Last Monday General Pervez Musharraf assured a group of Karachi businessmen that “peace had been restored to Balochistan and the issue had been resolved”. The same day 19 rockets blasted the Pir Koh gas plant, and three “security officials” lost their limbs in a mine explosion in Sangsila. The next day, the gas pipeline near Mastung was blown up, stopping supply to Kalat and Mangochar. Indeed, every day the insurgents notch up bold new strikes. So who’s he kidding?
The federal government’s argument goes like this. (1) There is an “emerging middle-class” in Balochistan that is anti-tribal. (2) The government is supporting this middle-class in displacing the traditional sardars in local state and society because it is pro-development. (3) Therefore the sardars of the biggest tribes – Marri, Mengal and Bugti – have taken up arms against the government’s grand “development” agenda for Balochistan. (4) Hence these sardars, who are in the pay of India’s RAW and Israel’s MOSSAD, cannot be called “Baloch nationalists”.
The government’s proposed solution runs like this. (1) Islamabad will not fall into the trap of an indiscriminate military operation because that would inevitably lead to “collateral damage” which would be exploited by the insurgents’ propaganda machinery. (2) Instead, a strategy of “selective” and “individual-level” repression will be adopted for maximizing military dividends. (3) Nor will the government be provoked into direct criminal action against aging tribal sardars because that too could rebound by fuelling a media backlash. (4) Equally, the government will abandon any “flip-flops” in policy which send mixed signals of dialogue and military action. This means that the Chaudhry Shujaat committee has been wound up and the operation is firmly in the hands of the feds led by the Governor Balochistan, Corps Commander Balochistan, IGP-FC Balochistan and Military Intelligence. (5) Instead, Islamabad will enforce a two-pronged strategy. One, it will make and use laws to enmesh the second-tier political leadership of the insurgents in criminal cases and enfeeble it – the Baloch Liberation Army has been banned as a “terrorist” organization; Gazain Marri, the son of Nawab Khair Bux Marri, is being extradited from Dubai; the Mengal and Marri households in Karachi are under siege; several Baloch activists have mysteriously disappeared (they will soon re-appear in chains before special anti-terrorist courts and be accused of belonging to, or abetting, the banned terrorist organization called BLA, etc; the accounts and properties of alleged members of the BLA and sardars will be seized; and so on.
Two, the government will speed up “development” in the province so that the pro-government (a) tribal elites and (b) anti-Sardar “nationalist” elements like the Abdul Hayee Baloch group, are strengthened with new stakes in the spoils of power. Simultaneously, the Baloch “middle-classes” will be recruited into the police (1700 so far) and even in the armed forces (there are 57 cadets from Balochistan in the military academy in Kakul today) to give them a sense of participation in the organs of state. In time to come, the argument goes, the 100,000-strong Marri-Bugti tribals who give succour to the 3000 insurgents will be isolated and marginalized in a population of over 6 million and the insurgency will be crushed or significantly curtailed to “manageable” proportions which merely reflect the “games that nations play” – a reference to the “Indian hand” in Balochistan in response to the “Pakistani hand” in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
There are serious flaws in this analysis of the Balochistan “problem”. Some pertinent questions arise. Why did the Baloch insurgency erupt in the “non-democratic” 2000s instead of the “democratic” 1990s? Does this have anything to do with the fact that the “bad, secular, nationalist tribals” had a rightful share in provincial power in the 1990s but were ousted in the pre-rigged 2002 elections by state-sponsored, “good, ideological, middle-class mullahs ”? Indeed, isn’t there a remarkably similar blowback-insurgency effect of bad state policies in both the NWFP (Waziristan and FATA) and Balochistan (Marri-Bugti) where secular and nationalist elements like the ANP and PPP in the former and the BNP and Marri-Bugtis in the latter were sidelined at the behest of the Military Mullah Alliance? In the NWFP, the mullahs are now a thorn in the side of GHQ because they support the Waziristani “foreign” rebels; in Balochistan, they are the cause of the political marginalisation of the “nationalists” who have been pushed into the arms of foreign powers. Has the “Baloch middle class” that the government looks upon so favourably as compared to the “tribals” materialized overnight out of nowhere? No, it hasn’t. The “middle-class” that Islamabad wants to support and prop up at the expense of the “tribal sardars” is a mullah-middle class, as opposed to the secular, mainstream nationalist middle class that is able to shut down Quetta and other towns in protest against government policies. Worse, thanks to these misplaced and tactical state policies, the “middle-class” Pakhtun and Baloch mullahs in Balochistan are now grouping to seize the provincial assembly in the 2007 elections, which will exacerbate the “Baloch problem” instead of resolving it as claimed by the government.
