And expect this process to take several DECADES at least. There are no shortcuts to this process, like it or not.
Perhaps we are also assuming the process is guaranteed.
That is not the case.
In addition it is also not guaranteed that there is one process happening either.
I will bring it back to the PTI and the situation faced.
If you think of the whole "bell curve" distribution of choice, on how to control people to make that come from fear or hatred rather than a neutral emotion you have to either have a system. Pakistan’s political‑military system has struggled to stabilize partly because it never consolidated either a clearly monarchic hierarchy(this can be a dictator) or a consistently functioning electoral‑democratic game, while its ideological “drivers” (
Islam, Islamic nationalism and shifting economic labels) have been used instrumentally on "whims" rather than as coherent rule‑sets for collective choice.
The result is a repeated reset of the “game” so that citizens, parties, and the military are never playing the same stable Prisoner’s‑Dilemma‑style interaction long enough to build trust, norms, or predictable incentives.
This is not a country ruined by a single villain but is a stage where every major actor learned the same bad script. As I repeatedly point out - the generals did not descend from another planet; they rose out of a society taught from birth that only men in uniform can save the nation from its enemies, internal and external. Politicians did not simply “fail”; they were trained in a politics where the shortest route to power was not convincing citizens, but convincing the referee in Rawalpindi.
So now if we go further back to creation of Pakistan then it began less as a settled social contract and more as an argument(
after all it was led by a barrister- nay, THE BARRISTER) carried out by other means: Who are “we”? Muslims of South Asia? A garrison against India? A laboratory for Islamic democracy? Because the birth question was never closed, every regime could reopen it and claim to be the “true” Pakistan. When the founding story is an open wound instead of a healed scar, power does not rotate; it ricochets and creates a congenital allergy to institutions, born from Jinnah's hurried dominion sketch that fused mullah fervor, Punjabi heartland muscle, and Bengali irrelevance into a state too brittle to bend.
In a stablish system you have religion, patriotism, socialism, capitalism playing a combined musical chairs and ring around the roses which in the mind of citizens become trade offs. In Pakistan, they became costumes. A uniform could put on “Islamic order” one decade, “enlightened moderation” the next; a party could be socialist at the rally and patronage‑capitalist in office - think of how the whole "Riyasat e Medina" rhetoric conflicts with IK's own allies and even some "good" economic capitalist decisions he enabled for startups. When words point everywhere at once, people stop using them as guides and start reading them only as signals of which faction currently owns the microphone.
Imagine a Prisoner’s Dilemma where the players are told, every few years, that this round is the last chance to save the nation. In that atmosphere, no one has an incentive to build habits, only to survive the emergency. The military uses the emergency to step in; civilians use it to invite the military in against their rivals; citizens use it to tolerate each extra‑constitutional “reset” on the promise that this, finally, will fix things. The game never matures; it only repeats.
So right now - The military's got the script: "We're the adults saving you from chaos." PTI's got theirs: "We're the pure ones fighting the deep state." Pashtuns in KP mutter off-script: "What about our dead kids on your forever war?" And the classes? Elites sip tea while rewriting the rules; middle class tweets fury from air-conditioned grandparent houses or flats; poor folks dodge bullets hoping for a bribe or a bailout. Nobody's learning the blocking because the everyone is waiting for the song of the game to end and the schoolteacher(history) keeps yelling "Everybody Stop, Reset!".
Pakistan's stuck in this loop and is not coming out of it, because just as always Military's got PTI cornered: Imran Khan's in jail calling the army chief names, and now PML-N, PPP, everyone’s chanting "back the forces" like their noses arent brown enough. PTI's yelling from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa rallies, but it's all hot air, middle-class uncles on Twitter raging while sipping chai, and the poor? They grab the biryani plates from dynasties and keep quiet.
Pashtun thing's bubbling in KP, families fed up with TTP blasts and failed ops, but it'll fizzle as "provincial drama" while PTI milks it for votes. Elites in their air-conditioned SUVs rewrite rules for themselves, middle class dreams of clean governance but pays EMIs first, poor switch sides for the next roti kapra makaan promise. No one's teaming up because why risk it when the big boys hold the bat - why risk it is the theme of the 80% here.
We are who we are: a nation eloquent in complaint, impotent in cure, watching its youth flee to Dubai or Germany or "anywhere but here" while generals toast "azadi" over another botched budget.
Military blinks first ONLY if classes align against them (middle + poor + Pashtun fury). PTI wins if they co-opt Pashtuns without scaring elites into total war. Nobody's mind even can think of "share the stage," so expect more ad-libs, blackouts, and the audience (Pakistanis) wondering when intermission ends.
The rest of the debate on cultism or not cultism is plain humanity - You cannot expect people to change sides because like most of humanity, once you pick a narrative or stand you find whatever you can to defend that stand especially if your body is in fight or flight mode all the time. Pakistan would probably rank in the top ten for out of control parasympathetic systems.
