Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped.

Some human rights crises burst into international consciousness through a single image, a single video, a single act of resistance that the world cannot ignore. Other crises unfold in the dark, year after year, building a pile of unaddressed suffering that grows so high it becomes invisible. Balochistan belongs to the second category. It is the most underreported sustained human rights crisis in modern South Asia, and the international community’s silence on it is one of the diplomatic failures of our time.

The numbers, when assembled, are difficult to dismiss. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee documented over 1,250 cases of enforced disappearance in 2025. The Human Rights Council of Balochistan recorded 1,455 cases in the same year. Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, documented 95 enforced disappearances in November 2025 alone, along with 21 cases of severe torture and 20 extrajudicial killings. These figures, reflecting only what could be verified, suggest that what is happening in Balochistan is not occasional repression but a sustained campaign of state violence against a population.

The Pattern of Disappearances

The mechanism of enforced disappearance in Balochistan follows a well-documented pattern. Pakistani security forces, operating in plain clothes or in uniform, conduct raids on homes, often at night, and take individuals away without warrants, charges, or notification of family members. The detained person enters a network of informal detention centres run by the army or intelligence services, where they may be held for weeks, months, or years without external contact.

Some of the disappeared are eventually released, often visibly broken by torture, with explicit warnings against speaking publicly about their experience. Some are formally charged after extended periods in incommunicado detention and transferred to regular prison. Some are killed during their detention, with their bodies dumped near roads or in remote areas, in what Baloch activists call kill and dump operations. And some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely for information that does not come.

The targets of disappearance are not, by and large, militants. They are students, lecturers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and human rights activists. Mahrang Baloch, the woman human rights defender who has emerged as the most prominent voice of the movement, is a medical doctor. Many of her colleagues in the Baloch Yakjehti Committee come from professional and academic backgrounds. The pattern is one of targeting the educated, articulate, and organisationally capable members of Baloch civil society, not just suspected separatists.

Some disappeared are released, broken by torture. Some are formally charged. Some are killed and their bodies dumped. Some simply vanish, never accounted for, leaving families to wait indefinitely.

The Recent Escalation

The crisis in Balochistan has escalated sharply since 2024. The triggering events have included a March 2025 attack by Baloch separatists on a passenger train, after which Pakistani authorities launched broad sweeps under the Counter Terrorism Department and arrested or disappeared several prominent Baloch human rights defenders. In response to peaceful protests organised against these arrests, Quetta police stormed a Baloch Yakjehti Committee gathering at the University of Balochistan in March 2025. A subsequent sit-in, organised by Mahrang Baloch and other activists, was raided by police using batons and tear gas at five-thirty in the morning.

The pattern continued through 2025 and into 2026. The provincial government’s approval of the Balochistan Prevention, Detention and Deradicalisation Rules 2025, signed off by Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti, was understood by human rights organisations as a state attempt to legalise the disappearance system that had been operating informally for years. The new rules permit the designation of individuals as suspects subject to interrogation in detention centres, formalising what had previously been an extra-legal practice.

Federal-level changes have made the situation worse. Amendments to Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 now allow law enforcement to detain individuals for up to three months without charge or judicial oversight. This power has been used repeatedly against Mahrang Baloch and other Baloch Yakjehti Committee activists. The legal framework that emerged in 2025 essentially provides Pakistani authorities with broad discretion to detain whoever they wish for as long as they wish, with minimal accountability.

The International Response Gap

The international response to Balochistan has been thin compared to the scale of the crisis. UN human rights experts have issued statements. Some Western governments have raised concerns in private diplomatic channels. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published reports. But there has been no sustained international campaign comparable to those organised around other comparable crises. There has been no UN Security Council attention. There have been no targeted sanctions against the Pakistani officials responsible. There has been no equivalent of the Magnitsky-style measures that Western states use for other human rights abusers.

The reasons for this gap are partly geopolitical. Pakistan has been treated as an important state by various Western governments, by China, and by Saudi Arabia. Each of these relationships has imposed costs on the willingness of those states to confront Pakistan publicly on its conduct in Balochistan. But the gap is not just about external geopolitics. It is also about the difficulty of access. Foreign journalists are largely barred from Balochistan. Foreign human rights observers face severe restrictions. The information space is, by Pakistani design, opaque. As a result, what is happening in Balochistan does not generate the kind of viral images and stories that drive sustained international attention.

This dynamic has allowed the Pakistani state to operate in Balochistan with a degree of impunity that would not be tolerated anywhere with greater external scrutiny. The pattern of disappearances has continued for over two decades. The international response has been incremental concern, rarely translating into structural pressure.

What Operation Sindoor Changed

Operation Sindoor, indirectly, has begun to change the international information environment around Pakistan. The detailed exposure of Pakistan’s relationship with Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba during the May 2025 conflict, combined with international attention to the Pahalgam massacre, has raised broader questions about the Pakistani state’s conduct. Some of those questions extend naturally to Balochistan. If Pakistan’s security establishment is willing to host UN-designated terrorists in major cities, what is it willing to do to its own citizens in marginalised provinces?

Indian diplomatic engagement with international human rights bodies has also become more sophisticated. The contrast between India’s open society in Kashmir, where journalists work and tourists travel, and Pakistan’s closed system in Balochistan has been highlighted in international forums by Indian representatives in ways that previously felt heavy-handed but now resonate more credibly.

