What Pakistan suicide blast reveals about the Balochistan insurgency and China

China and its belt-and-road projects in Pakistan are a collateral casualty of the insurgency in Balochistan region, rather than the target, according to politicians, dissidents and analysts.

The suicide bombing on Tuesday by a militant Baloch nationalist, which killed three Chinese academics and their Pakistani driver inside Karachi University, was a strategic move to build pressure on Pakistan's security establishment, the observers told This Week In Asia.

"The Baloch dissidents' agenda is primarily directed against the Pakistani state," said Mushahid Hussain, a ranking member of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party who chairs the Senate committee on defence. The China factor became an "add-on" issue only after the US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was established in 2015, he said.

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Balochistan is a vast, largely inhospitable province in western Pakistan that is rich in natural resources. Separatists in the region have long fought for greater control over their minerals and political autonomy.

Nawab Akbar Bugti, a former governor and chief minister, launched the insurgency in 2005.

Pakistani politicians in 2006 and 2015 came close to reaching peace settlements with Baloch militant leaders, but these efforts were sabotaged by establishment hardliners, said Hussain.

As chairman of the parliamentary subcommittee on Balochistan in 2006, Hussain wrote a report on recommended conditions for a peace deal, the terms of which Bugti had accepted. However weeks before it was published, Bugti was killed in a military operation.

Hussain said another peace push in 2015, when Sharif's brother Nawaz was prime minister, "came close to a successful culmination" after the government dispatched emissaries to meet Baloch dissident leaders living in self-exile in London and Geneva.

"But in a shortsighted move, it was scuttled by establishment hardliners, for which the country continues to pay a heavy price," he said.

Explaining the hardliners' resistance to the negotiations, Hussain said "many in the Pakistani system" believed the Balochistan insurgency was being waged "at the behest of some inimical foreign powers who want to undermine the Pakistan-China strategic bond".

During his state visit to Pakistan in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the CPEC, which included Balochistan as a focal point because it was where the Chinese-operated port of Gwadar had already been built with funds from Beijing.

As work started on the infrastructure projects during the CPEC's US$25 billion "early harvest phase", the number of Chinese workers in the country rapidly escalated, tripling to a peak of 60,000 in 2018.

Many of these workers often kept to themselves, living in residential quarters near the CPEC projects. Others based in cities across Pakistan tended to live in large houses in upscale neighbourhoods, and were often seen shopping and dining out in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, despite constant warnings from the Chinese embassy over the years that they were increasingly at risk of terrorist attacks.

Veteran Baloch rights activist Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur said there was widespread public resentment in Balochistan towards CPEC projects and the multinational mining companies extracting significant reserves of copper, gold, lead and zinc in the province.

Logistical infrastructure is being built in restive areas of Balochistan to connect Gwadar port with Pakistan's partly Chinese-built motorway network, thereby linking the Arabian Sea outlet to the far west region of Xinjiang.

But Talpur said the native Baloch population had seen none of the benefits from the multibillion-dollar investments, the terms of which are a state secret.

"There isn't even a trickle-down effect," Talpur said. "When people are deprived of what belongs to them and they see it benefiting multinationals and the federal government, the reaction naturally will be resentment."

In 2018, Chinese diplomats met self-exiled dissident Baloch tribal chiefs in Britain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates towards the end of a major Pakistani military operation in Balochistan that was believed at the time to have routed the insurgents.

Operating with Islamabad's blessing, Beijing's representatives sought to persuade the chieftains to stop attacking CPEC projects and Chinese workers in Balochistan, said Kiyya Baloch, a journalist based in Norway.

"The Chinese approaches were rejected," he said. "In any case, the exiled leaders had become completely irrelevant to the insurgent movement. Foot soldiers fighting security forces in Balochistan take their own decisions."

According to Kiyya, educated, middle-class Baloch like Karachi University suicide bomber Shaari Baloch wanted nothing to do with feudal tribal politicians.

Pakistanis were stunned to learn that Shaari was a happily-married secondary school science teacher with two children aged eight and four years old.

The 30-year-old fit the profile of a well-settled, educated Baloch. Although she was previously a student activist, she maintained a low profile. Most of her family members were civil servants, including Shaari herself and her husband Habitan Bashir Baloch, a dentist who worked as a demonstrator at Makran University in Balochistan province.

On Tuesday, Habitan posted a tweet saying he was "beaming with pride" at his wife's actions. He was arrested by Pakistan's security agencies on Wednesday.

