Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
Page 9
The next people to dream of Gwadar, or at least of its coastal environs, were the Russians. The Makran coast was the ultimate prize denied them during their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s—the fabled warm water outlet to the sea that formed the strategic raison d’être for their Afghan adventure. From Gwadar the Soviet Union could have exported the hydrocarbon wealth of Central Asia, thus liberating the most landlocked portion of the Kremlin’s empire. But Afghanistan proved to be the graveyard of Soviet imperial visions. Rather than expand the empire, it destroyed it. Gwadar, still just a point on the map—a huddle of stone fishermen’s houses on a spit of sand—was like a poisoned chalice.
The story goes on. The 1990s in Pakistan were a time of successive democratic governments struggling to cope with the country’s intensifying social and economic turmoil, aggravated by the spread of urban slum populations and the increasing scarcity of water. Violence was endemic to Karachi and other cities. But even as the Pakistani political elite turned inward, it remained obsessed with the related problems of Afghanistan and energy routes. The anarchy in Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet troop withdrawal was preventing Pakistan from establishing roads and pipelines to the new oil states of Central Asia—routes that would help Islamabad consolidate a vast Muslim rear base for the containment of India. The final egress of this energy network would be Gwadar. So obsessed was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government with containing Afghan chaos that her interior minister, the retired general Naseerullah Babar, conceived of the newly formed Taliban as a solution to Pakistan’s problem. Bhutto’s government provided the Taliban with money, weapons, vehicles, fuel, subsidized food, and volunteers from Pakistan’s own Islamic madrassas, all of which eased the extremist movement’s path to power in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban provided stability of a sort, but it was that of the grave, something that Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) and other firms, intrigued by building an energy pipeline from the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad natural gas field across Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Indian Ocean ports like Gwadar, all found out to their dismay.
Then in October 1999, army general Pervez Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup precipitated by years of gross civilian misrule. In 2000 he asked the Chinese to consider funding the development of a deepwater port at Gwadar. A few weeks after 9/11, as it happened, the Chinese agreed. Thus, with little fanfare, Gwadar became an example of how the world began to change in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in ways far different than Americans and the administration of George W. Bush ever imagined. The Chinese spent $200 million on the port project, completing the first phase on schedule in 2006. In 2007, PSA Singapore (the Port of Singapore Authority), was given a forty-year contract to run Gwadar port. It appeared that Gwadar was finally moving beyond the stage of dreams to become twenty-first-century reality.
So imagine now, a bustling deepwater port with refueling and docking facilities at the extreme southwestern tip of Pakistan, more a part of the Middle East than of the Indian Subcontinent, equipped with a highway and oil and natural gas pipelines that extend northeast all the way through Pakistan—cutting through some of the highest mountains in the world, the Karakorams—into China itself, from where more roads and pipelines connect the flow of consumer goods and hydrocarbons to China’s middle class fleshpots farther east.3 The pipelines would also be used to develop China’s restive, Muslim far west; indeed, Gwadar looked poised to cement Pakistani and Chinese strategic interests.4 Meanwhile, another branch of this road and pipeline network would go from Gwadar north through a future stabilized Afghanistan, and on into Iran and Central Asia. In fact, Gwadar’s pipelines would lead into a network extending from the Pacific Ocean westward to the Caspian Sea. In this way, Gwadar becomes the pulsing hub of a new silk route, both land and maritime: a mega-project and gateway to landlocked, hydrocarbon-rich Central Asia—an exotic twenty-first-century place-name.
