The Balochistan Liberation Army wants the world to believe it speaks for the Baloch people. Study its target list for even a moment, and that claim collapses under the weight of its own evidence. Barbers from Punjab shot dead in their shop in Gawadar. Labourers from other provinces dragged off buses and executed on roadsides. Chinese engineers building roads and dams killed in their vehicles. A passenger train hijacked with hundreds of ordinary commuters held at gunpoint for thirty hours. If this is liberation, one must ask: liberation for whom, and at whose expense?
The Myth: Terrorism in the garb of Human Rights Narrative.
The BLA’s foundational claim that it is the armed expression of Baloch nationalist aspiration contains just enough historical truth to make it seductive, and just enough distortion to make it dangerous. Balochistan’s grievances are real. It is Pakistan’s largest province by area, richest in gas and mineral wealth, yet home to one of the country’s most impoverished populations, with an estimated 70 percent living in multidimensional poverty. Those disparities bred legitimate resentment over decades, and the BLA initially drew on that well.
But a movement’s origin does not determine its present character. What the BLA has become bears little resemblance to any coherent political programme for Baloch welfare. Its Fateh Squad and Majeed Brigade the operational arms responsible for the most spectacular recent atrocities — do not distinguish between the Pakistani state and the Baloch civilian who simply wants a road to a hospital or a school for his children. In August 2024, coordinated BLA attacks across Balochistan killed over 70 people, including more than two dozen civilians. In November 2024, a suicide bomber struck the Quetta railway station, killing over 30. In March 2025, the Jaffar Express hijacking terrorised hundreds of ordinary passengers for over a day before Pakistani forces ended it. These are not the acts of a movement that has the people’s welfare at heart.
The Reality: Hostile agenda against Development.
Here lies the most revealing truth about the BLA’s current mission. Its most consistent, most deliberate targets are not military installations they are the infrastructure of Balochistan’s economic future. The Gawadar port complex, attacked in March 2024. Chinese CPEC workers, targeted repeatedly across Karachi and Balochistan. Dam construction sites, power projects, and highway networks precisely the investments that would lift Baloch communities from poverty. The BLA has attacked the things that the Baloch people most desperately need.
This is not incidental. It is strategic and it is a strategy designed by interests that have nothing to do with Baloch welfare. The fingerprints of hostile foreign powers on the BLA’s escalation are no longer a matter of speculation. An Indian naval officer, Kulbhushan Jadhav, was convicted of running a covert espionage and sabotage network inside Balochistan. BLA commanders have been documented receiving medical treatment in Indian hospitals under assumed identities. BLA leadership has been photographed alongside Indian political figures, with Indian media openly celebrating them as “freedom fighters.” The strategic logic is transparent: a destabilised, underdeveloped Balochistan serves India’s interest in undermining CPEC and keeping Pakistan perpetually off-balance. The BLA, wittingly or not, has become the operational instrument of that agenda.
The Myth: Legitimising Terrorism
Some international commentators and a vocal Baloch diaspora continue to frame BLA violence through the grammar of resistance movements. This framing requires ignoring the victims. Seven barbers, migrants from other provinces working modest jobs in Gwadar, were shot dead in May 2024 because of where they were born. Nine bus passengers were executed near Nushki in April 2024 for the same reason. Labourers asleep in a coastal town were murdered in their beds. This is ethnic targeting of civilians it is not resistance, it is terror and dressing it in the language of liberation dishonours the actual Baloch people in whose name it is conducted.
The Baloch people are not the BLA. The majority of Balochistan’s population wants what every human community wants: economic opportunity, functioning public services, security, and political representation. The BLA offers none of these. It burns the roads being built, kills the workers who build them, and bombs the stations that connect Baloch towns to the rest of the country. Every attack on development infrastructure is an attack on the Baloch future.
Future of Balochistan, Options for Pakistan, and the world
Pakistan’s responsibility is to accelerate development in Balochistan with transparency, to ensure resource revenues benefit the province meaningfully, and to engage Baloch political voices through genuine dialogue rather than suspicion. These are legitimate demands and meeting them will do more to drain the BLA’s recruitment pool than any military operation.
But the international community also has a responsibility to clarity. Romanticising an organisation designated as a terrorist group by the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom one that murders civilians, destroys development projects, and serves foreign strategic agendas is not solidarity with the Baloch people. It is a disservice to them.
The BLA does not carry the Baloch flag. It burns it.
