frustration of working inside Pakistani bureaucracy - which he acknowledges plainly - but the cost is worth the leverage.

He defines a think tank for the lay viewer as “the powerhouse and institutional memory of the state.” Governments rotate; the policy memory has to live somewhere stable. The reason America is a superpower, he argues, is not its military but the depth of its think-tank stack - RAND, Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations - and the reason Britain was one was the same shape: RUSI on one side, Oxford and Cambridge on the other. IPRI is being rebuilt to be that house for Pakistan’s national security establishment.

The 3D playbook: datafication, digitalization, disruption

The interview pitch, when he was hired, was a single sentence delivered to the now-NSA: this institution can keep going the way it has been going for another twenty years and it will not get anywhere. Give me autonomy and I will overturn it.

He calls his reform programme the 3D policy: datafication, digitalization, disruption. The first move under disruption was the HR. His position - “if you want to change a country, change its HR” - is the one he has watched land at the Planning Commission, at NCOC, and now at IPRI: bring in younger people, bring in a more diverse set of people, give them power, and the institution moves. The most important variable in any reform, in his reading, is the bench.

Datafication came next, and not just on the research side. To know what to reform, you need data on the institution itself - twenty years of IPRI’s output, comparative data on other think tanks, an honest read on what works and what doesn’t. The headline finding of that exercise: long reports don’t work any more. Forty, fifty, a hundred-page documents get filed and forgotten. Visuals, infographics, dashboards get read. So the same data-driven posture was rolled into research methodology, into impact assessment, and into the strategic decisions of the institute itself - “start to end.”

Digitalization is the layer everyone can see. Press releases became videos. Infographics moved to the front. A live dashboard tracking US foreign-aid projects has just shipped.

The receipts are concrete. In twenty years prior, IPRI had never appeared on the UPenn Global Go-To Think Tank Index. Nine months into the reforms, it landed at rank 74. Hussain’s point isn’t the ranking. It’s that an institution of the Pakistani state, in the same environment, with the same people, on the same budget, can produce a top-league outcome if it is willing to reform. The corollary - which he names directly - is PIA, PTV, and the rest of the country’s underperforming state organisations. None of them, in his view, are structurally exempt from the same move.

On the question of whether young hires actually deliver, his answer is unequivocal: at the Planning Commission, at NCOC, at the Nerve Centre, and now at IPRI, they have. The pattern that breaks it is universal: managers motivate and train the new bench, and then start micromanaging them. The fix is to add autonomy and the right to fail a few times. The 50-years-of-experience CEO is a myth that has already broken globally - “those are kids that went to their garage, made an app, and became billionaires” - and the technology stack a graduate enters with today is unrecognisable from the one a graduate entered with ten years ago. A government still running on a British-era operating model cannot absorb that change without making space for the people who arrive holding it.

G5 Internet Observatory: studying the country that already exists on TikTok

The headline reform at IPRI - the one Muzamil first noticed on Twitter - is the Global 5 Internet Observatory, or G5 IO. The framing is direct. The other IPRI reforms, Hussain admits, are catch-up: things that the rest of the world’s think tanks already did. G5 IO is the one that puts Pakistan on the frontier alongside Stanford Internet Observatory, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. “Top of the top of the food chain. And then now at IPRI.”

His diagnosis of the gap it fills is precise. Research methodology in Pakistan still sits on the traditional triangle - ethnography, qualitative, quantitative - and ignores the entire fourth modality that has taken over the country: digital and data. The example he uses is TikTok. You can stack fifty years of USAID and DFID and Pakistani-government rural-economy interventions next to two years of TikTok, and TikTok will have done more to change the rural economy than all of them combined. Whether you read that change as good or bad is a separate debate. The point is that nobody at the policy level in Pakistan was studying it.

Muzamil pulls this into a thread he has personally watched fail. As a content creator in Islamabad he has been pulled into focus-group discussions on how to reach rural communities for, say, a financial-inclusion campaign - which then ends up with the banners going up between Sectors F-6 and F-10. “Yahan par har banda jo hai financially included hai.” The campaigns target a population that already has the thing the campaign is about, because the methodology to reach the population that doesn’t was never built. TikTok built it accidentally - by connecting rural Pakistan with the global, then attaching monetisation. A farmer earning twenty-five thousand rupees a month watches his son earn five or six lakh from monetised content.

G5 IO is set up to study that change as policy material. Seven or eight data scientists and behavioural scientists - the kind of bench that doesn’t normally sit inside a Pakistani think tank - crunching tweets and Facebook posts to surface how digital media is exacerbating hate, exacerbating violence, surfacing fake news at the local-community level, and shaping governance. Hussain’s framing is that the lab’s purpose is twofold: to help Pakistani policy makers make future-proof decisions, and to put Pakistan into the global conversation as a producer of the research rather than a subject of it. Joint seminars with the Atlantic Council are already done; partnerships with Stanford are next.

The “great game,” not the endgame: rewriting the double-game story

The conversation pivots to the question that Muzamil knows is the reason most of his audience clicked: with US forces leaving Afghanistan on a September 11th deadline, what happens to Pakistan?

