The teacup did not rattle, but the water inside it vibrated. A low, rhythmic thrumming came from the north, a sound that the residents of Dera Ismail Khan have learned to decode the way a sailor reads the shifting color of the sea. It was not thunder. May is too hot, too heavy for rain. It was the sound of a mortar hitting dry earth, miles away, followed by the thin, metallic crackle of distant automatic fire.
For those living outside the borderlands, May is a month of shifting seasons, of heading into summer, of planning holidays. But according to the latest data compiled by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), May was a month where the air grew thick with cordite.
Militant violence across the country did not just tick upward. It surged by 27 percent.
To look at a spreadsheet of conflict data is to look at a map of a mountain range from a satellite. You see the peaks, the coordinates, the elevations. You do not see the loose gravel that gives way under a soldier’s boot. You do not see the dust settling on a school uniform left in a closet because the roads are no longer safe.
Let us look past the digital ink of the PICSS report. Consider a hypothetical shopkeeper in an area like North Waziristan—we can call him Tariq. Tariq sells loose tea, flour, and small bars of soap from a concrete stall with a corrugated iron roof. For Tariq, a 27 percent increase in violence is not a percentage. It is three fewer hours of daylight that he dares to keep his shutters open. It is the sudden, chilling absence of the local police constable who used to stop by for a cigarette, now reassigned to a fortified checkpoint five miles up the ridge. It is the calculation of whether a delivery truck will make it through the night without being stopped by men with covered faces.
The numbers themselves are stark, unyielding. During those 31 days of May, the country witnessed dozens of distinct attacks, a sharp escalation from the month prior. The geography of the violence remains stubborn, concentrated largely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the twin corridors where geography and history seem to conspire against stability.
But why May?
The answer lies partly in the season itself, a pattern familiar to anyone who has tracked the decades-long rhythms of the region. As the snow melts completely from the high passes of the Hindu Kush, paths that were impassable in January become open highways. Smuggling routes clear. Small groups of men, carrying weapon systems that have circulated through Central Asia since the Cold War, can move across ridges without leaving footprints in the drifts. It is a seasonal surge as old as the hills themselves, yet every year it catches the institutional memory off guard.
The nature of the target is shifting too. A year ago, the focus was often on large, symbolic infrastructure—governmental buildings, high-profile summits, logistics hubs. The May surge, however, showed a grinding preference for the small and the vulnerable. Checkpoints. Mobile patrols. Local elders who dared to sit on peace committees.
Think of it as micro-attrition. The strategy is not to hold territory in the traditional sense; it is to make the cost of governance too high for the state to bear comfortably. When a remote police post is attacked at midnight, the immediate casualty count might be low, but the psychological perimeter of the state shrinks by a few kilometers. The next morning, the local administration hesitates before sending a polio vaccination team into that valley. The week after, a schoolteacher asks for a transfer to Peshawar.
The security forces have not been passive observers. The response has been heavy, deliberate, and costly. Throughout May, intelligence-based operations grew in frequency, a subterranean war fought in the orchards and ravines. Dozens of militants were neutralized, according to official briefs. Yet, the ledger of conflict is rarely a simple equation of subtraction. Every operation leaves an aftermath—a village disrupted, a harvest delayed, a generation of young men watching from the hillsides.
There is a weariness that settles into the bones of a place when violence becomes cyclical. In the cities—Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi—the news of a blast or an ambush is a banner across a television screen, a momentary pause in the political chatter, a sigh before the commercial break. In the border districts, it is the background noise of existence. It shapes the real estate market. It dictates the age at which a father tells his son to leave for the gulf states to find work, any work, away from the dust.
The PICSS report is a warning system, a collection of digital flares sent up into the night sky to signal that the ground is shifting beneath our feet. It tells us that the lull we hoped for during the winter months was merely a pause for breath, a period of replenishment before the heat set in.
The sun sets over Dera Ismail Khan in shades of bruised purple and orange. Tariq pulls down the heavy iron shutter of his shop, locking the three padlocks with a practiced flick of his wrist. The street is already emptying, much earlier than it would have a year ago. The silence that follows is not peaceful; it is expectant. It is the silence of a community waiting to see what the next month’s percentages will mean for the streets they call home.
