Meet Lieutenant General Omer Ahmed Bokhari, Corps Commander Peshawar — one of the most senior military commanders overseeing a province where communities continue to raise serious allegations about drone strikes, military operations, civilian deaths and displacement.
For the people living in affected areas, these are not statistics.
They are homes destroyed, families displaced, children living under fear, and civilians paying the price for operations carried out in the name of security.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly itself has formally raised the issue of repeated drone attacks and the loss of innocent lives. Residents in affected areas have also taken to the streets demanding answers.
So the questions of command responsibility cannot simply be avoided:
Who authorises these operations?
Who determines their targets?
Who investigates when civilians are killed?
Who answers for families forced from their homes?
And what responsibility lies with the military command overseeing operations in the province?
If Lt Gen Omer Ahmed Bokhari and the Peshawar Corps command are involved in directing or supervising these operations, then the public has a right to know what safeguards exist to protect civilians and who is held accountable when those safeguards fail.
Counterterrorism cannot become a blank cheque for civilian suffering.
Every civilian death must be independently investigated. Every displaced family deserves protection and compensation. And every commander exercising state power must remain answerable under the law.
The people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not collateral damage.
Their lives matter. Their homes matter. Their rights matter.
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