The sound of a ringing phone is something most people ignore. In Mashkay, it is a luxury that can cost a life.
Imagine a town where the air smells of parched earth and cooking fires, but the streets are completely empty. Mashkay sits hidden within the rugged folds of Balochistan, a region where rocky mountains stretch out like jagged teeth against a blinding sky. For weeks, a suffocating silence has hung over this place. It is not the quiet of a peaceful afternoon. It is the heavy, terrifying stillness of a military curfew.
When a town is cut off from the world, the first thing to vanish is not food. It is information. Communication lines have been severed. Signals are dead. To find out if a relative is still breathing, a person must risk walking into the crosshairs of an checkpoint. The local markets, once vibrant with the noise of bartering and the scent of crushed spices, are locked down behind rusted iron shutters.
The dry facts of a news briefing tell us that military operations are underway to root out insurgents. They tell us that security measures require restrictions on movement. But a spreadsheet cannot capture the desperation of a mother watching her child’s fever climb in the dead of night, knowing that stepping outside her front door could mean facing a bullet.
The Invisible Borders of Survival
In places like Mashkay, survival is dictated by a clock you cannot see. The curfew is total. It transforms the simple act of existing into a series of high-stakes gambles.
Consider a hypothetical resident named Murad. He is a farmer whose livelihood depends on tending to a small grove of date palms and a few head of livestock. Under normal circumstances, his days are defined by hard, honest labor. But under an indefinite curfew, Murad’s world shrinks to the four walls of his mud-brick home. His goats are bleating from hunger just a few hundred yards away, but to feed them is to violate an order. To violate an order is to become a target.
The structural reality of these operations is rarely discussed in the press releases issued in distant capitals. When a counter-insurgency operation is launched, the immediate objective is isolation. The state aims to cut off the oxygen supplying militant groups. However, the net cast by the military is often so wide that it traps the innocent alongside the accused.
Food supplies do not magically replenish themselves when a town is locked down. Flour mills stop grinding. Trucks carrying essential goods from the larger hubs of Hub or Quetta are turned back at checkpoints. Within days, the local supply chain collapses. Price gouging begins in secret. A single bag of rice becomes worth its weight in silver.
This is the hidden mechanics of a humanitarian crisis. It is a slow-motion disaster that happens behind closed doors, away from the lenses of international journalists who are strictly barred from entering the zone. The state defines this as a temporary necessity for national security. For the people living through it, it feels like a collective punishment.
When Medicine Becomes a Contraband
The true cruelty of a prolonged curfew reveals itself in the clinics and hospitals—or rather, the lack thereof. Mashkay is already geographically isolated. The roads leading to it are unpaved, winding tracks that punish any vehicle attempting to traverse them.
When the military enforces a strict lockdown, medical emergencies become death sentences.
Think about the local healthcare workers. They are caught in an impossible vice. To treat a patient who has broken curfew is to invite suspicion of aiding the enemy. Pharmacies run out of basic antibiotics within a week. Insulin spoils because the electricity grid, unreliable at the best of times, is completely shut off during operations.
The human body does not care about military strategy. Chronic illnesses do not pause because a government has declared an emergency. Appendices still burst. Women still go into labor.
During these operations, giving birth becomes a terrifying gamble. Without access to a midwife or a functional clinic, families are forced to manage complicated deliveries on kitchen floors by the light of a cell phone battery. If something goes wrong, there is no ambulance to call. The silence outside the window is absolute, broken only by the occasional rumble of a military convoy patrolling the empty roads.
The Mathematics of Displacement
The state often argues that these measures are short-term disruptions necessary to ensure long-term peace. They point to the threat of Baloch insurgent groups who have targeted infrastructure and security forces for decades. The grievance of the state is real; soldiers are dying in ambush attacks, and the sovereignty of the nation is challenged.
But the mathematics of this strategy are fundamentally flawed.
Every day a child goes hungry because of a curfew, a seed of resentment is planted. Every time a father is humiliated at a checkpoint while trying to buy medicine for his daughter, the distance between the periphery and the center grows wider. The state tries to win the territory, but in doing so, it permanently loses the people.
This pattern is not unique to Mashkay. It is a script that has been played out in conflict zones across the globe for centuries. The playbook relies on intimidation and total control. Yet, history shows that instead of crushing the spirit of rebellion, heavy-handed tactics often act as the premier recruitment tool for the very insurgencies the military is trying to destroy.
Consider what happens next: the operation eventually ends. The checkpoints are dismantled, or at least loosened. The soldiers return to their barracks. What is left behind? A community shattered by trauma, an economy in ruins, and a younger generation that views the uniform not as a symbol of protection, but as the face of oppression.
The World That Looks Away
The most agonizing part of the crisis in Mashkay is the sense of complete abandonment. The internet blackout ensures that no videos escape to social media. No trending hashtags bring international condemnation. The global community remains largely indifferent to the struggles of Balochistan, viewing it through the murky lens of geopolitics and regional alliances.
Pakistan’s domestic media operates under a thick blanket of self-censorship. Editors know exactly which lines cannot be crossed. To report extensively on human rights abuses in Balochistan is to risk a sudden shutdown or the mysterious disappearance of journalists. Therefore, the suffering of Mashkay is reduced to a three-line mention on the back page of a newspaper, framed entirely as a successful operation against "anti-state elements."
But truth has a way of leaking through the cracks of even the tightest blockades. It comes out in the whispered phone calls made from the tops of distant hills where a single bar of signal can sometimes be caught. It comes out in the eyes of the families who eventually manage to flee the valley, arriving in the slums of Karachi with nothing but the clothes on their backs and stories of a town that became a prison.
The dust in Mashkay will eventually settle. The shops will reopen, and the people will walk the streets once more, their faces hardened by another chapter of survival. But the silence that was forced upon them will remain, echoing in the spaces where trust used to live, a quiet reminder of what happens when a state chooses power over its own people.
