"Rising Violence by Separatists Adds to Pakistan’s Lethal Instability" 5 May 2022

Shari Baluch was a 30-year-old mother of two children and a schoolteacher. Late last month, on a university campus in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, she detonated a suicide bomb, killing herself and four others, including three Chinese teachers. [...]

Baluch separatism is just one of the forces threatening the nation’s already tenuous unity and stability, including violent insurgencies by the Islamic State affiliate known as ISIS-K and the resurgent Pakistani Taliban. [...]

Insurgent groups have fought repeatedly against political centralization and resource exploitation, in return facing heavy state repression and human rights abuses.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is developing a Chinese-operated deepwater port in Gwadar, Baluchistan, and a transportation network linking Gwadar to China. Pakistan’s government views such foreign investment as vital, and is eager to strengthen ties with China as a counterweight to Pakistan’s archrival, India.

But to the separatists, the development projects put Beijing squarely on the side of the exploiters and oppressors, so in recent years, many targets of insurgent violence have been Chinese.

In 2018, B.L.A. militants killed four people in an attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi, and the next year the group mounted an assault on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in Karachi, which is 40 percent owned by Chinese investors, killing three people. In both cases, the assailants were also killed. Last August, a B.L.A. suicide bomber killed two children in an attack on Chinese nationals in Gwadar. [...]