Pakistan’s lame attempt to pin the KSE attack’s blame on India distracts attention from its own problems

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No sooner the attacks, then the accusations followed. The operation to clear the Karachi Stock Exchange from the attack by four terrorists had hardly ended when Pakistani officials were on Twitter blaming ‘fascist’ India for the attack. That included Prime Minister’s Special Assistant  Moeed Yusuf, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quershi and most recently, Prime Minister Khan himself. It’s a strange turn of events. For months, Khan has been warning of a ‘false flag’ operation from India, which implies that India would stage a terrorist attack on its own soil and blame Pakistan. Now it appears that the reverse has happened.

Consider a few details. Three of the attackers were  identified as being from Kech, Balochistan, with officials citing a claim on Twitter by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). The Sindh Rangers Director General proudly told journalists that the whole operation had been finished in ‘eight minutes’ from start to finish. That is a world record, and raises the possibility as to whether the whole terrorist plan was known from the start. The BLA has some of the most hardened fighters within its ranks. In 2018, it had the nerve to attack the Chinese consulate in Karachi, in one of the most secure zones in the country. The leaders of that attack were killed in Kandahar within a month.

Clearly, Chinese pressure matters. With Chinese companies owning a forty per cent stake in the KSE,  Beijing is likely to buy Islamabad’s story of Indian involvement, hook line and sinker. Suitable evidence will be produced, with the Foreign Minister laying the ground in mid-June on Indian ‘sleeper cells’ active in the country. That suits Islamabad’s playbook, given the glee with which Pakistanis have watched the India-China conflict at the border. It seems Pakistan is involved in its own ‘false flag’ operation, the alternative being that it is a genuine BLA operation, staggeringly poorly done. That doesn’t seem to indicate much training.

India’s sympathy for the Baloch cause, hasn’t done them much good. They have been betrayed time and again, from Indira Gandhi – who  promised assistance and then cried off -  to the present leadership. In August 2016 PM Modi spoke of the Baloch cause from the ramparts of Red Fort,  with nothing heard since. A bitter Baloch migrant once told this author, that India should not talk of assistance if it doesn’t mean to carry it through. The charge of Indian assistance has led to Pakistan’s agencies wreaking havoc on the people, lifting youth from their homes in a strategy of “Enforced disappearances’ and mutilated bodies found later. One assessment is that some 45,000 men, women and children have gone missing. A Baloch journalist covering the issue, was  recently killed  in Sweden, where he had fled to, indicating the reach of the ISI. The brutality has gone up since the advent of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which Baloch bitterly call the China Punjab Corridor.

Home to the gas fields that power Pakistan, Balochistan has always been something of a colony. With the CPEC, that has worsened. It’s not just the Gwadar Deep Sea Port, now under lease to China for 99 years and which provide no jobs for locals. There is the HUBCO Coal power project carried out by the China Power Hub Generation Company ( Private) Limited.  Government reports exposed inflated costs by Chinese IPPs in the power sector with excess payments to the tune of PKR 291 billion that also involved officials close to the Prime Minister. Projects like the Gwadar Nawabshah LNG terminal are yet to see the light of day. The Bostan Industrial Zone spread over a thousand acres, was notified as a CPEC project only in March 2020, after Baloch parliamentarians protested that they had no benefits from CPEC despite giving their land and resources for the grand project. To the insurgents, the CPEC is a sign of yet another foreign occupation. To the state government, it is another sign of Punjabi dominance.

That the Baloch hate the Chinese almost as much as they hate Pakistan is therefore evident. But the KSE attack seems far too amateurish, for the BLA. Imran Khan on the other hand, may find this a reprieve from the several scandals that have dogged him over the last two weeks; his own comment on the ‘martyrdom’ of Bin Laden, the suspension of Pakistani pilots by various airlines as it emerged that one in three pilots had fake licenses, and the open rift between his party and allies apparent during the budget session. There’s little to cheer. Happily, the traditional enemy is always available for an outraged blame game. Hating India has always been an escape route for a regime under stress. That’s a falsity that’s more than the flag.

Tara Kartha is former director, National Security Council Secretariat. Views are personal.