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Gunmen kill dozens of people taken from vehicles in Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province
Quetta, Pakistan — Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan killed at least 31 people in two separate attacks on Monday and security forces killed 12 insurgents, officials said, in one of the deadliest days of violence in the restive Baluchistan province, with reports of other shootings and destruction in the area. Twenty-three people were fatally shot after being identified and taken from buses and trucks in Musakhail, a district in Baluchistan, senior police official Ayub Achakzai said. The attackers burned at least 10 vehicles before fleeing.
In a separate attack, gunmen killed at least nine people, including four police officers and five passersby, in Qalat district also in Baluchistan, authorities said.
Insurgents blew up a railway track in Bolan, attacked a police station in Mastung and attacked and burned vehicles in Gwadar, all districts in Baluchistan. No casualties were reported in those attacks.
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The attacks came just hours after Pakistani authorities said two separate bus accidents, just hours apart, had left at least 35 people dead and dozens more injured. The first of the crashes happened when a bus carrying Shiite Muslim pilgrims returning from Iraq through Iran fell from a highway into a ravine in Baluchistan, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more, police and officials said. The second crash on Sunday was in Punjab province. Police did not suggest any criminal activity behind the deadly crashes.
Baluchistan has been the scene of a long-running insurgency in Pakistan, with an array of separatist groups staging attacks, mainly on security forces. The separatists have been demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. Although Pakistani authorities say they have quelled the insurgency, violence in Baluchistan has persisted.
The attack in Musakhail came hours after the outlawed Baluch Liberation Army separatist group warned people to stay away from highways as they launched attacks on security forces in various parts of the province.
But there there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest killings.
In a statement on Monday, the BLA only said it inflicted heavy losses on security forces in attacks in the province. Pakistan’s military and government did not immediately comment on that claim. The group often provides exaggerated figures of troop casualties.
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Separatists are known to ask people for their ID cards, and then abduct or kill those who are from outside the province. Many recent victims have come from neighboring Punjab province.
Uzma Bukhari, a spokesperson for the Punjab provincial government, denounced the latest killings on Monday, saying the “attacks are a matter of grave concern” and urging the Baluchistan provincial government to “step up efforts to eliminate BLA terrorists.”
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said in a statement that security forces in Baluchistan responded to the latest attacks on Monday, killing 12 insurgents. He said authorities would reveal who was behind the latest attacks after completing an investigation, but noted that “terrorists and their facilitators will have no place to hide” in the country.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Interior Minister Naqvi in separate statements called the attack in Musakhail “barbaric” and vowed that those behind it would not escape justice.
Later, Naqvi also condemned the killings in Qalat
In May, gunmen fatally shot seven barbers in Gwadar, a port city in Baluchistan.
In April, separatists killed nine people after abducting them from a bus on a highway in Baluchistan, and the attackers also killed two people and wounded six in another car they forced to stop. BLA claimed responsibility for those attacks at the time.
Syed Muhammad Ali, an Islamabad-based security analyst, said the latest killings of non-Baluch people are an attempt by separatists to harm the province economically.
Ali told The Associated Press that most such attacks are carried out with the aim to economically weaken Baluchistan, noting that “the weakening of Baluchistan means the weakening of Pakistan.”
He said insurgent attacks could hamper development work being done in the province.
Separatists in Baluchistan have often killed workers and others from the country’s eastern Punjab region as part of a campaign to force them to leave the province, which for years has experienced a low-level insurgency.
Most such previous killings have been blamed on the outlawed group and others demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. The Pakistani Taliban also have a presence in the province, and they are closely connected to the BLA.
In a separate attack on Monday in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, a roadside bomb killed four people and wounded 12 others in North Waziristan district, said local administration official Abid Khan.
The Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, is a separate group but allied with the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 as U.S. and NATO troops were in the final stages of their pullout from the country after 20 years of war.
President-elect Donald Trump made claims about the history of U.S. tariff collection as he defended his plan to raise tariffs on goods from countries like China and Mexico in a news conference this week, claims historians say are at odds with the facts.
