Abductions and Attacks Mark a Day of Insecurity
On June 24, personnel of the Bomb Disposal Unit and police in Upper South Waziristan successfully defused an improvised explosive device in the Partogai area of Sararogha tehsil. They then got into their vehicle and began the six-kilometre drive back to the police station. They never reached it. Armed men intercepted the vehicle and abducted eight personnel, including the Station House Officer. The hostages were recovered the following morning through the mediation of tribal elders. Not through a court order, not through a police operation. Through elders, because in these districts, that remains the only mechanism that reliably works.
The same day, June 24, gunmen walked into Government High School Sardad Khan in Bannu and took headmaster Nisar Ahmed out in front of surveillance cameras, in the middle of the school day. Neither incident was extraordinary. In much of the former FATA and the southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they have become distressingly familiar.
May and June: A Cascade of Violence
May opened without mercy. A vehicle-borne suicide bomber packed with more than a ton of explosives struck a police post in Bannu, killing 14 police personnel and forcing hospitals to declare emergencies. Three days later, an IED planted on a motorcycle detonated in Sarai Naurang market in Lakki Marwat, killing nine people, two of them traffic police officers, in a crowded market on a Tuesday afternoon. Weeks before that, PTCL employees installing surveillance cameras for the Bannu Safe City Project had been abducted while laying the very infrastructure intended to improve security.
June continued in the same register. A vehicle-borne suicide bomber struck a military post in North Waziristan on June 2. Militants attacked a Federal Constabulary post in Musa Dara on June 9, killing six paramilitary personnel. A girls' school in Janan Kot, Wana, was bombed. A police constable and local footballer, Sabeel Noor Wazir, was abducted on his way home in Wana.
Cumulative Impact of Familiar Violence
The significance of these incidents lies not only in their frequency but also in their familiarity. Kidnappings, targeted killings, and bomb attacks occur with such regularity that they rarely remain in the national conversation for more than a news cycle. Yet their cumulative effect is profound. In many of these districts, people increasingly live with the expectation that roads may become unsafe, schools may be attacked, and public servants may disappear.
This persistence of insecurity raises an uncomfortable question. How does a militant organisation continue to exercise coercive influence in areas that have witnessed nearly two decades of military operations and eight years of constitutional integration? The answer cannot lie solely in military capability.
Governance Vacuums Enable Militancy
A state's writ is not established by press releases announcing militants neutralised. It is established when citizens instinctively turn to formal institutions because they trust them to function. Pakistan's security forces have paid a heavy price in this conflict. Thousands of soldiers and police personnel have lost their lives over the past two decades, and operations have repeatedly disrupted militant networks. Yet military campaigns, however necessary, cannot by themselves create political order or produce enduring peace.
The problem in the merged districts is increasingly one of state presence. The Twenty-Fifth Constitutional Amendment was presented as a historic turning point. The merger of FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa promised constitutional rights, representative governance and the gradual replacement of exceptional arrangements with ordinary citizenship. Residents were promised courts, policing reforms, development and responsive administration. Eight years later, many of those promises remain unfulfilled.
Institutional Weaknesses Exploited by Militants
This matters because insurgencies rarely survive on ideology alone. They survive by exploiting institutional weaknesses. Militants flourish where justice is inaccessible, administrative capacity is weak, and citizens perceive formal institutions as ineffective or absent. The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan can abduct teachers, extort businessmen and intimidate communities not because it commands overwhelming military strength, but because governance vacuums persist between the checkpoint and the village.
Official framing sometimes obscures this. Statements routinely describe militant violence as a foreign-sponsored conspiracy, and external sanctuaries have undoubtedly complicated Pakistan's security environment. But they cannot explain why bomb disposal personnel are abducted kilometres from their own police station, or why a schoolteacher can be taken in broad daylight. These are fundamentally questions of governance.
Caught Between Two Failures
The tragedy is that residents remain caught between two failures. On one side stands a militant organisation that bombs schools, assassinates community leaders, and subjects local populations to extortion and intimidation. On the other hand stands a state that too often appears through operations and checkpoints but too rarely as a dependable provider of justice and administration.
The headmaster was taken from his classroom, the constable seized on his way home, the trader confronted with extortion demands: these are not abstractions. They are the overwhelming majority of the population, and the principal victims of both failures. The ordinary resident consequently disappears from competing narratives of counterterrorism and militancy.
Recovery by Elders Underscores State Weakness
The recovery of the abducted officers in Sararogha is welcome. But it should also be unsettling. They were freed not through a police operation or judicial process, but through the intervention of tribal elders. This is not an argument against jirgas. It is a reminder that eight years after the merger, citizens still turn first to informal structures because they regard them as more immediate and effective than the state.
A state's writ is not established by press releases announcing militants neutralised. It is established when citizens instinctively turn to formal institutions because they trust them to function. The people of Waziristan, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, Bajaur, Kurram and Dera Ismail Khan are not waiting for another operation. They are waiting for something more fundamental: the ordinary, dependable presence of the state. That remains the unfinished business of the merger.
