Pakistan's hybrid system has run out of foreign rent

The unipolar order strained itself, and now nobody is in charge

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation he wants: not Pakistan’s domestic politics in isolation, which he calls meaningless without context, but Pakistan read through the regional and global re-ordering happening around it. He introduces Yasir Ahmed Soomro as one of the most underrated analysts on Pakistani media and a daily voice he has followed for the last year.

Yasir Ahmed begins, characteristically, by taking a long step back. America, he argues, drew its post-war power from capitalism, and capitalism thrives in isolation — you sell to the world without letting the world inside your house. Globalisation broke that. The institutions America built — the WHO, the UN, NATO, the Mastercard-Visa rails of global commerce — eventually started running against America’s own interests as China funded what America defunded. “When you try to move a status quo that you yourself built,” he says, “you should give up the expectation that it will return to where it was.”

What was left, in his telling, was military power. America began shaking the world’s security architectures one by one — telling NATO to pay up, pressuring the Gulf, opening the Iran front — on the theory that destabilised allies would be more dependent, not less. It did not work. Germany, France and Belgium started raising their own production. The Arabs read the Iran confrontation as a preview of their own future and refused to be drawn in. The expected bipolar world never materialised. What emerged instead, in Yasir Ahmed’s phrase, was “interest-based blocs” — a politics in which countries hedge case by case rather than line up behind a single patron.

Pakistan as the gun for hire, and why that model is exhausted

Muzamil pulls the camera back to Pakistan. From the moment of independence, he argues, Pakistan chose the Western bloc. Its patronage came either directly from the United States — under Ayub, under Zia, during the war on terror — or indirectly through US-aligned Gulf states who routed money back into Pakistan’s elite. The country’s whole rent-seeking infrastructure, he says, has been sustained “either directly by the US patronage or indirectly historically by proxy of US states in the Middle East.”

The problem, he tells Yasir Ahmed, is that nobody has any money to give anymore. Saudi Arabia has just lost roughly forty-eight percent of its revenue over two months and posted a 126-billion-riyal deficit — an entire year’s projected deficit in eight weeks. The UAE is asking about swap lines. Iran is emerging from sanctions and has its own rebuilding to do. The Middle East, Muzamil says flatly, “does not have the money to sustain your excesses.”

Yasir Ahmed agrees, and then sharpens the point. Pakistan’s relevance to America right now exists for one reason only: the Straits of Hormuz are not yet resolved, and Iran will only talk through Pakistan. “Iran said: talk through Pakistan. China went around and came back and also said: talk through Pakistan. So Trump had to talk through Pakistan.” But once that file closes, he is blunt: “I don’t see any need for Pakistan in this towards America.”

That, he argues, is why the gun-for-hire model is structurally exhausted. Pakistan can still rent its military to bloc politics — to Turkey, to a Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey axis, to Iran if the alignment shifts that way. But the volume of foot soldiers no longer decides modern conflict. Muzamil makes the comparison directly: this is the late-USSR problem. “An incredibly powerful military yet a flailing economy.” Without a paying patron, the structure cannot fund itself.

Why the Arabs stopped writing cheques — and what fills the vacuum

One of the harder passages in the conversation is about why Gulf money has, in practice, stopped flowing. Yasir Ahmed lists the difficult decisions Pakistan has already taken: returning UAE deposits, hedging towards Iran, leaving the Qatari LNG question unresolved. Each of those decisions has a cost. “If we don’t take LNG from Qatar, they will say fine — the security relationship we had with you, the money we were parking with you, we take it back.”

He is also careful to identify why the Arabs ever cared about Pakistan in the first place. “Why was Saudi Arabia interested in us? For the military and for the sect.” The sectarian dimension, he points out, cuts both ways. If Iran emerges as a natural middle power between America, China and Russia — and the Straits give Iran exactly that leverage — then Iranian influence on Pakistan’s power structure becomes a live variable, not a hypothetical one. “We cannot go against Iran for a while.”

China, both men agree, is the wild card, but not a generous one. Muzamil presses the point: China is transactional. It does not run proxy patronage networks the way the US and the Gulf did. “Their attitude is: do business with me, take your money, that’s it.” If Pakistan is hoping Chinese money will replace American and Arab money on the same terms — free, recurring, politically convenient — that hope is, in Yasir Ahmed’s words, denial.

Yasir Ahmed adds a piece of recent history that he treats as load-bearing. He suggests the Pakistani establishment, after 2011 and the disasters that followed, kept a deliberate hedge open against China. CPEC, he points out, was delayed and delayed. Under Nawaz Sharif its leadership sat with civilians; under Imran Khan it was moved to the military; after that “nobody knows what happened to CPEC.” The CPEC Authority, he says, was created and then quietly absorbed. He reads this as a tell: Pakistan was preserving the option, if Washington ever asked, of slowing China’s growth even if it could not openly oppose it. “If we cannot go against China, we can slow China. We can become an obstacle to its growth.” Whether that hedge is still credible after the recent re-alignment is, in his view, an open question.

A four-star post that nobody fills

Yasir Ahmed offers a small, telling detail that the conversation lingers on. The 27th Amendment created a new Joint Strategic Command post — a four-star slot sitting between the existing three- and five-star ranks. The post was created. It was not appointed. “There is a three star and there is a five star. There is no four star and nobody is four star.”

The detail matters because, he argues, it captures the wider pattern: the legal and structural scaffolding is being raised faster than the political settlement underneath can hold it. He returns to the Israel question to illustrate the same dynamic from outside. After the recent war, Israel read Pakistan clearly: “Pakistan is the hindrance. It could have destroyed Iran, it could have moved on Turkey. The only thing it saw in the way was Pakistan.” That reading, he warns, leads to one alignment — India and Israel — and Pakistan should not assume that alignment will stay quiet.

