The wall buys time. It doesn’t build anything.
Protection is not a strategy. It is a pause. It holds the line while the rest of the world keeps moving. And here is what I find striking about the current fight: the draft policy everyone is arguing over sets its own target of $6 billion in vehicle and auto-parts exports by 2031. Even the assemblers quoted in the coverage concede the real point — what the sector needs is predictable policy that rewards exports, genuine localisation and technology transfer, not a permanently sheltered home market.
We are spending our energy fighting over the tariff line and almost none on the export line. That is the wrong fight to win. A firm that survives only because imports are made expensive has not become competitive — it has become comfortable. And comfort is the most dangerous place to stand when the ground is about to move.
The ground is moving under the old model
And it is moving quickly. For forty years our supplier base was built around a handful of Japanese assemblers and the petrol engine. That world is ending. Chinese brands are arriving with new models and new price points. Battery-electric, hybrid and plug-in vehicles each carry different parts, different suppliers and different import dependencies.
A component engineered for an internal-combustion engine is, more and more, a component with an expiry date — and no tariff can push that date back. This is precisely the moment when hiding behind a wall is most dangerous, because the wall protects yesterday’s product. If a meaningful share of what our members build is designed for engines the world is walking away from, the question is not how to defend that output. It is where else on earth it can be sold — and what to build once it can’t be.
I have watched this work the other way
I am not arguing from theory. From 2004 to 2007, as CEO of the Engineering Development Board, my mandate was to take Pakistani industry into Europe. For the decade after that, as an engineering expert with the Netherlands’ CBI programme, I worked with more than 150 small and medium manufacturers across more than 40 countries, preparing them to meet European buyers on European terms.
The lesson from every one of those cases is the same. Exporting is not a lucky order picked up at a trade fair. It is a system — the right product, the right market, the compliance, the costing, the follow-through — built deliberately, one step at a time. The firms that treated it as a system broke into markets they had been told were closed to them. The firms that simply waited for protection are, many of them, still waiting.
What a Business Support Organization could do now
This is where an organisation like PAAPAM could change the story. Its weight with government is real, and its jobs argument is legitimate. But weight spent entirely on defending the home market is weight only half used. The other half is helping members earn foreign currency.
Imagine the same energy directed at export readiness: working out which members have a product a foreign buyer actually wants; which markets to enter, and in what order; what certification and quality gaps stand in the way; and how to position Pakistan as a credible “China+1” second source for Western buyers who are, right now, actively trying to de-risk away from a single supply country. That is not a theoretical opportunity. It is a door that is open today and will not stay open forever. A BSO that walks its members through it builds something a tariff never can — companies that can stand on their own in any policy weather.
The wall will come down. Be ready for it.
Policies change. Governments liberalise, then protect, then liberalise again — no wall in this country has ever stood forever. The firms still standing when this one shifts will not be the ones that built the highest barrier. They will be the ones that used the shelter to get export-ready while they had it.
So by all means, make the case to the Prime Minister. The jobs are worth fighting for. But fight for the second thing too. If you want to know where your own business actually stands on export readiness — before you spend a rupee — that is the conversation I spend my days having. The wall is a pause button. The smart move is to use the pause to build the plan.
