By Sudhir Ahmad Afridi
Only a year ago, the despair that gripped Pakistan felt like a permanent weather system, a low pressure of the soul that refused to lift. To be Pakistani was to navigate a daily arithmetic of survival: the cost of flour, the flicker of the lights, the quiet shame of a brain drain that saw our brightest young minds queuing for visas to anywhere else. The world, when it looked our way at all, saw only a fragile state on the edge of a map, a place of insoluble problems. And yet, something curious has happened. The ground beneath us has not magically healed; the potholes are still there, and the ledgers remain stubbornly in the red.
However, the air feels different. A tremor of self-belief has begun to pulse through the collective artery of the nation. It is a strange thing, this hope. It is not born of prosperity, for prosperity remains a distant relative who never visits. It is born, instead, of a peculiar global moment. Consider the chessboard. The old certainties of the Cold War have crumbled into a messy, multi-polar brawl. Washington’s influence, while still immense, is no longer a monolith. In addition, into this vacuum of moral leadership, Pakistan has been forced, almost accidentally, to grow up.
When the world held its breath over the widening chasm between the United States and Iran, it was not London or Paris that offered the quiet, persistent whisper of diplomacy. It was Islamabad. When the unspeakable tragedy of Ayatollah Khamenei’s martyrdom at the hands of an unnecessary US-Israeli war machine threatened to set the region ablaze, it was our generals and our prime minister who refused to bow.
Let us be clear about the pressure they were under. Pakistan is a country whose economic arteries are, to a humiliating degree, fed by the very same Western financial institutions that take their orders from the Treasury. To defy Washington is, for us, a form of financial self-harm. Yet, alongside China and Russia, we stood up. We used our voice. In a world where the self-appointed champions of human rights fell into a complicit silence, Pakistan said no. That is not bravado; that is the quiet courage of a nation that has nothing left to lose except its dignity, and has therefore decided to keep it.
The proof of this new standing was visible recently at the diplomatic forum in Antalya. Watch the footage. Look at the body language of the Middle Eastern and Central Asian leaders as they greet Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. That is not the polite nod given to a supplicant. That is the embrace given to a partner. They are not looking for a handout from us; they are looking for a shield. They see the bullying of Israel, backed by the expansionist ambitions of a new India, and they recognize that the old protectors across the Atlantic are unreliable.
They look to us because they remember our history. They know that when the hour is darkest, there is only one country in the Muslim world that has stared down the might of a superpower and blinked last. None of this pays the bills of a rickshaw driver in Lahore, and the leadership would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The economic patient is still in intensive care. But the human spirit does not live on bread alone. It lives on respect. It lives on the knowledge that when you speak, the powerful stop to listen. After years of feeling like a victim of history, Pakistan is beginning to feel like an author of it. That is a currency more valuable than the dollar, and it is the only thing that can light the long, dark road ahead.
(The writer is a senior journalist at tribal region, covers various beats, can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
