Pakistan is seriously running out of time. For decades, every crisis across the Wagah border has been dismissed as “yet another cycle" in a permanently turbulent republic. But today’s Pakistan is not simply going through a rough patch. It is inching toward a structural and possibly irreversible breakdown. The state that once sold itself as the “fortress of Islam" now struggles to pay its bills, feed its children, educate its youth, or even pretend that the social contract is intact.

The most dangerous threat to Pakistan is no longer India, Afghanistan, or some imagined external conspiracy. The gravest danger lies within, in its slow implosion driven by elite capture, economic decay, a broken education system, and a military-political-radical machine that refuses to loosen its grip even as the house burns. If there is any force left that can arrest this decline, it is Pakistan’s Gen Z. But that window is closing fast.

A Republic at the Edge

Strip away the rhetoric and the numbers tell a stark story. Pakistan’s growth trajectory has steadily weakened over the last three decades. Average GDP growth has fallen from above 4 per cent in the 1990s to around 2.9 per cent in the last decade, far below the South Asian average of nearly 6 per cent. Public debt has surged to over 82 per cent of GDP, external liabilities have crossed $130 billion, and debt servicing eats up almost half the federal budget. Inflation that averaged around 8-10 per cent in earlier decades has climbed above 12 per cent in recent years, spiking close to 30 per cent in 2023. The rupee has lost roughly three-quarters of its value since 2018.

This is not a normal business cycle. It is a long, grinding slide into insolvency. Pakistan is not borrowing to build; it is borrowing to breathe—by rolling over old loans, plugging fiscal holes with IMF packages and friendly deposits, delaying reforms, and hoping the world will continue to “bail out a nuclear power". The model is exhausted. The country is “too nuclear to fail" in the eyes of anxious creditors, but also too captured and too comfortable in its dependency to reform itself.

The human cost is brutal. Around 42 per cent of the population now lives below the poverty line. Nearly 38 per cent suffer multidimensional poverty, meaning they lack basic education, health, nutrition, and services. This is not an abstract index; it translates into empty kitchens and permanently stunted lives.

A Society Starved of Basics

You cannot build a modern, productive economy on a malnourished, poorly educated population—yet that is precisely what Pakistan has tried to do.

Forty-two per cent of Pakistani children under the age of five are stunted, a far higher number than the South Asian average. Stunting is not just low height; it is impaired brain development, reduced cognitive capacity, and permanently lower lifetime earnings. The estimated economic cost is at least $7-8 billion a year, and that figure does not capture the full long-term damage. Only a tiny fraction of young children........

© News18