IN Washington, a short walk can feel like an exercise in mapping the world’s anxieties. On one quiet stretch of Northwest DC, Pakistan’s embassy sits just steps away from the Israeli mission — neighbours by accident of location, but poles apart by history, narrative and ideology.

A few miles away across the Potomac, in Langley, Virginia, the CIA’s headquarters is a reminder of the machinations of a superpower’s deep state. An hour’s drive from the capital on hilly terrain, the timeless rigours of nature around the Shen­andoah valley, got me thinking about the world’s most influential constitutional democracy, and how its new security document “looks like the Janus face of a fraying domestic constitutional order, providing geopolitical cover for domestic authoritarian rule and corporate aggrandizement”, in the words of two former US officials.

The lesson, in fact, is simple: no society is immune when trust collapses and politics turns into a fight not over policy, but legitimacy. Pakistan has lived this saga for decades. Our tragedy is that we often debate democracy as if it were a trophy to be won, not a discipline to be practised. We speak of ‘rule of law’ while rewarding selective accountability.

We invoke constitutionalism while resorting to distorting it. We offer dialogue without first restoring dignity, then wonder why no one trusts the offer. At the heart of this dysfunction is this question: are we governed by law or by rulers who use the law as an instrument? Under the rule of law, the state restrains itself; under the law of the ruler, the state restrains the citizen.

Pakistan does not require yet........

© Dawn