Key Points

Four houses were obliterated in the attack, leaving families buried under rubble. While the military has refused to acknowledge responsibility, local officials have confirmed that the assault was carried out under the pretext of striking Taliban hideouts. In reality, it was innocent civilians who paid the price.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Iqbal Afridi has accused the army of launching "an attack on unarmed civilians," making it clear that this was not crossfire, but a deliberate strike.

This is not the first time Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been forced to bleed for Islamabad's wars. The region has been turned into a battlefield for decades, starting with Pakistan's decision in 1979 to use the tribal belt as a staging ground for anti-Soviet jihad.

Funded by billions of US and Saudi dollars and guided by the ISI, militant groups were trained and sheltered in the same mountains that are now being bombed.

When the Soviets withdrew in 1988, these groups did not dissolve; they entrenched themselves deeper. Following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, waves of fighters crossed into Pakistan, bringing instability and bloodshed.

By the late 2000s, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan had formed, headquartered in precisely the same districts now devastated by airstrikes. Islamabad claims these operations are meant to fight terrorism, but the evidence shows otherwise.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly documented how Pakistan's campaigns in the tribal belt rely on indiscriminate bombardment, extrajudicial killings, and collective punishment. In 2009, the military's offensive in South Waziristan displaced over half a million people.

In 2014, the so-called Operation Zarb-e-Azb uprooted nearly a million more. In both cases, airstrikes leveled entire villages.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tracking drone strikes and Pakistani air raids, has estimated that thousands of civilians--including women and children--were killed in Pakistan's tribal belt between 2004 and 2018 alone. Yet official records often describe these deaths simply as "terrorist casualties," erasing the reality of who was actually killed.

The humanitarian toll is staggering. More than three million people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been displaced since the early 2000s.

Camps remain overcrowded, underfunded, and neglected, with families living without basic healthcare, schooling, or clean water. Entire generations of Pashtun children are growing up under the shadow of fighter jets and drones. For them, the Pakistani flag does not symbolize protection but fear.

Every bombing plants deeper resentment, feeding the very militancy Islamabad claims to be fighting. Studies by conflict-monitoring groups confirm that civilian killings by state forces correlate with higher rates of insurgent recruitment.

Put simply, Pakistan is manufacturing the enemies it then claims to battle. The silence from Islamabad is perhaps the most damning evidence of impunity.

After the Tirah Valley strike, no government minister stepped forward with an explanation. No inquiry was announced. No reparations were promised to families who had lost their homes and loved ones.

This pattern is consistent: when the Pakistan Air Force bombed villages in North Waziristan in 2014, killing scores of civilians, no independent investigation followed.

When artillery fire hit refugee camps in Kurram Agency in 2008, Islamabad dismissed reports as "enemy propaganda".

Each massacre disappears from public record, erased by the military's tight control of media narratives. The ethnic dimension cannot be ignored. Most victims of these operations are Pashtuns, a community that has long been treated as second-class within Pakistan.

The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) has consistently raised its voice against extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and indiscriminate airstrikes, but its leaders are harassed, arrested, and silenced.

The military's branding of entire Pashtun populations as "terrorist sympathizers" has created a system where civilian lives are seen as expendable. When bombs fall on Pashtun villages, Islamabad's ruling elite in Lahore and Islamabad barely notice.

What makes this even more hypocritical is Pakistan's double game with militancy. For decades, Islamabad sheltered groups like the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network, providing them safe havens while cracking down on local Pashtuns under the banner of counter-terrorism.

Even today, international analysts point out that Pakistan differentiates between "good Taliban," who serve its strategic goals, and "bad Taliban," who challenge its authority.

This cynical distinction means that the full weight of military power is directed not against insurgents but against civilians caught in the middle. The result is what we saw in Tirah Valley: dead women, dead children, and a government that pretends nothing happened. The cost of Pakistan's militarized policies is not limited to its borders.

Every time Islamabad bombs its own civilians, it destabilizes the wider region. Refugees flee into Afghanistan, straining already fragile systems there. Cross-border violence escalates, feeding cycles of retribution. International jihadist networks use these massacres as propaganda, pointing to them as proof of state brutality.

Pakistan's actions, instead of containing militancy, export it across South and Central Asia. International silence only deepens the tragedy.

Western governments that routinely criticize human rights violations in other countries remain muted when Islamabad bombs its own villages. Pakistan markets itself as an indispensable ally in the "war on terror," but the reality is darker.

This is the same state that nurtured militant networks for strategic depth, the same military that sheltered the Afghan Taliban leadership, and the same intelligence apparatus that played a double game for decades. Today, it justifies civilian massacres under the cover of counterterrorism while demanding international aid and legitimacy.

The 23 killed in Tirah Valley are not collateral damage. They are the latest victims of a system that views its own people as targets. From Waziristan to Swat, from Bajaur to Khyber, the pattern is the same: bomb first, deny responsibility, and move on without accountability.

The cycle will continue until Pakistan dismantles its militarised policies, ends indiscriminate air campaigns, and begins treating the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as citizens instead of enemies.

The families who lost everything in a single airstrike do not need more empty rhetoric about security. They need justice, acknowledgement, and the right to live without fear of their own army. And until that happens, the truth remains stark and unavoidable: Pakistan is a state that is killing its own people.

- IANS