Three parties, no party

Muzamil walks Yasir Ahmed through the three major political vehicles. PTI: Imran Khan in jail, a movement that is genuinely powerful but a party whose post-Khan shape nobody can describe. PML-N: Maryam Nawaz running the Punjab campaign, but with no plausible route to a second victory on the back of current performance. PPP: a party Muzamil says he genuinely cannot decode — a province held for two decades with no observable improvement, and yet the party that produces the most cynical hedging in foreign policy.

He notes the recent visible alignment shifts. Before the vote of no confidence, Murad Ali Shah, Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto were making repeated trips to the US — “six or seven times in six months,” as Yasir Ahmed remembers it. The recent Zardari trip to China, by contrast, was not a head-of-state visit so much as a full PPP delegation visit. The party is reading the room.

Yasir Ahmed’s verdict on the three is unsparing. “If I look at party structures, they have all become irrelevant.” PTI has no organisational shape without Khan. PML-N has no genuine vote bank that survives a clean count. PPP is what he calls “soft seizure — they are compromised,” held in place by a power structure rather than by a constituency. The hybrid regime can shuffle the deck, but it cannot manufacture a party.

The legacy trap, and why total control will not hold

The hardest section of the conversation is about the field marshal — Muzamil’s framing of a leadership that, by his reading, has now collected almost every external marker of success: title, amendments, history-book legacy from the Indian and Iranian wars, international recognition as Pakistan’s first Chief of Defence Forces. The one thing that remains is what he calls “the love of the people.”

He proposes that the last leg of cementing power could be a Saudi-style or China-style accountability sweep — a performative, dramatic action against the same traditional politicians that the public has come to resent. Public support for PTI, he argues, was always less about Imran Khan than about exhaustion with the Sharifs and the Zardaris. A large enough accountability moment could reset that anger in the establishment’s favour.

Yasir Ahmed is sceptical. “If the establishment tries to bring itself to either accountability or total control,” he says, “that will fail.” The reason, he explains, is not external — nobody outside will challenge a fully consolidated establishment. It is internal, and it is structural. The accountability route forces a partnership with PML-N to get a two-thirds majority. The moment PML-N senses that Lahore, or Punjab, is the price, the alliance breaks. “Lahore goes, we go,” is how he reads Maryam’s view. The mechanics he lays out are precise: a model that depends on a single compliant party will always be hostage to the moment that party calculates its own survival differently.

The Frankenstein and the patchwork

Muzamil’s last setup is about the law itself. He observes, correctly in Yasir Ahmed’s view, that Pakistani policy-making over the last two to three years has been a series of patches applied to specific faces. A leakage here, a problem there, an amendment to handle one judge, a body to handle one case. The system, he says, is not running on rules. It is running on people, and those people are holding it together with the weight of their own power. “When the system flips, that’s when the stress test arrives.”

Yasir Ahmed agrees and goes further. “Most probably this is going to get reversed. Too many lacunae. If we sit down to explain them legally, we get stuck in problem after problem.” He uses the Federal Constitutional Court versus Supreme Court standoff as the live example. The new norm, he allows, may hold for five, six, seven, eight years. It will not hold for a generation. He cites the floated separation of the Chief of Defence Forces post from the army chief — an idea publicly raised by Afsar Alam two or three days before the actual amendment, and then quietly buried. “That doesn’t mean the idea is buried. It means it will eventually reverse.”

2030: the chaos case and the negotiation case

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks for a medium-term outlook. By 2030, what does Yasir Ahmed actually see? He rejects the lazy consensus that nothing will happen. “The same thing will not continue. In Pakistan, the status quo always develops leakages from inside.”

He lays out the two paths plainly. One is a negotiated internal settlement — “let’s sit and settle this and talk.” The other is the path of assertion: the belief that “I am me, I can do this, so I will.” The first path he treats as honest but unlikely, because, as he puts it, “our habit is to waste things, to fight, to not realise our opportunities.” The second path, he says, ends in chaos — and the pressure points he names are specific. “Balochistan will be a turmoil, bad turmoil. So exploited that we won’t be able to control it. The same for KPK.” That belt, he notes, connects directly into Afghanistan, and that whole belt connects upward to China. Exploit one node, and the pressure arrives from every direction at once.

He sharpens the warning with a specific recent example. During the Iran conflict, he reminds Muzamil, Pakistan also chose to open a parallel chapter with Afghanistan. “Why? What was the need? Nobody could understand. And the same day, you were made to announce that you were closing the Afghanistan file.” Assertion, in his telling, is rarely strategic. It is reflex, and it tends to arrive at exactly the moment the country can least afford a second front.

He returns to a point he has made earlier in different language: stability is the one thing every actor in the region now wants. “After this war, everyone wants only one thing — stability.” If Pakistan refuses to provide it — by stripping its provinces, by exploiting its own federation, by treating amendments as instruments of personal architecture rather than national settlement — then the country will not just lose patronage. It will lose relevance to bloc politics altogether. “Nobody will like the instability after this war.”

He closes on the figure neither he nor Muzamil expect to disappear: Imran Khan. “Khan sahib will be important. You cannot exclude him.” The people who hate him most, he says, will be the ones for whom this becomes most painful. Muzamil signs off with the line the show has earned: somewhere, somebody will have to give the people room to breathe — and the decision about who, and when, is still in the hands of a system that has not yet accepted how little time it actually has.