“Nurse Duckett plucked Yossarian’s arm and whispered to him furtively to meet her in the broom closet outside in the corridor… She had urgent news about Dunbar.

‘They’re going to disappear him,’ she said.

Yossarian squinted at her uncomprehendingly.

‘They’re what?’ he asked in surprise, and laughed uneasily.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know. I heard them talking behind a door.’…

‘Why are they going to disappear him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.

What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?’“ — Catch 22, Joseph Heller

OPENING WORD

My March 30 cover story in these pages, How to Counter the Insurgencies, got respectable traction. That makes me happy, as it would any writer. Unsurprisingly though, my reference to dealing with the separatist insurgency in Balochistan as primarily a political problem has elicited some responses that one might describe as negative or, more charitably, as sceptical. This article is an attempt to posit some of those responses and to try and respond to them as best as I can.

LIST OF RESPONSES

A: One sceptic asked me if a politico-democratic approach is the best way to deal with insurgencies. The argument implicit in this view is that insurgent violence cannot be countered through strategies that tie the state’s hand through laws and rules of engagement, especially when the insurgent — or terrorist, if you will — is free to resort to innovative violence that is often, as is the case in Balochistan, also directed towards non-Baloch ethnic groups and flouts the accepted rules of engagement.

According to this argument, the problem is exacerbated by the insurgents’ use of social media and disinformation and through the political activism of “soft separatists” who use the legal-constitutional compact to make the job of security forces and intelligence agencies even more difficult.

Corollary: unfortunate though it is, the state has to suspend the normal operations of law to deal with the insurgency — ie let’s ignore voices calling for a political process until the insurgency (or its terror component) is dealt with.

The issue of how to deal with the insurgency and dissent in Balochistan continues to divide people and often elicits the most entrenched, if not predictable, responses. Ejaz Haider attempts to answer the most common critiques of the contention that they should be dealt with primarily as a political problem…

B: Who should the state talk to? The insurgents are bent on perpetrating violence while the Baloch leaders have no real roadmap to offer to the state. This argument has many moving parts that, unlike a machine’s, are not synchronic.

B-1: Sardars [tribal chieftains] are not relevant anymore so there’s no point talking to them.

B-2: The insurgency now involves educated, middle-class professionals who do not want to talk to the state.

B-3: The political opposition in Balochistan basically comprises “soft separatists” who do not condemn violence and are in cahoots with the insurgents/terrorists.

B-4: The army has tried multiple times, through various initiatives, to incentivise the Baloch to accept the federal structure. They don’t bite.

B-5: Multiple development schemes and monies associated with them have not worked. The Baloch just don’t want to talk.

Corollary: the only way to go about this problem is to improve and sustain counterinsurgency (COIN) operations and to bring the violence down to manageable levels. Once again, as with A, the bottomline is: we have to suspend some rights to deal with the situation.

Let’s try and unpack this, beginning with A.

COUNTER-ARGUMENTS

The argument encapsulated in A above, and all it entails, is not a novel view, nor is it peculiar to Pakistan. Debates over how to tackle insurgencies and/or internal low-intensity conflicts have raged in several states confronted with the problem.

States have employed various strategies in combatting internal threats and those strategies almost invariably have had a coercive component that operates outside the law — exceptions, if you will, to the normal operation of law and functioning of the courts.

In more extreme cases, states have resorted to collective punishment of insurgent populations, extra-judicial killings through death squads (Latin America has been notable in this regard, though it’s not an exception), complete suspension of constitutional rights for the duration of such operations, introduction of draconian laws (India is a case in point) and even forced population displacements and relocations (you will be surprised how often this unethical stratagem has been used by states as a counterinsurgency tool).

The question then is: if states have been doing this, why can’t Pakistan do it?

There are three reasons why Pakistan should avoid using such measures: they are morally reprehensible (we are still living with the scars of East Pakistan); they do not work in the long run, even when there might be some initial successes (this runs through COIN literature like a motif); and using such ignoble means against one’s own ethnically distinct population groups sends a clear internal and external signal that the insurgents’ cause against the state was justified ab initio.

But before I proceed further, a word about “exception”. Exception creates a legal fiction but it’s been around. The Romans called it iustitium [literally, standstill or suspension of law]. But it should be evident that exception denotes exactly that — exception. It cannot be the norm. Also, measures taken in an emergency remain contentious even within that framework. Outside of that framework, they are generally considered illegal, unconstitutional, violative of rights and due process and, in many cases, downright criminal.

