A different kind of reckoning

The old roads to Waziristan are haunted again. At night, the air smells of pine and gunpowder, and it hums with stories of men climbing down from the same mountains that once buried them. Somewhere between Mir Ali and North Waziristan, a soldier counts the hours till dawn. His radio crackles once, then dies. A shadow moves. A convoy burns. And by morning, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has claimed another victory.

We were promised these ghosts had been buried. Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the grand cleansing of 2014, was supposed to end the war that began with our silence. Yet here we are, in 2025, watching the same hills erupt with fire. The TTP, thought dismantled, is once again alive, more organised, more ideological, and far more ruthless than before. Their ambushes in Dera Ismail Khan, their roadside bombs in Tank, their assassinations in Swat, they come carrying guns and a grim reminder that endings here are only pauses between wars.

Farhat Taj, in her book Taliban and Anti-Taliban, warned of this long before most of us were listening. She wrote of a people caught between two wars, the one fought by militants, and the one fought in their name. She argued that the tribes of the former FATA were never Taliban sympathisers, never "fiercely autonomous savages" as caricatured by analysts in Islamabad or Washington. They were citizens abandoned to the chaos of strategic depth, their voices buried under drone hums and official lies.

In those pages, Taj describes jirgas broken by bombs, elders silenced, entire generations taught to fear both the state and the gunman. "Not Taliban, but anti-Taliban," she wrote, of men who raised lashkars to defend their villages. Many of them were later targeted, not by the Taliban alone, but by the ambiguity of a government too nervous to choose sides. Their courage died in the space between collusion and neglect.

The resurgence of the TTP is a harvest of choices sown long ago, watered by broken promises. After FATA's merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018, there was talk of "mainstreaming". Roads were built, yes, but justice was not. Development funds vanished into bureaucracy, political integration became a slogan, and "reconciliation" turned into quiet amnesty for fighters whose weapons were never surrendered and whose ideology was never disowned. Some even returned to the same villages they once terrorised. The result is the map we see today: a belt of fear stretching from South Waziristan to the outskirts of Swat.

Years earlier, Taj had chronicled the courage that once pushed back against this tide. In Adeyzai, villagers formed an anti-Taliban lashkar they called "emissaries of peace", before a suicide bomber killed their leader, Haji Abdul Malik. And in Orakzai, it was the women of Chamanjana who rose in defiance. After the Taliban killed their relatives, they fought back capturing five militants patrolling their village and beating them with farming tools until the men lay bloodied on the ground. The militants returned later, burning their homes in retribution. Those stories belong to another decade, yet their defiance remains a mirror for our present: proof that the frontier's people never lacked bravery, only a state that stood with them.

But our policy still refuses to learn from that humanity. Each time the militants regroup, our reflex is the same; a statement, a strike, and then silence. Air raids replace dialogue, heroics replace honesty. Counterterrorism has become theatre, and the TTP thrives in the spaces between the lines. Every civilian death, every coerced confession, every displaced family becomes another verse in their recruitment song.

The result of this theatre is a hollow kind of victory, loud in rhetoric, empty in reach. The state wins headlines but loses the trust that could have won the war. To defeat the TTP, Pakistan must do what it has always feared: listen. Listen to the people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the displaced, the widowed, the teachers, the farmers, the tribal elders who once risked their lives to fight extremism when the state would not. Bring them back into the conversation. Empower jirgas to mediate. Let reconciliation be led by those who bled for it.

At the same time, the double games must end too. There can be no "good" and "bad" Taliban, no quiet tolerance of sanctuaries for the sake of influence. Every compromise carved in secrecy becomes another wound in our own soil. The TTP cannot be bombed out of existence if its ideology is allowed to breathe in seminaries, political parties, or online sermons that glorify jihad and martyrdom.

What this moment demands is a different kind of reckoning, one grounded in moral clarity. The army cannot do it alone. The answer lies in the civilian space we abandoned, the courts that never reached the erstwhile FATA, the schools that were never rebuilt, the young who never saw the state except through checkpoints. Real peace will come when justice is no longer outsourced to bombs, but built through laws, trust and accountability. The resurgence of the TTP is not the rebirth of an old enemy, it is the resurrection of our unfinished story. We buried the war without burying its causes. We declared victory while leaving the victors unacknowledged, the people who resisted both the militants and the state's complicity.

Somewhere tonight in the borderlands, the moon rises over weary soldiers and sleepless children. The war hums its old refrain, yet within that stillness, something fragile endures. Hope has not vanished; it lives quietly in the courage of a people who have endured everything except surrender. Pakistan can still rewrite this story, if it learns to trust the very hearts that have kept beating for its survival.

Because silence is not neutrality, it is the absence of vision. But if the state dares to listen, dares to trust its people, then perhaps these mountains will no longer echo with war cries but with the laughter of children who finally inherit peace.