NEW DELHI: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Ministry of Defence are spearheading an ambitious, multi-billion-dollar digital transformation aimed at hardening national security infrastructure and automating counter-terrorism and internal security functions. A review of recent government tender documents, including the National Computer Emergency Response Team (NCERT) “Digital Forensic” project and the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) 2026 IT framework, points to a strong pivot toward indigenous cybersecurity standards to reshape the country’s intelligence and surveillance landscape.
The shift marks a departure from Pakistan’s historically human-intelligence centric model. Intelligence assessments from late 2025 indicate that the ISI is increasingly emphasising technical enablement, encrypted communications, and data-driven monitoring to support long-term operational continuity. This transition reflects a move towards a “digital-first” security posture, in which technology augments or replaces traditional tradecraft across counter-terrorism, financial tracking, and internal threat detection.
The financial underpinning of this transformation is visible in Pakistan’s 2025-2026 defence allocation, which rose to approximately $9 billion (2.55 trillion PKR), representing a roughly 20 percent increase year-on-year. Procurement records and policy documents suggest that a significant portion of this funding is being channelled into cybersecurity, surveillance infrastructure, and technical capacity-building.
Central to this effort is the convergence of security requirements issued by the National Telecommunication and Information Technology Security Board (NTISB), NCERT, and related regulatory bodies. Together, these requirements function as a de facto national security certification regime. Under current timelines, defence and defence-linked entities are expected to rely exclusively on locally certified hardware, software, and services, reflecting concerns about foreign supply-chain compromise and hidden access mechanisms in imported technology.
A review of Ministry of Defence, NCERT, and civilian security-agency tenders shows particularly aggressive spending in three areas:
- Networking Infrastructure: A January 2026 tender calls for the large-scale acquisition of rack-mounted, fully managed Layer-3 PoE switches and high-performance core switches with forwarding capacities exceeding 98 million packets per second. These systems support centralised, fault-tolerant monitoring environments.
- Intelligence Platforms: Classified tenders from NACTA and the Federal Board of Revenue seek “intelligence risk management” platforms capable of scanning social media, open web sources, and the dark web to detect illicit financial flows (hawala and hundi) and banned organisations using machine learning.
- Forensics and Vulnerability Testing: An NCERT tender specifies advanced mobile and computer forensic hardware alongside fuzzing and vulnerability testing software to enable encrypted-device access and proactive discovery of software weaknesses.
By consolidating these capabilities under nationally defined certification and audit requirements, Pakistan is pursuing “digital sovereignty.” The objective is twofold: first, to reduce dependence on foreign technology, and second, to centralise visibility across domestic networks while limiting external insight into Pakistan’s own intelligence infrastructure.
However, documents show many of these tools are being imported from China, while Islamabad also engages with US-based entities for similar capabilities. One main emphasis in recent procurements has been on local hosting of data and auditable cryptographic implementations. Firms seeking to participate must submit to local certification and long-term presence requirements. The ISI and GHQ have effectively excluded vendors whose products remain “black boxes” or whose cryptographic implementations are inaccessible to regulators.
If fully realised, this transformation would represent the most significant restructuring of Pakistan’s intelligence and security infrastructure since the post-9/11 period.
