Daily Times Editorials 18th September 2026

Disturbing Revelations

Weapons allegedly moving from Afghanistan through Bara and into Azad Jammu and Kashmir should set off alarm bells in a country already fighting militancy on multiple fronts. Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, Minister of State for Interior Tallal Chaudhry noted that an arrested dealer, Zia, had operated for years and supplied weapons to individuals associated with the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee. According to investigators, he was in contact with an Afghanistan-based supplier, while another alleged facilitator moved weapons from Bara towards AJK. Narcotics, smuggled fuel, vehicles and hawala transfers were also said to form part of the network. These allegations must now be proved in court.

Still, the Afghan connection cannot be dismissed as an isolated thread. Pakistan has spent much of this year fighting precisely this kind of cross-border militancy. Earlier this month, security forces killed 25 militants attempting to infiltrate North Waziristan from Afghanistan. The UN has separately documented the continuing presence and activity of TTP networks in Afghanistan, while Washington and Islamabad have jointly identified the TTP, BLA, Al Qaeda and IS-K as threats requiring closer cooperation and disruption of terrorist facilitation networks.Send Money Overseas

The cost is visible across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where civilians have been killed in quadcopter attacks in Bannu, police personnel continue to be targeted, and the security apparatus remains stretched across repeated intelligence-based operations. Mr Chaudhry rightly pointed out that 200 such operations were being conducted across the country every day. Balochistan presents the other major front. Islamabad has repeatedly accused India of financing and facilitating separatist violence, including through networks operating from Afghanistan, and has already shared evidence relating to attacks such as the Jaffar Express incident with international partners and UN mechanisms.

Seen against this backdrop, an alleged weapons route running from Afghanistan through Bara and onwards into AJK yet again points towards the convergence of organised crime, illicit finance, smuggling corridors and militant logistics that Pakistan has been trying to break elsewhere.

Questions of electricity tariffs, wheat subsidies, representation and governance remain legitimate subjects for negotiation and democratic politics. No qualms about that. But weapons belong somewhere else entirely.

Pakistan has every reason to keep political space open in AJK and every obligation to close the space available to armed networks. *

Still Unequal

Pakistan has once again found itself near the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, ranked 143rd out of 145 economies in 2026. The headline is grim by all accounts, even as the picture does not seem entirely static. Pakistan’s parity score rose to 59.5 per cent, its strongest year-on-year improvement in a decade, driven largely by gains in education.

Nevertheless, female labour-force participation stands at 28.2 per cent against 81.5 per cent for men. Women account for barely 6.1 per cent of senior officials and managers, while estimated earned-income parity is only 26.3 per cent. Female literacy remains 48.5 per cent against 69.1 per cent for men. That Pakistan ranked first in the world for enrolment in tertiary education still needs perspective. Even as 10.71 per cent of women were enrolled against 11.01 per cent of men, parity at a low base remains a low base.

More troubling is the direction beneath these numbers. Pakistan’s economic-participation score remains below where it stood in 2006, while earned-income parity has actually deteriorated over two decades. Women now constitute almost 45 per cent of professional and technical workers, yet scarcely appear in senior management. Pakistan is educating women and bringing many into skilled professions without allowing comparable numbers to move into authority or higher earnings.Send Money Overseas

Its political history makes the contrast harder to ignore. Benazir Bhutto became the first woman elected prime minister in the Muslim world in 1988. Maryam Nawaz is Pakistan’s first woman chief minister. Yet women hold only 3.45 per cent of ministerial positions today. Breaking through at the very top has clearly done little, by itself, to dismantle the structures underneath.

Those structures begin at home. The ILO estimates that around 60 per cent of Pakistani women spend more than 15 hours a week on domestic work, against fewer than seven per cent of men. Women who do enter wage employment still earn around 25 to 30 per cent less. More worryingly, the report records unequal rights for women in inheritance and divorce, restricted access to justice and restricted reproductive autonomy. Almost one in four Pakistani women is reported to have experienced gendered violence in her lifetime. An SDPI study released this month found that barely two per cent of ever-married women own land alone or jointly, even though 67 per cent of employed women work in agriculture.

This is why Pakistan’s gender debate cannot remain satisfied with firsts, reserved seats or graduation photographs. The problem runs through the household, labour market, workplace and corridors of power. Until those at the helm change that status quo, we will continue to celebrate individual breakthroughs while the larger structure beneath them stays stubbornly intact. *