Pakistan Needs a Red Team Before Cabinet Says Yes

By the time a major proposal reaches the federal cabinet, it has usually acquired an air of inevitability. Months of drafting, consultation and negotiation have gone into it. The sponsoring ministry has invested institutional prestige in its success; officials have defended it across several meetings; and the summary before ministers is designed, quite properly, to secure a decision.

This process establishes whether a proposal is lawful, affordable and administratively acceptable. It is less effective at answering another question: what if the government’s central assumptions are wrong?

Pakistan audits expenditure, but it does not systematically audit confidence.

Serious policy failures seldom begin with an obviously foolish decision. They more often begin with a plausible forecast that nobody rigorously challenged: a project cost premised on uninterrupted financing; a tariff measure that underestimates behavioural response; a digital platform designed without accounting for weak departmental data; or a reform whose success depends upon several institutions acting in concert despite having little history of doing so.

The weakness is visible in Pakistan’s development portfolio. The International Monetary Fund’s 2025 Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment identifies inadequate mechanisms for project prioritisation, weaknesses in appraisal and selection, failure to protect funding throughout the project life cycle, and major delays and cost increases.

An earlier Public Investment Management Assessment found that, in 2022–23, the estimated cost of completing projects already in the federal Public Sector Development Programme stood at Rs10.7 trillion—more than fourteen times that year’s allocation of Rs727 billion.

These are not merely failures of implementation. Often, they are failures of anticipation. A proposal may satisfy every procedural requirement while resting on optimistic estimates, uncertain coordination or an untested theory of how citizens, markets and provincial governments will respond.

The federal government already possesses extensive consultative machinery. Under the Cabinet Division’s official format for cabinet summaries, a summary must present the relevant facts, record consultations with concerned ministries and divisions, and state any divergent views.

These are sensible disciplines, but they serve a different purpose. Consultation collects institutional opinions; red teaming assigns reviewers outside the sponsoring chain to test the assumptions beneath them.

Nor would a red team duplicate the Secretaries’ Committee. That forum can reconcile inter-ministerial differences and draw upon the experience of senior civil servants.

Its working papers, however, are also organised around background, consultation and a proposal for decision, as the Cabinet Division’s prescribed format for the committee shows. A red team would perform a narrower task before approval: construct the strongest evidence-based case that a proposal may fail, then identify how it could be made more resilient.

Pakistan does not need another permanent authority with separate headquarters, a large secretariat and an expanding budget. It needs a Red-Team Protocol within the existing machinery of government, administered by the Cabinet Division and applied selectively to consequential decisions.

The Cabinet Division could use a short risk screen based on fiscal exposure, difficulty of reversal, dependence on multiple institutions, uncertainty about public or market behaviour, data sensitivity and the consequences of failure.

Proposals crossing an agreed threshold would receive red-team review. Routine business would continue without delay; scrutiny would be reserved for decisions in which an untested assumption could impose serious and lasting costs.

For each qualifying case, a small group drawn from outside the sponsoring chain of command should produce a confidential, one-page Challenge Note.

Depending on the subject, it might include officers from other divisions, economists, engineers, implementation specialists or former civil servants with relevant experience. The review period should be fixed but proportionate—perhaps seven working days for an ordinary case, with additional time for genuine technical complexity.

Early access would be essential. A challenge delivered after positions have hardened becomes ceremony rather than scrutiny.

The note should focus on a limited set of questions. Which assumptions must hold for the proposal to succeed? What evidence would contradict them? How have comparable Pakistani initiatives performed? Where is the likely implementation bottleneck? What evidence or event should cause the government to revise, pause or terminate the initiative?

This would force proposals to move beyond phrases such as “adequate resources will be provided”, “all stakeholders will cooperate” or “the measure is expected to improve efficiency”. Such language often conceals the uncertainties ministers most need to see.

Major proposals should also contain a handful of testable forecasts. Instead of promising that an intervention will “substantially improve compliance”, the sponsoring division should state the expected improvement, the period in which it should occur and the information by which it will be measured.

