Balochistan - Is there a solution?
- Thread starter Oscar
- Start date
SteppeWolff
Trusted Member
New chief, new policies. And normal people stay stuck in the vicious cycle of terrorism while their own families dont even live in Pakistan.
Hopefully Pessimistic
Registered Member
This is the facts.
Too many people within Pakistan undermine its interests because of "shared ethnicity, 1 blood, lar o bar" some do it more openly, others do it quietly while pretending to be your well wishers but steer you off track.
In Pakistan you are sold Muslim bhai chooran, minority rights/representation chooran, Oppressed Baloch and Pashtun chooran to throw you off track. And the submissive population eat it up.
hydrabadi_arab
Trusted Member
IoK insurgency was all supported by Pakistan. Once support ended? Kashmiris themselves have not done much, pahalgam here and there but nothing major.
Afghanistan is dead state, they have little hope for future. So chances of they stepping back is next to 0. Only option left is all out war and balkanization of Afghanistan. Or Balochan whores will keep making videos in Afghanistan while pretending to be in Pakistan.
Cipher212
Registered Member
You can't do any of that buddy. You don't have the economic strength to fight an endless insurgency like other countries and you certainly don't have the capability and intelligence to regularly take out their leaders. You hold too high an opinion of the capabilities of Pakistani armed forces. They are not Mossad or CIA.
Israel gets literal rockets and drones fired at it regularly. It is only because they have an extremely expensive and hi tech Iron dome system (which Pakistan could never afford in its wildest dreams) can they keep their losses to a minimum. Their military casualties remain low because they have the money to not load 12 jawaans into a Hilux and send them to patrol. They have armoured cars and 24/7 air support from Apaches and F-15s (no shortage of fuel, spare parts or money)
We however do not have that luxury. 90% chance we never will either.
Also this PTM is TTP and BYC is BLA shit is getting old. Engage with them now and give them political space to play or lose the outer regions forever and live in Punjabistan. Words do not hit as bad as armed ambushes (India did this far better than us in Kashmir). Already you cannot drive a Punjabi number plate to Quetta without thinking twice.
If you genuinely think taking out their leaders would kill their organisation then my question to you is how would you achieve that? Is Pakistan capable of tracking them down in Iran, Afghanistan and Oman? I'll tell you now the answer is NO. it's not like they haven't been trying in fact Noor Wali Mehsud has died 5-6 times on OSINT accounts already. Inke has ki baat hi nahi hay.
Also my so called drawing room solution has never been tried. Pakistan has tried one thing and one thing only, which is to go out with military force and crush all who oppose. It's worked barely in Balochistan and tribal areas and it failed in East Pakistan. There is no stick and carrot policy or even a remote attempt of actually developing these areas or giving any political space to them.
You are talking as if what I'm suggesting has already been tried. No genius it's your type of thinking that has been applied for 20 years. Get this through your head , Pakistani military is good at one thing, a short and intense conflict with India in order to deny and deter. In every other domain it's your typical third world army. They are not going to be able to do what you're envisioning or they would have already done it in the past 20 years.
Your posts and many others seem to suggest that all Pakistan has to do is to go '100%' as if the armed forces are not already stretched to their limits. You also operate in a vacuum of thinking where there will be no blowback from locals after we keep doing operation after operation and destroying it further. This is the reason that today BLA gets tip offs even inside Quetta on movements by PA convoys.
hussain0216
Elite Member
Pakistan doesn't have strategic clarity because our people are ducking morons and we have allowed rampant ethnocentrism above Pakistani identity
This is why we can't deal with the Afghans or Baloch
If the Afghans and BLA were Hindus and a different ethnicity to us
Then Pakistan would have SLAUGHTERED them
We would have bombed village and towns and cities
Never tolerated them in Pakistan
If they did something against us, we would have rounded them up like animals
We are stuck, because of pashtunist and Baloch ethnic kinship with others and because of that we can't reply with overwhelming and brutal force
We may have to rethink this and apply brutal force going forward
We need to not start hitting them and hitting them hard
hasssanali8998
Elite Member
these words directly lead to these ambushes but yes keep living in denial
no it will be a part of it , it has been proven again and again
i seriously dont understand why u are so against kiling leadership
yes if the retards stop worrying about what happens in the bedrooms of judges and politicans and focus on eliminating these guys
again for the thousandth time doing one without the other will not work
development with no ops == failure
ops with no Development== failure
ops worked in bln and kpk at the start , then they army forgot to imrove the lives and it went back to shit again
bs
they are recruitment and propaganda machine , and yes you will say why not improve the life of normal pakistani in bln/kpk so they dont join , how about both you improve and deal with these orgs whose only job is spread filth and brainwash more kids into bla/ttp
we dont
Samlee
Trusted Member
More Funds More Development and Greater Employment Opportunities Directly To Baloch People.
