There is an old story about a farmer whose sons were industrious in almost nothing. On his deathbed, he told them that treasure lay buried somewhere in his field. After he died, the sons dug through the land from end to end, certain they would find gold. They found nothing.
But the digging had broken and turned the soil. With little else to do, they planted wheat. The harvest was abundant. The next year they dug again, still half-convinced they had missed the treasure, and again they planted. Again, the field yielded well. Only after repeating this cycle did they understand what their father had left them.
There had never been treasure buried in the field. The treasure was the field itself, and the knowledge of how to cultivate it.
That story offers a useful way to think about a phrase Pakistan invokes frequently, especially around the fourteenth of August: soft power. We are told that Pakistan must build it, improve its image, brand itself better, and tell its story to the world. Campaigns are commissioned, slogans written, tourism videos celebrated as breakthroughs. Behind much of this is the assumption that soft power is something a country manufactures and then projects outward.
But perhaps the treasure was never buried.
Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” to describe influence through attraction rather than coercion or payment: the ability to make others want what you want. The concept remains useful. Yet in practice, some of the most durable forms of international admiration are not designed as instruments of statecraft at all.
A fast bowler does not run in thinking about national image; he is trying to take a wicket. A qawwal does not raise his voice to improve diplomatic relations; he is trying to reach something beyond himself and take his listeners there. A humanitarian does not answer an emergency call to manage the reputation of a country; he answers because somebody needs help.
The admiration comes afterward.
This suggests a different way of understanding soft power. The question for Pakistan, then, is not simply, “How do we make ourselves attractive to the world?” It is also, “What do we already do, for its own sake, that the world has learned to admire?”
The farmer’s sons expected something spectacular and immediately valuable: gold. What they inherited instead was wheat, seasonal and demanding, but renewable. Gold can be extracted and spent. A field must be cultivated, but it can yield again and again.
The distinction matters for national image-making. A branding campaign often follows the logic of extraction: locate something attractive in the culture, package it, and convert it into prestige. Cultivation works differently. It begins by asking what already exists within a society: what its people do exceptionally well, what they value deeply, what habits of excellence have developed organically over generations.
Soft power, viewed this way, need not begin with invention. It can begin with discovery.
Pakistan may therefore not need a new soft power invented from scratch by a committee. It may need to recognize the soft power its people have already been cultivating for decades.
Allama Iqbal gives us a language for this. In Bang-i-Dara, he writes:
Yaqeen-e-mohkam, ‘amal-e-paiham, mohabbat fatih-e-Alam
Firm conviction, continuous striving, and love that conquers the world.
The line is often repeated as patriotic ornament. Read as an argument, however, it is more demanding. Conviction becomes meaningful through sustained action, and action draws its deepest force from love. Iqbal’s “love that conquers the world” need not be read as domination.
That is where Pakistan’s most persuasive forms of soft power have often come from.
Cricket is an obvious example. What travelled outward from Pakistan was never only victory, but style: the sight of fast bowlers such as Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis turning reverse swing into an art form studied and imitated around the cricketing world. The affection this generated did not begin in a ministry. It began in nets, grounds and streets, with players learning what an old ball could do.
Hockey tells an older story. For decades Pakistan was one of the defining powers of the sport, winning three Olympic gold medals and four World Cups. Squash offers an even more extraordinary example. Jahangir Khan’s 555-match unbeaten run, followed by Jansher Khan’s domination of the game, turned Pakistani excellence into part of the sport’s global memory. In each case, influence followed mastery. The world admired Pakistan because Pakistanis had first become very good at something they cared deeply about.
K2 offers a different kind of inheritance. Pakistan did not create the mountain, but its place in the Karakoram has made the country inseparable from one of the world’s great stories of endurance and human limit. Climbers come because the mountain is difficult, not because it has been marketed well. Here too, the lesson is recognition before promotion: some forms of attraction already exist. The first responsibility is to understand their value and steward them well.
The same principle appears differently in culture.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan carried qawwali from a devotional tradition rooted in South Asia into concert halls across the world. Many listeners understood neither Punjabi nor Persian, yet language was not the barrier one might expect. Voice, repetition, longing and spiritual intensity travelled on their own. Faiz Ahmed Faiz achieved something similar through poetry. His work emerged from a specific political and literary world, yet its language of hope, grief and justice has been adopted by readers and movements far beyond its original context.
What crosses borders in such cases is not “information about Pakistan.” It is something more intimate: cadence, beauty, ache, aspiration.
And then there is Abdul Sattar Edhi.
Edhi complicates the very idea of soft power because he appears to have cared so little about power of any kind. From Karachi, he built a humanitarian network of ambulances, shelters, orphanages and medical services on an extraordinary scale. Yet the force of his example lay not only in the institution he created. It lay in the moral simplicity behind it: need came before identity, publicity or prestige. He was not trying to make Pakistan look compassionate. He was trying to help the next person who needed help.
That is precisely why his life became such a powerful representation of Pakistan. Compassion performed for an audience is publicity. Compassion practiced because suffering demands a response becomes moral authority.
Sport, culture and service may appear to be separate stories, but they share a structure. Love of a game becomes discipline, and discipline becomes excellence. Love of language and sound becomes art, and art creates intimacy. Love of human beings becomes service, and service creates trust. Soft power, in this sense, is not manufactured first and believed later. It is earned internally before it is recognized externally.
This should not become an exercise in self-congratulation. Pakistan’s image is also shaped by sectarian violence, intolerance, inequality, political instability and failures of public compassion. No serious account of national influence can simply place sporting trophies, poetry and charity over those realities and call the picture complete.
But failure to embody a value does not necessarily mean the value has disappeared. Pakistani society still possesses a moral vocabulary shaped by ideas such as rahmah (mercy), ihsan (excellence in doing good), khidmah (service) and generosity. The existence of such a vocabulary does not absolve failure. It does, however, provide a language by which failure can still be recognized as failure, and therefore a resource through which renewal remains imaginable.
This is why the language of cultivation matters.
Return to the field. The farmer’s sons did not become wealthy because they eventually located hidden gold. They prospered because repeated labour taught them what the land could produce. The work itself became the inheritance.
Pakistan’s soft power may be much the same. It does not need to be invented from nothing or announced into existence. It has already grown in cricket grounds and hockey fields, in the discipline of squash champions, in qawwali and poetry, and in an ambulance driver crossing Karachi because someone, somewhere, had called for help.
The task is not to search harder for treasure. It is to recognise the field, protect what grows well in it, repair what has been neglected, and cultivate it with greater seriousness.
Yaqeen-e-mohkam, ‘amal-e-paiham, mohabbat fatih-e-Alam.
Conviction. Sustained action. Love that conquers the world.
Perhaps that is soft power at its deepest: not the power to compel the world’s attention, but the ability to cultivate something so well, and for reasons so much larger than publicity, that the world chooses to pay attention anyway.
