The Pakistan Rangers: From Border Defense to Internal “Protection”

Abstract

Pakistan has several paramilitary forces whose mandate has been expanded considerably since the 1990s. These forces are not militia organizations acting as auxiliaries to law-enforcement professionals or using illegitimate violence to private ends, but security service units commanded by high-ranking police or military officials and answer- able to the federal authorities. Some of these forces, such as the National Guard2 and the Rangers, come under Interior Ministry authority but are commanded by military officers. Others, such as the Frontier Constabulary (FC), are commanded by a police officer and placed under the authority of the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions (SAFRON). These paramilitary forces, with troops numbering a total of 270,000 (compared to 500,000 in the regular army),3 were originally in charge of defending the country’s international borders. Their mandate has expanded, however, to include policing tasks within the national ter- ritory. Since the end of the 1980s, law enforcement in Karachi, capital of Sindh province as well as Pakistan’s economic and financial hub, has been divided between the municipal police and the Rangers, who numbered 10,000 in 2003 (i.e., half the size of the police force).4 The Rangers’ sociological profile is similar to that of the military:5 most of them come from the Punjab and Pashtun peasantry in the north, viewed by the British as “martial races.”