By Ehsan
A careful look at Pakistan’s political and security landscape reveals a stubborn reality: many of the country’s most persistent internal crises are not imported from abroad. They are manufactured at home. They grow out of discriminatory governance, failed administration, and the long shadow cast by policies that have alienated entire regions. Nowhere is this more visible than in Balochistan, where a grinding conflict has endured for years and continues to deepen rather than recede.
At the heart of the Balochistan problem lies the state’s treatment of its own citizens. For decades, Baloch people have lived on the margins of political power, economic opportunity, and cultural recognition. Reports of enforced disappearances, military operations in civilian areas, the extraction of natural resources without local benefit, and pressure on language and cultural identity have accumulated into something far heavier than grievance. They have left scars that cut across families, towns, and generations.
Policies like these do not pass quietly. They generate anger, resentment, and widespread disillusionment. No protest movement, and certainly no armed confrontation, emerges without cause. When governments abandon dialogue and justice in favor of coercion and humiliation, they create the conditions for backlash. In such environments, the driving force of instability is often the system itself, the very structure that has closed off peaceful alternatives. Yet rather than wrestle with that uncomfortable truth, Pakistan’s rulers and their hard-line order have reached for a familiar escape route: deflection.
Blame is regularly pushed outward, toward Afghanistan or other neighboring states, whenever violence flares in Balochistan. These accusations serve a political purpose more than they address the roots of the conflict. History is littered with examples of governments that, unable or unwilling to repair their own houses, point across the border instead. Creating external villains may rally domestic support in the short term, but it rarely resolves the underlying problem. If anything, it erodes public confidence further and signals a leadership uneasy with introspection and uncomfortable confronting the complexity of its own society.
A state that refuses to hear its citizens eventually frames every complaint as a security threat. Everything becomes militarized. Every grievance is treated as subversion. That reflex, far from restoring order, often tightens the knot. It hardens resentment, narrows political space, and drives wedges deeper between the center and the periphery.
Understanding Balochistan, therefore, requires shifting the lens away from foreign capitals and back toward Islamabad. It demands a reckoning with a long domestic record of discrimination, unequal development, and political exclusion. So long as Baloch citizens remain shut out of meaningful participation, denied a fair share of economic opportunity, and constrained in expressing and preserving their cultural identity, Pakistan’s internal unrest will not simply disappear. It will recycle itself, generation after generation.
Public awareness and intellectual engagement play a decisive role in moments like this. Societies move forward when uncomfortable realities are confronted rather than concealed. The path out of Balochistan’s turmoil lies in genuine domestic reform, not in assigning blame beyond the country’s borders. Deflection postpones solutions. Reform creates them.
History offers a blunt lesson. No government secures lasting stability through repression alone. Force may impose silence, but it cannot command loyalty. If Pakistan’s present regime truly seeks stability, security, and national unity, it must first hold up a mirror to itself and reassess the discriminatory and failed policies that have shaped the present moment. Pakistan’s current crises are the legacy of years of misguided decisions. That truth cannot be erased through rhetoric or buried beneath accusations. Sooner or later, it demands to be faced.
