Islamabad, May 16 Pakistan's most frequently targeted security force is also the cheapest to maintain – a stark and indefensible arithmetic that reflects a system in which the personnel are consistently underpaid, under-resourced, and left exposed.
According to a report in online magazine 'The Diplomat', among the provinces across Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa records lowest police salaries - underscoring the sharp disparities in pay structure in the volatile region.
It mentioned that while a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa constable earns roughly 69,000 rupees a month and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Deputy Superintendent earns 184,867 rupees, a Deputy Superintendent in Balochistan earns 453,727 rupees, almost two-and-a-half times as much which is why Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Inspector General of Police (IGP) has now formally written to the Chief Minister seeking 'hard area' status to close the gap, at an annual cost of around 2.2 billion rupees.
The report noted that the May 9 attack on a police checkpoint in Bannu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which killed 15 personnel, was not an isolated incident.
Among the 437 security personnel killed in militant attacks across Pakistan last year, 174 – the largest single contingent – wore the green-and-blue of a provincial police force, not the khaki of the army.
“Most fell in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Bannu district alone recorded 134 attacks on its police, 27 of them fatal,” Aamir Hayat, an expert on tracking militancy and security developments in Pakistan, wrote in 'The Diplomat'.
The list of the dead stretched across several districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Karak, Bajaur, and Wana.
Emphasising the collapse of the prosecutorial pipeline, the report said that only 17 out of 100 militant attack cases in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s anti-terrorism courts end in conviction, while thousands remain under investigation in the province alone, alongside the national Anti-Terrorism Court backlog of over 2,200 cases.
It further highlighted that even three years after 84 worshippers were killed in Peshawar’s Police Lines mosque, the trial has not yet commenced. The accused facilitator, a serving constable within the same force, allegedly received Pakistani rupees 200,000 from the militant group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. He was arrested in late 2024, while the case file reportedly still remains in the pre-trial stage.
Highlighting the human cost borne by the Pakistani police personnel, the report said, “The men being buried this week in Bannu were paid less than they should have been for what they did. The least the state owes them, and the colleagues who will replace them tomorrow, is the truth about what their lives cost.”
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