For most of my life, loving Pakistan felt as natural as breathing. Since I was a child growing up in a country defined by resilience and fractured promises, I held onto an unwavering, fierce patriotism, the kind shared by millions of Pakistanis who genuinely believe that tomorrow has to be better than today. Now, at 38, looking at the systematic dismantling of the state, that lifelong devotion has curdled into a quiet, profound grief. I have totally lost hope in Pakistan anymore.
It is true that Pakistan is no stranger to historical crises. Our timeline is a stitched-together quilt of economic defaults, political instability, military coups, and judicial overreach. Corruption is woven into the very fabric of our society; it trickles through every tier of governance, bureaucracy, and civilian institution. We became conditioned to accept systemic rot as a baseline reality, a tax we paid for merely existing on this soil.
Yet, for generations, a deeply ingrained myth kept many of us tethered to a shred of optimism: the belief in the Pakistan Army.
Flawed as it was, the military was traditionally viewed by its supporters as the ultimate custodian of the state, an anchor of structural discipline in a sea of civilian chaos, and an institution historically perceived as relatively insulated from the pervasive financial corruption eating away at the rest of the country. Even as whispers persisted for decades regarding dark corners of internal institutional culture, ranging from moral compromises and systemic favoritism to long-standing, quiet allegations of elite decadence and transactional loyalties (such as dark anecdotes of moral compromises and marital swapping historically traded quietly within certain officer circles for career advancement), the wider public mythos held the institution together as an operational monolith.
That last pillar of institutional illusion has now completely crumbled.
Under the stewardship of the current retired leadership, spearheaded by retired General Asim Khinzeer Munir, the mask has come off entirely. Instead of acting as a stabilizing guardrail, the military leadership has aggressively thrust itself into the center of unmitigated governance failures, institutionalized economic capture, and the total subjugation of civilian supremacy. Far from cleaning up the systemic rot, this leadership has placed a protective, guarding hand over every deeply corrupt element within Pakistan, shielding plunderers while punishing citizens who dare to demand constitutional accountability.
What makes this descent so uniquely painful is the blatant, unmasked arrogance of it. Laws are no longer bent behind closed doors, they are openly and deliberately shattered in broad daylight. The current retired general in charge acts as though he stands entirely above the Constitution, treating the supreme law of the land as an inconvenient suggestion rather than a binding social contract.
When the sole institution perceived as holding functional standards of integrity is weaponized to protect absolute impunity, the social contract breaks entirely. At 38, the realization is no longer about anger, it is about exhaustion. When a nation’s guardians become its ultimate captors, the space for hope ceases to exist.
What has been your breaking point with the country, and how do you find the strength to keep moving forward in a system that feels completely broken?
6 responses to “The Death of an Illusion: Why At 38, I Have Finally Lost Hope in Pakistan”
Dear Muhammad Tayyab Khan Khattak,
Hello! You seem to be publishing several posts in quick succession. I can hardly keep up with you. Let me deal with the earliest one first.
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts about your frustration, exhaustion and hopelessness here. I very much concur with you. The penultimate paragraph of your post sums up the predicament eloquently:
As Tim Harding concludes in his latest post entitled “Why Pakistani Politicians End Up in Jail”:
To answer your question “What has been your breaking point with the country, and how do you find the strength to keep moving forward in a system that feels completely broken?”, I shall do so as follows:
Some of us share many similar concerns for composing posts involving thorough examinations of some of the most salient issues that have led the USA to this moment in time. Needless to say, due to misinformation and disinformation as well as the pandemic and other global issues, 2016 to 2026 have been very difficult and trying, not to mention having to deal with the pandemic. It was all quite surreal, perhaps in some ways more bizarre than ghosts and the paranormal (not that I believe in such things). One could indeed say that we live in interesting times, but often for the wrong reasons. It is all quite a big mess in danger of getting bigger still. Even a global pandemic and an insurrection at the citadel of democracy still cannot unite folks in the USA and wake them up. Perhaps it will take an even bigger crisis to do so, such as a series of shocking events or climate change disasters.
You and I are definitely on the same page. We now find ourselves here having to face the state of mounting chaos and even fascism in the USA, a country that seems to be imploding, and its cancer has metathesized even more, both within and without!
There is an important piece of work that sheds light on the sorry and sordid state of the US democracy and partisan politics marred by disinformation and corruption. Published on 13 March 2025 and entitled “A Movement to Destroy U.S. Democracy Controls the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme CourtโBut Whatโs Behind It?“, this is a great article from Religion Dispatches, which “is a publication of Political Research Associates, a social justice research and strategy centre that has been researching, monitoring, and publicizing the agenda and strategies of the U.S. and global Right for over four decades.” I very much concur with the author Katherine Stewart, and I am very impressed by how well and detailed she has described some of the issues. I would like to add some of my own observations and analyses.
