Between Applause and Action: What Pakistan Must Do with This Moment

Kashif Mirza

As a participant of the Congressional Pakistan Caucus symposium at the U.S. Capitol on March 24, 2026, I was struck by something that distinguished this gathering from the familiar choreography of bilateral engagement: this was a first. The Congressional Pakistan Caucus had not convened a public symposium before. The room carried the particular energy of an opening rather than a continuation, and that matters, because it means the patterns of the past do not have to govern what comes next.

Pakistan has not always been positioned to receive such an opening with readiness. The combination of a newly active Congressional caucus, a bilateral relationship that has survived considerable turbulence, and a moment of relative diplomatic engagement on both sides represents a convergence that does not arrive on a predictable schedule. Opportunities of this kind are not banked; they are either acted upon or they expire. The choice before Pakistan’s policymakers, civil society, and diplomatic establishment is therefore not whether to engage, but how quickly and how seriously to convert this opening into a structured agenda. That requires arriving at the table not with grievances and requests, but with proposals, systems, and the institutional capacity to deliver on commitments made.

The question this moment puts to Pakistan is not whether American goodwill exists. It demonstrably does. The question is whether Pakistan has built the institutional machinery to receive it, convert it into outcomes, and account for those outcomes publicly. That is a harder question, and it deserves a direct answer.

The most urgent convergence point between U.S. interests and Pakistan’s internal reform agenda is security, specifically, counter-terrorism. Lisa Curtis identified the stakes plainly:

“The TTP is a dangerous and deadly organization that threatens the Pakistani state and regional stability. The United States has a strong interest in ensuring Pakistan remains a stable country free from terrorism and therefore must support Pakistan’s right to defend itself from TTP attacks.”

This acknowledgment opens a door. But Pakistan’s experience has taught us that military capacity without civilian governance is a revolving strategy, clearing ground that the absence of state services allows extremist networks to reclaim. The areas most affected by TTP violence are precisely those where children lack schools, minorities lack legal protection, and communities lack any meaningful interface with the state beyond the security apparatus. Counter-terrorism divorced from these realities is not strategy; it is maintenance.

This is where the economic dimension enters, not as an abstraction, but as a security variable. Pakistan’s fiscal fragility directly constrains its ability to deliver services in contested spaces. Where the state cannot educate, protect, or adjudicate, it creates the marginal populations that recruitment narratives exploit. Bilateral economic engagement, whether through trade facilitation, investment frameworks, or targeted budget support, must therefore be evaluated by more than macroeconomic indicators. The test should be whether it reduces structural exclusion in the places where exclusion is most dangerous.

The institutional precondition for converting any of this into results is rule of law. And here Pakistan faces what is accurately described as a crisis of execution, not of legislation. The frameworks exist. Child protection laws, police reform acts, juvenile justice ordinances, minority rights provisions, these are distributed across provincial statutes and federal instruments. What is missing is the machinery that makes them operational. Hassan Abbas located the entry point with precision:

“There is significant scope for U.S. support to strengthen Pakistan’s civilian law enforcement capacity. In a country confronting terrorism, organized crime, and cross-border threats, investing in police reform also strengthens the broader criminal justice system, rule of law, and the daily security of ordinary citizens, enhancing people-to-people ties.”

Pakistan’s policing architecture remains structurally colonial, a force built to manage populations rather than serve them. This matters acutely for children, women, and religious minorities, who are simultaneously the most frequent victims of crime and the least likely to receive a meaningful state response. The reform opportunity is not complex: nationwide notification and operationalization of independent police oversight bodies across all provinces, modeled on the institutional logic Pakistan has already attempted in juvenile justice. The gap there was never the design; it was the political will to notify, fund, and insulate oversight bodies from interference. That same will, applied to policing, could produce a force that investigates crimes against ordinary citizens with the same urgency it deploys for other priorities.

Rule of law reform also demands transparency infrastructure. Pakistan needs publicly accessible, independently verified metrics for justice delivery, not internal dashboards visible only to ministry officials, but open-data systems through which civil society, media, and communities can track performance. Assistant Secretary of State Dr. Paul Kapur named the aspiration that such systems would serve:

“We want to ensure the goodwill and high-level attention in the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship translate into concrete benefits for the American and Pakistani people.”

Translating goodwill requires Pakistan to make benefits trackable. Budget execution transparency for rule-of-law programming, independently audited reporting on police performance, and measurable indicators for access to justice, particularly for children, women, and minorities, are not donor conditions to be managed around. They are instruments of national self-interest. We need fewer declarations and more dashboards.

Education is where the security argument and the rights argument converge most completely, and where Pakistan most consistently defers investment. In conflict-affected districts, girls’ education is simultaneously the most underfunded intervention and the one with the strongest evidence of reducing extremist recruitment pipelines over a generation. This should be presented in every bilateral conversation not as a welfare consideration but as a strategic one. Any engagement framework that does not include sustained, measurable commitments to girls’ education in KP and Balochistan is strategically incomplete, regardless of how well it performs in a Washington briefing room.

