The Communist Manifesto (Marx, 1996) opens with a spectre, an idea so disruptive that it promised to upend entire class structures and build a society where development was free and fair. The dream, of course, was grand.

But like most idealisms, it tripped over its blind spot: humans. Marx theorised systems but underestimated their participants. William Golding may have understood better: we do not destroy systems, we build them to destroy themselves.

Plea bargaining, in Pakistan, is one such self-defeating system. A mechanism born of necessity, marketed as reform, and now repurposed as cover for legalised impunity.

It started with a logic: courts are overwhelmed, cases drag on for decades, prisons are overcrowded. Let the accused confess, pay back a portion of what they stole, and be released. On paper, it's pragmatic. In practice, it's industrial-scale laundering – of money, names and responsibility.

In the United States, plea bargains function within a known structure. There's Rule 11, sentencing guidelines, judicial supervision. It is flawed, certainly, and often accused of coercing confessions from the poor. But the system at least performs its due process. There is a courtroom. There is a record. There is the illusion of checks.

Pakistan, in contrast, has no need for illusions. Section 25 of the National Accountability Ordinance allows for what is called........

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