In November 2024, Pakistani security forces opened fire on tens of thousands of unarmed supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan as they approached Islamabad’s D-Chowk. Amnesty International called for an “urgent and transparent investigation” into reports of live ammunition and “shoot at sight” orders issued during a total communications blackout. Doctors told the media that hospital officials confiscated medical records of the dead and injured and forbade staff from speaking. While the opposition put the death toll far higher, the state initially claimed nobody had died at all. Western front pages, by contrast, moved on within a news cycle.

This is not an isolated failure of coverage. It is a pattern — and understanding why the world’s most powerful newsrooms have gone quiet on Pakistan’s military state tells us as much about geopolitics as it does about journalism.

Consider the accumulation of evidence that would, in almost any other country, constitute a five-alarm human rights crisis. In November 2022, Imran Khan survived what his own party called a “meticulously planned” assassination attempt during a protest march, an event the military’s media wing quickly dismissed. Today, Khan sits in solitary confinement in Adiala Jail, cut off from his lawyers and family since late 2025. According to medical reports, he has lost nearly 85 percent of the vision in his right eye after jail authorities ignored his medical complaints for months. The UN’s human rights office has called his prolonged isolation “unlawful,” warning of severe consequences for his physical and mental health.

Add to this the events of May 9, 2023, when over 100 civilians were swept up and tried by military courts under legislation that Amnesty International says gave them no meaningful right to appeal. A five-judge Supreme Court bench initially struck these trials down as unconstitutional in October 2023, only for a reconstituted constitutional bench to overturn that ruling in May 2025 — validating the military trials while parliament, a year on, still has not passed the appeal legislation the Court itself demanded. Add the sweeping midnight raids by Punjab police on May 23, arresting dozens of political workers ahead of peaceful marches, a tactic ripped straight from martial law playbooks.

Add the stolen mandate of the February 2024 general election, marred by blatant, real-time military manipulation and an EU election observation report that has been suspiciously withheld from the public. And add the perpetual tragedy of Balochistan, where the state’s own toothless Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances has closed thousands of cases without a single prosecution, leaving families in a permanent state of grief.

None of this is secret. Human rights organizations have documented all of it in real time. Yet almost none of it registers in the sustained, agenda-setting way that comparable abuses in other nations register in the Western press.

The Military’s Information Bottleneck

Part of the answer lies in how tightly Pakistan’s military controls the pipes through which information flows to the outside world. Reporters Without Borders has documented how the army “quietly yet effectively”........

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