The presence of military leadership at that table is less a verdict on civilian capacity than an extension of a model Pakistan has already tested. The Special Investment Facilitation Council brought the same institutional weight to economic revival, not because civilian ministries had failed on their own, but because a challenge cutting across federal and provincial lines needed a convening authority able to move all of them in step. Civil and military leadership sitting together on population is itself a statement: it signals that population is no longer being treated as a soft-sector welfare issue to be managed quietly by a line ministry, but as a matter of state importance, on a par with the economic and security questions that typically draw that combination to one table. If that state weight can come together to improve the economy, why not population and human-capital development outcomes?

That framing matters because population is routinely mistaken for family planning alone. It is not. An unmanaged demographic trajectory is an economic problem—it is the dependency ratio eating into the budget before schools and hospitals ever get built, and a labour market that must absorb millions of new entrants each year with too few jobs........

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