The Debrief: The rise of Pakistan’s Baloch separatist insurgency

Since January, insurgents in Pakistan’s Balochistan province have launched increasingly complex attacks, killing hundreds. The violence has posed a new threat to Pakistan’s government that is grappling with a growing grassroots rights movement not afraid to face off with the police.

Dozens of people were waiting on the platform at Pakistan’s Quetta railway station on Saturday, November 9,, when a person carrying a bag packed with explosives walked into the crowd. The ensuing blast killed 26 people and injured more than 60 others, and was claimed by Balochistan’s most prolific insurgent group, Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). Ten days and several more attacks later, Pakistan approved a “comprehensive military operation” against militant and separatist outfits in Balochistan.

The blast in Quetta was not the first or even the worst assault in the province this year. In January, the BLA seized control of the city of Mach, an hour’s drive from Quetta, for more than 48 hours in an unusual military-style siege. On August 26, the separatist group launched “Operation Herof,” carrying out multiple types of attacks across the province in what came to be known as the “deadliest day” in the region’s recent history.

Factal senior editor and South Asia expert Halima Mansoor said the roots of the decades-old Baloch insurgency can be traced back to long-standing grievances against rights abuse and economic neglect, where 70 percent of the population is “multidimensionally poor.”

“One of the base factors of the insurgency is the obvious disparity between what is extracted from the resource-rich province by the state and its foreign investors, and the poverty its people continue to face,” Mansoor said.

“One of the base factors of the insurgency is the obvious disparity between what is extracted from the resource-rich province by the state and its foreign investors, and the poverty its people continue to face”

Mansoor said the shift by BLA away from sporadic flash attacks to more sustained and military-style assaults became more noticeable around the same time that Baloch youth and women, such as Mahrang Baloch, became increasingly more visible in their fight for civil rights. This expanding, broad-based battle against the state by multiple separate entities — some non-violent and others militant — all accusing the Pakistani government of discrimination, has created a challenging environment for Islamabad, Mansoor said.

Recent protests in the province in part demand answers about more than 7,000 people who have been taken without due process since the 2000s. Security forces will often abduct individuals in Balochistan and detain them with no official record.

“They get taken to black sites,” Mansoor said. “There’s usually no paper trail and people have no idea where their family member went after some police officer came and picked them up.”

As of early 2024, nearly 3,000 people were unaccounted for after enforced disappearances. The government of Pakistan claimed only 50 were missing.

“There is a heavy presence of the Pakistani military and it has been growing over the years,” Mansoor said. “Wherever the military sets base in Balochistan, there are streams of development leading to their bases where there’s electricity and running water and then a few dozen kilometers outside there are no proper roads, and there’s still people living in fishing huts.”

“The Pakistani military never leaves Balochistan, it exists there in its multiple forms”

The resentment against various arms of the Pakistani establishment extends to low-income laborers coming from Punjab to Balochistan for work, who are seen as symbols of Punjabi dominance in Balochistan despite their low wages. In the August attack, Baloch separatists targeted the workers, killing dozens.

The Baloch insurgency continues to identify all outsiders, including foreign investors, as legitimate targets, with China posing the main threat. The BLA has claimed that Beijing is directly helping both the Pakistani military and government via the development of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor and failing to deliver its promises of economic betterment for locals via its projects.

The Pakistani government, however, claims the real external threat to Balochistan are its neighbors, accusing both India and Afghanistan of directly or indirectly supporting the insurgency without outlining clear evidence of direct involvement.

“I think with any country facing an insurgency, one natural conclusion is that an outside force is involved and benefiting from the internal unrest,” Mansoor said.

Iran, which shares a Baloch-majority region with Pakistan, faces its own separatist challenges and has frequently seen cross-border insurgent activity. January military strikes between Iran and Pakistan, a rare occurrence, were seen as a warning to both governments to crack down on militancy across their borders.

Pakistan’s government, already under immense pressure from a slew of other problems including economic and political instability, and an increase in militancy, now faces the daunting task of fighting an insurgency which has only grown more robust and organized in recent years. It is also making the country’s allies very nervous — the uptick in insurgency prompted China and Pakistan to announce their first joint anti-terror drills in five years.

The extent of the military operation remains to be seen and how it impacts things like foreign investors operating out of Balochistan.

“It remains to be seen whether ‘comprehensive’ will be more of the same under-the-radar ops to counter insurgents or more like the military’s 2014 ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ in northwest Pakistan, involving tens of thousands of soldiers and drone strikes to target foreign and local militants, displacing one million people,” Mansoor said. “The Pakistani military never leaves Balochistan, it exists there in its multiple forms,” she said.

Written by Awais Ahmad. Edited by Jillian Stampher.

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