But history is as much a series of accidents and ruined schemes as of great plans. And when I got to Gwadar, it was the pitfalls that impressed me as much as the dreams. What was so fantastic about Gwadar was less the futuristic vision mapped out for it than the present-day reality of the town itself. It was every bit the majestic frontier town that I had imagined, occupying a sweeping, bone-dry peninsula between long lines of soaring ashen cliffs and a sea the color of rusty tap water. The cliffs, with their buttes and mesas and steeple-like ridges were excruciating in their complexity. The town at their foot could have been mistaken for the sprawling, rectilinear remains of an ancient Near Eastern city: low, scabby white stone walls peeking up amidst the sand drifts and mounds of rubble. People sat here and there in broken-backed kitchen chairs, sipping tea under the shade of bamboo and burlap. Everyone was in traditional clothes; there were no Western polyesters. It evoked a nineteenth-century lithograph of Jaffa in Palestine or Tyre in Lebanon by David Roberts, with dhows emerging out of the white, watery miasma, laden with silvery fish thrown ashore by the fishermen, who were dressed in filthy turbans and shalwar kameezes, prayer beads dripping out of their pockets.*
Indeed, there truly was a dreamlike aura to Gwadar, owing to the haze that fused sea and sky into a unitary shroud. If Gwadar does develop as advertised, then the Western visitors who are trickling in now and then might be among the lucky ones, seeing it in its final days as a time-honored fishing town like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and the other storied ports of the Persian Gulf as experienced by the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger in the 1940s and 1950s, just before Big Oil changed everything. “Here life moved in time with the past,” Thesiger writes of Dubai, describing naked children romping in the shallows between the dhows alongside armed Bedouin, “Negro slaves,” Kashgai tribesmen in their felt caps, and Somalis just off small boats from Aden. In Dubai, Thesiger felt ill at ease in his European clothes.5 His description is a lesson in how rapidly things can change.
Meanwhile, the Chinese-built deepwater port with its neat angles, spanking new gantry cranes, and other cargo-handling equipment appeared charged with expectation, able to offer accommodations for the largest oil tankers, even as the complex stood silent and empty against the horizon, waiting for decisions to be made in the faraway Pakistani capital of Islamabad. I was shown a scale model of a vast housing project with tree-lined boulevards and a Marriott resort. “Come back in a decade or two and this place will look like Dubai. You won’t recognize it,” a businessman visiting from Karachi assured me. Yet Gwadar’s airport was so tiny that it lacked even a conveyor belt for luggage.
Little seemed to be happening here, except at places like the fishermen’s wharf. I watched as piles of salmon, trout, snappers, tiger prawns, perch, bass, sardines, and skate were dropped into straw baskets and put ashore through an ingenious pulley system. A big dead shark and a similarly large swordfish were being dragged by ropes into a vast, stinking market shed filled with fish, shiny and slippery, slapping on the bloody cement floor beside piles of manta rays. Donkeys, waiting patiently with their carts, stood at the ready to drag the mountains of fish away to smaller markets in town. Until the next building phase of the port and pipeline project began, traditional fishing was everything here. And the wharf was only part of the spectacle.
At a nearby beach I watched as dhows were built and repaired. Men used their fingers to smear the wooden seams of the hulls with epoxy while others, nestled next to scrawny dogs and cats, took long smokes in the shade. With all the talk of a geopolitical nerve center, here there were no generators, no electric drills, just craftsmen making holes with manual drills turned by bowlike devices, as though they were playing string instruments. A few men working for two months can build a forty-foot fishing boat that lasts about twenty years. The teak wood is imported from Burma and Indonesia. Cod liver oil is painted on the outside to make it waterproof. New boats are launched on the first and fifteenth days of the moon cycles to take advantage of the high tides. This was Arabia before the modern era.
As-Salem Musa, a turbaned Baluch graybeard, tol
d me that his father and grandfather before him built boats. He fondly remembered the “freer” days of Omani control of Gwadar because “we were able to sail all around the Gulf without restrictions.” He harbored both hope and fear of the future: change could mean even less freedom for the Baluch, as Punjabis and other urban Pakistanis swept down here to take over the city. “They don’t have a chance,” a Pakistani official in Islamabad told me, referring to the fishermen in Gwadar. “Modernity will wipe out their traditional life.”
In the covered bazaar, amid the most derelict of tea, spice, and dry goods shops, with their dusty jars filled with old candy, I met more old men with beards and turbans who spoke with nostalgia about the sultan of Oman (Qabus’s father, Sa‘id bin Taymur), and how Gwadar had prospered under his rule, however backward it was in Oman. Many of these old men had dual Omani-Pakistani nationality. They led me through somnolent, burlap-covered streets and along crumbling mud-brick facades, past half-starved cows and goats hugging the shade of collapsed walls, to a small and round stuccoed former palace with its overhanging wooden balconies used by the sultan during his infrequent visits. It was like everything else in Gwadar, in some advanced stage of disintegration. The sea poked through at every turn, now a bottled chlorinated green color in the mid-afternoon.
