A stunning train hijack and hostage crisis this week, in which hundreds of passengers were held for a day by suicide vest-clad separatists, has made clear the limits of Pakistan’s ambitions for the resource-rich province of Balochistan.
Insurgents late on Tuesday blew up the tracks and ambushed the carriages of the Jaffa Express, which had just left Quetta, the capital of Balochistan. After a day-long stand-off, security forces rescued 339 passengers, but 26 hostages, among them 5 civilians, and 4 paramilitary officers died in the attack. Authorities said 33 attackers were killed.
Those who escaped the train said they had to walk for hours without water to reach safety. The images and videos of bloodied survivors and flag-draped coffins have spurred grief and outrage across the country.
Pakistan has fought a low-level insurgency against separatists and tribal chieftains in Balochistan, the country’s largest but least developed province, since the country’s founding in 1947.
But the attacks have stepped up in recent years as Chinese and western companies have invested billions in the province, imperilling those projects and hopes for economic development.
“Pakistani leaders have often depicted Balochistan . . . as a potential lodestar for the country’s long-term growth,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Washington-based Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.
“Instead, it’s become a cautionary tale about over ambition. You can’t simply wish away deep-seated local grievances, growing security threats, infrastructure deficits, and investor discomfort.”
Analysts said successive Pakistani governments, both civilian and military, had given the security forces broad latitude to pacify the province, including through enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. The military has also installed friendly provincial governments.
“With both a say in the political rule and economic development of their own lands denied . . . many young Baloch are naturally ‘going into the mountains’ to join the insurgency,” said Mahvish Ahmad, a professor of human rights and politics at the London School of Economics. Non-violent protests have also faced violent crackdowns, she added.
Ahmad noted a shift among separatist movements in the province “from being tribally-led to being led by a growing middle class, that has mushroomed in the south . . . as a result of remittances from the Gulf”.
The number of attacks rose 84 per cent rise in 2024 versus the previous year, while those by groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army, which claimed Tuesday’s assault, and Balochistan Liberation Front increased 120 per cent, according to a report in January by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies think-tank.
Many locals also see foreign investment as an echo of colonial efforts to extract the province’s resources.
Canada-based Barrick Gold is investing $7bn and courting Saudi and western financing to revive the Reko Diq mine, which the company says holds one of the world’s largest stores of untapped copper and gold.
China’s investment in the port city Gwadar has become the greatest cautionary tale for development in Balochistan. In 2015, Beijing began pouring in billions of dollars to develop a deep-water port and copper mine as part of its Belt and Road infrastructure drive.
The Chinese-backed port and airport were intended to link trade from western China and central Asia to the Indian Ocean. But many Baloch complain the city has been transformed by a maze of security infrastructure including checkpoints, fencing and surveillance cameras to protect Chinese investment.
Pakistani officials also reject accusations of repression. They instead blame India for funding armed groups in Balochistan and say Taliban-ruled Afghanistan has become a haven for insurgents, as well as a source of western-made weaponry abandoned by Nato forces.
India and the Afghan Taliban regime rejected the allegations as baseless.
Pakistani officials and Chinese and western investors have also promised to devote a share of the profits from resource extraction to improve livelihoods in the province. China has donated thousands of free solar panels to households and boosted spending on housing reconstruction after floods in 2022 killed hundreds, development officials said.
Barrick says its mine will create 4,000 long-term jobs and has agreed to pay royalties and social development funds to the provincial government.
But those promises have failed to quell local anger. Last July, a protest march on Gwadar led officials to block major highways, cut off internet access for five days and arrest dozens of activists. Earlier that year, eight insurgents attempted to invade the port authority, prompting a shootout that killed two Pakistani soldiers.
Insurgents have also targeted Chinese personnel and interests, including an attack last month on a convoy from a Chinese-backed copper mine and a bombing at Karachi’s airport last year that killed two Chinese engineers.
So unstable is the security situation in Gwadar that the airport — Pakistan’s largest, which China financed to the tune of more than $240mn — was inaugurated virtually last year by Chinese premier Li Qiang.
And that situation seems unlikely to improve in the short term. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the spokesperson for the army, vowed that the perpetrators of the hostage crisis and their supporters would be hunted down and brought to justice.
The attack, he said, “changes the rules of the game”.
