Politics & Policy

May 14, 2026

Pakistan ran a fiscal surplus on petrol — not policy

with Adeel Azhar

Radio host and finance commentator Adeel Azhar joins Muzamil to unpack the gap between the government's headline numbers and what life actually feels like in Pakistan — the petroleum development levy as a hidden tax, the squeezing of the middle class, the eighteenth amendment, Karachi's red line, and why a younger generation no longer feels the emotional bonding to Pakistan that his did.

May 11, 2026

The Rs. 415 petrol price is not an international problem

Muzamil walks through the actual breakdown of Pakistan's Rs. 415 petrol price — why most of the latest hike is levy rather than international crude, which sectors are being shielded from tax, and why the only rational defence is to move savings into dollarised assets like solar and electric bikes.

May 6, 2026

Pakistan's hybrid system has run out of foreign rent

with Yasir Ahmed Soomro

Analyst Yasir Ahmed walks Muzamil through the global re-ordering reshaping Pakistan's options — why American patronage is thinning, why Arab money is no longer free, why the hybrid regime cannot be sustained by hard power alone, and what realistically happens to the federation by 2030.

Apr 16, 2026

Why I'm done pretending to be apolitical about Pakistan

A solo episode where Muzamil explains the two-year transition behind the camera, why he has effectively depoliticised himself, what he still believes about Imran Khan, and how he plans to cover Pakistan's politics from here on.

Jul 23, 2025

Pakistan's two real university problems are governance and quality

with Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed

HEC Chairman Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed walks Muzamil through the real numbers behind Pakistan's higher education system — where access stands, how gender parity flipped, why he refuses to blame money, and what the shift from impact factor to impact looks like inside the universities.

Jun 23, 2025

Punjab's budget is finally spending on people, not just roads

with Marriyum Aurangzeb

Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb walks Muzamil through the 2025-26 provincial budget — why the headline number sits on health and education for the first time, how the eighteenth amendment changed what a province is allowed to do, and what it took to keep Pakistan out of default in 2023.

Jan 9, 2025

If you don't shackle the Leviathan, it eats you up

with Sultan Mehmood

Economist and legal-reform researcher Sultan Mehmood walks through Pakistan's 26th amendment, the real history of the lawyers' movement, why repression is a sign of weakness, and what a focal point for change actually looks like.

Dec 11, 2024

Inside Bangladesh's revolution, told by a Dhaka University student

with Mamunur Rashid

Mamunur Rashid, a 22-year-old psychology student at Dhaka University, walks Muzamil through the summer of 2024 in Bangladesh — from a quota reform protest to a one-point demand, an internet shutdown, an army that refused to fire, and the morning Sheikh Hasina left the country.

Oct 16, 2024

Pakistan's system isn't broken — it was built to extract

with Saeed Afridi

Energy researcher and systems thinker Saeed Afridi argues that Pakistan's governing apparatus is doing exactly what it was designed to do: extract. Calling it a democracy doesn't change the colonial wiring underneath.

Oct 11, 2024

Why the army finally lost Pakistan's middle class

with Niaz Murtaza

Political economist Niaz Murtaza walks Muzamil through the rupture that has broken the old order in Pakistan — the end of the American aid model, the breakdown of PPP–PMLN patronage, and the moment the middle class stopped supporting the establishment.

Oct 9, 2024

Pakistan's identity is not a product of our organic history

with Shershah Khan

Shershah Khan returns to Thought Behind Things to argue that the modern Pakistani identity was imposed on us, that the 1950s constitutional debate was the country's most productive intellectual moment, and that the country's real problem is the organising power of the modern state itself.

Sep 30, 2024

Zulfi Bukhari: Pakistan is under a soft martial law

with Zulfi Bukhari

Former minister and PTI international affairs lead Zulfi Bukhari argues Pakistan is being run as a soft martial law behind a thin democratic veneer, breaks down why the February election outcome was structurally — not marginally — incorrect, and explains why the only negotiation PTI will sit at is one that begins with fresh elections.

Sep 18, 2024

Pakistan is sliding into chaos. The only exit is a third republic.

with Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair

Dr. Mohammed Ahmed Zubair — former chief economist of Pakistan's Planning Commission and a twenty-two-year lead economist at the Islamic Development Bank — argues that Pakistan is trapped in a deepening chaotic system, and that the only sustainable exit is a third republic built on debt restructuring, a competitive market economy, and a renegotiated social contract.

Sep 11, 2024

Pakistan's problem isn't debt — it's that the inflows have dried up

with Muzammil Aslam

Muzammil Aslam — adviser to the KP chief minister on finance and inter-provincial coordination — sits with Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economy is not failing because the debt stock is too large. It is failing because the receipts that used to service that debt have stopped arriving. The diagnosis is unsentimental, and the prescriptions are uncomfortable for the federal government he is criticising.