At another beach there was the bizarre sight of donkeys—the smallest donkeys I have ever seen—romping out of the water and on to the sand, pulling creaky carts driven by little boys that were loaded down with fish just transferred from boats bobbing in the waves, which were flying a black, white, yellow, and green flag of Baluchistan. Miniature donkeys emerging from the sea! Gwadar was a place of wonders, slipping through an hourglass.
By contrast a few miles away, in vast tracts of desert just beyond town, a new industrial zone and other development sites had been fenced off, with migrant labor camps spread alongside, waiting for construction to begin. “Just wait for the new airport,” another businessman from Karachi told me. “During the next building phase of the port complex you will see the Dubai miracle taking shape.” But everyone who spoke to me in terms of a business hub to rival Dubai neglected a key fact. The Gulf sheikhdoms, Dubai in particular, had wise, effective, and wholly legitimate governments that, because they had to rule only city-states without hinterlands, lacked all the weaknesses and disadvantages of Pakistan’s various military and civilian regimes, which, in the course of the decades, not only had rarely proved effective, but were often perceived as illegitimate as well. Moreover, Pakistani regimes had to govern a sprawling territory of mountains and desert badlands, beset by constant wars and rebellions.
The Gulf states did not just happen; it was not destiny. It was the product of good government under ideal conditions, which Pakistan singularly lacked.
Whether Gwadar could become a new silk route nexus or not is tied to Pakistan’s own struggle against becoming a failed state. Pakistan, with its “Islamic” bomb, its Taliban- and al-Qaeda-infested northwestern borderlands, its dysfunctional cities, and territorially based ethnic groups—Baluch, Sindhis, Punjabis, Pushtuns—for whom Islam could never provide the glue for a common identity, was commonly referred to as the most dangerous country in the world, a nuclearizing Yugoslavia in the making. So Gwadar was a litmus test for more than road and energy routes; it was an indication of the stability of the whole Arabian Sea region—that is, for half of the Indian Ocean. If Gwadar languished, remaining what for a Western visitor like myself was just a charming fishing port, it would indicate yet more disturbing trends about Pakistan that would affect neighboring countries.
As it turned out, no one ever did ask to see my non-objection certificate; I could have come here without one. But after a few days in Gwadar, I managed to attract the attention of the local police, who thereafter insisted on accompanying me everywhere with a truckload of black-clad commandos armed with AK-47s. Talking to people became nearly impossible, as my police escort immediately surrounded whomever I met. The police said that they were there for my own protection, but there was no terrorism in Gwadar, only poor Baluch fishermen and their families. While awkward to reach, Gwadar was nonetheless one of the safest places in Pakistan that I had been in nine long visits to the country.
The locals clearly did not like the police. “We Baluch only want to be free,” I was told whenever out of earshot of my security detail. You might think that Gwadar’s very promise of economic development would give the Baluch the freedom they craved. But more development, I was told, meant more Chinese, Singaporeans, Punjabis, and other outsiders who would turn the place into an authentic international port and transit center. Indeed, there was evidence that the Baluch would not only fail to benefit from rising real estate prices, but in many cases would be disenfranchised from their land altogether.
The respected Karachi-based investigative magazine The Herald had published a cover story, “The Great Land Robbery,” which alleged that the Gwadar mega-project had “led to one of the biggest land scams in Pakistan’s history.”6 The magazine detailed a system in which revenue clerks had been bribed by influential people from Karachi, Lahore, and other major cities to have land in Gwadar registered in their names at rock-bottom prices, and then resold to developers for residential and industrial schemes. In fact, hundreds of thousands of acres of land were said to be illegally allotted to civilian and military bureaucrats living elsewhere. In this way, the poor and uneducated Baluch population had been shut out of Gwadar’s future prosperity. And so, Gwadar had become a lightning rod for Baluch hatred of Punjabi-ruled Pakistan. Gwadar’s very promise as an Indian Ocean–slash–Central Asian mega-hub threatened to sunder the country further.
Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast has long been rife with separatist rebellion, with both Baluchistan and Sindh having rich, venerable histories as ethnic-geographical entities harboring fewer contradictions than the state that has existed here since 1947. For the Baluch and Sindhis, independence from Great Britain created a harsh irony: after resisting Punjabi overlordship for centuries they found themselves subject to Punjabi rule within the new state of Pakistan. Whereas the Punjabis venerated the historical memory of the Mughal kings of yore, the Baluch and the Sindhis looked back on the Mughals as symbols of oppression since, with the exception of the periods of rule by the Mughals, the medieval Arabs, and a brief interlude under Mahmud of Ghazna in the eleventh century, the Sindhis, for example, had been independent, ruled by their own local dynasties in the land they called Sindhu Desh.7
In fact, talk had revived of a future Baluch-Sindh confederation quietly supported by India. The two regions are complementary, with Baluchistan holding the natural resources and Sindh the industrial base. In recent decades the six million Baluch have mounted four insurgencies against the Pakistani military to protest economic and political discrimination. In the fiercest of these wars, from 1973 to 1977, some eighty thousand Pakistani troops and fifty-five thousand Baluch warriors were involved in the fighting. Baluch memories of the time are bitter. In 1974, writes the South Asia expert Selig S. Harrison, Pakistani forces, “frustrated by their inability to find Baluch guerrilla units hiding in the mountains, bombed, strafed, and burned the encampments of some 15,000 Baluch families … forcing the guerrillas to come out from their hideouts to defend their women and children.”8
What Harrison calls a “slow-motion genocide” has continued in recent years, with thousands of Baluch in 2006 fleeing villages attacked by Pakistani F-16 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships. This was followed by large-scale government-organized kidnappings and disappearances of Baluch youth. Recently, at least eighty-four thousand people have been displaced by the conflict.9 Also in 2006 the Pakistani army killed the Baluch leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti. But as government tactics have grown more brutal, Baluch warriors have congealed into an authentic national movement, as a new and better-armed generation—emergent from a literate Baluch middle class in the capital of Quetta and elsewhere, and financed by Baluch compatriots in the Persian Gulf—have to a s
ignificant degree surmounted the age-old Baluch nemesis of feuding tribes, which outsiders like the Punjabis in the Pakistani military had been able to play against one another.
The insurgency now crossed regional, tribal, and class lines, the International Crisis Group reported.10 According to the Pakistanis, the Indian intelligence services have been helping the Baluch, since the Indians clearly benefit from the Pakistani armed forces being tied down by separatist rebellions.11 The Pakistani military has countered by pitting radical Islamic parties against the secular and nationalistic Baluch. In a region that has turned into a cauldron of fundamentalist rebellion, “Baluchistan is,” in the words of one Baluch activist, “the only secular region between Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan and has no previous record of religious extremism.”12
The Baluch number only 3.57 percent of Pakistan’s 172 million people, but most of Pakistan’s resources, including copper, uranium, potentially rich oil reserves, and natural gas, are in Baluchistan. Although more than a third of the country’s natural gas is produced there, Baluchistan consumes only a fraction of it because of poverty, even as Pakistan’s economy is one of the world’s most dependent on natural gas.13 Moreover, as Selig Harrison explains, the central government has paid meager royalties to the province for the gas, and at the same time denied it development aid.
Thus, the real estate scandal in Gwadar and fears of a Punjabi takeover there come as culminations to a history of subjugation. To taste the emotions behind all of this, I met with Baluch nationalist leaders at the other end of the Makran coast, in Karachi.
The setting for the first meeting was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in the Karachi neighborhood of Clifton, whose entrance was guarded by a private security guard with a shotgun and billy club. Such fast-food joints, with their overt American symbolism, have been sites of terrorist bombings. Inside were young people wearing both Western clothes and pressed white shalwar kameezes, with freshly shaven chins and long beards in Muslim religious fashion. Yet despite the clash of styles, they all had a slick suburban demeanor. Everyone had trays of chicken and Pepsi, and between bites were busy texting and talking on their cellphones. Drum music blasted from loudspeakers: Indian-Pakistani Punjabi bhangra. In the midst of this upscale scene, five Baluch in soiled and wrinkled shalwar kameezes, wearing turbans and topis, stormed in with stacks of papers under their arms, including the copy of The Herald with the cover story on Gwadar.