Pakistan’s Fire Within: Balochistan, Sindh and the Blowback of Proxy Wars

How Pakistan’s obsession with Kashmir has boomeranged into ethnic uprisings and secessionist sentiment at home.

Even as Pakistan reeled under the onslaught of India’s ‘Operation Sindoor,’ a deadlier reckoning unfolded at home. If reports are to be believed, in Balochistan’s parched expanse, a remote-controlled IED tore through an army convoy in Bolan, killing a dozen soldiers including two Special Operations commanders. Hours later, another ambush in Kech district compounded the toll. The responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). Days earlier, former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had warned that the Pakistani state was losing its grip on Balochistan. Abbasi’s warning was a dire premonition.

For decades, Pakistan has pursued its irredentist ambitions in Kashmir with the zeal of a state possessed. In this pursuit, it has cultivated proxy groups, sanctioned jihadist networks and allowed the military-intelligence complex to dominate national policymaking. But while the state’s gaze remained fixated on India, fires ignited at home - in Balochistan, Sindh, among the Mohajirs and Pashtuns.

This is a war of ethnic estrangement, economic dispossession and geopolitical blowback. And it has been a long time coming.

The internal periphery of Pakistan comprising Balochistan, Sindh, parts of southern Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was never integrated into the state in any meaningful sense. As Anatol Lieven observes in his comprehensive, scholarly (and overly generous) work ‘Pakistan: A Hard Country,’ (2011) the provincial identities of Pakistan - Sindhi, Baloch, Pashtun, Mohajir – are not the products of centuries-old national consciousness, like the Czechs or Poles under the Habsburg Empire. Rather, they are brittle constructs, shaped by tribal affiliation, religious sub-sects and regional inequality. Ironically, so too is the Pakistani state itself, an edifice of artificial unity held together less by national cohesion than by fear of fragmentation.

Balochistan, the most resource-rich and population-poor of Pakistan’s provinces, is a case study in this contradiction. Despite being the source of most of Pakistan’s natural gas and mineral wealth, it remains the most neglected region. Roads are sparse, schools barely function, and electricity is intermittent. In Quetta, army cantonments gleam beside dusty slums. In Gwadar, promised as a crown jewel in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), locals are banned from fishing near their own shores.

The gas fields around Sui, long a vital source of Pakistan’s energy, have yielded little benefit to the Bugti tribe in whose territory they lie, igniting recurring waves of militancy. Now, attention has turned to the vast copper and gold reserves under development at RekoDiq.

Strategic ambition further complicates matters. Pakistan has long dreamed of becoming an energy transit corridor. The Gwadar port itself, built by the Chinese at Islamabad’s behest, was meant to transform Balochistan’s fortunes. But its development has instead provoked bitter resentment among the Baloch, who accuse the state of flooding the province with outsiders and shutting locals out of the spoils. The government claims otherwise, pointing out that many tribesmen profited by selling land.

Pakistan’s military elite has long justified its authoritarian dominance by invoking the existential threat posed by India, especially in Kashmir. Over time, this obsession with Kashmir mutated into a strategic doctrine that saw proxy warfare and militant sponsorship as legitimate instruments of statecraft. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has forged ties with jihadist outfits from Lashkar-e-Taiba to Jaish-e-Mohammed to creating a vast, murky ecosystem of militancy.

First, many of these jihadist networks turned rogue with some like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) targeting Pakistan itself. Others exported their ideology into Pakistan’s cities, fomenting sectarian violence and radicalism. More insidiously, the state’s militarised approach to Kashmir emboldened it to adopt similar heavy-handedness against domestic dissent.

Crackdowns in Balochistan became the norm. In Sindh, the Sindhudesh movement was met with raids and disappearances. Mohajir activists in Karachi were silenced. Pashtun civil rights movements like the PTM were accused of treason. Each time, the Pakistan’s Punjabi Muslim elite have resorted to the same playbook it used in Kashmir and each time, the response has grown only more hostile.

Sindh’s simmering discontent rarely grabs headlines like Balochistan’s insurgency. But the grievances run deep. As Lieven notes, even seemingly straightforward development projects like the Thar coal reserves remain stalled for years due to friction between the Sindh provincial government and the federal authorities in Islamabad. The reason is a fear that any strong assertion of provincial autonomy might trigger a wave of Sindhi nationalism strong enough to fracture the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP).

Many Sindhis see the state as a Punjabi-dominated entity with the military viewed as an external imposition. Mohajirs, migrants from India who settled in Sindh post-Partition, have their own history of political alienation, especially after the state’s clampdown on the MQM in the 1990s and again in recent years. Karachi, Sindh’s teeming metropolis, has witnessed intermittent ethnic riots between Sindhis, Mohajirs, Punjabis and Pashtuns, each group battling over territory and jobs.

Yet, paradoxically, Karachi is also a symbol of Pakistan’s complex unity. It is home to more Pathans than Peshawar, more Baloch than Quetta, and as many Punjabis as Lahore’s outer suburbs. Here, the dreams of nationalism often collide with the demands of daily survival. But today, even this fragile equilibrium is being tested as rising inflation, police brutality and state overreach grind away at civic trust.

If Pakistan survives as a nation-state, it will be only because Punjab wills it so (if it has will that is). This identification with the idea of Pakistan makes many Punjabis staunch defenders of national unity. But it also blinds them to the resentment they engender elsewhere.

What Pakistan did in Kashmir to ‘bleed’ India has now come home to roost. The same logic of militarised nationalism, the same disdain for local autonomy, the same demonisation of dissent are now routine in Balochistan, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

For many in Balochistan and Sindh, the ‘Kashmir Banega Pakistan’ slogans ring hollow. They see a state that invokes self-determination for Kashmiris but denies it at home. A state that champions development in Muzaffarabad while ignoring Gwadar. One that tolerates tribal autonomy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa only so long as it doesn’t challenge the military’s writ.

But the façade is today cracking rapidly. As Pakistan’s economy teeters and international scrutiny mounts, the centre cannot hold. Pakistan’s greatest threat today is that its dream of a unified Islamic nation is faltering, long undone by the realities of ethnic fragmentation, economic disparity and political repression.

While Baloch tribes that settled in Sindh and Punjab centuries ago have produced two presidents in form of Farooq Leghari and Asif Zardari, this elite success has done little for Balochistan itself. Most Baloch remain marginalised, caught between a crumbling tribal hierarchy and a state that governs by neglect.

As Lieven observes in his work, modern Baloch nationalism is shaped as much by myth as by memory. Mir Chakar’s short-lived confederacy in the 15th century and the 17th-century Khanate of Kalat serve as totems of a lost sovereignty. Baloch nationalists insist Kalat was a quasi-independent entity akin to Nepal, and not merely a princely state like those integrated into India and Pakistan post-1947. The Pakistani state disagrees and has often unleashed to back its claim.

A significant portion of ethnic Baloch live across the frontier in Iran, where the Sunni-majority population suffers under the Shia theocracy. This has led to calls for a ‘Greater Balochistan’ encompassing parts of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, says Lieven. The Iranian Baloch insurgent group Jundallah has operated with support from tribes straddling the Pakistani border - smugglers, gunrunners and middlemen in a heroin pipeline stretching from Afghanistan to the Gulf. Islamabad and Tehran alike suspect that Western intelligence has flirted with Jundallah to pressure Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

But allegiances in this arid borderland are fluid: the same routes used for heroin and insurgents also carry weapons and recruits to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Pakistan’s treatment of the Baloch has lacked both imagination and generosity. And in a region where tribal memory stretches back centuries, injustices are not easily forgotten.