Now, what would a typical Pakistani be doing?

A normal Pakistan— presumably a country with a stable political system, viable finances, and a 5 percent or above economic growth rate to provide space for accommodating a multitude of unemployed youth in the economy—would be tackling three strategic or core issues that the country is facing. Firstly, under normal circumstances, Pakistani strategic planners would have been preparing plans for tackling the two insurgencies that the Pakistani state is facing in the Northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Southwestern province of Baluchistan. Apparently, the secular-minded Baluch separatists and religiously inspired Taliban are poles apart ideologically, but they seem to have developed some connections and possibly coordinated their attacks on Pakistani security forces. One strong indication of coordination among these groups is the transfer of suicide technology of terrorism from the Taliban to Baluch separatists.

Baluch separatist groups have been using this technology against the Pakistani state for the last three years after overcoming initial reluctance on the part of their leadership to copy the Taliban in this regard—the Taliban who had learned this technology from Arab Afghans during the prolonged civil war this region witnessed in the wake of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. We don’t see any planned and coordinated efforts to defeat these twin insurgencies on the part of state machinery. Fossilised and myopic comprehension of the state and its operatives of the problem at hand is forcing the Pakistani state and society away from tackling the Baloch insurgency at the political level. As they say, when the only solution available to you is a hammer all your problems look like nails. Military manpower and firepower are the only tools available to the Pakistani state to tackle the armed insurgencies. Military forces coupled with unsophisticated administrative measures are being applied in Baluchistan to tackle a situation which on the face of it appears explosive.
No insurgency can go on in any society where there are no supportive social and political structures. This is a universally accepted lesson of insurgencies from across the world. From the reports that are reaching here, it is clear that the Baloch insurgency has the support of Baloch society. Unlike the 1970s this time around the insurgency is not led by tribal chiefs. This time it is the Baluch middle class that has turned against the Pakistani state. Does the Pakistani state have any political tool available to it to make its presence felt in Balochistan? or have we abandoned all political options and decided to deal with the insurgency with hard military power and somewhat stupid administrative measures only? Unlike military plans which need to be kept secret, political plans need to be put on the table and properly announced or made public. So, we can safely assume that the Pakistani state doesn’t have any political plan or strategy to deal with the explosive situation in Balochistan.
Insurgency in the Northwest is more lethal for civic life in Pakistan. Pakistani Taliban are old players in this game. They have the backing of a powerful segment of the Afghan Taliban government in Kabul, which is providing them with financial support, weapons, and hideouts inside Afghanistan, from where they carry out attacks on Pakistani security forces. After the August 2021 takeover of Afghanistan by Afghan Taliban the Baluch separatists who had established bases in the Southern parts of Afghanistan before American withdrawal, were told by Taliban leadership to vacate their bases in the south. They temporarily shifted their bases to Iranian Balochistan. Reports suggest that the Baloch separatists have now re-established their bases in Afghanistan after relations between Islamabad and Kabul deteriorated to new lows.

It is a well-established fact that Indian intelligence is backing the Baluch insurgents. Until recently the international military experts believed Indian support to Baluch insurgents was of limited nature and could not cause major damage to Pakistan’s security interests. The situation seems to have undergone substantive change in recent months. The Baluch insurgents have stepped up terrorist attacks, using suicide bombing as a tool, and are particularly targeting military personnel in their attacks. This move seems to cause two problems for the Pakistani state: the recent attacks in Balochistan seem to badly damage Pakistan’s already badly shattered image of a stable and secure state and society. Secondly, a ruthless response is expected to the killings of military personnel in Balochistan from Pakistani security forces and thus this will further vitiate the already extremely bad blood situation that exists between Pakistani security forces and Baluch society. This will make a political solution nearly impossible—a situation that the Baluch insurgents and their planners envisaged in the first place while planning the militant and terrorist attacks. We don’t seem to have a political elite sensitive enough to this danger of plunging into a full-fledged military operation in Balochistan. The general discourse in society seems to favor this course and who cares what will be the political impact of a full-fledged military operation in the province?
A prolonged counter-insurgency operation in Northwestern parts of the country against the Pakistani Taliban would be devastating for Pakistan’s social, political, and economic stability. How long will this operation take? Two years, three years, or maybe four? In such a situation economic recovery will be a pipedream. Between 2001 and 2018 we fought a prolonged counter-insurgency operation in Northwest but during this period we were backed by Washington who used to finance part of the operation. How are we going to meet the bill? Running a military machine in an environment of insurgency could be described as the most expensive military operation that could be envisaged by a developing country like Pakistan.

