WHEN Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared that Pakistan’s system has collapsed, he offered more than a diagnosis. A senior official responsible for the state’s administrative machinery publicly conceded that the apparatus he helps run can no longer solve the problems it was meant to address. The statement mattered less for originality—ordinary citizens have long experienced its truth—than for its source. Power rarely admits its own exhaustion so openly.

Yet “collapse” describes a symptom more than the underlying condition. Systems fail according to the logic that shaped them. Pakistan’s administrative and political architecture was never primarily organized around human dignity. It was organized, first under colonial rule and later under successive post-colonial elites, around hierarchy, extraction and the management of subjects rather than the empowerment of citizens. That inheritance remains the ghost in the........

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