The ironic fact is that most modern states have come into being through secession. As American political scientist Bridget Coggins has noted, “Secessionism does not herald the emergence of every state, but it underlies most twentieth-century births.” America fought a war of independence to secede from the British crown. The northern states then fought a civil war to prevent the southern states from seceding. The first was about segregation; the second about integration, even if enforced.

Before World War I, states, especially strategically located ones (Central and Eastern Europe is an example), often died through conquests and were resurrected in some shape and form through armed insurgencies. Other parts of the planet that were colonised were considered terra nullius [literally, no man’s land]. Those lands were for the taking, as French author and politician Victor Hugo famously exhorted his fellow Europeans to go forth and colonise Africa: “God gives land to men. God offers Africa to Europe. Take it!”

Since World War II and the evolution of state sovereignty and state practice against occupation and annexation that dates back to the 19th century, states have generally stopped dying in the sense of being vanquished, occupied and annexed. Many, however, are riven by civil wars, insurgencies, and general lawlessness, what economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson would call “the Absent Leviathan.” Equally, in most such cases, the Leviathan became absent because it was despotic, forcing peoples to rise up, which then invited external predation.

Most analysts that use the state as a unit of analysis either shy away from the moral argument or dismiss it, arguing that moral considerations do not fit in with the realist framework or realpolitik. The argument is bogus: at best it betrays a lack of understanding of the realist framework; at worst it is a pernicious employment of terms in the service of policies that are dangerous.

If Realism had no room for a moral argument, German-American jurist and political scientist Hans Morgenthau would not have emerged as the foremost critic of America’s Vietnam misadventure. Deeply ironically, proponents of American intervention in Vietnam couched the savagery not in realist but “legal” and “moral” terms — opposing aggression, fighting for freedom. This approach was blasted by George Kennan, the doyen of the American strategist community, who “called for a return to policy-making which more clearly defined national interests.”

As for the use of realpolitik interchangeably with “realism”, “realist” or raison d’ etat [reasons of state], it is best for interested readers to look for Professor John Bew’s brilliant history of the term and how “the true meaning of realpolitik remains occluded by the partisan way the word has been used in Anglo-American political discourse.”

The issue is neither mere semantics nor just academic. Policies have real-life consequences and, in situations requiring tools of violence, the price is human blood. But before we proceed further, let’s look at the direction of causality — ie what is the cause of an effect.

Take the arguments in B, basically A but with some specific questions. The problem is exacerbated when our views — I wouldn’t call them analysis — become incoherent. For instance, during one of the conversations regarding my previous article, a former senior establishment officer — after telling me that Sardar Akhtar Mengal (as also other sardars) are irrelevant to the current situation — went on to somewhat vehemently defend the absurd decision by the Balochistan government to not allow Mr Mengal and his party to express their opposition to the ongoing situation by marching on Quetta.

When I pointed out to him that if the argument that Mr Mengal is merely looking for brownie points is correct — and it might well be — then how does he explain the government’s response to Mr Mengal’s political protest? Surely, the government would do well to earn its own brownie points by letting Mr Mengal let off some steam, given his supposed irrelevance?

States have employed various strategies in combatting internal threats and those strategies almost invariably have had a coercive component that operates outside the law. The question then is: if states have been doing this, why can’t Pakistan do it? There are three reasons why Pakistan should avoid using such measures: they are morally reprehensible (we are still living with the scars of East Pakistan); they do not work in the long run, even when there might be some initial successes; and using such ignoble means against one’s own ethnically distinct population groups sends a clear internal and external signal that the insurgents’ cause against the state was justified ab initio.

Or is it that Mr Mengal might not be as irrelevant as he is made out to be? The only obvious way to square this non sequitur, of declaring Mr Mengal irrelevant and then giving him relevance, is for the government to decide that it has the space to be cussed without the necessity of developing a coherent policy.

Another interlocutor, again a very senior former establishment officer, told me that the top army commander in Balochistan had requested to meet with Mr Mengal repeatedly but the latter had not bothered to respond to those invitations. When I asked my interlocutor if he had entertained the thought that Mr Mengal might just be signalling that the very meeting with the top army commander is the problem rather than a solution, he was somewhat flummoxed.

I had to explain: “Sir, if one of the major problems behind Baloch grievances is the governance and political structure that is dominated by the army, would it be good strategy by a protesting Baloch politician to accept such an invitation and, by doing so, signal his acceptance of something that he is protesting against?

