Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [206]
When I attended a meeting of the party in Quetta, the not very resolute-looking Sardar Talal Bugti on the platform was rather cast into the shade by the fierce features and impressively bristling beard of his nephew Baramdagh, whose large picture was being held aloft by two fifteen-year-old children from – of all places – the elite St Mary’s School. And this illustrates the most worrying aspect of the insurgency as far as the Pakistani state is concerned: that it seems to have spread from sections of the Marri and Bugti tribes to parts of the new Baloch educated youth who have emerged in recent years.
As in so much of the developing world, there are not nearly enough state jobs to provide for these people, and their often worthless education certificates do not equip them for modern technical or managerial jobs in gas, mining or at Gwadar – which they believe that they should be given as representatives of the indigenous ethnicity. The more moderate elements try to use their Sardars and the Pakistani political system to force the state to give them jobs; the more radical ones have turned to armed revolt.
So far, this revolt has not been impressive in military terms (which also means that Indian help to the insurgents must so far be at a pretty low level). Attacks on the army, the Frontier Corps and even the wretched police (many of whom in Balochistan are still armed with Second World War-era Lee Enfield bolt-action rifles) are still relatively infrequent. The great majority of the militants’ targets are ‘soft’ ones – the Punjabi and other ‘settlers’ who have moved to Balochistan over the past 150 years to work in a variety of technical occupations for which the Baloch lack the education (like teachers) or which they consider beneath them (like barbers).2
What is happening is a sort of low-level ethnic cleansing, with more than 250 ‘settlers’ killed across Balochistan in the year before my visit in August 2009. The district of Kalat was typical. In the first seven months of 2009, the militants had killed three Kashmiri bakers (together with a Baloch customer), three Punjabi tube-well drillers, one Punjabi teacher and one Baloch policeman.
The result naturally has been an exodus of non-Baloch teachers and technicians from villages and small towns in the ethnic Baloch areas, except where (as in the case of Sui Gas, the mining camps and the cantonments) settlements are under the direct protection of the army. The result has been to depress both Baloch educational levels and the Baloch economy still further, but, unlike the Taleban in FATA, this less than heroic insurgency does not as yet pose a serious threat to the control of the Pakistani military.
BALOCH TRIBALISM
Whether this remains the case will depend largely on how far Baloch tribal society is changing, and generating the kind of frustrated new class which will identify with Baloch nationalism rather than their own tribe. From the point of view of government, Baloch tribalism, like Pathan tribalism, was always an infernal nuisance, but it was also a containable nuisance susceptible to bribes. Among the Pathan tribes, social change and disruption helped to bring about the Taleban movement. It is not clear yet if social change among the Baloch is capable of creating a modern nationalist movement.
In many respects, Baloch tribal culture