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The hour of
reckoning
By B Raman
"Don't push us ... it is not the
1970s, and this time you won't even know what has
hit you," President General Pervez Musharraf
is reported to have warned Baloch
nationalist elements during an interview to Geo
television, Pakistan's private TV channel, last Monday.
He issued this warning while replying
to a question on the deteriorating law-and-order
situation in Balochistan due to the protest
movement launched by Baloch nationalist elements,
spearheaded by an organization which calls itself
the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA). Not much is
known about this organization. It is possibly an
offshoot of the Baloch People's Liberation
Organization (BPLO), patterned after the Palestine
Liberation Organization, which was active in the
1970s in the wake of the birth of Bangladesh. It
tried to emulate the Bangladesh freedom struggle,
but the government of Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, then
in power, managed to crush it with the help of the
army and the air force, forcing its leaders and
remnants to take shelter in Afghanistan, the
United Kingdom, France and the then USSR.
Musharraf is not wrong when he warns the
Baloch nationalists "it is not the 1970s". In the
1970s, the Pakistani political leadership, as well
as the military, were yet to recover from the
traumatic loss of East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was
known before 1971. The army was still in a state
of demoralization, with senior officers blaming
each other for the humiliating debacle in East
Pakistan. The US was yet to replenish all the
equipment lost by the Pakistani armed forces in
East Pakistan. Pakistan was not a military nuclear
power. There was no terrorist or insurgent
movement in Indian Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir
(J&K) to keep the Indian security forces
preoccupied.
Indira Gandhi, whom the
Pakistani military-intelligence establishment
respected, feared and hated, was still at the
height of her power in India. The then Afghan
government in Kabul was a close ally of India.
Consequently, worries over the possibility of the
Indian and Afghan armies helping the Baloch
nationalists, either overtly or covertly, was a
factor influencing Pakistan's policy.
Despite all these inhibiting factors, the
Pakistani army and air force, on the orders of
Bhutto, intervened and ruthlessly put down the
nationalist movement, though they took many months
before they could root it out. The Shah of Iran
was at the height of his power and influence in
Tehran and he was determined to see that the BPLO
did not succeed lest it have an adverse impact on
Iran's control over its Balochs. He had reportedly
assured Bhutto that if India intervened to help
the Balochs, his army would enter Balochistan to
help the Pakistan army crush the Balochs. This
imparted some confidence to the Pakistani
leadership.
Today, Pakistan is a nuclear power.
Jihadi terrorist organizations from Pakistan
continue to keep the Indian security forces
bleeding in J&K. India has had a succession
of prime ministers who have no stomach for
using the stick against Pakistan. Afghanistan is
ruled by a government that is strongly under the
control of the United States and hence unlikely to meddle
in Pakistan's internal affairs. Pakistan's economy
is improving steadily. Musharraf is the blue-eyed
boy of the US and other Western governments. US
economic and military assistance has been resumed
to Pakistan on a generous scale.
The army
has been in receipt of considerable US military
supplies, such as helicopter gunships,
surveillance equipment, arms and ammunition, etc
meant for use against al-Qaeda and the
International Islamic Front (IIF) of Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan's border areas. Musharraf could
easily divert them for use against the Baloch
nationalists, and the US is unlikely to raise any
objection.
Despite all this, there are many
negative factors too, which should be a cause for
concern for Pakistan. First, when he put the Baloch
revolt down, Bhutto was still the popular leader
of Pakistan, with considerable public support,
particularly in Punjab and Sindh. Musharraf
enjoyed such popularity for a few months after
he seized power in October 1999, but his
popularity has declined today because of his
supporting the US in its operations against the
Taliban and al-Qaeda and his refusal to lay down
office as the chief of the army staff in violation
of the solemn promise made by him in the beginning
of last year.
