In the exchange now circulating online, Kiyya Baloch rebukes Hamid Mir for airing unverified claims, then moves to a larger defense: that governance failures and security excesses in Balochistan have pushed locals toward armed action and abduction. That formulation matters. A serious journalist can and should demand verification. But once the argument shifts from verification to explanation that softens abduction, hostage taking, and attacks on civilians, it stops being a media ethics point and starts sounding like political laundering for armed coercion. Even if one accepts that Balochistan has suffered neglect, abuse, censorship, and disappearances, none of that turns kidnapping into legitimacy. It only shows how easily a valid grievance can be used to blur a moral line that should remain bright.
The strongest version of the pro insurgent argument begins with a truth. Balochistan has long carried a heavy burden of enforced disappearances, political mistrust, weak civilian governance, and abusive overreach by state institutions. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and United Nations experts have all raised serious alarm over disappearances, arbitrary detention, and the treatment of protesters and activists. Anyone who denies that record is not describing the province honestly. But acknowledging state abuse is not the same as excusing insurgent abuse. The moment armed groups pull passengers off buses after checking identity cards, storm work camps, attack ports and bases, bomb railway stations, or seize a passenger train and threaten executions, they forfeit the right to hide behind the language of grievance alone.
Grievance may explain rage. It does not excuse hostage taking
That is why the Kiyya line, as summarized in the public exchange, ends up proving the opposite of what it intends. If the defense is that bad governance has driven people to abduction, then abduction is no longer being denied. It is being rationalized. That is not a small shift. It is the heart of the matter. It asks the public to look at armed groups not as kidnappers and hostage takers, but as damaged political actors reacting to circumstances. Yet the recent record is plain. BLA operations have included major assaults in Gwadar and Turbat in March 2024, coordinated attacks across Balochistan in August 2024, a deadly strike near Karachi airport in October 2024, the Quetta railway station bombing in November 2024, the execution style killing of bus passengers in February 2025, and the Jaffar Express hijacking in March 2025. That is not symbolic resistance. That is an escalating campaign of organized violence.
This is where the provincial and federal response also deserves hard criticism. The state has not been soft in rhetoric. It has spoken the language of force for years. But it has been soft in outcome, soft in deterrence, and soft in strategic clarity. A government cannot claim success while militants keep demonstrating operational reach, propaganda discipline, and the ability to hit soldiers, infrastructure, foreign targets, public transport, and civilians. If repeated mass casualty attacks are followed by the same official script of condemnation, denial, and short term operations, then the result is not authority. It is drift.
In that limited but important sense, critics are right to say the government has been too soft, not because it used too little force in the abstract, but because it failed to build credible, lawful, sustained deterrence
Still, the answer is not the crude slogan of tit for tat. A state cannot outbid insurgents by copying their methods. Collective punishment, disappearances, torture, media blackouts, and loose talk about traitors only feed the cycle. Every rights report on Balochistan points to the same trap: abuse by the state deepens mistrust, mistrust fuels radicalization, and radicalization gives militants a larger recruitment pool. So the real alternative is not softness versus revenge. It is weakness versus lawful firmness. It is impunity versus intelligence led policing, prosecution, witness protection, border control, financial disruption, and political seriousness.
A serious response begins by refusing two lies at once. The first lie says there is no state abuse in Balochistan. The second says state abuse turns abduction into understandable politics. Both lies are destructive. The province needs a state that is strong enough to crush kidnapping networks and armed cells under law, and honest enough to investigate disappearances, punish officials who act outside the law, and reopen political space for peaceful dissent. That is the only way to separate the angry citizen from the armed recruiter.
It also strips commentators of the easy habit of wrapping hostage takers in the language of victimhood
Kiyya Baloch may have intended to expose state failure. Instead, the argument now attached to his response does something else. It shows how quickly a discourse of rights can slide into apology for coercion when it refuses to call abduction by its proper name. Balochistan does need truth about state excess. It also needs moral clarity about insurgent violence. Any public voice that blurs that distinction does not rescue the people of Balochistan. It rescues the image of the men who kidnap, bomb, and hold civilians hostage, then ask to be read as the wounded conscience of a neglected land. They are not. They are armed actors using fear as politics, and the state must answer them with law, capacity, and resolve, not drift, not denial, and not borrowed excuses.
