Every few months, a column appears in foreign outlets announcing that Balochistan is lost to Pakistan. The argument is familiar. The province is too vast, its borders too porous and its people too alienated, so the Pakistan Army is destined to fail. It makes for dramatic reading. It also ignores what has actually happened on the ground this summer.
In early July, terrorists struck a police post guarding the Mangi Dam pumping station in Ziarat. Nine police personnel were martyred on the spot, and the terrorists later killed 18 others they had kidnapped. It was one of the most brutal attacks on law enforcement in recent years.
The state’s answer came quickly. The Pakistan Army, Frontier Corps and Balochistan Police launched Operation Shaban, a joint campaign that has since run on two fronts. It targets the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) around Ziarat in the north and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) around Lasbela and Khuzdar in the south.
That detail matters. The Ziarat attack is often described abroad as the work of Baloch rebels, but the operation’s northern front was aimed at TTP networks. Balochistan faces several terrorist groups with different agendas. That fact undercuts the claim that its violence is a single popular uprising against the state.
By mid-July, security sources said 109 terrorists had been killed in Operation Shaban and related intelligence-based operations across the province since July 5. The operation has continued since then. In recent weeks, security forces have killed 12 Fitna al-Hindustan terrorists in Kalat, eliminated 11 in Kharan and Washuk, killed a commander in a quadcopter strike in Mastung and killed 19 terrorists in Quetta and Kech. A soldier was martyred in the Quetta and Kech operations.
These are not the actions of an army “at the mercy of rebels.” They show a force that has adapted to the terrain, using intelligence, air support and new technology to take the fight into the mountains where terrorists once felt safe.
Critics are right that Balochistan is vast. It makes up about 44 percent of Pakistan’s land area and has a scattered population. But size isn’t destiny. It is a reason to invest in surveillance, mobility and intelligence-based operations, and Pakistan is doing exactly that. The Mastung strike shows how drones and precision targeting are shrinking the space in which terrorists can hide.
The long borders with Afghanistan and Iran are a real challenge. They are also the reason Pakistan has pressed hard on cross-border sanctuaries. At the UN General Assembly this week, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif raised terrorism coming from Afghanistan as a central concern. The problem is being named on the world stage, not hidden.
The deeper test of a state is how it treats its own failures, not whether it suffers attacks. After Mangi Dam, the families of the martyred policemen held a sit-in in Quetta. The protest ended after the provincial government agreed to set up a high-level inquiry into the security lapses.
The Balochistan government then formed a judicial commission headed by Justice Muhammad Amir Nawaz Rana of the Balochistan High Court, and it invited citizens and agencies to submit evidence. A state that was losing control would not open itself to that kind of scrutiny.
The political leadership has also stayed involved. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif chaired a Balochistan Apex Committee meeting in Quetta on July 9. The meeting directed all agencies to step up intelligence-based operations under the National Action Plan and to dismantle terrorist networks and their facilitators.
Critics rightly say that many people in Balochistan still lack schools, jobs, electricity and clean water. Nobody in Pakistan should deny that, and the province deserves far more than it has received. But poverty is a reason to speed up development, not to hand the province to armed groups who blow up gas pipelines, attack labourers and kill workers from other provinces.
Every road, school and port project that terrorists target is a project meant for Baloch families. The militants’ war is fought against the province’s own future. Most Baloch people, who want work, education and safety, pay the heaviest price for it.
Pakistan has long maintained that hostile foreign hands support terrorism in Balochistan, which is why the state now calls these groups Fitna al-Hindustan. The case is strongest when it rests on evidence presented openly, as Sheikh M. Usman has argued in its analysis of Indian-sponsored terrorism. Columns that treat terrorists as freedom fighters and describe a province of Pakistan as “occupied” are part of that information war.
Balochistan will not be secured by operations alone, and Pakistan’s own leaders say so. Lasting peace needs security and development to move together, including faster delivery of basic services, jobs for young people, a fair share of resource revenue for local communities, and justice for victims of violence.
But the claim that Balochistan has “already slipped” away doesn’t survive the facts of this summer. The police who held their posts at Mangi Dam, the soldiers who have fallen in Kech and the troops still pressing into the mountains are proof of a state that is fighting back. Balochistan is Pakistan, and Pakistan is staying.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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