The abduction of four construction workers in Tirah should shame the Pakistani state: men hired to build a road were taken at gunpoint in a valley that has already given too much blood, too many homes and too many years to war. This was not an attack on a convoy or a checkpoint. Local elders said the kidnapping could derail development works. They were stating the obvious.
Pakistan keeps answering such moments with the language of operations, border pressure and resolve. That language has its place. No qualms about that, but it cannot be the whole policy. A state that can announce the mainstreaming of the former tribal districts, amend anti-terror laws and invoke the National Action Plan should also be able to secure labourers pouring the first layer of a road. If it cannot, then the failure is political before it is tactical.
The UN monitoring team has repeatedly pointed to how militant outfits, especially the TTP, enjoy preferential treatment in Afghanistan and retain room to plan attacks against Pakistan. Pakistani officials have publicly tied peace with Kabul to a break with terrorist groups. At the same time, violence inside KP has surged, with reports saying fatalities in the province rose from 1,620 in 2024 to 2,331 in 2025
Tirah also exposes an older prejudice–that the people of the merged districts can absorb insecurity longer than everyone else. They cannot. They still remember how last year, three kidnapped youths in Tirah were later found shot dead, one of them the only son of his parents and another married just two weeks earlier. HRCP has warned that in parts of the merged districts, militants continue to extort residents and kill with glaring impunity those who refuse to comply.
We know too well where this drift leads. It leads to the police lines mosque in Peshawar, where more than 100 people were killed in 2023. It leads back to the Army Public School massacre, where 132 children were murdered, and the country swore that ambiguity had ended. Those dead are part of this story, too.
So what now? The provincial government would do well to start with the plain obligations that grand strategy often pushes aside: fund the merged districts, secure roads and markets, expand civilian policing and subject any future line of action to parliamentary scrutiny and public accounting. The ruling PTI has spent the last two years making grand promises and centring the whole governance model around political sloganeering. It is high time they returned to the basics.
