by Junaid S Ahmad
The West is very proud of its eyesight. Satellites blink. Algorithms scrape. Journalists retweet. Intelligence agencies inhale metadata like oxygen. We are assured—ritually — that nothing escapes the gaze.
And yet, for more than two years, one of the largest, most unified, and most explicitly nonviolent protest movements in the Muslim world unfolded in Pakistan and barely registered as a rumor. Millions marched. Courts were folded into origami. Media was throttled into obedience. Protesters were killed. An election was bent in public view. A former prime minister — still the country’s most popular politician — was jailed, isolated, and legally pulverized in slow motion.
The West saw none of it.
Or rather, it saw everything — and chose silence.
That silence has outlived the alibi of oversight. It is not a blind spot. It is a preference. A policy choice, executed with the same professional calm Pakistan’s rulers apply to repression: administrative, legalistic, incremental — and therefore safely boring.
Now contrast Iran. There, unrest — sometimes courageous, often fragmented, occasionally theatrical — is greeted with breathless saturation. Every burning trash bin becomes a prophecy. Every scuffle is narrated as destiny. Panels bloom. Hashtags are canonized. Sanctions are proposed as moral hygiene. Bombing plans are floated as compassion. The West’s moral imagination, we are told, is fully awake.
In Pakistan, repression lacks cinematography. It is paperwork with bruises. Court orders with truncheons. Blackouts, disappearances, selective massacres — administered in polite, digestible doses. No spectacle, no redemption arc, no viral crescendo.
And therefore: no outrage.
This is the real double standard — not democracy versus dictatorship, but spectacle versus discipline. The West does not respond to injustice; it responds to aesthetics. It is not moved by principle but by alignment. Iran is defiant, ideologically irritating, and refuses obedience. Pakistan, under khaki management, is compliant, rentable, and useful.
Regime change in Islamabad already occurred in April 2022. Washington got what it wanted. Why linger for the cleanup?
So repression in Iran becomes a civilizational emergency, while repression in Pakistan — broader, more systematic, and more casually vicious — is filed under “complex internal dynamics.” Neocons avert their eyes. Imperial liberals suddenly discover nuance. Stability has been preserved. That is what matters. Democracy, as ever, is a slogan — shouted at adversaries, playfully whispered to clients.
Pakistan’s rulers, meanwhile, deserve grudging applause for technical mastery. They have perfected repression without alarming donors. No tanks on television. No mass executions. Just preventive detention, judicial choreography, media blackouts, calibrated violence. The objective is not terror; it is fatigue — the slow education of a population into resignation.
They learned from the best. Endless force can be laundered as “security.” Repression can be polished into “stability” and sold at investment forums. Align abroad, manage the natives at home, and human rights become a domestic inconvenience — regrettable, but non-actionable.
Imran Khan’s treatment is emblematic. Reduced to a nuisance footnote. His mass popularity treated like bad weather: unfortunate, irrational, best ignored. His imprisonment framed as law rather than what it is: the procedural neutralization of the only figure capable of mobilizing popular consent against a military-mafia political order.
Western officials know this. Western journalists know this. Their silence is not ignorance; it is calculation. Pakistan is not the patient they wish to save. It is the contractor they wish to retain.
Why the indulgence? Because Pakistan is useful.
It sells arms into sanctioned shadows. It pressures Afghanistan on cue. It whispers when messages need passing. It balances China just enough. It competes with India theatrically, offering leverage over both. And it does all of this cheaply — content with IMF choreography, diplomatic flattery, and the occasional imperial head-pat. If a compliment from Washington’s strongmen passes for statesmanship, that is because the bar has been buried.
Iran, by contrast, refuses to audition for usefulness. It does not subcontract sovereignty. It does not beg for approval. And so its unrest is elevated into a moral epic, while Pakistan’s organized, strategically disciplined uprising is reduced to background noise.
Here lies the lesson — brutal, transferable, and widely learned: nonviolence is invisible; coordination is punished; popularity is dangerous. Repression works if executed quietly and in alignment with Western interests. The moral economy of attention is not rigged accidentally — it is rigged professionally.
Pakistan’s rulers are not victims of this hypocrisy; they are its beneficiaries. They have mastered the art of being just authoritarian enough to dominate at home and just cooperative enough to escape scrutiny abroad.
But hypocrisy, like repression, compounds interest.
A world that amplifies unrest in Tehran while ignoring mass repression in Pakistan is not promoting democracy; it is advertising cynicism. A media ecosystem that fetishizes chaos while dismissing organization is not informing publics; it is training them to mistake noise for courage and order for apathy. A foreign policy that rewards usefulness over legitimacy is not stabilizing regions; it is manufacturing the next rupture.
What the West has done here is issue a quiet but devastating memo to the world: shout, burn, bleed theatrically, and you may be seen; organize patiently, mobilize millions, threaten power without spectacle — and you will be erased.
That is not neutrality. It is instruction.
And history has never been kind to empires that mistake erasure for control.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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