By Raza Ruman
–Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous words captured a moment when Pakistan confronted what it saw as an existential security challenge.
The decision that followed eventually culminated in the country’s nuclear capability, demonstrated decades later at Chagai. It was a long, difficult journey, built on political will, scientific effort and an insistence that Pakistan could not permanently outsource its security to others.
Today, Pakistan stands at another such crossroads — but this time the battlefield is digital.
The global race for artificial intelligence is accelerating at a pace that could transform economies, militaries and societies before countries such as Pakistan have even finished deciding how to respond.
AI is no longer simply another emerging technology. It is rapidly becoming a foundational layer of economic competitiveness, national security and state capacity.
For Pakistan, the stakes are particularly high.
A significant portion of the country’s roughly $4.6 billion in annual IT exports comes from freelancing, call centres, software services and relatively entry-level coding. These sectors have provided employment and brought valuable foreign exchange into the country. But they are also among those most exposed to rapid advances in AI.
As AI systems become capable of performing coding, customer support, content creation, data analysis and other digital tasks at increasingly low costs, the value of many services currently exported by Pakistan could decline sharply. What looks like a competitive advantage today could become a vulnerability tomorrow.
There is another, less visible problem: dependence.
If Pakistani businesses, universities and government institutions increasingly rely on AI models, cloud platforms and computing infrastructure owned by foreign corporations, the country could find itself paying an ever-growing external bill simply to participate in the AI economy. By the end of this decade, those costs could become substantial.
The more serious concern, however, is national security.
Modern defence systems are becoming increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence. Drones, electronic warfare, intelligence systems, autonomous platforms and advanced sensors are all moving towards greater use of AI. A country that depends entirely on foreign systems, foreign models and foreign data infrastructure for these capabilities risks creating a strategic vulnerability that cannot easily be repaired during a crisis.
Pakistan therefore needs an AI sovereignty strategy — not necessarily a race to build a model larger than those developed by the world’s richest technology companies, but a determined effort to ensure that the country can operate, adapt and innovate independently.
The first step should be talent.
In the 1970s, Pakistan managed to create incentives that persuaded scientists and engineers living abroad to return and contribute to a national project. A similar effort is needed today. Pakistani computer scientists, AI researchers, engineers and technology entrepreneurs around the world should be given a compelling reason to come home.
They should be offered competitive salaries, generous research budgets, modern laboratories and, most importantly, autonomy.
Pakistan does not need to replicate the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the world’s largest technology companies. It needs to identify the capabilities that matter most to its own economic and strategic interests.
That could begin with hosting capable open-weight AI models domestically, developing expertise to fine-tune them for Pakistani languages and local requirements, and building secure national data pipelines. Government institutions and defence organisations should be able to run critical AI applications inside Pakistan, rather than relying entirely on foreign infrastructure.
The computing infrastructure itself need not be concentrated in expensive urban centres. Data centres can be established in locations where electricity and land are relatively affordable and reliable, while research and development can remain closely connected to universities and technology hubs.
The objective should be simple: Pakistan must be able to use AI without becoming dependent on someone else’s AI.
That is a far more realistic ambition than attempting to build a frontier model from scratch. Once the foundations — talent, computing capacity, data, research institutions and domestic models — are established, the country can decide how far it wants to go.
The lesson of Chagai is not merely that Pakistan built a nuclear capability. The deeper lesson is that strategic independence begins with recognising a threat early enough to act.
The nuclear programme took decades. AI does not offer Pakistan that luxury.
The technological landscape is changing in years, perhaps even months. Skills that are valuable today may be automated tomorrow. Industries that appear secure today may be transformed almost overnight. Defence systems that seem advanced today may become obsolete without continuous access to AI expertise and infrastructure.
Pakistan cannot afford to wait until the consequences become impossible to ignore.
The country once decided that it could not permanently leave its security in the hands of others. It may now have to make the same decision about artificial intelligence.
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