Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [213]
And, above all, of course, why had he not been arrested by the Pakistani security forces, and why in fact was he still sitting in a paid position on the board of Pakistani Petroleum, to which he had been restored after a period of suspension? To these questions the Nawabzada’s responses became rather less fluent. Concerning his non-arrest, he declared that ‘I suppose given all my medical problems, they do not want another dead Bugti on their hands’, though I must say he looked in fine fettle to me.
By the end of the interview, therefore, the Nawabzada seemed to me to represent not an unqualified failure on the part of the Pakistani state, but rather a sort of qualified success – a success, that is for the old twin imperial policies of divide and rule and co-optation of elites, something that every successful empire-builder from Rome to Victorian Britain has understood perfectly. In the case of the British empire on the Baloch frontier, this involved financial subsidies to the Sardars to keep their tribes quiet, subsidies which could then be withdrawn from those who stepped out of line. Military action was very much a last resort.
PAKISTAN AND BALOCHISTAN
The Pakistani approach has generally been the same in essence but different in form. It is summed up in the remarkable fact that, as of 2009, out of sixty-five members of the Baloch Provincial Assembly, sixty-two were in the provincial government as ministers, ministers without portfolio or advisers with ministerial rank. Nor did the remaining three deputies constitute much of an opposition. Two had not occupied ministerial chairs by virtue of being dead, which is an obstacle to government service even in Balochistan. The third cannot visit Quetta because of the blood feud with the chief minister, mentioned above.
This is the kind of thing which has led me to place the word ‘democracy’ in this book in inverted commas; and perhaps I should do the same for ‘development’; because the point of this whole set-up is that on top of their ministerial salary and staff, every member of the government gets a Rs50 million (£385,000) personal share of Balochistan’s development budget, to spend on projects in his own district.
Irrational? Not at all. From the point of view of serious development, yes of course completely crazy. As a new way of co-opting the tribal leadership (in an age when you can’t just have political agents handing out bags of gold coins), eminently sensible – and effective. It is above all thanks to the Pakistani state’s ability to hand out this kind of personal largesse – as well as some hard blows when necessary – that as of 2009 all but three of the eighty-odd tribal Sardars or claimants in Balochistan were ranged with the government, and had not joined the anti-Pakistan insurgency. For that matter, even members of Nawab Bugti’s own Jamhoori Watan Party continued to sit in the provincial assembly!
The priorities of Baloch ministers took on an almost comically obvious shape in the already mentioned interview I had with the Minister of Sports and Culture. Outside his office, his four staff sat around drinking tea, chatting, reading the papers and otherwise doing absolutely nothing – not that they could have done very much, since neither they nor the minister had a computer or even a typewriter. The minister complained bitterly that Balochistan has a quota of state jobs according to its small population, when instead – in his view – it should get the same proportion of jobs as it has of Pakistani territory – i.e. almost half of all jobs in the central bureaucracy, a thought which made me choke into my tea. For the population in general, he demanded that Islamabad create 60,000 junior administrative jobs in Balochistan, and distribute them to graduates. As of early 2010, this is being negotiated between the governments in Islamabad and Quetta, with 30,000 jobs a frequently mentioned compromise figure.
Completely