A ‘weak-state’ package

By Khaled Ahmed

The Baloch have suffered because of lack of good governance and sheer neglect. Now the province is in the grip of a militant movement that intimidates but derives its strength from the ‘state of nature’ in Afghanistan where external elements are gathered to pressure Pakistan

The PPP government has offered to Balochistan a ‘package’ of administrative and financial reforms on the basis of a consensus reached in a parliamentary committee. Anyone who looks at the pledges made in the package would say the centre has largely corrected the biases the critics of its Balochistan policy had pointed out. But the ‘absent’ rebel Baloch leaders, and those in political currency but outside the provincial assembly, have dismissed the package out of hand.

The maximalist phenomenon: Given the depth of the reform contained in the package, it is reasonable to take the position that the ‘maximalists’ are a natural phenomenon in the given situation and should not upset the centre. Everyone sees a dialogue with them in the offing in which they will be persuaded through ‘action on the ground’ to give up their clearly separatist stance. The existence of anger among the Baloch is a good omen because it can be caused to go down. However, the general rejectionism in Balochistan is based on the factor of intimidation and signals the extent to which the writ of the state has been eroded by terrorism.

The ‘package’ will be debated in parliament after Eid and may be modified in light of the Baloch response. But it is clear that the parliament will not agree to undo the state map as it stands now and that some rights of the centre will stand in spite of the quashing of the ‘concurrent list’. The discussion will set a limit to the growing all-Pakistan sympathy for the Baloch cause and may crystallise the irreducible distance that remains between the Baloch rebels comprising the major tribes of the province and elements in other provinces that promote the cause of the Baloch as a device of achieving their new levels of autonomy from the federation.

Is there a quid pro quo in the package? (1) The package seeks to delete the concurrent list, the Police Order of 2002 and the Balochistan Local Government Ordinance of 2001. It seeks effective implementation of article 153 on the Council of Common Interests, and implementation of articles 160 (NFC award), 154 (council functions and rules of procedure), 155 (interference with water supplies), 156 (National Economic Council), 157 (electricity projects), 158 (priority of requirements of natural gas) and 159 (broadcasting and telecasting).

This addresses the demands not only made by Balochistan but by all the provinces. The Baloch rebels will see it as a bad bargain in return for giving up their militant movement in an environment of weakness of the Pakistani state. To them acceptance would mean strengthening of the weak central state.

(2) The package seeks ‘facilitation of political exiles returning to Pakistan, except those involved in ‘acts of terrorism’; it wants ‘the unanimously passed provincial assembly resolutions from 2002 to-date relating to the province implemented ‘within the legal framework of the constitution’.

The political exiles may return and that may include those who have abetted acts of terrorism. This would reflect the measure of pragmatism if that means a return to peace in Balochistan. Exclusion of some Baloch actors amounts to denying general amnesty which is unrealistic.

Grey areas persist: (3) The package wants the federal government to immediately review the role of federal agencies in the province and ‘stop all such operations that are not related to the pursuit of fighting terrorism’. The federal government should announce withdrawal of army from Sui, to be replaced by the Frontier Corps (FC) and no proposals be formulated to construct new cantonments ‘except in frontier areas wherever required’. It wants a halt to the construction of new cantonments in Sui and Kohlu ‘for the time being’ and the army to be withdrawn from Sui after handing over to FC, which is also to take over the already constructed Sui cantonment.

The package wants withdrawal of ‘agencies’ but not of those forces that are fighting terrorism. It wants the federation to give up plans of building cantonments, but here too ‘the border areas’ are exempted. This may include the region of Mekran which is where the Iranian gas pipeline will be laid and will have to be protected. There is a hidden quid pro quo in the withdrawal of the army from Kohlu for permission to prospect for gas there. However, no such quid pro quo is accepted by the Marri tribal chiefs. The Baloch tribes – mainly Marri, Bugti, Mengal – will have to agree to accept Frontier Corps in the cantonments in lieu of the army. Their demand for the replacement of FC with levies has already been accepted by the past Quetta assemblies.

Granting rights from weakness: (4) If things had been normal in Balochistan a majority of the population there would have welcomed the committee’s recommendation that: The federal government immediately create 5,000 jobs for the province; the federal government pay arrears of gas development surcharge (GDS) from 1954 to 1991, amounting to Rs120 billion, in 12 years; the province buy up to 20 percent of right shares offered in open market in organisations like PPL, OGDCL and Sui Southern; and the federal government immediately give 20 percent from its 30 percent shares in Saindak project to the province, which will exclusively own it on completion and after withdrawal of the foreign company.

The Baloch maximalists will reject the package because they see that the centre is bedevilled by insurgencies and is also weighed down by the ‘threat from India’ which substantially emanates from Afghanistan. The strategy of ‘normalising’ with India to defuse the danger from that country, recommended by the international community, has not found favour with Islamabad. This means that Baloch rejectionism will remain intact, looking forward to what the Mengals call ‘sovereign status as per the 1940 Pakistan Resolution’ .

When should the dialogue begin? How should a state ‘talk’ to an insurgency prospering on its ability to acquire allegiance through intimidation? Talking to the tribal insurgency in FATA, the state learned that it had to talk from a position of strength. It came to this conclusion after realising that the tribal warrior doesn’t want to talk when he is in a position of strength. The tribal warrior goes for the kill when he gains the position of strength. Statesmanship at the global level recommends that the time to talk is when the opponent is weak.

Pakistan is a weak state like many states in the Third World. Its institutions are wobbly, its police and the courts scared of strong people. It is jumpy only because some of its weaknesses are not shared with the rest of the Third World. Its writ is so weak in most of the areas of its territory that foreigners can come and go freely and set up their little states with the help of local people to start challenging the state on the basis of sharia, the one vulnerability that other non-Muslim states of the Third World don’t suffer from. The state brought this state of affairs on itself by embracing jihad, a concept that undermines the state.

Fixing the weak state: Francis Fukuyama in his book State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century, writes: ‘Weak governance undermines the principle of sovereignty of which the post-Westphalian international order has been built. It does so because the problems that weak states generate for themselves and for others vastly increase the likelihood that someone else in the international system will seek to intervene in their affairs against their wishes to forcibly fix the problem. Weak here means a lack of institutional capacity to implement and enforce policies, often driven by an underlying lack of legitimacy of the political system as a whole’. (p.129)

The Baloch have suffered because of lack of good governance and sheer neglect. Now the province is in the grip of a militant movement that intimidates but derives its strength from the ‘state of nature’ in Afghanistan where external elements are gathered to pressure Pakistan. (Courtesy: The Friday Times, Lahore)