By Qaiser Nawab, Chairman BRISD
Sunday morning began like most mornings in Quetta — with people moving through the city, attending to ordinary life. A shuttle train was carrying Pakistani security personnel and their family members from the cantonment area toward the Jaffar Express connection near Chaman Phatak. Among those on board were not just soldiers and officers fulfilling their duty to the nation, but the wives and children who share in the quiet sacrifices of military life. The bomb that tore through that train spared none of them.
The death toll has crossed thirty, with more than a hundred people injured. Buildings adjacent to the railway line were damaged. Train carriages overturned and caught fire. The Balochistan Liberation Army claimed responsibility within hours — a group designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States, and one whose campaign of violence has brought nothing but grief to the people of Balochistan and Pakistan at large. The attack was not the first of its kind, and the people of this country know it. What must not be allowed to follow is silence.
Quetta has borne more than its share of this kind of morning. The 2024 railway station bombing, the Jaffar Express hijacking in 2025, and now the Chaman Phatak attack — each one a calculated act of terror aimed at breaking the will of a people and a state that have refused to be broken. That refusal is not incidental. It is a reflection of something deep in the character of Pakistan’s security forces and of the civilian population that has lived alongside this violence with a resilience that deserves far more recognition than it typically receives.
The Human Weight Behind the Numbers
Every figure in a casualty count is a biography interrupted. The soldiers killed on that train had families, postings, plans for leave. The family members travelling with them had school runs to make, markets to visit, lives quietly assembled around the rhythms of cantonment existence. The injured will carry Sunday with them for the rest of their lives — in scars, in the particular alertness that does not leave people who have survived a blast, in the long shadow that sudden violence casts over everyday moments.
It is worth pausing on that before anything else, because the political and security analysis that follows such attacks has a way of absorbing the human reality entirely. Behind every name on a casualty list is a family that woke up on Sunday expecting an ordinary day. Parents who sent a child off on a routine journey. Spouses who said a routine goodbye. Children who are now without a parent. That is the true cost of what the BLA delivered on Sunday morning, and it must not be allowed to dissolve into abstraction.
Pakistan’s security personnel and their families occupy a particular place in the national life. They are stationed in difficult postings, separated from extended family and community, and asked to operate in an environment that carries real physical danger. The families who travel with them share that exposure without carrying a rank or drawing a full salary for doing so. When we mourn those killed at Chaman Phatak, we should mourn them with full awareness of the commitment they embodied simply by being on that train.
Terrorism’s Calculated Logic and Its Limits
The BLA’s targeting of a train carrying soldiers and their families is not random. It is a deliberate strategy: attack the infrastructure of daily military life, make service in Balochistan feel untenable, and signal to the population that the state cannot protect even its own. It is a form of psychological warfare as much as physical destruction, and it deserves to be understood as such rather than treated as an expression of legitimate political grievance.
The BLA has framed its campaign in the language of rights and recognition. But there is no rights-based framework under which a suicide bomb directed at women and children on a morning train constitutes a legitimate act. The group’s consistent targeting of civilians — at a railway station platform in 2024, aboard an inter-city express in 2025, and now on a shuttle service — removes any ambiguity about its character. It is a terrorist organisation in its methods, in its targets, and in the human cost it has been willing to impose on an already burdened population.
What the BLA has not achieved, despite years of escalating operations, is the disintegration of the Pakistani state’s presence in Balochistan or the alienation of the broader Baloch population from the national mainstream. That failure is significant. It reflects the endurance of state institutions under sustained pressure and the fact that the majority of people in Balochistan, whatever their political views, have not endorsed a path of violence. That majority deserves to be heard, supported, and protected.
The Path Forward: Resolve Without Relenting
Pakistan has faced terrorism of this kind before and has not been defeated by it. The operations that dismantled the TTP’s capacity in the tribal belt, the resilience shown after the Army Public School attack in Peshawar, the slow and costly restoration of order in areas that had fallen to militant control — none of these came easily or quickly, but they came. The country has earned the right to approach Sunday’s attack not with despair but with a clear-eyed determination to respond effectively.
That response will necessarily include continued security operations. The BLA’s ability to plan and execute attacks of this complexity — a vehicle-borne suicide bomber intercepting a moving train in an urban setting — speaks to an operational capacity that must be degraded. Pakistan’s military and intelligence institutions have the experience and the commitment to pursue that objective, and the nation stands behind them in doing so.
At the same time, the long-term stabilisation of Balochistan will require sustaining the development investments and economic initiatives already underway in the province. The mineral wealth, the connectivity projects, and the economic corridors being developed across Balochistan represent a genuine opportunity to improve lives in a province that has historically seen its potential underserved. Ensuring that those benefits reach ordinary Baloch families — in jobs, in infrastructure, in services — is the most powerful long-term counter to any narrative of exclusion that terrorist groups attempt to exploit.
The international dimension also warrants attention. The BLA operates with external support and maintains sanctuaries across the border in Afghanistan. Pakistan has raised this consistently in bilateral and multilateral forums, and the US State Department’s designation of the BLA as a foreign terrorist organisation in 2024 was an important step in international recognition of that threat. Sustaining that diplomatic pressure, and deepening cooperation with partners who share an interest in regional stability, is an essential complement to domestic security efforts.
This newspaper has covered Quetta through too many difficult mornings. Each time, the instinct is to find words adequate to the loss and to the moment. Each time, the words fall somewhat short — because no editorial can fully honour what the families of the dead are carrying, or what the survivors will live with. What can be said with certainty is this: the people of Balochistan, and of Pakistan, are not defined by the violence inflicted upon them. They are defined by what they build, protect, and refuse to surrender. On Sunday, terrorism took lives. It did not take the country.
Author:
Qaiser Nawab is Chairman of the Belt and Road Initiative for Sustainable Development (BRISD), an international platform fostering cooperation and innovation across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He can be reached at qaisernawab098@gmail.com
