In 1948, a brutal insurgency erupted in the dense jungles of Malaya. The Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), which was a communist guerrilla force, launched a wave of assassinations, economic sabotage and ambushes against the British colonial administration and local authorities. The root causes were clear: a massive ethnic Chinese squatter population felt economically marginalised, politically excluded and stripped of land rights. Initially, the British administration made a textbook error. It treated the crisis purely as a military problem. It launched massive, heavy-handed kinetic sweeps through the jungle, burning villages and executing suspected sympathisers. The result? The local population grew more resentful, and the insurgents easily melted back into the jungle, using the people as a shield and a source of intelligence. The government was losing soldiers daily and was trapped in a reactive cycle in which it could not convert military might into actual stability.

Fast-forward to modern Pakistan, and the parallels with Balochistan are striking. Following devastating coordinated attacks across nine districts, in which 42 security personnel were tragically martyred, the CM of Balochistan tweeted that security forces were “successfully” progressing towards neutralising the threat. Okay! But this brings us to a harsh, inescapable truth: Is this a body-count game? The illusion that killing three insurgents for every two soldiers lost is a victory is a dangerous fallacy.

In asymmetric warfare, the........

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