Those who think Pakistan’s only problem is the
rising tide of jihadism in that country are grossly mistaken. There are
indications that the London-led project to separate Balochistan from Pakistan has
now been given an impetus. The objectives are many. To name a few: It would
weaken a belligerent Pakistan; create a buffer between Pakistan and
Afghanistan; secure a strong foothold along the southeastern borders of Iran;
and undo China’s long-term plan to link up the Karakoram Highway in the north
to the Arabian Sea, by a land bridge running through Balochistan.
The British plan to separate Balochistan is a longstanding
one. Britain’s Foreign Policy
Centre (FPC) arranged a seminar on the Balochistan province of Pakistan
in collaboration with the so-called Balochistan Rights Movement on June 27,
2006 in the House of Commons. The seminar was a one-sided attack on Pakistan for
“colonizing” Balochistan and suppressing the Baloch people. Its chairman
Stephen Twiggs, is a member of parliament from Enfield Southgate, who chairs
Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a Westminster-based pro-Israel lobby group
working within the Labour Party. Twiggs has been involved with the FPC from its
inception in 1998, and as a member of the board from 1998 to 2006. FPC wields
considerable influence in Westminster, and is
also consulted routinely by the Foreign Office and Downing Street on matters
relating to the Middle East. Tony Blair is
known to consult its members about Middle East
policy.
In June 2006, Pakistan’s
Senate Committee on Defense accused British intelligence of “abetting the
insurgency in the province bordering Iran
[Balochistan]”, according to the Press Trust of India, Aug. 9, 2006. Ten British
MPs were involved in a closed-door session of the Senate Committee on Defense
regarding alleged MI6 support to Baloch separatists. Also of relevance are
reports of CIA and Mossad support to Baloch rebels in Iran and Southern
Afghanistan.
US military analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, writing in the
June 2006 issue of The Armed Forces Journal, suggested that Pakistan
should be broken up, leading to the formation of a separate country, “Greater
Balochistan” or “Free Balochistan.” The latter would incorporate the Pakistani
and Iranian Baloch provinces into a single political entity.
Fresh cry to break up Pakistan
Although at the time, for the George W. Bush Administration,
and later the Obama Administration, the dismemberment of Pakistan had taken a
back seat—not because Pakistan was an ally, but to ensure help from Islamabad’s
security and military apparatus in finding a way out of the Afghan mess—it is
likely that the option to create an independent Balochistan was very much on
Washington’s agenda for a long while. Now, as relations between the United States and Pakistan
have soured to a point that many in Washington
consider that the differences between the two are irreconcilable, particularly
on security matters, the pro-British Obama Administration has seemingly joined
hands with the “break up Pakistan”
faction in Washington.
US expert
on Balochistan, Selig Harrison, writing for The National Interest, Feb. 1,
2011, urged the Obama Administration to create an independent Balochistan, and
laid out the steps that the United
States should take to make that happen. He
said that Washington should do more to support
anti-Islamist forces along the southern Arabian sea
coast. First, it should support anti-Islamist Sindhi leaders of the Sufi
variant of Islam, with their network of 124,000 shrines. Most important, it
should aid the 6 million Baloch insurgents fighting for independence from Pakistan in the
face of growing ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) repression. Pakistan has given China a base at Gwadar in the heart
of Baloch territory; an independent Balochistan would serve US strategic
interests, in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamist forces.
Subsequently, M. Chris Mason, a retired diplomat with long
service in South Asia, and a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense
Studies in Washington, in an article titled,
“Solve the Pakistan
problem by redrawing the map,” for the Toronto Globe and Mail on Dec.
21, 2011, let it all hang out. “The permanent solution to the Pakistan
problem,” he wrote, “is not more of this chest-beating appeasement. The answer
lies in 20th-century history. In 1947, when India
gained independence, a British Empire in full retreat left behind an unworkable
mess on both sides of India—called
Pakistan—whose
elements had nothing in common except the religion of Islam. In 1971, this
postcolonial Frankenstein came a step closer to rectification when Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan,
became an independent state.
“The answer to the current Pakistani train wreck is to
continue this natural process by recognizing Baluchistan’s
legitimate claim to independence. Baluchistan was an independent nation for
more than 1,000 years when Great
Britain notionally annexed it in the
mid-19th century. The Baluchis were never consulted about becoming a part of Pakistan, and
since then, they have been the victims of alternating persecution and neglect
by the Pakistani state, abuse which escalated to genocide when it was
discovered in the 1970s that most of the region’s natural resources lie
underneath their soil. Since then, tens of thousands of Baluchis have been
slaughtered by the Pakistani army, which has used napalm and tanks
indiscriminately against an unarmed population.
“Changing maps is difficult only because it is initially
unimaginable to diplomats and politicians. Although redrawing maps is the
definition of failure for the United Nations and the US State Department, it
has, in fact, been by such a wide margin the most effective solution to
regional violence over the past 50 years that there is really nothing in second
place. Among the most obvious recent examples (apart from the former Soviet
Union) are North and South Sudan, Kosovo, Eritrea, Bosnia,
Croatia, Macedonia, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia,
East Timor and Bangladesh.