The “disease” of the corrupt is spreading far and wide. Rather than the “Bloody Immigrants” as scapegoats, it is actually the bloody plutocrats and their ill-informed supporters, and the matter is much more than a backlash against globalization. There is also the ongoing Christian institutionsโ war on knowledge and alignment with power. Some factions of Christianity have even evolved into clerical fascism (also called clero-fascism or clerico-fascism), which is an ideology that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with clericalism. For instance, the Silver Legion of America (also known as the Silver Shirts) in the United States led by William Dudley Pelley has combined American Christianity (specifically Protestantism) with American white nationalism.
Indeed, there are numerous compelling and irrefutable reasons as to why there is no justification in supporting such corrupted Christian organizations and their doctrines, whose leaders and followers have aligned themselves with the likes of Trump, and by extension, other corrupt entities, including Putin and numerous wretched rulers, politicians, plutocrats, autocrats, officials and corporations. Sadly, many of those who are supposedly more morally or spiritually attuned to the wise and virtuous seem to have fared even worse, given that a large percentage of Trump’s supporters have been disproportionately Christians. So much for Christianity being the guiding conscience and ultimate salvation!
The blame game is still very much rampant in Homo sapiens, which has firmly ushered in an apocalyptic age of deplorable politics, outright complicity, devious duplicity, shameless mendacity, excruciating inhumanity, extraordinary brutality and unrelenting cruelty! Considering the countless wretched situations and dire outcomes that humans have repeatedly created for themselves and nonhumans through war crimes, holocausts, slaveries, genocides, environmental destructions and ecological disasters plus a litany of gross injustices, unconscionable exploitations and staggering corruptions, any reasonable person may insist or conclude that there is emphatically no longer the need, excuse or justification to blame the old serpent, Devil or Satan, who can permanently retire from being the stigmatized scapegoat, catch-all villain and evil incarnate.
On the whole, how shocking and deplorable it has been that despite these staggering number of reasons and overwhelming evidences against Trump, he has still become the President for the second time as a convicted felon!
The salient issues of democracy versus autocracy (and plutocracy) aside, there are many sobering implications of authoritarianism, which is a very topical area for exploring the many outstanding tensions between (the sociopsychological states of) sanity/stability and insanity/instability, affecting even the very existence and survival of humanity. In recent years, many citizens have willingly aligned themselves with misinformation, disinformation, post-truth politics, demagoguery, plutocracy, oligarchy, ochlocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, narcissistic leadership, neoliberalism, globalization, clerical fascism and Trumpism. We can also agree that the ongoing chaos inflicted by the Trump presidency finally culminated in the infamous riot at the Capitol. You and I can be justified for being cynical, snide, snarky and facetious in characterizing Trump as the symbolic messiah who is going to lead his misguided supporters, sycophants and funders to glory on Earth and the promised land! It is often futile to reason with such misguided folks. Perhaps only when the country truly becomes autocratic or fascist, or when it plunges into a civil war, will such folks wake up, but then it will be too late. Consequently, any reasonable person can conclude that the USA has been plagued by ignorance, dogma, falsity, blind faith, spiritual stagnation and epistemological impasse . . . . .