Bhutto did not
have to contend with strong Islamic
fundamentalist and jihadi terrorist elements. Because of the policies
followed by Zia ul-Haq and his successors as the
army chief, including Musharraf himself, the
jihadi terrorist elements have become a
Frankenstein's monster. There was no large-scale
Shi'ite-Sunni tension in the 1970s. The frequent
Shi'ite-Sunni violence was a product of Zia's
encouragement of sectarian forces, and this has
become worse since Musharraf took over in 1999,
spreading from Punjab to Sindh, then to
Balochistan and now to the Northern Areas.
Musharraf has had until now the
unquestioned support of all the officers of the
rank of major-general and above, but at lower
levels there is hostility to him - in the army and
the air force. This was evident from the
involvement of some junior officers of the army
and the air force in the two unsuccessful attempts
to kill him in December 2003, and the recent
escape of one of them, who had been sentenced to
death in November 2004, from air force custody.
Even earlier, it was known that the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) had penetrated
the army. In September 1995, General Abdul
Waheed Kakar, the then army chief, discovered a plot by
a group of army officers headed by
Major-General Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi, acting in complicity
with the HUJI, to assassinate him and Benazir
Bhutto, the then prime minister, and capture
power.
Recent Pakistani media reports have
indicated that some of the army and air force
officers who were involved in the December 2003
plots to kill Musharraf were members of the
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), thereby indicating
penetration of the military by it too. In
addition, it is believed that there has been
penetration of the army by the Hizbut Tehrir too.
An army infiltrated by anti-US and anti-Musharraf
jihadi terrorist elements could not be a fit
instrument for counter-insurgency duties in
Balochistan.
The military campaign against
the Uighur, Uzbek, Chechen, Kazhak and Arab
survivors of the IIF who are operating from South
Waziristan has not been successful, despite
claims to the contrary made by army spokesmen.
Violent attacks on the army continue to be
reported. Already about 210 military and
paramilitary officers are reported to have lost
their lives there and South Waziristan is
threatening to become a mini-Iraq. At a time when
victory against the terrorist remnants is not yet
in sight in South Waziristan, it would be unwise
for Musharraf to open up another front in
Balochistan.
The continuing prosperity
of the Pakistani economy depends on stability
in Balochistan. Industries and power stations in
the rest of Pakistan have already been affected by
the frequent disruptions of gas supply from Sui
in Balochistan by the BLA. A prolonged
military conflict between the military and the
Baloch nationalists would cause a setback to the
economy. Moreover, there is large involvement of
Chinese personnel in the Gwadar port construction
and other projects in Balochistan. There is
already considerable tension amongst the Chinese
residents after the killing of two of their colleagues
by improvised explosive devices in May last year
by as yet unidentified elements. A military
conflict and the resulting instability would add
to this nervousness and could come in the way of
further Chinese involvement in projects in
Balochistan.
Finally, there has
been a deterioration in the law-and-order situation in
other parts of Pakistan since Musharraf joined
hands with the US in October 2001 against
al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Sectarian clashes have
spread to Gilgit and Baltistan in the Northern
Areas of J&K, which are directly administered
by Islamabad. Since the middle of last year,
normal life has been frequently disrupted due to
the exacerbation of the anti-Shi'ite violence and
the sprouting of anti-Ismaili violence in these
areas. Musharraf has been watching helplessly
without being able to stop this violence.
Any military operation in Balochistan
against the nationalist elements has to be fast
and surgical if it is to be effective. Otherwise,
a prolonged conflict would make the situation
intractable. In 1971, General Yahya Khan and his
senior generals convinced themselves, just as
Musharraf seems to have convinced himself now,
that the army will have a walkover in the then
East Pakistan. The result: an independent
Bangladesh.
Any hasty and over-confident
action by Musharraf could create a similar
situation in Balochistan. Musharraf may end up
being another General Yahya Khan, the army chief
in 1971, or another Lieutenant-General Tikka Khan,
who came to be abused as the butcher of the
Bangladeshis.
B Raman is
additional secretary (retired), cabinet
secretariat, government of India, and currently
director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai,
and distinguished fellow and convener, Observer
Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. E-mail:
corde@vsnl.com.
(Copyright B Raman
2005.) |
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