Targeted Actions Against BLA/BRAS Based Only On The Most Credible Of Intel (There Is A Reason I Emphasize Credible Intel)
Article 370 /Kafeel System Like Constitutional Safeguards To Address Insecurities Of Baloch People
Give People Like Sardar Akhtar Mengal and Abdul Maalik Baloch A Free Hand and Engage Them. Balochistan Situation Improved Dramatically When Dr Maalik Was CM, and General Nasir Janjua and Gen. Amir Riaz Were In Charge Of Southern Command
Targeted Actions Against BLA/BRAS Based Only On The Most Credible Of Intel (There Is A Reason I Emphasize Credible Intel)
Article 370 /Kafeel System Like Constitutional Safeguards To Address Insecurities Of Baloch People
Give People Like Sardar Akhtar Mengal and Abdul Maalik Baloch A Free Hand and Engage Them. Balochistan Situation Improved Dramatically When Dr Maalik Was CM, and General Nasir Janjua and Gen. Amir Riaz Were In Charge Of Southern Command
Cipher212
Registered Member
000......5
Again, your entire arguement is banking on the assumption that Pakistan has some super intelligence agency that only hasn't killed Noor Wali Mehsud or other bigwigs because its been handicapped due to distractions in some Judge's bedroom.
IBOs have never stopped, drone strikes are always happening. So are operations. They have tried many times to drone strike him. At least 4 or 5 times in my memory and they fail each time. They can't locate one guy in Afghanistan where we have total air supremacy to fly drones overhead 24/7. Afghans have barely a few working AA Guns.
That is why I'm against killing leadership. Its like bean counting. Already you see plenty of 'high-value' targets getting taken out. Koi farq parta hay? Absolutely not. Because TTP or BLA are not hi-tech organisations. It does not take a lot of training or know-how to fire an RPG, build an IED kit or fly an FPV drone. They are not operating fighter jets, tanks or doing big coordinated offensives that require some sort of military leadership that can be 'taken out'. You can only mow the lawn against such organisations as long as their support base remains.
It is irrelevant whether or not BYC or PTM are literally the political wings of BLA and TTP in your opinion. This should be proven in a court of law and then charge Mahrang and Manzoor Pashteen accordingly. The way things are being done even Yasin Malik got a fairer trial in India than what we're doing. Hamne tou ulta uskay waqeel + husband ko andar kardia without explanation along with her. What this will achieve? Nothing but more resentment. If you don't believe me go discuss with Baloch if you have ever met any.
What BLA is doing is peanuts compared to what situation was before Zia Ul Haq's operation (back then even Iraq was meddling) and there was no BYC or Mahrang. My father lived in Balochistan as a civilian right after that era up till Bugti died. Many people we know there only 'support' the Pakistani state out of fear.
Aap kisi ko zabardasti namaz nahi parha sakte tou zabardasti nationalist bhi nahi bana sakte. Hammer only works for short term.
Again, your entire arguement is banking on the assumption that Pakistan has some super intelligence agency that only hasn't killed Noor Wali Mehsud or other bigwigs because its been handicapped due to distractions in some Judge's bedroom.
IBOs have never stopped, drone strikes are always happening. So are operations. They have tried many times to drone strike him. At least 4 or 5 times in my memory and they fail each time. They can't locate one guy in Afghanistan where we have total air supremacy to fly drones overhead 24/7. Afghans have barely a few working AA Guns.
That is why I'm against killing leadership. Its like bean counting. Already you see plenty of 'high-value' targets getting taken out. Koi farq parta hay? Absolutely not. Because TTP or BLA are not hi-tech organisations. It does not take a lot of training or know-how to fire an RPG, build an IED kit or fly an FPV drone. They are not operating fighter jets, tanks or doing big coordinated offensives that require some sort of military leadership that can be 'taken out'. You can only mow the lawn against such organisations as long as their support base remains.
It is irrelevant whether or not BYC or PTM are literally the political wings of BLA and TTP in your opinion. This should be proven in a court of law and then charge Mahrang and Manzoor Pashteen accordingly. The way things are being done even Yasin Malik got a fairer trial in India than what we're doing. Hamne tou ulta uskay waqeel + husband ko andar kardia without explanation along with her. What this will achieve? Nothing but more resentment. If you don't believe me go discuss with Baloch if you have ever met any.
What BLA is doing is peanuts compared to what situation was before Zia Ul Haq's operation (back then even Iraq was meddling) and there was no BYC or Mahrang. My father lived in Balochistan as a civilian right after that era up till Bugti died. Many people we know there only 'support' the Pakistani state out of fear.
Aap kisi ko zabardasti namaz nahi parha sakte tou zabardasti nationalist bhi nahi bana sakte. Hammer only works for short term.