Aug 9, 2024

Pakistan's ruling system has fire under its feet

with Adeel Malik

Oxford political economist Adeel Malik unpacks why Pakistan's elite-capture system is finally cracking — the geopolitical squeeze that keeps it on a leash, the social contract that never got written, and the eastward shift the country keeps refusing to own.

Jun 28, 2024

Pakistan is in coercive economic diplomacy — and the elite has no foresight

with Adeel Malik

Oxford political economist Adeel Malik sits with Muzamil to map the cracks in Pakistan's ruling system — why the old indirect-rule structure is breaking, why the country is being held in strategic suspension, and why the most important failure is intellectual, not economic.

Nov 10, 2023

The logistics of getting aid into Gaza and flooded Pakistan

with Hafiz ur Rehman

Prof. Dr. Hafiz ur Rehman, president of Al Khidmat Foundation, walks Muzamil through the exact mechanics of moving relief into Gaza while the border stays shut — and the slower, harder work of rehabilitating the 33 million Pakistanis the 2022 floods left behind.

Nov 3, 2023

Why Pakistan built the power and still cannot deliver it

with Naeem Shafique

Naeem Shafique spent four decades inside General Electric — from commissioning Tarbela's turbines as a fresh graduate to running GE's power business in Pakistan. He walks Muzamil through how the country ended up with surplus generation it can't deliver, a circular-debt trap of its own making, and the unglamorous fix nobody wants to fund.

Oct 20, 2023

How Shaukat Khanum built world-class cancer care from nothing

with Dr Aasim Yusuf

Dr Aasim Yusuf has run the medicine at Shaukat Khanum for thirty years — from a hospital that opened in a wheat field with no electricity to the first charitable hospital in Pakistan to win US-grade accreditation. He walks Muzamil through how you build an institution that treats most patients for free, why it turns away two thirds of the people who come to it, and what the brain drain is doing to the staff who keep it running.

Oct 13, 2023

Why Pakistan's healthcare crisis is really a pricing problem

with Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan

Dr. Muhammad Saleem Khan has spent nearly forty years inside Pakistani medicine, from the army to building Kulsum International Hospital. He walks Muzamil through the unglamorous economics underneath the country's healthcare — why care is underpriced, why young doctors leave, and why a 500-bed medical city only makes sense if you can wait eight years for the payback.

Oct 11, 2023

The electric car policy Pakistan's auto mafia killed

with Malik Amin Aslam

Malik Amin Aslam, Pakistan's former climate adviser, walks Muzamil through the 2019 EV policy that promised a regional head start — and the car cartel that buried it from inside government. Plus the IPP debt trap, the billion-tree project, and why water is the issue no one prices.

Sep 29, 2023

The seventy good years might have been the aberration

with Zaigham Haque

Zaigham Haque — investment banker turned founder of Dubai's first serious culinary school — walks Muzamil through a 1960s London childhood, Pakistan's vanished sporting and banking glory, and why he fears the kind, fair world he lived in was a historical accident his grandchildren won't inherit.

Sep 6, 2023

What AI does to law, and the courts too slow to notice

with Adam Jabbar

Adam Jabbar wrote a book of 101 ChatGPT prompts for lawyers and watched it sell worldwide. He and Muzamil work through whether AI can clear Pakistan's case backlog, who owns AI-generated content, and why a data-privacy bill written by copy-paste could push the next founder out of the country.

Aug 11, 2023

Pakistan doesn't have a water problem. It has a soil problem.

with Taimur Malik

Taimur Malik traces his path from a Lahore spinning mill to regenerative agriculture, and makes the case that Pakistan's water crisis, nutrient collapse, and broken farm economics are all downstream of one neglected asset — dead soil — and that fixing it is a national security priority, not a luxury.

Jul 19, 2023

Why Pakistan makes billions of Panadol tablets but can't make the powder

with Farhan M. Haroon

Farhan Haroon runs Haleon Pakistan — maker of Panadol, CAC-1000 and Sensodyne. He walks Muzamil through a triple-qualification sprint out of a humble Karachi home, the GSK demerger, and the uncomfortable economics of a pharma industry that mixes the tablet here but imports the molecule, and exports $200 million a year against India's $24 billion.

Ep 309 · Mar 10, 2023

Asad Umar: Pakistan cannot grow without deep reform

with Asad Umar

Asad Umar joins Muzamil to argue that Pakistan's economic crisis is structural, not a bad ten months: real estate as a black-money sink, an import bill larger than its exports can ever retire, and reforms the country's most powerful interests keep blocking.

Feb 16, 2023

Imran Khan on the cipher, the economy, and refusing to quit

with Imran Khan

A special sit-down with former Prime Minister Imran Khan, recorded from the room he was confined to after his leg injury. He lays out his account of the cipher and his removal, contrasts Pakistan's economic indicators ten months apart, and argues that rule of law, not a single genius economic plan, is the only reform that matters.

