For decades, the Star Wars franchise, developed by George Lucas (now acquired by Disney) and beginning with the release of the first film in 1977, was designed to appeal to younger audiences and, in later years, nostalgic grown-ups who grew up with it.
Star Wars is a space opera that heavily borrows themes from Greek mythology and tells the story of the struggle between good (the Rebellion) and evil (the Empire).
At its heart are nine films (three trilogies) complemented by a number of spinoff films and series. One of those series currently airing is ‘Andor’, which is approaching the conclusion of its second and final season. This particular instalment of the Star Wars franchise stands out for adopting a grittier tone, distinctly aimed at adults. It explores serious themes of colonialism, genocide, information warfare/ fake news, sexual violence, and the slow, engineered slide of a society’s politics from democracy into fascism.
The recently concluded story arc describes the Empire’s creeping colonisation of an indigenous people’s land for natural resources. Sy is policed with increasing aggression, mistreatment by security forces, and deliberately pushed towards insurgency. To create a pretext for a genocide, security services willfully close their eyes to manufacture a volatile situation, prod insurgents to action, and even fire the first bullet. The clash leaves hundreds of locals and a much smaller number of coloniser soldiers dead. In the controlled news coverage that follows, the dead colonisers are humanised and mourned while deaths of the indigenous population are covered up, not acknowledged, and questioned.
Watching the ending, I was reminded of two places on Earth — the current Middle Eastern genocide and Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. In both places, the simplest explanations fit the facts that the most recent violence (October 7, 2023 and April 22, 2025) are reactions to occupying forces continuing to push the local populations’ backs against the wall.
But ‘Andor’ reminded me that the slightly more complicated explanation, that both attacks were allowed to happen to create a context that serves to justify yet another round of atrocities, what some commentators in the media have called a false-flag operation, is not outside the realm of possibility. Art imitates life and life imitates art. While no two situations are ever exactly the same, it makes me wonder if the tens of millions of fans that will watch this series will see the many parallels between this piece of fiction and the world we live in.
Like many compatriots, I spent the day after the ceasefire announcement reflecting on the loss of innocent civilian lives on both sides, but also celebrating Pakistan’s military and diplomatic wins and savouring this moment of national unity. I spent some time sifting through media clips from across the border of fuming media personalities who, only two nights earlier, were loudly claiming the fall of all major cities of Pakistan.
I am sure there will be a great many lessons in military tactics and strategy that will be derived from the events of the last few days. But in the running analysis of the conflict, one talking point that kept popping up was that Pakistan has a much lower capacity to absorb the financial cost of a prolonged shooting war. Coverage by domestic and foreign correspondents consistently described Pakistan’s economy as cash-strapped to the extent that it would have a harder time keeping up a prolonged fight.
The lesson in the background was that, to afford a credible deterrent defence needed for life in our neighbourhood, we have to grow more prosperous. The US won the cold war against the USSR not by firing more shots or employing superior tactics, but by outspending it.
For anyone who has worked in or studied the education sector — school and higher, private and public — that is not a new lesson. Growing more prosperous and productive will require an educated population, and no country to date has ever achieved that without a literate and educated citizenry (and sometimes not even then) — it is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition.
To provide access to quality education to all will require more (much more) spending, which makes this a chicken-and-egg problem. The economy seems to have done better in the last year, but we will have to see how that translates into more attention to and resources for education.
There was also another aspect to the conflict. In addition to its kinetic operations, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) stated that they were augmented by systematic and organised cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in India, a significant development. To the lay observer, it may look a lot like the information warfare conducted by unorganised or semi-organised trolls that flood social media. All it takes to be a troll is a phone, basic literacy, and the ability to offend — an education is optional.
Cybersecurity is a very different ballgame that requires deep technical expertise. The world today is all caught up in the (justified) excitement for artificial intelligence, but for mainstream adoption, that too will have to be underpinned by cybersecurity.
So, where do we stand? The average number of school grades for which children attend school in Pakistan is eight, but the average level of learning is equal to a child who has attended and understands concepts covered up to grade V. The adult literacy rate stands at 63% — more than a third of the population of 240 million is classified as not literate. This is the state of the pipeline to the higher education sector. The higher education sector has seen some initiatives that proved successful but also others that were less so.
Today, going by different sources, the percentage of Pakistan’s population that has access to higher education has reached the 10-12% level. Quality remains the pivotal challenge in both school and higher education. There is no question that it has seen many improvements since the dawn of the millennium, but I question if it needed to take all of these 25 years to get to where we are now (and the road ahead is still very long).
The contribution of the federal budget to higher education for the last seven years has stood frozen at around Rs65 billion. For context, that comes out to only $230 million for various levels of support to more than 140 public universities — a pittance! For global context, a single public university in the US often has an annual operating budget ranging anywhere from $1 billion to $10 billion, depending on size.
Unfortunately, I have heard quite a few senior bureaucrats of the bean-counting persuasion express their views on the higher education sector, alleging that it is too expensive and has not delivered anything. Reducing or freezing investments in education, both school and higher, is not an ingredient of a high-GDP economy and, by extension, a strong defence.
The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
