Pakistan is straining under the weight of overlapping crises. Its economy remains dependent on international lenders, its political system struggles to project stability, and public confidence in institutions has thinned to a fragile thread. Conversations that once stayed private now surface openly, a quiet admission that the state itself feels unsteady. Security, long a chronic concern, has become a defining national condition.
Nowhere is that unraveling more visible than in Balochistan. In the vast, mineral rich province long shaped by insurgency, violence has shifted from episodic to constant. Coordinated gun attacks and suicide bombings have struck schools, banks, and security installations, killing more than 200 people since the start of the year, most of them civilians. As the military intensifies its crackdown and the state moves aggressively against dissent in Baloch communities, the conflict is no longer contained. It is spreading, deepening, and pulling both the province and the country toward a more entrenched crisis.
A Province of Wealth and Poverty
Balochistan sits at the center of Pakistan’s deepest contradictions. It is the country’s largest province by territory, rich in copper, gold, gas, and other strategic resources, yet it remains its poorest. Sparse settlements stretch across a harsh desert landscape, marked by limited infrastructure and few visible benefits from the wealth beneath the soil. For decades, successive governments have treated these resources as national assets, while local communities have remained largely excluded from their rewards.
As Pakistan’s economy has weakened, Balochistan has increasingly been recast as a financial lifeline. Its mineral reserves are framed as essential to national recovery, its coastline as a gateway to foreign capital. Gwadar Port, built with Chinese financing and engineering, stands at the center of that vision, promoted as a strategic hub for trade, investment, and regional influence. For Islamabad, sustained instability in the province is no longer a local security concern. It is a direct threat to national economic strategy and foreign relations.
Grievance, Identity, and Armed Resistance
For many ethnic Baloch, the story looks very different. The province is their homeland, yet they describe a long history of political exclusion, economic exploitation, and heavy handed control by the central state. These grievances have fueled a separatist movement demanding greater autonomy and a larger share of Balochistan’s natural wealth, and for some factions, independence itself. The state’s response has largely been coercive, with cycles of military suppression stretching back decades.
At the center of the armed struggle is the Baloch Liberation Army, the strongest of the separatist groups. Its fighters have repeatedly targeted Pakistani security forces and projects linked to Chinese investment, including infrastructure connected to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. Violence has escalated sharply in recent years. What was once treated as a peripheral insurgency has hardened into a sustained conflict, tying Pakistan’s economic future to one of its deepest internal fractures.
The State’s Answer: Force
For decades, force has been the state’s default language in Balochistan. Periods of calm, when they appear, are often followed by crackdowns that deepen fear and resentment rather than resolve the conflict. Families speak quietly of disappearances, of young men taken and never returned, of communities isolated by suspicion and intimidation. Now, after a surge in separatist attacks that has spilled beyond the province, Islamabad has again turned to a full scale security campaign, seeking to suppress the rebellion through force.
At the start of the new year, security forces launched sweeping operations across multiple districts, targeting the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army. Officials said in late January and early February that 177 fighters had been killed, while provincial authorities imposed new restrictions on public gatherings and the concealment of identity, including face coverings. Yet the violence has continued. Far from signaling the end of the insurgency, the crackdown appears to have hardened it.
A Weekend of Coordinated Attacks
That reality was on stark display over the weekend, when coordinated attacks struck more than 10 cities in what analysts described as an unprecedented escalation. Videos shared on social media showed insurgents moving openly through Quetta, firing rocket launchers at a bank, torching police stations, and detonating a car bomb inside the city’s red zone, killing police officers, including a deputy superintendent.
In Mastung, attackers stormed a prison and freed nearly 30 inmates. In Gwadar, home to China’s flagship deep sea port project, militants attempted to breach perimeter security. In Pasni, a suicide bomber struck the coastguard headquarters, killing several militants and a maritime security official. Mobile internet services were shut down across multiple cities as the attacks continued.
Officials insisted the situation was under control. The interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, rushed to Quetta to meet provincial leaders. The chief minister, Sarfraz Bugti, said more than 140 militants had been killed within 40 hours. The defense minister, Khawaja Asif, told local media that security forces were carrying out a mopping up operation and that calm was returning.
Analysts were more cautious. Michael Kugelman of the Atlantic Council called the attacks among the most serious in Balochistan in years, pointing to their scale, coordination, and sophistication as signs of a deepening crisis. Sahar Baloch, a Berlin based researcher, said the violence reflected a new operational tempo, not isolated incidents but province wide assaults. She described the Baloch Liberation Army as a sustained militant threat, capable of coordinating attacks across wide areas and drawing strength from long standing grievances that continue to replenish the conflict.
Regional Pressures and External Narratives
Pressure is also mounting beyond Pakistan’s borders. Afghanistan, now under Taliban rule, is widely viewed in Islamabad as a source of militant sanctuary. India remains central to Pakistan’s security thinking, particularly after last year’s cross border escalation. Iran’s regional tensions add another layer of instability that risks spilling into Pakistan’s western regions.
Pakistan’s leadership has increasingly framed the Baloch insurgency through the language of external threats, accusing foreign powers of backing rebel groups, claims neighboring states deny. The narrative reinforces a familiar strategy, uniting the country through external hostility rather than internal reconciliation. It also risks escalating regional tensions while leaving the core conflict unresolved.
A Conflict at the Center of the State
For decades, Balochistan remained on the margins of global attention, overshadowed by Kashmir and Pakistan’s broader security disputes. That is no longer the case. The province now sits at the intersection of Pakistan’s economic survival, regional strategy, and internal stability.
As violence spreads from Quetta to Gwadar, the conflict is no longer a remote insurgency on the periphery of the state. It is becoming a central test of Pakistan’s cohesion, its governance, and its future.
