Winning Reports, Losing Reality: A Dictator’s Downfall

The war was lost, but the morning report to the top boss, regardless said: “everything under control.”

To truly understand what is happening in Pakistan, you have to know how the country’s power system operates in two parallel realities. One is the actual ground reality, and the other is the sanitised version presented in daily reports and morning briefs, custom-built for one end consumer: the top boss.

The problem with hierarchical, mechanised institutions when operating under insecure and intellectually dishonest leadership is that nobody wants to be honest or the bearer of bad news. The result? Daily monitoring reports are first ‘tinkered with,’ then ‘adjusted,’ and, in the final days of the regime, utterly ‘distorted.’

This distortion serves a critical purpose. It adds to the confirmation bias and keeps the leader cocooned in a false sense of control while those around him continue with their short-term perks, privileges and promotions.

There’s a reason why there won’t be an internal coup the way we imagine it—through a midnight attack or takeover by morally upright officers—because the nature of the coup has changed, and it’s already underway on auto-pilot for while.

The very chain of command that is meant to serve the top boss is configured to insulate and sabotage the man in the high castle; a slow, painful coup simmering on low heat, inevitable but delayed by delusion.

The history is replete with the same script over and again, yet the fate of the dictator is to never learn.