Bullets are taking a heavy toll of men in Balochistan. A great many of them are fired by those who, in the same breath, speak the language of dialogue and peace. The result is that Pakistan’s largest province continues to burn in a conflict of an intensity it has not known in decades.
The state’s answer to Baloch demands for dignity and a fair share of local mineral wealth has been force. Dedicated military operations have been launched for the purpose, and they have done nothing to blunt the demand that now runs beneath all the others: separation from Pakistan itself. They have only deepened an anger already fed by enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the sense of a people kept poor atop their own riches.
By September 14 this year, Balochistan had recorded its highest number of violent fatalities in over a decade. Security think tanks are still grappling with conflicting official, independent and media accounts, and no tally can be treated as settled. But the picture is frightening enough. More than 1,750 people are estimated to have been killed: over 1,000 Baloch fighters, some 300 security personnel, and scores of non-Baloch travellers and civilians. They fell to ambushes by armed nationalists, of whom the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) is the tallest; to target killings by nationalists and security forces alike; and to intelligence-based state counter-offensives.
It was in July that the nationalists struck with vengeance. Between July 4 and 8, coordinated assaults beginning in the Hanna Urak Valley near Quetta and extending to a police checkpoint in Ziarat and a highway ambush in Lasbela killed 38 security personnel and four civilians. Eighteen abducted police officers were executed by their captors. The military replied with Operation Shaban, a multi-district sweep it says killed some 150 “militants”.
A violent tale in figures
The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), an Islamabad think tank, recorded the consequences. In Balochistan the death toll rose by 241 per cent, from 109 in June to 372 in July. Deaths among security personnel went from six to 62, an increase of 933 per cent. Militant deaths rose from 75 to 238, civilian deaths from 28 to 54. Eighteen members of peace committees also paid with their lives for a well-intentioned exercise. In Pakistan as a whole, July was the deadliest month of 2026, with eight suicide attacks, the highest monthly figure in ten years.
What do these figures indicate, if not that Pakistan’s grip on the province weakens with each passing day? Through2026 the nationalists have called the shots. Balochistan, according to top Pakistani security analyst Muhammad Amir Rana, is “a major security theatre”.
Consider the Jaffar Express, for many the only affordable link between Quetta and the rest of Pakistan on its long run to Peshawar. On May 24 a vehicle-borne suicide bomber claimed by the BLA struck a shuttle train near the Chaman railway crossing in Quetta, killing at least 29 people and wounding more than a hundred. The Jaffar Express, standing ready to depart, was cancelled. Service resumed after two days, was suspended again on May 27, and was restored only on May 30, with no explanation offered for the second suspension. Coupled with an internet blackout, the effect was the near-total isolation of the region, and it is hard not to read that as deliberate: cut the nationalists off, drive them into a corner, and let a heavy military intervention do the rest.
The more charitable reading may also be correct. The train has been attacked repeatedly, most spectacularly in the March 2025 hijacking, and its non-Baloch passengers, Punjabis in particular, have been singled out and shot. Renewed security concerns disrupted the service again on September 5 and 6.
Harassment of an exceptional leader
What is not in doubt is that Pakistan has shown no sign of abandoning force, repression and political persecution as its only route to peace. It has built no bridges with nationalist leaders, including those confined strictly to peaceful means. On June 22 Anti-Terrorism Court in Quetta sentenced Mahrang Baloch, who leads the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, and fellow BYC leader Sibghatullah Shahji to life imprisonment over the killing of a Frontier Corps official during a Gwadar sit-in in July 2024. Mahrang received two life terms.
Independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council did not stop at condemning the verdict. They called her punishment “a travesty of justice, following an unfair trial”, and said counter-terrorism and murder charges had been misused to crush peaceful protest and the freedoms of association and expression. The sit-in in question had been called to highlight enforced disappearances, state violence, impunity and the unlawful appropriation of indigenous land and resources tied to foreign investment, the Reko Diq mine among them. The court, the experts noted, inferred a shared intent to murder from nothing more than the two leaders’ presence at that protest. The trial was moved inside a prison and the accused denied the chance to appear in person, though Mahrang had warned that video proceedings would leave her unable to defend herself. She was made to accept a state-appointed lawyer. The experts also recorded their concern at her health, her poor access to medical care, and reports of pressure on her family.
None of it has cost Islamabad a night’s sleep. Mahrang, reportedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, has emerged instead as an exceptional leader, and thousands of Baloch women are following in her footsteps. That, more than any ambush, is what the state appears unable to answer.
Like the guns, meanwhile, the words go on. Pakistan’s leaders never tire of stressing the need for dialogue, and have yet to move a finger in that direction.
Striking admission
The most striking admission that force alone cannot deliver a lasting peace came on September 12, from an unnamed senior security official briefing journalists in Quetta. The report appeared in The Express Tribune, a paper generally credited with credibility, though the anonymity of the source limits what can be made of it. Its thrust was blunt: “We need to win peace, not war, in Balochistan.” Bullets would not settle the province’s problems, the official said; dialogue would. He rejected the idea of a disloyal population, insisting virtually everyone in Balochistan was a patriot, and named political deprivation rather than economic backwardness as the central failure. He called for a ten-year vision instead of reflexive responses to each crisis, and said the state should engage ordinary citizens. Those who take up arms would still be met with arms, he added, but a political settlement had to run alongside. At the same briefing, officials claimed Mahrang had repeatedly refused to join negotiations, a charge she cannot answer from prison.
On the very same day, Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti demolished all of it. There would be no dialogue in any case with those who had taken up arms, he told national media by video link, and the war would continue until the “last terrorist” was eliminated. The civil and military leadership were united; there was no ambiguity or confusion on the matter. He is right about the absence of confusion. Two irreconcilable positions were put before the Pakistani public within hours, and only one of them carries a name.
Bugti’s record sharpens the contradiction. Only in August he was asking Baloch youth to return to the national mainstream and talk to the government. He has never explained why a government that wants talks cannot open them. Nor is he alone. Addressing the Balochistan National Workshop in Islamabad on August 21, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called for a “grand, frank and meaningful dialogue” and said the province’s people held the first right over its resources.
Road to nowhere
Set beside the ground reality, such assertions are pious and close to meaningless. The security forces are gunning for nationalist youth while the Prime Minister speaks of listening to them. Meanwhile Pakistan’s topmost military officials take stock of Balochistan with growing frequency. On September 5, Field Marshal Asim Munir, Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces, visited Quetta Garrison and reviewed the security environment and operational preparedness. The next day Maj Gen Faisal Naseer, appointed National Coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Authority barely 48 hours earlier after a career in Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) counter-intelligence, called on Bugti in Quetta to discuss a joint counter-terrorism strategy.
Neither visit was about opening a political conversation. Both underline what Pakistan’s real objective is: peace first and at any cost, not peace with honour for the people who live there.
A workable alternative exists, and the anonymous official came close to describing it: engagement with ordinary Baloch rather than tribal intermediaries, real provincial control over what is dug out of the mountains, an end to enforced disappearances, and courts that do not convict protest leaders for attending a protest. Every one of those requires the state to move first. Nothing in 2026 suggests it intends to.