Pakistan's ruling system has fire under its feet

The professor at the high table

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a guest he has wanted on the show for a long time. Adeel Malik is an associate professor at the University of Oxford, a development economist whose recent paper on Pakistan’s political economy went viral because it described — in plain language — the rent-seeking ruling structure that has held the country in place since independence and the pressures now cracking it. Muzamil is open about the deference: he wanted to dig deeper than the paper, into geopolitics and into the comparative economies Adeel has spent his career working on.

Adeel walks through his trajectory in a sentence or two. A Masters in economics from Quaid-i-Azam University. Two years at the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre in Islamabad. A Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, doctoral work on Nigeria, Indonesia and Thailand, and now a Globe Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on the economies of Muslim societies. “More than half of my life now,” he says of his years in Oxford. The biography matters because of what comes next: most of the framings Adeel uses in this conversation are not Pakistan-specific at all. They are general claims about how societies change, applied to a country that keeps refusing to change.

Creative destruction and fire under the feet of the system

Muzamil’s opening question is the obvious one. People are anxious. The frameworks they used to read Pakistan no longer work. What is actually going on?

Adeel’s answer is the structural one. “The situation looks bad,” he says, “but you need to take not just a microscopic view but a telescopic view.” Every stable society today was built on top of an earlier instability. British constitutionalism is incomprehensible without the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Germany’s inflation-aversion is unreadable without the hyperinflation of the 1930s. China’s rise traces back through the Opium Wars. “What looks like breakdown,” he says, “is actually creative destruction. The old order has to break for the new one to come.”

He then names the specific pressure points in Pakistan. A middle class is expanding in Punjab, KP and other regions. Social media has produced a generational shift in awareness. External flows are shrinking. “Fire is developing under the feet of the ruling system,” he says, borrowing Daron Acemoglu’s phrase about the revolutionary constraint on elite preferences — the moment when elites concede ground because the alternative is being swept away. From a telescopic view, he tells Muzamil, this is “a very creative stage.” It does not feel that way from inside it.

The man on the spot

Muzamil pushes on the genealogy of the system. How did it get built? Adeel goes back to the archives. Before the British, there were no defined property rights in the modern sense. Imperial officers came in, identified “natural village heads”, elevated them into landed zaildars, and tied their fortunes to the Crown through canal colonies in Punjab, military recruitment patterns, and dedicated institutions like Aitchison College. Soldiers wounded on international fronts got stipends in Bengal — but in Punjab, they got plots of land. The Punjab regiments became embedded in Britain’s imperial war effort. The first Pakistani army chiefs had served in Burma.

The deeper inheritance, he argues, is the indirect rule template the British perfected on the frontier. Sir Olaf Caroe and others ruled the tribal areas through a political agent — a single man on the spot who controlled a tribe, kept it economically isolated from the wider world, and managed it on behalf of a distant centre. “More or less the FATA model became the Pakistan model,” Adeel says. Whether the man on the spot was Musharraf, Zia or someone else, “for outsiders it is very easy. You deal with one person, and he has control of society and of his own domain.” That is the structure he says is now cracking — “fissures have appeared in the system of ruling through elites.”

Liaquat Ali Khan and the transfer that never reversed

Muzamil presses on what was distinct about Pakistan’s post-1947 trajectory, given that other post-colonial states inherited similar systems. Adeel quotes his father, who used to insist that the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan was the real turning point. The question of who killed him was, in his father’s words, “beside the point.” What mattered was that power transferred from the Muslim League’s political leadership to a bureaucratic class: Ghulam Mohammad as a representative of the civil service, Ayub Khan as a representative of the British Indian army, and Iskander Mirza as a former political agent. “Practically there was a transfer of power from political leadership to the bureaucratic class,” Adeel says, “and we are still stuck in that paradigm.”

The comparison is with what did happen across the border. India ran land reforms. Bengal ran land reforms. Indian Kashmir ran massive land reforms — which, he argues, is why a state-resisting middle class emerged there. Pakistan announced reforms and then quietly preserved the pre-colonial equilibrium. Agricultural income tax is still essentially untouchable. The Quaid’s own agrarian reforms committee went nowhere. “The pre-colonial equilibrium got reinforced,” Adeel says.

The 1985 hinge

Muzamil notes the dynastic shape of present-day politics — the same families recycling through the legislature for decades — and asks where the conventional pathways for new leaders have gone. Adeel locks onto a specific year: 1985.

Before Bhutto, he says, politics had a professional middle class. Bhutto’s politics made it easier for poor people to enter the legislature. “But 1985 was a turning point,” he says, “because those were party-less elections. If you are a candidate, your ideology is not so important. What matters is whether you got the nali paved, whether you are a sayyed, what biraderi you belong to, how much money you have, how well you can control voters.” Add the MP development spending introduced around the same time, and what you get is patronage politics on steroids. Dynasties — father, son, grandson — accelerate visibly after the mid-eighties.

