If anything, the present nexus between the military establishment and the toothless civilian leadership has shown that it is difficult to have a fair space for criticism and dissent in Pakistan.

In yet another flummoxing display, Pakistan has charged the opposition leader in the National Assembly with treason. Mehmood Khan Achakzai, Chairman of the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP), has been booked and charged with treason for his remarks at a public meeting in Balochistan. Achakzai is the president of Tehreek Tahaffuz Ayeen-i-Pakistan (TTAP), a multi-party opposition alliance formed to protect the Constitution of Pakistan, which, according to the opposition, is under attack from the military establishment, with the support of the government.

Although a long practice in the country, using the draconian law to silence critics of the military establishment/government has picked up in recent years. One reason for that is the nature of the present ruling administration.

It is interesting to see that the scope of these laws has expanded; now the political opponents of the existing “hybrid model” of government in Pakistan, as Defence Minister Khawaja Asif calls it, have borne the brunt of the sedition laws for their criticism of the government, or the hybrid regime, to put it in its truest description. The civilian leadership is forced to mitigate the adverse effects of the model simply because it cannot be in government or run functions if it were to break ties with the military establishment. That being the case, the civilian part of the model is subservient to the military establishment. How can that be called even a “hybrid model”?   

The civilian leaders act as intermediaries, while the military establishment pulls the strings on every decision. No wonder that in the last couple of years, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, and others have been currying favour with the country’s security forces, even on the economy. Prime Minister Sharif, known for his unhinged use of praise to extract favours from powerful personnel, went beyond even his own previous injudicious acts and said on an occasion recently that “History will always remember the wise and courageous leadership of the field marshal (Asim Munir) in golden words.”

Such flattering words from the Prime Minister tell a lot about the nature of the current model of governance in Pakistan: the civilian leaders will act on behalf of or for the military generals, and critics will bear the brunt.   

Achakzai’s case is not the only one. On a similar pattern, in yet another high-profile case, former Prime Minister Imran Khan was charged with treason for a rather bizarre accusation. Several activists and political opponents have been sent to jail after being charged with the draconian law.

All these cases are nothing but a mockery of such a serious penal law. While Imran Khan was accused of wrongfully dissolving parliament in 2022, Achakzai’s case is more interesting: he is charged with treason because he questioned the law and order situation in Balochistan and said that the government had failed to provide security to the people. There is no shortage of reports, even statements from the military establishment and the government on the situation in Balochistan that would mean the same, but it coming from the opposition leader is chargeable with the harshest possible penal code in the country, underscoring the strict policy of the current administration towards its opponents.   

More importantly, the case against the Opposition Leader in the National Assembly exposes the nature of politics in Pakistan. Essentially, the crux of the issue is that the military establishment is domineering in the present ruling political system, and any criticism of an issue points towards the failures of the military establishment. And given the stakes of Field Marshal Asim Munir in the system, the Army is unlikely to tolerate that. Therefore, conformity is sought in every case, at every possible cost.

It also shows that Pakistan’s perennial political crisis has taken a life of its own. There is no sign of it getting resolved. The Pakistani State has taken a clarion call: everyone must conform to the current administration, i.e., the military establishment, the deep state and its coterie in the civilian power circles.    

Historically, the military has dominated the country’s politics. Its domestic and foreign policies have been shaped by the generals. Even domestically, it is well documented that the military has “groomed” and “appointed” leaders in the country.

In politics, it is said that nation and state function as synonyms; in Pakistan, the military establishment and the state function as synonyms. So, any criticism against the military means the state is criticised. Such criticism therefore begets a strong punitive and legal response, including the charges of sedition. 

The story does not end here. Given that the military establishment is deeply involved in the government, any criticism, therefore, against the government is interpreted as a criticism against the military, and thus against the state. And there is a long list of such cases in Pakistan. Some of these include the cases of Baloch and Pashtun activists. In such cases, the people who have questioned the government policies towards Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have been accused of treason and put behind bars.  

Almost the entire leadership of Baloch Yekjehti Committee (BYC), a non-violent Baloch organisation mainly comprised of the Baloch whose relatives have been victims of enforced disappearances, is in jail. So is the former member of the National Assembly and Pashtun activist, Ali Wazir. Wazir has been behind bars for a long time on treason charges for questioning the policy of the military operations and their impact on the common Pashtun in KP. Ali Wazir has spent a good share of his life in jail. He was arrested a few hours after he was released on bail on 26 March. The cases against Wazir are various sedition cases.  

