Islamabad, May 8 (IANS) Pakistan’s reliance on proxy militant networks, its heavy-handed handling of local grievances, and its failure to respond to emerging militant alliances have fuelled the current crisis in Balochistan. Far from being a peripheral theatre, the province is turning into the epicentre of a multilayered insurgency shaped by decades of strategic miscalculations by Pakistani authorities, a report has detailed.
According to a report in Eurasia Review, Balochistan has once again descended into violence, with Islamabad continuing to portray the situation as part of an “external conspiracy”. However, the recent wave of clashes across the province, including the deadly confrontation at the 143 Wing post in Chaman and the April 26 ambushes near Dalbandin, reveals a troubling reality: “Pakistan’s own security establishment has helped engineer the very conditions” fuelling regional instability.
Citing field reports, it said a confrontation at the 143rd Wing post in Chaman resulted in heavy casualties among Pakistani border forces, followed by intense fighting with Afghan Taliban fighters on April 26, leaving seven soldiers dead at a roadblock.
The report said that these were not isolated incidents but “symptoms of a deeper structural failure” within Pakistan’s security framework.
Pakistan’s security establishment spent decades exploiting militant networks as “instruments of regional influence”, but today those same networks are directing violence inward.
“The attempt to move ammunition and fighters across the Chaman sector underscores how the border has become a two-way corridor for groups Islamabad once believed it could control,” the report noted.
It highlighted that the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) reportedly formalised an operational partnership in 2026, “a development that should have triggered alarm bells across Pakistan’s national security apparatus”, rather than “the establishment downplayed the threat”.
The April 27 ambush along the N40 highway near Dalbandin, killing four Pakistani soldiers, underscores the widening operational reach of these groups.
The report emphasised that Pakistan’s military establishment has long framed the unrest in Balochistan as “externally orchestrated”, yet the current escalation is driven by actors “once cultivated, tolerated, or selectively ignored” by the Pakistani authorities.
These developments suggest not “external manipulation” but “internal policy failures” that have enabled militant ecosystems to grow beyond the state’s control.
Warning of the wider implications, the report said, “If Islamabad continues to deny the structural roots of the conflict, the situation will deteriorate further. The insurgency is no longer fragmented. It is learning, adapting, and expanding, while the state remains trapped in outdated narratives. Balochistan’s future now hinges on whether Pakistan’s security establishment can confront the consequences of its own policies or whether it will continue down a path that has already cost lives, territory, and legitimacy.”
–IANS
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