Dr Zafar Khan Safdar<\/p>\n
Somewhere in Pakistan this week, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is preparing a long march to the federal capital. Every elected member has been directed to participate. The chief minister will personally lead the convoy. Government vehicles, government fuel, government logistics, and government staff will facilitate a political exercise whose stated purpose is the release of one man from prison. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending public money deploying tens of thousands of security personnel, positioning hundreds of containers across motorways, and suspending mobile phone services across entire cities to stop the march that the other government is conducting. Two governments. One political crisis. Zero attention to the three million unemployed young people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who woke up this morning to no job, sixteen hours without electricity, and a province where terrorist attacks have become as routine as the weather.
\nThis is what Pakistani governance looks like in 2026. Public money funding the march. Public money stopping the march. And the youth of KP paying for both, in joblessness, in darkness, and in the slow destruction of the futures they were promised and never received.
\nKhyber Pakhtunkhwa has a youth unemployment rate that exceeds the national average of 12.5%, in a province where the formal economy has been hollowed out by three decades of conflict, displacement, and industrial investment that was promised in every manifesto and delivered in none. Of 866,000 candidates who applied for 16,454 teaching positions in the province last year, fewer than two percent were selected. The Rashakai Special Economic Zone, KP\u2019s flagship industrial project under CPEC, has not generated the manufacturing employment its inauguration photographs suggested. There is no industrial zone of any scale that absorbs KP\u2019s graduates. There is no technology park, no export processing zone, no manufacturing corridor that gives the educated young Pashtun a reason to build a career at home rather than queue at a travel agency for a Gulf visa. The province generates hydroelectric power for the national grid and receives sixteen hours of load shedding in return, making even home-based digital work a daily negotiation with an inverter whose battery drains before the deadline arrives.
\nInto this vacuum, ice has arrived. Crystal methamphetamine seizures in Pakistan increased from 61.9 kilograms in 2023 to 404 kilograms in just the first five months of 2025 in Punjab alone, and KP, as both a transit route for Afghan narcotics and a province with precisely the combination of youth unemployment, social stress, and institutional absence that makes addiction epidemics develop rapidly, is not insulated from this trend. Pakistan has approximately 6.7 million people affected by substance abuse nationally, with 4.25 million classified as drug-dependent. Universities and colleges have been specifically identified as primary targets of ice distribution networks.
\nA substantial body of research links youth unemployment and economic distress with greater vulnerability to substance abuse. KP has all three conditions in abundance and a public health infrastructure too underfunded to respond to the crisis they are producing together. The rehabilitation centres that remain inadequate, the counsellors who were never hired, and the prevention programmes that were never developed are not merely administrative gaps. They are the accumulated consequence of years in which political priorities have repeatedly pushed the harder work of protecting a vulnerable generation into the background.
\nTerrorism compounds every other failure simultaneously. August 2026 recorded 199 militant attacks across Pakistan, a 38 percent increase from the previous month, with KP bearing the overwhelming share. In the second quarter of 2026, KP alone accounted for 61 percent of all terrorism-related fatalities in the country, with 475 deaths in three months. A young person in Peshawar, Nowshera, Bannu, Tank, or Lakki Marwat is navigating the simultaneous reality of unemployment, load shedding, drug availability, and the possibility of a terrorist attack on any given day. The KP government\u2019s response to this reality has been to prioritise the political crisis of its founder\u2019s imprisonment over the governance crisis of its population\u2019s survival. The federal government\u2019s response has been to deploy containers rather than factories, security cordons rather than investment frameworks, and mobile service suspensions rather than economic policy.
\nKhyber Pakhtunkhwa had been promised Rashakai, promised CPEC industrial relocation, promised special economic zones, and promised digital employment schemes for a decade. What it has received is political performance, conducted on public money, aimed at an audience in Islamabad rather than the generation in Peshawar, Kohat, Swat, and Mardan watching their twenties disappear into joblessness, darkness, and danger.
\nThe march will happen or it will not, the containers will hold or they will not, and the political prisoner will be released or he will not. These are political questions and they matter in the way that all questions about constitutional rights and democratic accountability matter. But the young man in Peshawar who has been unemployed for four years, who sits in darkness for sixteen hours daily, who has watched his degree become a credential for emigration rather than employment, who has seen ice reach his neighbourhood while the rehabilitation centre in his district remains unfunded, is asking a different question entirely. His question is not political. It is existential. And neither the government marching toward the capital nor the government deploying containers to stop it has addressed a single word to him this week, or last week, or in any week that anyone can remember.
\nBoth governments are failing the same generation, one while marching and the other while blocking the march. The youth of KP deserve better than to become the background noise of a political crisis that has consumed everyone\u2019s attention while their own crisis remains largely ignored. For God\u2019s sake, someone govern this province before its young people have nothing left to lose.<\/p>\n
The writer is Ph.D in Political Science and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad. His area of specialization is political development and social change. He can be reached at zafarkhansafdar@yahoo.com and on X @zafarkhansafdar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dr Zafar Khan Safdar Somewhere in Pakistan this week, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government is preparing a long march to the federal capital. Every elected member has been directed to participate. The chief minister will personally lead the convoy. Government vehicles, government fuel, government logistics, and government staff will facilitate a political exercise whose stated purpose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[13031],"class_list":["post-569243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-article","tag-dr-zafar-khan-safdar"],"yoast_head":"\n