Balochistan Is Paying For Afghanistan’s Security Vacuum – OpEd
The Balochistan upheaval is habitually pushed into this discourse of historical injustice, deprivation and a perpetual centre province war. And there are the ills, and they are worth airing. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to assume that today type of violence is a localized type of uprising. Geography matters. Balochistan is a neighbouring state to Afghanistan which has been swinging between war, disintegration and inability to control their borders over the decades. Security relations do not have a borderline where a province borders an unstable theatre.
Lawless areas in the territory of Afghanistan have given breathing space to terrorist groups over the years. The crude elements of enduring militancy are sanctuary, movement and time. The ability of fighters to conceal, move, regroup and train with minimal-interfered has provided them with the depth in operation. Once again, the United Nations monitoring assessments have mentioned Afghanistan as a free haven to different armed formations and that the refusal of the de facto governments that no terrorist formations are operating within the Afghanistan soil, is impracticable. The fact that Pakistan is not abstract on permissive space. It is echoed on the trend of violence on the belt of west, Balochistan is another one.
The cross-border element is not peripheral, it is central. The dogma that the insurgency is purely indigenous disintegrates as there are so many pointers to the infiltration, the routes of weapon and money laundering which can be traced back to the motherland of Afghanistan. It does not require you to possess a conspiracy theory to view it. You must learn the operations of militant ecologies. Networks exchange routes, secure locations, messengers, facilitators and technical expertise. Other groups tap into them as one of the groups accesses a cross-border pipeline. That is the way capability takes root and that is the way local anger is radicalized to be long-term terrorism.
The UN monitoring reporting is particularly easy when it comes to the aspect of superimposition of the activities between groups. According to the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team which issued its thirty seven report in early February 2026, although basing it on the information received as of the end of December 2025, it reports that the de facto authorities had remained able to provide a permissive environment to a diversity of terrorist groups in Afghanistan, and that the Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan in particular was still being played at in Afghanistan. It also reports that cross border terrorism in Pakistan has escalated drastically ever since the year 2021 and some of the most affected areas have been Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The point is, that since 2001, and more aggressively since 2021, security vacuum in Afghanistan contributed to the spillover. Balochistan was no longer an internal theatre and was transformed into a frontier province that was open to regional militant alignments.
This is another layer that is being obfuscated by many observers’ convergence between transnational jihadist infrastructure and separatist violence, which was also mentioned in the same UN report. It states that Baloch Liberation Army has been targeting Pakistani security agencies and projects of China Economic Corridor and states that some member states have claimed that the group has been collaborating with TTP and ISIL K, sharing training sites and resources, including coordination and meetings among commanders. This is not a small detail. Training, sharing of resources and contact on the commander level are indicators of an ecosystem rather than an isolated insurgency. Once this kind of ties are established, the violence in Balochistan cannot be weighted down to a local grievance alone, because the exterior facilitation will be a force multiplier.
There is economic resentment in Baluchistan. They are extraction, they are disproportionate services, they are graft and they are elite capture. That causes resentment and facilitates recruitment. But not operative power is complaint. The form with which they are attacked, the number and the amount of sophistication all refer to the supports which transcend a village, a district, a province. It is maintained campaigns that can be carried out with external sanctuaries. They support training, medication recovery, purchasing and planning. They also make law enforcement difficult to disrupt networks permanently as the back area may be accessed by the state as it is not located directly under its control.
The issue is even worsened by the fact that the foreign intelligence is taking advantage of the Afghan soil. Afghanistan has been used as the proxy battlefield, which encompasses areas of rivalry in the pressure points. It does not mean that all attacks are operated by a foreign hand, but it means that even such militant services as hostile services can strengthen the militancy of the local world, finance the facilitators and help with the technical support unnoticed. The province of Balochistan is a very good target in such an environment: it is a big target, it is hard to patrol, and it has got strategic infrastructure as well as it has got political sensitivities that can be propagated.
The implication of the policy is straightforward. Pakistan cannot solve the security crisis in Baluchistan by domestic policies and, neither by balance policies along the borders. The state must do both at once. Internally, it must be governable plausibly, fairly included in terms of both economic factors and the rule of law, and political space that does not compel a legitimate, dissent towards the militants. On the facade, it should possess a long-term counter terror stance facing the cross-border pipeline: intelligence collaboration where possible, pressure where necessary and tightening control of transit routes that militants are utilizing. Even the UN commentary on the topic of haven and cross border attacks could be regarded as a warning sign and not a point of discussion.
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