By Dr. Farhan
As violence and instability continue to grip Balochistan, Pakistan’s military regime has once again opted for a familiar escape route. Instead of grappling honestly with the conflict’s internal causes, it has repeatedly tried to offload responsibility onto neighboring states, most notably Afghanistan and India. This reflexive deflection does not resemble sober security analysis. It reads far more like an effort to absolve itself while obscuring decades of flawed governance in one of the country’s most consequential provinces. Within this official storyline, the Baloch are not treated as a population with grievances but as pawns of foreign powers, a framing that only sharpens distrust and further widens the chasm between Islamabad and the periphery.
The core of the crisis, however, lies much closer to home. It is rooted in realities that residents of Balochistan have lived with for generations. Systematic deprivation has shaped daily life across the province. Economic discrimination shows up in broken roads, aging power grids, scarce schools and hospitals, and joblessness that has become almost structural. At the same time, Balochistan’s immense natural wealth, its gas reserves, mineral deposits, and strategic geography, continue to enrich others, while the Baloch people sitting atop those resources are left to absorb pollution, displacement, and persistent poverty.
Politics and social life offer little relief. Genuine participation in national decision-making remains thin. The Balochi language and cultural traditions face steady marginalization. Reports documenting large-scale abuses have accumulated over the years, painting a bleak picture that includes enforced disappearances, sweeping security operations, and civilians caught in the middle. Together, these patterns form not isolated incidents but a sustained condition that has eroded faith in the Pakistani regime.
When a government proves unwilling, or unable, to answer the legitimate demands of a segment of its own population, it often reaches for the cheapest political instrument available: conspiracy. The invention of a shared “external enemy” can redirect anger outward and mute uncomfortable questions at home. In Pakistan’s case, sympathetic media outlets and official briefings have leaned heavily on this tactic, insisting that unrest in Balochistan is orchestrated from beyond the border.
Yet an obvious question refuses to go away. If the movement is merely a foreign fabrication, how has it sunk such deep roots and endured across decades? Are people stripped of influence over their land, livelihoods, and political future really fighting because outsiders tell them to, or because of pressures they experience every day?
The latest attacks on Saturday, the 11th of Dalwa, punctured that narrative in dramatic fashion. Targeted operations carried out in the heart of Balochistan, coupled with the visible and active presence of the BLA’s leader inside the province itself, dealt a direct blow to claims about command centers in Afghanistan or India. It strains credibility to suggest that a domestic rebellion is choreographed from afar when its senior figures remain among their own communities, operating from the mountains and remote districts of Balochistan and directing actions on the ground. This is not conjecture or rumor. It is an observable reality, one that undercuts official talking points and points back to a simpler explanation: the unrest is powered less by foreign sponsorship than by long-standing local grievances.
What years of denial, repression, and carefully managed messaging have demonstrated is not success, but failure. These approaches have not closed wounds. They have widened them. They have turned old rifts into hardened lines and pushed resentment deeper into the political soil. Stability in Balochistan is unlikely to emerge from additional garrisons or ever-expanding security campaigns. Durable calm is far more likely to grow from justice, opportunity, and credible reform. If Pakistan’s military regime is serious about national cohesion, it will eventually have to abandon the unproductive habit of blaming others.
The moment has arrived to stop scanning neighboring landscapes for imaginary enemies and to listen instead to voices rising from within the country’s own borders. The outlines of a way forward are not mysterious, even if they are politically demanding. They include serious and unconditional dialogue with genuine Baloch representatives, an equitable distribution of wealth drawn from the province’s resources, real investment in jobs and infrastructure, protection of cultural and linguistic identity, and meaningful access to political power.
Only along such a path can Balochistan begin to move toward a future defined by stability rather than confrontation. Continuing along the present course promises something very different: prolonged suffering for the province’s people and a lingering source of insecurity for Pakistan as a whole.
