On the intervening night of October 7-8, Pakistan Army suffered one of its deadliest blows in recent months when eleven of its soldiers, including two senior officers, were killed in an anti-militancy operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai district. According to a statement from Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lt. Col. Junaid Tariq, 39, and his second-in-command, Major Tayyab Rahat, 33, were killed during an intelligence-based operation (IBO) against Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants.

Now, barely 24 hours later, in another statement, ISPR revealed that another young officer, 30-year-old Major Sibtain Haider, was killed in another firefight in Dera Ismail Khan. The loss of these many soldiers in mere two days highlights the resurgence of militancy across Pakistan’s restive northwest and Balochistan. It reveals an uncomfortable truth that while its soldiers bleed on the frontlines, Pakistan’s powerful military leadership remains increasingly busy in managing internal politics, governance and diplomacy instead of its delegated responsibility of national security.

These recent deaths add to a steadily rising tally of military casualties in Pakistan’s long and exhausting counterinsurgency wars. What began two decades ago as an ambitious campaign to “cleanse” the tribal belt of militants has evolved into a grinding cycle of violence that Pakistan has never truly escaped. Since launching “Operation Azm-i-Istehkam” in June last year, which was supposed to be comprehensive campaign to reassert state authority in militancy-infested regions in the country’s hinterland, the military has claimed frequent “successes” in neutralizing insurgents. However, the numbers tell another story.

According to a recently released report by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), Pakistan witnessed 212 militant attacks in August and September alone, which resulted in 135 deaths beside injuries to nearly two hundred. More significantly, among the dead were 61 security personnel, which is nearly triple the number of militants killed during anti-insurgency operations. The ratio exposes a deeply troubling imbalance that far from being on the defensive, militant outfits like the TTP and Islamic State’s Khorasan affiliate (IS-K) have grown more emboldened and well-equipped.

Parallel data from the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) reinforces the bleak picture. “In just three quarters,” CRSS noted, “2025 has proven nearly as deadly as all of 2024, with 2,414 fatalities recorded compared to 2,546 for the entire year before. With a quarter still remaining, 2025 is on course to surpass last year’s toll.” If the trajectory holds, this could be Pakistan’s bloodiest year in a decade.

The figures are symptomatic of a deeper institutional malaise. Pakistan’s Army, which is inarguably the most powerful institution in the country and has for decades served its de facto decision-maker, is increasingly distracted due to its non-military functions. Under Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir, who took command in November 2022, the military’s attention has been directed more toward managing Pakistan’s politics and external relations than securing its own soil.

Instead of focusing on the country’s hinterland in KPK and Balochistan where militants and insurgents have reasserted their presence, the top brass in Rawalpindi has been preoccupied with stabilizing a floundering civilian government, brokering deals with foreign creditors, and navigating Islamabad’s fragile ties with Washington, Beijing, and Riyadh. Asim Munir himself has appeared as much a statesman as a soldier by not only negotiating financial lifelines, leading diplomatic engagements, and, in many ways, functioning as Pakistan’s parallel prime minister.

But this expanding political role has come at a cost. While the Army’s leadership remains entangled in governance and foreign policy, its counterterrorism machinery has been stretched thin as well as demoralized.

Such military causalities will only add to the worsening morale of soldiers.

While the militant violence has resurged across Pakistan’s peripheries, with TTP re-establishing its shadow administrations in parts if KPK and a new generation of Baloch insurgents targeting military convoys, economic projects, and Chinese infrastructure linked to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the state’s response has been both predictable and ineffective. Rawalpindi and Islamabad has responded with more military operations, more checkpoints, more rhetoric about “national resolve.”

For those living under the shadow of this militarised system in KPK and Balochistan, Pakistan Army’s presence has always been “less like protection” and more like suppression and occupation. Despite such a reality, the country’s security establishment has never shown any willingness to confront the political roots of this instability. They continue to overlook how the decades of militarized governance have alienated communities and deepened distrust between the centre and the periphery.

While soldiers die on the frontlines, the Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi remains entrenched in civilian affairs. Field Marshal Munir has been instrumental in shaping Pakistan’s political transition after the fall of Imran Khan’s government, ensuring a pliant civilian administration led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. The Army’s imprint, which was shadowy earlier, over the judiciary, media, and bureaucracy has grown heavier than ever.

In economic policy, too, the military’s footprint is unmistakable. Army Chief has been instrumental in establishing the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), which aimed at attracting foreign investments into the country. Even foreign policy has become a military domain with Asim Munir regularly visiting abroad to countries like United States and China besides Gulf countries. He is not only eclipsing the role of a foreign minister but is growingly demonstrating himself to the world as the most important power centre of the country. This over-centralization of power has weakened civilian institutions, stifled accountability, and blurred the line between national defense and political engineering.

Pakistan’s security doctrine has, for a long time, demonstrated external fixation on India and Afghanistan, whom it has blamed for its recurrent security failures. However, today Pakistan’s most serious threats lie within. The persistence of homegrown militancy in KPK, ethno-nationalist insurgency of Balochistan, and sectarian violence across the country indicates a failure of security doctrine.

Though it conceived Operation Azm-i-Istehkam, like many of its predecessors, as a show of force, its failure to contain militancy demonstrates the reluctance of the Army to deal with its own policy contradictions. For decades, Rawalpindi tolerated “good” and “bad” militants, a legacy of decades of sponsorship of various proxies given its regional ambitions. Now its attempts to fight them without addressing the ideological and institutional complicity that sustained them is akin to treating symptoms while ignoring the disease.

The growing toll of military casualties are a reminder of this cost, symbolizing the futility of a security policy mired in political distraction. For years, Pakistan’s generals have justified their political dominance as a bulwark against instability. Yet the rising body count suggests the opposite as the more the Army entrenches itself in the levers of governance, the less secure the country becomes.

As the violence escalates, will military continue to be both the ruler and the defender remains to be seen. But the fact remains that the sprawling, unaccountable, and politically entangled empire of the generals has hollowed out the very institution it claims to protect. It is the Pakistani soldiers who are paying the price for a leadership that has lost its sense of responsibility.

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