Mr Dar and our 'Inshallah economy'.

The metaphor of the boiling frog seems to capture quite aptly how Pakistan's economy has been driven into abject despair over the past few months. The myth goes that a frog, if dumped into boiling water, will struggle, jump out and escape, but if placed in tepid water that is gradually brought to a boil, it will ignore the danger till it dies. The story illustrates the dangers of not acting against threats that are building up slowly over time. In the example illustrated by the metaphor, the 'creeping normality' of slowly warming water ultimately proves deadly for the frog.

In Pakistan's case, our financial managers' inability to act against the creeping normality of eventual default has brought us to the edge of a gruesome fate. The political question, of course, is: what timeline do we put on this period of inaction? Those familiar with the trajectory of Pakistan's economy would argue that we were always doomed to be where we are now.

A country that consumes far more than it produces, and finances its growing deficits with more loans rather than increasing its capacity to produce, was always bound to end up where we are now. There is no denying the fundamental soundness of that argument.

Yet, there is also no denying the fact that we may just have avoided this painful reckoning had it not been for the disastrous antics of our current Finance Minister Ishaq Dar. Just why Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, Maryam Nawaz, chose to impose him on the country in the midst of a raging crisis defies understanding.

Even when the help from friendly countries that he kept promising repeatedly failed to materialise, the finance minister refused to budge from this line

Their party, the PML-N, had spent three odd years condemning and criticising the PTI government, describing its leaders as unfit, unexperienced and having no grasp on Pakistan's economic realities. One would have assumed, given the self-confidence with which it launched into those tirades, that the N-league's 'more experienced' finance team would have the answers to Pakistan's predicament when it took over last April.

It seemed for a short while that it did. Mr Ismail, for all his faults, seemed aware of the looming danger and struggled proactively - and ultimately, successfully - to revive the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme. Yet it was clear even then that not many within his party agreed with his approach.

In swooped Mr Dar with a snake oil pitch. He discredited Mr Ismail's...