Nasar Khan
Blood on the Tracks: Balochistan’s Unending Ordeal
The explosion near the Chaman railway crossing in Quetta last Sunday was not merely an act of violence. It was a declaration — brutal, deliberate, and aimed at the most defenceless. An explosives-laden vehicle rammed into a crowded shuttle train ferrying ordinary passengers toward Quetta railway station. At least thirty people were killed. Women. Children. Commuters who had done nothing more than board a train. Dozens more were wounded. Nearby homes crumbled. Roofs caved in. Entire neighbourhoods were shaken to their foundations by the force of a single, savage blast. What followed was silence of a familiar, terrible kind — the silence of a nation that has learned, through repetition and grief, how to absorb these wounds without yet knowing how to close them.
The banned Balochistan Liberation Army wasted no time claiming responsibility. That claim, chilling in its swiftness, confirmed what security analysts had long warned: militancy in Balochistan has not receded. It has regrouped, recalibrated, and returned with renewed audacity. The Chaman attack is not an isolated tragedy. It belongs to a pattern. The March 2025 Jaffer Express siege, which ended with thirty-three militants killed alongside several hostages, offered only a temporary pause in that pattern, not an end to it. The geography of violence has remained consistent — Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provinces that share long and porous borders with Afghanistan, continue to serve as theatres for organised militant activity. Networks find space there to recruit, to move, and to strike.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has expressed alarm, and rightly so. Civilians, labourers, travellers, and law enforcement personnel are increasingly exposed to attacks on public spaces and critical infrastructure. What was once a conflict largely perceived as distant or peripheral has crept into the mundane rhythms of daily life — train journeys, market visits, morning commutes. The ordinary has become dangerous. That normalisation of danger is itself a form of defeat that the state cannot afford to accept.
Pakistan has consistently maintained, with evidence it deems verifiable, that India actively supports separatist and militant elements within Balochistan as part of a broader strategy of destabilisation. In the current regional climate — sharpened by the tensions following Operation Sindoor — these concerns carry greater weight than they might have in calmer times. Hostile external actors have historically exploited internal fractures, and there is no reason to assume that calculus has changed. Foreign interference is real, and its role in aggravating insecurity cannot be dismissed as mere diplomatic deflection.
But to attribute Balochistan’s chronic unrest entirely to external manipulation would be both intellectually dishonest and strategically counterproductive. The insurgency has persisted through decades, through changing governments, through military operations and political promises alike. Something deeper sustains it. That something must be confronted with honesty, however uncomfortable the reckoning.
Baloch nationalist voices have long articulated a specific set of grievances: enforced disappearances that have destroyed families and bred lasting rage, political exclusion that has left provincial communities without meaningful representation, chronic underdevelopment that contrasts grotesquely with the resource wealth extracted from Baloch soil, and the absence of local ownership over natural resources that belong, by every moral measure, to the people who live above them. These grievances may be contested in their details. They may be exploited by militant groups for purposes that have nothing to do with justice. But they exist. They are felt. And a state that continues to dismiss them as propaganda or enemy fabrication will continue to find that military operations produce temporary suppression rather than lasting peace.
This is the hard truth Pakistan must now face without flinching. No single instrument can resolve a crisis this deep. Force alone cannot do it. The state must retain and demonstrate its writ — no responsible government can allow armed groups to bomb trains and besiege public infrastructure without decisive response. But purely kinetic strategies have been tried repeatedly in Balochistan, and the cycle of violence has not broken. Suppressing symptoms while ignoring causes is not counterterrorism. It is postponement.
Equally, a purely conciliatory approach — negotiation without accountability, dialogue without governance reform — would send the wrong signal entirely. It would reward violence with concession and invite further attacks by groups that calculate, rationally, that bombs produce results. The state cannot negotiate from a position of perpetual weakness while its citizens bleed on railway tracks.
What Pakistan needs is a comprehensive strategy — one that holds both truths simultaneously. Firmness against terrorism and genuine political inclusion are not opposites. They are complements. Stronger intelligence coordination, tighter border management, and decisive action against terrorist networks must go hand in hand with sincere political dialogue, accountability for enforced disappearances, and a serious reckoning with the economic deprivation that militant recruiters exploit as their most effective argument.
Governance in Balochistan must become accountable to the people of Balochistan. Natural resource revenues must translate into visible, tangible improvement in provincial lives. The disappeared must be accounted for — not because militants demand it, but because the rule of law demands it. Political voices that represent legitimate Baloch aspirations must have space to speak without being conflated with those who plant bombs.
Thirty lives were taken near the Chaman crossing last Sunday. Among them were women who had places to be, children who had years ahead of them, passengers who trusted that a train journey was safe. That trust has been violated, repeatedly, for far too long. The state owes these citizens not just condemnation and condolences — it owes them a strategy serious enough to match the gravity of their sacrifice. Balochistan’s wounds will not heal through military operations alone. They will not heal through words alone. They will heal only when justice, governance, and security are delivered together, consistently, and without condition. Pakistan has the capacity for that comprehensive response. The question is whether it has the will.
