Two recent reports drew my attention to a glaring institutional deficit: Pakistan lacks a consolidated, reliable and publicly accessible database through which citizens and policymakers can independently assess the performance of two vital pillars of national stability—national security and economic governance. Consider Naveed Hussain’s column, “Taliban’s Double Game,” published in The Express Tribune on October 11, 2026. It describes Pakistan’s worsening security situation and the Afghan Taliban’s alleged role in allowing militancy to threaten Pakistan’s long-term stability. While the column discusses the threat posed by terrorism, it does not provide a consolidated account of the security operations undertaken in response. This reflects a wider institutional problem: the absence of a dedicated, publicly accessible official database that systematically records both militant violence and counterterrorism operations.

It raises a fundamental question: how can an analyst or the state itself evaluate the effectiveness of Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy without maintaining a comprehensive, reliable and publicly accessible record of militant attacks, security operations and their outcomes? For a country that has confronted persistent militancy for more than two decades, this is not merely a statistical issue. Without consistent, disaggregated data, policymakers cannot adequately assess whether their strategies are working, while citizens are left to interpret competing figures published by independent monitors and media organisations.

International indexes such as the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) frequently shape public discussion of Pakistan's security situation. The 2026 edition ranked Pakistan first among 163 countries for the impact of terrorism in 2025, while Afghanistan ranked eleventh. The ranking is a serious indication of the scale of Pakistan's terrorism problem. However, the GTI measures the impact of terrorism through indicators including attacks, fatalities, injuries and hostages; it is not designed to assess the full range of state counterterrorism operations. Consequently, its figures cannot, by themselves, provide a comprehensive assessment of national security performance.

To understand the wider picture, we need to examine both dimensions of the crisis: fatalities resulting from terrorist attacks and those attributed to security operations. These categories must remain distinct. Terrorist attacks measure the human cost of militant violence, while fatalities during security operations reflect another dimension of the conflict. Neither category, considered in isolation,........

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