Waziristan’s Warning

A deadly bombing and a court ruling have thrown Khyber Pakhtunkhwa into political chaos, exposing Pakistan’s deeper crisis of governance.

Pakistan’s already fragile political centre is reverberating once more with tremors from the restive North Waziristan. A suicide bomber, operating under the banner of Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s faction of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a military convoy, killing 16 soldiers and injuring two dozen others including children whose homes collapsed under the force of the blast. It was the deadliest attack on the military in months, underscoring the perilous fault lines crisscrossing Pakistan’s restive northwest.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the province bordering Afghanistan, has long been a barometer of Pakistan’s internal stability. It is now shaking violently under the twin pressures of escalating militancy and deepening political dysfunction. This latest atrocity, claimed by a group affiliated with the TTP, coincided with a legal shock from Islamabad. Recently, Pakistan’s Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the populist juggernaut led by the incarcerated former prime minister, Imran Khan. In a ruling laden with political consequence, the court barred PTI’s proxy—the Sunni Ittehad Council—from claiming 25 reserved seats for women and minorities in the KP Assembly.

Together, these events expose not only the volatility of a province on the edge but also the frailty of Pakistan’s democratic institutions and the emboldenment of militant networks in the vacuum they leave behind.

For much of the 21st century, KP, in particular the tribal districts like North Waziristan, has served as ground zero in Pakistan’s war against Islamist militancy. After 9/11, the porous Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan became a corridor for Taliban fighters, al-Qaeda operatives and later, the Pakistani Taliban. Military operations launched by Islamabad succeeded in temporarily scattering militant groups but did little to resolve the deeper grievances of disenfranchised Pashtun communities.

In 2018, the merger of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into KP was meant to integrate these frontier regions into the mainstream. But years later, infrastructure remains weak, economic development is sparse, and the security apparatus is both overstretched and resented. Since the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul in 2021, cross-border militancy has resurged. Islamabad accuses the Afghan Taliban of harbouring TTP militants—a charge vehemently denied by Kabul but corroborated by a rising death toll. By AFP’s count, nearly 290 people, mostly soldiers, have died in such attacks this year alone.

The security crisis in KP is now paralleled by an institutional one. Following controversial national elections in February 2024 in which the PTI was effectively barred from contesting under its iconic cricket bat symbol, Imran Khan’s party sought to maintain its grip in KP by aligning victorious independents with the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC). The goal was to regain access to the 25 reserved seats in the provincial legislature.

That gambit has now failed after the Supreme Court ruled that SIC, a minor religious party hastily repurposed for political survival, cannot inherit PTI’s electoral spoils. Though it commands the support of 98 members (including 58 independents once affiliated with PTI), it lacks formal party cohesion.

Pakistan’s anti-defection law, Article 63(A), only applies to party members. These independents can now align with opposition parties without penalty, potentially tipping the balance of power. If opposition parties (currently 27 strong) claim the reserved seats and woo the independents, they would command 88 seats in the 145-member Assembly, well over the majority threshold of 73.

The real question is whether any party can lay claim to legitimacy in a system that increasingly resembles a legalistic shell game. The judiciary has repeatedly intervened in politically contentious matters, often appearing less as a neutral arbiter and more as a participant in a broader campaign to sideline Khan. The implosion of PTI in the province it governed most effectively now leaves a dangerous vacuum as militant groups exploit the paralysis. Their message is brutally simple: when the state fights itself, it cannot protect its people.