Pakistan’s Balochistan Problem: An

Insurgency’s Rebirth
Early in 2012, a small group of US congressmen looking for alternatives to
the Obama administration’s AfPak policy made recommendations for two
changes in the region. The first, that instead of fantasizing about
incorporating the Taliban into the Afghan political system the United States
ought to rearm the Northern Alliance, had been discussed previously. The
second recommendation was more novel and controversial: instead of
trying to normalize relations with Pakistan’s corrupt government and hostile
military, the US ought to support the creation of a separate state of
Balochistan in the southern part of Pakistan. US Representatives Dana
Rohrabacher, Louie Gohmert, and Steve King went so far as to introduce a
bill stating that the “Baloch nation” had a historic right to self-
determination and called for Congress to recognize Baloch independence.

Although the congressmen involved are not seen as influential members of

the foreign affairs establishment, the idea of dismembering the largest of
Pakistan’s four provinces, consisting of nearly half of the country’s land
mass and having a profound strategic importance because of a shared
border with Afghanistan on the north, threw Balochistan into the US
foreign-policy calculus almost overnight. Journalists and think tanks began
to examine the Baloch nationalist movement and its heterodox idea that
because ethnic identity trumps religious identity Muslim Pakistan is
therefore not a nation. The controversy that has divided leaders of the
Baloch nationalist movement—greater autonomy versus outright succession
from Pakistan—began to receive new scrutiny. As with other sudden policy
enthusiasms, however, the subject quickly got ahead of itself, racing past
the deeper understanding of Balochistan’s history and its place in Pakistani
nationhood that is required to bring the independence movement into clear
focus and understand the implications of its demands.

Among the ancient inhabitants of the central Caspian region, the Balochs
were an independent tribal union until the nineteenth century. In 1893, the
British drew the Durand Line, which divided British India and Afghanistan,
as well as the Pashtun and the Baloch tribes on both sides of the new
border. Indian independence in 1947 gave the tribes the choice of joining
either Pakistan or India. Baloch leaders agitated for a third way:
independence. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, believed that
Balochistan would not be able to survive on its own and forced it to join
Pakistan. One of the Baloch leaders at that time, Suleiman Khan, later said:
“We had no desire to be part of Pakistan but we were ignored and the
agreement was eventually forced down our throats. Till the very last
moment, they kept us in the dark. All the time we were assured that the
Baluch would keep their independent state but instead we were sold down
the river.”

The alignment with Pakistan was initially based on an agreement that

Balochistan would be autonomous and retain authority over land,
resources, and political matters while the Pakistani government would
oversee currency, foreign relations, and defense. But almost from the
beginning, the central government aimed at control, leading to violence
between Baloch guerrillas and the Pakistani army sent into the province to
subdue them.

One of the more dramatic confrontations came in 1963 when Baloch leader
Sher Mohammad Marri resisted the central government’s intention to
establish military bases in the province, giving rise to an insurgency
ranging over forty-five thousand miles. The insurgency ended after five
years with a cease-fire agreement that promised greater political autonomy
for Balochistan. But these promises were not kept and Baloch separatists
mounted another insurgency in 1973, fighting for greater social and
political rights and an end to exploitation of Balochistan’s resources.
Pakistan’s military operations in the area, supported by forces of the Shah
of Iran, exacted a high toll on Baloch insurgents. In 1973, an assault by
the Pakistani Air Force ordered by General Tikka Khan, later referred to as
the “Butcher of Balochistan,” led to the deaths of five thousand guerrillas
and more than three thousand soldiers.

A truce finally came after Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto fell to a
coup by General Zia-ul-Haq. General Zia initiated a policy of development
that temporarily quelled that insurgency of Balochistan’s people. But after
three decades of unfulfilled promises for more effective local government
and a greater share of state resources, another one broke out in 2005 and
has yet to be contained.

It is obvious why the central Pakistani government has been obsessed with
keeping tight control of Balochistan. It is not only the largest province in
Pakistan in terms of area, with a population of roughly seven and a half
million, but it has vast natural resources, especially energy resources,
including an estimated nineteen trillion cubic feet of natural gas and six
trillion barrels of oil reserves.
The central government controls tourism, environment, population, labor,
welfare, the newspapers, and even the educational curriculum, which
rigorously excludes the use of the Balochi language, which Pakistan’s
political elites ridicule as primitive.

Not surprisingly, Balochistan’s literacy is the lowest among the four

provinces. Despite being the major supplier of natural resources to other
Pakistani provinces, the Balochs are behind the rest of the country not only
in terms of education, but also in social development. They have the lowest
per capita income among the four provinces, with sixty-three percent living
below the poverty line, eighty-five percent lacking safe drinking water, and
eighty percent without electricity. There are very few government civil
servants from Balochistan working in Islamabad, moreover, and not even
one Baloch in the Pakistani Foreign Service.

