Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [199]
The city used to be known to its educated inhabitants as ‘Little Paris’. This is about as staggering a statement as one could well imagine, and not one that I would like to make in Paris itself – except perhaps to a Roman frontier official in Lutetia Parisorum 2,000 years ago, who might have seen some similarities. The notion of Quetta as Paris certainly brings home the distance between most of Quetta and the rest of Balochistan.
Outside Quetta begins the world which Quetta was built to quell and hold at bay: the world of the tribes. Drive out along the Saryab Road, and, between the edge of the city and the ridges that fringe the Quetta valley, you find yourself amid villages of yellow-grey mud, which from the outside could be the first human towns of the Middle East 12,000 years ago. Regular driving on the Saryab Road is not, however, a good idea these days. This is the poor Baloch area of Quetta, where the patrols of the Frontier Corps clash nightly with Baloch nationalist militants; quite apart from the threat of common-or-garden banditry and kidnapping. The tribal frontier is now within the boundaries of the garrison city, just as the tribal leaders sit in the government buildings of the cantonment.
On 11 August 2009, on which day the militants had vowed to hold their own Baloch Independence Day, I drove out on the Saryab Road with the Frontier Corps in a Flag March – an old British tradition which is exactly what it says it is. The soldiers hoisted large Pakistani flags on their jeeps and armoured cars and drove slowly up and down the road and around the outskirts of the city.
I asked an officer what all this was for. ‘To show everyone that we are still here, and no one is going to push us out,’ he replied. More specifically, the Frontier Corps was there to tear down any Baloch nationalist flags, which pro-independence parties had sworn to fly on that day. So beside the tribes, around them, and watching them from without and within sits another power in the land, the Pakistan army, flexible, pragmatic, restrained – most of the time; but implacably determined that in the end, and in all essential matters, its will should prevail.
However, since 2001, Balochistan has been menaced from another direction: the overspill of the war in Afghanistan, which has brought the Afghan Taleban to the Pathan areas of Balochistan – and Pathans make up as much as 40 per cent of Balochistan’s population, and are a majority in Quetta itself. According to US intelligence, much of the Taleban leadership itself, grouped in the so-called ‘Quetta Shura’, was still based in Balochistan in late 2009. So far, this hasn’t been bad for Balochistan. On the contrary, the Afghan Taleban seem to have struck a deal with the Pakistani security forces whereby they will not stir up militancy among the Pathans of Balochistan, in return for being left alone.
Given Pakistan’s problems with Baloch militancy, Islamabad considers it especially important to keep the Pathans of Balochistan loyal. This is an additional reason for the shelter that Pakistan gives to parts of the Afghan Taleban leadership in Balochistan. Until early 2007, local journalists told me, the presence of these leaders was so open that it was very easy for Pakistanis (not Westerners) to gain interviews with them. Since then, however, US pressure has made Pakistan more careful, and the ‘Quetta Shura’ has been moved out of Quetta to more discreet locations in the Pathan areas in the north of the province.
The Afghan Taleban’s presence risks provoking the US into