The situation in Pakistan’s northwest has an international and regional dimension and this is an inescapable reality that Pakistani Taliban are backed by international terror networks—international terror networks whose main targets have never been the Pakistani state. Rather organisations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS are more focused on Western countries and superpowers. To cut the story short the situation in the Northwest is very complicated and beyond the capacity of the Pakistani state to deal with on its own.
The second strategic issue that the Pakistani state must be dealing with under normal circumstances is the Indian military build-up with the help of the West, Russia, and Israel. Washington led the Western world to take India as a counterweight to China’s rise as a military and economic power. They want to integrate India into the joint military planning against China and in the process, they are transferring state-of-the-art military weapons and technology to India. Indians have the financial muscle to acquire these weapon systems and technology. Nobody would argue that a financially and economically weak state like Pakistan should match India in weapons and technology acquisition.
However, there are reports that Pakistan, despite its financial difficulties, is acquiring expensive weapon systems from China. What impact this weapons acquisition will have on our financial conditions nobody knows as we don’t have a vibrant debate in our society on these issues. Nevertheless, Indian acquisitions are not simply targeted against China. Indians are also displaying inclinations to undermine Pakistan’s strategic capabilities in the region by acquiring conventional weapons, which not only widen the conventional gap between the two countries but could potentially undermine Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent.

Already Indians are talking about learning the right lessons from the Ukraine and Gaza war. What are those lessons? Most relevant to the Pakistan-India situation is the lesson that attack has become very inexpensive whereas defense has turned out to be extremely expensive. Secondly, both Ukraine and Palestinians have attacked nuclear-armed states—Russia in the case of Ukraine and Israel in the case of Palestinians—without provoking a nuclear response from states armed with nuclear weapons. To cut a long story short, let me state that the military situation on our Eastern border is far from stable. We don’t know how it will evolve and what the implications will be for Pakistan. And more sadly we are too busy putting popular political leaders behind bars during the past ten years, the period when these military developments were taking place in the region and beyond—to meaningfully planning and strategising.

The third core issue that Pakistan, under normal circumstances, should be planning and strategising about is the rising level of military and political tensions between the United States and China during recent years. During the past years, the Washington-based American think tanks have published several reports about possible scenarios of military conflicts between China and the United States. Pakistani political and military leaders have repeatedly made it clear that their country doesn’t believe in the camp politics of the Cold War era. But one thing is for sure Pakistan won’t be able to remain detached from any aggravated levels of political and military rivalries between Washington and China. Do we have a plan to deal with such a situation? Even if we are not part of the conflict, any military clash between superpowers in our region could potentially devastate Pakistan at the economic level. Remember the Ukraine war became an issue in our economic situation.
Pakistani domestic political unrest has so overwhelmed our strategic and military leadership that they seem to have lost the capacity to plan and strategise for strategically threatening situations that we are facing in our region and within our country. Remember sounding statements using powerful adjectives about your strategic intentions do not constitute a plan or a strategy. The irony is that our political and media discourse is more focused on petty political problems—our media presents petty political squabbles as core issues—while ignoring strategic threats as non-issues. This leaves wide space for military and civil bureaucrats—bureaucrats with deeply fossilised and myopic minds—to make decisions that could be described as not wise at the strategic level. For instance, if our military is acquiring state-of-the-art military weapons and technology from China in response to Indian military buildup, ignoring our financially weak conditions, we will be facing a more explosive situation in the future because of such decisions. An informed public debate is a necessary condition for wise decisions.