More provinces will not make Pakistan safer

https://arab.news/w2bxd

The idea of creating new provinces has resurfaced in Pakistan at a moment when the state is fighting resurgent terrorism and an unstable economy. Supporters argue that smaller units would improve governance and bring power closer to local communities. Critics warn that the proposal would sharpen ethnic divisions and pull attention away from the security crisis. The critics have the better case.

Proposals now in circulation go as far as 12 new provinces, and all of them rest on a claim of administrative efficiency. But Pakistan’s problem has never been the size of its provinces. It has been the concentration of power at the center. In Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the state is already experienced as distant and extractive, and that perception is the ground on which grievance grows.

History suggests that redrawing borders does not by itself produce better governance. Pakistan has not lacked capacity at the provincial level. It has lacked the political will to devolve power. Creating new units while retaining central control over policing and security would be decentralization in name only, and it would deepen precisely the alienation that militant groups recruit from.

The suspicion attached to the current push is itself telling. There is no mass movement demanding new provinces. The demand is coming from the same political and economic elite that produced the elite capture it now promises to........

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