The second issue is related to the “foreign hand” in Balochistan. It cannot be shrugged away as a simple consequence of the “games nations play”. One reason why the insurgency in the 1970s (which erupted when the Baloch nationalist NAP government was sacked by Z A Bhutto) could be crushed was that there was no foreign hand of any consequence in it. By contrast, the current one is hugely funded by RAW and trained by MOSSAD, as claimed by the government. That is one reason it can’t be militarily crushed quickly – helicopters borrowed from the Shah’s Iran played a critical role in the counter-insurgency campaign in the 1970s because they couldn’t be shot down by World War II vintage.303 rifles whereas better helicopters cannot be used effectively today because of the enormous and modern firepower with the insurgents.
The third set of questions that springs to mind is also critical. Why is India fingering Pakistan in Balochistan when it is simultaneously seeking normalization of relations and resolution of conflicts with Islamabad in the wake of Pakistan’s recent “flexibility” on Kashmir? Why is MOSSAD stirring trouble in Balochistan when Pakistan and the United States (Israel’s mentor and boss) are presumed to have a special and strategic relationship to stabilize the region, and Pakistan is inching towards recognition of Israel? To claim that this is all part of the business-as-usual “games nations play” is stupid. It is certainly more fruitful to see this situation in the prism of the Military-Mullah Alliance in Pakistan that has destabilized India in Kashmir and the United States in Afghanistan by stoking the fires of Talibanism, and not stamping out Al Qaeda and Jihad. The threat of a “middle-class mullah Iran” armed with nuclear weapons has added to the problem of radical, middle-class, political Islam in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Both the West and India have now come out firmly against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Indeed, reports suggest that the US has set boots on the ground in the Azeri, Kurdish and Baloch areas of Iran in preparation for dealing with Iran. Is it any wonder then that US proxies are active in Pakistani Balochistan, that India has abandoned the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project in exchange for a nuclear deal with the US, that the Baloch insurgents are specifically targeting Pakistan’s oil and gas infrastructure even as General Musharraf is setting his sights on going it alone with the Iran pipeline?
General Musharraf’s tactics and strategy are out of sync. The mullahs are out to get him personally and sabotage his pro-West foreign policy that keeps the economy moving. Yet he is unwilling to put them down. He wants normalization with India so that talk of war doesn’t destabilize the economy and lead to capital flight but is unwilling to put the jihadis down. He wants to get rid of Al Qaeda in Waziristan because it is spreading its tentacles to the rest of FATA and undermining his profitable relationship with the US. But he is unwilling to put down the Taliban and Frontier mullahs who support and prop up Al Qaeda morally and materially. He wants to normalize with Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan and wean it away from India. But he is unwilling to uproot the Taliban in the Pakistani borderlands who are attacking the US-Karzai forces in Kabul. If he sees all this as part of the usual game of “leveraging” that states play, it is a great pity. The net result of this clever-by-half, intelligence-sponsored mindset is actually endangering both General Musharraf personally as well as Pakistan politically.
The “solution” to Balochistan is part of the “solution” to Pakistan. The solution to Pakistan is in the cobbling of a new alliance of democratic and liberal forces in the country. Instead of the Military-Mullah-Alliance (MMA) we need a Military-Liberal Alliance or MLA (and by that we don’t mean Martial Law Administrator!) to see us through a transitional period of better democracy in the run-up to and post-2007 general elections after which the military can start retreating to barracks. The MLA should comprise all the anti-mullah forces in the country that straddle not just the labouring and middle classes but also the business, feudal and tribal elites which support the PPP or the Baloch and Pakhtun nationalists, or the MQM or the many liberal politicians in the Pakistan Muslim League Q and N. Until these “rightful” claimants to power are accommodated as is their due, General Musharraf will remain a prisoner of tactics over strategy and Pakistan’s long-term prospects will continue to look grim.