Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart

There is a persistent habit, especially among our soi-disant commentators, of predicting Pakistan’s imminent disintegration. The arguments are familiar: Baloch insurgency, Pashtun irredentism, low Kashmiri fertility, economic weakness, and analogies to 1971. They are also, taken together, wrong.

To begin with, most people discussing Pakistan do not understand its internal sociology. They begin with a conclusion, “Pakistan is artificial and unstable”, and then select facts to confirm it. This is confirmation bias dressed up as analysis.

Consider the Pashtuns. The claim that they are natural irredentists misunderstands who they are and how they live. Pashtuns in Pakistan are not a marginal population looking across the border for salvation. They are deeply integrated into the Pakistani state, economy, and military. They dominate transport, logistics, security, and large parts of urban informal commerce. Large numbers have moved permanently into Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Assimilation is not failing; it is proceeding at scale.

The comparison with Azerbaijanis in Iran is instructive. Iranian Azeris are not secretly waiting to defect to Azerbaijan. They are embedded in Iranian society, power structures, and culture. Shared ethnicity does not automatically produce separatism. Politics, incentives, and lived realities matter more than maps.

In both cases, Azeris in Iran and Pashtuns in Pakistan, often noted for features regarded as more “European” in local racial taxonomies, have, through extensive intermarriage, materially reshaped the ethnic, racial, and aesthetic presentation of Persian and Pakistani elites, further binding these groups into the core of state society rather than marking them as outsiders.

Language matters as well. Afghanistan is, in practice, a Dari-speaking state. Pakistan is an Urdu-speaking one. This difference is not cosmetic. Language shapes elite formation, bureaucracy, media, and identity. Cultural continuity does not imply political unity across borders.

Balochistan is also routinely misunderstood. It is not a coherent, homogenous block waiting to secede. It is ethnically mixed, tribally fragmented, and geopolitically boxed in. Any serious analysis must ask a basic question: who would support an independent Balochistan? Iran would not. Nor would any regional power interested in stability. Secession does not occur in a vacuum. It requires sustained external backing. That backing does not exist.

The analogy to Bangladesh is especially careless. Bangladesh was not a normal separatist case. It was a geographically bifurcated state, split into two wings separated by an enemy country, under wartime conditions, with massive external intervention. There is no comparable case where a contiguous state with a unified military and elite structure simply dissolved under internal pressure alone. Timor-Leste and South Sudan required extraordinary external force. Pakistan faces nothing of the kind.

Pakistan is also not a purely democratic state in the liberal sense. It is a feudal-elite system with a strong military core. That is not a moral defense, but it is a structural fact. Such systems are often more stable than outsiders expect because elite buy-in is coordinated across ethnic lines. Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Seraikis, and Kashmiris are not operating as separate political projects. They are invested in a shared state.

This does not mean Pakistan is healthy. Balochistan is not a paradise. Economic management has been poor. The state has paid a long-term price for being a Prussia-lite security system. But weakness is not the same as fragmentation. Economic distress does not automatically translate into territorial collapse.

In fact, in certain respects Pakistan has been unusually consolidated in recent years. The state has reasserted control over demagogues, for better or worse. It has stabilized its foreign policy posture. It has retained internal coherence despite severe pressure. These are not signs of a state on the verge of dissolution.

Much of the current commentary also suffers from a failure of humanization. Entire populations are reduced to abstractions: “Baloch,” “Pashtuns,” “Muslims,” “demographics.” People become pieces in a speculative board game. This is not analysis; it is moral laziness. When real events occur, whether in the case of Sunila Khatun, Kashmir or elsewhere, they are filtered through ideology rather than law, fact, or human reality.

The claim that Pakistan survives only because of external patrons is also overstated. External support matters, as it does for many states. But Pakistan’s cohesion is not borrowed. It is internally generated through institutions, elites, and social integration.

States do not usually collapse because analysts expect them to. They collapse when elites defect en masse, when borders become porous with sustained external backing, and when legitimacy evaporates simultaneously at the center and the periphery. None of those conditions currently apply.

Pakistan is evolving, not dissolving. Those who keep predicting its breakup are not reading reality. They are reading their own assumptions back into it.