Pakistan is F***ked

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Pakistan's not having a good year. And while it's not exactly alone in the 2026 sucks club, it does stand apart in how it's being from several directions all at once. There's the on again offagain shooting match with their neighbors in Afghanistan that a ceasefire has proved incapable of stopping, ongoing Pakistani Taliban attacks inside the country, and an escalating separatist campaign which just last weekend took the lives of dozens in a massive bombing. Presiding over all of that is a country that's in really no financial shape for any of this. They've made so many trips to the IMF that even Argentina is like, "Whoa, dude. Steady on there, mate." And while none of these conflicts are particularly new, Islamabad has never had to stare them down at the same time before.

[00:00:44]What's complicating this even more is that the more it seems to work on any one of them, the worse the others seem to get. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the one partner Pakistan can least afford to alienate is beginning to lose its patience.

[00:00:57]Everything and nothing. Now, before we get to the violence that's been spiraling out of control in Pakistan's largest province, we have to make sense of where it's actually happening. For those of you who may not be terribly familiar with Pakistani geography, do not worry. I've got you covered. At the heart of the recent attacks is the province of Baloistan, the largest in terms of geography, taking up a little under half of the country's land mass.

[00:01:19]Despite all that real estate though, it's only got about 6% of Pakistan's population, making it also the most rural. If it isn't worldrenowned for its population density, it is for something else. Somewhere in the vicinity of 80% of the country's mineral wealth is located here, along with a good amount of its gas reserves. In case that wasn't enough, it also has one of the largest yet untapped copper and gold deposits on the planet, as well as the majority of the country's coastline and one of the only areas with water deep enough to build a full port. On paper at least, Balajasthan should be the country's wealthiest area. But it isn't. Not by a long shot. In spite of the vast resources it sits on, the province generates only about 7% of Pakistan's overall GDP and comes in at dead last on just about every measure of human welfare you can think of. Over 2/3 of people who live here do so in what's called multi-dimensional poverty, which looks at people's access to school, health clinics, clean water, that sort of thing. So once you drill down into the individual districts, things get even worse, much worse. In some, north of 90% of residents are in poverty and a handful score lower on the UN's human development index than countries like South Sudan. And in case you're wondering, no, this is not something that's shared equally throughout Pakistan. The country is not exactly rich but these measurements improve dramatically outside of Balachasan especially in the heartland of the country Punjab where its multi-dimensional poverty pls in at less than half. China has been one of Pakistan's biggest investors for some time now and Balashthan is where much of the money has gone through a project called CPEC. Throughout the course of this project Beijing sunk some $60 billion into roads, railways, pipelines and power plants. It also oversaw the expansion of a deep water port at Guada, which offered them an ocean route that sidesteps the contested waters of its own eastern coast and gave Islamabad the opportunity to finally kickstart its poorest province. A decade in, it's not really meeting the hype. Budar still isn't even hooked up to the national power grid, relying instead on imports from their neighbor Iran. A testament to just how poorly developed the area really is. But under delivering or not, Pakistan can't walk away. CPEC is the country's biggest bet on its own future and the whole thing runs through Balajasan which makes it all the more worrying for Islamabad that Balajasan is also where a major insurgency is now heating up. But before we get on to that major insurgency, a quick moment to tell you about Warfronts's spin-off, Front Sto, our subscriber outlet for people who like what we do here but wish there was space for it to go a bit deeper, get a bit more nerdy. Every week we publish two exclusive videos, podcasts, and at least two articles written by actual experts on major conflicts shaping your world. Our most popular piece right now is a deep dive by a top tier OENT analyst into the chaos tearing Marley apart. So yes, like we say, fairly nerdy stuff. And it's not just the articles that are in depth. Starting this coming week, we're going to be sporadically releasing documentary deep dives hosted by yours truly into all sorts of obscure and important topics. We're kicking off on Tuesday with an 82minute exploration of Kim Jong-un's mindset and what life is really like for the North Korean elite. That video will be exclusive over on Front. So if you want to see it, you'll need to sign up. A membership cost just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. That's fronts.co. And now let's get back to that insurgency, shall we?