Jango
THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
The funny part is this sorry excuse of a human has "Sindh" in his twitter handle.
Beta teri hi sab say pehle tui par chittar parain gay agr majority has Taliban like rule...why do we even give air time to such BS?
RescueRanger
Meme Lord
Bahi excellent post as always, sorry for delayed reply as I've been off because of work.
Image courtsey of Al-Jazeera
Or why Bridges don't blow themselves up...
By Oscar (assistance from Perplexiy.ai for search and compilation of ideas, flow and structure...because I dont like to hide AI assistance in authorship)
When militants destroyed the Sorgill Bridge in Dalbandin, the main crossing on the Kharan–Quetta route, two key spans in Mastung, and a critical bridge in Kachhi district in a single coordinated wave, they weren't just destroying concrete and steel. They were issuing a strategic statement and one that Islamabad has received, misread, and filed under "terrorism" for the better part of two decades.
The question is not whether Pakistan has a Balochistan problem. It manifestly does.
The question - the one that Pakistan's generals, its civilian politicians, and its international patrons consistently refuse to answer honestly is whether any solution is actually available to them?
The cold answer, triangulated across conflict data, governance indices, and peer reviewed security studies, is: probably not. Not because the Baloch people are ungovernable. But because the conflict has become a stable equilibrium that serves the institutional interests of nearly every powerful actor involved...except the Baloch, Pashtun and Punjabi(as ethnic targets) civilians who absorb all of its costs.
The blueprints of a Manufactured Stalemate
Let's be precise about what is happening in Balochistan in 2026. This is not a primitive tribal uprising. The Balochistan Liberation Army has executed simultaneous multi district attacks, hijacked a military train, deployed female suicide bombers, and as this infrastructure offensive shows, have developed a sophisticated anti-development targeting doctrine that treats roads, bridges, and energy infrastructure not as civilian assets but as instruments of occupation. The BLA's operational sophistication has increased during the period of maximum international counterterrorism pressure, including its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States in August 2025.
Pakistan's military response? In February 2026, renewed operations claimed to have killed 216 militants in a week. Within weeks, new attacks followed. ACLED's conflict database records that 2024 was the most violent year in Balochistan's modern history. This occurring while Pakistan was already running intensified operations. By any honest empirical measure, the security first approach has produced twenty years of compounding failure.
If we take a devil's advocate approach - Chomsky once observed that the standard technique of privatizing profit and socializing cost is the defining feature of state-corporate power. In Balochistan, the inversion is equally stark: the profits of Reko Diq, Gwadar, Saindak, and CPEC flow outward to Islamabad, to Beijing, to international investors. Meanwhile the costs of the conflict, the enforced disappearances, the destroyed infrastructure, the economic strangulation, are socialized entirely onto the Baloch population(and as mentioned earlier non Baloch civillian population).
But is it an accident of policy failure? Or is it the architecture of a system working as designed?
The seemingly blocked exits
If walk through the solutions honestly then the picture becomes a little less unambiguous.
Lets start with a genuine political settlement with real power-sharing, a truth commission on the estimated 5,000 to 8,000 enforced disappearances, binding resource-revenue legislation would require the Pakistani establishment to formally relinquish its decision making authority over Balochistan's political future. However, some argue that GHQ's institutional budget, patronage networks, and political relevance are all predicated on Balochistan remaining a security problem. Peace, paradoxically, would be an institutional catastrophe for the institution that claims to be fighting for it.
The probability of meaningful progress here within five years: 3 to 5 percent.
What about Asymmetric federalism? Genuine constitutional autonomy for the Baloch with real fiscal devolution? This sounds more tractable until you remember that the 18th Amendment already exists on paper and has been systematically hollowed out by the same military-bureaucratic apparatus that would supposedly implement the new arrangement. Every devolution cycle since 1973 has been reversed within one political cycle. The SSRN's comparative federalism study is clear on the mechanism that the structural incentive for reversal in establishment policy - i.e. by military budget protection, federal patronage has never been addressed by any constitutional reform.
Probability of success: 8 to 12 percent, and only if China consents to CPEC renegotiation, which it will not.
Ok then - what about Development-first approaches? That is happening...isnt it?? Well, reorienting CPEC to benefit Baloch communities, conditioning Reko Diq royalties on local benefit metrics would collapse against a wall of structural contradictions. The BLA here has operationalized anti-development targeting as explicit doctrine. Every bridge destroyed in Dalbandin, Kharan, Mastung, and Kachhi is not random economic sabotage. It is a precise tactical statement that development under occupation is not development — it is logistics for extraction. Meanwhile, Pakistan's IMF program structurally prevents the public investment that would make private investment viable, and China has consistently resisted local content requirements across every Belt and Road jurisdiction.
