The Cold War Dividend That Pakistan Never Claimed

Meanwhile, the Cold War Dividend That Pakistan Never Asserted.

Key points

• The Man Who Turned Wheat Into Schools: A Story Of Cold War In Taxila.
• Co-founder, Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and Engineering University Peshawar & International Transboundary Water Expert.
• Blood And Sand: Pakistan's Cold Arithmetic In The Collapsing Gulf Order.
• How Khojas, Bohras & Memons Built India's Economy Danish Khan.
• Washington Owes Pakistan More Than A Counter Terrorism Dialogue.

For context, the real failure is a failure of training, not of opportunity. Pakistan's diplomatic corps has for decades been built around a security-and-protocol model of foreign service. Engineer Arshad H Abbasi, General Ghulam Mustafa.

We are neither economists nor diplomats; one of us is a soldier, the other a mechanic. Since we suspect none of them has had the nerve or clarity to produce it in thirty-five years, what follows is not a technical trade analysis but a raw, unvarnished argument, one we believe demands the attention of the credentialed minds inside Pakistan's Foreign Office and economic ministries. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen new flags went up, fifteen new anthems were written, and thirty-five years afterwards it is worth asking what that moment actually cost. This person assisted pay for it, and who has collected the dividend since. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen new flags went up, fifteen new anthems were written, and thirty-five years afterwards it is worth asking what that moment actually cost. This person assisted pay for it, and who has collected the dividend since.

Pakistan's contribution to that story is real and documented, even if it rarely gets remarked this plainly. Through the 1980s, Pakistan was the frontline state of the Soviet-Afghan war in the fullest sense of that phrase. It was not merely a transit corridor. The mujahideen who eventually fought the Soviet Army to a standstill were recruited, sheltered, and trained on Pakistani soil in Peshawar, in the tribal belt, in camps that turned scattered Afghan resistance factions into a sustained fighting force. Meanwhile, the United States funded and armed that effort through Operation Cyclone, and the Gulf states matched Washington's funds, but no American soldier ever fired a shot at a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. While hosting more than three million Afghan refugees on top of it, it was Pakistan's territory, Pakistan's training infrastructure, and ultimately Afghan and Pakistani-trained fighters who did the dying and the fighting on the ground.

That decade-long war is widely regarded by historians as Moscow's "Soviet Vietnam": a drain on manpower, morale, and treasury that compounded the economic stagnation, the falling oil revenues, and the nationalist pressures already pulling at the Soviet system from within and the frontline state that created the war feasible was Pakistan, not Washington. It is a hard fact that Pakistan was a genuine, costly, and underacknowledged contributor to the pressure that broke the Soviet state, and it paid for that role in blood, in refugees, and in the long radicalisation it is still living with today. Over 260 million Pakistanis still pay the ultimate cost for the freedom of 15 nations and Germany pledging our blood daily to shield their peace The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification belong to a separate, more European story of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, of Gorbachev's own retreat, of East German crowds who simply ceased being afraid and Pakistan's honest claim on that chapter is symbolic at best: part of the same Cold War current, not a direct cause. Since the point next door is robust enough to stand on its own, we should be careful not to overreach on that point.

In practice, the Man Who Turned Wheat Into Schools: A Story Of Cold War In Taxila.

When it tells this story at all, that is the part of the story Pakistan tells itself. While the frontline state that supported bleed the USSR dry watched fifteen new nations walk free, Pakistan itself captured almost none of the diplomatic or economic dividend of that freedom, here is the part it does not tell: for thirty-five years. Look at what independence actually did for these countries. The Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania went from Soviet republics with centrally planned, chronically shorted economies to European Union and NATO members with some of the fastest digital-governance and startup ecosystems in Europe; Estonia alone now runs almost its entire administration online and has produced more unicorn startups per capita than almost any country on earth. Kazakhstan, sitting on vast oil and gas reserves that Soviet planning could never fully monetize for its own individuals, is now Central Asia's largest economy by a wide margin, with Nur-Sultan-turned-Astana rebuilt from almost nothing.

