Islamabad, Pakistan – When assembly United States President Donald Trump within the Oval Workplace in September, Pakistan’s military chief, Subject Marshal Asim Munir, opened a briefcase with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif standing subsequent to him.
Inside have been a set of glistening minerals. Their show was a part of Pakistan’s newest provide to the Trump administration: The nation was prepared to open up its minerals to US funding.
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Lower than 5 months later, a cloud has moved over that promise. Most of Pakistan’s richest mineral deposits are within the province of Balochistan. The province – the nation’s largest by space and its most impoverished – has lengthy witnessed a separatist motion pushed by anger over perceptions that the pursuits of the native inhabitants have been ignored by the federal authorities. On Saturday, coordinated assaults throughout Balochistan by which fighters killed 31 civilians and 17 safety personnel whereas the navy gunned down 145 fighters served up an pressing reminder of the challenges that Pakistan – and potential traders – face within the province.
Balochistan can be on the coronary heart of China’s investments in Pakistan, making Saturday’s assaults notably delicate for Islamabad.
Inside hours of the assaults throughout a minimum of 12 places, Inside Minister Mohsin Naqvi blamed neighbouring India. “These weren’t regular terrorists. India is behind these assaults. I can inform you for positive that India deliberate these assaults together with these terrorists,” Naqvi stated with out providing any proof to again up his claims.
The attackers belonged to the Baloch Liberation Military (BLA), a separatist group that has lengthy sought independence for Balochistan and has waged a decades-long insurgency towards the Pakistani state alongside a number of different armed teams.
In a video posted on social media, BLA chief Bashir Zeb stated the assaults have been a part of the group’s “Herof 2.0” operation, a follow-up to an analogous coordinated assault launched in August 2024.
India on Sunday rejected Pakistan’s allegations, calling them an try and divert consideration from what it described as Pakistan’s “inner failings”.
“As a substitute of parroting frivolous claims every time there’s a violent incident, it could do higher to concentrate on addressing long-standing calls for of its individuals within the area,” Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson for India’s Ministry of Exterior Affairs, stated in a press release.
Amid this blame sport, analysts stated the roots of Pakistan’s disaster in Balochistan run deeper than anyone incident – and ignoring them gained’t assist Islamabad because it tries to woo each the US and China to spend money on the province.
Roots of the unrest
Balochistan is dwelling to about 15 million of Pakistan’s 240 million individuals, in accordance with the 2023 census. It’s the nation’s poorest province regardless of its huge pure assets wealth.
It holds vital reserves of oil, coal, gold, copper and fuel, assets that generate substantial income for the federal authorities.
With Pakistan having promised components of this useful resource wealth to China, its closest ally, and to the US beneath a landmark settlement signed final yr, issues persist that escalating violence couldn’t solely jeopardise tasks price billions of {dollars} but in addition threaten the nation’s fragile financial restoration.
Annexed by Pakistan in 1948 quickly after partition from India, Balochistan has been the location of a separatist motion nearly for the reason that nation’s founding.
The province has witnessed a minimum of 5 main rebellions since then. The newest part started within the early 2000s when calls for for higher management over native assets regularly escalated into requires full independence.
The federal government’s response has been marked by heavy-handed safety operations. Human rights teams accuse authorities of killing and forcibly disappearing 1000’s of ethnic Balochs suspected of being concerned in or having sympathy for separatist teams.
In March, BLA fighters carried out one in all their most audacious assaults, trying to hijack a passenger practice, the Jaffer Specific, travelling from Quetta to the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Greater than 300 passengers have been rescued after an operation that lasted greater than a day, throughout which a minimum of 33 fighters have been killed.
The incident was a part of a broader uptick in violence throughout Balochistan together with the remainder of the nation. In response to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Research, the province noticed a minimum of 254 assaults in 2025, a 26 p.c enhance from the earlier yr, leading to greater than 400 deaths.
The newest wave of violence got here simply days after Pakistan hosted a minerals summit geared toward attracting Chinese language firms.
China has already invested closely within the province, together with within the growth of Gwadar, Pakistan’s solely deep-sea port. The port is a key node within the $60bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which goals to attach southwestern China to the Arabian Sea.
In September, USSM, a US-based mining agency, additionally signed a $500m memorandum of understanding to spend money on mineral excavation in Pakistan.
Saher Baloch, a Berlin-based researcher specializing in Balochistan, stated there was a “core contradiction” in Pakistan’s efforts to courtroom worldwide companions by emphasising the province’s assets with out addressing its political grievances.
