Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [216]
So there would be an immense amount of valuable work to be done by a long-term infrastructure fund drawing on the profits of Balochistan’s gas and mineral wealth. The problem is that, left to Baloch Sardari politicians to administer such a fund, there is no way that most would save anything for the future, or for the benefit of Balochistan as a whole. Everything would be spent on short-term gains for themselves and their followers. This would actually increase discontent both among educated Baloch and in the tribes in the immediate vicinity of the mines.
If the army or some other Pakistani national institution were made responsible for distributing the benefits of extractive industries to the population, their task would therefore involve a huge and perhaps impossible degree of diplomacy. This is something at which the Pakistani army and state in Balochistan have a decidedly mixed record. In general they have not done too badly, aided by the fragmentary and feuding nature of Baloch tribal society. Sometimes, however, they have slipped up very badly indeed, as in the death of Sardar Akbar Bugti.
Like other senior officers, General Wynne now admits that the army seriously mishandled its treatment of Bugti and Bugti’s death. Like them, he claims that the Pakistani army did not in fact kill Bugti (which is highly doubtful) and (which has been confirmed to me by several different sources) that they were in fact negotiating with him to the very end. The general was open in his personal contempt for Bugti, whom he described as interested only in his own family and followers and doing nothing to spread the benefits of Sui Gas among his tribesmen, let alone Balochistan as a whole. He said that when, as a young officer, he had asked Bugti about his representatives stealing the workers’ wages, Bugti had just laughed at him dismissively.
On the other hand, the general said, there is no good seeing things in Balochistan in terms of black and white:
Everything here is shades of grey. Here you have to be street smart. Or to put it another way, you need to be a little bit of a rascal to understand this part of the world. You always have to be prepared to negotiate with your enemies – who knows, they may change sides and become your allies tomorrow. That is something the Americans still haven’t understood in Afghanistan ... That is why you can meet in Quetta many nationalist politicians who have declared themselves to be rebels against Pakistan, but who we deliberately haven’t touched.
When it comes to dealing with Akbar Bugti, the overwhelming majority of Pakistani political, media and elite opinion – including liberal opinion – agrees with General Wynne that the state and army should have gone on negotiating with him even after he took up arms and started killing Pakistani soldiers. Indeed, there have even been demands not just from Baloch nationalists but from liberal human rights lobbyists that Musharraf be tried for his murder. Certainly everyone sensible agrees that it is necessary to negotiate with radical-sounding Baloch nationalists in an effort to wean them away from the real hardliners. Given that these Baloch rebels are not exactly progressive people, this makes an interesting contrast with the attitude of Pakistani liberals to the attempts of the state and army to negotiate with Islamist militants in the Pathan areas and elsewhere. These attempts have been denounced not just as foolish and hopeless but as evidence of sinister hidden sympathy and co-operation between the military and the Pakistani Taleban.
The reality seems to me rather different, and will