KP CM Afridi Demands Federal APCs and a Seat at the Counterterrorism Table After DI Khan Bombing

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi said on September 28, 2026, that his provincial government "does not accept policies made behind closed doors" and cannot achieve lasting peace without the federal government taking KP "into confidence" on counterterrorism strategy, a day after he visited survivors of the September 26 suicide bombing at a checkpost in Dera Ismail Khan's Darazinda area.

What Afridi is demanding

Afridi's central complaint is concrete rather than rhetorical: he said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has already made payments to federal agencies for modern weapons, equipment and armoured personnel carriers, but that the equipment has not been delivered. "We told the federal government to give us our APCs because your APCs were being used for us," he said, framing the request as the province simply asking for hardware it had already paid for rather than seeking a new allocation.

Beyond equipment, Afridi argued that KP's government must have a formal role in shaping counterterrorism policy going forward, saying the objective was to ensure the province's voice — which he said continues to bear the heaviest burden of the current wave of militant violence — is built into the policy response rather than informed of it after the fact. He said the fight against militancy "could be won" if the federal government took KP's government into confidence and accepted the province's proposals, implying that the current arrangement does neither.

The visit that preceded the statement

Afridi, accompanied by Provincial Minister for Information Technology Shafi Jan, visited the Trauma Centre at District Headquarters Teaching Hospital in Dera Ismail Khan on September 27 to check on those wounded in the Aman Mela checkpost bombing, which killed at least 11 people and wounded around 30 when a suicide bomber struck the joint police-customs post in Darazinda on September 26. Former chief minister Ali Amin Khan Gandapur, also of PTI, joined him at the hospital and the two later met separately at Al-Amin House to discuss what officials described as matters of mutual interest — a signal that KP's PTI leadership, current and former, is presenting a united front on the province's security grievances.

Part of a wider standoff with Islamabad

Afridi's demand lands directly on top of an already-tense week between KP's PTI-led government and the federal centre. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi had told reporters days earlier that the government was consulting the Law Ministry on options for the province, including governor's rule — a threat KP's own governor, Faisal Karim Kundi, publicly dismissed as baseless even as Afridi warned it would trigger an "unprecedented" public reaction if pursued.

Taken together, the APCs dispute and the governor's-rule talk describe the same underlying fight from two angles: a PTI-run provincial government that says it is being asked to absorb the human and political cost of a worsening militant campaign along the Afghan border while being kept out of the room where the federal response to that campaign gets decided. KP has recorded a disproportionate share of Pakistan's militant violence this year, including the Dera Ismail Khan bombing and repeated cross-border clashes and strikes tied to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, giving Afridi's complaint a body count to point to rather than an abstract grievance about provincial autonomy.

What happens next

Islamabad has not publicly responded to the specific APCs claim or committed to any formalised consultation mechanism with KP on counterterrorism strategy. Given that federal officials were, in the same week, openly discussing whether to curtail the KP government's authority altogether, a quick concession to give that same government more say over security policy looks unlikely in the near term — which suggests this dispute, like the governor's-rule talk it sits alongside, is more likely to keep resurfacing after each new attack than to be resolved by any single statement from either side.

Build Better Pakistan's Politics Desk is tracking Centre-province tensions over Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's security response and will update this piece if the federal government answers Afridi's demands.