Pakistan’s Extraordinary Diplomacy

🇵🇰 | A Feudal, Fragile State That Keeps Getting Foreign Policy Right

I haven’t had a moment to breathe lately. I’ve been in Dubai; a city whose heat and ambition leave little room for reflection. But even in the desert haze of hyper-modernity, some themes press through. And perhaps none more than this: the sheer tactical genius of Pakistan’s foreign policy in recent months.

Let me be clear. Pakistan is not a strategic power. It is a fractured, feudal, low-HDI state with deep structural issues. It’s trapped in cycles of elite capture and ideological rigidity. But it is also, to my astonishment, among the most tactically agile states on the planet. It punches far above its weight, not because it has a clear long-term vision, but because it dances well in chaos.

Where India plays the heavy-set civilizational power; bound increasingly to the West and the Israel playbook, Pakistan has played the margins, the hedges, the emotional currents. And it has played them well.

Ever since the Pahalgam conflict, Pakistan’s diplomacy has rarely been wrong-footed. Its tactical instincts are near-perfect. In moments of geopolitical flux, from Qatar to Kathmandu, Pakistan has found ways to remain relevant, nimble, and central. Not liked, not admired but impossible to ignore.

This post is not a celebration. It’s a recognition. A state can be deeply dysfunctional internally, yet highly functional externally. And in a world of waning superpowers and rising regional blocs, that matters.

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Pakistan is Not India’s Mexico

It’s become fashionable to frame the India–Pakistan relationship as akin to the U.S.–Mexico one: a wealthier neighbor with a poorer, chaotic cousin. This is shallow and misleading.

If analogies must be made, Pakistan is less India’s Mexico and more India’s North Korea; not in state structure, but in psychic weight. The obsession, the demonization, the surveillance, the fantasies of collapse; all belong more to the DMZ than the Rio Grande.

Yet even that comparison falls short. Because unlike North Korea, Pakistan is open; not just open to capital, but open to culture, critique, and churn. Its media may be muzzled, but it bites. Its poetry still burns. And its politics, though dysfunctional, retain a certain performative electricity. Pakistan is chaotic, yes. But it is not closed.

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The Baluch Ceiling

Baluchistan is a tragedy, but not a flashpoint. Iran will not allow an independent Baluchistan just as it will never entertain an independent Kurdistan. Afghanistan lacks the institutional bandwidth to entertain border revisionism. Demographic realities inside Pakistan have changed, with settlement and redistribution reengineering the province’s makeup.

The insurgency is real. The discontent is real. But the idea that Baluchistan is another Bangladesh is a false hope recycled by lazy analysts. The math doesn’t work. The terrain doesn’t support it. And the regional veto is absolute. Of course Pakistan would do best to do an Alsace-Lorraine and just accept the current Kashmir border as permanent and renounce any interest in Kashmir.

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Bangladesh and the Long Arc

The reconnection between Bangladesh and Pakistan has begun; cautiously, quietly, under the table.

Once hailed as a model of “post-Pakistan” development, Bangladesh now finds itself circling back. This is not nostalgia. It is realignment. Shared religion, shared fears, shared grievances. History may have separated them, but geography is patient. And the emotional pull of religion, particularly in post-colonial contexts, never quite fades.

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Pakistan and the Saffron Psyche

BJP cannot let go of Pakistan. Not strategically, not emotionally.

Most South Indians don’t obsess over Pakistan. Nor do Indian Christians, Muslims, or urban liberals. But for the North Indian, upper-caste Hindu male, especially one bound to the BJP, it’s existential. Partition is unfinished business. Pakistan is the broken shard. And every Muslim is treated as a potential link.

This isn’t strategy. This is trauma, masquerading as geopolitics.

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Why Pakistan Won’t Break

Let’s be clear: Pakistan is not about to collapse. It is too centralized, too militarized, and too proud.

Yes, there’s elite capture. Yes, there’s (extreme) economic stagnation. Yes, there’s military interference. But this is slow rot, not sudden death. Collapse is a fantasy; one projected by Indian analysts who’ve read too much Tom Clancy and not enough history.

Even Israel, in its latest miscalculated strike on Qatar, has been forced to update its priors. The Ummah is not what it was in the 1990s. Iran survived a direct strike. Azerbaijan won a regional war. Turkey has grown teeth. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are wealthier than ever. The fantasy of a brittle Muslim world no longer holds. Pakistan, for all its failures, endures. And in a world of crumbling certainties, that alone is power.

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The Sunni Vanguard

In the aftermath of Israel’s Qatar debacle, Pakistan has reemerged as an odd sort of vanguard; an awkward but pivotal Sunni pole.

Iran will always be Shi’a. Turkey, though Sunni, is post-Ottoman and aloof. Saudi Arabia is rich, but brittle. Egypt is too near and Indonesia is too far. That leaves Pakistan, nuclear, mobilized, familiar, as the awkward cornerstone.

Qatar, the Gulf, and others now quietly lean toward Pakistan; not out of affection, but necessity.

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The Co-evolution of Islam in Pakistan

Here lies the crucial difference. In Iran, secularism has become fashionable. In Pakistan, it never landed. Where Iran is peeling away from Islam, Pakistan is co-evolving with it. There is no post-Islamic movement here. No hipster atheism. No mainstream rebellion. Instead, Islam mutates, flexes, absorbs. It remains foundational.

Pakistan is nationalist, feudal, tribal but its religious identity is integrative. The secular rupture simply never came. It was never allowed to. It is fun to be an elite in Pakistan but not the lower rungs.

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India’s Strategic Misreading

India, for all its economic rise, has never managed Pakistan well. It has either ignored it, demonized it, or catastrophized it.

But Pakistan’s role on the global chessboard is rapidly growing, not shrinking. And as India aligns with the United States (despite the recent froideur), the Global South shifts beneath its feet. Afro-Asianism, the vision Nehru once intuited, is more relevant than ever. Modi’s hyper-alignment with the West may win headlines, but it risks civilizational incoherence.

India belongs to Asia. Its radial axes, Himalayas, Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, pull it toward its neighbors. Toward China. Toward Africa. Toward a post-Western future.

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The Opportunity Cost of Partition

In a just world, the Konkani coast of the Indian subcontinent (with gems like Mumbai & Goa) would have been the playground of Asia.

Instead, Dubai, Doha, and Singapore themselves have eaten its future.

Pakistan failed to become the gem of the region. But India, too, failed to be its steward. What holds South Asia back isn’t just poverty or politics; it’s feudalism. Deep, structural, cultural feudalism. The inability to think beyond caste, beyond parochialism, beyond partition. Why doesn’t the subcontinent confederate? Why don’t Nepal and Bhutan anchor into Indian defense? Why is Sri Lanka ignored? Why is there no Brown Union?

Because we remain trapped by the ghosts of 1947.

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A Final Note

I’ve been writing on Twitter, on newsletters, and elsewhere—but it’s here, in longform, where things settle. Pakistan is misunderstood not because it is unknowable—but because it is too knowable. Too familiar. Too close.

It is not the enemy. It is the mirror.

And India, until it faces that mirror with open eyes, will keep misreading the future.