Editorial
The Republic Policy Think Tank has long held that Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan occupy a category of their own in Pakistan’s national calculus. These are not ordinary administrative units. They are territories whose status carries direct consequences for Pakistan’s security, its diplomatic standing, and its future as a state. Treating them with the same administrative logic applied to a provincial department would be a strategic error of the first order.
The starting point must always be the internationally recognised disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir. This is not a domestic matter that Pakistan alone gets to define and resolve. It is a live international dispute, documented in United Nations resolutions, argued before global forums, and contested across diplomatic channels for more than seven decades. Occupied Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan are three distinct dimensions of a single unresolved question. Collapsing them into one administrative framework, as though the dispute did not exist, would hand Pakistan’s adversaries an argument they have long sought: that Pakistan itself treats the region as settled territory rather than disputed land.
This is why flexibility and pragmatism are not weaknesses in Pakistan’s approach to these regions. They are strategic necessities. Rigid administrative uniformity, however satisfying it may appear in legal or bureaucratic terms, risks undermining the moral and political case that Pakistan presents to the world: that the people of Kashmir have an unexercised right to self-determination, and that this right remains Pakistan’s cause and commitment.
The state must therefore approach every decision concerning these territories through a wider lens, one that holds national interest, diplomatic strategy, and historical responsibility in view simultaneously. Administrative convenience cannot be allowed to compromise geopolitical reality. Pakistan’s position on Kashmir is its strongest card. It must be played with care.