Likewise, Mahrang Baloch, a Baloch and doctor by profession, along with others, is facing multiple cases of sedition. Even if she gets some relief or bail in one case, other cases are invoked to keep her behind bars. The same method is used against the people who support or defend activists in the courts of the country. Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha, advocates who are fighting cases of several victims of state violence, have been booked, charged and sentenced to 17 years of imprisonment for social media posts that were critical of the country’s security institutions.  

If anything, the present nexus between the military establishment and the toothless civilian leadership has shown that it is difficult to have a fair space for criticism and dissent in Pakistan. Now, since the military establishment has increasingly taken control of the country into its hands, any civilian leadership or government is symbolic. Naturally, any criticism directed at the government will be seen as criticism of the military establishment. Therefore, in all likelihood, draconian laws like treason and others will be employed more to frighten and curb dissenting voices in Pakistan. 

For the Pashtun people, questioning Pakistan Army’s role and pointing its misconduct in the tribal belt is to invite accusations of treason as the state did with PTM.

Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan have plunged to their lowest point in years. The recurrent clashes across the Durand Line that divides the two countries are often framed as a dispute over the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Pashtun Islamist insurgent group which has become Achilles heel for the Pakistani state. But, beneath the surface of this conundrum lies a much older struggle that predates the Taliban and the war on terror. It is the decades long tension between Pashtun nationalism and a Punjabi-dominated Pakistani state.

The TTP is often described purely as an umbrella militant organisation. Yet it represents a fusion of Islamism and ethnic grievance and is a product of decades of marginalisation of the Pashtun heartland by a state that has alternated between military repression and strategic manipulation. To understand why the conflict refuses to end, one must revisit how Pakistan’s power structure was built on the exclusion of its largest ethnic periphery.

Pashtun nationalism did not begin with neither Afghan Taliban nor Pakistan Taliban. Its current incarnation dates to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, or Bacha Khan, also known as the “Frontier Gandhi,” who led the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) movement in British India. Bacha Khan, as a staunch secularist as an ideological commitment opposed India’s religion-based partition of 1947. However, when partition became a fait accompli, he, and others in the tribal leadership, demanded that the Pashtuns be allowed the choice of creating their own Pashtunistan (the Bannu Resolution of 21 June 1947).

In the years that followed, Bacha Khan and his followers were vilified, jailed, and banned and their demands for provincial autonomy was branded as treason by the Pakistani state which increasingly became military dominated. This set the template for how the country’s overwhelmingly Punjabi-dominated ruling establishment would treat dissent from the peripheries: with suspicion, suppression, and militarisation.

Despite extreme suppression and oppression, the legacy of Bacha Khan’s peaceful struggle survives to this day through movements like the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) and Awami National Party (ANP) by highlighting Pakistan Army’s misconduct through enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence across the tribal belt.

The PTM’s rallies were filled not with insurgent slogans but with portraits of missing persons, chants for accountability, and the insistence that their blood be valued as much as any Punjabi. While PTM has been proscribed by the Pakistani state and its leaders like Manzoor Pashteen routinely silenced, yet their demands echo the same call made nearly eight decades ago which is that of dignity, rights, and an end to collective punishment.

If history began with exclusion, it was the Pakistani military that institutionalised control. The colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that represented a draconian legal code denying tribal residents due process remained in place as recent as 2018. For over seven decades, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) were governed this FCR that granted local tribal lords with autonomy thereby treating people treated as subjects rather than citizens.

The tragedy of Pakistan’s Pashtuns is that they have been both the sword and the sacrifice of the state being deployed in its proxy wars and displaced in its peace. Their land has been used as a laboratory for proxy wars, their people as cannon fodder for strategic depth. The Pakistani military viewed these borderlands less as communities and more as a strategic buffer.

In the 1980s, during the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Pashtun belt was turned into a staging ground for mujahideen recruitment and weapons smuggling. After 2001, it became a battleground again but this time for Pakistan’s ambiguous war on terror. While Islamabad allied with Washington, its intelligence services sheltered the Afghan Taliban, seeing them as a tool of regional influence.

