The Mastung and Bannu bombings did not arrive in isolation. They were the culmination of a wave of political violence that swept Pakistan in the weeks before the July 25 general election. Earlier that month, a bombing at a candidate's office in North Waziristan wounded ten people. A week before the Bannu attack, a motorcycle bomb struck an election campaign in the same city. Two days before July 13, a suicide bomber killed Awami National Party leader Haroon Bilour and nineteen others at a rally in Peshawar. The day before the twin bombings, gunfire and an explosion hit the Balochistan Awami Party's office in Khuzdar, injuring two. Each attack was a message: democracy in Pakistan would not proceed unchallenged.

In Mastung, the detonation killed 128 people immediately. By July 15, the death toll had climbed to 149, with 186 wounded -- making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan since the Army Public School massacre in Peshawar in 2014. The Islamic State claimed responsibility and named the bomber as Abu Bakar al-Pakistani, though investigators identified him as Hafeez Nawaz of Abbottabad, a man who had traveled through Sindh and affiliated with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi before crossing from Afghanistan just two days before the attack. In Bannu, the target was former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister Akram Khan Durrani. Despite death threats that had prompted the deployment of forty police officers in his convoy, an IED planted in a motorcycle exploded near his vehicle as it passed Haved Bazaar. Durrani survived -- as he had survived two previous assassination attempts -- but five people died and thirty-seven were wounded. A group called Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen claimed that attack.

The intelligence existed. After the Peshawar bombing that killed Bilour on July 10, Pakistan's National Counter Terrorism Authority forwarded twelve specific threat warnings to federal and provincial interior ministries. NACTA named six politicians at high risk, including Durrani and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chairman Imran Khan. Security was supposed to be enhanced. Yet on July 13, a suicide bomber walked into a crowd of a thousand people in Mastung and detonated. The gap between intelligence and action -- between knowing the threat and stopping it -- proved fatal. ISIL had been escalating in Balochistan for years: twin attacks in Quetta in 2016, a shrine bombing in Sehwan in 2017, an attempted assassination of the Deputy Chairman of the Senate in Mastung that same year. The pattern was visible. The protection was not.

Before ambulances reached Mastung, ordinary people loaded the wounded into taxis and drove them to Quetta Civil Hospital, where the provincial government declared a state of emergency. Seventy-three bodies arrived first, then waves of survivors -- eventually 110 victims were being treated simultaneously. The hospital overflowed. Beds ran out. Patients lined the corridors. The Sindh Blood Transfusion Authority requested a thousand blood bags, and mobile messages urging citizens of Karachi to donate blood began circulating across the city. It was a crisis response improvised by a population that had learned, through bitter repetition, what mass casualty events demand.

Pakistan's caretaker government declared a day of mourning. The Election Commission designated 17,000 polling stations across the country as sensitive -- nearly six thousand in Sindh, nearly four thousand in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 1,768 in Balochistan. Politicians from every party condemned the attacks, even as some used the moment to score points against rivals. What the bombers perhaps miscalculated was the resilience of the process itself. The election was not postponed. On July 25, 2018, Pakistanis went to the polls across all four provinces. The attacks in Mastung and Bannu had killed 154 people and wounded more than 220, had demonstrated the reach of extremist violence into the heart of the democratic process. But they had not stopped it. The people the bombers murdered were attending a political rally -- exercising the most fundamental act of democratic participation. That they died doing so makes the loss not smaller but more consequential.