Pakistan: A Hard Country (64 page)
My interview with General Wynne il ustrated the way in which the Pakistani army is repeatedly drawn into managing wider areas of the state. This is not always because the generals want this, but because of an iron logic proceeding both from the fact that the armed forces constitute by far the most efficient and coherent institution of that state, and that in the NWFP and Balochistan economic development has a critical security dimension. It has to be protected from insurgency, and it can contribute to defeating insurgency.
Thus our conversation began with the usual ritualistic declaration on the part of the general that the army has no interest in once again becoming involved in politics and government, and wishes to concentrate on its core tasks of defending the country against external aggression and defeating domestic insurgency. He said that while the army is ultimately responsible for internal security within Balochistan, it is not involved in operations against the present insurgency, which are the business of the Frontier Corps.
The interview ended with the general describing how the army is closely involved in the management of the big coal mine being developed at Chamalang near Balochistan’s border with Punjab and Sindh, which in 2007 – 9 produced around 1 mil ion tons of coal. This is in a mixed Pathan – Baloch area, where Marri tribesmen have traditional grazing rights, and a violent dispute broke out between them over access to benefits from the mine, which for many years held up its development. In 2006 the army was invited to settle this dispute, and to guarantee the resulting agreement.
This involved recruiting and paying Marri tribesmen as local police (levies), and a development fund from the profits of the mine to be spent on schools, roads and health care to benefit both the Pathans and the Marris. ‘This is something that I am real y proud of, that we are involved in nation-building,’ the general told me. Al this also has a security dimension. In the general’s view, the deal over Chamalang has contributed greatly to persuading Marris not to join the present insurgency.16 It wil be very interesting to see if – as has been proposed – the army now starts taking a key part in running other mining projects in Balochistan and elsewhere, and distributing the benefits to the local population. The army wil in any case have to be present at these sites in order to protect them from the insurgents.
The question of just how much wealth lies underneath Balochistan is the subject of crazed nationalist myth-making, with stories abounding of Balochistan ‘having more oil than Kuwait’, and so on. Having talked to geologists, the truth appears to me to be that Balochistan probably has very little oil, and few major new gas fields left to discover. What it does have, however, is very large amounts of copper, together with lesser amounts of gold.
The Chinese corporation running the Saindak mine as of 2010
processes around 15,000 tonnes of ore a day. Informed (as opposed to mythical) estimates for the Reko Diq field near the borders with Afghanistan and Iran range up to 16 mil ion tonnes of pure copper and 21 mil ion ounces of gold, which if developed would make Pakistan one of the world’s largest producers of copper (though stil far behind Chile), and a serious gold producer. A joint Canadian – Chilean consortium (Tethyan Copper) plans to invest up to $3 bil ion in Reko Diq’s development (leading to the inevitable paranoid headline on the pakalert website, ‘Reko Diq Mystery: Why Neocons and Zionists are after Balochistan?’).17
Reko Diq could be of great benefit to Pakistan and Balochistan – or it could lead to explosive disputes between them, and among the Baloch themselves, as has been the case with both Sui Gas and Gwadar Port. The most obvious solution to distributing the benefits of mines like Reko Diq would be something like the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests a proportion (in effect 11 per cent) of the proceeds of Alaskan oil for the long-term benefit of the population of Alaska, above al in terms of investment in infrastructure, services and water conservation.
Especial y water conservation. Although Balochistan’s population is so smal , it is stil far too large for the province’s water resources, unless the use of water is radical y improved. At present, the Quetta val ey in particular is beginning to look like my grim prediction for Sindh and even Pakistan a few decades down the line: mil ions of people trying to survive in a desert. Over the past fifty years, water experts in Quetta told me, draining by tube-wel s has made the local water table sink from 40 feet to more than 800 feet below the ground.
In ‘Settler Town’, in the mid-1990s, the water table was at 200 feet.
Now it is at 1,200 feet, and there is in any case less and less to bring up. Many of the local tube-wel s and manual wel s are now dry, and much of the population has to buy its water from tankers. Settler Town contains approximately 200,000 people. It goes without saying that the state’s water-pipe system is now permanently dry. In the grim judgement of Andrew Arthur of the UNHCR, ‘In another ten years or so, the water table in parts of the Quetta val ey wil be below 2,000 feet and people wil start to migrate out, as has already happened in Sibi, Chaghi and Dalbandia, where the situation is even worse.’18
The two natural springs which created an oasis in the Quetta val ey and were responsible for the creation of Quetta itself have both long since dried up. A new water pipeline is being built from the hil s to supply drinking water to the city, but what wil become of local agriculture if this goes on no one likes to think. Moreover, corruption and changes of government mean that this pipeline is already three years behind schedule. An urgent need is for more smal earthen dams to trap rainwater, since what little there is in Balochistan at present mostly goes to waste, and for the replacement of private tube-wel s with metred government windmil -pumps that bring up a little at a time and cannot be used for the dreadful y wasteful ‘flood irrigation’.
So there would be an immense amount of valuable work to be done by a long-term infrastructure fund drawing on the profits of Balochistan’s gas and mineral wealth. The problem is that, left to Baloch Sardari politicians to administer such a fund, there is no way that most would save anything for the future, or for the benefit of Balochistan as a whole. Everything would be spent on short-term gains for themselves and their fol owers. This would actual y increase discontent both among educated Baloch and in the tribes in the immediate vicinity of the mines.
If the army or some other Pakistani national institution were made responsible for distributing the benefits of extractive industries to the population, their task would therefore involve a huge and perhaps impossible degree of diplomacy. This is something at which the Pakistani army and state in Balochistan have a decidedly mixed record. In general they have not done too badly, aided by the fragmentary and feuding nature of Baloch tribal society. Sometimes, however, they have slipped up very badly indeed, as in the death of Sardar Akbar Bugti.
