On Saturday, the Fateh Khel police post in Bannu was hit by an explosives-laden vehicle, followed by gunfire from several directions and the reported use of quadcopters, leaving 15 police personnel martyred and three injured. The men asked to hold the line in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are too often being pushed into a new kind of war with an old kind of state behind them: drones, suicide vehicles and organised militant alliances on one side, under-equipped posts, exhausted constables and delayed attention on the other.
There is no ambiguity about the enemy. Armed groups operating under shifting names and splintered banners are killing Pakistani policemen, civilians and local elders while exploiting the Afghan border, sanctuaries and the cover of deniability. Islamabad is right to press Kabul, build a diplomatic case and insist that Afghan soil cannot remain a staging ground for those who murder Pakistanis before disappearing into the fog of ideological kinship.
Bannu also exposes the dishonesty of provincial politics in Peshawar, where the PTI-led government has spent far too much of its public energy converting governance into a subplot of its founder’s incarceration, protest calendars and federal confrontation. Only days before, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi was reported to be consulting political leaders for an Islamabad protest to seek Imran Khan’s release.
That Pakistan topped the Global Terrorism Index for the first time after recording 1,139 terrorism deaths and 1,045 incidents in 2025, with deaths at their highest level since 2013, should shame every tier of power.
The Anti-Terrorism Amendment Act 2025 may give the state preventive detention powers, and such powers may disrupt plots in a theatre where militants move fast and hide well. Yet, Pakistan cannot find its way out of this war. It needs prosecution that survives in court, terror-finance tracking that follows money rather than only foot soldiers, police posts built for the weapons militants now use, and CTD units treated as core national infrastructure rather than provincial afterthoughts.
The country can defeat this wave, but only if it moves beyond the familiar routine in which men in uniform are asked to stand in fire while ministers arrive later with statements, wreaths and promises. Bannu has put the question plainly: will the state build power where its men are dying, or will it keep sending condolences to places it has not properly governed? *