Every state that has ever fought an insurgency eventually makes the same discovery, usually after a great deal of expense and a great many funerals: the shooting part is the easy part, or at least the part that fits neatly into a press briefing, while the part that actually decides whether the shooting was worth it happens quietly, slowly and without anyone cutting a ribbon. Military planners have a tidy name for this sequence, Clear, Hold and Build, which Washington used in Iraq and Afghanistan with results that are still being argued over in think tanks that were never at risk of being shelled.
Pakistan knows the sequence better than most, having lived it district by district in the tribal belt. Officials now talk about the first phase as a “cut” as much as a “clear,” meaning the severing of militant supply lines, financing and infiltration routes along the Afghan border, and this is sensible, necessary and, to be fair, the one thing the state does with real competence. The trouble is that a cleared valley is not a governed valley, and the militants have always understood this better than we have, which is why they wait patiently on the other side of the ridge for the convoys to leave and the paperwork to begin.
So the real question is what follows the kinetic phase, and here is the honest answer: kinetic efforts must be complemented by people-centric governance at the grassroots, strategic engagement with the public, the dismantling of the terror-crime nexus that thrives under the patronage of vested interests, and serious police capacity building. Read that list slowly and notice that not one item on it can be delivered by a tank.
Take Hold first, which in practice means the police. The International Crisis Group argued in its 2015 report on Pakistan’s counter-terrorism strategy that a well-resourced, empowered police force is “the most credible tool” for a lasting strategy, which is a polite way of saying that soldiers can win a district but only a constable can keep it. And yet we have treated the constable as an afterthought for decades, underpaid, under-equipped and transferred at the whim of whoever happened to be powerful that month. International Crisis Group’s Samina Ahmed made the point bluntly years earlier when she insisted that “Political appointments must end” and that postings and promotions go by merit, a recommendation that has aged about as well as a promise to reform the police, which is to say it has aged precisely as often as it has been repeated. The scholar Hassan Abbas said much the same at a PIPS seminar in Islamabad, arguing that military action alone keeps failing because investigating and monitoring suspects is primarily the job of local police.
Then there is the terror-crime nexus, which deserves more attention than it gets, because no amount of border-cutting will starve a movement whose money is made inside the country, in smuggling routes, extortion rackets and protection economies that happen to enjoy the friendship of people with power. It is one of the more charming features of our security debate that we can spend months discussing who is financing militants from across the border while the local patron who profits from the same trade sits comfortably in the front row at a public function. Dismantling that nexus is the non-kinetic twin of the cut, and it needs political courage rather than firepower, which explains why it is so rarely attempted.
Build, finally, is where legitimacy is either earned or forfeited. People side with whoever delivers security, a quick court verdict and a functioning clinic, and they drift away from whoever delivers only a notification.This is also where the debate over new provinces and smaller administrative units becomes relevant rather than merely fashionable, because Hold and Build are not abstractions: they need an address. A police station has to belong to someone, a court has to sit somewhere, a development budget has to be spent by an administration that can be reached and held to account, and a district that is too far from its provincial capital tends to be governed by files rather than by officers. Smaller administrative units shorten that distance, bringing policing, justice and public services within reach of the citizen, and in that sense they can be the machinery that turns a cleared area into a governed one, which is precisely what the Hold and Build phases demand. The merger of the tribal districts into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa shows both sides of the argument: it gave those areas, for the first time, the formal structures of police, courts and civil administration, but the promised funding and reform were slow to follow, and the militants, never ones to miss an opening, noticed before the ministries did. The lesson is not that administrative units do not matter, but that they work only when the structure is matched by delivery. A new boundary on its own is just a line on a map, but a new unit with funded police, working courts and accountable officials is the strongest tool the state has for making sure the gains of Clear and Cut are not lost.
The honest conclusion is an unglamorous one. Clear and Cut buy time, and time is all they buy. What the state does with it, through honest policing, an end to the protection of crime, real engagement with the people it claims to protect and administrative units that deliver rather than merely exist, will decide whether Pakistan finally converts its sacrifices into peace or simply keeps winning the same war every few years.
