The objective socio-economic interests of the Baloch people are inextricably connected with their government’s Chinese-backed plans to comprehensively develop this de facto feudalist province, not in splitting from Pakistan in order to impose a neo-feudalist system upon its already very impoverished population.
The so-called “Baloch Liberation Army” (BLA) claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in Karachi on Tuesday that killed three Chinese teachers and their Pakistani driver. This terrorist group targeted those foreign nationals due to their hatred of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is the flagship project of Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). They’re fighting not just to separate their mineral-rich and geostrategically located province from Pakistan, but also to impose neo-feudalism.
To explain, CPEC will revolutionize the socio-political situation in one of the poorest areas of this global pivot state since its terminal port of Gwadar is located in that province. Balochistan has been held back for decades by its de facto feudalist local structure that’s largely presided over by very corrupt tribal leaders. The central government sincerely wants to improve those people’s lives by bringing them into the 21st century through Chinese-assisted comprehensive development projects connected to CPEC.
The hope is that Balochistan can one day become a shining example of everything that BRI is capable of doing for some of the world’s most impoverished societies such as that province’s, but to get to that point, CPEC must first be totally completed. Therein lies the challenge, however, since the BLA is fully opposed to CPEC because their leadership wants to keep Balochistan in the pre-modern era. The reason for that is simple enough to understand, and it’s that such a societal structure helps them retain power.
Instead of equitably distributing the economic benefits connected to their mineral-rich province’s natural wealth and geostrategic location like the central government hopes to one day do upon CPEC’s completion, they want to monopolize it under their control in order to enrich themselves. The BLA has no intention of developing Balochistan since their interests are derived from indefinitely holding it back and imposing a neo-feudalist system upon it in the event that they succeed in their separatist goals.
That’s a lost cause, however, since Pakistan’s military-intelligence structures are among the best in the world and would therefore never allow that scenario to succeed. This means that the BLA is guaranteed to lose, which thus exposes their goal as a hopeless one. That in turn should lead observers to realize that it’s killing people for absolutely no reason whatsoever in pursuit of its selfish ideological aims, which in any case can never be justified by blowing up innocent people, let alone foreign teachers.
Terrorism has no ethnicity, religion, geography, ideology, or any other identity-centric determinants like many in the West falsely believe. The BLA is indisputably a terrorist group even if its hopeless goal aligns with some foreign actors’ who appreciate that its suicide bombers are complicating China’s geo-economic vision by proxy through their senseless attacks in Pakistan. Nobody can claim to have the Baloch people’s best interest in mind when they support the terrorist group that’s holding them back.
The objective socio-economic interests of the Baloch people are inextricably connected with their government’s Chinese-backed plans to comprehensively develop this de facto feudalist province, not in splitting from Pakistan in order to impose a neo-feudalist system upon its already very impoverished population. No matter how many people the BLA blows up, they’ll never succeed in their twisted goal of breaking Balochistan off from Pakistan in order to hold its people back even more.