Left-leaning insurgencies, while diverse, often manifest common patterns such as carrying out onslaughts on power structures, taking to guerrilla warfare tactics. However, the particular approaches can vary, influenced by factors like the political, historical and geographic contexts, and the nature of the state to be fought with.
The four-decades-long armed struggle between the Türkiye and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was ended through a combination of efforts that included a call for disarmament by jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. From amongst the Kurdish rebels, specifically the PKK, in a ceremony on 11 July 2025, around 20-30 rebel fighters burned their weapons as a step toward peace with Türkiye.
For most of its history the PKK has been labelled a 'terrorist group " by Türkiye.
This historic PKK's switch from armed struggle to peaceful political transition would help to set out and explore many fundamental questions: especially whether a similar transition would be possible in the rank of other leftist insurgencies such as the separatists in Balochistan.
Balochistan has experienced multiple Baloch nationalist outfits and insurgent movements, with the most prominent ones occurring in the 1950s, 1970s and early 2000s.
Since 1948, from tribal uprisings, to leftist insurgencies, to separatist sub-nationalist uprisings, Balochistan underwent numerous waves of militancy with the momentum of ups and downs.
In the case of the Baloch militancy and the PKK, Mohammad Amir Rana, a security analyst, writes that among the leftist insurgencies the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) seeks inspiration from Kurdish militant movements in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran, viewing them as historical parallels. This influence was certainly reflected when the BLA named one of its female suicide bomber after Zilan Kurd, a Kurdish woman who, on 39 June 1996, carried out a suicide attack targeting Turkish soldiers in Dersim. The real name of the Baloch Zilan was Mahal Baloch, who was a seventh semester law student at the University of Turbat, from district Gwadar, and she carried out a suicide attack on security forces in Lasbela district of Balochistan in 2024.
It is a common perspective that the BLA is an ethno-nationalist separatist militant organisation with left-leaning tendencies; and it is also one of the most active insurgent groups among the 10 major leftist separatist movements worldwide.
Mohammad Amir Rana also adds that left-leaning separatist militant organisations are known to take inspiration from one another in shaping their ideological and guerrilla warfare paradigms. The BLA is significantly following the footprints of Kurdish militant groups in their inclusion of women in their ranks.
Columnist Nadeem Farooq Paracha, in his article in daily Dawn “The BLA reckoning," writes that the roots of BLA are often traced back to the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), which was one of the largest Baloch insurgent groups during the 1970s insurgency. BLF stood for an independent Balochistan and 'national communism' – a term first coined by Yugoslavian Marxist Milovan Djilas to describe communism and ultra-nationalism. Yet, the BLF was still there when BLA was formed.
Paracha added that BLA was originally backed by the Soviet intelligence agencies who were looking to espouse the Baloch militants with the ideology of a socialist Balochistan due to Pakistan's involvement in the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. So, BLA was initially put together in the 1980s but began to wither away along with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the fact is that the BLA was revived in 2000 and not formed as such.
According to the political scientist Seema Khan, India has become a major financier of BLA. In her 2024 book Balochistan and The Mèlange of Violence, she wrote, "India arms, funds, trains and shelters Baloch separatists". It wants to keep Balochistan's trouble alive to hamper Chinese projects there.
Recently, an undated video of Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) Commander-in-Chief Allah Nazar Baloch surfaced on social media on 11 May 2025. In the 30-minute-long clip, the Baloch militant leader could be seen issuing a rare direct appeal to New Delhi. He said, “India should only give us the 93,000 guns that were surrendered by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh,” addressing the global community and India, urging support for Balochistan’s fight against what he repeatedly calls a "fascist" Pakistani state.
It cannot be ruled out that like most separatist movements anywhere in the world, the Baloch separatist movements too have had external support. But the key factor behind the Baloch insurgency lies mostly internally, where the sense of alienation and grievances are so deep. In addition to that, the colonial style of rule in Balochistan can be a major cause that has mostly led to educated Baloch youth having resorted to armed revolt.
On 25 July 2025, an article on the Al Jazeera website also claimed that Israel was planning to “hijack the Baloch struggle” in Pakistan.
However, as it is often claimed by the Pakistani authorities, anti-Pakistan militant outfits have safe havens and training camps in the region close to Pakistan's western borders, it is also added that these militant training centers receive financial support and war equipment from India. A key BLA ex-commander, Aslam Achu, was living in Kandahar and depended on support from Afghan intelligence and Kandahar police in particular to prop up the BLA's warmongering ideology. In March 2016, Aslam Achu was injured in an operation and was rescued in Afghanistan and subsequently moved to India for treatment. On his return to Afghanistan, the then BLA commander Aslam Achu formed a unit of suicide bombers; this unit was named after Majeed (i.e., Majeed Brigade).
Perhaps it would be better late than never; before external forces further take advantage of Pakistan's internal political crisis to cause more violence
Majeed Baloch was basically a young Baloch insurgent during the 1970s Baloch insurgency; he wanted to assassinate the then prime minister of Pakistan Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in August 1974 but failed.
Aslam Achu offered to sacrifice his own son, Rehan Baloch, as the first BLA suicide bomber for a militant's sinister cause; in August 2018, he sent his son to attack a Chinese convoy in Dalbandin, about 340 km southwest of the provincial capital Quetta. Later, the then BLA commander Aslam Achu was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan on December 25, 2018.
