Roles and Priorities

Beyond geography, Pakistan plays a set of concrete roles in its regional environment — some long-standing, some newly assumed, some that the country aspires to but has not yet secured. This lesson maps these roles and identifies the policy priorities that emerge from them.

Five regional roles

Each of these roles has been earned through specific policy choices and could, with different choices, be enlarged or eroded.

The corridor role

CPEC, operational since 2015, has been the principal vehicle for Pakistan's transit-corridor ambition. The corridor's first phase delivered:

• Roughly 8,000 MW of new generation capacity through coal, hydro and solar IPPs
• The Karakoram Highway Phase II upgrade between Raikot and Thakot
• The Sukkur-Multan and Multan-Lahore motorway sections
• The Gwadar deep-water port expansion and Free Zone
• Industrial cooperation zones at Rashakai (KP), Allama Iqbal (Punjab) and Dhabeji (Sindh)

The second phase, formally announced in 2023, emphasises industrial cooperation, agriculture and information technology rather than the energy-and-infrastructure focus of phase one. The strategic logic is to move Pakistan up the value chain from mere transit to actual production for regional markets.

A parallel set of corridors — the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan trilateral routes, the Quadrilateral Traffic in Transit Agreement (QTTA) with China, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the proposed Pakistan-Uzbekistan trade corridor through Afghanistan — extends the corridor concept beyond CPEC.

The counter-terrorism partner role

Pakistan's counter-terrorism capability — built through the operations described in the previous topic — has become a regional asset. The country is a working partner of:

This counter-terrorism partnership role is not glamorous and rarely produces headlines. But it has been one of the most consistent assets in Pakistan's regional position over the past two decades.

The labour and remittance role

Pakistan supplies roughly 9 million overseas workers, concentrated in the GCC (Saudi Arabia 2.7 million, UAE 1.8 million, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain) and the UK (1.6 million Pakistani-origin residents). Remittance inflows in FY 2023–24 reached $30.25 billion, equivalent to approximately 8% of GDP and roughly equal to the country's net exports of goods.

This is more than an economic statistic. The Pakistani diaspora is a regional asset:

• It anchors political-level Saudi and UAE engagement with Pakistan
• It generates the foreign-exchange flows that have repeatedly stabilised the rupee
• It produces a soft-power footprint through Pakistani professionals, traders and clerics across the Gulf
• It is, increasingly, a source of skilled migration to Japan, South Korea and Germany under new bilateral arrangements

The challenge is upskilling. Pakistan's average exported worker is semi-skilled; competing economies (the Philippines, India, Bangladesh) export increasing shares of professional and technical labour. The 2022 National Skills Strategy attempts to address this gap.

The nuclear-power role

Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in May 1998 (Chagai-I and Chagai-II) in response to Indian tests earlier the same month. Since 1998:

• The country has developed a full-spectrum deterrence posture including strategic, operational and tactical-level weapons
• It has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)
• It is not a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, though it has applied since 2016
• It has developed a comprehensive command-and-control architecture under the National Command Authority (established 2000)

The nuclear capability shapes the regional strategic balance with India and provides Pakistan with the deterrent floor on which other policy is built. It is not, in itself, a positive role; but it is a structural feature of Pakistan's regional position that no policy framework can ignore.

Priorities for the next decade

Translating these roles into sustained regional influence requires policy choices along five dimensions:

1. Economic stabilisation: ending the recurrent IMF-cycle through structural reforms in taxation, energy and state-owned enterprises. Regional influence flows from economic credibility; Pakistan has not had a full IMF-free decade since 1988.
2. Export diversification: reducing dependence on textiles (currently 60% of exports) by expanding IT services (the 2024 IT-export target of $5 billion remains under-achieved), agricultural processing, and engineering goods.
3. Border management: completion of effective border control on the Afghan and Iranian frontiers; institutional consolidation in the merged former-FATA districts.
4. Diplomatic bandwidth: rebuilding the Foreign Service's regional-specialist depth, particularly in Central Asian languages and Persian, after a decade of attrition.
5. Soft-power infrastructure: leveraging the diaspora through scholarship schemes, cultural-export programmes, and reciprocal arrangements with destination states.

The country's role in the region in 2035 will be shaped less by what is decided in summits than by what is implemented at home. The next decade's regional position is being built — or eroded — in the budgets, courtrooms and classrooms of Pakistan itself.