Child rights more broadly are constrained by the same implementation deficit that affects every other governance domain. Pakistan has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and enacted national and provincial child protection frameworks. What most jurisdictions do not have is a functioning referral system, the institutional connective tissue that links a child in crisis to a state response. The plumbing does not exist at scale. Technical cooperation from the United States, to be meaningful in this space, should focus precisely here: functional case management systems, notified and budgeted child protection units within police structures, and inter-agency protocols that survive changes in government. This is unglamorous work. It is also the only work that produces durable outcomes.

Minority safety is the stress test of every reform this article has discussed. A police force that does not protect minority communities from mob violence has not been reformed, regardless of what its training curriculum says. Congressman Bergman’s remarks, though framed in the American political context, carried direct structural relevance for Pakistan:

“When we think about Pakistan, one of the central challenges, and opportunities, is bringing together diverse populations to thrive in urban, suburban, and broader societal settings. That kind of unity doesn’t happen by chance. It starts with conversation. It starts with a shared belief that progress is possible when people come together, exchange ideas openly, and engage respectfully, even, and especially, when there are disagreements. Disagreements are inevitable. What matters is how we handle them, how we approach them with respect, listen with intent, and work toward common ground. That’s how meaningful, lasting progress is made. Through the Congressional Pakistan Caucus, Representative Suozzi and I are committed to building strong relationships with people from different governments, backgrounds, and perspectives. We strive to lead by example: two individuals from different parties, working side by side, demonstrating that collaboration and mutual respect can rise above division in pursuit of the common good.”

Pakistan does not lack diversity. It lacks the structured mechanisms for managing it without communal escalation. This requires investment in local government, the tier of the state closest to the fracture lines, and in community-level platforms where grievances are processed before they become security incidents. Minority protection indicators must be explicitly integrated into every governance and security reform that receives bilateral support. They cannot remain a supplementary chapter.

Ambassador Touqir Hussain offered the framing that should govern how Pakistan approaches this opening:

“If America wants good partners, it should have good policies. And the criterion of a good policy should not simply be that it looks good in Washington.”

The reciprocal applies: Pakistan must want good outcomes, and the criterion of a good outcome cannot simply be that it satisfies a donor report.

It is worth noting that the bilateral relationship has not arrived at this symposium without foundation. Chargé d’Affaires Natalie Baker has, over the course of her tenure at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, earned a quality of trust that is rare in diplomatic postings, respected on both sides of the relationship, in Washington’s policy corridors and in Pakistan’s civil society circles alike. Her engagement has been substantive, consistent, and attuned to the ground realities that often escape diplomatic attention. Alongside figures such as Rizwan Shaikh, whose standing in both capitals reflects the kind of people-to-people credibility that no formal framework can manufacture, she represents what effective bilateral stewardship looks like in practice. There is a strong case, and a widely held view among those who have worked with her, that elevating Natalie Baker to full Ambassador to Pakistan would send exactly the right signal at exactly the right moment: that the United States is not merely present in this relationship, but invested in it at the highest level of attention it can demonstrate.

Congressman Suozzi closed the symposium with a frame that Pakistan should take seriously as an opportunity rather than a ritual:

“This conference is about learning from the past, understanding where we are today, and charting a smarter, more cooperative path forward between our two countries.”

A smarter path has specific requirements on Pakistan’s side. Immediate notification and operationalization of independent police oversight bodies across all provinces. Publicly accessible, independently verified metrics for justice delivery and rule-of-law spending. Sustained, measurable investment in girls’ education in conflict-affected areas, named explicitly as a counter-terrorism priority. Functional child protection referral systems built within existing institutional frameworks. Minority protection indicators integrated into every bilateral reform programme from inception, not appended as afterthoughts.

None of these require new legislation. Most require only the decision to implement what already exists. The Congressional Pakistan Caucus has opened a door. What Pakistan does on its own side of that threshold will determine whether this moment becomes a milestone or simply another entry in a long register of promising beginnings.

One dimension conspicuously absent from the symposium’s agenda deserves mention, not as a criticism of an inaugural event, but as a marker for what the next edition must include. U.S. humanitarian assistance has been among the most tangible and emotionally significant threads in the U.S.–Pakistan relationship across decades. From earthquake response to flood relief, American assistance has reached Pakistani communities at their most vulnerable moments, building a reservoir of goodwill that no policy framework can replicate and no political disruption has entirely depleted. That history is not merely sentimental; it is strategic. It is the people-to-people foundation on which every higher-level engagement ultimately rests. A future symposium that places humanitarian cooperation, its past, its current constraints, and its potential architecture going forward, at the centre of its agenda would be addressing the dimension of this relationship that Pakistanis feel most directly. It belongs in the room.

In the end I have appreciate the all tireless efforts in entire team Congressman Tom Suazzi & Congressman Jack Bergman and Pakistan Embassy at Washington  DC.

Hope, in this context, is not a sentiment. It is a policy choice.

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Kashif Mirza is International Awarded, Researcher, writer filmmaker.  He writes on child rights, juvenile justice, and minority protections. The views expressed are his own. He can be reached at qashif.mirza@gmail.com and on X @qashifmirza. www.kashifmirza.com