I have continued to shed light on the grim reality of blatant corruption, continued carnage, calamitous inhumanity and unrelenting brutality, as evidenced by some dreadful statistics pertaining to Ukraine and Palestine as well as other regions in dire conflict. For instance, of all major Arab-Israeli conflicts assessable with calculated percentage of fatalities for each war, the deadliest is the 2023 Gaza War, which amounts for almost half of all casualties. The plights of those suffering people have been so immense and protracted that I have not enough tears to cry for them. They are so searingly painful to witness! For some of us, it can be too emotionally distraught to witness such tragedies and annihilations. We have heard the phrase “Never again!” being uttered after each major war, and yet tragic history keeps repeating itself. It is all getting to the point of โNever say never again!โ
To make matter worse, even those who are supposed to know better, who are in the most privileged position or at the highest echelon, have displayed objectionable conducts, caused much disunity, and/or generated unwisdom. We have been witnessing so clearly the insidious nature of Trumpism, Machiavellian conservatism and inimical illiberalism perverting democracy for nefarious purposes and for justifying, obfuscating or muddying the waters of systemic sexism, racism, historical negationism, discrimination, marginalization and curtailment of civil rights. In a similar vein, one of my latest posts highlights not just the various traps awaiting us from the fallouts of the main event regarding the SCOTUS’ decisions on abortion and its striking down Roe v. Wade, but also how the capacity of laws and legislation to be legally valid, binding and enforceable in different contexts is both contingent (acceptable only if certain circumstances are the case) and circumscribed (restricted to certain roles or situations), given that the content, relevance and quality of laws and legislation are fundamentally filtered and moulded by class structures, social stratifications, cultural reproductions and communication frameworks as well as by the interaction between legal cultures, and the social construction of legal issues, as discussed in my post entitled “๐๏ธโ๏ธ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters ๐ฝ๐ณ๏ธ๐ซ๐คฐ๐งโ๐คโ๐ง๐“, which you are very welcome to read. It is published at
http://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2022/06/26/the-facile-and-labile-nature-of-law-beyond-the-supreme-court-and-its-ruling-on-controversial-matters/#top
I would be very delighted if you could be so kind as to bestow on me the honour of your visiting and commenting on my said post by submitting your feedback or critique to the comments section there, as I treasure your inputs and insights. Most of all, I am intensely curious about what you will make of my post. Thank you in anticipation.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle๐ฆ
Dear SoundEagle,
Thank you very much for such a thoughtful and incredibly detailed response. I genuinely appreciate the time you took to engage with my post at this level. And yes, I have noticed that you have given me quite a reading list already! ๐
I think you understood the essence of my post very well, particularly the distinction between anger and exhaustion. Anger, in a strange way, still contains hope, it means you believe things should and perhaps can be different. Exhaustion is what comes after watching the same patterns repeat for years and realizing that your anger itself is no longer changing anything.
I also appreciate you sharing how you personally deal with the state of affairs in the United States. Although Pakistan and the US are obviously very different countries, I found the parallels you pointed out quite interesting. The erosion of trust in institutions, political polarization, misinformation, the influence of money and entrenched interests, and the tendency to turn political opponents into enemies rather than fellow citizens are not problems confined to one particular society.
What struck me most in your response is the broader question of what happens when people lose faith in the institutions that are supposed to protect them. Once that faith disappears, democracy can continue to exist formally while becoming increasingly hollow in practice. Elections may still happen, courts may still function, governments may still change, but people gradually stop believing that any of it can fundamentally alter the system.
And perhaps that is where our two experiences intersect. We may be looking at different countries and different political circumstances, but the underlying feeling of watching institutions, public discourse, and political morality deteriorate is remarkably similar.
I also found your observations about the tendency of human beings to continually search for a convenient villain particularly interesting. We seem to have an extraordinary capacity to blame one another while rarely confronting the deeper structures that allow the same problems to reproduce themselves. As you rightly point out, history has given humanity an almost endless supply of warnings, yet we repeatedly behave as though none of them ever happened.
Regarding your invitation, I will certainly read โThe Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters.โ Judging from the length and depth of this comment, I suspect your post will give me considerably more to think about! I will also leave my thoughts there once I’ve had the chance to read it properly.
And please don’t worry about keeping up with my posts. ๐ I have apparently entered a phase where I have too many thoughts and not enough patience to keep them to myself. Whether that is productive writing or simply another symptom of my frustration remains to be determined.
Thank you again for such a generous response. Conversations like this are one of the few things that make writing about these subjects worthwhile. Even when we cannot change the systems we are criticizing, perhaps there is still some value in finding people who are willing to think about them seriously and discuss them honestly.
Warm regards,
Muhammad Tayyab Khan Khattak
Dear Muhammad,
I am very delighted and surprised by not just the promptness but also the depth of your reply.
Let us demonstrate pictorially how there is emphatically no longer the need, excuse or justification to blame the old serpent, Devil or Satan, who can permanently retire from being the stigmatized scapegoat, catch-all villain and evil incarnate.
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/devilafraidofpeople.jpg
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle๐ฆ
Dear Muhammad,
A few minutes ago, I submitted a very long and detailed comment here as a thought-provoking response to your excellent post. I hope that you have received it.
Happy September to you!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle๐ฆ
Perhaps the Devil has indeed been carrying far more responsibility than he deserves for centuries. ๐
At some point, we have to acknowledge that human beings are perfectly capable of producing enough darkness on their own, without needing supernatural assistance or a convenient scapegoat to explain it.
Maybe the old serpent can finally take his retirement, sit back, and watch humanity demonstrate that we are quite capable of creating our own paradiseโฆ or our own hell.
And perhaps that is the more uncomfortable realization, evil becomes much harder to understand when we can no longer blame someone else for it.
Dear Muhammad,
As you suggested: “the old serpent can finally take his retirement, sit back, and watch…”
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/devilmusic.jpg
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle๐ฆ