“An independent Baluchistan
would, in fact, solve many of the region’s most intractable problems overnight.
It would create a territorial buffer between rogue states Iran and Pakistan. It would provide a
transportation and pipeline corridor for Afghanistan
and Central Asia to the impressive but
underutilized new port at Gwadar. It would solve all of NATO’s logistical
problems in Afghanistan,
allow us to root the Taliban out of the former province and provide greater
access to Waziristan, to subdue our enemies
there. And it would contain the rogue nuclear state of Pakistan and
its A.Q. Khan network of nuclear proliferation-for-profit on three landward
sides.”
Other players in the fray
Twiggs’ orchestrations in the FPC are not the only Israeli
footprints in the new-fangled Great Game to create a buffer-state between Pakistan and Afghanistan,
and Pakistan and Iran. The
Iranian government accuses Jundullah, a terrorist group that has carried out
myriad terrorist actions in the area bordering the Sunni-majority
Balochistan-Sistan province of predominantly Shi’a Iran over the last decade.
Jundullah came into existence in Balochistan in 2003, and Iran has claimed that it was working
hand-in-glove with the US, Israel, and
al-Qaeda, perpetrating acts of terrorism and supporting separatism. Jundullah
planned its terrorist acts against Iran
from military camps in Pakistan,
Tehran claimed.
More evidence of Israeli involvement, however, becomes
visible on the Baloch diaspora’s website, Government of Balochistan (GOB) in
Exile. The website says the Baloch diaspora established the newly formed
“democratic, liberal and secular” government in Jerusalem in 2006. Its address is: The World
Baloch Jewish Alliance Building: P.O.
Box 5631: Jerusalem,
Israel.
Another arch-enemy of Pakistan,
India, which would like to
weaken Islamabad’s influence in Afghanistan and promote its own, has long been
accused by the Pakistani security agencies of aiding and abetting the Baloch
secessionists with a wink and a nod from Washington.
New Delhi
vehemently refutes those accusations. Nonetheless, a cable from the US Embassy
in Islamabad, leaked by the whistle-blower
website WikiLeaks, disclosed that there was enough evidence of Indian
involvement in Waziristan and other tribal areas of Pakistan, as well as Balochistan.
The Express Tribune, which is part of the International
Herald Tribune group, reported on Dec. 3, 2010, that, according to the
WikiLeaks cable, a draft of a presentation shared with the US by Pakistan’s
National Security Advisor Mahmud Ali Durrani, stated that Pakistani
parliamentarians were also told that India
and Russia
were involved in the insurgency in Balochistan. The Express Tribune reported
that ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha said that India has established nine training
camps along the Afghan-Balochistan border, where it is training members of the
Baloch Liberation Army. He also claimed that “India
and the UAE (reportedly due to its opposition to construction of the Gwadar Port)
were funding and arming the Baloch. Pasha also claimed that the Russian
government was directly involved in funding/training/supporting the
insurgency.”
The article also said “former Pakistani president Pervez
Musharraf had also raised the point with US officials in September 2007.”
According to a memo, he had asked the US
to intervene against “the ‘deliberate’ attempt of Kabul
and New Delhi
to destabilize Balochistan.”
Why Balochistan?
President Obama has clearly stated that the drive to build
up American military presence in the Asia-Pacific region stems from identifying
two enemies of the United States—China and Iran. While Iran is the immediate one, China is
potentially the greater bête noire.
Prior to, or after, issuance of those statements, a number
of developments have occurred rapidly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
Besides Washington’s distancing itself from Islamabad, the US has begun openly to court the
Taliban, an avowed Wahhabite enemy of Shi’a Iran. Vice President Joe Biden has
reminded us recently that President Obama had never identified the Taliban as
an enemy. The Taliban has also opened an office in Qatar,
a vassal-emirate of Britain,
and where the US has
military installations; they hope to negotiate with the US/NATO to resolve the Afghanistan imbroglio, and to stake a claim in Kabul. The American plan
is seemingly to wean the Taliban away from Pakistan,
and bring to power in Kabul
a force that is avowedly anti-Iran. Since Iran
has been identified by Obama and his Administration as its enemy, the enemy of Iran, the Taliban, may soon become Washington’s friend.
In order to bring pressure on Iran,
the US has also tripled the
size of the Shindand Air Base in western Afghanistan, about 20 miles from
the Iranian border. Having been in the works since the Fall of 2010, completion
of the “Far East Expansion” makes the base second in size only to Bastion Field
in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province,
Afghanistan.
The project is part of a $500 million military construction effort to support
Regional Command West, and turn Shindand into the premier flight-training base
in Afghanistan.
The expansion is slated to become the new living and work area for more than
3,000 Coalition forces and government contractors. Their relocation will make
possible the construction of a new 1.3-mile NATO training runway, scheduled to
begin early 2012.
So, what is now on Washington’s
mind? To begin with, the Obama Administration may have concluded that in order
to “deal” with Iran, the US/NATO would like to create a “trouble-free”
Afghanistan, which, in Washington’s book, means putting Kabul, and, in essence,
all of Afghanistan, under the control of the “friendly” Afghan Taliban and
separating the group from its loose ties with Pakistan.
