This week, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a militant separatist group from Pakistan’s southwestern province, claimed responsibility for a series of coordinated attacks that left 73 people dead across numerous provinces. While no Chinese citizens were targeted, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif claimed that the BLA wanted to “drive a wedge” between Pakistan and China and scare off Chinese investors from projects in Balochistan and other parts of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Saleem Ahmad and Saud Mehsud from Reuters reported on the scope of the attacks:
Pakistan’s military said 14 soldiers and police and 21 militants were killed in fighting after the largest of the attacks, which targeted buses and trucks on a major highway.
Balochistan’s chief minister said 38 civilians were also killed. Local officials said 23 of them were killed in the roadside attack after armed men checked passengers’ IDs before shooting many of them and torching vehicles.
[…] Officials said militants also targeted police and security stations in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by area but least populated, killing at least 10 people in one attack.
[…] The [BLA] said four suicide bombers, including a woman from the southern port district of Gwadar, had been involved in an attack on the Bela paramilitary base. Pakistani authorities did not confirm the suicide blasts, but the provincial chief minister said three people had been killed at the base. [Source]
Pakistan witnessed 409 militant attacks in the first five months of 2024, leading to 414 deaths and 474 injuries, marking an 83 percent increase in attacks over the same period in 2023, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. This week’s attacks, the deadliest in years, reinforce the trend of a deteriorating security environment. Haroon Janjua from DW described the significance of these latest attacks, which experts view as a major escalation:
Analysts view the latest coordinated attacks as alarming due to their unprecedented scale and intensity, raising serious concerns about the security impacts.
“These are extremely significant attacks because of their scale — in terms of number of fatalities, the geographic scope of the attacks, and the wide range of targets, both civilian and security,” Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told DW.
Kiyya Baloch, a journalist and commentator who has extensively covered Balochistan, said that Monday’s attacks marked a new level of seriousness due to their meticulous planning and coordination.
“This indicates that the use of force by the state in Balochistan in the last two decades is not effective. It is backfiring and worsening the situation,” Baloch told DW. [Source]
Abid Hussain from Al Jazeera described the message that the BLA was attempting to send via the attacks, along with their motivations:
The targeted attacks on workers from Punjab — Pakistan’s biggest, most prosperous and most politically dominant province — also add to a growing pattern, said experts. As with multiple previous attacks on Chinese nationals and projects in the province, the separatist movement wants to send the message that outsiders are not safe in Balochistan, they said.
“Besides the Chinese, Baloch nationalists also target specific groups such as security forces, Punjabi laborers, and workers involved in development projects. Their aim is to discourage these groups from coming to Balochistan to work on these initiatives,” Malik Siraj Akbar, a Balochistan expert based in Washington, DC, said.
[…M]any in the province accuse the Pakistani state of systematically neglecting their needs and exploiting their resources, fuelling a sense of betrayal and deepening support for separatism.
“The nationalists are strongly opposed to the exploration of gold, minerals, and coal, seeing these activities as the exploitation of Balochistan’s resources,” Akbar said. “They often highlight images of coal trucks leaving the province as evidence of resources being extracted without benefiting the local population. This narrative helps to boost public support for their cause.” [Source]
The CPEC and its flagship Gwadar port and free zone project, located in the resource-rich Balochistan province, are major investments by Chinese state actors that underpin the countries’ bilateral relationship. But local backlash to these projects has grown and made Chinese citizens targets of BLA attacks. Describing the insecurity-underdevelopment nexus in Balochistan, Abdul Basit wrote for The Diplomat about the neocolonial terms in which the BLA views China and the CPEC:
In its propaganda, BLA frames China’s economic footprint in Balochistan as a neo-colonial project and compares it with the British East India Company which entered the Indian Subcontinent in 1608 as spice traders and gradually took over the entire region. In multiple statements after targeting Chinese nationals and projects in Pakistan, BLA has issued warnings to Beijing to roll back its development projects and leave the province.
BLA alleges that CPEC would give China control over Balochistan’s mineral resources and strategic coastline through Gwadar’s deep-sea port. BLA also accuses China of furthering the restive province’s sense of economic marginalization that would reduce the Baloch community to a minority in their own province once Gwadar is fully developed as a modern city. Lacking technical skills and modern education, the Baloch fear that job opportunities in Gwadar will be grabbed by outsiders while sidelining them. Concurrently, Pakistan’s worsening economic situation has also generated rumors that the country will offer Balochistan’s resources to repay soaring Chinese loans, which have now risen to $30 billion of Pakistan’s $126 billion external debt. Such narratives strengthen the insurgent groups and allow them to recruit by leveraging the Baloch community’s economic anxieties to perpetuate the conflict. [Source]
The attacks coincided with a meeting on Monday between Pakistani Army Chief Gen Asim Munir and visiting Commander of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Forces Gen Li Qiaoming to discuss bilateral security cooperation. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian also told a regular news briefing that “China is ready to further strengthen counter-terrorism security co-operation with the Pakistani side in order to jointly maintain regional peace and security.”
But it is unclear whether China’s security cooperation will make a difference. In Wednesday’s China-Global South Project newsletter, Eric Olander wrote: “China’s in a bind because it’s too deeply invested in Pakistan to pull out, but the South Asian country is clearly not stable enough for Beijing to add more money to the $60 billion that it’s already spent building the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It’s going to have to make do with the status quo, which means more destruction and more bloodshed.”