[00:04:38]The insurgency. So on the morning of May the 24th, the Jafar Express passenger train pulled out of Queta Station, the capital of Baloasan, carrying security personnel and their families headed home for Eid holiday. A few minutes later, near a crossing on the edge of the city, a vehicle packed with more than 70 kilos of explosives drove straight into it and detonated. The attacker belonged to the Majid Brigade, the dedicated suicide bombing unit of the Baluchistan Liberation Army, or BLA, the largest and most radical of the province's separatist groups. As is so often the case here, the casualty figures differ depending on who you ask. Pakistan railways confirmed around 30 dead.

[00:05:13]Rescue officials cited numbers around 47 and the BLA claims more than 80.

[00:05:17]Regardless of who's right, the message was unmistakable. We are here. We can hit you any time and there's nothing you could do about it. In and of itself, this would be a massive issue for Pakistan. No country would ever tolerate such an attack on its armed forces. But such attacks have become increasingly routine and Islamabad seems to be increasingly at a loss for how to address them. This series of violence really kicks off back in August of 2024 when the BLA launched operation here.

[00:05:43]Throughout the fighting, they claimed to have killed more than 130 military personnel and were also accused of killing 23 Punjabi travelers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their crime was not being balanc. This was only a warm-up for the group though. A few months later, they blew up the tracks inside a tunnel in the mountains, bringing the same Jafar Express to a complete standstill. They took some 400 passengers hostage, holding the train for roughly 30 hours and demanding the release of block prisoners before the army fought its way in. Then at the end of January this year, the BLA launched operation here off 2. This one dragged on for the better part of a week and spread out across a dozen districts in Baloasan. By Islamabad's own accounting, the campaign left some 250 dead, the bulk of them BLA fighters. The setback clearly did not deter the group as just 4 months later they launched the attack we mentioned earlier on the train once again departing for Queta. And let's just say I'm not going to be queuing up for tickets to go on that train anytime soon. Now unrest in this neck of the woods it's not anything new. This is actually the fifth wave of Block separatist campaign since Pakistan's founding back in 1947. But unlike previous waves which were dominated by poorly equipped tribal-based guerrillas, this one is the real deal. Typically, when you think of an insurgency from a poorer region, it draws from poorer, more rural areas. And on paper, Balajasan is exactly that. But the PLA has been drawing disproportionately from the educated and the urban. Much of the leadership got started in student-based politics. And one suicide bomber included a woman with a master's degree who blew herself up outside a Chinese-run institute in Karach back in 2022. Clearly, this isn't your average everyday protest over food supplies or even a low-grade campaign for independence. And worryingly, the government does not seem to have an answer. This lack of progress, for what it's worth, hasn't been for lack of effort. For the better part of 20 years, the Pakistani army has kept large numbers of forces in the province attempting to hunt down the group's commanders and operatives. Numerically, they've been relatively successful. By its own count, the army has eliminated thousands of militants, more than 700 in a single 12-month stretch alone. This campaign has succeeded in driving most of the surviving leadership into exile, most notably to London, while operational commanders have taken up residents along the Afghan and Iranian borders. And that's about where the success stops. None of this has helped pacify the province in the slightest.

[00:08:02]Recent years have seen a massive uptick in attacks, and unless they're able to devise a new strategy, they seem guaranteed to continue. If anything, the BLA is more emboldened now than in any previous point. Part of this campaign, essentially arresting anyone suspected of working with the PLA, hasn't exactly helped smooth things over either.

[00:08:19]Pakistan has embraced a policy of effectively disappearing those who could be on the wrong side of things.