This is where “who should the state talk to” becomes “there’s no one to talk to” and therefore the only solution is (a) to find collaborators from within the population and (b) treat the rest of the population as enemies of the state in and through policies that suspend the normal operation of law and the constitution.

This is not my interpretation. It is the very essence of the argument I am countering. If the sardars are irrelevant, the middle class supportive of the insurgency and the political opposition are “soft separatists”, then it is a war against an entire ethnolinguistic group — a war without end, unless the state can either completely subjugate that ethnic group or exterminate it. Need anyone mount an argument to establish the moral abomination of this approach?

A CHICKEN-AND-EGG PROBLEM?

What causes insurgencies? It’s easier to determine the causes where people rise up against foreign domination or colonial occupation. We are not dealing with those cases. The issue at hand is the question about why a particular group within a state takes to armed resistance.

Analysing this is important, not just in terms of determining the direction of causality in and of itself. The issue of causality must also inform the strategies the state has to employ to address the problem, especially if we can determine that a resistance group formed group identity because it failed to get the state to take cognisance of its grievances within the accepted legal-constitutional compact and through a socio-political process of aggregation of interests.

Let’s try to understand it through the problem of disarmament. How does one convince states to disarm without first creating an atmosphere of trust between them. Put another way, as Spanish diplomat and writer Salvador de Madariaga once did, do states distrust each other because they are armed or are they armed because they distrust each other?

After a while, the causality becomes bidirectional. States distrust each other so they arm themselves and because X is arming itself, Y and Z must too — until it becomes an arms race.

Does a political process lead to lessening of violence or does the state need to put down violence to make space for a political process? This obviously throws up the question of whether one can indeed look at this issue linearly and sequentially — that A would lead to B which is then supposed to lead to C.

Let’s take stock of the situation once again. At some point, a group within the state decides it wants to secede, exit being the only option after voice has failed and loyalty makes no sense. It has to mobilise. Mobilisation requires identity formation, which needs a marker, an ideology or a distinct ethno-linguistic uniformity.

It would then launch a struggle against the state. That could be armed, unarmed or a combination of the two. It would also require to win adherents within the state and outside. Sometimes, as happened in the case of East Pakistan, it would reach out to external state actors to recognise the struggle and support the group covertly or overtly.

These phases are not necessarily sequential. They can overlap. Mobilisation is never smooth and, despite identity formation, there can be competing groups within the struggle. If we consider these phases as “choke points”, as American political scientist Peter Krause does, then the state can formulate policies to disrupt the struggle at each of these choke points.

During The Troubles, the period in Northern Ireland from roughly 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the British went through many phases in trying to put down the Irish insurgency. They created the Diplock Courts, which did away with jury trials and where a single judge would hand down sentences. Doing away with the juries was owed to cases of perverse acquittals and because members would often be intimidated. Even so, the Diplock Courts garnered much criticism.

At the operational level, the British forces relied, for the most part, if not always, on intelligence-based, discriminatory operations and avoided provoking the population. Also, their main operational thrust was on netting the IRA leaders rather than using scorched earth policies to kill foot soldiers and civilians.

But discriminatory action requires first-class intelligence and highly trained forces with the will to not be trigger-happy. In low-intensity conflicts, this is not an easy feat to achieve. But that is precisely what high-standard training is meant to achieve. It also implies rules of engagement that are supposed to give the state a high moral perch.

It should be obvious that, just like diagnosing a disease early, it is easier for the state to reach out early to the insurgent group during the mobilisation and identity formation phases — even early in the armed struggle phase. This is also the critical juncture in terms of deciding whether politics will take the lead with the kinetic as back-up or the other way round — ie using force to inform the group that they have no choice but to talk.

In the early stages of a brewing conflict, prudent states would try to rely on dealing with the problem politically. This is not to say that the state would allow the hardliners among the secessionists to run amok. But the use of force or the threat of its use would not be the focal point of the policy.

At the stage where things have already gone out of joint, we always run the risk of being tempted into hard responses. Blood spilled on both sides hardens attitudes. Anger and revenge upstage prudence and equanimity. That’s the most dangerous stage of COIN. One can assume that the state has already failed to prevent mobilisation and identity formation. Violence is now centre stage: the insurgent cannot win but, by entrenching identity and succeeding at mobilisation (recruitment), he continues for the long haul. He wins by not losing.