This deprivation has fueled the ongoing spirit of insurgency, whose causes
scholar Frederic Grare summarizes as three-fold: expropriation,
marginalization, and dispossession. Expropriation relates to the Balochs’
claim that their resources are exploited by the Punjabi-dominated central
government. Marginalization particularly relates to discrimination against
Baloch labor in ongoing development projects, with workers often imported
from the other provinces rather than hired locally. Dispossession is an issue
because Balochs see the best of their land being taken over by “foreigners”
from Islamabad.

The province is now in the middle of its fourth major episode of

insurgency, following major outbreaks in 1948, 1963–69, and 1973–78.
The central government has always claimed that these eruptions were the
result of conspiracies to dismember Pakistan between Baloch leaders, the
Soviet Union, and Iraq. It has used military force to deal with the guerrillas
who have damaged gas pipelines, blocked coal shipment to Punjab, and
made life tough for the Pakistani army in the mountains despite numbering
at best some fifty thousand against the army’s force of more than eighty
thousand.

The current wave of insurgency began with the gang rape of a female
doctor by army officers. The late veteran politician Nawab Akbar Khan
Bugti voiced his anger and demanded punishment of the rapists. In
response, the army launched an attack on Dera Bugti, the country’s largest
natural gas reservoir. Baloch guerrillas countered by firing rocket launchers
at then President General Pervez Musharraf’s helicopter during a visit to
Quetta, Balochistan’s largest city. A full operation by the Pakistani army
then began in the province, particularly in Kohlu and Dera Bugti, in 2005.
Several Bugti and Marri militants were killed, further fueling an insurgency
that had already been complicated by the simultaneous rise of the Taliban,
the War on Terror, and the decline of law and order in Punjab and Karachi.
Taking advantage of the rapidly changing (and deteriorating) situation, the
Baloch movement gained momentum, popularity, and support, locally and
internationally, setting up a government in exile in 2006.

As the Balochs have gotten more serious about independence, the central
government has responded with an heavier display of force. Nearly four
hundred bullet-ridden bodies of Balochs have been recovered from
mountains and roadsides in recent years—most likely, casualties of ISI, the
powerful Pakistani intelligence service, which has been active in the
province. Others suspected of ties to the insurgency have been
“disappeared,” according to the Baloch Missing Persons Forum, which
claims that some ten thousand individuals are assumed to have been
confined and tortured by the Pakistani secret service agencies before being
killed.

Over the past few months, a faction of American congressmen, minority

Afghan groups, Baloch nationalists, and supporters have outlined a
framework for an alternative US policy to Southwest Asia. US advocates for
an independent Balochistan have yet to receive wide support, but their
campaign, which now centers around secession, is receiving more attention
among policymakers particularly because of three recent high-profile
events: the congressional hearing on Baluchistan; the introduction of a
Baloch self-determination bill in Congress; and a highly publicized meeting
of the Balochistan National Front in Berlin earlier this year.

Supporters of the new approach note redrawing of Southwest Asia’s

political borders through Balochistan independence would advance
American interests on several fronts, especially by creating valuable new
economic opportunities that could offset the costs of the failed wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and spur economic growth after the global recession.

Meanwhile, the insurgents, particularly those in the government in exile,

are reinventing themselves to attract more attention from the US. In its
earlier phases, the insurgency was dominated by a Marxist ideology and to
some extent (enough to be an irritant to Islamabad, but not enough to
involve an expensive commitment) supported by Russia. Many of the
leading figures studied in Russia and styled themselves Marxist-Leninists.
However, the latest outbreak of hostilities occurred after the death of the
Soviet Union and has looked toward India, Great Britain, and especially
America for support. That it now sees itself as a democratic movement is
reflected in the recently drafted Charter for the Liberation of Balochistan:
Article 1 stipulates “one person one vote.”

There is also a new sophistication about international opinion on the part

of the insurgency’s leaders, especially Allah Nazar Baloch, the forty-four-
year-old leader of the Balochistan Liberation Front. The eponymously
named rebel trained as a medical doctor and is part of a new generation
that has taken the cause of independence global, successfully espousing
the cause in the British House of Lords and the American Congress.

The liberation movement has also been buoyed by the tides of war in the
region. Pakistan’s hidden agenda has always involved secretly supporting
the Taliban for its own strategic purposes. But the Karzai government in
Afghanistan has found a chance to pay it back by providing safe haven to
the Baloch guerrillas who shelter and train in camps there.

Pakistan today is facing unprecedented challenges: economic turbulence

and rising poverty, a stalemated army operation in the Northern region,
law-and-order issues in Sind and Punjab, an increasingly cold collaboration
with the US in the War on Terror, spillover effects of Afghanistan’s
insurgency, and, of course, the enduring rivalry with India. It cannot afford
Balochistan’s insurgencies, which—owing to the province’s vast land,
hostile terrain, arid climate, and a population unreconciled to Islamabad’s
discriminatory and exploitve policies—have been difficult to suppress.
Pakistan has attempted to drown the voices of the Balochs for more than
sixty years, but they appear to be growing louder and more demanding
with each passing day.