Separatist group rocks China-Pakistan ties

Just a week before Pakistan welcomes Shanghai Cooperation Organisation leaders for a summit, a suicide attack on a convoy of Chinese investors and engineers has now left at least two dead and another 10 injured near Pakistan’s major Karachi airport.

Within hours of Sunday night’s attack, the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) had claimed responsibility, China’s local embassy had denounced it, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had committed to “safeguarding our Chinese friends.”

But why the attack? 

The BLA, a listed terrorist group, has long sought independence from Pakistan, aiming to carve out the southwest province of Balochistan (near Iran and Afghanistan) as the Baluch ethnic group’s own turf. 

Enter China, which has all kinds of reasons to make friends with Pakistan: partly because they’re neighbours, partly to develop and stabilise China’s own border areas, but also partly due to the region’s big game of chess: one of nuclear-armed China’s rivals is nuclear-armed India, which also happens to be rivals with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

SoBeijing announced its global Belt and Road Initiative on infrastructure back in 2013, and Pakistan has been its cornerstone ever since, getting some $65B for projects aimed at linking China’s own Xinjiang province with Pakistan’s coastal hubs like Gwadar and Karachi.

Dubbed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the initiative has delivered lots of gleaming new highways, power plants, and beyond. But plot twist: that China-Pakistan ‘corridor’ also runs right through Pakistan’s Balochistan province, so the BLA argues China and Pakistan are simply grabbing its resources via “Chinese exploitative plans.”

And the BLA has escalated things lately, reportedly with the help of US-made arms the neighbouring Taliban took after the US pulled out of Afghanistan: 

• In 2018 it attacked China’s consulate in Karachi
• In 2019 it shot up a Gwadar hotel frequented by Chinese investors
• In 2020 it hit the Pakistan Stock Exchange (which has had CPEC boosts)
• In 2021 it struck a bus carrying Chinese workers
• In 2022 it killed three Chinese teachers in Karachi, and
• In 2023 it attacked another convoy of Chinese engineers.

Meanwhile, Pakistan clearly has its own interests at play here: trying to a) quell its various armed insurgencies, b) get some much-needed infrastructure, and c) bring China close as a way to balance rival India next door.

So Pakistan has remained a huge CPEC fan, and that’s meant seeking to clamp down on the BLA — within hours of brutal BLA attacks that left more than 70 people dead just in August, Pakistan approved another $72M for its military to combat Baloch armed groups.

But can Pakistan end the Balochistan insurgency with force alone?

There are a couple of complicating factors. First, it might not surprise you to learn that Balochistan is also Pakistan’s poorest province, with 70% of its population in poverty and two thirds of its 15 million people under the age of 30. That’s a lot of young and hopeless people vulnerable to malign actors. Of course, CPEC is theoretically meant to provide more economic opportunity, but that’s proving a tough sell.

And second, the last two provincial elections ended up installing Balochistan governments with close ties to the Pakistani military, fuelling pre-existing scepticism towards Pakistan’s democracy. There are reports these results may also have pushed many on-the-fence locals to sympathise more with the BLA, as an answer to the Pakistani military’s force-first approach to handling local grievances.

Anyway, that’s a taste of what’s playing out, just as a dozen or so world leaders from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) prepare to touch down for next week’s summit.

INTRIGUE’S TAKE

It’s worth a quick look at this ‘SCO’, which is a China (and Russia)-led grouping of ten countries in and around Central Asia. When it first emerged in 2001, it was basically pitched as a way to counter the influence of Western blocs like NATO.

And that gets us to two observations:

• First, as China positions itself as an alternative to the US-led world order and seeks a bigger regional and global footprint to that end, it exposes itself to the same kinds of criticisms it’s long welcomed against the US, and
• Second, China’s motto on this journey has been to offer ‘win-win’ cooperation for its partners, but these developments out of Pakistan are a reminder that even two ‘wins’ may not always be enough.

Also worth noting:

• The BLA is listed as a terrorist organisation in Pakistan, China, the UK, the US, and the EU. Armed Baloch separatists also target neighbouring Iran, which has responded with attacks back in Pakistan.
• Pakistan has long accused rival India of supporting armed insurgencies in Balochistan (accusations India has long denied).