Pakistan
Pakistan is facing one of the most complex and overlapping crises in its history. Political instability, armed conflict, climate disasters, and deep structural inequities are converging, and children are bearing the brunt of the consequences. For millions of young people, daily life is shaped by fear, displacement, hunger, and the loss of access to education and healthcare. Understanding what is happening in Pakistan today is essential if we are to respond with urgency, compassion, and meaningful action.
Political Instability and Democratic Erosion
Pakistan’s current crisis is rooted in prolonged political instability and weakened democratic institutions. Public trust in governance is at historic lows following disputed elections, widespread allegations of corruption, and the increasing use of punitive laws to silence dissent.
The imprisonment of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in August 2023 became a flashpoint for nationwide unrest. His arrest triggered mass protests, met by sweeping crackdowns involving surveillance, mass arrests, and military court trials. Thousands of civilians were charged under broad anti-terror and public order laws, often without sufficient evidence.
Rather than dialogue, the state has increasingly relied on lawfare, the use of legal systems as instruments of punishment to repress opposition. This deepening authoritarianism has left ordinary citizens feeling powerless, unheard, and unsafe. For children, this instability translates into interrupted schooling, heightened exposure to violence, and growing psychological trauma as political conflict spills into everyday life.
Armed violence has surged across northwestern Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Suicide bombings in Islamabad and Peshawar, including an attack outside a district court that killed civilians and injured many more, underscore the country’s deteriorating security situation. Militant groups linked to the Pakistani Taliban have intensified attacks, targeting public spaces, security forces, and educational institutions. These assaults not only claim lives but also foster a climate of constant fear, one that disproportionately affects children who grow up surrounded by instability and loss.
Border Tensions with Afghanistan and India
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have sharply worsened since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Cross-border clashes, airstrikes, and stalled peace talks have displaced families and strained humanitarian access in already fragile regions.
Tensions with India, particularly over Kashmir, continue to simmer. Decades of conflict, including wars in 1947-48, 1965, 1999, and recent missile exchanges, have entrenched militarization and civilian vulnerability on both sides of the border. Children living in conflict affected areas of Kashmir grow up amid curfews, surveillance, and recurring violence, often without consistent access to education or healthcare.
Balonchistan
Perhaps nowhere are Pakistan’s structural injustices more visible than in Balochistan. Despite being rich in natural resources, Balochistan remains Pakistan’s most underdeveloped province. Decades of political marginalization, forced disappearances, and militarized repression have fueled a long running insurgency, and a devastating human rights crises.
Reports document widespread enforced disappearances, extrajudicical killings, and mass displacement. Families are left searching for missing loved ones, while children grow up amid fear, poverty, and chronic underinvestment.
Balochistan consistently ranks lowest in Pakistan’s Human Development Index. Many districts face extreme poverty, food insecurity, and limited access to clean water, education, and healthcare. For children, this means stunted growth, untreated illnesses, and futures constrained before they begin.
Climate Change and Economic Hardship
Pakistan is one of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries despite contributing minimally to global emissions. The 2022 monsoon floods displaced millions, destroying homes, schools, and farmland. More than 1.5 million people remain without permanent housing, and subsequent monsoon seasons have slowed recovery efforts. At the same time, high inflation and debt have driven food prices beyond reach for many families. Between late 2024 and early 2025, 11 million people faced crisis level food insecurity, with children at the highest risk of malnutrition.
Refugees and Displacement
Pakistan hosts over 3 million Afghan refugees, many of whom have lived in the country for decades. Recent repatriation policies have forced hundreds of thousands to return to Afghanistan, often with no shelter, income, or access to basic services. Children in displaced families face compounded trauma, uprooted from their homes, cut off from education, and exposed to hunger and exploitation.
Why Children Are Most at Risk
Across Pakistan’s overlapping crises, children continue to face interrupted or nonexistent education, chronic malnutrition and preventable illness, exposure to violence and psychological trauma, forced displacement and family separation, and limited access to healthcare, especially for women and girls. Without intervention, these conditions risk creating a lost generation, one denied the safety, dignity, and opportunity every child deserves.