In particular, Trump exaggerated the impact of tariff hikes during his first term, falsely claiming that “no other president took in 10 cents” of revenue from trade collections on Chinese imports. Trump also pointed to 19th-century tariff increases championed by former President William McKinley as evidence that his plan could benefit the economy.
But data shows the federal government had been taking in billions in revenue from tariffs on Chinese imports long before Trump came to office, and historians say the high tariff era of the 1890s was economically rocky for Americans.
Tariffs are taxes on imports, often charged as a percentage of the price that importers pay foreign sellers. They aren’t paid by foreign nations, but by U.S. companies who often pass the cost to American consumers by raising prices.
In his next term, Trump has pledged to put an additional 10% levy on all Chinese goods, along with a 25% tariff on all products from Mexico and Canada. Americans spend more than $1 trillion on goods from those three countries each year, according to data from the Census Bureau.
What Trump gets wrong about history of tariffs on China
In his news conference this week, Trump repeated a claim he made frequently on the campaign trail: that his predecessors essentially took in no money from tariffs on Chinese goods, while his administration took in billions.
Tariffs on Chinese imports have existed since the 1700s, generating billions in revenue for years before Trump came into office.
During President Barack Obama’s final year in office, tariff revenue from Chinese imports totaled over $12 billion, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission. That amount increased after Trump’s first round of tariff hikes to over $22 billion, the same federal data shows.
Trump did dramatically raise the total revenue generated from Chinese imports by adding tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods. However, even with that increase, tariff collections have not accounted for much more than 2% of federal revenue at any point in the last 70 years, according to the Congressional Research Service this month.
The president-elect has argued his tariff plan for his next term could bring in revenue to help defray the cost of income tax cuts. Goldman Sachs estimated that Trump’s proposed levies on goods from China, Mexico and Canada could generate just under $300 billion in tariff revenue per year, which would be up from $77 billion in fiscal year 2024.
But tariffs had not been viewed as a primary way to raise revenue since the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, said Judith Goldstein, a political science professor at Stanford.
“As the U.S. became more involved in the world, the effect of tariffs on domestic production and prices were increasingly a problem,” Goldstein said.
Trump has also repeatedly argued his tariff plan will help protect U.S. companies. There’s some evidence that the customs duties he imposed in his first term boosted jobs in specific industries like washing machine manufacturing, according to research from the Brookings Institution, a think tank. However, manufacturers also faced higher costs for raw materials and retaliatory tariffs from other nations, according to the Federal Reserve.
What Trump gets wrong about the McKinley tariffs
This week, Trump also cited McKinley’s 1890 tariff hikes as evidence that these customs taxes can enrich the U.S.
“You go back and look at the 1890s, 1880s, McKinley, and you take a look at tariffs, that was when we were proportionately the richest,” Trump said.
In 1890, tariff hikes raised the average duties on foreign imports from 38% to nearly 50%. McKinley, a representative for Ohio at the time, pushed for the taxes to protect his state’s steelworkers from foreign competition, according to Dartmouth College economics professor Doug Irwin.
However, the decade that followed these hikes was marked by economic trouble.
“The U.S. went into a depression in 1893, and we didn’t really emerge out of it until the mid-1890s. So in general the 1890s was not a great decade for the U.S. economy,” Irwin said.
Additionally, McKinley’s tariff bill raised prices of goods like shoes and clothes, leading to voter backlash that cost Republicans 93 seats in the next election, according to the House of Representatives Office of the Historian.
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for clarification on why he said America was “proportionately the richest” after this bill passed.
Historic data shows gross domestic product per capita for Americans has vastly increased from about $6,400 in the early 1890s (in 2017 dollars) to roughly $69,000 today (in 2024 dollars).
“It is unclear why he’s picking on the 1890s as this golden age. It wasn’t considered good times, at least by the people living through it at the time,” Irwin said.
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