According to the researcher Joshua C. Underwood, if an external supporter doesn’t provide military aid, separatist movements usually collapse.
But it is not necessarily true that the survival of militant groups in the world will always lead to victory. Except for some examples that would include East Pakistan, where Bengali nationalists, who were militarily supported by India, managed to break away from Pakistan and become Bangladesh.
Another example is that of the Kosovo Liberation Front (KLF), a militant group active during the 1990s that sought Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. The KLF's armed struggle was brought to an end by NATO's intervention and subsequent military operations against Serbian forces, until the region declared its independence from Serbia in 2008.
Mainly, the emerging rise of separatist militant organisations and religiously-inspired terrorism worldwide, particularly after the 9/11 attacks in the US, which is often seen as a watershed in military history. In modern-day wars, many states engage in fights through proxies. The deterrence power of states dissuades them from directly waging full-scale wars. This always suits many neighbouring countries that have their axes to grind, by allowing them to back and finance their proxies.
Proxy wars of such a nature began to be seen in the Middle East, where AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) and the Mahdi militia moved at the will of state-backed sponsors across to Syria and Iran respectively due to the porous border. Iran even allowed elements of Al-Qaeda to move from Iran to Afghanistan through its territory. Boko Haram, a self-proclaimed jihadist militant group based in northern Nigeria, reportedly crossed over the border into Cameroon, Niger and Chad due to the permeability of borders. Somalia has been divided into autonomous regions, which remain at daggers drawn with each other. Each of these regions is said to have potential ties with foreign sponsors. In Libya, a proxy war is being fought with Türkiye and Qatar supporting the Government of National Accord(GNA), while Russia, the UAE and Egypt back the faction of Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. Each of these countries, with its national interests, wants to establish bases in the Mediterranean in the close vicinity to Europe.
In the Libyan conflict, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt supported different factions based on their shared opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, while Türkiye and Qatar had interests in Libyan oil and gas and supported opposing sides. This created a complex web of alliances and rivalries, influencing the dynamics of the civil war and regional power struggles.
Some political observers also argue that in war-torn regions, the lingering proxy wars will possibly trigger conventional and full-blown wars in the days to come.
However, taking lessons from a historic end to a decades-long armed struggle between Türkiye and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), it may provide an incentive for a political dialogue to deal with such militancy through a political process in any part of the world.
The states who engaged rebellion groups with political negotiation ultimately succeeded in bringing them back into mainstream politics, and were finally successful in making them abandon violence.
Naturally, some critics also argue that dialogue with terrorist outfits is tantamount to endorsing and legitimising their terror onslaughts and warmongering ideology. It is argued that the group being negotiated with may just be looking for space and time to reorganise.
Indeed, the war waged by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers, was ended through a military operation by the Sri Lankan government in May 2009, whose deadly campaign lasted for 37 years.
However, except for the case of LTTE, the other long-lasting and decades-old militancy problems in the world were mostly dealt with by political means. Apart from any merits or demerits of political talks, the world's history offers many examples of historic shifts from armed revolts to political engagement through peace accords.
An example can be drawn from a historic peace agreement that ended the rebel movement in Northern Ireland after years of violence.
The British government eventually did talk to the Sinn Fein. Eventually, the Good Friday Accord of 1998 was signed between the British government and IRA militants.
In 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace accord, officially ending over 50 years of armed conflict. The agreement, reached after years of political talks and negotiations, marked a significant turning point in Colombian history.
Similarly, Spain also suffered ruthless terrorist attacks for decades from the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), which was an armed Basque nationalist and far-left separatist organisation in the Basque Country between 1959 and 2018. Spain entered a political dialogue with ETA; through political talks in 2018, ETA abandoned its almost five-and-a-half-decades-long armed struggle and offered an apology for its violence.
Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group. The group wanted to seek political representation, and was eventually granted the status of a political party by the Lebanese government. The relative peace and stability that Lebanon witnessed was because of the political process of bringing Hezbollah to join mainstream politics.
Insurgents in Guatemala and Peru, where peace accords were signed in 1996, formally ended a 36-year civil war after extensive negotiations.
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to address the human rights violations that occurred during the apartheid era, which fostered national unity and reconciliation in South Africa.
Perhaps it would be better late than never; before any external forces further take advantage of Pakistan's internal political crisis to cause more violence, the state must give preference to political transition rather than the use of kinetic force which may further escalate political uncertainty. The use of force by the state may counter terrorism for a transitory period, but for a permanent peace process to prevail, kinetic operations alone cannot work.
In his book Counter-insurgency warfare: Theory and practices, David Galula emphasises that a lasting solution to insurgency lies not in overwhelming military force but in political strategy. There is a need to draw up a comprehensive approach through political means.
As military specialists from the era of Sunzi (Sun Tzu) knew, there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare. The Pakistani state must carve out a path for political reconciliation and political talks with Baloch separatist organisations, as well as religiously-inspired militants.
Negotiations and dialogue can be the way forward to put the country back on track towards a peaceful and smooth political transition. These could be the most important tool in staving off the menace posed by terrorism in Pakistan.