It also means that if and when Balochistan becomes an
independent country, London and Washington will secure a direct access to Central Asia
using the Arabian Sea. Such an arrangement would
smooth US/NATO logistical requirements and pose a permanent threat to the
security of Iran’s Strait of Hormuz, a stone’s throw from the western tip of
Balochistan. In the interim, a vigorous secessionist movement unleashed within
Balochistan will enable the anti-Iran crusaders to weaken Iran’s
northeastern region through irregular warfare.
In the long term, perhaps, the London-Washington objective
is to prevent China from
coming into the Arabian Sea in the south from the Karakoram Highway in the North, thus
establishing a supply line which would enable a faster development of its
western part bordering Central Asia. London and Washington
believe that by preventing the economic development and security of western China, they would be in a position to set up
satrapies on the southern flank of Russia, another potential major
enemy.
The China
angle
One of the first indications of China’s
long-term interest in Pakistan
was construction of the Karakoram Highway (KHH), or “Friendship Highway,” jointly, by the
governments of Pakistan and China,
completed in 1986. It connects the northern areas of Pakistan
to the ancient Silk Road. It runs
approximately 1,300 km from Kashgar in the Xinjiang region of China, to
Havelian in the Abbottabad District of Pakistan. An extension of the highway
meets the Grand Trunk Road at Hasan Abdal, west of Islamabad. The highway cuts through the
collision zone between the Asian and Indian continents, where China, Tajikistan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India come within 250 kilometers of
each other.
On June 30, 2006, a memorandum of understanding was signed
between the Pakistani Highway Administration and China’s state-owned Assets
Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) to rebuild and upgrade the
KKH. According to S. Fredrick Starr, a professor at Johns Hopkins
University, and chairman
of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a new North-South phase of the corridor
is underway. Examples of this thrust are: the rebuilding of the KKH; the new
route running from southwest Xinjiang across Tajik Badakhshan; the planned US
highway bridge over Pansh, linking Tajikistan with Afghanistan’s main
north-south routes; the improvement of existing highways from the Urals and
western Siberia to Central Asia, and their extension to Afghanistan; and
developing road and rail routes from Iran’s port of Bandar-Abbas, north across
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan to Russia.
China,
meanwhile, has integrated its western and central regions, and is now in a
position to use the KKH and other links for expanding trade with West and South Asia. To further strengthen the KKH, a railway line
alongside it, connecting Pakistan
and western China,
is now under consideration as an integral part of the TEC (Trade and Energy
Corridor) project. The railroad is intended not only for trade but also to
transport oil and gas by tankers, in case a pipeline is not a viable option.
This rail track will be linked to Gwadar, where oil-refining and storage
facilities are now under construction. (Source: “Prospects of Pakistan becoming a trade and energy corridor
for China”:
Fazal-ur-Rahman.) In other words, China
envisions the Gwadar Port to become a trans-shipment hub for the
landlocked Central Asian states, Afghanistan,
and Western China.
The second leg of China’s
Pakistan policy is the
development of Gwadar Port on Pakistan’s
Makran coast in Balochistan, not far from the Strait of
Hormuz. The Gwadar
Port project got underway
soon after 9/11. On March 22, 2002, China flew in Vice Premier Wu
Bangguo to lay the foundation stone, and the first phase of the project was
completed in 2005. The overall cost is estimated at $1.16 billion; the Chinese
contribution to finance the first phase was $198 million, while Pakistan
invested $50 million.
Since the completion of Phase I, Pakistan has taken some interesting
decisions. On Feb 1, 2007, Islamabad
allowed the Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) to sign a 40-year agreement with the
Port of Singapore Authority (PSA), one of the biggest port operators in the
world, and its subsidiary Concessional Holding Company, for development and
operation of the tax-free port and duty-free trade zone. The concessions given
to the operators had already been approved by Shaukat Aziz, former prime
minister of Pakistan,
on Jan. 23, 2007.
However, a decade-long war in Afghanistan
and rapid deterioration of security conditions within Balochistan, have stymied
progress in the development of the Gwadar
Port. According to
Pakistani Sen. Ismail Buledi, the Port
of Singapore Authority is
relying only on government cargo, thus grossly deviating from the master plan
of the government. He added that the port should be given to China, so it
can be operated according to the master plan. “If the Gwadar Port
is marketed well, the regional ports will lose considerable business,” he said.
“It is time we took right decisions. Otherwise Gwadar
Port may lose this opportunity to the
fast developing Iranian port
of Chabahar.”
It is evident that in the Chinese scheme of things, the key
to the success of its Pakistan
policy lies with the Gwadar
Port. In choosing a port
site to link up with the KKH, Gwadar’s location is ideal. It is on the Arabian
Sea coast in the southwestern tip of Pakistan’s
strife-torn province of Balochistan, and faces the Gulf
of Oman and the Strait
of Hormuz. However, it seems that both London
and Washington are ready to use their muscles
to prevent China
from achieving that goal.
The author is South Asian Analyst at Executive
Intelligence Review