The Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has recently unveiled a proposal to establish a new “Regulatory Force”, a move that at first glance appears bold and assertive. It arrives wrapped in the language of reform, with promises to crack down on regulatory violations and enforce long-ignored laws. However, beneath the surface, this initiative is far less about reform and far more about repeating the past, clothed in new terminology. In truth, the proposed force is not a leap forward but a familiar sidestep, born from the state’s chronic unwillingness to fix what already exists.
According to the draft bill, the Regulatory Force will investigate and prosecute regulatory offences, headed by a Director General and Chief Regulatory Officer, both appointed by the Chief Minister. At the district level, authority will rest with Deputy Commissioners, career bureaucrats who, under the proposed framework, will act as ex officio heads. This might sound efficient on paper, but it betrays a deeper discomfort with empowering existing institutions and instead reveals a tendency to retreat to centralised, bureaucratic solutions that Pakistan has long outgrown.
What the bill quietly ignores is that the legal machinery to address these offences already exists and has for years. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Act of 2017 explicitly empowers the police to investigate all offences under provincial and federal law. Section 13 of the Act even allows the formation of specialised units for complex and technical crimes, including those involving white-collar or regulatory violations. Additionally, the colonial-era Police Rules of 1934 require officers to be conversant with a range of regulatory frameworks from excise and narcotics to food safety and environmental codes. The existing law is not silent; it is simply not being used.
Rather than reinforcing existing structures and addressing why enforcement has faltered, the government appears to have chosen a path of duplication, one that history has shown leads only to greater institutional confusion. At the heart of this proposal is the decision to vest enforcement powers in Deputy Commissioners, a throwback to colonial-era governance where the DC was a singular authority, judge, and administrator rolled into one. It is a model the world moved away from decades ago, and with good reason. In the modern age, criminal investigation is a specialised domain requiring technical training, legal precision, and an understanding of forensic and procedural norms. These are not the natural skillsets of generalist civil servants. Resurrecting the DC’s role in law enforcement not only undermines the professionalisation of policing but chips away at the principle of separation of powers that modern democracies rely upon.
We’ve tried this before. Pakistan’s institutional landscape is dotted with the debris of similar efforts, maybe well-meaning but misguided. Special anti-narcotics units under excise departments? Ineffective. Task forces to curb electricity theft? Promising on paper, but ultimately toothless. These failures didn’t occur because the legal powers were lacking, but because the underlying problems of weak coordination, absence of political will, and institutional turf wars were never addressed. New bodies didn’t solve the problem; they merely added another layer of confusion.
This then bring us to the more sobering reality — the cost. Establishing an entirely new force is not just a policy shift but also a financial commitment. Recruitment, training, salaries, pensions, vehicles, equipment, office infrastructure, all carry a substantial and recurring fiscal burden. This, in a province already grappling with financial constraints, where police stations lack vehicles, health departments operate on shoestring budgets, and education sectors are chronically underfunded and faltering. In such a context, proposing the creation of an entirely new enforcement body seems not only imprudent but profoundly detached from fiscal reality.
The deeper flaw lies in its misdiagnosis, that is, targeting symptoms rather than the systemic dysfunction and rot at the core. Take, for instance, the persistent issue of encroachments on canal land under the Canal and Drainage Act. The law itself is unambiguous. The departments responsible, irrigation and revenue, have clear mandates. And yet, illegal constructions flourish. Why? Not due to legislative gaps, but because of local-level collusion, indifference, and a near-total absence of accountability. The real governance deficit lies in enforcement and institutional rot, not in statutory silence. Creating a new force won’t cleanse this decay; it will merely allow it to fester under a new name.
There is, of course, a better path forward, one grounded in realism rather than spectacle. Instead of chasing headlines with new agencies, the government should be investing in the tools, training, and autonomy that allow existing units to do their job. Enforcement must be backed by coordination between departments, overseen by the Chief Secretary’s office, with field-level collaboration between regulatory and law enforcement units. Most crucially, public servants must be evaluated not by how many departments they create, but by the outcomes they deliver. Performance reviews, audits, accountability are the less glamorous but far more effective tools of reform.
True reform is not measured by the number of new institutions we create, but by the strength and integrity of the ones we already have. The proposed Regulatory Force, for all its fanfare, is a costly distraction. It is a legislative sleight of hand that draws attention away from uncomfortable institutional failures. If the Government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa genuinely seeks better governance, it must look inward. It must ask why the police or for that matter the already existing departments aren’t enforcing laws, why existing agencies don’t coordinate, and why administrative accountability remains elusive. Until these questions are answered, any new force, no matter how well-intentioned, will only add to the noise, not the solution.
