ALLOW a deep, complicated problem to fester long enough and the eruption of violence may defy any logic or pattern. Fierce clashes between the paramilitary Frontier Corps and the insurgent Balochistan Republican Army in the Sui area of Dera Bugti district on Thursday have left dozens dead — and many Balochistan watchers bewildered.

The usual action-reaction pattern has been given as the reason for the violence by the Frontier Corps: alleged Baloch militants killed some security personnel in upper Sindh and then escaped to the area in question, triggering a search operation by the FC which led to the violence and high death toll on Thursday.

While the immediate details alleged by the security forces could be true, fresh violence in the historic heartland of Baloch dissidence must necessarily be seen in a wider context: by and large, compared to Khuzdar or the Makran belt or even Quetta, Dera Bugti has been quiet and relatively peaceful, with no suggestion that a spike in violence was imminent. And yet, there are now dead bodies aplenty in an area where the state has long waged a war to suppress dissent.

Unexpected as the violence may be, most of the other security aspects of Balochistan are wearisomely familiar. The security policy continues to be controlled and driven by the security establishment. The civilian governments, both central and provincial, talk as good a talk as any before them, but nothing meaningful has been attempted to try and take charge of the situation in Balochistan.

And, having seemingly given up on influencing security policy for now, the civilian apparatus would rather talk about development and infrastructure projects — in a province where vast swathes of the Baloch areas are virtually cut off from the rest of Pakistan, and even the provincial capital.

Who can know better what needs to be done than Chief Minister Abdul Malik and his team and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his advisers — all of them veterans, all of them familiar with the province’s security woes, all of them aware of how political will can and should work. Instead, the inevitable has begun: dark references to outside power interference. As ever, that may well be true, but the mess in Balochistan is very much of Pakistan’s own making.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2014