When a movement speaks loudest about Pashtun lives yet stays silent when those same lives are taken by terrorists, the question is no longer about rights. It is about the agenda.
Every few months, a new name surfaces from the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. A new face. A new story of abduction, oppression, or state violence. And every time, before a single fact is verified, before any institution has completed so much as a preliminary inquiry, the international appeals begin. Statements go out to foreign embassies.
Press releases land in the inboxes of human rights bodies in Geneva and Washington. The Pakistani state is already convicted in the court of global opinion before the ink on the complaint has dried.
This is not how movements seeking justice operate. This is how movements seeking leverage operate.
The case of Farid Afridi follows an identical script. Within hours of the reported incident, PTM had framed it as enforced disappearance at the hands of security forces, mobilised its media network, and begun the familiar ritual of international outrage. No investigation had concluded. No evidence had been presented. The verdict was the point, not the process.
What is most instructive is not what PTM says but what it consistently refuses to say. In the last several years, terrorist attacks across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former tribal areas have killed hundreds of civilians. Pashtun men, women, and children have been bombed in mosques, shot at checkpoints set up by terrorist groups, and displaced from ancestral lands by the same networks that Pakistan’s security forces have spent two decades fighting at the cost of thousands of their own soldiers’ lives.
PTM has not held a single press conference about these victims. There are no candlelit vigils. No appeals to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings when the killers carry the flag of the TTP rather than the uniform of the state.
A movement that claims to speak for Pashtun lives must answer for this silence. It is not a minor omission. It is the clearest window into what PTM actually is and what it is not.
Then there is the question of PTM’s ideological geography. The movement that presents itself as a Pakistani civil society organisation has, on multiple documented occasions, seen its gatherings marked by the Afghan national flag. Its leadership echoes narratives that find far warmer reception in Kabul and New Delhi than in Islamabad or Rawalpindi. Foreign diplomatic interest in PTM’s activities is not incidental.
It is structural. The movement’s value to hostile regional actors lies precisely in its ability to clothe geopolitical interference in the language of indigenous rights.
Pakistan is no stranger to the tactic of using minority or regional grievances as instruments of external pressure. The playbook is old. What is newer is the sophistication with which social media, international human rights architecture, and diaspora networks can be mobilised to generate reputational damage against state institutions that are, whatever their imperfections, engaged in a legitimate and costly struggle against terrorism.
This does not mean that accountability for state actors should be dismissed. It should not. Pakistan’s security institutions serve the Constitution and must answer to it. Due process, transparency, and the protection of citizens’ rights are not luxuries to be deferred; they are the foundation on which the state’s moral authority rests. The demand for these things is entirely legitimate.
What is not legitimate is a political organisation that bypasses domestic legal processes entirely, refuses to await investigation outcomes, and runs straight to foreign capitals with allegations designed to embarrass Pakistan internationally rather than to secure justice for the individual concerned.
If PTM’s leadership genuinely cared about Farid Afridi as a person rather than as a symbol, they would be engaging Pakistan’s courts, its human rights commissions, and its parliamentary oversight mechanisms. They are not. That choice tells you everything.
Pakistan’s Pashtun communities are among the most resilient, patriotic, and long-suffering in the country. They have lost more sons to terrorism than perhaps any other group.
They deserve spokespeople who fight for them honestly and completely. What PTM offers instead is a selective performance of solidarity that falls silent precisely when the perpetrators of violence are not wearing Pakistani uniforms. That selective silence is not an oversight. It is policy. And it is time more Pakistanis called it exactly what it is
