Nabeeha Fajar Javed
Snow does not wait for political slogans, and hunger does not pause for street theatrics. In Tirah, where displacement, insecurity, and harsh weather have collided into a human emergency, governance was supposed to show its face.
Instead, what the people witnessed was absence, an absence masked by convoys, rallies, and hollow displays of political strength elsewhere in the province . At a time when Tirah needed leadership at its most present and practical, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Chief Minister, Sohail Afridi chose the noise of street movements over the silence of suffering .
For months, the situation in Tirah had been known to the provincial government. Law-enforcement agencies repeatedly warned that militants had embedded themselves within the civilian population, making targeted operations impossible without temporary evacuation.
Therefore, Local Mashran and state representatives reached a consensus, temporary evacuation was necessary to protect lives . Yet implementation, which was responsibility of local administration, was deliberately delayed. Not out of humanitarian caution, but political calculation. When action finally came, it arrived in the dead of winter when hardship could be turned into imagery, distress into narrative, and suffering into propaganda .
The result was entirely predictable. Administrative chaos at registration points, insufficient staffing, long queues, and preventable misery.
Registration, camps, food, healthcare, compensation, and logistics are not military responsibilities and fall squarely under the provincial government’s civilian authority . Yet instead of owning these failures, the provincial leadership attempted to redirect blame, converting governance collapse into a media spectacle.
Crucially, the ongoing relief and rehabilitation operations are not and were never meant to be the responsibility of the armed forces. The army’s role in Tirah is limited to security and counter-terrorism operations.
Moreover blurring this distinction is a deliberate evasion of responsibility. When relief fails, it is because those elected to govern were elsewhere, busy staging rallies instead of managing a humanitarian response.
What makes this neglect more disturbing is the contrast between need and priority. While displaced families struggled for shelter and warmth, Sohail Afridi was busy orchestrating rallies and street movements, events that drain public resources, disrupt civic life, and serve no immediate relief purpose.
This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question. Does governance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa begin and end with one man’s political visibility? Is the machinery of the province so captive to personality politics that public money can be spared for rallies but not for the displaced people of Tirah?
The irony is cruel. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, according to reports, ranks among the worst-affected provinces in terms of poverty, with nearly 49% of its population living below acceptable standards. This is not a province suffering from a lack of problems, it is suffering from a lack of priorities.
Infrastructure remains weak, healthcare overstretched, education uneven, and entire regions like Tirah remain historically marginalized. In such a context, spending political capital and public funds on rallies is not just tone-deaf, it is indefensible.
Critically, leadership is not measured by the size of a convoy or the volume of slogans, but by presence in crisis. Tirah did not need speeches, it needed systems. It did not need optics, it needed administration.
Instead, the people saw a chief minister absent from the province’s most pressing humanitarian and governance challenge, while his government presided over confusion, delay, and allegations of corruption surrounding the very funds allocated for displacement relief.
The episode exposes a deeper rot. The deliberate reframing of a security and law-enforcement operation as a humanitarian catastrophe to shield political negligence. Temporary displacement during counter-terrorism operations is a globally accepted practice meant to reduce civilian casualties.
Calling it collective punishment while sabotaging its administration is intellectual dishonesty. Civilian suffering is being weaponized to deflect from provincial incompetence.
The real failure, therefore, is not displacement itself, nor the security operation that necessitated it. It is the abdication of civilian responsibility. While the army carried out its limited mandate, restricted to security and counter-terrorism operations rather than governance or relief, the provincial leadership constitutionally responsible for relief and rehabilitation chose political theatrics over administration. Tirah was not failed by institutions, it was failed by priorities.
Ultimately, Tirah’s tragedy is not displacement, it is abandonment. Abandonment by those elected to govern, to plan, and to protect. Until leadership in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa learns that governance is not performance and responsibility cannot be outsourced to narratives, regions like Tirah will remain trapped between militants, mismanagement, and political indifference.