It should be obvious that, even at the advanced stage, the state can use the choke points of mobilisation and identity formation by reaching out to whoever it can reach out to and by addressing basic grievances. It’s not an easy task, because at this stage the insurgent will disrupt political processes and development schemes and kill those among the group he thinks are betraying the cause by working with the state.

The entire thrust of my previous article on the subject was to debunk linearity and easy solutions. I made two points: one, social policy space does not permit tame solutions because the problems are wicked. And the problems are wicked because policy must be formulated within a problem’s ecosystem, where the sub-systems and the impact of the policy on them become visible only after one begins to implement a policy. The problem is aggravated further because humans, psychologically, are prone to tailoring new data to fit the original hypothesis rather than reformulating the problematic on the basis of new data.

This is the perception problem: perceptions are quick to form but resistant to change. Intelligence analysts often try to circumvent this problem by pairing up an old hand with a new one to synergise their strengths: the old hand bringing in the longue duree [long duration] expertise and the fresh mind picking up new information and cancelling the old hand’s cognitive biases.

Without going into the complexity of the work done by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on fast (heuristics) and slow thinking, let it be said that we are all, to the last person, defined by such biases. Even the best have to train themselves to think slow to cancel our cognitive shortcuts and biases.

WHAT THEN?

This brings us to the problem of who governs Balochistan. No serious discussion to formulate policy can avoid this question. While it links up with the broader civil-military relations problem this country has been beset with, Balochistan stands at its extreme end. A number of factors, including historical memory, have gone into creating the problem whose latest iteration has been festering since the mid-noughties. The army’s predominance in the province and its influence on and machinations in the province’s politics stand out. It is this power equation that, inter alia, feeds the insurgency.

The security establishment is a state’s thin end of the wedge. In states with effective civilian oversight, the use of this thin end is dependent on political decision-making. The insurgent can, in theory, talk to the political principals. But how does he talk to the very force he is fighting against and which, in this case, not just represents the state but comes to the room as the state itself?

The other issue is how and when do you talk to the group which, in a manner of speaking, is a combo of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army? In a recent manifestation of this problem, a judge in Quetta asked Baloch Yakjehti Committee’s incarcerated leader Dr Mahrang Baloch to sign an affidavit of loyalty to the state, a demand that had nothing to do with the case before him. By making this demand, instead of asking the prosecution for evidence against Dr Baloch, the judge, wittingly or unwittingly, created the very binary that agitates the Baloch.

This is where we come to the issue of “soft separatist.” This new term is being bandied about to establish that even those who are without guns but protesting nonetheless have to be put down because, in the end, they are as “disloyal” to the state as the insurgent who is armed and bent on violence. This is the basis of the question about who the state should talk to. One doesn’t need a vexing exercise in reflection to figure out what this means: if you don’t accept what exists, warts and all, and declare loyalty to the state, the state will sort you out — like it does the one with the gun.

If this approach denotes a political process then, to quote Dorothy Parker, the Statue of Liberty is located in Lake Ontario.

Those who are agitating (so far) within the legal-constitutional framework of this state are not enemies. They are precisely the people who the state must reach out to if it is indeed serious about a political process. But these are also people who walk not just a tightrope but a razor-edged one.

They have to deal with the insurgent, their unarmed support base and the state at a time when their relevance within the support base is grounded in the unarmed component of the movement. To ask them to file affidavits of loyalty and subjugate themselves to the state before the state would talk to them is egregious folly couched as informed policy.

They are useful because they still represent people who haven’t picked up the gun. To turn them into collaborators means killing their very usefulness in any political process. It is no surprise that these grotesqueries are primarily being mouthed by those politicians in Balochistan who are already state collaborators and represent no one. Far from being useful, they are instrumental in fanning the flames.

FINAL WORDS

Where the situation stands, there are no easy solutions. But there are solutions that can improve the environment and, by so doing, change the ecosystem incrementally. Did I say ecosystem? Yes, I did. And that implies situating what is happening within the broader problem of power relations in this country, of which Balochistan has become the microcosm.

I am not a betting person but roughly constituted as I am and from where I stand, even I am prepared to wager money on the unfortunate fact that the state, configured as it is, would not do the right thing. It’s not that there’s any dearth of good-intentioned people. There is none. But the system has evolved in a way and has enough collaborators to take on its own life and perpetuate itself.

As someone said, a bad system will beat a good person every time.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 27th, 2025