Hussain’s correction is immediate. People are calling this the endgame; he calls it a great game - the phrase from the Soviet era. He won’t engage the question, though, without first laying down the framing that he says Pakistan has failed for forty years to articulate clearly.

“Hum pe baar baar kaha ja raha hai ke ji double game kar di inhone. What is actually double game? I’ll tell you what double game Pakistan has played. Pakistan saw America after 9/11 as a bull in a china shop. What we tried to do was one thing: save the bull and save the china shop. That was all what we’ve done.”

The argument unfolds in two parts. The first is historical: Pakistan did not start the turmoil in Afghanistan. The Afghan civil war was already running before Pakistan ever intervened. Zahir Shah’s government fell in 1973. The Saur Revolution was an internal PDPA Marxist-against-Marxist affair - hardcore Marxists killing Najibullah from inside the same party. Pakistan only entered the picture in 1979, when millions of refugees were already crossing the border. Any country in that position, he argues, would have intervened.

The second part is the read on the last twenty years. Pakistan’s core stance throughout the war on terror - through Musharraf, the PPP, PML-N, and into Imran Khan - was the same: tell America to go for political dialogue, restrain the imperial wrath, save the country from its own policy blunders, and save the Afghan people from being collectively flattened by an American security establishment that classified anyone “above the age of 16 with a beard” as a Taliban. The three million refugees Pakistan hosted were largely political and tribal leaders, not Taliban fighters.

The thing called “double game,” in this reading, was Pakistan saying go talk, while America said no, we need to set an example, and bombarded. The cost to Pakistan was the FATF grey-listing and a wrecked economy. The pay-off was the avoidance of an even worse outcome - which is exactly the kind of policy success that, by its nature, gets credited to nobody.

“We have nothing to gain from the economic side or any side from Afghanistan. Our core goal was: when you have an imperial power that has decided to invade and has no plan whatsoever - Americans entered with no plan to exit, to this day they have no idea what the exit looks like - you, as a friend of America, you say: yaar, easy. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Because you know the realities. Half of the world’s Pashtun population is living in Pakistan. We understand the people. Forget about understanding, we are the people.”

Hussain’s verdict on the present is sharp. “The world owes an apology to Pakistan.” Pakistan saved the bull, saved the china shop, took the humiliation, took the FATF damage, and is still being painted as the spoiler.

What happens when the US leaves

Muzamil presses on the practical question. The civil war is starting again. The US has, as in the 1980s, pulled out before stabilising what it broke. What’s the worst case and what’s the best?

Hussain’s answer is bleak and pragmatic. “There is no best-case scenario.” Read the three-thousand-year history of the region and the pattern is consistent: empires arrive, empires leave, the land does not become inclusively governable in any modern Western sense. Even the current US government, he says, has accepted privately that the idea of an inclusive Afghan government cannot work.

The reason is not the Taliban alone. It is that the twenty-year Afghan elite that the US was sponsoring - what he flatly calls “highly racist, bigoted, and crooks” - did not deliver development. The funding that was meant for the districts went to Dubai. USAID and Inspector General reports openly state how much American taxpayer money intended for poor Afghans was looted at the top.

The result is the thing Muzamil has been watching unfold on Twitter: districts falling to the Taliban with no fighting at all. Soldiers lay down arms. People walk over. The local read is that the government that was supposed to deliver development for two decades, didn’t - and Taliban governance, whatever else it is, is a credible alternative because the bar is on the floor.

Hussain refuses to characterise the Taliban - he hasn’t met them, no one has, there is no round-table representation of who Taliban actually is at this point. What is publicly visible is what the Doha office has stated: no killing spree, no formal stance against women’s rights or minority rights, but a clear stated intent to settle scores with the political class that wronged them at the top level. The complication, and the thing that scares Pakistan, is that “Taliban” is not one entity. The Doha representatives and the Nangarhar fighter are different actors in the same loose conglomerate. The minute the US is gone and the unifying enemy disappears, internal war is the realistic next step.

“Pakistan’s biggest fear, and my biggest fear, is that we don’t want to see an Afghanistan which is split into over a hundred different militias. So it is very important that one group emerges - whoever that group is - the Haqqanis, the Hekmatyars, whoever - that someone you can talk to, someone you can deal with.”

On the border fence - the 2,300 kilometres, 5,000-feet-up Pak-Afghan barrier, extended now toward Iran - Hussain is firm about its limits. Speaking as an academic and not a representative of the state: the border is for peace of mind. Like a lock on a house door. It helps. But the real determinant of safety is the stability of the region around the border. If Afghanistan is stable, the border is symbolic. If Afghanistan is unstable, no border in that terrain stops the flow.

Then a softer point, which lands. The US, the richest country in the world, fought elections in 2016 over a few hundred Syrian refugees and a question of Mexican migration. Pakistan has hosted three million Afghans for forty years without any political party making it an election issue. “Hamare bhai hain” - they are our brothers - is, in his framing, the default answer at the street level even during the worst years of bombings on Pakistani soil. He treats this as a cultural fact worth naming, not as a humblebrag - because it is the actual baseline from which any future Pak-Afghan policy will operate.

