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Pakistan’s fire-alarm politics: why the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa emergency is about a march, not militants
Militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa did not begin on 11 October. The emergency did. That Sunday, President Asif Ali Zardari, acting on the advice of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, imposed an emergency and governor’s rule on the province, citing the provincial government’s ‘deliberate disengagement from the fight against terrorism.’ By Monday, the elected chief minister, Sohail Afridi, was in detention, schools in Peshawar and three other districts were shut, and the internet across parts of the province had gone dark. The timing was perfect: Imran Khan’s supporters were about to march on Islamabad to demand his release. So what, exactly, was the emergency?
The easiest way to understand Islamabad’s move is as a fire alarm. Pull one in a crowded building, and everyone has to leave, no questions asked, whether or not anything is actually burning. In Pakistan, terrorism is the alarm that never fails. This time, though, the people being herded out of the building were not militants but the party that has governed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2013 and keeps winning there.
Look at who has actually been rounded up. Police officials told AFP that 278 members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) had been detained within a day of the declaration. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi promised that party figures taken into custody would be released once law and order improved, which is generous of him, given that PTI says it has not even been told where its leaders are being held. It is a curious counterterrorism operation that begins by arresting a provincial cabinet.
Then there is the evidence. Information Minister Ataullah Tarar announced that the PTI government was ‘hand in glove with the terrorists’, without offering a shred of proof. Naqvi insisted the government had dozens of pieces of evidence; none has been made public. Evidence this damning, it seems, must be protected from the public at all costs.
Meanwhile, ordinary people are paying the price. Schools and universities have closed, exams have been postponed, and phone and internet connections have been cut in several districts, with students, low-income families and day labourers hit hardest. Amnesty International has raised concerns about arbitrary detentions and the shutdowns. It is hard to see how cancelling a teenager’s exam in Mardan inconveniences a single militant. In 12 districts near the Afghan border, the government has gone even further. It has switched off the constitutional rule that keeps judges separate from the government, so officials can now act as judges too.
If this were really about terrorism, the map would look rather odd. PTI chairman Gohar Ali Khan asks a fair question: why governor’s rule covers the whole province when the government’s own security concerns centre on those 12 districts. And according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, most of this year’s attacks took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. But Balochistan has had no emergency. It is also not run by Imran Khan’s party.
Pakistan has seen this film before. In fact, the cast is almost the same. In November 2007, General Pervez Musharraf declared an emergency, citing extremism and lawlessness. Nawaz Sharif, the current prime minister’s brother, said it was worse than martial law. Benazir Bhutto, Zardari’s late wife, called it a ‘mini-martial law’. One of the people arrested that week? Imran Khan. Nineteen years later, the families who led the outrage are now in charge. And the man arrested then has been in jail for more than three years. Pakistani politics doesn’t repeat itself so much as recycle its cast.
Yes, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has a genuine security crisis. The government told parliament that more than 3,787 militant incidents had been recorded in the province over the past year. And the PTI hasn’t covered itself in glory either. Its provincial government opposed further military operations, and Afridi spent conspicuous energy on the campaign to free Khan, including an overnight sit-in outside Adiala jail. So yes, there is real smoke. But the army was already deployed in the province before Sunday. What changed was not who fights the militants. It was who runs the province. The government did not need to arrest a chief minister, close schools or cut the internet to fight terrorism. It did, however, find all three very handy for stopping a march.
And this alarm may ring for a long time. Parliament, where Sharif’s coalition holds a majority, endorsed the emergency on Wednesday. Once approved, the constitution sets no fixed end date, and lawyers warn that the provisions allow fundamental rights to be suspended for as long as Islamabad likes.
The federal government accuses Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s leaders of putting politics before security. Over the past week, it has given the province a masterclass in exactly that. The people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who have lived with real bombs for years, deserve a government that pulls the alarm when there is a fire, not when its opponents are heading for the door.
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