The year 2025 will be remembered in Pakistan not as a chapter in a linear story, but as the definitive portrait of a nation at war with its own realities. It was a year of profound schism: existential threats receded while foundational crises silently metastasized; geopolitical stature soared as domestic willpower withered. Pakistan mastered the art of the precarious balance, securing its position in the world by leaving the future of its own people in the lurch.
Economically, 2025 was the year of managed stagnation. The ghost of sovereign default was exorcised, not by the hard medicine of reform, but by the familiar saline drip of financial life support – friends’ debt rollovers, an IMF programme, and the relentless loyalty of a diaspora remittance army. This was stability on life support. With anemic growth below 2 percent, the economy bled jobs faster than it created them. The defining narrative was a tale of two countries: a stock market painting digital fortunes for the elite, while the brutal arithmetic of crushed red chilies, wheat, and electricity tariffs strangled the poor. The State’s priorities were laid bare: health and education budgets remained skeletal, yet the cabinet found the fiscal space for a self-awarded salary raise.
The privatisation of PIA became a perfect metaphor – a transaction that answered no fundamental question, solved no structural flaw, but simply moved a set of liabilities from one ledger to another, leaving only the smoke of a concluded deal.
Politically, the nation kept sleepwalking through a tense and petrified equilibrium. The ragged echoes of 2024’s disputed elections were buried under a new constitutional architecture, designed to enshrine executive power and solemnise a renewed civil-military covenant. In a move of tragic myopia, Parliament sought to tame the judiciary blind to the precedent that the cudgel it forges today will be wielded by another hand tomorrow. Subsequently, the final pillar of societal order, the judiciary, was rocked by resignations and a fake-degree scandal that dissolved another layer of public trust.
The opposition, particularly the PTI’s remnants proved incapable of anything but internal cannibalism, unable even to nominate a leader of the opposition, let alone mount a credible challenge. Imran Khan was seen standing alone, lonely, determined but surrounded by eternal uncertainties.
Yet, within this frozen landscape, the earth cracked. The conviction of a retired spy chief was not just a news item; it was a seismic event, a tremor in the very bedrock of power that whispered a new, unsettling word: accountability. Conversely, the legal siege around Khan tightened with finality; suddenly the 9 May cases started looking like a political tomb – about to sealing a door with the heavy sound of history’s judgment.
If home was a tableau of paralysis, the world stage was a theater of audacious assertion. Here, civilian diplomacy was a whisper against the roar of military statecraft, which delivered with ruthless efficiency. A choreographed détente with Washington – from symbolic luncheons to substantive pacts on cryptocurrency and rare earth minerals – rewrote a stale script. Geopolitical winds shifted fortuitously; with Donald Trump’s return, Kashmir found an unexpected megaphone in the White House, while heavy tariffs on India applied the gift of external pressure.
But every external gain extracted an internal cost. The warmth with Washington drew a visible chill from Beijing, casting a long shadow of distrust over CPEC’s Phase-II. The “all-weather” friendship now seemed a transaction, managed with reluctant, calculating pragmatism by both sides.
Militarily, the year crowned a zenith. A successful aerial duel with its arch-rival was followed by the appointment of a Field Marshal and the creation of a Chief of Defence Forces – titles that reinforced the public image of its armed forces while formalizing a hardened reality. The landmark defense pact with Saudi Arabia did not merely sell services; it anointed Pakistan as the net security stabiliser, a doctrinal shift from client to cornerstone. This hardened confidence fueled bold, heretical pivots: recognising Armenia, assuring Bangladesh, avoiding Israel, and coldly distancing from a Taliban-led, TTP-harbouring Afghanistan – a strategic asset now logged as a lost cause. The ‘suspended’ Indus Waters Treaty remained a platform to warn India of serious consequences while not making any alternate plans to forestall an imminent water crisis.
The cruelest contradiction lay in security. While projecting strength abroad, the State faced an insurgency within. One province – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – stood as a recalcitrant interior, refusing cooperation and questioning Islamabad’s very motives, exposing a fractured national narrative against the gravest threat it has faced for years.
Additionally, in late 2025, Pakistani strategists watched with grave concern as escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE brought the two GCC nations to a dangerous precipice, placing Pakistan’s defense pact with Saudi Arabia under its first genuine test. Fortunately, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi resolved the matter bilaterally, thereby, sparing Pakistan from an acute diplomatic dilemma.
As 2025 closes, Pakistan thus stands not at a crossroads, but at a perpetual divergence. It has achieved a formidable, harsh equilibrium: avoiding economic death while forfeiting the chance at a healthy life. It is a nation expertly navigating storms at sea while the hull quietly rots. Meanwhile, the powerful rearranged the furniture in a house in disarray.
Yet, even within this calcified structure, the stubborn heartbeat of Pakistani society refused to flatline. Beyond the state’s ledger, a parallel economy of ingenuity thrived – in tech startups forging to solve local crises and in farmers reviving ancient water wisdom. The same diaspora whose remittances funded the status quo digitally besieged it with calls for justice, while poets and writers, from society’s raw edges, tried to map the national psyche with clarity. Clearly, this leaderless civic energy constituted the nation’s true, unquantified capital: the fragile yet unyielding substrate upon which any future may finally be built.
The ultimate lesson of 2025 is that a nation can learn to survive every imminent catastrophe yet become utterly impervious to the need for change. The words – reform, justice, and equity – now echo into a chamber where the only decision made is the decision to postpone. The shore of a better tomorrow recedes, not because it is unattainable, but because the nation has chosen, with every fiber of its conflicted being, to stop rowing.
The writer is a former Ambassador of Pakistan and author of eight books in three languages. He can be reached at [email protected].
