Max Bearak at the Washington Post on the dreadful situation in Baluchistan:

Baluchistan is a place that desperately needs lawyers.

Pakistan’s largest province by area, it is the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency, fueled by real grievances over neglect and lack of political representation. It is also increasingly the target of Sunni extremists, who bomb and kill its Shiite minorities. What leaders the province has are widely considered corrupt. Dozens of local journalists have been kidnapped in the past few years. It is nearly impossible for foreign reporters to enter Baluchistan. Lawyers are almost all that give the province a semblance of justice.

And now a large percentage of them have been slaughtered.

They were packed into an emergency room where the body of a slain colleague lay, riddled with gunshot wounds. A widely circulated video showed lawyers milling about the hospital before an enormous explosion. A Pakistani Taliban offshoot claimed the attack, as did the Islamic State, though analysts say the latter’s claim is dubious.

And it’s not as if it will be easy to replace them. If you were a lawyer would you want to move to Baluchistan?

The global response has been muted. Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton and other international figures issued brief statements. Pakistan’s leaders did much the same. No officials have been held responsible for the security breakdown at what should have been a highly guarded scene. The website of Dawn, a Pakistani English-language newspaper, had only a day-old story and photo gallery about the attack on its homepage on Tuesday evening.

The response should not be muted.

Photo of lawyers killed in #QuettaAttack shared widely on Twitter.Many mourning a'generation of lawyers'#QuettaBlast pic.twitter.com/1rXPd42659

— shaimaa khalil BBC (@Shaimaakhalil) August 9, 2016