Pakhtunkhwa: National and Geopolitical Stakes
It is high time the progressive leadership of Pakhtunkhwa faces difficult questions concerning its future.
Image: Gilaman Wazir/X
This July, a massacre of Pashtun protestors by the Pakistan army in Khyber was live-streamed on social media. A mass of unarmed people advancing towards a check-post in protest at the killing of a girl in a mortar attack were riddled with bullets. Five people were killed, many injured. The soldiers’ body language, their use of disproportionate force, and their gunshots did not seem like nervous acts; instead, they manifested the colonial normalcy of violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
A resurgent wave of militancy in Pakhtunkhwa after the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan hardly seems uninfluenced by the tug of war between different national and international forces.
Shortly after the fall of Kabul in 2021, Pakistan’s PTI government (2018-2022) initiated negotiations with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), aimed at resettling thousands of TTP fighters back in the country. A delegation led by then-director general of the intelligence services, General Faiz Hameed, brought the TTP to a ‘temporary ceasefire’ in late May 2022. The negotiations had hoped to create “cracks” within the TTP to weaken it from within. Such plans notwithstanding, the TTP broke the ceasefire within a few months in November 2022, and expedited their attacks.
As Pakhtunkhwa has seen militant attacks escalate even further in recent months, the masses have been fighting back by staging ulasi pasoonona (popular uprisings) in many districts, if not all. Meanwhile, bourgeois parliamentary parties in Pakhtunkhwa have convened a series of jirgas (councils) to devise their own plans to address the situation.
Two splinter parties, the National Democratic Movement (NDM) and the Pashtunkhwa National Awami Party (PNAP) (which broke away from the ANP and the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP), respectively) have proposed a national front, based on a select joint agenda. However, this arrangement seems tenuous because the class interests of the latter are currently more aligned with the politics of the centre in Islamabad, especially after the Bonapartist phenomenon of Imran Khan magically inverted the conventional bases of opposition in the country (vis a vis Pakistan’s military establishment).
On the other hand, the popular Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) is insisting upon the demands made by its Pashtun Qaumi Jirga, claiming a mandate of hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns. The PTM, a radical democratic movement operating independently of mainstream political parties, has inspired the masses and represents impoverished people from areas most affected by the imperialist War on Terror. However, since the PTM and its inspired forces have a historical mandate and the potential to lead the masses, it is high time they grounded their strategy in organised practice. It is worth remembering that emancipatory politics, besides being courageous and defiant, is nevertheless an art.
The Pakistani state also continues to hold a soft spot for certain active factions of the TTP, enabling it to exercise a degree of control on the geopolitical landscape. In 2023, the JUI-F leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman had accused the PTI provincial government of allocating 10% of all shares in government tenders for militant groups. Now, ironically, the PTI’s own chief minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ali Amin Gandapur, has lambasted the establishment’s policy of supporting ‘good Taliban’ against ‘bad Taliban’, a facile binary which has long marked those militant groups that serve the interests of the Pakistani establishment as good.
More alarmingly, in the recent wave of militancy, popular and radical Pashtun leaders have been targeted and killed in an open effort to suppress people’s resistance. This marks a shift from the 2000s, when such attacks primarily targeted tribal chiefs, and later, political cadres of the (secular Pashtun-nationalist) ANP.
This year, Maulana Khan Zeb, an ANP political worker and also a member of the Pashtun Qaumi Jirga, was shot by ‘unknown men’ on the road while campaigning for Ulasi Pasoon. The TTP has denied involvement, while the relevant CCTV cameras were removed the following day, raising suspicions. Maulana was a man of letters who had authored several books, notably the bestseller Shthamana Pakhtunkhwa (Abundant Pakhtunkhwa), which offers an overview of the region's riches.
Some months ago, another member of the Jirga, Mufti Munir Shakir, a dissenting voice against clericalism, militancy, national oppression, and imperialism, was killed in a bomb blast near his home in Peshawar. These organic intellectuals had openly resisted imperialist war in the region. They were offering critical analyses of the profound geopolitical shifts affecting the region while sincerely serving the Pashtun national cause.
These shifts are now widely known, following recent overtures between Pakistan and the United States. In particular, the two parties have signed a rare minerals deal pertaining to mining in Balochistan and the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a directly governed, specially administered federal territory that was merged with Pakhtunkhwa province in 2018.
The hybrid civil-military regime currently ruling the country plans to reverse the merger of FATA and bring it back under federal authority. The paramilitary force, Frontier Constabulary, initially limited to north-western Pakistan, has been renamed the Federal Constabulary and expanded across the entire country, mainly to suppress popular resistance and make provisions for future nation-wide dispossession.
So far, the minerals bill has been passed by the provincial assembly of Balochistan, but has met with disapproval in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Here, it has been fiercely contested even by members of the ruling PTI, which bodes well for the province's politics.
It is high time the progressive leadership of Pakhtunkhwa faces difficult questions concerning its future. The rapidly escalating global economic crisis and the rivalry between the US and China, with all its geopolitical implications, demand detailed historical and strategic analyses, not least regarding Pakhtunkhwa’s position in the mineral war and in major investment projects in Pakistan, like CPEC and SIFC. As an immediate step, it must be decided whether the question is merely about provincial autonomy in receiving royalties from the sale of Pakhtunkhwa’s minerals, or about outright resistance to the monopolistic extraction of its resources in the first place.
Beyond that, it is becoming urgent to ask how to organise collective struggles of the marginalised classes against dispossession. The state cannot be trusted to dismantle terrorism, as it also supports certain groups to maintain its influence and control. Pashtun political leaders and intelligentsia have little choice but to organise and empower ordinary Pashtuns. As Fanon says, “[T]here is no such thing as the demiurge... the demiurge is the people themselves.”
Asfandyar Shinwari studies Politics at the University of Edinburgh and has worked with informal workers in Peshawar for ethnographic research.