“Balochistan’s instability isn’t episodic. It’s structural and rooted in longstanding grievances over possession, political exclusion and militarisation,” she instructed Al Jazeera.
So long as violence persists, she stated, large-scale extraction tasks will stay high-risk and closely securitised, making them viable primarily for “state-backed actors like China, not market-driven Western traders”.
And “even Chinese language tasks beneath CPEC have confronted repeated assaults, forcing Pakistan to deploy 1000’s of troops simply to safe restricted infrastructure,” she added.
Abdul Basit, a analysis fellow at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam Faculty of Worldwide Research, supplied a unique perspective, arguing that the province’s primary traders, China and doubtlessly the US, are already absolutely conscious of the dangers.
“China has CPEC investments within the nation, and the US signed a minerals deal in September final yr, an entire yr after Herof 1.0, so that they each know the danger profiles and what they’re moving into,” Basit instructed Al Jazeera, referring to a different coordinated BLA assault throughout a number of places in August 2024.
“Clearly, such assaults do shake investor confidence, however these are government-to-government offers. These are a part of strategic funding calculus, and neither the US nor China will pull out their funding,” he added.
Financial stakes rise
Pakistan’s economic system, which has lengthy struggled, has confronted sustained strain in recent times. The nation solely narrowly prevented default in the summertime of 2023, securing a last-minute bailout from the Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF).
Since then, Pakistan has regained some stability beneath its newest IMF programme, the twenty fifth time it has turned to the lender, securing $7bn in funding.
Regardless of official efforts to market Pakistan as a sexy funding vacation spot, international direct funding (FDI) has remained weak.
Central financial institution figures launched final month confirmed a pointy decline from July to December. In response to the State Financial institution of Pakistan, the nation acquired simply $808m in FDI in the course of the first half of the fiscal yr 2026, down from $1.425bn in the identical interval a yr earlier.
Imtiaz Gul, govt director of the Islamabad-based Centre for Analysis and Safety Research, stated the surge in violence in Balochistan and elsewhere was deterring traders.
“No sane nationwide or worldwide investor will danger their cash in a particularly risky scenario,” he instructed Al Jazeera, including that the disaster was “rooted in issues centred within the province itself and linked to Islamabad’s strategy”.
Balochistan additionally shares an extended and porous border with Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province. That provides to the area’s notion as a “high-risk zone” for traders.
“Persistent assaults counsel that even closely guarded tasks are weak,” she stated. “Absence of native consent will increase the chance of a backlash.”
Exterior vs inner concern
The Jaffer Specific practice assault in March was adopted a month later by an assault in Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir, which killed a minimum of 26 individuals.
These incidents escalated right into a four-day navy confrontation between India and Pakistan in Might, marked by missile strikes, drone assaults and cross-border shelling.
Pakistan has repeatedly accused India of coaching and facilitating Baloch rebels and, after the Jaffer Specific assault, formally designated Baloch separatist teams as “Fitna al-Hindustan”, a time period implying Indian involvement.
However Basit stated such claims should be backed by credible proof.
“This assault was carried out in broad daylight and accomplished by locals. It is a straight-up failure of intelligence and native safety equipment. Whereas the response time was fast they usually have been in a position to restore management, the query is why such an assault, in primary cities, was in a position to happen in any respect,” he stated.
Saher Baloch described Islamabad’s concentrate on India as a well-known tactic that will present short-term diplomatic cowl however does little to handle deeper points.
“Pakistan seeks to reframe Balochistan from a political battle to a safety downside in an effort to entice diplomatic sympathy and deflect scrutiny internally,” she stated, including that the strategy has limits.
“There may be much more consciousness now that Balochistan’s unrest is pushed primarily by home components, similar to enforced disappearances, lack of political autonomy and financial marginalisation,” she stated.
Gul stated that whereas native grievances are central, extended instability might nonetheless serve the pursuits of exterior actors.
India, he argued, may gain advantage by limiting China’s footprint within the area. “I wouldn’t be stunned if there are exterior motives and that’s the reason cash is poured into violence and militancy to maintain Balochistan on tenterhooks,” he stated.
Basit stated the involvement of each China and the US already provides the battle a world dimension however burdened that the roots of the violence stay native.
“Exterior parts are all the time secondary as inner fault strains are the first causes of why there’s battle and violence within the province. The federal government should bridge the hole to make sure that these exterior parts don’t exploit these inner points,” he stated.
