Rifat ullah Kakar
Balochistan is not simply a security problem. To reduce it to one is to misunderstand it entirely, and that misunderstanding has cost Pakistan dearly across multiple decades. The crisis in Balochistan is political, social, and deeply psychological. It is rooted in history, sustained by grievance, and sharpened by the repeated failure of the state to offer its Baloch citizens a credible, dignified future within the federation. Until that changes, no military operation, however decisive, will deliver lasting peace.
The Baloch people today face what appears to be a stark choice: remaining within the Pakistani federation or aligning, in spirit or in action, with separatist movements that promise liberation. But the real question is not who holds more guns. The real question is where the majority of ordinary Baloch men and women place their hopes. That is the question the Pakistani state must answer honestly, because it is the answer that will determine whether this crisis deepens or begins to heal.
The uncomfortable truth is that a large segment of the Baloch population has grown deeply disillusioned with the state. When political representation is hollow, when people believe their governments are manufactured by power centres rather than produced by genuine public will, when questions of resources, identity, and self-determination go perpetually unaddressed, a vacuum is created. Separatist narratives rush to fill that vacuum. They do not create the anger. They inherit it.
Force alone cannot resolve this. Violence, as history teaches, breeds more violence. When a family loses a member to a military operation or an enforced disappearance, that loss does not extinguish resistance. It ignites it. Brothers, cousins, sons who might otherwise have stayed out of the conflict find themselves drawn toward militancy not by ideology alone but by grief and rage. Every such cycle of loss and retaliation makes a political settlement harder and a military one more elusive. The Pakistani state must reckon with this mathematics.
Pakistan’s federation is a constitutional and territorial reality. Balochistan is an integral part of it, and no responsible vision for Pakistan can accommodate its separation. But holding Balochistan within the federation through coercion alone is not unity. It is occupation dressed in federal language. True federalism demands that every constituent unit feel genuinely represented, genuinely heard, and genuinely empowered. Balochistan has rarely experienced that.
There have been moments of possibility. During the tenure of Dr. Malik Baloch as Chief Minister, a significant portion of the Baloch public began to believe, tentatively but genuinely, that a political path within Pakistan might actually lead somewhere. Here was a Baloch nationalist leading a provincial government through democratic means, and his presence offered something the security establishment could never manufacture: authentic hope. The Eighteenth Amendment similarly created expectations that provinces would gain real autonomy, real resources, and real recognition of their distinct identities.
But hope is fragile when it is repeatedly betrayed. When elections are engineered rather than held freely, when governments are assembled according to establishment preferences rather than public mandates, when the people come to understand that their vote changes nothing because the decisions were already made elsewhere, that hope turns to bitterness. And bitterness, in a province with Balochistan’s history, does not remain dormant.
It is important to distinguish between the Baloch-majority areas and the Pashtun-majority regions of Balochistan, where the dynamics are somewhat different. But in the Baloch heartland, the wounds run very deep. The issues of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, resource exploitation without local benefit, political marginalisation, and the systematic suppression of Baloch cultural and political identity have accumulated over generations. These are not grievances that a new highway or a gas pipeline can address. They require political answers, constitutional guarantees, and above all, consistent good faith from a state that has rarely demonstrated it.
The path forward begins with genuine elections. Not managed elections, not predetermined outcomes dressed in ballot-box formality, but honest electoral processes in which Baloch voters choose their own representatives without interference, intimidation, or manipulation. If the people of Balochistan are to believe that their future lies within Pakistan, they must first experience what it means to actually govern themselves within it. Representative government is not a favour the federation extends to a restless province. It is a constitutional right, and its denial is itself a form of violence.
Beyond elections, the question of enforced disappearances must be confronted directly. Thousands of families in Balochistan live in unbearable uncertainty, not knowing whether their missing relatives are alive, dead, or held in some unofficial detention. This wound festers. It poisons the relationship between the Baloch people and the Pakistani state more effectively than any separatist propaganda ever could. Until the state demonstrates that it is bound by law in its treatment of Baloch citizens, the distrust will persist.
Baloch militancy is not a temporary eruption. It has persisted across decades and across generations. If the political conditions that sustain it remain unchanged, it will persist across decades more. The guns can be managed for a time. The underlying sense of dispossession, the identity crisis, and the political psychology of a people who feel they have been perpetually deceived cannot be managed. They must be addressed.
Pakistan’s federation can only be genuinely strengthened by the willing participation of all its constituent peoples. A Balochistan that stays within Pakistan because it has no military option is not the same as a Balochistan that stays because it believes its future here is safe, honourable, and self-determining. The first is an uneasy truce. The second is a federation. Pakistan must decide which one it actually wants, and then govern accordingly.
