We are neither economists nor diplomats; one of us is a soldier, the other a mechanic. 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, because we suspect none of them has had the nerve or clarity to make it in thirty-five years. 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 later it is worth asking what that moment actually cost, who helped 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 later it is worth asking what that moment actually cost, who helped 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 said 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. The United States funded and armed that effort through Operation Cyclone, and the Gulf states matched Washington’s money, but no American soldier ever fired a shot at a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan. 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, while hosting more than three million Afghan refugees on top of it.
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 made the war possible 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 price 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 stopped 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. We should be careful not to overreach on that point, because the point next door is strong enough to stand on its own.
That is the part of the story Pakistan tells itself, when it tells this story at all. Here is the part it does not tell: for thirty-five years, while the frontline state that helped bleed the USSR dry watched fifteen new nations walk free, Pakistan itself captured almost none of the diplomatic or economic dividend of that freedom. 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 nearly its entire government 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 people, 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 many 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 growth, was available to any of these republics as constituent parts of the USSR, where investment, prices, 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.
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 helped set the stage for all of this, has a trade and diplomatic footprint across 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 about 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 across 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.
This, we would argue, is the real failure and it 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: officers trained in political reporting, ceremony, and crisis management, not in trade economics, investment structuring, or market entry strategy. The Foreign Office’s working definition of “economy,” as far as one can tell from thirty-five years of missed openings, begins and ends at the personal level: a plot in Dubai, an apartment in London, a cryptocurrency portfolio quietly built on a diplomat’s own account, and the well-trodden postings to Washington and Brussels that every ambitious officer competes for. That is not economic diplomacy. That is personal asset management wearing a diplomatic passport. An institution whose collective economic imagination stops at real estate in the Gulf and paperwork in the West was never going to notice sixteen countries, from Tallinn to Tashkent to Berlin, quietly building the kind of trade and technology relationships Pakistan should have built first. You cannot represent a country’s economic interests in Astana or Vilnius if the only market you have ever studied closely is the one for your own second home. In 2026, diplomacy that cannot read a balance sheet is diplomacy that leaves money on the table. Countries that have gotten this right, Singapore’s trade-first foreign service, South Korea’s chaebol-embedded commercial attachés, Germany’s own Auswärtiges Amt with its dedicated economic diplomacy track, treat economic literacy as a core competency for a diplomat, not a specialist add-on.
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 helped make possible. 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 because thirty-five years of missed dividends is a long enough lesson that the next thirty-five should not repeat it. It should also never be forgotten, and rarely is it said aloud: these fifteen nations and a reunified Germany now live their freedom and prosperity in peace, 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.