Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [178]
In fact, the Taleban stand about as much chance of taking over Karachi as I do, given the make-up and culture of most of its inhabitants. Rather, the dangers to Karachi from the Taleban are twofold. The first is that Taleban terrorist attacks attributed to members of the Pathan minority in the city may exacerbate ethnic tensions to the point where they are beyond the power of the army and Rangers to contain, and the economic life of the city – and of Pakistan – is severely damaged.
The second, more remote possibility is that developments elsewhere will split the army and weaken the state to the point where their control over Sindh and Karachi will collapse altogether, and this region will be delivered over to its own inner demons. On the basis of my own researches, I can state with melancholy confidence that the ability of Sindh’s populations to regulate their differences peacefully in the absence of the Pakistani state would be low to non-existent.
Looming behind the short- to medium-term threat of ethnic violence is an even greater long-term danger – that of water: not enough of one kind, and too much of another. For the past 5,000 years and more, human civilization in this region has been a gift only of the River Indus, which flows through what would otherwise be desert and semi-desert. After the British conquered Sindh in the 1830s, their first census recorded a population of barely 1.3 million people. One hundred and seventy years later, the population has soared to around 50 million people – and 50 million people cannot live in a desert.
This growth was thanks above all to massive British irrigation projects, which turned large areas of semi-desert into some of the most fertile land on earth. But almost all the water that flows down these canals still comes from the same old source: the Indus, that ‘capricious and incalculable river’; and through a mixture of over-use and appalling wastefulness, in the decade leading up to 2010 the Indus no longer flowed into its delta for much of the year, and the sea crept in to replace it.
The great floods of 2010 have replenished the delta and promised Sindh’s farmers a bumper crop in 2011, but this is likely to be a purely temporary effect – unless, on the one hand, Sindh can develop an infrastructure to conserve and use its water properly; or, on the other hand, such floods become a frequent occurrence, in which case much of Sindhi agriculture will be reduced to a subsistence level. By driving hundreds of thousands of Sindhi and Pathan peasants from their swamped lands and wrecked villages into Mohajir-dominated Karachi, the 2010 floods have also threatened Sindh’s precarious ethnic peace – atendency that can only get much worse if ecological disasters become a regular pattern.
As to the consequences of a really serious rise in sea levels as a result of climate change, you only have to stand on the low sea wall at Karachi and look at the city with its millions of inhabitants stretching back across miles of low-lying land (Karachi’s average height above sea level is 26 feet) to imagine what would happen.
Caught between the hungry sea and the thirsty land, and with both pressures in danger of drastically intensifying as a result of climate change, Sindh needs nothing less than a revolution in its system of land use and water management over the next decades if human civilization in this region is not to be seriously threatened. Given the centrality of landownership to Sindhi political society, and the centrality of water to usable land, such a revolution would probably need to be not only technological and economic but also social and political; and whether one of the most stagnant societies in Asia is capable of such change seems highly doubtful.
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