Is Baluchistan the tipping point for a proxy war in West Asia?
From The Barrel
Zachary Witkoff.
Image: Supplied
ZACHARY Witkoff is a powerful individual. He lords it over the decentralised finance protocol and cryptocurrency company called World Liberty Financial, WLF for short. WLF, like so many companies of its ilk, putatively referred to as DeFi’s, was founded in 2024 by Donald Trump’s family and their partners.
His two elder sons, Don Jr and Eric, as well as Jared Kushner, the president’s inscrutable son-in-law, are on record as holding 60% of this DeFi behemoth. The promoters launched the WLFI, the project’s governance token through a public sale.
With a staggering 100 billion of total supply, the public sale raised $550 million from the allocated token sales of 35%. According to public records the Trump family and affiliated corporations were allocated 22.5 billion units of these tokens, worth several million dollars at launch.
And so Zachary is a powerful man. But so is his dad, Steve Witkoff, who is even more so. He is President Donald Trump’s long-term friend from their New York real estate wheeling and dealing days and are close golf buddies. At his second stab at the Presidency as POTUS 47, he appointed Steve Witkoff as his special envoy to the Middle East and Russia.
With a reputation of master of deception, whether against friends or foes no matter, when in doubt, DJT would always resort to the instincts of Witkoff, despite what Keith Kellogg and Lindsey Graham are inclined to believe.
Just a few days before the Pahalgam attack, the trigger that resulted in a hot war exchange between India and Pakistan, WLF commenced negotiations with Pakistan’s Crypto Council for stablecoin development, asset tokenisation and regulatory sandboxes.
Bolstered by a veritable lineup of eminent investors, including the Chinese billionaire Justin Sun and the Abu Dhabi government backed MGX amongst others, the Pakistan Crypto Council had enlisted the advisory genius of Binance Founder, Chanpeng Zhao to boost the Council’s credibility.
The assets to be pledged against the tokenisation initiative, are the rare earths minerals, estimated at trillions of dollars. In Pakistan, these minerals are nestled deep in the troubled belly of a beleaguered Baluchistan province. And for emphasis, everything about Baluchistan is troubled, including its history with Pakistan.
In late March of 1948, almost six months after Pakistan separated from British India and gained its independence from British rule, the Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmad Yar Khan was forced to sign the Treaty of Accession and thus Baluchistan was annexed into Pakistan. And so, the embers of the Balochi vortex started smouldering with ferocity.
The volcano of discontent was ready to erupt without warning, fed by many chronicles of what the Balochi describe as violent oppression. One sad epic upon another, stacked up tight like gunpowder, compacted wall-to-wall all the way to the surface, leading up to the recent episodes of bombings and ambushes.
By 2003 under President Perez Musharraf, the region was gripped in paroxysms of gory violence which have lasted to date without relent.
Pakistan’s largest of the four provinces commanding 43% of the country’s landmass, yet the least populated, began scripting its slow odyssey to a dark chapter that has brought them to this moment of existential crisis.
Baluchistan claims the status of being Pakistan’s richest enclave, boasting of prodigious amounts of gold, copper, lithium, chromite, iron ore, antimony, cobalt, nickel, sulfur, zircon, beryllium, oil, gas and an unspecified number of rare earth ores. However, accounting to reasons whose chronology is historically traceable, the province remains the least economically developed.
With the removal and incarceration of Imran Khan, criminally cited for violating sedition laws of Pakistan and liberally accused of corruption, the raison d’ etre of the current hybrid regime, a ruling alliance of the military and the elected representatives, a contraption more military than democratic, had been to ensure the doling out of the treasures lying beneath the soil of the Balochi.
In the topmost north-western corner of Baluchistan bordering both Iran on the west and Afghanistan on the north-west axis, lies the district of Chagan. Here, the Reko Diq project of Barrick from Canada to extract copper and gold proceeds with minimum perturbation. The Pakistani government has committed to ensure to that.
This means that Pakistan is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so, including doing the things they are accused of at the UN General Assembly by India. And it’s a panoply of disturbing accusations.
There are allegations of enforced disappearances numbering seven thousand to date. There are also detailed recounts of torture, indiscriminate arrests and cultural genocide. Topping that list, are narratives of extra-judicial killings. And for the Balochi, none represents the pain and insidiousness of these extrajudicial murders even outside of Pakistan more than the tragic story of Karima Baloch.
Karima was a Balochi human rights activist, a gender spokesperson for her peers and a freedom advocate. As youthful as she was, she survived a military attack by the Pakistani special forces and fled to Canada. In 2006 she joined the Balochi Student Organisation (BSO) and later became its first female president.
Being the most visible and spirited voice among her contemporaries, her last tweet was on the 14th of December 2020. On the 22nd of December 2020 she was found drowned near lake Ontario at the waterfront. The circumstances of her demise rekindled the fear of extrajudicial killings in faraway shores.
Over six decades of resistance in Baluchistan which started with yearnings for self -determination, and with more violent repression grew into a full-blown demand for independence, has seen the bourgeoning of indigenous political formations.
The most prominent proponent of self-determination was the historic figure of Nawar Mohammad Akbar Khan Bugti, former Minister of Interior and Governor of Baluchistan. The anniversary of his death on the 26th of August represents a revolutionary moment of yearning for the Balochi.
There had been different organisations, ostensibly articulating the sectarian view of their promoters and supporters. There is the Bugti Republican Guards, led by the grandson of Nawab Khan Bugti. There is also the Baluchistan Liberation Front. The Sindhi Liberation Organisation counts among them and so does the Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army.
Yet, none of all the branded efforts combined command the profile of daring and violence much the same way the Baluchistan Liberation Army does. Founded in 2000, they were banned in 2006 as a terrorist organisation. The United States and its allies quickly followed suit in similarly declaring them as such.
The amount of violence in that enclave has become too ghastly to contemplate. And with mounting losses of the Pakistani army, coupled with civilian casualties including those taken as hostages in train and truck skirmishes, the Pakistani authorities, emboldened by their relationship with US, retaliated in like manner.
On the night of the 9th of October, Pakistan launched decapitation strikes in Kabul, the Taliban’s citadel of power, to assassinate the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief, Noor Wali Mehsud. They missed him. The attackers killed his son and thirty other unsuspecting innocent Afghani.
The fluidity of the situation which has been brewing for decades, has made for some strange factual bedfellows. The Baluchistan narrative is India’s media favourite pastime, almost singularly responsible for the global narrative version of it. The Chinese, through the China -Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative, are heavily invested in the Gwadar port in Baluchistan.
The US deep state has always sided with Pakistan against the Indians. All what the successive US presidents had to do, is to manage the public face of the US-India relations, or manage India as their vassal against China, if you will. The main factions of the Balochi are supported by the Taliban, remembering always that the Balochi language is Iranian. China is rebuilding Afghanistan economically and the Taliban’s military rebirth is undergirded by the Russians.
To be sure, Pakistan has just signed a Mutual Defence Pact with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And Trump has just demanded that the Taliban must relinquish the ownership of the Bagram airbase in Kabul to the Americans, or else.
Being a Friday, the Taliban could not miss the reverence of the Salat al-Jumu’ah. They may be silent for now. But there is no doubt that they are contemplating their next political if not military move.
Who knows, this may be the tipping escalatory attack which may turn Pakistan from a US political vassal into a full military proxy.
* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.