Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (13 page)

At another beach there was the bizarre sight of donkeys—the smallest donkeys I have ever seen—romping out of the water and on to the sand, pulling creaky carts driven by little boys that were loaded down with fish just transferred from boats bobbing in the waves, which were flying a black, white, yellow, and green flag of Baluchistan. Miniature donkeys emerging from the sea! Gwadar was a place of wonders, slipping through an hourglass.

By contrast a few miles away, in vast tracts of desert just beyond town, a new industrial zone and other development sites had been fenced off, with migrant labor camps spread alongside, waiting for construction to begin. “Just wait for the new airport,” another businessman from Karachi told me. “During the next building phase of the port complex you will see the
Dubai miracle taking shape.” But everyone who spoke to me in terms of a business hub to rival Dubai neglected a key fact. The Gulf sheikhdoms, Dubai in particular, had wise, effective, and wholly legitimate governments that, because they had to rule only city-states without hinterlands, lacked all the weaknesses and disadvantages of Pakistan’s various military and civilian regimes, which, in the course of the decades, not only had rarely proved effective, but were often perceived as illegitimate as well. Moreover, Pakistani regimes had to govern a sprawling territory of mountains and desert badlands, beset by constant wars and rebellions.

The Gulf states did not just happen; it was not destiny. It was the product of good government under ideal conditions, which Pakistan singularly lacked.

Whether Gwadar could become a new silk route nexus or not is tied to Pakistan’s own struggle against becoming a failed state. Pakistan, with its “Islamic” bomb, its Taliban- and al-Qaeda-infested northwestern borderlands, its dysfunctional cities, and territorially based ethnic groups—Baluch, Sindhis, Punjabis, Pushtuns—for whom Islam could never provide the glue for a common identity, was commonly referred to as the most dangerous country in the world, a nuclearizing Yugoslavia in the making. So Gwadar was a litmus test for more than road and energy routes; it was an indication of the stability of the whole Arabian Sea region—that is, for half of the Indian Ocean. If Gwadar languished, remaining what for a Western visitor like myself was just a charming fishing port, it would indicate yet more disturbing trends about Pakistan that would affect neighboring countries.

As it turned out, no one ever did ask to see my non-objection certificate; I could have come here without one. But after a few days in Gwadar, I managed to attract the attention of the local police, who thereafter insisted on accompanying me everywhere with a truckload of black-clad commandos armed with AK-47s. Talking to people became nearly impossible, as my police escort immediately surrounded whomever I met. The police said that they were there for my own protection, but there was no terrorism in Gwadar, only poor Baluch fishermen and their families. While awkward to reach, Gwadar was nonetheless one of the safest places in Pakistan that I had been in nine long visits to the country.

The locals clearly did not like the police. “We Baluch only want to be free,” I was told whenever out of earshot of my security detail. You might think that Gwadar’s very promise of economic development would give
the Baluch the freedom they craved. But more development, I was told, meant more Chinese, Singaporeans, Punjabis, and other outsiders who would turn the place into an authentic international port and transit center. Indeed, there was evidence that the Baluch would not only fail to benefit from rising real estate prices, but in many cases would be disenfranchised from their land altogether.

The respected Karachi-based investigative magazine
The Herald
had published a cover story, “The Great Land Robbery,” which alleged that the Gwadar mega-project had “led to one of the biggest land scams in Pakistan’s history.”
⁶
The magazine detailed a system in which revenue clerks had been bribed by influential people from Karachi, Lahore, and other major cities to have land in Gwadar registered in their names at rock-bottom prices, and then resold to developers for residential and industrial schemes. In fact, hundreds of thousands of acres of land were said to be illegally allotted to civilian and military bureaucrats living elsewhere. In this way, the poor and uneducated Baluch population had been shut out of Gwadar’s future prosperity. And so, Gwadar had become a lightning rod for Baluch hatred of Punjabi-ruled Pakistan. Gwadar’s very promise as an Indian Ocean–slash–Central Asian mega-hub threatened to sunder the country further.

Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast has long been rife with separatist rebellion, with both Baluchistan and Sindh having rich, venerable histories as ethnic-geographical entities harboring fewer contradictions than the state that has existed here since 1947. For the Baluch and Sindhis, independence from Great Britain created a harsh irony: after resisting Punjabi overlordship for centuries they found themselves subject to Punjabi rule within the new state of Pakistan. Whereas the Punjabis venerated the historical memory of the Mughal kings of yore, the Baluch and the Sindhis looked back on the Mughals as symbols of oppression since, with the exception of the periods of rule by the Mughals, the medieval Arabs, and a brief interlude under Mahmud of Ghazna in the eleventh century, the Sindhis, for example, had been independent, ruled by their own local dynasties in the land they called Sindhu Desh.
⁷

In fact, talk had revived of a future Baluch-Sindh confederation quietly supported by India. The two regions are complementary, with Baluchistan holding the natural resources and Sindh the industrial base. In recent decades the six million Baluch have mounted four insurgencies
against the Pakistani military to protest economic and political discrimination. In the fiercest of these wars, from 1973 to 1977, some eighty thousand Pakistani troops and fifty-five thousand Baluch warriors were involved in the fighting. Baluch memories of the time are bitter. In 1974, writes the South Asia expert Selig S. Harrison, Pakistani forces, “frustrated by their inability to find Baluch guerrilla units hiding in the mountains, bombed, strafed, and burned the encampments of some 15,000 Baluch families … forcing the guerrillas to come out from their hideouts to defend their women and children.”
⁸

What Harrison calls a “slow-motion genocide” has continued in recent years, with thousands of Baluch in 2006 fleeing villages attacked by Pakistani F-16 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships. This was followed by large-scale government-organized kidnappings and disappearances of Baluch youth. Recently, at least eighty-four thousand people have been displaced by the conflict.
⁹
Also in 2006 the Pakistani army killed the Baluch leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti. But as government tactics have grown more brutal, Baluch warriors have congealed into an authentic national movement, as a new and better-armed generation—emergent from a literate Baluch middle class in the capital of Quetta and elsewhere, and financed by Baluch compatriots in the Persian Gulf—have to a significant degree surmounted the age-old Baluch nemesis of feuding tribes, which outsiders like the Punjabis in the Pakistani military had been able to play against one another.

The insurgency now crossed regional, tribal, and class lines, the International Crisis Group reported.
¹⁰
According to the Pakistanis, the Indian intelligence services have been helping the Baluch, since the Indians clearly benefit from the Pakistani armed forces being tied down by separatist rebellions.
¹¹
The Pakistani military has countered by pitting radical Islamic parties against the secular and nationalistic Baluch. In a region that has turned into a cauldron of fundamentalist rebellion, “Baluchistan is,” in the words of one Baluch activist, “the only secular region between Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan and has no previous record of religious extremism.”
¹²

The Baluch number only 3.57 percent of Pakistan’s 172 million people, but most of Pakistan’s resources, including copper, uranium, potentially rich oil reserves, and natural gas, are in Baluchistan. Although more than a third of the country’s natural gas is produced there, Baluchistan consumes only a fraction of it because of poverty, even as Pakistan’s
economy is one of the world’s most dependent on natural gas.
¹³
Moreover, as Selig Harrison explains, the central government has paid meager royalties to the province for the gas, and at the same time denied it development aid.

Thus, the real estate scandal in Gwadar and fears of a Punjabi takeover there come as culminations to a history of subjugation. To taste the emotions behind all of this, I met with Baluch nationalist leaders at the other end of the Makran coast, in Karachi.

The setting for the first meeting was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in the Karachi neighborhood of Clifton, whose entrance was guarded by a private security guard with a shotgun and billy club. Such fast-food joints, with their overt American symbolism, have been sites of terrorist bombings. Inside were young people wearing both Western clothes and pressed white
shalwar kameezes
, with freshly shaven chins and long beards in Muslim religious fashion. Yet despite the clash of styles, they all had a slick suburban demeanor. Everyone had trays of chicken and Pepsi, and between bites were busy texting and talking on their cellphones. Drum music blasted from loudspeakers: Indian-Pakistani Punjabi
bhangra
. In the midst of this upscale scene, five Baluch in soiled and wrinkled
shalwar kameezes
, wearing turbans and topis, stormed in with stacks of papers under their arms, including the copy of
The Herald
with the cover story on Gwadar.

