Pakistan, Sept. 7 -- Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz has invited an avoidable controversy by saying that her province faces a greater security threat from neighbouring provinces than neighbouring countries. Read alongside her remarks about tri-border areas, checkpoints and militant movement, she appears to have been describing the routes through which terrorists reach Punjab. Her choice of words, however, has allowed an operational point to be read as something altogether larger: that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan themselves constitute the source of the threat.

The chief minister would do well to clarify the distinction, especially when Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar used ...