Pakistan must wake up to geo-economic trends

Economic dynamism increasingly drives today's world. It dictates military heft and power equations. Any country that doesn't smell what's brewing on this front will be vulnerable

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That Pakistan could not afford an arms race with much larger India was clear all along. The infirmity of its quest for parity via nuclear weapons, for which a former Pakistani leader once said people would go hungry if need be, was exposed by its own role in a covert game of inflicting a 'thousand cuts' on India with terror attacks.

In 2019, its nukes did not deter Indian surgical strikes on its territory in retaliation to mass violence perpetrated in Pulwama, Kashmir. Today, after 26 tourists were gunned down in Pahalgam, the logic of proportionality has given India a catapult to hit back again.

Meanwhile, our gap in the capacity for conventional warfare continues to widen. New estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that our military spending dwarfs that of Pakistan.