The Baloch movement itself has become more articulate, more organised, and more capable of presenting its case in international languages. Mahrang Baloch’s prominence as a face of the movement has helped. So has the work of diaspora communities in Europe, North America, and the Gulf, who have built advocacy networks that did not exist a decade ago.

These developments are early. They have not yet translated into the structural international pressure that would force a change in Pakistani conduct. But they represent a shift in the information landscape that, if sustained, may eventually force the world to look more carefully at what has been happening in Balochistan for far too long. The first step is to refuse to look away. Operation Sindoor, by exposing what Pakistan does abroad, may help sustain attention on what Pakistan does at home. That is a small consolation for the families of the missing. It is not nothing.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

This clause would mark the first time in Pakistan’s history that the entire military chain of command is legally and constitutionally subordinated to a single officer.

Since his appointment in November 2022, Field Marshal Asim Munir has proved a master practitioner of power consolidation, outpacing even Pakistan’s most notorious military strongmen such as Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf. His latest gambit, the proposed 27th Constitutional Amendment, cements that legacy and threatens to formalize Pakistan’s drift into an overt military state.

At its core, the 27th Amendment rewrites Article 243 of Pakistan’s Constitution which details the governing framework of the command of the armed forces (Chapter 2). While, it may appear to be a technical legal change, however, it is, in fact, a crude structural reordering of the Pakistani state in favor of the military establishment that has anyway calling the shots for decades.

Nevertheless, one of the most consequential provisions (clause 5) is the proposed creation of a new office of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF). Under this clause, the Army Chief will automatically assume the role of CDF role, which effectively merges the tri-service command of the army, navy, and air force into one uniformed post. The existing Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC), a forum meant to balance inter-service authority, will be abolished.

In practical terms, this means all branches of Pakistan’s armed forces will answer to one man, that is Asim Munir. It also conveniently sidelines General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the senior-most general whom the Shehbaz Sharif government bypassed when appointing Munir in 2022.

This clause would mark the first time in Pakistan’s history that the entire military chain of command is legally and constitutionally subordinated to a single officer.

Another major clause (6) under Article 243 transfers effective control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to the Army Chief. The Prime Minister would nominally appoint the Commander of the National Strategic Command (the custodian of nuclear weapons), but only from among “members of the Pakistan Army” and solely on the “recommendation of the Chief of Army Staff concurrently serving as Chief of Defence Forces.”

This wording is not incidental. It ensures that the nuclear command, which has traditionally been supervised by a civilian-led National Command Authority, will now operate entirely under military discretion. Pakistan’s already fragile notion of civilian oversight is being reduced to fiction. With this, Asim Munir not only commands Pakistan’s conventional military forces but also gains exclusive control of its nuclear deterrent. 

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the 27th Amendment lies in its provisions for legal protection. Given that the amendment proposes lifetime immunity to the Field Marshal (clauses 7,8,9,10 &11), it practically equates his legal status with that of the President as the Head of the State of Pakistan. In effect, Asim Munir, who was conferred the title of Field Marshal earlier this year, cannot be prosecuted, investigated, or held accountable by any court or parliamentary body for decisions made during or after his tenure.

This is a historic and most consequential departure from Pakistan’s constitutional tradition. Even military rulers like Zia and Musharraf, both of whom seized power through coups, lacked explicit lifetime impunity under constitutional law. However, Munir has, by securing this clause, effectively insulated himself against future civilian pushback or judicial scrutiny, ensuring that any transition of power will not endanger his position or legacy.

Though Pakistan’s history has seen several military rulers institutionalizing their dominance through legal means like Ayub Khan’s rewriting of the 1962 Constitution or Zia-ul-Haq giving the military a permanent political veto by amending Article 58(2)(b), Asim Munir’s strategy is more sophisticated and inarguably more durable. Unlike his predecessors, who relied on overt coups, Munir is using constitutional procedure and parliamentary approval to codify military supremacy. As such, Munir seems to be outdoing the likes of Ayub, Zia, and Musharraf not through coups but by rewriting laws in his own favor.

The Shehbaz Sharif government’s cooperation in pushing this amendment through parliament reveals how deeply Pakistan’s civilian leadership has become dependent on the military’s favor. The Asim Munir-led military establishment has leveraged this vulnerability and extended its control over domestic politics, the economy, and even foreign policy. 

By institutionalizing this control through the 27th Amendment, the military no longer needs to rely on backroom manipulation as it can now rule openly, with parliamentary consent.

The conferment of the title “Field Marshal” on Munir earlier this year, following India’s “Operation Sindoor” was the clearest signal of his elevation to the highest power status in the country. It very well echoed self-promotion of Ayub Khan to Field Marshal in the 1960s, when he justified his authority was essential to the country’s national defense.

Munir would do well to remember that Pakistan’s streets which are restless, politically volatile, and steeped in resentment against military domination, though it may dormant now, have a way of humbling even the most entrenched generals. Equally, it is interesting how the country’s political elite, particularly Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party who currently backs Munir seem to have forgotten how such curry favouring of generals have bitten them in the past.

The 27th Amendment marks not just another chapter in Pakistan’s cycle of military dominance but a turning point of the transformation of military supremacy from an unwritten reality into a constitutional fact. Field Marshal Asim Munir may believe he has achieved what his predecessors could not: absolute power with absolute legitimacy. But Pakistan’s history suggests that even the thickest face and the blackest heart cannot shield a ruler from the reckoning that follows hubris.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.