Shehbaz defends Khyber Pakhtunkhwa emergency, accuses PTI of 13 years of failed rule
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Saturday the federal government had no other option but to impose emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, blaming the provincial administration for failing to tackle rising militant attacks.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has defended the federal government's decision to impose emergency and governor's rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, saying on Saturday that the centre had no other option, and blaming the provincial administration for failing to tackle rising militant attacks in the province.
President Asif Ali Zardari imposed emergency and governor's rule earlier this month in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was governed by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. The government cited rising militant violence and the provincial administration's alleged failure to cooperate in counterterrorism efforts as the main reason for the move, according to Arab News.
The decision was taken as the province's chief minister, Sohail Afridi, was marching towards Islamabad with thousands of Khan supporters to demand his release from prison. The federal government has taken Afridi into what it calls protective custody and transferred powers to run the province to Governor Faisal Karim Kundi.
Speaking in Islamabad, Sharif said the province's leadership had disengaged from counterterrorism work, a point also made in Dawn's account of the decision, which dates the imposition of emergency and governor's rule to 11 October. Pakistan has seen a surge in militant attacks since November 2022, when a fragile truce between the state and the Pakistani Taliban broke down.
Sharif put the human and economic cost of militancy in stark terms. During the past two and a half years, thousands of ordinary citizens, police and military officers were killed in militant attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he said, and Pakistan's economy had suffered a devastating blow from militant attacks since the early 2000s. Around 80,000 people were killed, he said, and the economy suffered losses of between 150 billion and 200 billion dollars — a figure Dawn's version put at around 15,000 billion rupees.
The prime minister went further at a meeting of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz parliamentary party in Islamabad, turning his criticism on the PTI's record in the province as a whole. He accused the party of achieving very little, if anything, during its 13-year rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, questioning whether funds allocated to the province were used transparently for public welfare.
According to Dawn's account of that meeting, Sharif said the PTI had failed to fulfil its pledges to build hospitals, universities, schools, dams and solar power projects across the province. He questioned the lack of Safe City projects and improvements to the Counter-Terrorism Department in the province, noting that substantial funds had been provided to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under National Finance Commission arrangements to combat terrorism.
The imposition of emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has heightened political tensions across Pakistan. The sacking of the PTI's only provincial government is the latest blow against Khan, who has been in prison since 2023, and it removes the party's last base of executive power.
The PTI has pushed back. It has formed a six-member negotiating committee to seek an end to governor's rule and the emergency, a move already reported on News Orbit Live, and its supporters argue that the federal action is political rather than security-driven. The party's position is that the province was singled out because it was the PTI's last government, not because of any failure on counterterrorism.
The federal government rejects that reading. Its argument, as set out by Sharif on Saturday, is that the province's administration had stopped cooperating on security at precisely the moment when attacks were rising, leaving the centre with no choice but to step in. That claim — of deliberate disengagement — is now the central dispute between the two sides.
What happens next will depend on both the security situation and the courts and politics around the emergency. If attacks in the province fall, the government will present that as vindication; if they continue, the PTI will argue the intervention achieved nothing. Either way, the emergency has already reshaped Pakistan's political map, leaving the country's largest opposition party without a provincial government for the first time in more than a decade.
For residents of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the immediate question is more practical: whether governor's rule brings better security, services and development, or simply a new layer of political confrontation. Sharif's Saturday remarks suggest the government intends to make that case in public, province by province, project by project — and to hold the PTI's 13-year record up against it.