What we can do
Despite the scale of these challenges, action makes a difference. Organizations working on the ground help provide emergency food and nutrition support, safe access to education for displaced children, as well as, healthcare services for women and girls. When we invest in children growing up in conflict zones, we are not just responding to crises, but rather helping build resilience, dignity, and hope. Supporting these efforts means ensuring that a child in Pakistan has a classroom instead of a battle field, a meal instead of hunger, safety instead of fear, and a future of prosperity, rather than survival.
When crises feels this vast, it is easy to believe that individual action does not matter. But history shows the opposite as meaningful change is built through collective effort, through people choosing to act with what they have, where they are. Supporting children growing up in conflict zones does not require perfection or even proximity. It demands intention, awareness, and a refusal to look away.
One of the most powerful tools we have is our voice. Many humanitarian crises persist not because they are unsolvable, but because they are ignored. Sharing accurate information, amplifying credible reporting, and speaking openly about what is happening in places such as Pakistan, helps counter silence and erasure. When stories go untold, suffering becomes easier to dismiss, and when we remain uninformed, violence is allowed to continue in the shadows.
Pakistan underscores the fact that ignorance is not neutral. It breeds indifference, and indifference enables harm. By staying informed and encouraging others to do the same, we push back against the normalization of violence and remind the world that these lives matter.
Local and international organizations are providing lifesaving support everyday, delivering food, healthcare, education, and protection to children and families affected by conflict, displacement and climate disasters. Donating to organizations like UFO, and others working directly with affected communities allows resources to reach children who need them most. Even small contributions help fund school supplies, medical care, safe spaces, and emergency relief.
For children living through instability, this support can mean the difference between survival and opportunity.
UFO would also like to stress that awareness is a starting point, not an endpoint. Staying active can take many forms like advocating for humanitarian funding, supporting refugee protections, attending community events, or continuing to learn about the structural causes of conflict and displacement. Sustained engagement matters because crises do not end when headlines fade. Children continue to live with the consequences long after the world's attention moves on.
Not everyone can donate money, not everyone can volunteer time, but we all can do something. Action looks different for each person. We can share information with our networks, support ethical and humanitarian initiatives, engage in conversations that challenge misinformation, and simply try our best to teach younger generations empathy, and global responsibility. What matters is not the scale of the action but the willingness to act.
To remain silent in the face of suffering is not a passive choice, it is a decision that allows injustice to persist. When we choose not to know, not to speak or not to care, we become complicit in systems that harm the most vulnerable. Children growing up in conflict zones do not have the luxury of looking away. They rely on a global community willing to see them, stand with them, and act.
Works Cited
Center for Preventive Action. (2025, May 12). Conflict between India and Pakistan. Global Conflict Tracker; Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-between-india-and-pakistan
Hein, S. von. (2025, November 5). Pakistani Taliban complicate Afghanistan ceasefire push. Dw.com; Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/pakistani-taliban-complicate-afghanistan-ceasefire-push/a-74626116
Mendez, Z. H. (2020, August 31). Repression and Revolt in Balochistan: The Uncertainty and Survival of a People’s National. Air University (AU). https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/2331243/repression-and-revolt-in-balochistan-the-uncertainty-and-survival-of-a-peoples/
Mohiuddin, Lubna. “Human Rights Violations: A Case Study of Kashmir.” (2016).
Pakistan. (n.d.). International Rescue Committee (IRC). https://www.rescue.org/country/pakistan
Press, T. A. (2025, November 11). A suicide bomber targets an Islamabad court, killing at least 12 people and wounding 27. WUNC News. https://www.wunc.org/2025-11-11/a-suicide-bomber-targets-an-islamabad-court-killing-at-least-12-people-and-wounding-27
Thorner, Alice. “The Kashmir Conflict.” Middle East Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 1949, pp. 17–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4322039. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
Ul Haque, M. S. (2024, September 20). Kashmir to remain a thorn in the side of India–Pakistan relations | East Asia Forum. East Asia Forum. https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/09/20/kashmir-to-remain-a-thorn-in-the-side-of-india-pakistan-relations/
Vaish, Varun, Negotiating the India-Pakistan Conflict in Relation to Kashmir (September 9, 2011). International Journal of World Peace, September, 2011, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2055278
Waseem, Z. (2024). Inside the Punitive State: Governance Through Punishment in Pakistan. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/06/pakistan-punitive-state-terrorism-police?lang=en
