Balochistan Governor Owais Ghani has accused Afghan warlords and drug barons of arming the tribal militants in Balochistan, and India of financing them. His statement comes a day after 21 people were killed in the latest round of violence in the province. He said the deteriorating security situation was "partly a spill-over from Afghanistan due to the weakness of President Hamid Karzai’s government". He added that he had successfully stopped 10 to 12 percent of arms movement from Afghanistan, but the border between Afghanistan and Balochistan was 1,200 kilometres long and it was very difficult to completely seal it. The governor chose to go public on the issue a week before President Karzai is to visit Islamabad.
There seems to be a game of mutual accusations being played between Afghanistan and India on the one hand and Pakistan on the other. India and Afghanistan accuse Pakistan of not stopping (or actually facilitating) infiltration of militants and terrorists into the territories they control. Pakistan accuses both of covertly funding and supplying weapons and explosives that kill people in Pakistan. Unfortunately, while both sides may be speaking the truth about the other, the international community is inclined to be increasingly sceptical about what Pakistan says. The international press constantly supplies evidence against Pakistani claims.
The problem is that infiltration into Afghanistan and India may be proved overtly while Pakistan simply points to a covert movement of money and weapons. The NATO troops in Afghanistan are under threat from the Taliban and tend to think that Pakistan is facilitating them. This impression is compounded by the fact that most Pakistanis are sympathetic towards the Taliban, hate the NATO presence in Afghanistan and are leery of the Karzai government’s credentials as a controlling authority in the Afghan territory.
Afghanistan is often described by UN officials as a Hobbesian state where it is dog-eat-dog after the collapse of the residual state mechanism many years ago. On the Pakistani side, there are "buffer" areas that Pakistan is most reluctant to describe as Hobbesian or semi-Hobbesian. For example, not all of Balochistan is under normal administration and the consensus there - as it emerged in the Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain-led parliamentary committee’s report in 2005 - is that the province should have no federal paramilitary force, which passes for a factotum policing structure, and no police, which controls only five percent of the territory of Balochistan, which comprises 45 percent of Pakistan’s territory.
Add to that the territory called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and you have more than half of Pakistan living outside the proper jurisdiction of the state. The Balochistan governor glibly accuses Karzai’s Afghanistan of being infested with warlords, but the fact is that warlordism - complete with training camps and private armies - is also present in his own province. If the Hobbesian state of Afghanistan is put together with these two "buffers" of Pakistan, you have a large stretch of landscape presided over by warlords with little or no writ of the state. In fact if ever there is a competition for power among them, the warlords of Balochistan would give the Afghan warlords a run for their money.
The Balochistan governor says the Pak-Afghan border is difficult to patrol because it is so long. But the truth is that where it is controlled the control is not efficient and actually runs against the interests of the people living on both sides of the Durand Line. One reason the entire population of Balochistan (and the political party consensus represented in the parliamentary committee report) wants the Frontier Corps (FC) to go away is that it stops people from smuggling goods across the border. The total smuggling into Pakistan through the Spin Boldak-Chaman border crossing was $5 billion in 1999, out of which the Taliban got $70 million to finance their $100 million war budget. Pakistan’s loss through smuggling of electronic goods and other wares stood at $600 million in 1999. The black economy in Pakistan is about half the size of the country’s GDP.
Nonetheless Pakistan is better equipped than Afghanistan to get rid of its warlords and bring the "buffer" areas under normal administration. But the political consensus for doing so doesn’t exist. Pending the development of such a consensus, however, Pakistan has to cope with the problem as rationally as it can. The current practice of accusing the neighbours is not a good policy especially when official statements are followed by "events" that look like tit-for-tat strikes in the two accused countries. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006 2 8story_8-2-2006_pg3_1 |