Female suicide bombers are rare in Pakistan because Taliban insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies who have waged an insurgency in the country since 2002 are notoriously sexist.

Sardar Akhtar Mengal, a prominent dissident-turned-mainstream Baloch politician, said it was important for Pakistanis to "try to understand what made a woman who had a bright future ahead of her" become a suicide attacker.

"The consequences of this incident will be catastrophic", if Pakistan's security establishment continued with its zero-tolerance policy towards dissidents in Balochistan, he warned.

A few hours before he spoke to This Week In Asia, rights activist Talpur reported on social media that his cardiologist friend, Dildar Baloch, had been "forcibly disappeared" from Karachi.

Alongside military action, Pakistani security agencies have conducted a well-documented campaign of enforced disappearances, torture during detention, and "pick and dump" killings on Baloch.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both counted several hundred extrajudicial killings of Baloch activists since 2005, although Baloch rights groups put the numbers of dead in the thousands.

Talpur said human rights violations in Balochistan by Pakistan's state institutions were "too numerous and too pervasive to present in a few lines".

"It should be understood that though physical violation of human rights like the enforced disappearances and the 'kill and dump policy' of those abducted are those that should and will garner most attention, what's often overlooked are the economic, social and political injustices," he said.

Faran Jeffrey, a London-based security analyst, said the Baloch separatist militancy was "largely a secular ethnonationalist phenomenon, unlike the Pakistani Taliban's militancy".

Militant Islamist groups like the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have historically found willing recruits from seminaries.

While most Baloch rebels are impoverished and only nominally educated, emerging evidence has indicated that groups like the Baloch Liberation Army's Majeed Brigade - which claimed responsibility for Tuesday's attack - are "attempting to seek recruits from universities in urban centres where they have found somewhat fertile ground", Jeffrey said.

This has prompted Pakistan's security agencies to profile Baloch students, some of whom have been arrested in full public view.

Following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last August, most of the "Baloch militant organisational presence is now concentrated in Iran, including along both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border", he said.

Their training camps as well as many of their family members were based in Iran, he said. They often entered Pakistan through mountains to carry out attacks against security forces and then fled back to Iran, said Jeffrey, who is head consultant for the Midstone Centre for International Studies, a London-based public policy institute and consultancy.

He said there were increasing signs of cooperation between Baloch and TTP militants based in areas of southern Afghanistan near the tri-border with Pakistan and Iran.

"After the Taliban takeover of Kabul, these ties have only grown stronger and TTP might even have provided some logistical help to some of these Baloch militant groups in recent times," Jeffrey said. "This would also explain how some of these Baloch militant groups are getting their hands on Nato weapons and equipment."

Relations with the TTP had also helped Baloch militant groups "drastically upgrade their capabilities" with the addition of suicide squad operations and suicide bombings, Jeffrey said.

Increasingly, Baloch rebels were being hunted back by Pakistani drones. Dozens of Baloch militants were killed and wounded in several recent drone strikes, Jeffrey said.

After Tuesday's suicide attacks, Pakistan's security agencies cracked down against Baloch suspected to have militant links.

Students at Punjab University in Lahore on Wednesday posted a video on social media showing their Baloch classmate, Beebarg Imdaad, being manhandled into the back seat of a white pickup truck by half a dozen plainclothes security personnel.

Abdul Basit, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, called the abduction "a tried, tested and failed strategy".

"Over the years, this attitude (of Pakistan's security establishment) has produced more separatists than any other reason, contributing to the prevailing sense of alienation among the Baloch," he said.

Basit said Pakistan's authorities should "step back and revisit" their heavy-handed approach to dealing with Baloch dissidents.

"Humanise the policy discourse on Baloch, don't securitise it further," he said.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the suicide blast, Senate defence committee chairman Hussain said "additional measures could be in the offing as a force multiplier for promoting security of the Chinese working in Pakistan".

Pakistan was likely to strengthen its own security apparatus vis-a-vis protection of Chinese personnel and projects in Pakistan, beyond what it already was doing for CPEC personnel and projects, he said.

But Hussain ruled out an extension of China's security apparatus into Pakistan.

Pakistan and China had a long-standing, robust partnership in defence and security, including regular counter terrorism drills between their armies and intelligence collaboration, he said.

"This quiet but substantive bilateral mechanism is likely to continue and there is no likelihood of any Chinese security apparatus being injected into Pakistan," Hussain said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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