Operation Shaban, Pakistan’s renewed counterinsurgency (COIN) and counter-terrorism (CT) surge, has put the Pakistan Army Aviation Corps (PAA) back into sustained, large-scale combat employment for the first time in a decade – and, not least, with an open-ended timeline.
Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Pakistan Army’s press wing, describes the ongoing COIN/CT campaign in Balochistan as a “large-scale air and ground offensive” that will continue indefinitely.
Currently, the campaign operates across two theatres against two separate insurgencies – i.e., the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) in the south, around Lasbela and Khuzdar, and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the north, around Ziarat.
Today’s events echo an observation Quwa had made in a recent Market Intelligence brief on the PAA – i.e., historically, General Headquarters (GHQ) only invested in new rotary attack and transport platforms when faced with an enduring COIN/CT challenge.
The caveat to Operation Shaban, despite maintaining an open-ended timeline, is that it is unclear if GHQ considers the COIN/CT to be of the same magnitude of importance as it had in the late 2000s (in the midst of the sequential operations, e.g., Rah-e-Rast, Rah-e-Nijat, etc.).
However, given the strong – and growing – economic importance of Balochistan (e.g., the growing use of the Gwadar port, mineral resources, and potentially a gas pipeline from Iran), the persistent insecurity and instability of the province, and pressure to resolve the volatility (both overt from foreign partners like China and implicit in the need for security to encourage investment), GHQ has major incentives to not only focus on COIN/CT along its western frontiers, but to maintain standing COIN/CT capabilities.
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