Pakistan's Real Choice: Reform or Repression

 Pakistan’s Real Choice: Reform or Repression

Militancy is a real threat, but answering it by overriding voters risks deepening the problem it is meant to solve.

Opinion

On October 11, Pakistan’s federal government imposed emergency rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), suspending the provincial government led by the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. Islamabad says the step is needed to confront rising militant violence. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) calls it a political takeover. Former President Arif Alvi, a PTI loyalist, described it as “the final nail in the coffin of democracy.” His language is partisan, but it shows how little trust in Pakistan’s institutions remains, and it raises a question beyond one province: is the state’s preference for control over consent making it less stable?

The government’s case deserves a fair hearing first. Pakistan faces a serious security threat. The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) has regrouped since 2021, finding room to operate across the Afghan border, and attacks on soldiers, police, and civilians in KP and Balochistan have climbed. Any government would feel compelled to act, and no serious critic argues that militancy can be ignored. Yet the threat cannot be understood in isolation. As The Diplomat has observed, “Pakistan’s security challenge cannot be separated entirely from its domestic political environment. The country has experienced deep polarisation since the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2022 and the subsequent confrontation between his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and the authorities.” The real question, then, is whether suspending an elected provincial government makes the province safer or only feels decisive.

There are reasons to doubt it. The KP measure is the latest episode in a long contest between Pakistan’s civilian politicians and its military establishment. Khan, once favored by the generals, fell out with them, was ousted in a no-confidence vote, and is now imprisoned on charges his supporters call politically motivated. His party has faced arrests, rally bans, and restrictions on contesting elections under its own symbol. Even so, PTI-backed candidates did remarkably well in the 2024 vote, which suggests the party’s support is real and that overriding its mandate in KP will be read as a rejection of voters, not just of a party.

That matters because the military’s role is bigger than any one dispute. It has ruled Pakistan directly for decades and shaped policy from behind the scenes in between, citing threats from India and Afghanistan and the need to protect a nuclear arsenal. Those threats are real. But the arrangement tends to feed itself: when civilian governments are checked on foreign policy or security, they stay weak, and that weakness is offered as proof that only the army can hold things together. Civilian politicians are not blameless. Dynastic parties, a thin record of delivering services, an elite that largely avoids taxes, and Khan’s own mixed record in office have all handed the generals arguments. Still, the result is a state far better at coercion than at everyday governance.

Everyday governance is where the pressure is greatest. Pakistan’s economy has lurched from one IMF program to the next, with low growth, high inflation, heavy debt, and a narrow tax base. Demography adds to the strain: the population now exceeds 240 million, and with a median age around 22, millions of young people are entering a job market that cannot absorb them. Fertility has been falling, but from a high level. Researchers debate how directly joblessness drives militant recruitment, but a large pool of young people without prospects is a vulnerability for any stretched state.

Those pressures fall unevenly, so the problem runs across regions and communities as well as between rulers and ruled. Balochistan holds much of the country’s gas and minerals yet remains among its poorest provinces. Its insurgency draws on genuine grievances over resource extraction, enforced disappearances, and political exclusion, though militants there have also killed civilians, and any honest account must say so. Pashtun communities along the Afghan border have endured both militancy and military operations. Religious minorities, including Ahmadis, Christians, Hindus, and Shia Hazaras, face discrimination or violence, and women encounter steep barriers to education, work, and safety. A state that seems to deliver justice to some and not others hands its opponents a ready argument.

This is why asking whether Pakistan is about to break apart is the wrong question. The country has weathered repeated predictions of collapse, and its institutions, diaspora, and strategic position give it more staying power than doomsayers allow. The loss of East Pakistan in 1971 shows that states can fracture when large populations feel permanently excluded, but today’s picture is one of slow erosion, not imminent disintegration. The sharper question is what kind of state Pakistan will be.

The paths are clear enough. Repression offers the appearance of order: it can silence a party, jail a leader, and suspend a provincial government. Yet many analysts argue that heavy-handed tactics generate fresh grievances and ease recruitment for militants, and the frontier’s history lends that view weight. Reform is slower and harder. It means letting elections carry real weight, returning the military to a defined constitutional role, sharing resources fairly among provinces, broadening the tax base, and treating population growth as a policy challenge rather than a taboo.

None of this requires ignoring the TTP. Fighting militants and respecting elected governments are not opposites, and the stronger the political settlement, the easier it is to hold the ground security forces clear. Pakistan’s security and its politics are two halves of the same problem, and only one of them can be fixed from Islamabad. The danger in KP is that the government confuses taking control with winning consent. States endure when their citizens believe the system is theirs, and whether Pakistan’s leaders act on that will matter more than any single emergency order.