Explained: A Brief History Of Balochistan’s Separatist Movement
Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), the Baloch Republican Army (BRA), Lashkar-e-Balochistan, Baloch Jhalawan Tigers
Destabilizing Pakistan: Bookending Washington’s China Policy
Pakistan – America’s Other War
From my April 26th, 2022 post:
The “Baloch Liberation Army” Is a Foreign-Backed Feudal Terrorist Group
The US and India are well aware of this state of regional affairs and are attempting to exploit it to the utmost, taking advantage of the fact that this terrorist campaign is actually decades old but is being revived in response to CPEC and resultantly receiving a bunch of global news coverage because of it unlike before. To be clear, the Pakistani state is meeting the needs of the local population and addressing their various grievances, so those who are engaging in the BLA’s terrorism aren’t “freedom fighters” but loyal feudalists who are treasonously cooperating with foreign powers in order to suppress their own people. Even so, that angle of their campaign is conspicuously left out of the Mainstream Media’s coverage and only the anti-Chinese one is emphasized for reasons of “political convenience” since there’s a clear contradiction between the “democratic” principles that the US and India allege to support and the anti-democratic goals being advanced by the BLA.
India backing Balochistan Liberation Army: Rehman Malik
Senator Prof Sajid Mir also demanded to disclose the activities of all the countries involved in destabilizing Pakistan. “Let we also not give a clean chit to America, and if they are also involved, we need to name them.”
Senator Haroon Akhter also supported Prof Sajid Mir’s stance and said, “If any country is involved in destabilizing Pakistan, we should not be shy to name it.”
BLA Connection to Jundallah:
Understanding the Balochistan Liberation Army: An Analysis of Emerging Trends
Balochistan is a region endowed with natural resources. Besides having a long coastline overlooking the Arabian Sea, it has an abundant collection of resources like coal, natural gas, oil, copper, zinc, lead and so on. The geostrategic importance of the region has drawn international attention towards the region and made it an epicentre of global contestation. However, the wide array of resources has contributed the least to the development of the Baloch province. What has agitated the Balochi separatist movements is Pakistan’s handing over of vast sections of the region to China for its million-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project.
The low level of infrastructural development and lack of investment in the disputed zone has resulted in a low level of economic activities and hurt the province of Baloch on the fiscal front. Another case in point to argue for its geopolitical significance is the Gwadar port, that holds economic and geostrategic importance for Pakistan. In recent years, China has invested nearly $19 billion in the Gwadar port and other infrastructural developments in the Baloch province as a part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Such developments have triggered a surge of unemployment in Baloch, where jobs are mostly handed out to workers from China and Pakistan. Only 8 out of 330 CPEC projects have been allotted to Balochistan. In fact, Pakistani security analyst, Muhammad Amir Rana has explained the province as ‘an environment of fear’ and one where journalists cannot intrude and report about local problems. Plundering activities carried out in the region by the Chinese have thus, given birth to anti-Chinese sentiments that have manifested itself several times in the form of attacks on Chinese targets such as the one in the Chinese consulate at Karachi in 2018 or the very recent bombing at the Pakistani Stock Exchange.
This is the reason that the regional intelligence apparatus largely believes Jundallah to have established close ties with both Baloch separatists and Sunni sectarian extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Interior Minister Rehman Malik recently said that Jundallah had established close ties with the proscribed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ). All these groups are based in Pakistan and target government installations as well as ethnic and sectarian communities.
Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives — what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.
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But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel’s Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel’s recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel’s ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.
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Israel’s relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel’s activities jeopardized the administration’s fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.
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.A spate of stories in 2007 and 2008, including a report by ABC News and a New Yorker article, suggested that the United States was offering covert support to Jundallah. The issue has now returned to the spotlight with the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and has outraged serving and retired intelligence officers who fear that Israeli operations are endangering American lives.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 