The Foreign Hands Problem
Here is where the analysis must be disciplined against the temptation of both Pakistani nationalist framing and Western liberal framing.
Yes, the evidence for Indian intelligence involvement in sustaining BLA operational capacity is structurally coherent and it is documented across Pakistani state sources, Pakistani defense institution research, and Chinese state media, though notably absent from independent Western verification for reasons that could be genuine to downright bias and conspiracy.
The critical analytical point is not whether specific covert operations can be proven, but whether India's structural interest in a perpetually destabilized Pakistan is rational.
It is. Manifestly.
A Balochistan at war keeps CPEC throttled, Pakistan's military stretched across three fronts simultaneously, and Pakistani diplomatic capital consumed domestically. India does not need to have started this fire to have every rational interest in keeping it burning.
China's role is equally contradictory. Beijing needs CPEC to function and therefore needs Balochistan stable. But the stability it seeks is purely logistical because it has zero interest in the political accommodation that is the only thing that could achieve it. China has applied, and will continue to apply, direct financial pressure against any Pakistani government that attempts genuine provincial autonomy over resource contracts, because the legal precedent threatens its entire Belt and Road architecture globally. It is simultaneously the state most damaged by the conflict and the state most structurally positioned to block its resolution.
Afghanistan's Taliban government provides insurgent sanctuary and has its own reasons to keep Pakistan's western border ungovernable. Iran, facing its own Baloch insurgency in Sistan-Baluchestan, would treat an independent Balochistan as an existential irredentist threat. The United States has designated BLA a terrorist organization while simultaneously investing capital(and perhaps running parallel support for BLA as it has done or Mossad as with ISIS) in the territory it is actively destabilizing. Every major external actor's interests converge on continuation of the conflict from different directions.
This is what one would correctly call the hypocrisy of selective outrage. The same Western governments that invoke human rights in contexts that serve their interests are investing in Reko Diq, tolerating Pakistani military operations, and filing the Baloch question under "regional complexity" and even supporting BLA in small capacities while their capital flows to the extraction economy that fuels the grievance.
The BLA Is Not a Liberation Army Waiting for Permission
The final, most uncomfortable piece of honest analysis concerns the BLA itself.
The organization's leadership has formally and publicly moved past autonomy. Its stated goal is an independent Baloch state spanning parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. The Majeed Brigade's suicide cadre including female operatives, a deliberate adaptation to male-profiling counterinsurgency tactics is ideologically committed at a level where negotiated autonomy would be experienced as betrayal, not victory.
Any BLA commander who accepted a political settlement short of independence would almost certainly be assassinated by his own organization's hardline wing.
More critically: the BLA's organizational continuity depends on the conflict continuing. A referendum exposing internal Baloch political fragmentation between tribal sardars, Hazara communities, Brahui populations, and urban Quetta middle class would threaten the movement's claim to represent all Baloch.
A lost vote delegitimizes the armed struggle.
A won vote raises the question the BLA has never answered: who governs, and under what framework?
The movement has a military structure and an independence ideology. It does not have a post-independence governance model.
So Whither Solution?
Honestly? Not within the current structural configuration of incentives.
All data converges on the same baseline forecast: intensified counterinsurgency continues by default and not because it works, but because it is the only option that does not require any powerful actor to sacrifice its core institutional interest. The conflict enters a higher-intensity stable equilibrium. BLA operational sophistication continues its documented upward trajectory. Investment remains partially paralyzed. And the civilian population which is the only constituency with a genuine interest in resolution is what remains the only one without the structural power to enforce it.
The bridges will be rebuilt. Then destroyed again.
The operations will be launched. Then launch again.
The statements will be made. Then repeated.
Until the incentive architecture changes , until the Pakistani establishment faces greater institutional cost from perpetuating the conflict than from resolving it, until China faces reputational consequences that outweigh its legal architecture concerns, until India's covert calculus shifts, until the BLA develops a post-independence political vision its own members will accept — there is no solution available. Only the management of a catastrophe that suits almost everyone in power.
That is not pessimism. That is the structure of the problem, stated plainly. And stated plainly is the only way it will ever be addressed.
@Hopefully Pessimistic @Fatman17 @Waz @VCheng @Jango @RescueRanger
And others - not tagged does not mean I do not care for your opinion...
I'm still travelling for work but InshaAllah when I arrive at the hotel by tonight, I'll sit down and give my two-cents.
So hitting terrorists inside Afghanistan and iran means cutting oxygen for 40% of land area??
Pakistani liberals love for bla has always remained a better love story than twilight. Poor ttp couldn't get same affection.
Salza
Elite Member
One strategic solution is to create multiple provinces from Balochistan and isolate the militancy to a single small province and then contain. As of now its too big province to manage and current provincial govt is restricted to Quetta only. Same formula should be applied to other parts of the country as well.
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