In 2007, before coming back to Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto paid a visit to the USA. An American think tank requested a meeting, and when the meeting was held, the officials of the think tank presented Benazir Bhutto with some booklets a partner think tank of theirs in Pakistan had published. The booklets attempted an analysis of Pakistan’s political economy outlining a way out to allow prosperity to ameliorate the living conditions of every Pakistani.
Benazir Bhutto had a look at the booklets, and after flipping a few pages, said, ‘In a country like Pakistan, think tanks are not effective.’
These are not the exact words Benazir Bhutto had uttered. What she may have had in mind or may have meant could be something like that: think tanks may or cannot be effective in bringing a change.
We can try to see the reasons behind her view of think tanking in Pakistan as a failed project. But that would be a useless exercise. So let us try to sort out independently why think-tanking cannot be effective in a country like Pakistan.
I have always shared that pessimism regarding the effectiveness of think-tanking in Pakistan. But not when they confine themselves to the work of education and advocacy alone. But these roles also have a limit.
My argument is that education and advocacy think tanks have people in general, or students, teachers, journalists, or any specific section of society, as their audience. No doubt, it requires patient and sustained work to change the opinion of any people; however, it is not something impossible.
However, in the case of economic and policy think tanks that are not fundamentally devoted to education and advocacy roles, and their audience is not people at large or this or that section of society, and their audience is the government and its policymakers; it is altogether different.
Of course, when the audience changes, the nature and role of a think tank’s work also changes. That is, their focus is on the way a government deals with the economy and the manner in which its policymakers handle the economy and the businesses.
Herein lies the catch. With education and advocacy work, a think tank can certainly succeed in bringing a noticeable or remarkable change in the opinions and intellectual environment of the society.
But it is never the same with a government and its policymakers, and do mind it when it is the government of Pakistan. By that I mean a state in which constitutional parliamentary democracy is a façade while, as a matter of fact, Riyasati Ashrafiya (state aristocracy) runs the whole show.
That is why I strongly believe that an economic and policy think tank has a very limited scope to be successful in Pakistan. And it is mostly in consonance with the pessimism that Benazir Bhutto expressed.
Unlike that, I equally strongly believe that education and advocacy think-tanking have an important role in changing successfully the opinions and intellectual environment. And it is mostly in contrast to Benazir Bhutto’s view of think-tanking in Pakistan as a failed project.
Both types of “experiments” have been conducted in Pakistan during the last 25-30 years.
The education and advocacy think-tanking initially exercised by the Alternate Solutions Institute and then by the Prime Institute (Policy Research Institute of Market Economy) markedly succeeded in bringing a change in the intellectual environment in Pakistan. Earlier, the narrative of a government-dominated economy was in vogue, but the efforts of these think tanks succeeded in changing it to a market-based economy. In the same way, the politics of ignoring fundamental rights came to be a politics of securing the same rights for each citizen.
Likewise, the Prime Institute’s economic and policy think-tanking since 2013 has been unsuccessful. No single example of sustained policy change is available on its record. Notwithstanding, Prime’s part of education and advocacy work has been abundantly productive.
As Jean-Paul Sartre, French writer and thinker, said, it is only practice that determines whether something is possible or impossible. I think the education and advocacy think-tanking in Pakistan demonstrated its efficacy, whereas economic and policy think-tanking yielded no positive results, so to speak.
That means Benazir Bhutto was part true and part wrong in her assessment of think-tanking in Pakistan.
[30 June, 2026]