The Cabinet Division could record these forecasts, the red team’s material warnings and the agreed review triggers in a compact internal Decision Calibration Register. After twelve or twenty-four months, outcomes could be compared with the original expectations.

The purpose would not be to reopen every decision or allocate blame with hindsight. It would be to discover whether ministries repeatedly underestimate costs, overstate coordination capacity or misjudge public response—and whether red-team warnings prove relevant or merely speculative.

Sponsoring divisions would have to defend their optimism; challengers would have to improve the quality of their criticism. Over time, government would learn not only whether its decisions succeeded, but whether its judgement was becoming more accurate.

This approach has growing support in administrative practice. The OECD’s 2026 work on behavioural public administration recommends pre-mortems, reference-class forecasting, calibrated estimates, red teams and stop-or-go decisions to counter optimism bias and sunk-cost thinking.

The United Kingdom recommends independent challenge panels to test policy weaknesses, while Canada’s Treasury Board guidance assigns its Secretariat responsibility for challenging departmental proposals and advising ministers on implementation risk. Pakistan need not reproduce either model. The lesson is that disciplined disagreement can be incorporated into government without transferring the power to decide.

Safeguards would be indispensable. The red team must advise, never veto. Its observations should distinguish evidence from inference and conjecture, while the sponsoring division should receive a short right of reply.

Ministers would then see the proposal, the strongest challenge to it and the sponsor’s response together. The note should remain confidential unless disclosure is subsequently authorised.

Membership should rotate according to the subject under review. Pakistan needs a permanent challenge process, not a permanent class of challengers.

A fixed group would eventually develop its own routines, incentives and blind spots; rotating expertise would reduce the risk of institutional capture and prevent the mechanism from becoming a rival bureaucracy.

A pilot could begin with a modest number of major infrastructure commitments, digital systems, consequential regulatory changes and programmes requiring several governments or agencies to act jointly.

After one year, the Cabinet Division could assess whether the process identified risks earlier, improved estimates or produced useful modifications. If it merely added paperwork, it should be redesigned or discontinued.

The deeper benefit would be institutional memory. Government files are usually excellent at recording what was approved, by whom and under which rule. They are less reliable at preserving what officials expected to happen, which risks they knowingly accepted and what warning signs were meant to trigger reconsideration.

A challenge note and calibration register would preserve the reasoning behind a decision and what experience eventually taught.

That record would help incoming ministers, transferred officers, auditors and parliamentary committees distinguish a genuinely unforeseen shock from an ignored warning. It would also protect conscientious officials.

A civil servant who raises an inconvenient possibility may presently be regarded as obstructive once momentum has gathered behind a proposal. A formal process would give responsible doubt a recognised place in decision-making.

This would neither weaken political authority nor permit unelected officials to frustrate an elected government’s programme. Ministers would remain free to proceed despite a warning. They would simply decide with a clearer view of the risks and the circumstances that might later require a change of course.

No protocol can eliminate policy failure. Governments must often act under pressure, with incomplete evidence and among unattractive alternatives.

A red team would serve a more realistic purpose: reducing avoidable surprise, exposing fragile assumptions before they become expensive commitments, and helping the state learn from the accuracy—not merely the outcome—of its decisions.

Pakistan’s administrative system has no shortage of intelligence or experience. What it lacks is a protected moment in which its best officers are instructed to doubt the official answer before the state commits itself to it, and a disciplined method for learning afterward whether that doubt was justified.

A confident government does not silence uncertainty. It organises it.

Sumreen Younas is an emerging legal scholar, writer and poet, and a final-year law student at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi. Her commentary in leading Pakistani newspapers and journals explores law, human rights, social policy and the responsibilities of public institutions, with particular attention to access to justice, student welfare and institutional accountability.

She received first place for an outstanding research submission through a U.S. Department of State GLO initiative involving a Fulbright Specialist and Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law & Religion.