WHEN the President, on the advice of the Prime Minister, proclaimed an emergency and placed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under governor’s rule on 11 October, critics called it an assault on the provincial mandate. That reading ignores both the Constitution and the reality on the ground. Article 148(3) obliges the Federation to protect every province against external aggression and internal disturbance and to ensure that every province’s government is carried on in accordance with the Constitution. When a province can no longer do so, intervention is not a political choice. It is a constitutional obligation.
The numbers speak for themselves. The federal cabinet was told that terrorist incidents in the province had risen by nearly 196 per cent. Nationwide, more than 1,200 attacks were recorded in the first nine months of this year, mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Behind every figure is a policeman who never returned home. Yet as the toll mounted, the provincial leadership chose confrontation with the Centre over coordination, kept its distance from counterterrorism efforts and spent its energy on marches towards the capital rather than at the apex committee table. Security is not a provincial privilege to be withheld as political leverage.
Equally corrosive was the collapse of governance. Development funds went unspent or misdirected, district administrations drifted without direction and complaints of corruption and patronage became routine. Where the state is absent, the vacuum does not stay empty. The unemployed youth of the merged districts, the extorted shopkeeper and the family still awaiting compensation become fertile ground for frustration, the raw material militants exploit. Terrorism thrives not only on weapons smuggled across the border but on the despair that bad government breeds.
In law, the measures stand on firm ground. Article 232(1) empowers the President to proclaim an emergency where the security of Pakistan or any part of it, is threatened by external aggression or by internal disturbance beyond the power of a provincial government to control. The words “any part” permit an emergency confined to the twelve worst-affected districts and the cross-border character of the threat, with militants sheltered and launched from Afghan soil, squarely engages the external-aggression limb. Where the President acts on his own, the proclamation must be placed before both Houses of Parliament for approval within ten days. Article 234 separately empowers the President, on the Governor’s report or otherwise, to assume the functions of a provincial government that cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution. It is time-bound by design: two months at first, extendable only by a joint sitting of Parliament and never beyond six months in all. Article 245 allows the armed forces to act in aid of civil power. This is not martial law. It is the Constitution’s own machinery, operating under parliamentary oversight and before courts that remain open.
Constitutionality, however, is where the argument begins, not where it ends. With the province now under direct federal authority, every excuse has been removed. Law enforcement agencies can no longer point to an uncooperative provincial government, a divided command or withheld resources. This is the defining test of the security apparatus, judged by results alone. The plan must therefore be robust, thought through district by district and orchestrated under a single unified command of the army, Frontier Corps, police, Counter Terrorism Department and intelligence agencies. Past operations cleared territory but did not always hold it. This time, clearance must be followed by policing, justice and services that make the gains permanent. We have to succeed as never before and for once the menace must not merely be contained; it must be eradicated.
Against those who have taken up arms against the state, the response must be ruthless, uncompromising in force and unshakeable in law. Terrorist networks, their financiers and their facilitators must be dismantled and prosecutions must be pursued to conviction so that the courtroom completes what the operation begins. Seal the infiltration routes along the western border, complete and monitor the fence and regulate every crossing. Pakistan has hosted Afghan refugees for four decades with rare generosity. But the state is fully entitled under the Foreigners Act 1946 to repatriate those who remain without legal status and that process must now be completed, in an orderly and dignified manner, so that militants can no longer melt into undocumented populations. Above all, the nation must stand with the state; terrorism feeds on division.
Force alone, however, has never delivered lasting peace. The people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are the foremost victims of terrorism, not its authors and they must come to see the state as their protector. The new administration must deliver visible relief quickly: pay salaries, keep hospitals and schools running, disburse compensation and hear grievances. At the same time, the window for reconciliation and negotiation must remain open with political stakeholders, tribal elders and Jirgas and anyone willing to lay down arms and accept the writ of the Constitution. The six-month ceiling in Article 234 reminds us that the destination is the restoration of a functioning elected government, now secured against the threats that brought it down.
Governor’s rule is a constitutional remedy, not a political victory. Its success will be measured not in the corridors of Islamabad but in the streets of Bannu, Lakki Marwat and Khyber, on the day a mother sends her child to school without fear. That is the standard by which history will judge this decision.
—The writer is a former Deputy Director General of International Law, Pakistan Armed Forces.
