The question of new provinces is back in the news, and it deserves a fair hearing. But almost everything we know about smaller provinces in Pakistan comes from modelling, not lived experience. Even our one true precedent cuts the other way. The One Unit scheme of 1955 merged the four provinces of the western wing into a single block, the opposite of a split, and it fell apart within fifteen years under the very grudges a fresh carve-up now risks stirring in reverse. Large-scale redrawing of the map is uncharted water, thick with moving parts we can only guess at, not measure.

There is one tier of government on which we do hold real data, gathered at real scale, more than once. Pervez Musharraf built the version most of us remember, a full district system, with elected nazims and coordination officers standing in for deputy commissioners, and commissioners struck off the map altogether. It was not the first attempt. Ayub Khan had tried something similar decades earlier, as Basic Democracies, a pyramid of some eighty thousand elected village representatives who in turn chose the president, meant to root power close to home while keeping it well fenced off from national politics. Both, notably, were drawn up under army rule and pushed down from the top rather than argued up from below. Both were, within a few years of a return to civilian rule, hollowed out or undone outright. That is not an accident. It is a pattern, and worth reading closely before we open a costlier, harder front elsewhere.

Consider what new capitals would and would not fix. They would bring the seat of power closer in miles. But the........

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