Pakistan is once again counting its dead people. Soldiers, police officers, other law-enforcement personnel and civilians are being killed across Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while political unrest in Azad Jammu and Kashmir has opened another dangerous fault line. 

Two recent articles—Shaukat Javed’s ‘Peace Begins at Home’ and Maleeha Lodhi’s ‘Three-Front Challenge’—have correctly warned that Pakistan cannot indefinitely project diplomatic influence abroad while failing to establish durable peace within its own borders. Their diagnosis must now be carried to its logical conclusion: the country needs neither another slogan nor another open-ended operation, but a constitutionally anchored national strategy that eliminates terrorists, dismantles the economies sustaining them and restores the confidence of citizens whom the state is bound to protect. 

The scale of the emergency cannot be minimised. The Center for Research and Security Studies recorded 813 violence-linked fatalities in 248 incidents during the first quarter of 2026. Balochistan’s fatalities more than doubled over the preceding quarter, reaching 443, while Balochistan and KP together accounted for almost 93 percent of the national toll. 

In May, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, terrorist attacks rose to 128; Balochistan alone recorded 71 attacks and 52 of the 54 reported abductions. These are not isolated disturbances. They reveal an expanding conflict ecosystem involving religious militancy, separatist violence, organised crime, narcotics, extortion, illicit finance, propaganda and foreign interference. 

The courage and sacrifices of Pakistan’s armed forces, police, Frontier Corps and other law-enforcement agencies must be acknowledged without qualification. Armed terrorists who kill civilians, attack trains, schools, markets, security posts and public infrastructure cannot be appeased. The state has both the right and constitutional duty to use proportionate force against them. Intelligence-based operations will remain indispensable.

But the men in uniform cannot be expected to compensate permanently for failures of politics, justice, policing, economic policy and federal governance. Tactical success becomes strategic defeat when cleared territory is not followed by credible administration, courts, schools, hospitals, jobs and public trust. 

Military operations can suppress violence and destroy terrorist formations; they cannot alone remove the conditions that enable such formations to recruit, finance themselves and regenerate. This distinction is fundamental: terrorists must be isolated and eliminated; peaceful dissenters, constitutional nationalists, students, lawyers, journalists, traders, community elders and civil-society organisations must be heard. Treating both categories alike enlarges the constituency of violence. 

A young person protesting against enforced disappearance, unemployment, denial of royalties, manipulated elections or arbitrary administration is not thereby an enemy of Pakistan. When every complaint is branded foreign-sponsored and every independent voice is treated as subversive, hostile agencies receive the greatest gift available to them: genuine grievances stripped of peaceful avenues for redress.

In an earlier article  on Balochistan [Balochistan Crisis: How Denial, Security Policy And Injustice Undermine Pakistan, Friday Times, February 9,........

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