Pak Tribune : Modern Stone Age

Modern Stone Age

by Shah Dost | Karachi October 01, 2006

In a move to promote his memoir, President Musharraf has said in a TV interview that the Bush administration after 9/11 warned him of “bombing Pakistan back to Stone Age” if it did not take up the role of a front-line state in the so-called war on terror. Gen Musharraf acquiesced in and Pakistan was saved, so he believes.

A few years later the general made a similar warning and acted upon it. He reminded Baloch nationalists that it was not the 1970s, an insulting reference to the last military operation in Balochistan, and warned: “This time you won’t know what hit you.” Nobody knows what hit the octogenarian Nawab Akbar Bugti, and where else but in a cave. Despite being rich in natural resources, Balochistan still lives in the Stone Age.

President Bush is indirectly responsible for the plight of the Baloch. His disregard for human rights has given his ally a licence to kill and he has a gun in each hand: one aimed at Islamic militants and the other at the Baloch.

In his recent US visit, Gen Musharraf did not urge President Bush to address root-causes of Islamic insurgency. Maybe because someone could have asked him why he does not apply this strategy to the Baloch problem.

The world is still governed by the law of jungle and we are witness to third round of the Great Game, with the Baloch question again coming into limelight. In its first round, the Baloch lost sovereignty to the British colonial forces, an act which led to what the nationalists see as forced annexation of Baloch states into Pakistan.

In its second episode, when US-led coalition waged a war against a progressive Afghanistan with the help of Islamic fundamentalists, Balochistan underwent a demographic change caused by settlement of Afghan refugees in the sparsely-populated province.

In the latest round, the Baloch people fear that the so-called Gwadar development project would do to them what Karachi has done to the Sindhis: red-Indianised them on their own soil. For the Baloch, it is a now-or-never situation.

The killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti has turned their sense of deprivation into alienation, again. Does it augur well for the future of a country faced with several other serious problems, including the erosion of writ of state in Pukhtoon tribal hinterland, and the prospect of the United States again ditching Pakistan (as it did after the Afghan war), to pursue the second part of its Great Game agenda: to change the map of the Middle East.

Every war ends at the negotiation table, an opportunity Gen Musharraf is willing to offer to the Taliban, whom he perceives as a threat to global peace, but not to the Baloch. This is the logic of might: power inspires awe and weakness invites wrath.