PM takes notice of future after ordering it cancelled

I have spent the better part of two decades trying to persuade Pakistan’s institutions to think in decades rather than in news cycles. I built the Pakistan State of Future Index (PK-SOFI) to measure where the country stood against its own long-range indicators. I have sat in rooms with the National Intelligence Council, the OECD, the UK Cabinet Office’s Horizon Scanning unit, and South Korea’s Parliamentary Caucus on Foresight, watching how seriously other systems take the discipline of anticipation. And I keep coming back to Pakistan with the same question: why does foresight refuse to take root here, no matter how many divisions we build, how many scenarios we run, or how many white papers we write? The honest answer is not that Pakistan lacks talent or awareness. It is that foresight is not something Pakistan does in public policy. It is not a step in how a budget is drafted, a plan is approved, or a ministry decides what to prioritise. There is no standing government body mandated to scan horizons, run scenarios, and feed the results into policy on a continuing basis. What exists instead is a series of one-off exercises, personality-driven units, and donor-funded pilots that surface, produce a report, and disappear without ever touching an actual decision. We are organised for emergencies, not trajectories. Pakistan has taken 25 IMF bailouts since 1958, meaning a state agency has spent a meaningful share of nearly every decade since Independence negotiating short-term fiscal survival rather than long-term fiscal design. Layer onto that a security environment that has run hot almost continuously (three wars with India, the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, a three-decade counterinsurgency, a live conflict on the western border), floods on a roughly generational cycle, most recently in 2010 and 2022, and governments that rarely complete a full term. Together, these have made firefighting the default posture, not because officials lack the capacity to think ahead, but