For two decades, Pakistan has fought terrorism with extraordinary courage and enormous sacrifice. Yet the longer the war continues, the more fundamental the question becomes: has our strategy strengthened the bond between the state and its citizens or weakened it? The state is often described as a mother. A mother’s first instinct is to bring her children together: to heal wounds, protect the vulnerable and prevent differences from becoming permanent divisions. She does not set one child against another. Her strength lies in holding the family together.
If the state instead divides religious groups, fractures political parties, weakens provinces, exploits tribal differences and turns political disagreement into a struggle for survival, something fundamental has gone wrong. Pakistan must examine the politics, governance and counterterrorism strategies of the past two decades through precisely this lens. We have had military operations, national strategies, policy initiatives and enormous expenditure. Thousands of civilians and security personnel have been killed. Yet the question remains painfully simple: are we safer?
The answer cannot be measured only by the number of operations conducted or militants eliminated. Security ultimately means that citizens can live, travel, work and participate in public life with confidence that the state will protect them and uphold their rights. There have been genuine successes in Pakistan’s counterterrorism campaign. But tactical success is not the same as a durable political and institutional settlement. The National Action Plan itself recognised that counterterrorism required more than force. It addressed extremism, sectarianism, terrorist financing, political reconciliation, institutional reform and criminal justice.
The lesson was clear: counterterrorism was never meant to be only a kinetic enterprise. If, after years of sacrifice, insecurity and violent extremism continue to threaten parts of the country, the answer cannot simply be another operation, another conference or another plan. Perhaps we need an audit of our thinking. Any competent institution can make a mistake. No strategy is infallible. But when mistakes recur, outcomes remain inadequate and those responsible are never required to explain the results, the issue becomes larger than failure. It becomes a question of competence and accountability. And if competent people knowingly pursue policies for institutional, political or personal advantage rather than the national interest, the problem becomes more serious still.
State power is a public trust. It belongs to the people. It is not the property of an individual or institution. Terrorism, moreover, does not emerge from guns alone. Political exclusion, injustice, economic desperation, humiliation, unequal enforcement of law and the absence of meaningful representation can create the conditions in which extremism takes root. When citizens begin to believe that their vote does not matter, their elected representatives are irrelevant, their province is distrusted and their rights are subordinate to power, the state is not drawing them closer. It is pushing them away.
That is why the fight against terrorism cannot be reduced to the pursuit of terrorists. It must also address the conditions that allow extremism to regenerate. A state cannot permanently defeat an enemy while weakening the social trust on which national security ultimately depends. Those who claim to act in the name of the state must therefore answer a fundamental constitutional question: Is the state meant to control politics, or to ensure that politics operates within constitutional limits?
When religious parties are divided, political parties fractured, leaders set against one another, Parliament weakened and elected representatives diminished while unelected forces acquire greater influence, the temptation is always to concentrate still more power at the centre. That is not state-building. It is state weakening. The state is larger than any government, institution or individual. Governments change and office-holders come and go. The constitutional order endures, defining the powers and responsibilities of every institution.
The state’s first duty is not to control, divide or silence its people, but to unite them, and everything else follows.
Pakistan’s Constitution is therefore more than a legal document. It is the political compact that allows diverse people, provinces, languages, histories and interests to belong to one country. Not our language alone binds us. Not our geography. Not our resources. Not any political party. Not any institution. And certainly not one individual.
The Constitution is the common ground on which Pakistan must stand. It defines the powers of Parliament, the executive and the judiciary. It protects fundamental rights and recognises the federal structure of the state. It establishes the constitutional framework within which legislation is made in accordance with the principles of Islam. Constitutional reform is legitimate when it strengthens representation, governance and accountability. What is dangerous is constitutional engineering designed to concentrate power, weaken Parliament or disturb the federal compact.
Giving one person powers that properly belong to Parliament, the provinces and other constitutional institutions does not create a stronger state. It creates a state dependent on one person. And a state dependent on one person is not strong. Nor can poor provincial governance be cured simply by dismantling provinces or taking authority back to the centre. If a government fails, hold it accountable. If an institution fails, reform it. If political leadership fails, let the people replace it. The answer is not centralisation. It is genuine devolution. Pakistan has repeatedly experimented with local government, yet political governments themselves have often treated local institutions as competitors rather than partners. This is a profound contradiction: political parties demand democracy from the centre and then hesitate to devolve power when they themselves are in government.
The centre fears the province; the province fears the district; the district fears the tehsil; the tehsil fears the union council. Power moves upward. The citizen is left below. The Constitution itself points in the opposite direction. Article 140A requires provinces to establish local government systems and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to elected local representatives.
A strong federation should produce strong provinces; strong provinces should produce empowered local governments; and empowered local governments should make the state visible in the daily life of the citizen. When citizens feel that the state belongs to them, an extremist has far less room to persuade them that the state is their enemy. The same principle applies to public office. Public office is service, not entitlement. If an office-holder demands an extension instead of demonstrating performance, exemption instead of accountability, greater powers instead of greater responsibility, or more time instead of completing the task entrusted to him, the question should be simple:
What measurable performance justifies it? A person who has completed his constitutional duty should be able to leave office with dignity. Institutions must be greater than individuals. No state should depend upon one person’s continued tenure. If the system cannot function without an individual, the problem is not the individual’s indispensability; it is the system’s weakness. Pakistan has already paid an enormous price for the failures of successive security strategies. Soldiers, police officers, children, women and ordinary citizens have all carried the burden. The Army Public School massacre remains one of the darkest wounds in our national memory.
But remembrance without accountability is incomplete. The real questions are not only who sacrificed, how much was spent, or when the next operation will begin, but what we learned, where previous resources went, and who was held accountable for past strategies. Pakistan cannot build lasting national security on permanent suspicion of its own citizens. Trust cannot be imposed by force; it must be earned through justice, dignity, equal citizenship, representation and constitutional restraint. A state is strengthened not by silencing disagreement, but by ensuring that its people never feel alienated from it.
What Pakistan needs today is not another experiment in concentrated power. It needs a national compact of trust: a Parliament respected for its constitutional authority; elections whose mandates are honoured; political parties accountable to voters; provinces protected within the federal structure; empowered local governments; institutions operating within their constitutional boundaries; transparent use of public resources; and independent evaluation of counterterrorism policies. Above all, no individual or institution should stand above the Constitution. A state is not strong when its citizens fear it, but when they trust it. That trust is our greatest national-security asset. The state’s first duty is not to control, divide or silence its people, but to unite them, and everything else follows.