Pakistan faces mounting political, economic, and security crises. But instead of addressing the underlying causes, the country’s rulers are hell-bent on targeting the opposition and treating it as the problem.
I have seen this approach firsthand in Balochistan, Pakistan’s militancy-ridden southwestern province. For years, the state has responded to political dissent and social, economic, and political grievances primarily through a security lens, via arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. The consequences have been severe: such policies have pushed thousands of youths toward a violent insurgency. But this approach is no longer confined to Balochistan.
Recent developments in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa suggest that the same logic is increasingly being applied elsewhere. On October 11, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari declared a state of emergency and suspended the provincial government led by Sohail Afridi, an ally of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Pakistani media reports said Afridi had been arrested and his whereabouts remain untraceable.
Enforced disappearances are a longstanding practice in Pakistan, particularly in its peripheries. But the disappearance of a politician who was the chief minister until Sunday morning raises disturbing questions about the rule of law and the fate of ordinary citizens with far less visibility or political influence.
The scenes from Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial capital, tell a similar story. Security forces have filled roads with brightly colored shipping containers to prevent Khan supporters from reaching Islamabad. On October 4, Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), took to the streets to demand his release. The federal government has defended the barricades and its latest actions as necessary to prevent unrest.
Such restrictions on political dissent go beyond the PTI.
In Balochistan, the authorities have confronted the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, a large grassroots movement against enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Its popular crowd-puller leader, Mahrang Baloch, was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 22 by an anti-terrorism court, alongside fellow activist Sibghatullah, over the alleged killing of a paramilitary soldier during a protest in Pakistan’s new emerging port city Gwadar in July 2024. The court found they had incited the crowd. Baloch’s lawyers boycotted the proceedings, held inside Hudda jail, and called it a faceless trial.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, another civil rights movement demanding rights for ethnic Pashtuns, has faced an intensive crackdown. Its soft-spoken, 34-year-old charismatic leader, Manzoor Pashteen, has been among those targeted, as the government has attempted to ban the movement and its leadership.
Authorities have used similar tools in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, long described by Pakistani leaders as the country’s “jugular vein.” On June 5, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir government designated the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a grassroots coalition that has organized protests over economic and political demands, as a proscribed organization under the region’s anti-terrorism law.
These are different movements, with different demands. But the state responds in a common way: it treats every political grievance as a security threat.
Laws such as the Fourth Schedule, once intended for terrorism, are also being used against lawyers, journalists, and political opponents. In particular, the controversial cyber law, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), is frequently used against activists and journalists.
In January, an Islamabad court handed prominent human rights lawyers Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir and her husband, Hadi Ali Chattha, prison terms totaling 17 years over social media posts the state called anti-state. The sentences were to run concurrently, so they were to serve 10 years. In September, the Supreme Court suspended the sentences and ordered their release on bail. Within hours, authorities rearrested them in an earlier protest case.
Since the controversial 2024 elections, Pakistan’s Parliament, the judiciary, and the media have come under intense pressure. Citizens on the periphery, especially ethnic minorities such as Baloch, Pashtuns, and Kashmiris, have little reason left to take a political complaint to those institutions.
Meanwhile, the security crisis has worsened.
The Global Terrorism Index ranked Pakistan the country most affected by terrorism in 2025. It recorded 1,139 deaths and 1,045 terrorist incidents, with Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bearing the brunt.
An Islamabad-based think tank, the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICS), documented 606 deaths and 232 injuries from militant attacks and counter-militancy operations in July 2026 alone, the deadliest month of the year to date. Most of the dead were militants: 401, against 112 security personnel and 74 civilians. The raw numbers still argue against the idea that more force is closing the war.
Some years ago, Pakistan spent millions of dollars on fencing its roughly 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan to contain cross-border attacks from militants allegedly based in Afghanistan. But militancy continues. Islamabad has since taken the war across the border.
On March 16, a Pakistani airstrike hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul, a drug-rehabilitation center on the site of a former NATO base. Pakistan said it had struck a militant storage site. The U.N. mission in Afghanistan confirmed at least 269 civilian deaths and 122 injured. Amnesty International later said the strike should be investigated as a possible war crime.
Cross-border strikes have continued. On October 1, Pakistan launched airstrikes in Kunar and Helmand provinces in Afghanistan. The Taliban government said at least nine civilians, mostly children, were killed and 11 injured. The U.N. mission said at least 10 civilians, most of them children, were killed and nine were injured. Pakistan said the strikes targeted militant hideouts and claimed 22 militants were killed.
There is a clear contradiction here. Pakistan’s leaders want to be seen internationally as peacemakers and mediators. At home, they have refused to engage politically with Imran Khan, Mahrang Baloch, the Kashmir committee, and Manzoor Pashteen, and they have preferred force with Afghanistan as well. The economic cost of that instability is why Islamabad is asking Washington for a $10 billion exchange-stabilization facility to strengthen its foreign-exchange reserves.
Western governments should be careful not to confuse that request, or Pakistan’s field Marshal General Asim Munir’s usefulness in mediating with Iran, with a diplomatic settlement. Pakistan matters to the West because of its size, its nuclear weapons, its position between South and Central Asia, and its role in regional security. Engagement with the army should not mean ignoring a provincial capital closed off with containers, civil rights movement leaders tried under anti-terror laws, or a strike on a Kabul hospital. Nor should Pakistan’s leaders assume that economic assistance or geopolitical usefulness can substitute for public trust.
Militancy cannot be excused, and the state has a legitimate responsibility to protect its citizens. But military action alone, whether inside or outside Pakistan, is not resolving the political alienation underneath the violence. Pakistan’s leaders need to face the hard questions. Why are educated Baloch in Balochistan being drawn toward a deadly insurgency? Why has resentment among Pashtun youth against the state increased? Why have large crowds in Kashmir repeatedly taken to the streets?
The West has tried to build a relationship solely through military generals before. It did not produce a stable partner. It is unlikely to do so while the same generals answer political protest with emergencies, repress dissent with terror and cybersecurity laws, target Afghanistan with airstrikes, and then ask the West to finance the country for economic stability.