Caught in the crossfire were ordinary Pashtuns. Between 2004 and 2024, according to various estimates including South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP) and CRSS Annual reports, at least 20,000 Pashtun civilians have been killed in Pakistan Army’s anti-insurgency campaigns and militant violence between 2004 and 2024. Besides, over 4000 people were also killed in hundreds of American drone strikes greenlighted by Pakistan Army according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Moreover, thousands of people were internally displaced, their homes flattened, family members disappeared, and entire villages across North and South Waziristan were razed under Pakistan Army’s counterterrorism operations like Rah-e-Rast (2009) and Zarb-e-Azab (2014). To this day, thousands remain unaccounted as victims of “enforced disappearances” with Pakistan military and its intelligence agencies as prime accused, with at least 3485 cases reported by the Missing Person’s Commission established by the Supreme Court.

As such, rather than peace, Pakistani state’s reliance on militarisation in the peripheries has only produced alienation. On ground, it reflects in the garrisoning of the Pashtun heartland with checkpoints dotting every artery and locals subjected to random searches and collective reprisals. A generation and two of Pashtuns have grown up knowing only checkpoints, recurrent curfews, and ever-present drones sounds and strikes.

If muscular policy of subjugation in their homeland was not enough, Pashtuns have long been cast as the “other” in Pakistan’s social imagination as ‘rough’ and ‘uncouth’ cousin to the so-called urbane Punjabi. This cultural stereotyping has been deeply ingrained in Pakistani cinema and literature with Pashtuns often portrayed as tribal, backward, and violent. Such characterisation has helped the state justify its decades of systemic exclusion of Pashtuns as well as normalise Pakistan Army’s misconduct.

This is also achieved by domination of the Punjabi elite within the politics and media of the country as well as the officer corps of its powerful army. While Punjab is Pakistan’s largest province by population, comprising 53 percent of its total population, it has a disproportionate share of senior military positions and federal bureaucratic positions with some estimates putting it above 70 percent In contrast, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including FATA, has been grossly underrepresented in the corridors of power in Islamabad and Rawalpindi with less than 12 percent and 10 percent share in federal bureaucracy and officer corps of armed forces respectively.

The costs of this hierarchy are stark. KPK remains among Pakistan’s poorest provinces, with nearly 30 percent of the population enduring multidimensional poverty, which is nearly double that of Punjab. Literacy among women in former FATA tribal districts hovers below 15 percent, which is nearly three times less than KPK (39 percent) and four times lesser from women in Punjab (58 percent). Infrastructure spending per capita in KPK is a fraction of that in Punjab’s major cities. The region’s development budget has often been slashed to subsidize military operations or bailouts for state-owned enterprises concentrated in Punjab and Sindh.

Such disparities are not accidental function as the political architecture of a state that conflates security with ethnicity. For the Pashtun people, questioning Pakistan Army’s role and pointing its misconduct in the tribal belt is to invite accusations of treason as the state did with PTM. Even the merger of FATA into KPK in 2018 (25^th Amendment), which was hailed as a democratic milestone has changed little on the ground. At best, it remains an annexation on paper rather than empowerment in practice.

Perhaps the darkest face of this militarised policy of the state is the impunity with which Pakistan Army conducts itself across the Pashtun heartland. For Pashtuns, the state’s “war on terror” is simply a war on being who they are and their identity often conflated with extremism and militancy. Islamabad and Rawalpindi never seem to understand that the killing of a family member, an arbitrary arrest or an enforced disappearance and every other misconduct of its military only fuel resentment and rebellion.

Detestably, Pakistan’s Punjabi-centric political and military elite often view Pashtun nationalism as an existential threat with a fear that such calls for justice and accountability might evolve into secession. Yet it is not separatism the demand for equal citizenship that drives the new generation of Pashtuns.

Islamabad’s refusal to reckon with this sentiment carries peril. The more the state relies on coercion, the more it alienates the very population it claims its own. The Afghan frontier may remain under barbed wire and drones, but the deeper frontier of Pakistan’s powerful Punjabi core and its neglected peripheries continue to widen.

Nevertheless, if Pakistan is to find stability, it will need to must start by listening to its margins be it Pashtuns, Baloch, and Sindhis, among others. But that would mean an end to its current policy of militarisation, accountability of its past actions and to the human rights violations of its military, and importantly allowing Pashtun people shape their own governance than dictating it from the garrisons of Peshawar. Until the Pashtun heartland is treated not as a frontier to be controlled but as a homeland to be respected, Pakistan’s both internal and external wars will never truly end.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.