Few provinces in Pakistan have paid as heavily for the country’s wars as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which absorbed the displacement and the militancy of the years after 2001, took in the former tribal areas through the merger of 2018 with promises of funding that both sides agree were only partly kept, and has been governed for most of the last thirteen years by a single party that came to power promising a model of reform for the rest of the country. It is against this long and costly background that the present moment has to be understood, because the province now faces the worst wave of militant violence in a decade under a government locked in open dispute with the Federation, and the Prime Minister has summoned his senior colleagues to weigh emergency or governor’s rule even as the Chief Minister invites citizens to march on the capital, so that a quarrel which began as politics has arrived at the doorstep of the Constitution itself.
The security record, to begin with, makes uncomfortable reading for the provincial government. The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies found that July 2026 was the deadliest month of the year, with at least 606 people killed across the country, and that deaths in the settled districts of the province, outside the former tribal areas, rose from 75 in June to 154 in July, while the Centre for Research and Security Studies reported that militancy-related deaths declined nationally in the second quarter even as fatalities in this province climbed by 53 per cent. The significance of these figures lies in their geography, because the settled districts are policed by the provincial police and not by the army, so that violence moving into them is evidence of weakness in the very part of the system which the province itself commands.
A military operation can clear a district of armed men, but it cannot hold the ground afterwards, and holding it requires a police force that is trained, equipped and protected, together with a civil administration that gives the population a reason to prefer the state to its enemies. It is here that the province has been found wanting, since a government which asks Islamabad for armoured vehicles to protect its own policemen, and in the same month returns a consignment of vehicles as old and substandard, has by its own conduct admitted that a gap exists. The Chief Minister’s opposition to military operations and his demand for a voice in security policy are perfectly legitimate, but opposition to one method becomes a policy only when another is proposed, and no workable alternative has yet been set before the public.
The financial picture points the same way. The province is heavily dependent on federal transfers and its complaints about delayed releases have real substance, yet the Sehat Card, its flagship health programme, was interrupted in 2024 because dues owed to the insurer had not been paid, which is a failure of planning that cannot be laid wholly at Islamabad’s door. When this is joined to frequent changes at the top of the government and to a leadership that has given so much of its attention to marches and to access to its imprisoned founder, the picture is one of priorities badly ordered.
The constitutional question is a separate matter, and the two relevant articles answer quite different problems. Article 232 permits the President to proclaim an emergency where internal disturbance is beyond a provincial government’s power to control, and while it leaves the provincial government in office, it allows the Federation to direct it and Parliament to legislate on provincial subjects. After the Eighteenth Amendment such a proclamation on grounds of internal disturbance is meant to follow a resolution of the provincial assembly, and where the President acts alone, both Houses must approve it within ten days, a requirement that matters greatly here because this assembly is most unlikely to invite the Federation in. Article 234, by contrast, applies where a provincial government cannot be carried on according to the Constitution, and it allows the President or the Governor to take over the executive and Parliament to take over the powers of the assembly, for two months at a time and for no more than six months in all.
The difficulty for those who favour the harsher course is that the province’s government has failed in performance without failing as a constitutional government, since it still commands a majority, passes budgets and runs its offices. The Federation therefore has better instruments to try first: it can release the money it owes and attach conditions on police training and equipment, it can negotiate a joint counter-terrorism arrangement in the Council of Common Interests.
A provincial government that has watched violence move into the very districts its own police are meant to hold, that has let its flagship programmes lapse for want of payment, and that has placed the politics of one party above the daily work of administration has, by its own conduct, shown that the province cannot be left to drift under the same arrangements for much longer. Governor’s rule under Article 234, imposed with the approval of Parliament and for a limited period, is therefore needed to put a functioning executive, a capable police and a settled chain of command in place, so that security is restored and the people of the province are governed in accordance with the Constitution. The failure of the government in Peshawar has become the failure of the province’s security and administration, and the Federation can no longer treat it as a quarrel between parties.suggets a good title for this
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