Georgia, battered by war and instability in the 1990s, pushed through some of the most aggressive anti-corruption and ease-of-doing-business reforms of any post-Soviet state and now ranks ahead of plenty of EU members on those measures. Armenia and Azerbaijan, despite the running wound of Nagorno-Karabakh, have each built diversified economies, IT services in Yerevan, energy exports in Baku that would have been structurally impossible under a Soviet ministry deciding, from Moscow, what each republic was permitted to produce. Uzbekistan, closed and heavily controlled for two decades after independence, has since 2016 opened its currency, its markets, and its trade relationships, and is now one of the fastest-growing economies in Central Asia. None of this innovation, none of this expansion, was available to any of these republics as constituent parts of the USSR, where investment, costs, and even university admissions were set centrally and where the incentive to build a startup, patent an idea, or open a private business simply did not exist. Germany's story is different in scale but the same in shape: unification cost the German state, by most estimates, well over two trillion euros in transfers to rebuild the former East but three and a half decades on, cities like Leipzig and Dresden are genuine technology and manufacturing hubs, a transformation no Soviet-style economy could have produced on its own.

Notably, the mujahedeen who eventually fought the Soviet Army to a standstill were recruited, sheltered, and trained on Pakistani soil in the tribal belt, in camps that turned scattered Afghan resistance factions into a sustained fighting force.

And Pakistan, the country that supported set the stage for all of this, has a trade and diplomatic footprint throughout these sixteen countries that can only be called thin. There is no significant Pakistani export presence in the Baltic tech economy. There is no meaningful Pakistani stake in Kazakh or Uzbek energy and logistics, despite decades of talk regarding Central Asian connectivity. There is no serious economic relationship with reunified Germany beyond routine, modest trade figures that have barely moved in a generation. Compare this to India, Turkey, or the Gulf states, each of which built active commercial relationships throughout the post-Soviet space within a decade of 1991 while Pakistan's Foreign Office treated the moment as a Cold War victory to be filed away, not an economic opening to be worked.

For context, the Border Panjab Never Asked For.

Our recommendation, offered humbly and without economic credentials of our own, is simple. Pakistan's Foreign Office should establish a dedicated cell, call it the Post-Soviet and Germany Partnership Cell, clubbing together all fifteen former Soviet republics and reunified Germany as a single strategic priority, on the basis that Pakistan has a moral claim on the goodwill of nations whose freedom it supported produce feasible. And that cell should not be staffed by career generalists rotating through a two-year posting. It should be staffed, deliberately and unapologetically, by credible, independently vetted economists, recruited the way central banks and sovereign wealth funds recruit, not the way the civil service traditionally has since thirty-five years of missed dividends is a long enough lesson that the next thirty-five should not repeat it. While Pakistan still buries its soldiers and its civilians week after week, paying in blood, even now, for a freedom the rest of the world was allowed to simply inherit and if that is not a sacrifice the world should study as a model, it is hard to imagine what would be, it should additionally never be forgotten, and rarely is it stated aloud: these fifteen nations and a reunified Germany now live their freedom and prosperity in peace.

Co-founder, Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and Engineering University Peshawar & International Transboundary Water Expert. Served in different staff, raised and commanded Army Strategic Force Command. War, Oil And New Geopolitics: Can Pakistan Convert Crisis Into. Blood And Sand: Pakistan's Cold Arithmetic In The Collapsing Gulf. Three States, One Security Calculus: A New Regional Order In The. The Art Of The Feasible: Why Diplomacy Is Pakistan's Core Development. The Versailles Collapse: Why Pakistan's Realist Diplomacy Is The Only. Geography Is Not Enough: Pakistan And The New Rules Of Trade. KASHMIR: The History India & Pakistan Tell Differently Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed.

How Khojas, Bohras & Memons Built India's Economy Danish Khan. India's Indus Strategy & War Crime EXPLAINED Dr. Hassan Abbas. Why India Is Furious Over Pakistan's Indus Valley Civilization Claim. IMF Debt, IPPs, China-Pakistan Corridor Explained Khurram Husain. Beyond The American Umbrella: A New Strategic Triangle Takes Shape. The NAB Amendments Judgment And CJ Isa's Legacy. Mubarak Sani Case: What Has Changed? Can Olympic Records And Javelin Diplomacy Thaw The Ice Between India. Fact-Check: Is Punjab CM Maryam Nawaz Suffering From Throat Cancer? Protecting Those Who Protect Humanity: World Humanitarian Day And.

Washington Owes Pakistan More Than A Counter Terrorism Dialogue. Pakistan's Governance Challenges: From Potential To Progress. Pakistan's Missing Link In FDI: Engaging The Private Sector. 14th August Special: Independence Of The Soul. Every City Cutting Down Its Own Name. Climate-Smart Agriculture As Pakistan's New Social Contract With Nature. Broad Peak's Warning: The UN, UNDP, And The Future Of Glacial.

Taken together, the developments around the Cold War Dividend That Pakistan Never Claimed point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.