Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [215]
This involved recruiting and paying Marri tribesmen as local police (levies), and a development fund from the profits of the mine to be spent on schools, roads and health care to benefit both the Pathans and the Marris. ‘This is something that I am really proud of, that we are involved in nation-building,’ the general told me. All this also has a security dimension. In the general’s view, the deal over Chamalang has contributed greatly to persuading Marris not to join the present insurgency.16 It will be very interesting to see if – as has been proposed – the army now starts taking a key part in running other mining projects in Balochistan and elsewhere, and distributing the benefits to the local population. The army will in any case have to be present at these sites in order to protect them from the insurgents.
The question of just how much wealth lies underneath Balochistan is the subject of crazed nationalist myth-making, with stories abounding of Balochistan ‘having more oil than Kuwait’, and so on. Having talked to geologists, the truth appears to me to be that Balochistan probably has very little oil, and few major new gas fields left to discover. What it does have, however, is very large amounts of copper, together with lesser amounts of gold.
The Chinese corporation running the Saindak mine as of 2010 processes around 15,000 tonnes of ore a day. Informed (as opposed to mythical) estimates for the Reko Diq field near the borders with Afghanistan and Iran range up to 16 million tonnes of pure copper and 21 million ounces of gold, which if developed would make Pakistan one of the world’s largest producers of copper (though still far behind Chile), and a serious gold producer. A joint Canadian – Chilean consortium (Tethyan Copper) plans to invest up to $3 billion in Reko Diq’s development (leading to the inevitable paranoid headline on the pakalert website, ‘Reko Diq Mystery: Why Neocons and Zionists are after Balochistan?’).17
Reko Diq could be of great benefit to Pakistan and Balochistan – or it could lead to explosive disputes between them, and among the Baloch themselves, as has been the case with both Sui Gas and Gwadar Port. The most obvious solution to distributing the benefits of mines like Reko Diq would be something like the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests a proportion (in effect 11 per cent) of the proceeds of Alaskan oil for the long-term benefit of the population of Alaska, above all in terms of investment in infrastructure, services and water conservation.
Especially water conservation. Although Balochistan’s population is so small, it is still far too large for the province’s water resources, unless the use of water is radically improved. At present, the Quetta valley in particular is beginning to look like my grim prediction for Sindh and even Pakistan a few decades down the line: millions of people trying to survive in a desert. Over the past fifty years, water experts in Quetta told me, draining by tube-wells has made the local water table sink from 40 feet to more than 800 feet below the ground. In ‘Settler Town’, in the mid-1990s, the water table was at 200 feet. Now it is at 1,200 feet, and there is in any case less and less to bring up. Many of the local tube-wells and manual wells are now dry, and much of the population has to buy its water from tankers. Settler Town contains approximately 200,000 people. It goes without saying that the state’s water-pipe system is now permanently dry. In the grim judgement of Andrew Arthur of the UNHCR, ‘In another ten years or so, the water table in parts of the Quetta valley will be below 2,000 feet and people will start to migrate out, as has already happened in Sibi, Chaghi and Dalbandia, where the situation is even worse.’18
The two natural springs which created an oasis in the Quetta valley and were responsible for the creation of Quetta itself have both long since dried up. A new water pipeline is being built from the hills to supply drinking water to the city, but what will become of local agriculture if