[00:08:25]Sometimes taken at checkpoints, other times taken from their homes in the dead of night. Oftent times they're held for months or even years without charge. One Pakistani rights group logged more than 2,300 fresh disappearances nationwide in 2024 alone with Baloistan naturally the worst hit region. The most famous face of these disappearances is a young doctor named Maran Balok, who came to the cause after her own father was disappeared in 2009, briefly resurfaced, and then was taken again in 2011 and killed. By 2024, on the back of the exclusively nonviolent organizing she put together, she landed herself on Time magazine's 100 Next list, one of the most influential leaders on the planet.

[00:09:04]She was herself arrested without charge the following year and remains in Greta jail today. This campaign has only exacerbated the issues the Balak people believe they're facing from the government in Pakistan, which has simultaneously sent a message that non-violent protesting will not be tolerated while also showing it can't fully tackle the more radical factions.

[00:09:24]It has not been, to put it mildly, a winning strategy. And all of this raises the question of why Islamabad won't try the one thing it's never done. Sitting down accounting for the disappeared and working out how to actually improve the situation on the ground in Baloistan.

[00:09:41]This isn't even to say that they should be prepared to give up the province altogether. Letting nearly half of your country's land split away isn't exactly something leaders are usually rushing to greenlight. But from political oppression to the bleak bleak economic situation in Baljasthan, it's hard to see how the situation is going to change at all with this current strategy. The answer realistically seems to come down to their ongoing partnership with Beijing, which they have long been prioritizing as a missionritical operation to modernize the country and help it compete against their perma rival to the west, India. In this light, block reform attempts are a threat to not just a development project, but the nation's security. And lately, this isn't only Pakistan's problem. Beijing has grown more impatient with Islabad's failure to keep Chinese workers in the country from turning up dead with every passing year. But what Beijing wants pulls Pakistan in two ways at once.

[00:10:34]Crush the insurgency by force. And it pours more troops into a province that increasingly sees the army as an occupying force. To win the population over, they'd have to do the one thing they never seemed willing to do. led the project's revenue actually stay in Balajasan instead of flowing back to the center. The reason that's such a tough pill to swallow is that this would basically upend the way that Pakistan functions. It's largely a Punjabrun nation state and the peripheries have long fed resources toward Islamabad to make the whole thing work. Handing the block real control over their own resources would mean the establishment surrendering a stream of wealth it has relied on for decades and the military fears where that could lead and not without unreasonable cause. They've already watched one province break away, Bangladesh, formerly known as East Pakistan. And if Balotistan follows suit, the whole project risks unraveling, falling apart. For all the attention on Balistthan, though, it's only one of the many crises facing the country. We've previously covered here on Warfronts, the war that broke out back in February between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And while there's technically a ceasefire in effect, you wouldn't know it from what's been going on there lately. Just to catch you up, back in February, Pakistan launched a series of strikes on their neighbor Afghanistan, targeting alleged training sites of the Terk E Taliban or TTP. This group is separate from the Afghan Taliban, which has been running the show in Kabul since 2021. And while the Afghan government denies cooperating with the TTP, it's not exactly difficult to figure out what site they come down on. Afghanistan responded, launching a crossber offensive on Pakistani positions on February the 26th. For Islamabad, which had originally welcomed the Taliban's return to power, but quickly had relations sour, this was the last straw.

[00:12:20]The Minister of Defense went on television the following day to declare open war against their neighbor. A shaky ceasefire reached back in March, cooled the worst of it. But as in so many other conflicts going on right now, ceasefires are more of an abstract concept than an actual enforcable reality. Lowgrade on again off-again skirmishes were breaking out fairly regularly and by late April the two were trading some of their heaviest blows since the fighting allegedly stopped. Pakistani shelling hit a university in the Kunar provincial capital which the Taliban said wounded dozens of people. Altogether, the UN estimates that over 370 Afghans have been killed and another 397 wounded. All of this has been unfolding while delegations from both governments sit in the Chinese city of Aramchi, where Beijing has spent the better part of 2 months trying to turn this ceasefire into something that can actually hold.

