Beyond Ethnicity: Pashtun Identity as a Strategic Variable in Pakistan’s Counterinsurgency Strategy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 2018-2024

Abstract

Pakistan’s counterinsurgency in KP has been studied under the broader rubric of Pashtun identity, which has been accorded a background role in a conflict defined largely by militancy, geography, and state capacity. This article argues that identity is not merely manipulated by other actors; it is strategically constructed by state and insurgent actors and contested and mobilized in ways that affect the legitimacy and durability of counterinsurgency outcomes. The article builds on securitization theory, the civil-war literature on ethnicity and insurgent organization, and the scholarly work on civil-military relations in Pakistan to design a conceptual framework that allows it to differentiate between identity-as-category and identity-as-strategy and test it in Pakistan’s frontier policy between 2018 and 2024. The analysis shows that the securitization of Pashtun civic mobilization was closely linked to, and likely facilitated, the rise of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan since 2021, most evident in the newly merged districts where the merger’s governance promises were least realized. The article concludes that counterinsurgency strategies that do not institutionalize ethnic identity as a useful distinction between insurgent threat and civic dissent risk inadvertently producing an “identity cleavage” that is self-reinforcing and a source of conflict, and that this applies to frontier and borderland conflicts that extend beyond the Pakistani experience.