Jaffar Express Attack: A New Face Of Terrorism In Pakistan – OpEd

Jaffar Express Balochistan hostage crisis is the concrete proof of new trends in behavior pursued by the non-state actors to disintegrate national security and achieve political instability. Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), the two terror outfits well-documented, have owned the attack, and it’s an evil trend of playing civilians as a pawn in hybrid war. They have employed asymmetrical means to pursue their agendas for decades, but the assault was novel and evil: on unarmed civilians, women, and children, to attempt to amplify their psychological and propaganda impacts.

The Jaffar Express attack reveals an evil development of routine militant modus operandi into a fresh and advanced model of hybrid warfare, with violence underpinned by psychological coercion. Hybrid war in this context is not necessarily referring to the actual kinetic violence, but also to the use of disinformation, manipulation of the media, and psychological operations to try and accomplish strategic effect by destabilizing the state. In attacking a civilian target and arresting individuals, the insurgents seek to maximize the psychological and emotional element of the attack by creating a reaction that can be read as an international narrative of victimhood and injustice.

Hybridity of the Attack

The attack itself was not a conventional terrorist act but a strategically deliberate act to destabilize Pakistan through hybrid warfare. The terror groups, particularly the ones with domestic as well as trans-border links, are getting more adept at leveraging physical as well as information platforms. BLA and BLF have been observed to operate at the nexus of kinetic violence and intellectual war by employing issues of the day to shape global opinion by launching disinformation campaigns. Here, civilians used as human shields by the terrorists were in fact an endeavor to discourage security forces from making the right reactions and to accrue extensive publicity for their activities in the mass media. The case also exemplifies how information warfare plays a growing role in modern war.

Misreporting of the attack on the Jaffar Express dominated sensational casualty reporting or manufactured photographs on the social media websites. The misreports typically constitute part of the much larger still, coordinated gameplan against state action. Forces acting against the state, typically externally sponsored, drive sensationalizing reports to extremes and the net and the social networking provide the alternative universe of sorts where the state is in error and the state’s adversaries are freedom fighters.

Foreign Interference and Disinformation

There was a coordinated information war, following the Jaffar Express attack, against the defense machinery of Pakistan.

Anti-state and foreign-backed forces easily overran social media with fabricated news and photoshopped images to gain a narrative of Pakistani state repression.

Platforms like The Balochistan Post and BYC live streams were at the forefront of sharing the news. These disinformation campaigns are not new but have increased in ferocity with the facilitatory work of foreign intelligence agencies, particularly the Indian intelligence establishment, in financing proxy wars along Pakistan’s borders. The greater role of external powers in creating instability in Pakistan, and particularly in Balochistan, is particularly horrifying. The BLA and BLF, funded and orchestrated from overseas, have foreign elements committed to exploiting the vulnerabilities within Pakistan facilitating their activities. The communication dialogue between plotters and Afghan handlers real-time, picked up by Pakistani security officials, also suggests testimony of the international scope of this conflict and the inability of Pakistan to secure its borders.

The Response and Its Criticism

Pakistan’s security forces have been condemned in general for the seeming slowness in eliminating the hostage-takers.

The condemnation is misplaced in the sense that it downplays the complexity of counterterrorism operations engaged in hostage-taking operations.

For in hostage-taking operations, security forces are confronted with the problem of balancing the necessity of saving lives with the necessity of not causing further damage to civilians used as human shields. Hasty actions would have inflicted much collateral damage, precisely what the terrorists desire. The Pakistani military’s restraint also shows a more mature approach to combating terrorism, still upholding the dignity of innocent lives at the expense of increasing pressure. This restraint, so much condemned, is a tribute to an adult reaction which does not wish to allow the horror to be a propaganda victory for the terrorists.

Political Facilitators and the Baloch Nationalism Moral Quagmire Perhaps the most scandalous part of the Jaffar Express horror is the part played by some elements of Pakistan’s political leadership in lending moral legitimacy to terror operations.

Although these leaders like Akhtar Mengal and other Baloch nationalist politicians themselves do not call for violence in so many words, their continuing condemnation of the military campaign in Balochistan can reasonably be seen as bestowing legitimacy on the insurgent propaganda.

By continually situating the Pakistani state as a state inherently an oppressor, these politicians essentially create a context within which terror is legitimized through a discourse of legitimacy.

This implicit legitimization of violence through recourse to normal political language is perhaps the most visible trait of hybrid war, where the militant organizations benefit from the feeling that what they are doing is standard and acceptable to the world at large. Baloch nationalist discourse, in not challenging the use of violence, helps construct the illusion that militant activity is part of a cause that is not terrorism and legitimate. ### Strategic Implications and the Future The Jaffar Express attack is not a singular act of violence—it is part of a larger hybrid warfare strategy to destabilize Pakistan and undermine its sovereignty. The attack is intended to demonstrate the growing strength of Balochistan’s militant groups, enabled by foreign powers and actively promoted by information warfare campaigns.

With increasingly sophisticated challenges now facing Pakistan in trying to counter such insurgencies, it must create a more comprehensive approach to counter-hybrid warfare.

That would mean combining military action with cyber, legal, and diplomatic action to counter not just the physical challenge of the insurgent forces, but also the information warfare being waged against the state.

The Pakistani government must take the positive action of confronting the complicity among political and media actors, who either by design or default provide an opening for the insurgent voices to be expressed.

In order to secure national security, Pakistan has to be proactive and reactive in light of shifting threats. The Jaffar Express attack cannot be seen as an arbitrary tragedy but an experimental example of the intricacies of counterterrorism in the contemporary age. In the interest of sovereignty, Pakistan needs to rethink its 21st-century hybrid threat model of counterterrorism.