Pakistan is a realm cursed by the living dead – not the lumbering ghouls of cheap reels, but a more insidious scourge. These are zombies – political, economic, institutional – fattened on the rancid grift of power and privilege. The nation buckles under dynastic titans, profiteering vultures, and an army enforcing this debilitating mafia’s writ. A predatory elite and a brutish military drain every drop of vitality from the people to perpetuate their wretched existence, leaving in their wake a withered husk of a nation.
The political landscape is a Jurassic Park of fossilized ambition. The PMLN and PPP, those dynastic relics of the Sharif and Bhutto lineages, exist not to serve but to plunder. To Western donors and multilateral overlords – their political paymasters – they don silk gloves, mouthing liberal pieties about democracy and progress, all while pocketing the aid. At home, the mask slips: their purpose is a crude pantomime of press conferences and platitudes while their fists remain buried in the till, crushing dissent with primal, draconian zeal. The army, that self- anointed fate arbiter, doubles as the muscle for this racketeering syndicate, propping them up. It turns a nation into a fiefdom where hope is a privilege the masses cannot afford.
The army is no mere accomplice. It’s the puppet master; it’s the boot throttling Pakistan’s throat for most of the nation’s life. A colonial ghost in khaki, it apes the British Raj’s scorn for the masses it lords over, seeing not citizens but serfs to be crushed. This isn’t power; it’s a sickness. Its chokehold split the country once – Bengalis, drained by its hubris, hacked out Bangladesh in 1971 – and now that same sneer stokes fires in Balochistan and KP, where vanishings silence pleas for respect. The army doesn’t serve Pakistan; it colonizes – a praetorian monster enslaving its fiefdom.
Read More: Smiling Betrayal: US Congressmen Embracing Butcher of Pakistani Democracy
And who better to embody this farce than General Asim Munir, who, at the Overseas Pakistanis Convention earlier this month, dusted off the moth-eaten two-nation theory to preach a tired gospel of division. With the swagger of a tinpot prophet, he ranted about Pakistan’s “distinct” religion, customs, and ambitions, as if Hindus across the border were some alien species rather than neighbors sharing millennia of history. His speech, pure divisive drivel, wasn’t strategy – it was a desperate bid to rally a fracturing nation by scapegoating India. This is the army’s playbook: when the house is burning, point at the neighbor’s fence. Munir’s words didn’t unite; they exposed a leadership so bankrupt it clings to 1947’s ghosts to justify its stranglehold.
In this swamp strides Imran Khan and his PTI, a spark for a youth desperate to claw free of feudal chains. Khan’s vision, flawed yet fierce, promised a rupture from the script. The army, ever the tyrant, has caged him for almost two years now in a crucible meant to break him. It has failed. He stands a defiant blade. Yet PTI falters – a vessel clogged with the same parasites that fester in PMLN and PPP. Beyond Khan and his young wolves – Aliya Hamza, Sadam Tareen, Murad Saeed, Taimur Jhagra, Hammad Azhar, and comrades unnamed but ablaze – the party’s stale lieutenants blunt its steel. For revolution, Khan must swing the katana: sever the bloated lieutenants, lift the firebrands brimming with blueprints to raze this decaying heap.
The economy mirrors this political rot, littered with a gallery of relics, from textile looms and sugar barons to combustion-engine clunkers, propped up by state crutches no toddler would need. Textiles gulp $3 billion in yearly credit to stay undead; autos, shielded by protection, rust in the past as the world zips electric. These aren’t industries, they’re vampires, leeching a nation. Salvation demands slaughter: torch the deadwood (firms too lame to stand, models too old to run), freeing resources for the swift and new. Pakistan nourishes its ghouls with tariffs, licensing ruses, and cheap loans bloating prices and strangling rivals, leaving a manufacturing clique too weak for the world, too dug-in to die.
This is not mere stagnation, but rather sabotage, pure and deliberate, to stifle choice for consumers and provide competition to force change. The army, perched atop this mafia pyramid, rigs a system that fattens rent-seekers and starves risk-takers. Entrepreneurship shrivels; dynamism’s a curse. Shutting down these zombie firms – scrapping the automotive fossils, smashing the sugar barons, torching the property landgrabbers, gutting the textile parasites – will sting. Jobs will bleed, families will reel. Yet the alternative is a death spiral: a cycle of dependence that chokes the future to prop up a rotting past. Creative destruction takes guts – a torch to the old, ashes for the new. The prize? An industrial spine that can stand, innovation that breathes, growth that doesn’t suck the people dry.
Pakistan stands at a crossroads. The mafia empire – army, elites, and their industrial cronies – must be razed. Khan, tempered by captivity, is the blade for this task, but his PTI is a blunt instrument unless he purges its cowards and promotes its Young Turks. Recall Turkey’s own Young Turks a century ago: a cadre of radicals who toppled an ossified Ottoman order not for the pashas or the merchants, but for the people. Pakistan’s revolution must follow suit, for the workers, teachers, farmers, IT coders, and youth clawing for a foothold in a system rigged against them. The zombies must die, politically and economically, or Pakistan becomes their eternal banquet. Drive a stake through the vampire’s heart, let sunlight cleanse, for a nation shall rise.
Forwarded as received.
Miyamoto Musashi, a Kensei of markets and power, wields a pen as sharp as his blade.