I left Pakistan in 2022, and I have been in Spain ever since. Distance does a strange thing to a person. It softens some opinions and sharpens others. The country I argued with constantly while I lived inside it is the country I now defend, quietly, at dinner tables in a language that is not mine, to people who know it only from headlines.
This is a post about the army, and I want to write it honestly, because anything less would only be flattery, and the army already receives enough of that.
So let me say the hard part first. The army in Pakistan is not just an army. It is the most powerful institution in the country, and anyone honest knows it. There have been moments when it has stood taller than the law that is meant to stand over it. People I respect have spent whole careers arguing that a nation cannot fully come into its own while one institution carries this much weight, and I do not think they are wrong to worry. I have worried about it too. A love worth anything has to be able to hold that worry without looking away from it.
And yet.
From here — four years on, most of a continent away — what I feel when I think about the army is not suspicion. It is gratitude. Maybe distance simplifies things unfairly. But when I watch a country wobble through floods that swallow whole districts, through economic years that would break a steadier nation, through people who would happily set the house on fire to win an argument, I keep noticing the same thing holding the line. Young men from villages I will never see, standing on cold borders and in flood water and outside burning buildings, so that the rest of us can argue about them in peace.
That is the part outsiders tend to miss. Pakistan is not threatened only at its borders. For years one of its hardest battles has been at home, against a simple and corrosive idea: that whoever can put the most furious men on the street, and shut down the most roads, gets to overrule everyone else. I am not here to argue about anyone’s faith — that is not mine to judge, and it is not the point. The point is the method, and the method is fear. A country cannot move forward a single inch while fear is allowed to govern it. Stability is not the same thing as progress, but it is the floor that progress has to stand on, and the army has been a large part of what keeps that floor from giving way.
None of this is an argument about how Pakistan should be governed. Better people than me are having that argument, and they should keep having it, loudly, because an institution this strong should always be watched closely. That watching is not disloyalty. It is the rent we pay for a country worth keeping.
I am only trying to describe a feeling I did not expect to find out here, in a quiet flat in Spain: that I love the thing which holds my country together, faults and all — the way you love a difficult, dependable older brother. Clear-eyed about everything that is wrong with him, and still the first to stand up when a stranger speaks against him.