Last Monday a dam of discord burst in three out of four provinces after General Pervez Musharraf went on national radio and TV and said he intended to build a couple of dams, including the highly controversial Kalabagh Dam, to cater for the country’s future water needs. Everybody and his aunt from Karachi to Khyber are up in arms, especially since the assemblies of Sindh, Balochistan and the NWFP have already passed resolutions rejecting the Kalabagh dam.
But the opposition’s ire is not unexpected. It rightly believes that it was unfairly done in by General Musharraf’s intelligence agencies before, during and after the general elections and is therefore ready to clutch at anything to undermine and destabilize him. But the stunning silence of the pro-Musharraf parties and provincial governments in Sindh and Punjab and Balochistan is surprising. Not one ruling-coalition politician has dared to line up behind General Musharraf and speak out openly in support of the Kalabagh dam.
Why, then, has General Musharraf raked up such a thorny and emotional issue, especially in the midst of crucial make or break negotiations with the MMA on the LFO? It is also surprising that he should think nothing of upping and outing to the USA after rousing such destabilizing sentiments. Is he clever or stupid, brave or foolhardy? Actually, the opposition thinks he’s quite cunning. “It’s a sneaky attempt to divert attention from the main constitutional issues in Islamabad to more mundane and provincial matters,” they charge. Is that right?
We don’t think so. To begin with, the “water problem” is neither provincial nor mundane. In fact, it is central to Pakistan’s prosperity because we are, and will remain for a long time, predominantly an agrarian country. If this issue was relevant in the 1980s when the Kalabagh dam was first conceived, it is critical today. There is not much point in dredging up the statistics to prove how water is, and will be, the core issue of the economy. If we take cultural emotionalism and historical distrust out of the equation, what do we find? We are plagued by floods and drought; our existing reservoirs at Mangla and Tarbela which regulate the water-flows in our canals for irrigation are silting up faster than they can be dredged; and the snow cap is melting not just in the Himalayas but across the icy poles. In the future we will need more regulated water supplies than ever before. But the capacity of our existing water resource base will have greatly diminished when we need it most. So the answer is: more reservoirs. And we must move fast.
But the “diversion” theory doesn’t hold water for other reasons too. General Musharraf is given to straight talking and shooting from the hip. At no time in his four year political career has he ever resorted to “deception” or “diversionary tactics” to achieve dubious ends. In fact, his refreshingly candid and embarrassingly blunt approach marks him as a totally different kettle of fish from General Zia ul Haq who always lied with a smiling face and always spoke with a forked tongue. This would suggest a simpler, and perhaps more dangerous, explanation for his “speech”.
For three years before the general elections, General Musharraf ran the country single handedly and took all decisions without having to worry too much about his actions or explain his motives or be accountable. Sometimes his policies were unpopular – as, for example, the IMF-assisted belt tightening economic programmes and his strategic, pro-American turnabout on Afghanistan and the Taliban after 9/11 – but that didn’t bother him too much, let alone stop him from doing what he thought needed doing, because he was convinced they were necessary and good for the longer term health of the country. But now things are different and it is showing in his demeanour. Is General Musharraf so frustrated by the incompetent and scheming politicians in his government and so irritated by the negativism of other politicians in opposition to him that he has decided to get on with governance without them if he cannot do so with them? This would suggest that he doesn’t much care any more whether parliament is truly functional or not as long as he retains the executive authority and power to run Pakistan as he likes in certain critical areas of the economy and national security. “The army is solidly behind me”, he said recently. As if to make his point stick, he ordered another round of retirements, promotions and transfers in the army high command last Monday.
General Pervez Musharraf clearly means business as far as the water issue is concerned. But before his exuberance gets the better of him, he might consider one critical factor: if he were to start building any major dam without cobbling a genuine political and national consensus, he runs the risk of spending colossal sums of money on a project which would most certainly run aground as soon as he exits from the apex of power at any time before the project is up and running in the next ten years. Surely that is not the sort of legacy he wants to leave behind.