Nisar Baluch, the general secretary of the Baluch Welfare Society, was the group’s leader. He had unruly black hair and a thick mustache. His fingertips tapped on the table as he lectured me. “The Pakistani army is the biggest land grabber,” he began. “It is giving away the coast of Baluchistan for peanuts to the Punjabis.

“The Punjabi army wears uniforms, but the soldiers are actually terrorists,” he continued. “In Gwadar, the army is operating as a mafia, falsifying land records. They say we don’t have papers to prove our ownership of the land, though we’ve been there for centuries.” He told me that he was not against development and supported dialogue with the Pakistani authorities. “But when we talk about our rights, they accuse us of being Taliban.

“We’re an oppressed nation,” he went on, never raising his voice, even as his finger-tapping grew in intensity. “There is no other choice but to fight. The whole world is now talking about Gwadar. The entire
political establishment in this country is involved in the crime being perpetrated there.”

Then came this warning: “No matter how hard they try to turn Gwadar into Dubai, it won’t work. There will be resistance. The future pipelines going to China will not be safe. The pipelines will have to cross through Baluch territory, and if our rights are violated, nothing will be secure.”

This threat did not exist in isolation. Other nationalists had said that somewhere down the road Baluch insurgents would ambush more Chinese workers and kill them, and that would be the end of Gwadar.
¹⁴

Nisar Baluch was my warm-up to Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, the chief of the Marri tribe of Baluch, who had been engaged in combat with government forces on and off for sixty years, and whose son had recently been killed by Pakistani troops.
*
Marri greeted me in his plush Karachi villa, with massive exterior walls, giant plants, and ornate furniture, where his servants and bodyguards rested on rugs in the garden. He was old and wizened, with a cane, robes, and a beige-colored topi with wide indentations that distinguished it from the kind worn by Sindhis. Before us was a vast spread of local delicacies. Nawab Marri spoke a precise, hesitant, whispering English that, when combined with his clothes and the setting, gave him a certain charisma.

“If we keep fighting,” he told me gently, “we will ignite an intifada like the Palestinians. It is the cause of my optimism that the young generation of Baluch will sustain a guerrilla war. Pakistan is not eternal. It is not likely to last. The British Empire, Pakistan, Burma, these have all been temporary creations. After Bangladesh left Pakistan in 1971,” he continued, in his mild and lecturing voice, “the only dynamic left within this country was the imperialist power of the Punjabi army. East Bengal [Bangladesh] was the most important element in Pakistan. The Bengalis were numerous enough to take on the Punjabis, but they seceded instead. Now the only option left for the Baluch is to fight.”

He liked and trusted no one in Pakistan who was not Baluch, he told me. He thought little of the late Sindhi leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, Benazir Bhutto. After all, as he explained, it was under the government of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the 1970s, that “our people
were thrown out of helicopters, killed in mass graves, burned, had their nails torn out, their bones broken … so I was not happy to greet her.”

And what about Punjabi overtures to make amends with the Baluch? I asked. “We say to these Punjabis,” he replied, still in his sweet regal voice, “leave us alone, get lost, we don’t need your direction, your brotherliness. If Punjab continues to occupy us with the help of the American imperialists, then eventually our name will be nowhere in the soil.”

He explained that Baluchistan overlapped three countries—Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan—and would eventually triumph as the central governments of all those lands weakened. In his view, Gwadar was just the latest Punjabi plot that would prove temporary. The Baluch would simply bomb the new roads and future pipelines leading out of there.

He was a man full of blunt insults, who abjured the give-and-take of politics, on which he seemed to have given up. As I was leaving his villa, it struck me that whether Gwadar developed or not depended signally on how the government in Islamabad behaved. If it did not make a grand bargain with the Baluch of the scope that would isolate embittered men like Marri and Nisar Baluch, then indeed the mega-project near the Iranian border would become another lost city in the sand, beset by local rebellion. Although, if it did make such a bargain, allowing Baluchistan to emerge as a region-state under the larger rubric of a democratic and decentralized Pakistan, then the traditional fishing village that I saw could well give way to a pulsing Rotterdam of the Arabian Sea, with tentacles reaching northward to Samarkand.