Adeel has done work on this. A very large percentage of legislators in the current National Assembly either entered politics in the 1980s or built their footholds then. Their power is local: the thana, the kacheri, the patwari system, the development branch. They aggregate up into national assemblies but they remain local patronage operators. He contrasts this with the UK, where Oxford’s constituencies of around fifty thousand voters create much tighter contestation. “The more contestation there is,” he says, “the more hope there is for change.”

What a national party is for

In the same passage, Adeel makes a point about political parties that is easy to miss. He is, he says carefully, not a PTI voter. He may not even agree with PTI’s policies. But any genuinely national party is a centripetal force. “It connects society. It has Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis, rural and urban, young and old, Muhajirs and Sindhis. That is a national institution. It is very difficult to build.” Watching the People’s Party collapse into a regional formation, he argues, was a structural loss for Pakistan, not just for the Bhuttos. The same logic applies to PTI now. National-level parties are how a country with this much linguistic and ethnic diversity stays glued together. “These are adaray,” he says — institutions — “and any state needs them.”

The transition zone

Muzamil raises a question many Pakistanis quietly carry: a lot of nations are organised around a single civilisational story, and Pakistan does not obviously have one. Iran has Persia. India has a long indigenous history. Pakistan’s territory has, for fifteen hundred years, mostly been a buffer. Adeel does not flinch from the question. He simply rejects the framing.

Many states, he points out, are arbitrary. Wales, Scotland and England are very different from each other. American states were declared by rulers. The Middle East was cut up by foreign hands; so was much of Africa. The honest answer, he argues, is that “unity in diversity requires a more authentic embrace of yourself.” Pakistan, in his reading, is a genuine transition zone. The north of the country is where Central Asia meets South Asia. The south is where the Middle East meets South Asia. The Indus Valley civilisation, the Sufi networks running from Bukhara and Samarkand down through Multan to Karachi, the lineages from Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani out of Iran into Kashmir — these are all part of one cosmopolitan space that the modern nation-state happens to have cut through. Owning that diversity is, for him, the real work.

Constitution versus social contract

When Muzamil asks whether Pakistan needs a new constitution or whether the current one can be evolved, Adeel separates two things people routinely conflate. “The constitution is one thing,” he says. “The system is another.” The 1973 constitution was a major unifying act after the country broke in two, and most of Pakistan’s service rules and judicial rules are, on paper, reasonable. The problem is not the text. The problem is that every actor in power bypasses it.

The social contract is the unwritten one — muahida-e-imrani, in Urdu — the bargain between citizen and state. That, Adeel argues, is broken. “Whenever people ask the state a question, the state’s method is violence.” A working contract requires a real bargaining structure. Citizens give something — taxes, compliance — and get something in return: services, representation, security. Right now, he says, traders who could pay direct tax point out, correctly, that they get nothing back. Their children are in private schools because public schools have collapsed. Extortionists collect from them because the state cannot. “No taxation without representation,” he says. The phrase is old; the missing piece is the same.

Constraints on power, and the IPP moment

The deepest theoretical claim Adeel makes in the conversation is that political economy reduces to one principle: constraints on executive power. Free media. Independent judiciary. Real civil society. Student unions. Professional associations. Political parties that aggregate practices across regions. “Any system, for its survival, needs a counter-constituency as strong as the power centre,” he says.

He uses Pakistan’s IPP debate as a live illustration. Whatever the motives behind the recent campaign exposing the independent power producers, what is actually happening is pressure on the government — questions about which families own the IPPs, including the family of Shehbaz Sharif’s son, and why citizens are paying their bills. “If you do not have accountability,” he says, “what the powerful does is fascism.” Even at a human level, he points to the discipline of fasting as a kind of self-imposed constraint. “You need that constraint. It is required for human flourishing, and it is required for the flourishing of a society.”

Indonesia, Turkey and the crisis that unlocks reform

Muzamil pivots to the comparative question. Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines — countries with similar populations and post-colonial inheritances — have moved on dimensions Pakistan has not. What changed?

Adeel’s first move is to lower expectations. “Political economy teaches you that change in these societies is slow and incremental,” he says. “There is a lot of persistence of institutional outcomes.” That is the field’s main finding. But Indonesia did shift. The 1997 East Asian financial crisis broke the closed, cronyist equilibrium and forced an opening. Once Indonesia’s elites became tied to trade — especially external trade — their long-term interest aligned with growing the economic pie rather than redistributing a shrinking one. Pakistan’s elites, by contrast, remain tied to “large landed aristocracy and protectionist industry.” Their interest is the small pie, not the bigger one.

He extends the point to Turkey. Today’s Turkey is illegible without Turgut Özal’s reforms in the early 1980s, undertaken when reserves were down to a few months and the economy had collapsed. “It is really sad to waste a crisis,” Adeel says, “because a crisis can really set the stage for reform.”

Egypt, Israel and the leash

Muzamil pushes on Egypt as a closer parallel — same demographic scale, same outsized military, same dependence on external handouts. Adeel concedes the similarities but draws out the crucial difference.

