At an Islamabad business summit, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi declared that Pakistan's governance system had "collapsed" and demanded a reset, including new administrative units or provinces. Unfortunately, every few years, an unrepresentative guardian or impatient saviour claims that politics has failed and only a bold experiment can rescue the country. Each promises efficiency, stability and clean government. Each weakens the institutions needed to restrain the next experimenter.

The pattern began early. The 1949 Objectives Resolution embedded religious sovereignty in the constitutional imagination, creating an unresolved tension between equal citizenship and ideological guardianship. In the 1950s, senior bureaucrats, uniformed personnel and accommodating judges treated government as a technical enterprise too important for politicians. The Constituent Assembly was dissolved; constitutionalism yielded to administrative command. Ayub Khan then tried his hand in regimental style: decisions at the........

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