By Sameer Hoth
Beyond smuggled arms and abandoned US weapons that have grabbed headlines, Pakistan faces a deeper crisis: a generation of educated Baloch youth ready to fight and die for something they see as their only option.
The Washington Post reported on Monday April 14, that Baloch insurgents involved in the deadly March 11 attack on Pakistan’s Jaffar Express train used American-made weapons left behind after the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The train, carrying more than 400 passengers, was ambushed by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), which took hostages and engaged Pakistani security forces in a two-day unprecedented standoff. Among the weapons recovered at the site was an M4A1 carbine rifle, with its serial number confirming it was initially supplied to the Afghan National Army by the United States, the Washington Post report said.
Accessing advanced American weaponry, including rifles, night-vision goggles, and ammunition by regional armed groups like BLA and Pakistani Taliban, highlights a disturbing reality. American arms, once intended to stabilize Afghanistan, are now fuelling regional insurgencies. But the issue goes beyond hardware and weaponry.
Various reports suggest that BLA has gained access to advanced American weaponry, which in return has contributed to its enhanced lethality. However, this alone is not a fundamental shift in the group’s operational capacity. In recent years, the BLA has evolved into a highly organized and deadly insurgent force, which is capable of executing very complex, coordinated attacks across multiple cities and towns of Balochistan simultaneously. Such operations demand more than just weapons. They require trained manpower, which the BLA appears to have in growing numbers.
What differentiates BLA from other regional militant groups is not merely its access to American-made weaponry, but its growing pool of human capital, ideological commitment among its fighters, and the operational capacity to carry out large-scale suicide bombings and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attacks.
BLA has routinely deployed between six to ten suicide bombers in a single mission that shows a level of growing human capital that cannot be purchased on any arms market. In 2024 alone, the group claimed responsibility for at least seven suicide attacks.
Weapons of all types in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran region can easily be purchased on the black market. Pakistan’s tribal belt, particularly areas like Darra Adam Khel and Peshawar, has long been home to a flourishing black market for arms, where some reports suggest there were once nearly 200 illicit workshops and almost 2,000 illegal arms shops operating openly. In the past, genuine Kalashnikovs could be acquired for as little as $120, and locally manufactured copies for as low as $70. The situation worsened after the Cold War, when the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directed billions of dollars’ worth of arms, including Swiss-designed anti-aircraft guns, British-made SAMs, and Chinese rockets into Afghanistan through covert pipelines. These arms did not vanish after the Soviets withdrew in 1988, but remained in circulation, which contributed to a booming shadow economy of violence stretching from Chechnya to Lebanon to the Philippines.
In fact, the current influx of American-made weapons from Afghanistan is merely the latest chapter in a long history of blowback. Before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, between 1.5 million and 10 million weapons were estimated to circulate in Afghanistan alone, with over 100,000 tonnes of ammunition stockpiled. Some of the most lethal items, like the FIM-92 Stinger missile, became prized assets on the international black market, showing up as far afield as North Korea and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
What makes the Baloch insurgency especially lethal, however, is not the influx of American weapons but the underlying political reality that drives an increasing number of young, educated Baloch to take up arms in the first place.
Pakistan’s historical approach to Balochistan has been marked by repression, enforced disappearances, economic neglect, and lack of political inclusion, all of which have created an irreparable mistrust between Islamabad and Baloch youth. The decision to fight, to die, and to carry out suicide missions came long before the fall of Kabul or the arrival of American rifles in BLA’s hands. These young insurgents are not simply armed with American weaponry, but they are radicalized by decades of perceived injustice and the absence of state serious in finding a solution to Balochistan’s longstanding political and economic issues. Even before the Taliban captured Kabul in 2021, Baloch militants were already engaged in asymmetric warfare and relied on Chinese and Russian-made weapons.
It’s a fact that US weapons are now a symbol of abandoned wars, failed policies, and the lingering chaos left in their wake. But it is also a fact that the BLA has a big human capital. And due to state’s policies, youth in Balochistan are driven by a sense of hopelessness and deep disillusionment, who view violence as the only way to fight for their rights.
In a nutshell, this is not merely a story of abandoned U.S. weapons, but of growing human capital joining Baloch armed groups.
Pakistan now faces an increasingly lethal insurgency in Balochistan. One armed not just with advanced American weaponry, but with a legacy of anger, oppression, and marginalization that neither counterinsurgency efforts can extinguish, nor the denial of American weapons can prevent.
(The author is a graduate in Violence, Conflict and Development from SOAS University of London, with a research focus on Iran and its ethnic tensions, particularly concerning the Baloch community across the goldsmith line. He hails from Sistan-Baluchestan.)