Bangladesh and Pakistan are talking again. Biman has flown to Karachi twice a week since January 29. Ships from Karachi berth at Chattogram. Pakistan has offered 500 scholarships over five years, and by late September its Higher Education Commission put the number of Bangladeshis who had joined Pakistani universities at 74. Delegations have gone both ways.

I was in Islamabad from October 6-9 with a six-member delegation under the NextGen Leaders initiative. We met Tabadlab, Karandaaz and Globesight, the Pakistan Digital Authority, NADRA, the National Incubation Centre, the Special Technology Zones Authority and a network of Pakistani professionals educated abroad. The hospitality was warm and the briefings were serious. One question stayed with me. What does Bangladesh gain from this?

In FY2025-26 Pakistan sold us $67.2 million from us. That is close to eleven to one, on the State Bank of Pakistan's figures. Our central bank's numbers for the year before show the same shape, $71.6 million out. Four fifths of what Pakistan sells us is cotton and textile raw material. Our mills buy it because the Pakistani rupee fell and the cotton became cheap.

Bangladesh has asked Pakistan to remove tariffs on jute and jute goods. We made that request at the Joint Economic Commission in Dhaka last October, the first such meeting in nearly two decades. Pakistan said it was keen to buy more jute and committed to no tariff change.

The BGMEA president made the same request to Pakistan's high commissioner on 4 October this year, and the answer was an offer of business matchmaking and talk of a trade agreement after we graduate from least developed country status.

Why that request matters explains the relationship. Pakistan buys about 99% of its raw jute and jute yarn from us. Raw jute is charged 2% at the Pakistani border. Woven jute fabric is charged 20%. Jute sacks and bags are charged 36%.

Pakistan takes our fibre almost free and taxes everything we make from it. Its jute industry is shrinking, with half its mills closed. We already hold nearly all of a market that is not growing, and the duty ladder stops us climbing it. Our jute earnings from Pakistan fell from $63million in FY2021-22 to $23 million two years later.

The Pakistan Business Council has put unrealised Pakistani export potential in Bangladesh at nearly $3 billion,and Pakistan's chambers talk of raising sales to us from about $800 million to $3 billion. No institution in either country has published a target for Bangladeshi exports to Pakistan.

A participant at a round table in Islamabad told us that Bangladesh does not have much to offer Pakistan. He was describing the arithmetic rather than insulting us.

A deadline is coming. Our preferential access under SAFTA lapses when we graduate. Graduation stands at 24 November this year, and the Economic and Social Council has recommended a three-year deferral that the General Assembly has not yet adopted.

We have no bilateral arrangement with Pakistan beyond SAFTA. One was proposed in 2002 and stalled when Pakistan declined to give us unconditional market access. The preference we hold today will lapse with nothing behind it.

So if the gain is not trade, where is it?

It is in the systems, and this was the useful part of the visit. Bangladesh ranks ahead of Pakistan on five of the six international digital benchmarks we were shown, including e-government, network readiness and internet speed. Those indices measure access and services. They do not ask whether a payment clears instantly between any two providers, or whether one agency can fetch a record from another with a citizen's consent.

Pakistan has built those shared systems and we have not. Raast, run by the State Bank, connects every bank and wallet, costs the user nothing, and handled about 2 billion transactions worth Rs 50 trillion last year. Our binimoy closed in August 2025 and our interoperable system is due in 2027.

We have 255 million registered mobile money accounts sitting in wallets that connect poorly with each other and with the banks. NADRA and the Pakistan Digital Authority offered to share their standards and experience. That offer is worth taking before we build rather than after.

Pakistan does not substitute for India. Our relationship with India involves our rivers, our energy, our logistics and the bulk of our trade. Nothing in Islamabad touches any of that. A relationship built on the rupture with Delhi will be abandoned the moment Delhi becomes manageable again, and it will have cost us in the meantime.

Pakistan's attention has moved west. On July 1 last year the World Bank moved Pakistan and Afghanistan out of its South Asia region into an enlarged Middle East grouping, without a public announcement or a stated reason.

The vice-presidency that now handles Pakistan sits in Riyadh. South Asia is six countries run from New Delhi. Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia in September last year and a three-way agreement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye in August. It mediated a ceasefire between the United States and Iran. It is not looking east, and nobody has asked it to.

The history is unsettled. Pakistan's deputy prime minister told reporters in Dhaka in August last year that the issue "was settled for the first time in 1974". Its foreign ministry said in March that the events of 1971 are "complex and open to different interpretations". 

Our foreign adviser answered on the day: "I definitely do not agree. If we had agreed, the problem would have been resolved." At the first foreign office consultations in fifteen years we put three things on the table, a formal apology, $4.52 billion in pre-1971 assets, and the repatriation of some 324,000 stranded Pakistanis.

Pakistan responded to none of them. In Islamabad I met younger professionals who want to move past this. I did not hear it from anyone senior.

That is the trade-off. This relationship costs us at home and it will keep costing us, so we should be exact about what we are buying. If we are buying a trade partner, we are paying a political price for $67 million of exports and a tariff ladder that Pakistan has twice declined to lower.

If we are buying the institutional design we have failed to build across fifteen years of digital programmes, the price is worth paying, as nobody else is offering to teach us for nothing.

Pakistan is not weighing this relationship hard. It has Riyadh, Washington and a defence pact to think about. We should weigh it harder, as we are the only one of the two who will be asked at home to justify it.

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Md. Rubaiyath Sarwar is the Managing Director, Innovision Consulting and Lead, Inclusive Development and Socio-Economic Equity, Panam Institute