A Swedish friend, Tetra Pak MD in Pakistan, departed from the country on short notice.
I asked why? His guard had stepped away for prayers and left his rifle 🔫 in the open. The MD's ten-year-old son found it. That was the moment he decided #Pakistan was not a safe place.
We've normalised brandishing guns. Rifles on every gate, containers across every road — to us, that reads as security. To the rest of the world, it is the opposite: an insecure country on the brink of an attack.
I've watched long marches of Benazir (90s) Nawaz (00s), Imran (10s), and never seen this many container walls. Shutting down a city to manage a protest projects the opposite of control and clam.
Every visible gun, every sealed road, is an act of self-sabotage against #FDI we want.
#Investors read our security theatre as a warning, rather as safety.
To us, guns mean "you are protected”, but to investors they scream "be afraid."