What is unfolding in Pakhtunkhwa can be understood as a coordinated, full-scale, all-out colonial war against the Pashtun people under Pakistan rule. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a large and strategically critical province in northwestern Pakistan.
This colonial war encompasses political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, resource extraction. And military repression and staged military actions. Also, territorial and land seizures, control over natural resources, political domination. And the systematic dismantling of political and democratic rights and institutions.
The former FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) system has not merely been restored. It has been expanded from seven tribal agencies to twelve districts. This extends exceptional rule and militarised control across a much larger territory.
The Punjab- and military-centric federal government has seized provincial legislative, executive, administrative, and fiscal powers. It has stripped the Pashtun people of even the limited political autonomy previously available to them.
The state is institutionalising exceptional rule and governance through military force. It is turning political resistance into an act that can invite lethal state repression. This is not simply the restoration of the old colonial frontier system. It is its expansion and consolidation across Pakhtunkhwa.
Some compare the establishment of a separate secretariat for twelve districts in Pakhtunkhwa with the South Punjab Secretariat in Bahawalpur/Multan. They are actually endorsing the colonial state’s narrative.
The Punjab government established the South Punjab Secretariat through amendments to its own Rules of Business, within the existing provincial constitutional and administrative framework.
Punjab was not placed under emergency or Governor’s Rule. Nor did the federal government displace its elected provincial government and seize its powers. Nor has Punjab faced a staged war aimed at consolidating colonial expansion.
In Pakhtunkhwa, by contrast, the federal government has imposed emergency and Governor’s Rule. It has displaced elected provincial authority. It has seized sweeping legislative, executive, administrative, and fiscal powers. It has imposed an exceptional system of governance across twelve districts.
To portray this federal/military seizure of power as a mere administrative rearrangement is to conceal the political character of the colonial assault on Pakhtunkhwa. And the wider questions of military domination, territorial dispossession, control over land and natural resources. And of provincial autonomy and the national and democratic rights of the Pashtun nation.
If the Punjab-centric federal government and the army redraw Pakhtunkhwa, they must be prepared for the redrawing of Pakistan itself!
Good for us... This would open new opportunities to organize for international communist revolution.
—Comrade in Pakistan
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