A dramatic train hijack in Pakistan’s Balochistan province left hundreds of passengers trapped as hostages on the locomotive and more than three dozen people, including at least 30 attackers, dead, according to security officials. The Balochistan Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for the attack. This armed group fighting for the secession of the southwest region of Pakistan has repeatedly targeted the country’s military officials and appears to have grown in prominence in recent years. Predictably, the Pakistani officials said that there is no room for compromise with the attackers, who gave Islamabad a 48-hour window to release Baloch political prisoners, among other demands. As Pakistan’s armed forces attempted to rescue passengers on the train and capture or kill the attackers, the reality on the ground points to two facts that are hard to ignore. First, the nature and the scale of this attack underscore Pakistan’s intelligence and security weaknesses, which are acute in Balochistan but also span the country’s struggle against violent extremism in other parts of the nation, especially in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. Second, while Pakistan regularly accuses India and its intelligence agencies of fomenting rebel sentiments in Balochistan, Islamabad, as many Pakistani analysts point out, has only itself to blame for the crisis in that province.
Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by area. The thinly populated region is also rich in minerals and is the heartland of Pakistan’s most ambitious infrastructure initiative ever, the $62-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. One of Pakistan’s deep-sea ports, the China-built Gwadar Port, is in Balochistan. Yet, decades of neglect mean that the province is Pakistan’s poorest. Instead of addressing that injustice, and the frustration that this has seeded, Pakistan’s response has been driven by a military calculus. Its aim has been to subdue criticism, rather than listen to it. Arrests and forced disappearances are common in Balochistan. Peaceful protests are barred, and when such protests grow in size, Islamabad blocks participants from leaving the province and cuts off the internet. That approach, as the train attack shows, is failing. As is Pakistan’s struggle against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the hardline ideological ally of the Afghan Taliban, which is behind a surge in violent attacks across Pakistan. The lesson for Pakistan — and other States — is clear: a military-first approach to targeting political criticism rarely works.
