I still remember the sound of the chainsaws on Patriata. At 7,800 feet, the mountain carried one of the last intact stands of ancient conifer forest in the Murree hills — trees that had stood since 1872, when the British reserved that catchment for one purpose: to protect the water supply of the Northern Command of the British Indian Army, the garrison we today call GHQ Rawalpindi. That forest was never ornamental. It was infrastructure — the quiet, living kind that holds a slope together and keeps a watershed clean. I watched it fall for the New Murree Project, and I have never been able to shake the bitterness of that memory. What made it worse was that the destruction was avoidable. Before the bulldozers moved in, the design was still meant to pass through the filter of sustainability, geological stability, and environmental review.

The Government of Punjab, to its credit, invited a team of urban planning experts from New Zealand to examine the master plan. I was in the room when they did. I will never forget what happened next. After going through the plan for Patriatan; a plan for a new hill city on a fragile, landslide-prone mountain, in a reserved forest, above a watershed that fed the country's military headquarters — the head of the New Zealand team turned to the Pakistani side and asked, quite simply, whether Pakistan had institutions that actually trained city planners. It was asked politely. It was still devastating. In that one question, delivered without malice, was their verdict on the entire master plan and they went on to reject it.

Then came the moment I still cannot forget. When pressed on the planning rationale, Tahir Shamshad — NESPAK's own Project Director for New Murree told the New Zealand........

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