Egypt, in his reading, has been bailed out repeatedly because of where it sits. The recent fifty-five-billion-dollar package — the EU’s eight, the World Bank’s eight, the IMF’s sixteen, the UAE’s twenty-five — came together after Gaza, in a coordinated way, because an unstable Egypt is an unacceptable risk for Israel and for the Gulf. He runs the math: Egypt’s external debt was forty-five billion dollars when Sisi came to power in 2014. It is now around a hundred and forty-five to a hundred and fifty billion. “The cost of sustaining that rule over ten years is a hundred billion dollars,” he says. “You just follow the money.”

Pakistan’s authoritarian moments have always depended on American military and financial aid: take it out from under Ayub, Zia or Musharraf and the structures collapse. But Pakistan, unlike Egypt, has no Israel next door making its stability geopolitically non-negotiable. Worse, Pakistan exercises some strategic options — with China, with its location, as a nuclear power — which means Washington does not fully trust it. “Egyptian military is their ally. No question asked,” he says. “Pakistan’s situation is worse than being an enemy. We are a friend they cannot trust.” That is why the rent streams keep shrinking and Pakistan is kept on the IMF leash, programme after programme, with just enough oxygen to keep the system breathing.

He adds a careful coda on Morsi: the brief opening under the Muslim Brotherhood failed in part because Morsi privileged his own faction over the national task of building a transitional framework. “In a political transition,” Adeel says, “you need the political wisdom and sagacity to engage with all in society, including those who really hate you.” It is a warning he is clearly applying forward, not just backward.

The eastward future the elite will not accept

Asked whether Pakistan should pick a side in the US–China contest or stay neutral, Adeel reframes the choice. “The world only takes seriously those countries that take themselves seriously,” he says. Vietnam plays both sides. India plays both sides. Pakistan’s problem is not that it lacks options — “we have options, that is not the issue” — it is that its elite makes whim-based decisions instead of long-term ones, with no input from think tanks, no analytical capacity on China or Saudi Arabia, and no policy-making structure linked to academia.

His long-term call is unambiguous. “Our future lies in the east,” he says. The country sits next to two of the largest emerging market economies in the world — China and India — and next to the world’s second-largest gas reserves in Iran, with the Gulf on the other side. “We are connected to the world through our geography but we are acting like a landlocked country.” Reopening regional trade does not mean surrender; it means using the Iraq playbook, where the US grants annual exemptions for Iranian electricity imports because domestic protests would otherwise be unmanageable. “We need to negotiate, and we should negotiate.”

He is clear about why the elite cannot follow this logic: “Their houses are in Avenfield, their buyers are abroad, their children are in school abroad.” Their personal exposure is to the West. The West knows it. And so it uses it.

The intellectual desert

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question that has clearly been building. Where are the academics? Why has the Pakistani intellectual diaspora — sitting in serious positions around the world — been so quiet?

Adeel agrees that the deepest failure in the country is intellectual. The response to his own viral paper, he says, is the evidence. “I asked myself afterwards: was there something especially novel in what I wrote? Not really. It was just academic prose. It was not rocket science. So why such a response?” The answer he arrives at is uncomfortable. “It is not that my article was a success. It is that our intellectual discourse has become such a desert that the most radical thing now is to describe what you see.” Most Pakistani scholars get tangled in personalities — Imran, the parties, the military — and never make it to the society-level analysis. That is the gap his article happened to fill.

He connects this to a class problem. Many scholars trained abroad are products of elite schooling and write inside that consciousness. He is open about his own formation: a wagon to school, half the journey home on foot, Quaid-i-Azam University as a public-sector student. That, he argues, gives him a different shaoor — a different consciousness — that connects with the street. Turkey, he points out, has transformed its intellectual class over the last few decades precisely because new businessmen funded new foundations and think tanks, and ordinary people from rural areas got plugged into knowledge production.

Plant a seed

Muzamil closes by asking whether change in Pakistan will come top-down or bottom-up. Adeel rejects the messiah model outright. “One man will not come and fix it all,” he says. “You need partnership and teamwork. You need like-minded people pulled together. A great leader is one who connects people, who channels their energies.” He offers his own example: with two colleagues, he co-founded the Oxford Pakistan Programme, now the largest scholarship pipeline for deserving Pakistani students into any Western university. It started as a pandemic-era idea. It grew faster than he expected.

The image he ends on is from a hadith. Someone asks the Prophet what should be done if the Day of Judgement is upon us. The answer is: plant a seed. “Wherever you are,” Adeel tells Muzamil, “in whatever domain — content, teaching, business, industry — generate positive energy and try to bring change around you. We are all leaders in our own domains. And the best leader is the one who creates other leaders.”

Muzamil thanks him for giving double the time he had asked for. The conversation, taped at the one-hour-thirty-minute mark, ends where Adeel started: on the long view, on the slow work, on the fire that is now under the feet of a system that has held too long.