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Seventy-nine years after independence, Pakistan remains constrained by military dominance, foreign dependence and elite rule. The writer argues that decolonisation requires popular sovereignty, social justice and an autonomous foreign policy.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
Every August 14, Pakistan performs sovereignty like a state auditioning for the role of itself. Flags breed on rooftops. Fighter jets carve patriotism into the sky. Politicians discover freedom for 24 hours. Generals appear beneath enough ribbons to upholster a sofa and assure 250 million people that Pakistan bows before no one.
Then the ceremonies end, the bunting droops, and the rulers return to asking Washington, Riyadh and assorted creditors what sovereignty should look like this quarter.
Seventy-nine years after 1947, Pakistan’s problem is not that it lacks the legal furniture of independence. It has borders, embassies, nuclear weapons and an anthem thunderous enough to frighten colonialism retroactively. Its problem is that the ruling order has repeatedly treated sovereignty not as power to be exercised, but as an asset to be rented.
The British departed. Dependency merely changed accents.
SEATO, CENTO, Afghan jihad, the War on Terror: Pakistan discovered early that geography could be monetised more easily than industry could be built. Thus emerged the governing genius of the postcolonial state: sell strategic usefulness abroad, manufacture patriotic mythology at home, and call the difference national interest.
Washington supplied weapons. Gulf monarchies supplied deposits and patronage. China supplied infrastructure and strategic ballast. The IMF periodically arrives to explain, with accountant’s precision, that flags cannot service debt.
The patrons change. The posture survives.
Pakistan’s deeper tragedy is institutional. It inherited a formidable colonial bureaucracy and military but no comparably powerful tradition of popular sovereignty capable of subordinating them. The state was stronger than society; the cantonment better organised than the citizen. From that imbalance came coups, managed elections, palace conspiracies and the enduring conviction that the public may periodically vote but must never be permitted to rule.
The political tendency associated with Imran Khan became dangerous because it popularised two ideas Pakistan’s establishment finds almost indecent: that social justice should matter at home, and that sovereignty should mean conducting foreign policy without permanently seeking permission abroad.
These propositions are hardly revolutionary elsewhere. In Pakistan, apparently, they require tear gas.
The crisis of 2022 and the repression that followed transformed a political dispute into a civic education. Whatever judgment one makes about the competing accounts of Khan’s removal, millions began asking the question every postcolonial elite dreads:
Who actually governs Pakistan — and for whom?
By 2026, the establishment’s answer has become almost magnificent in its absurdity.
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Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif celebrate Pakistan’s renewed “geopolitical relevance.” Trump is friendly. Vance is friendly. Washington takes Munir’s calls. Islamabad appears at important tables.
Behold independence: powerful Americans know our names.
This is not sovereignty. It is social climbing with nuclear weapons.
Access is not autonomy. Relevance is not independence. Being useful to Empire does not mean one has escaped it.
A valet may be indispensable to the banquet. He still does not own the house.
Nothing illustrates this confusion better than Pakistan’s enthusiasm for Trump’s cartoonishly titled “Board of Peace”. Islamabad treats membership as proof that Pakistan has returned to the diplomatic high table. But sovereignty is not measured by the quality of the chair one receives at somebody else’s table. If Pakistan cannot materially shape the terms, defend Palestinian rights, and resist arrangements designed to domesticate resistance while accommodating Israeli power, then its seat is not evidence of influence. It is decorative Muslim upholstery.
The same applies to defence arrangements with Saudi Arabia. Regional security cooperation could advance genuine autonomy if it reduced dependence on outside powers. But supplying Pakistani military competence to protect a fabulously wealthy monarchy from the consequences of its own asinine strategic behaviour, while Pakistan remains financially dependent upon Gulf largesse, is not independence.
It is subcontracting with a crescent attached.
Yet Pakistan’s unfinished decolonisation is not a counsel of despair. It is precisely where the promise of Pakistan survives.
That promise lies in constructing a republic whose independence is social as well as diplomatic: where sovereignty belongs to citizens rather than cantonments; where the exploited majority receives justice rather than sermons; where foreign policy is neither American nor Gulf-owned, but Pakistani; where solidarity with Palestine means confronting Zionism rather than inventing ever more sophisticated mechanisms for accommodating it.
Pakistan could still become something far larger than the strategic rental property its rulers have made of it: a genuinely sovereign, socially just leader of the Global South, capable of cooperating with great powers without kneeling before them and confronting Empire without searching first for permission from Empire.
That would be decolonisation completed.
Until then, August 14 remains less a commemoration than a reminder.
Pakistan became a state in 1947.
The struggle to become free is still underway.
Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.
