BARA: Atop a police outpost in northwest Pakistan, Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Faizanullah Khan stands behind a stack of sandbags and peers through the sights of an anti-aircraft gun, scanning the terrain along the unofficial boundary with the tribal districts.

On this cold and rainy February morning, he is not looking for aircraft, but for the militants behind the attacks against his force, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police.

It is daytime so he could relax a bit, but night was a different story, the ASI said, pointing to the marks left by bullets fired at the Manzoor Shaheed outpost.

The outpost is one of dozens that provide defence against the militants waging a fresh assault on the country’s law enforcers from hideouts in the border region adjoining Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The threat the insurgency poses to Pakistan was illustrated last month when a bombing at a mosque inside Peshawar’s police compound killed more than 80 police personnel. Jamaatul Ahrar, a faction of the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), had claimed responsibility.

Reuters visited police outposts across northern Pakistan and spoke to more than a dozen people, including senior police officials, many of whom described how the force is suffering increasing losses as it bears the brunt of insurgent attacks while contending with resourcing and logistical constraints.

Police here have fought militants for years — more than 2,100 personnel have been killed and 7,000 injured since 2001 — but today they seem to be the sole focus of militants’ operations.

“We’ve stopped their way to Peshawar,” ASI Jameel Shah of Sarband police station, which controls the Manzoor Shaheed outpost, said of the militants.

Sarband and its eight outposts have suffered four major attacks in recent months and faced sniper fire with unprecedented frequency, according to police based there.

Elsewhere, militants stormed a police head office in Karachi on Feb 17, killing four before security forces retook the premises and killed three assailants.

Muhammad Khurasani, a spokesman for the banned TTP, told Reuters their main target was the military, but the police were standing in the way.

“The police have been told many times not to obstruct our way, and instead of paying heed to this the police have started martyring our comrades,” he said. “This is why we are targeting them.”

The military has conducted operations alongside the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police and faced TTP attacks, but the military’s public relations wing did not address questions from Reuters about casualties.

The TTP wants to show that its fighters can strike outside their current areas of influence, said Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. While their ability may be limited, he said, “propaganda is a big part of this war and the TTP are getting good at it”.

Zahid Hussain, a journalist and author of books on Islamist militancy, said the police were more vulnerable than the military, given their resources and training.

“I mean, they’re sitting ducks there,” Hussain said.

Moazzam Jah Ansari, the former chief of KP police, told Reuters earlier this month that militant strategies had been evolving.

“They try and find more effective ways to conduct military operations, more lethal weapons,” he said in an interview before being replaced.

Militants have procured US-made M4 rifles and other sophisticated weapons from stocks left by Western forces that exited Afghanistan in 2021, police officials said. Some police guards told Reuters they had seen small reconnaissance drones flying over their outposts.

The TTP spokesman also confirmed that the group was using drones for surveillance.

Several police officials at Sarband station said the provincial government and military provided them and other outposts with thermal goggles in late January to aid the fight, but that posed another problem.

“About 22 hours of the day we have power outages... there’s no electricity to charge our goggles,” Shah told Reuters at Sarband.

The station has one rooftop solar panel, which officers paid out of their own pockets to install, according to station chief Qayyum Khan.

One policeman said they use their vehicles or go to a petrol station equipped with a back-up generator to charge their goggles.

Officers also said they had taken other protection measures, including erecting rudimentary walls to guard against sniper fire, and procuring bulletproof glass from a market that sells equipment left behind by US-led forces.

At the Manzoor Shaheed post, Faizanullah Khan says that on some nights, militants call out to him or his fellow guards.

“They say ‘we see you; lay down your arms’,” he said.

He and his fellow guards sometimes reply, he said, by firing their guns into the darkness.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2023