Balochistan’s minerals sector gets security boost

EDITORIAL: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s recent directive to deploy the Frontier Corps across Balochistan’s Rakhshan Division in a bid to establish a dedicated security corridor for the province’s minerals sector is a necessary and long overdue measure aimed at safeguarding an area with the potential to become one of Pakistan’s most consequential economic assets.

The decision was taken during a meeting of the Provincial Apex Committee of the National Action Plan in Quetta, which reviewed Balochistan’s security situation and the progress of development projects there. For decades, the country’s vast mineral reserves have remained largely underdeveloped, constrained by rampant insecurity, poor governance and chronic institutional neglect. Without credible security arrangements, then, no serious effort to build a viable mining industry has any hope of succeeding.

Balochistan, along with parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the northern regions, is believed to hold substantial reserves of rare earth elements and other critical minerals increasingly indispensable to the global economy, forming the backbone of industries that will shape the future, from renewable energy and electric vehicles to advanced computing, telecommunications and defence technologies.

Beyond extraction, however, lies the more consequential opportunity: with investments in processing, refinement and downstream manufacturing, Pakistan can move up the value chain and avoid confining itself to the role of a mere supplier of raw inputs. This could prove central to the country’s economic revival by easing pressure on external finances, attracting greater FDI, diversifying exports and transitioning the economy from primary production towards more sophisticated, globally integrated industrial activity. Pakistan, then, stands before a significant economic and strategic opportunity provided it can create the stability, security, research ecosystem and infrastructure necessary to harness it.

Right now, the sector’s current annual output of barely USD2 billion against some estimates placing Pakistan’s mineral wealth in the trillions stands as a glaring indictment of prolonged policy inertia, exacerbated by two decades of sustained militancy in Balochistan. Successive governments have failed to curb terrorism that has left thousands dead and allowed violence and a pervasive sense of insecurity to become entrenched features of daily life.

In such an environment, commercial activity has inevitably become vulnerable, with mining and other economic ventures repeatedly targeted by terrorist groups, most recently in last month’s attack on a mining site in Chagai district while an undertaking as consequential as the Reko Diq project has also remained in the crosshairs of an unpredictable and fragile security landscape.

Disrupting militant networks and eroding their operational reach, then, remains an urgent imperative, alongside improving intelligence-led policing and tightening coordination between civilian counter-terrorism bodies and security institutions, and one hopes that the security corridor in Rakhshan Division reinforces these efforts by establishing a more structured and continuous security footprint in a strategically sensitive area.

Security gains alone, however, will not suffice unless accompanied by a fundamental shift in how the sector is developed. Pakistan must move beyond rudimentary extraction practices towards a modern, research-driven mining ecosystem that prioritises efficiency, safety and value addition by strengthening capabilities for downstream utilisation of extracted ores.

For this, the development of a state-of-the-art geosciences and mineral research framework to improve exploration techniques, refine extraction methods and build technical expertise for effective downstream utilisation is essential.

In this context, the petroleum minister’s recent meeting with the Japanese ambassador, which explored collaboration in geosciences and mineral research through the Geoscience Advanced Research Laboratories signals a potentially important step towards institutional capacity-building and international technical partnerships in a sector long constrained by outdated practices and limited scientific investment.

Taken together, strengthened security arrangements and a sustained shift towards research-led, value-added mineral development could help break past inertia and lay the groundwork for a more secure and economically productive mining sector.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026