Like other senior officers, General Wynne now admits that the army seriously mishandled its treatment of Bugti and Bugti’s death. Like them, he claims that the Pakistani army did not in fact kil Bugti (which is highly doubtful) and (which has been confirmed to me by several different sources) that they were in fact negotiating with him to the very end. The general was open in his personal contempt for Bugti, whom he described as interested only in his own family and fol owers and doing nothing to spread the benefits of Sui Gas among his tribesmen, let alone Balochistan as a whole. He said that when, as a young officer, he had asked Bugti about his representatives stealing the workers’ wages, Bugti had just laughed at him dismissively.
On the other hand, the general said, there is no good seeing things in Balochistan in terms of black and white: Everything here is shades of grey. Here you have to be street smart. Or to put it another way, you need to be a little bit of a rascal to understand this part of the world. You always have to be prepared to negotiate with your enemies – who knows, they may change sides and become your al ies tomorrow. That is something the Americans stil haven’t understood in Afghanistan ... That is why you can meet in Quetta many nationalist politicians who have declared themselves to be rebels against Pakistan, but who we deliberately haven’t touched.
When it comes to dealing with Akbar Bugti, the overwhelming majority of Pakistani political, media and elite opinion – including liberal opinion – agrees with General Wynne that the state and army should have gone on negotiating with him even after he took up arms and started kil ing Pakistani soldiers. Indeed, there have even been demands not just from Baloch nationalists but from liberal human rights lobbyists that Musharraf be tried for his murder. Certainly everyone sensible agrees that it is necessary to negotiate with radical-sounding Baloch nationalists in an effort to wean them away from the real hardliners. Given that these Baloch rebels are not exactly progressive people, this makes an interesting contrast with the attitude of Pakistani liberals to the attempts of the state and army to negotiate with Islamist militants in the Pathan areas and elsewhere. These attempts have been denounced not just as foolish and hopeless but as evidence of sinister hidden sympathy and cooperation between the military and the Pakistani Taleban.
The reality seems to me rather different, and wil be explored in the fol owing chapters. Certain sympathies and strategic calculations concerning the Taleban have existed; but the main underlying theme has been a different one, characteristic of the Pakistani state in many areas including Balochistan. This theme involves a chaotic but often in the end fairly effective mixture of continual negotiation and bargaining, with intermittent brutal force. As is obvious, this mixture failed in the end when dealing with the Pakistani Taleban; but as wil be seen in the fol owing chapters, the way in which it failed has also been crucial to Pakistan’s success against the Taleban.
10
The Pathans
The very name Pakhtun spells honour and glory,
Lacking that honour what is the Afghan story?
In the sword alone lies our deliverance, The sword wherein is our predominance, Whereby in days long past we ruled in Hind; But concord we know not, and we have sinned.
(Khushal Khan Khattak)1
One way of looking at the Pathans of Pakistan is as eighteenth-century Scots without the alcohol.2 Here we have a people with a proud history of independence, often bitterly resentful of their incorporation in a new state – and yet many of whom at the same time draw tremendous advantages from membership of that state, most of which is much richer than their own stony pastures. The already poor province has been impoverished stil further in recent years, first by the war with the Pakistani Taleban, then by the floods of 2010 which hit this region worst of al . A Pakistani Dr Johnson could wel say of his Pathan compatriots that ‘the noblest prospect a Pathan ever sees is the high road that leads him to Punjab.’
Not that many Pathans would admit that, even the ones actual y living in Punjab. Pathan ethnic pride is notorious. Just as completely integrated Scots in the British establishment have often at heart remained proud and even resentful Scots, so I heard a senior Pakistani civil servant in Peshawar railing against the Punjabis whose industrialists, he said, were sucking the North West Frontier Province dry and who had blocked his own advancement within the central civil service. And yet this man would as soon have wished for an independent Pakhtunkhwa linked to Afghanistan as he would have wished for a union with Pluto. Nor indeed was his own family united on this: his daughter, employed in Islamabad, growled in response, ‘And what have Pashtuns ever done for themselves? They just sit there asking Islamabad for subsidies.’
It should be noted that every single senior civil servant, serving or retired, whom I met in the province was himself an ethnic Pathan, and an attempt has been made to ensure that the most senior military commanders in the province and FATA are also usual y ethnic Pathans. This marks a major difference from Balochistan; and from this point of view at least the notion of the NWFP as a Punjabi colony is quite wrong.
On the other hand, at a dinner party in Peshawar, I listened to two members of the Pathan elites, a retired army colonel and a senior local journalist for a Pakistani TV channel, discussing the possibility of Pakistan breaking up into its ethnic regions. Neither of them wanted this outcome, and both would suffer from it very badly indeed; but they were prepared to discuss it with a cool detachment which you would never find among Punjabis of their rank and position.
The complexity of Pathan links to Pakistan is il ustrated by an anecdote told me by a leading politician for the nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), Bashir Bilour. The Bilours are strong Pathan nationalists, but have also sided at different times with al Pakistan’s national parties, as part of factional fighting within the ANP. Al the same, I was quite surprised to learn that his family has intermarried with that of the late Ghulam Ishaq Khan (1915 – 2006), veteran Pakistani bureaucrat, President from 1988 to 1993 and an ardent Pakistani patriot. Nonetheless, when in 1993 Ghulam Ishaq appealed to Bilour to support him against Nawaz Sharif, he did so with the words, ‘After al , we Pashtuns should stick together, not go with the Punjabis!’