Pakistan’s provinces are pulling in opposite directions on private weapons. In the past three weeks, Sindh ordered a province-wide halt on new arms licences, and interior officials told a Senate committee that federal approvals of non-prohibited bore licences had fallen by more than 90 percent — to 5,700 in 13 months, down from over 100,000 a year earlier. Balochistan, the province most battered by militancy, is doing something different. It is keeping licensing open while digitising it.
Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti launched a fully digitised licence centre in Quetta in August 2024 and said the model would be extended across the province. Licences are now issued as smart cards valid for five years, with NADRA supporting the conversion, and holders of old paper licences were given a limited window to switch before theirs were cancelled. The project had been pending since 2017, when a 2017 agreement with NADRA targeted around 300,000 manual licences in the province.
Two more changes this year shape how the system will work. In July, Balochistan launched an e-domicile system with NADRA, which officials say will curb middlemen and fake certificates once fully operational. That matters because a Balochistan domicile is the gateway to a licence, and Bugti himself acknowledged complaints about misuse of the certificate. On 29 July the provincial cabinet declared the entire province a regular police area after merging the Levies force into the police, so one force is now responsible for enforcing whatever the registry records.
The scale of the problem
The Small Arms Survey estimated in 2017 that Pakistani civilians held about 44 million firearms, the fourth-largest civilian stockpile in the world, and by most accounts only a small fraction is registered. Unregulated craft production feeds an informal market that never appears in official data. Both estimates are dated, which is itself part of the problem: the state does not know what it is trying to regulate.
Digitised licensing will not end Balochistan’s insurgency, and it should not be sold as though it would – but it can help remove the anonymity that lets weapons slide between legal and illegal hands
The violence is severe. PICSS recorded 3,387 combat-related deaths across Pakistan in 2025, up 73 percent on 2024, with several indicators at their highest in a decade. CRSS found that Balochistan runs the opposite way to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where security operations kill more people than terrorism does: in the first eleven months of 2025, terrorist attacks in Balochistan killed 517 security personnel and civilians, more than the 379 who died in security operations there. In March 2025 Baloch Liberation Army militants hijacked the Jaffar Express and held more than 300 passengers hostage, according to the US State Department. In May 2026 a suicide bombing on a shuttle train in Quetta, claimed by the BLA, killed more than 30 people.
What digitisation can do
It binds a licence to a verified person. NADRA’s biometric records replace paper files that were open to forgery. A federal revalidation campaign that closed in December 2015 computerised more than 180,000 licences, and NADRA said around 8,000 others were found to be bogus.
It links a weapon to a sale. The deputy commissioner’s procedure in Quetta requires the dealer’s purchase receipt to enter a weapon on the record, and digitising that step creates a searchable trail between dealer and owner.
It gives police something to check. Officials in Quetta said action would follow against people carrying weapons without a computerised licence, and NADRA said it planned to put licences on phones so they could be verified on the spot. That step was announced in 2024, and I could not confirm whether it has been delivered.
The limits
Digitisation will not disarm insurgents. The weapons that most alarm Pakistani officials are military equipment, not items sold on a provincial licence. The Washington Post reported that the US Army and the Pentagon confirmed that 63 weapons Pakistan showed reporters, mostly M16 rifles with some M4 carbines, had been supplied to Afghan forces. The Pentagon told Congress that nearly $7.2 billion of equipment was left behind in Afghanistan, and analysts say it has boosted both the Pakistani Taliban and Baloch separatist groups. Watchdogs including the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and the UN have been unable to verify that all of it remains solely with the Taliban. Nor does a registry touch a vehicle bomb.
The gain is indirect. A clean registry narrows the grey zone in which illicit weapons hide behind legitimate paperwork, lets police treat an unlicensed weapon as a warning sign rather than a norm, and, when a weapon is recovered, gives investigators a starting point for finding its last legal owner. The evidence that registries reduce terrorism specifically is thin; the case rests on tracing and enforcement, not proven causation.
There is also a fair objection. Keeping licensing open may enlarge the civilian arsenal just as Islamabad and Karachi are tightening. Balochistan’s answer is that a visible, traceable market is easier to police than a hidden one. That is a bet, not a finding.
Tracing is the currency of international arms control. The 2001 UN Programme of Action commits states to reliable marking, cooperation on tracing and better national regulation, and the 2005 International Tracing Instrument frames tracing as following a weapon from its manufacture or last import to its last legal title-holder. Under Sustainable Development Goal 16.4, states have pledged to significantly reduce illicit arms flows by 2030, measured by the share of seized, found or surrendered arms whose illicit origin has been traced. A province that cannot say who owns a licensed weapon cannot contribute to that number.
Europe offers a template and a warning. The EU Directive on weapons requires member states to keep a computerised firearms register, newly made or imported firearms to carry a unique marking, and records to be kept for 30 years after a weapon is destroyed. It also requires police access to comply with privacy protections under the European Convention on Human Rights. Balochistan will need equivalent rules on who may see its data, especially in a province with an active separatist insurgency.
The stakes are geopolitical too. Washington designated the BLA and its Majeed Brigade a Foreign Terrorist Organisation in August 2025, citing among other attacks a 2024 suicide attack near the Gwadar Port Authority Complex. The AP noted the move came less than two weeks after a US-Pakistan trade agreement expected to let American firms help develop oil reserves in Balochistan. Where foreign capital and strategic ports are involved, provincial arms control stops being a purely provincial matter.
Digitised licensing will not end Balochistan’s insurgency, and it should not be sold as though it would. What it can do is remove the anonymity that lets weapons slide between legal and illegal hands, and give investigators in Pakistan and abroad a paper trail they now lack. Its credibility will rest on three tests. First, whether serial numbers, not just owners, enter the register. Second, whether the police, who now cover a province where the Levies once held about 90 percent of the territory, can enforce it. Third, whether the public is told in numbers how many licences have been digitised. No such tally has surfaced in reporting to date.