Pakistan is not simply mismanaged; it is being methodically harvested by a small, tightly connected elite that has turned the state into an extraction machine rather than a public trust. Over the past three decades, that machine has been refined to the point where its workings can be described with clinical precision. This investigation sets out to do exactly that: to move past the lazy language of “corruption” and show, in concrete institutional and financial detail, how a narrow oligarchy has captured the commanding heights of the economy and re‑engineered public institutions to serve private ends.
The starting point is an unusually blunt diagnosis from the International Monetary Fund in late 2025. In a 186‑page governance and corruption assessment, the Fund stopped speaking in euphemisms and put a number on what it calls “elite capture.” Pakistan, it concluded, could increase its output by roughly five to six and a half percent if it dismantled the privileges and policy distortions enjoyed by a small group of politically connected actors. Those actors include large business groups and enterprises owned by or affiliated with the state – a careful way of acknowledging the military’s sprawling commercial empire. This is not a slogan from a protest march; it is a quantified judgment buried in the paperwork of Pakistan’s twenty‑sixth IMF programme. For the first time, an official creditor has effectively endorsed what many Pakistani economists and journalists have argued for years: that the country’s central economic problem is not a lack of reform, but the way reform has been consistently bent to protect the interests of an entrenched elite.
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