Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [163]
Alongside Lahore, the central region contains Punjab’s greatest industries, centred on the textile centre of Faisalabad (founded by the British as Lyallpur) and other cities. The importance of the great ‘feudal’ landowning families in this region has been greatly reduced in recent decades, and its politics are dominated by smaller landowners and new families risen through commercial success or (corrupt) government service. This region is closely linked to Kashmir, from where the families of many urban Punjabis (including the Sharif family) originally migrated. This has helped cement the commitment of many people in this region to the struggle against India in Kashmir. Punjabi speakers from Pakistani Kashmir also dominate the Pakistani diaspora in Britain.
The second region is the Potwar (or Potohar) plateau of north-west Punjab, extending from the Salt range of hills to the Indus River and the Pathan lands, which have exerted a strong cultural influence here. A good many of the Potwari-speaking inhabitants of this region are in fact from originally Pathan tribes, like the ancestors of the cricketer-politician Imran Khan Niazi, but consider themselves to be Punjabis. This is an area of poor, arid soil which the canal colonies did not reach. As in Balochistan and parts of Sindh and the NWFP, in much of the Potwar region the water table is dropping rapidly because of both excessive and inefficient use by agriculture, and the booming needs of the mushrooming twin cities of Islamabad – Rawalpindi. Water shortages in turn are driving farmers off the land to swell these urban populations still further. This is at present a low-level, undramatic movement, but its importance in worsening living standards should not be underestimated – as anyone who has seen Pakistani rural women carrying containers of water for long distances in the heat of summer can easily appreciate.
The Potwar region has few great landowners but numerous landowning clans, with bigger farmers exercising leadership – a development encouraged by past land reforms, which led landowners to split their lands between different members of their families. This marks a difference from central and southern Punjab, where (as in Britain) landowners tried to keep their estates in the hands of one son, and put other sons into the army, the civil service or business. Politics here is no longer ‘feudal’, but it is still critically dependent on kinship and leadership within kinship groups.
Owing to the poverty of its soil, the Potwar region has long exported its labour in one way or another. The British recruited most of their Muslim soldiers from the Potwar area, and until recently a large majority of the Pakistani army was also recruited from these few districts. The strong Pathan influence in this region has created concerns that Taleban influence could spread here from the NWFP. This could undermine the willingness to fight of the ordinary jawan (young man), or even in the worst case lead to mutiny. A great many people from this region are working in the Gulf, and the remittances that they send home help support the region economically and increase their families’ independence from local landowners.
The biggest city of the region is Rawalpindi, which now has more than three million people but was a tiny village until the British developed it as their military headquarters to cover the Afghan frontier (though it is close to the site of another city erased by war, the great Gandharan Buddhist centre of Taxila). The choice of this region by Ayub Khan for his new capital, Islamabad, reflected its better climate but also no doubt a desire to base the capital in an area with solid military ties.
The third great