For a country blessed with some of the most dramatic landscapes and layered histories on earth, Pakistan remains oddly absent from the world's travel imagination. When outsiders think of us, they too often think of headlines rather than heritage. We have spent decades explaining ourselves to the world through the language of security and crisis, when we could have been inviting it to see what we actually have. Tourism, treated as a strategic national priority rather than a seasonal afterthought, is among the cheapest and most credible ways to repair our image. It also brings foreign investment and foreign exchange.

Every province has a case to make. Gilgit-Baltistan offers K2, Hunza and a mountaineering pedigree that needs no introduction. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has the green valleys of Swat and the Buddhist ruins of Gandhara at Takht-i-Bahi. Punjab has Lahore's Mughal grandeur, Taxila's antiquities and Kartarpur, which showed how faith tourism can build bridges where diplomacy cannot. Balochistan has the surreal coastline of Hingol and Mehrgarh, a Neolithic settlement older than the pyramids. Each deserves serious........

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