WHEN Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi recently declared that national security requires deep reforms, and ISPR publicly endorsed the call, both were arguing for the same things: coherence, coordination, service delivery pushed closer to the doorstep, a state that functions as a state should. Nothing wrong with that ambition. The problem is what it left out, and how familiar that omission is.
Pakistan has set out for this destination before. Every serious reset since 1947 has restated some version of that list: Peace. Prosperity. Rule of law. A federation the provinces actually believe in. None of it was ever the wrong destination. What keeps happening is Odysseus’s wandering. His ship knows exactly where Ithaca lies and still takes the long way, blown off course by whichever storm is loudest that year. Each course correction adds distance instead of closing it. This is not a nation still discovering what it wants. It is a nation that has known the address for decades but keeps failing to arrive.
Climate change is the clearest evidence of that failure, the one threat that has already reshaped the economy and governance more than any militant group, hostile neighbour, or political crisis since 2010. Yet, it barely features in the national security conversation beyond a meek reference in the 2021 National Security Policy. Pakistan’s own climate finance planning puts annual investment need at roughly $56.6 billion, one and a half times what defence and debt servicing cost combined, nearly 20 times the federal development budget. Climate investment is deferred, year after year, for the next government or generation to absorb.
The reason is structural, not a matter of neglect. Hydrological volatility asks a different set of questions than the ones conventional threats ask. A flood breaches an embankment, and the people who decide whether that embankment holds are provincial irrigation engineers. An evacuation is run by a district administration working off exposure lists, not from provincial headquarters. Urban flooding is a municipal failure before it becomes a national one, a drainage line that was never cleared. The Constitution already assigns disaster management, water, agriculture and local infrastructure to the provinces. National security planning grew up answering more conventional and transboundary threats. A constitutional division of labour has put the actual climate mandate one or more levels below where the security doctrine is written.
Each course correction adds distance instead of closing it.
Naqvi’s critics have already converged on the obvious corrective, but have failed to offer a political economy analysis: why has local government never taken root? Pakistan has built it three times, Ayub’s Basic Democracies, Zia’s local bodies, Musharraf’s LGO 2000 — all three imposed by military leaders, all three the same design: an election without power, a base for the man at the top, no foundations underneath. Civilian governments never fixed this. The reign of top-down development has continued. Each time reform came up, provincial and federal legislators were lured by the discretionary schemes that let them decide what gets built and funded in their constituencies. A local politician’s power comes from controlling those schemes, and real local government would take that power away. This has replaced planning with ad hocism, turning much of the PSDP into an investment in random, uncoordinated allocations rather than resilience. Local government cannot consolidate, and climate vulnerability cannot be addressed, until this political economy architecture is dismantled.
As long as politicians control allocations to their own constituencies, neither local government nor climate resilience gets to compound the benefits. Only the losses do.
Pakistan’s fiscal policy has run the same choice for decades: squeezed development budget on terms set by lenders, or populist spending. Climate resilience loses either way, cut first under austerity because it produces no immediate political return, and starved again under populist spending because discretionary schemes absorb whatever fiscal space survives. Flood protection spending is patchy, addressed only after a flood has already caused the damage.
Elite capture runs well past the PSDP and local government. The automobile sector sits behind tariff walls, shielded from competition. Circular debt in the hydrocarbon energy sector is never resolved, only refinanced at a higher cost each time. Independent fossil-fuel power producers collect capacity charges regardless of what the country actually uses, a guaranteed return baked into the same contracts feeding the circular debt spiral. Undervalued official real estate rates let landowners dodge capital gains and wealth tax, channelling investment into speculative housing societies rather than production. And government borrowing crowds out private credit: banks holding government debt earn a safe return and have little appetite left to lend to the SMEs that would otherwise finance flood-resistant infrastructure or NAP and NDC implementation, the same SMEs that take the direct hit when a flood wipes out inventory or halts production. None of this is hidden: protected manufacturers, power producers, landowners, and captive banks are confident that the system built to check them answers, in practice, to them.
None of this invalidates the proposed reforms. But the reforms do not touch what has broken Pakistan’s economy and governance repeatedly, nor do they restore the local government capacity that decades of centralising incentive have deliberately eroded. Floods have destabilised the country more than insurgencies have. A weak district administration has cost more in a monsoon season than most internal security lapses cost in a year. A reform agenda that does not start there is not incomplete. It is aimed at the wrong problem, and it is one more course correction that adds distance instead of closing it.
The demand for structural national security reform is correct. The deepest reform available is recognising that Pakistan’s reform agenda does not begin with creating economically unviable administrative units, but with building hubs of performing local government first, units earned through capacity rather than drawn on a map. It will be a decades-long electoral process, building the capacity to manage administrative units before creating more of them. The state has seen its Ithaca before and sailed past it, more than once. Climate resilience and functioning local government both are fundamentally national security questions. This odyssey ends only when the doctrine comes home to the districts it has spent decades avoiding.
The writer is a climate expert.
Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2026
