Last week, the government of Pakistan imposed emergency rule and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The Pashtun-majority province, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, has been deeply shaped by events across the frontier.
KP’s instability escalated during the 1980s, when Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship, backed by American and Saudi funding, transformed Pakistan into a launching pad for anti-Soviet Afghan Islamist insurgents. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1988, Pakistan aligned with the Afghan Taliban (TTA), who took power in Kabul in 1996. Even after the US forces ousted the TTA in 2001, Pakistan provided TTA fighters sanctuary to counter the new regime in Kabul installed by the US.
In 2007, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) emerged. While the TTA maintained ties with Pakistan’s security establishment, they also cultivated ideological links with the TTP. However, the TTA remained passive as the TTP carried out brutal attacks inside Pakistan.
Despite a major Pakistani military offensive (2015–2017) that displaced the TTP, Pakistan maintained the belief that the TTA were ‘good Taliban’ who would remain allies once in power. TTP became the ‘bad Taliban.’ The strategy was as juvenile as it sounds. Under the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), the government began resettling TTP fighters who had escaped to Afghanistan. There was no serious bar on them retaining their weapons and regrouping. This was yet another juvenile move by the state and its then-favourite government.
Decades of contradictory policies towards the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have left Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mired in insecurity. As the state imposes emergency rule in KP, the question is whether extraordinary powers can help correct the state’s longstanding strategic failures
Understandably, during the TTA’s return to power in 2021 in Afghanistan and Imran Khan’s ouster in 2022, the TTP launched a fresh wave of violent attacks, primarily in KP. The TTP had sensed that, after Khan’s fall, the policy of the new military establishment might shift. And it did.
Today, the federal government and military establishment accuse KP’s PTI-led provincial administration of shielding TTP elements. Meanwhile, the ‘good versus bad Taliban’ strategy has crumbled as the TTA regime in Kabul refuses to stop TTP attacks and has begun cultivating ties with India. According to the Pakistani government and the military establishment, the emergency in KP will sideline the PTI-led provincial administration, paving the way for a decisive military operation against the TTP that will be able to counter proxies backed by the TTA and India more effectively.
Emergencies are often viewed as dents in a democratic system. Indeed, but here I would explore it from another angle. There are political scientists, legal scholars and economists who have long observed that structural emergencies frequently act as catalysts for institutional growth. By fracturing rigid bureaucracies, overriding legislative inertia, regulating politicised security institutions and mobilising state capacity, there is a history of emergency conditions that have spurred economic advancement and curbed security threats.
In The Political Economy of States of Emergency, legal scholar Balakrishnan Rajagopal demonstrates that economic and national security emergencies historically drive states to centralise financial governance, rationalise labour markets and establish resilient public safety nets. Complementing this, the American sociologist Mancur Olson argued that emergencies dismantle entrenched interest groups. These groups slow down economic growth and facilitate agitation.
A clear historical example of this occurred during India’s 21-month emergency (1975–1977), declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi. Prior to the declaration, India was experiencing severe economic stagflation, spiralling inflation driven by global oil shocks, constant industrial strikes and political violence. As documented by the American legal historian Granville Austin, the centralisation of executive power through the emergency enabled the enforcement of a 20-point programme, clamping down on hoarding and strikes, which rapidly reduced inflation, increased industrial production and elevated tax compliance through stringent enforcement. Violence against the state and government too decreased significantly.
In South Korea, the state of emergency following the Korean War in the 1950s allowed state planners to initiate rapid, export-led industrialisation that transformed a devastated nation into a global economic power. In his book Constitutional Dictatorship, American political scientist Clinton Rossiter argued that temporary emergency powers are necessary mechanisms designed precisely to preserve constitutional order during existential threats. According to Rossiter, far from destroying the legal framework, well-regulated emergency powers allow democracies to deploy decisive force to restore order without permanent constitutional erosion.
In Singapore, early post-independence security emergencies led to the establishment of streamlined administrative and judicial frameworks that laid the foundation for one of the world’s most stable, low-crime and commercially reliable legal environments. According to Austin, in India, periods of national emergency eventually led the judiciary to refine constitutional protections, such as establishing the “basic structure doctrine” to balance executive emergency authority with civil liberties. This structural tightening creates a durable framework that lowers everyday crime rates and clarifies rule-of-law standards after the crisis subsides.
Emergencies also provide governments with the operational flexibility required to dismantle sophisticated clandestine networks, disrupt their financial channels and re-establish state sovereignty over ungoverned spaces. In Inside Terrorism, American political scientist Bruce Hoffman highlights that anti-terror operations require agility that standard peacetime administrative frameworks rarely afford. Emergencies enable real-time inter-agency intelligence-sharing and rapid response deployments, severely restricting the operational space of militant groups.
The contemporary application of this dynamic can be seen in Pakistan’s emergency declaration in KP under Articles 232, 234 and 235. Counter-militancy efforts in KP faced institutional paralysis due to political misalignment between the federal government in Islamabad and PTI’s provincial administration over kinetic military offensives.
The Pakistani scholar Hasan Askari Rizvi notes that emergency interventions serve as critical mechanisms for the state to reassert control over volatile territories. By placing executive authority under federal direction, emergency rule allows the federal government to streamline intelligence sharing between military assets and local police, eliminate political opposition to targeted offensives against militant groups and redirect provincial budgetary resources directly into border security and counter-militancy infrastructure.
A classic empirical parallel is Peru’s invocation of emergency measures in the early 1990s, which gave law enforcement the extraordinary legal tools necessary to capture the notorious militant leader Abimael Guzmán and effectively neutralise his violent ‘Shining Path’ insurgency.
Similarly, France’s 2015 emergency created integrated counter-terrorism intelligence databases and administrative search powers that permanently improved the state’s capacity to disrupt terror plots, while the UK’s security provisions during the conflict between Irish militants and the state in the 1970s and 1980s were eventually codified into permanent frameworks, such as the Terrorism Act 2000.
Knee-jerk reactions to emergency/governor rule in KP are expected. New conditions should be tracked and monitored instead of being outrightly rejected through typical social media outrage. For the state and government, it is important to learn from examples in which emergencies not only helped streamline economies and curb violence but also contributed in strengthening democracy in the long run.
Published in Dawn, EOS, October 18th, 2026