Balochistan’s deadly confluence of separatist insurgency and Islamist militancy

On 12 July, in the Zhob and Sui districts of Balochistan, the Pakistan Army lost 12 soldiers in two attacks claimed by Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan – said to be an outgrowth of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an affiliate of the Afghan Taliban. The attacks marked the army's single largest loss of troops in any engagement in 2023 so far, and came on top of dozens of attacks by Baloch separatist insurgents in recent times. According to the 'Pakistan Security Report 2022' from the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an Islamabad-based NGO, Baloch insurgent groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Front and Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) carried out 71 attacks in 2022 alone, mainly targeting security and military personnel. These included incidents inside but also outside Balochistan – such as a BLA-claimed suicide attack in April 2022 that targeted Chinese teachers working at the University of Karachi. Meanwhile, Pakistan's military forces embedded in Balochistan are fighting what the government calls a "foreign-funded conspiracy" against Pakistan. The 2016 arrest in Balochistan of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an alleged Indian intelligence officer, lent credence to these claims.

Pakistan's military has been embroiled in intensive counterinsurgency operations in Balochistan since at least 2006, when Akbar Bugti, the Sardar of Bugti tribe, was killed in an operation authorised by General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan at the time. That action triggered what Baloch nationalists today call the "fifth war of independence" in Balochistan since 1948, when a section of the Baloch rose up against accession to the newly independent Pakistan. In the last decade or so, Pakistan's internal war in Balochistan has intensified not only because the state has failed to address the underlying reason for the separatist insurgency – that is, the Baloch people's demand for control of the province's rich natural resources and a fair share of power – but also because of the state's overwhelming reliance on the use of force to try and crush the insurgency. This has led to a massive increase in the level of militarisation in Balochistan. To take just one manifestation of this: the Pakistan Army created a 15,000-strong Special Security Division in 2016 to protect China–Pakistan Economic Corridor projects – a large number of them in Balochistan, including the ongoing development of the deep-water port at Gwadar. The growing military presence is in addition to private militias led by pro-state local Sardars that tend to control and suppress the Baloch population, especially those sympathetic to the separatist cause.