[00:13:09]On paper, the talks look like they've gone fine. China's foreign ministry keeps describing them as advancing. And uh let me ask, where have you heard that one before? And no, nothing even close to a deal has come out of them. The issues here are the same ones that kicked off the war in the first place.

[00:13:26]Islamabad once guarantees that Afghan soil won't be used to launch attacks.

[00:13:30]For Kabal, though, this is an impossible bind. Even though they might have been resilient guerrilla fighters, they're not exactly in the best condition as a national army. What's more, they have their hands already full with the even more extreme Islamic State in Cororusan or ISIS K, which has carried out multiple attacks against the Taliban government, a government ISIS K considers to be an occupying force. The group would be a problem regardless of what was happening with Pakistan. But it's particularly significant given that it has long served as a destination for fighters who've become convinced that the Taliban, either Afghan or Pakistani, are insufficiently radical. The group was actually built through the work of three Taliban factions that broke away for exactly that reason. In the decades since, five of the six men who led ISIS K started their careers inside the TTP.

[00:14:18]Essentially, Pakistan's demands on Afghanistan to crack down on the TTP are forcing Kabal to choose between the possibility of conventional conflict with Islamabad or risking handing ISISK the single greatest recruiting motivator they've ever had. Given the deep long-term bonds between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, it probably isn't much of a surprise which side they've come down on. And speaking of the TTP, they haven't been sitting this one out either. Recently, they drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a security compound in Bajour and stormed it, killing at least 11 Pakistani soldiers, which leaves Islamabad with a complete mess. push kabal hard enough to make concessions through their vastly more powerful military and the result very well could be the Afghan state sliding back into civil war with a very pissed-off TTP and a newly emboldened ISIS K back off though and the Taliban just keep operating out of Afghan territory hitting Pakistani soldiers whenever they like there's no version of this where Islamabad comes out ahead and this puts Pakistan in the highly unenviable position of effectively fighting a two-front war the TTP has kept up a steady run of ambushes and bombings on soldiers and police alike across the Kaiba Paktunka province in the north all year while the BLA have been wreaking havoc in the southwest.

[00:15:35]The two have no shared goals. The PLA is actually a secular movement so it's not exactly eager to partner up with the TTP who themselves likely wouldn't be guaranteed to accept them even if they did. But they clearly do benefit from each other's successes. Finally, to cap it all off, there's the financial issue.

[00:15:51]a euphemistic way of saying that Pakistan has recently been going through the ringer with the International Monetary Fund. Islamabad has had to go to the agency more than two dozen times.

[00:16:02]And while that has obviously had knock-on effects for ordinary people, the bigger cause for concern in Islamabad may be what it says about their ability to afford sustained wars with insurgents and their neighbor Afghanistan. And that's that they can't afford to do so over the long haul.

[00:16:18]Sitting on top of that is somewhere around $20 billion in repayments due over the next year, which Islabad should be able to make as long as Saudi Arabia, China, and a handful of Gulf creditors keep agreeing to roll their loans over rather than call them in. That's less of a certainty now given that the Emirates did precisely that earlier this year, although it's worth remembering that Pakistan has been growing closer to the Saudis, which may suggest Riad is unlikely to do the same. All this then paints a picture of a country that no one could say is collapsing, but which has certainly seen better days. And we've not even touched on the ever simmering tension with India, which as we saw last year, could erupt into fighting again at any moment. Through all of this though, it's worth remembering what Pakistan actually is.

[00:17:04]This is not some random failed state. is a country of 260 million people with a nuclear arsenal to boot. Fighting two insurgencies it can't subdue, propped up by creditors whose patience is running thin and run by an establishment that would rather attempt to force the status quo in Balashthan than deliver on meaningful reform. None of these crises are going to resolve cleanly and none of them are going away.

[00:17:27]What's even more unsettling is that nobody, not Islamabad, not Beijing, not Washington, has a real plan for what happens if all these crises come to a head at once. Thank you for watching.