Dec 9, 2022

Syed Muzammil Shah: I Came to Media for Power, Not Truth

with Syed Muzammil Shah

Political commentator Syed Muzammil Shah explains why he entered Pakistani television to acquire power rather than tell the truth, why the ratings model guarantees shallow news, and why he believes real change in Pakistan can only come from outside parliament.

May 27, 2022

Who really destroyed Karachi?

with Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman

Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman, president of Jamaat-e-Islami Karachi, walks through the structural failures behind the city's decline — from a rigged census and gutted transport to water shortages and a feudal mindset that has outlasted the feudal countryside.

Mar 14, 2022

Pakistan's first 100% state-funded health insurance

with M. Arshad Qaim Khani

Arshad Qaim Khani, CEO of the Prime Minister's Sehat Sahulat Program, explains how Pakistan is building what may be the world's first cent-percent state-funded national health insurance — and why the hardest problem isn't money, it's dignity.

Jan 28, 2022

The state is not a political party, and its digital media shouldn't be either

with Shahbaz Khan

Shahbaz Khan walks through the path from FAST CS to Lall Studios to Ericsson to Teradata to running the government's digital media wing — and why the conflation of state communication with party politics is the most stubborn misunderstanding in Pakistani public life.

Jan 24, 2022

Gilgit-Baltistan is the only region fighting to integrate

with Yasir Abbas

Yasir Abbas, coordinator to the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, traces his path from a village called Yaseen to a Chevening LLM at Sussex, and lays out why the region's provincial status is a matter of months — not years — and what genuine integration would mean.

Dec 24, 2021

Pakistan's farmland is a science problem, not a land problem

with Saad Tamman

Saad Tamman — actuarial scientist turned farmer turned PM's strategic reforms unit lead — walks Muzamil through how a tomato farm went bankrupt because of a one-day price control, why 70% of agricultural technology is the seed itself, and what really happened inside the room when PTI's hundred-day plan was being written.

Nov 19, 2021

The obvious is the hardest thing to discover in Pakistan's economy

with Muzzammil Aslam

Muzzammil Aslam, spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, walks through what the rupee, the auto sector, the agriculture base, and Pakistan's habit of protecting the wrong people actually mean — and why the policies that hurt today are the ones that stop a bigger fall in 2023.

Sep 13, 2021

Afghanistan's $10 billion is being held by the country that signed its peace deal

with Raoof Hasan

Raoof Hasan, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information, walks through the Taliban interim cabinet, the $10 billion in frozen Afghan reserves, the contradiction at the heart of America's legitimacy demand, and why the region — not the West — will have to shoulder Afghanistan's recovery.

Sep 8, 2021

Do civil servants really serve? An AC answers honestly

with Ibrahim Arbab

AC Ibrahim Arbab, currently posted at Model Town Lahore, walks through what an assistant commissioner actually does — from land revenue to polio teams to weekend protests — and answers the question that follows civil servants everywhere on Twitter.

Jul 7, 2021

The ASP who built Pakistan's first gender protection unit

with Amna Baig

ASP Amna Baig on joining the police force as a woman, founding Islamabad's Gender Protection Unit, and why financial independence is the only real answer to gender-based violence in Pakistan.

Jul 2, 2021

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

with Dr. Hussain Nadim

A 33-year-old PhD running IPRI - Pakistan's national-security think tank - sits with Muzamil to argue why the US-Afghan war was never a double game, why a clean policy on Osama bin Laden is impossible in a post-colonial society, and what Pakistan actually was through twenty years of war on terror.

May 17, 2021

Dr. Tariq Banuri on higher education reform in Pakistan

A conversation with Dr. Tariq Banuri, former Chairman of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, on research funding, university quality standards, and the structural challenges facing Pakistani higher education.

May 10, 2021

On civil service, Balochistan, and building a life worth living: a conversation with Awaid Bhatti

with Muhammad Awaid Irshad Bhatti

CSS 2017 nationwide topper and Assistant Commissioner Islamabad Muhammad Awaid Irshad Bhatti speaks candidly about solo travel, the decision to leave a private-sector career, what it actually felt like to top the CSS exam, and why incremental change inside a flawed system matters more than utopian ambition.

May 7, 2021

Peace, Polarization, and Pakistan's Turning Point: A Conversation with Dr. Adnan Rafiq

with Dr. Adnan Rafiq

Dr. Adnan Rafiq, country director for the United States Institute of Peace, joins Muzamil to discuss how inequality, information access, and political polarization shape the prospects for peace in Pakistan.

Sep 1, 2020

Imran Khan on Pakistan's political crisis, foreign policy, and the road ahead

with Imran Khan

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan speaks candidly about the conspiracy he believes brought down his government, Pakistan's dependency on foreign powers, the justice system's failure to hold the powerful accountable, and why he sees this moment as a historic turning point for the country.