Irtiza Shafaat Bokharee
Speculation had run through Islamabad for a week, yet the federal government’s decision on Sunday to impose an emergency and Governor’s Rule simultaneously in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa still surprised seasoned analysts. Fairness demands that we examine every side. The historical record flatters no single party. The PTI governed the province for more than thirteen years and has long been accused of tolerating militant factions. Its supporters call this anti-imperialism and its opponents call it opportunism. The PML(N) has a difficult chapter of its own, since it pursued negotiations with the Pakistani Taliban in 2013 and early 2014, and the Army Public School massacre of December 2014 ended what remained of that approach. The PPP, ANP and MQM, meanwhile, paid heavily between 2008 and 2013, when their leaders and workers were killed at rallies and corner meetings for opposing religious militancy. History has vindicated their stance, though at a terrible cost.
Imran Khan’s record on militancy supports much of that criticism, although his defenders read it differently. He opposed military operations in the tribal areas, attributed radicalisation largely to American drone strikes, and proposed that the Taliban open an office in Islamabad. His provincial government allocated Rs300 million to Darul Uloom Haqqania in 2016-17, and a further Rs277 million was proposed in 2018. Khan defended the grants as a way of mainstreaming seminaries. Its head, Maulana Sami ul Haq, was long associated with the Taliban movement, and the PTI fielded him as a Senate candidate in 2018, along with seat adjustments in parliamentary elections. In October 2007, writing in the Sunday Telegraph after the Karsaz bombing, which killed at least 140 people, Khan said Benazir Bhutto “had only herself to blame” through her deal with Pervez Musharraf and the US. In June 2020, he told the National Assembly that the Americans had “martyred” Osama bin Laden. After the Taliban returned to Kabul in 2021, he said Afghans had “broken the shackles of slavery”, and his government entered talks with the TTP and considered amnesty for militants. His admirers see pragmatism and a principled objection to foreign intervention. The cumulative record still raises a question that deserves an answer: whether political calculation too often outweighed the security of citizens exposed to religious militancy.
Governor’s Rule is a blunt instrument, and responsibility for results now rests with the PML(N) and the PPP. Under Article 234, the proclamation lapses after two months unless a joint sitting of Parliament approves it, and it may be extended by up to two months at a time, to a maximum of six months. Article 232, for its part, covers threats to security from war, external aggression or internal disturbance beyond a province’s power to control, and it could be used to extend this setting indefinitely. Citizens can still petition the courts to enforce their rights. This is the fourth imposition in the province’s history, and the PPP has used the provision before: in Punjab in 2009 and, against its own provincial government, in Balochistan in January 2013, when Hazara families sat in Quetta’s winter cold beside their dead, demanding protection. The question then is the one before us now: whether a provincial administration can protect citizens where the state’s writ has weakened, above all in the former FATA. Pakistan recorded 699 terrorist attacks in 2025, a rise of 34 per cent, and 413 of them were in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Behind those figures are people. Terrorism killed 1,034 Pakistanis in 2025, and security and law enforcement personnel accounted for more than 42 per cent of the dead. Residents of the former tribal areas have also endured displacement, curfews and the suspicion that follows a region labelled as a problem. Pashtun communities have been asked before to accept extraordinary measures in the name of national security, and history suggests that such measures last only when those communities consent to them. The Iran war and Pakistan’s mediation have drawn attention away from the north. PTI-backed candidates won the province with a two-thirds majority in 2024, so Islamabad must show that this is a security measure and not a political one. The PTI, however, offers little to set against it. The march that began on 4 October was organised around a single demand, the release of Imran Khan, and the party now functions as a personality cult rather than a programmatic movement, with no policy commitments on governance or security to put before voters. Since the attacks on military installations on 9 May 2023, the security establishment has also been extremely wary of it, and rightly so. If violence continues, incumbency will count against the coalition at the next election. Police reform and more autonomy for counter-terrorism police to use modern technology can contain violence in the short run. They cannot settle a dispute over belief.
That dispute has deep roots. Support for austere interpretations of Islam grew after 1979, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan drew local and foreign patrons to armed groups, and it will not recede through operations alone. Militants who fight as guerrillas along the Durand Line are hard to dislodge, as the United States learned in the AfPak theatre. Sri Lanka, with Pakistani military assistance, ended its civil war against the single, hierarchical LTTE in 2009; scattered groups pose a harder problem. Islamabad also holds that the Afghan Taliban authorities shelter the TTP and that India backs hostile networks. The porous border sustains smuggling and trafficking that must be cut with precision. The state must reassert its monopoly on legitimate force, and everything revolves around the word legitimate. Lasting settlements come through political negotiation, restorative justice bodies and truth and reconciliation commissions. Talks have followed force here before: the Malakand accord of February 2009 collapsed, an operation in Swat followed in April, and South Waziristan came in October. With the Afghan Taliban adding to the instability, Pakistan’s political and bureaucratic elites need to present a united front, because division will be exploited.
The writer is a freelance columnist and a social scientist.
