Why Balochistan becomes unavoidable within five years

Beyond the security headlines

Muzamil starts with how most Pakistanis see Balochistan. If they have never been there, they think of terrorism, separatist movements, and a desert and mountain region with little development. Sometimes they think of the beautiful coastline from recent drone shots. But in the news, Balochistan almost always means a security threat.

He expects that narrative to change. “My personal view is that Balochistan is a very important lifeline for Pakistan,” he says. He goes further: in five to seven years, he thinks, many viewers may be relocating there. He knows it sounds far-fetched, and the rest of the episode is his reasoning.

Why development has been so hard

Muzamil first explains why Balochistan lags. Development needs flat land, water and connectivity: roads, energy and electricity. Balochistan is huge, sparsely populated and mostly inhospitable. The terrain raises the cost of every project. Connecting each village means the cost per person is far higher than the same service in Sindh or Punjab.

He does not deny that corruption exists, but he says geography explains a lot. America is not uniform either. Development follows revenue, which is why it concentrates in big cities like New York and Chicago, while a vast, sparse place like Alaska has nothing like California’s infrastructure. With limited resources, governments invested where the most people would benefit. Agriculture works in northern Balochistan around Quetta but not much further south.

So the real question, in his view, has always been how Balochistan can start to generate revenue. He sees three answers emerging, and none of them is purely local.

Path one: minerals, starting with gold and copper

Balochistan’s mineral wealth is old news, but Muzamil puts a number on it. In 2023 the federal government held a conference on Balochistan’s minerals, where an estimate of 6 trillion dollars at today’s value was quoted. He calls it conservative, because no extensive survey has been done. The deposits include gold, copper, silver and iron, plus chromite, fluoride and rare earth minerals that matter for batteries and renewable energy.

He recounts the history of the main gold and copper project as he understands it. In the early 2000s, the government gave the contract to an international company. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, cancelled it through a suo motu case. The company took Pakistan to international arbitration and won, and a 6 billion dollar penalty was imposed in 2020. Pakistan then settled out of court and signed a new agreement.

Under that deal, Barrick Gold holds 50%, the Government of Balochistan 25%, and Pakistan’s state-owned enterprises such as OGDCL 25%. The federal government has been in talks to sell some of that state share to a Saudi investment group. According to Muzamil, the project will see over 3 billion dollars of investment in the next five years and roughly 9 billion over its lifetime. Barrick expects production to start in 2028, generating around 2 billion dollars of revenue a year.

He is careful about what that revenue means. It is not money in the government’s pocket. What Balochistan and Pakistan receive depends on profit after extraction and processing costs. But the project brings jobs, roads, possibly a railway line, water and power. Its foundry will use a lot of electricity, which helps with Pakistan’s capacity payment problem, where too little industrial demand leaves paid-for power unused.

Why believe it this time? Muzamil gives two reasons. Pakistan has already been punished once with the penalty. And the government now understands that its future lies in exports and dollars. Mining is the easiest way for a government to earn, he argues, because large foreign companies bring their own expertise and capital. He notes that Saudi Aramco itself began as an American company working with the Saudis. “The first project is always the hardest,” he says, because it has to lay the infrastructure that later projects use.

Path two: CPEC, Gwadar and China’s backup route

The second force is the one Muzamil thinks most people misunderstand. Many see CPEC as just a road network, or repeat the Western talking point that China wanted to trap Pakistan in debt. He reads it as a geopolitical strategy.

His reasoning runs like this. China’s economy is on track to overtake America’s. China’s production and exports are concentrated on its eastern coast and leave by ship through the South China Sea. In his view, the US Navy’s global reach gives America the power to choke that trade if tensions rise, for example over Taiwan. China has built land routes by rail through Central Asia and Russia to Europe, and CPEC through Gwadar toward the Middle East and Africa.

He points to the Red Sea as a recent example. When shipping toward Israel was blocked from Yemen, an alternate land route through the UAE and Saudi Arabia developed quickly. “As soon as trade is choked in one place, an alternate route starts to fill up,” he says. If China’s sea trade is ever squeezed, he expects the calls, contracts and trucks to turn to Gwadar.

That, he argues, is why China stays patient even though Pakistan rolls over its loans and owes money to Chinese power producers. China spent around 50 billion dollars on CPEC and plans to earn it back through trade. In 2022, China exported 3.7 trillion dollars of goods and imported 2.7 trillion. Even if only a fraction, say 10%, passed through Pakistan, transit and port work would create real revenue and thousands of jobs. “Balochistan is not a nice-to-have for China,” he says. “Balochistan is an inevitability.”

He reads the proposed 10 billion dollar Saudi oil refinery the same way. In his view, it is meant to refine Saudi oil in Pakistan and move it overland to China, as an alternative to the long sea route.

The open question is whether Pakistan will be ready. Will its talent, energy and infrastructure be prepared to scale when China needs the route?

Path three: the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline

The third force is energy. Muzamil says Pakistan’s local gas will be close to zero by 2027, and imported LNG is too expensive to live on. Cheap Iranian gas through a pipeline is, in his words, an inevitability, and India needs it too.

The US has warned repeatedly that it would impose sanctions if Pakistan works on the pipeline, so he does not expect open progress soon. But he notes that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has said Pakistan will find a solution with its partners. He reads this as a likely negotiated exception with the US, and points to a precedent: India kept buying Russian oil under sanctions, and even refined and sold it on to the West.

The pipeline also runs through Balochistan, which makes security there essential. A long pipeline is an easy target for any non-state actor.

A contested province

Each of these projects has a large dollar revenue potential, Muzamil says, and each one threatens somebody’s interests. In his reading, India opposes a working Gwadar because it would strengthen CPEC and China. Gwadar competes with Iran’s Chabahar port. Iranian gas competes with Qatar’s LNG. Several regional players and the US have their own reasons to dislike Iran earning revenue.

“All of these things together create a big mess in Balochistan,” he says, which has let many armed and separatist groups take root. He is clear that local people have real grievances. “But real grievances are always used for a greater game,” he says. Pakistan’s job is to identify and resolve those grievances while protecting the province from outside agendas.

He sees bringing Saudi Arabia into the mining project as a smart geopolitical move for that reason, even though he has questions about its economics and transparency. A country with its own stake in Balochistan has a reason to want stability there.

Gwadar in ten years, and why he is going to Quetta

Muzamil closes with a picture. When he came to Islamabad in the 1990s, it was a small, newly developed city. He gets the same feeling about Gwadar five to ten years from now: an international, Middle East style city with foreigners and global trade. Pakistan cannot build that alone, he says. It needs international alignment, and he thinks the stars have now lined up.

He admits his framework has gaps and data that needs updating. That is why he accepted an invitation to the National Workshop Balochistan, a month-long annual workshop run by the Balochistan government. He was flying to Quetta the next day, with later stops in Peshawar, Islamabad and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, alongside politicians, media figures and business people. He had never been to Balochistan and wanted to meet its people and understand how the state sees the province’s future. He invited viewers to send him questions to carry into those conversations.