Pakistan, the US, and why Joe Biden isn’t calling

Muzamil turns to the part of the Imran Khan interview that lit up social media: the Prime Minister, with calculated nonchalance, noting that Joe Biden had not called him. Why hasn’t he?

Hussain knows the file. Biden is not new to Pakistan - “people don’t realise this thing.” He was the architect of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act; his name didn’t appear on it only because he had moved to the vice presidency by the time it passed. KLB was, in Biden’s original intent, a strategic-partnership bill. Hussain’s forthcoming book - Aid, Politics and the War of Narratives: US-Pakistan Relations Under the Kerry-Lugar, due in three to four months - is on exactly this thread.

The deeper read on the silence: Biden had a bad experience with Pakistan during the KLB years, partly because the State Department wasn’t running the Pakistan account - the CIA was, under the Obama administration. So the experience that shaped his current view was a distorted one. The non-call now is by design: don’t give Pakistan too much, don’t elevate it. There is also a big India angle on the China front; Washington does not want to upset Delhi by warming Islamabad too visibly. Senator Lindsey Graham, Hussain notes, is calling this a wrong policy in public. The administration is keeping Pakistan engaged on the military side regardless.

What lands harder is the historical recital. Pakistan was there for America in the 1950s under CENTO and the Baghdad Pact. Pakistan delivered the final blow on the Cold War - “I think it was General Zia ul-Haq’s time who basically promised the Americans that we will take the revenge of Vietnam War for you. We took it.” Pakistan dismantled the Al-Qaeda network during the war on terror in a way no other country did, surrendering over 800 operatives through its intelligence work. Yet the narrative inside Washington is that Pakistan has not been a friend.

Hussain’s larger framing is more interesting than the grievance. Pakistan, he argues, can play a uniquely positive role in the coming great-power moment: it is the only country fluent in both languages - tight historical ties with China, real cultural understanding of America - and could be the bridge between the rising power and the established one. “We understand Americans more than the Americans themselves,” he says, only half-laughing. Muzamil’s response is the obvious one: instead, we are being pushed into one camp.

Why nobody can ask the Osama bin Laden question cleanly

The last segment is the hardest. Muzamil notes that the same question keeps coming up to Pakistani politicians - to the Prime Minister, to the Foreign Minister - and gets a non-answer every time: was Osama bin Laden a martyr, or a terrorist? Why does no Pakistani politician give a clean answer the way every Western one would?

Hussain’s response is the most considered moment in the conversation. There is no one specific answer, he says, because there are two genuinely different populations in Pakistan and they are reading the same person through fundamentally different lenses.

“We live in post-colonial state and societies, where a large populace from a very post-colonial lens see Osama bin Laden as somebody who stood up against the American might. From that angle, for a very large populace, Osama bin Laden is somebody who was having a just war. Now you can’t basically convince those people - they come from a particular background where they see him as that. But you also have one large population which also believes that this guy is responsible for Al-Qaeda and all of that.”

The political question, then, is not “what is the truth” - it is “what does a politician say in a country that contains both populations.” Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s “I refuse to comment,” in Hussain’s read, was the structurally correct answer: the question is set up to humiliate either way. Nobody, he notes, asks the US generals who fought the Native American wars to make a public moral statement about their record. Nobody asks the British about Cecil Rhodes, and there are still British people who openly support him 200 years later. The burden of moral articulation gets placed on this part of the world, and only on this part, asymmetrically.

The deeper point is the methodological one. Politicians, no matter what they say, will take the beating. Muzamil’s read - “aap kuch bhi bolenge aap maar khayenge, aap isme bach nahi sakte” - is the same as Hussain’s. The personal answer Hussain would give if asked privately would be different from the public one. And that gap, in his framing, isn’t dishonesty - it’s the only viable posture in a state whose population is genuinely split.

Coda

The wind-down is brief. Muzamil thanks Hussain for the work, the service, the willingness to come on the show. Hussain’s last note is the one worth holding onto:

“There is so much immense opportunity that exists in the country, and I have absolute faith - when you ask me right now, I have absolute faith that the situation will be overturned in this country. It’s only a matter of time, because the situation is right. So for whoever is interested in coming back to Pakistan: this is the right time. And the country will reward you.”

It lands cleanly because the case he has just spent forty-five minutes making - that a Pakistani state institution can be reformed by a 33-year-old with a bench of young hires, that a Pakistani think tank can land in the global top 100 in nine months, that the country’s foreign-policy posture has been more coherent than the global narrative gives it credit for - is the receipts version of that closing line.

The conversation is one of the few on Pakistani podcasting where a young expert is allowed to articulate the country’s own self-understanding without being interrupted by a counterpoint hired to flatten it. Whether you accept Hussain Nadim’s framing or not, it is the framing that will staff the next decade of Pakistan’s foreign policy. That alone makes it worth the listen.