Conspiracy unlimited: Where the pipelines are concerned, the nationalists appear to be gripped by a common delusion that America secretly wants Balochistan to secede from Pakistan, in order to secure the superpower a new source of oil, claims The Economist.
This does not seem a conspiracy and is no delusion as the Americans have already stated they want to control all pipelines and fear the Chinese naval use of Gwadar port.
In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors -- Western Europe, Japan and China -- that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. #msg-4798276
The U.S. is not interested in Caspian oil to supply its own internal industry. The U.S. is grabbing for control of the Caspian oil fields because other countries need this oil--and because the U.S. wants to control them. Other imperialist rivals--including Germany and Japan--are "energy poor" and need access to oilfields outside their borders. Most Third World countries are heavily dependent on imported oil. #msg-3775550
Writing for the New York Times, Nayan Chanda, former editor of Far Eastern Economic Review, says, "Port's projected size and strategic location have sent ripples of anxiety through Washington, Tokyo and New Delhi about the potential establishment of a permanent Chinese naval presence near the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 per cent of the world's oil passes.
And the Americans are implicated in the kidnapping of the Chinese engineers.
Abdullah, who masterminded the abduction of two Chinese engineers,was freed from Guantanamo Bay in March after the Pentagon said he no longer posed a threat to the United States. #msg-4318776
-Am
Can the government tame Balochistan?
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: In the Hindu ghetto, a maze of winding alleys and bright-coloured temples, Lal Chand sluices water over the dried blood and innards of his neighbour. Of 67 people killed in a battle in March between tribal militiamen and government troops in Dera Bugti, a small town in Balochistan, around half perished when the ghetto was shelled by the government’s men, said the news website of The Economist. Their target was a large white house adjoining the ghetto’s walls: the ancestral home of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, septuagenarian sardar of the surrounding 5,000 square miles and their 150,000-odd residents—and thorn in the flesh of Pakistani governments for half a century.
But the government failed to kill Bugti in the fray—which, it claims, began when his bearded tribesmen attacked its troops outside the town. The news website reports the government’s violence did not end a decades-old dispute with the wily and charismatic sardar over the sharing of revenues from local gas-fields, or ease tensions across Balochistan.
All the same, in the contradictory way of Pakistani politics, said The Economist, the government in Islamabad may after decades of occasionally brutal rule over the provinces be about to adopt more moderate policies. On May 3, a parliamentary committee headed by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the leader of President Pervez Musharraf’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League, issued 32 recommendations on how the government should address grievances in Balochistan.
It is Pakistan’s poorest province. The committee’s recommendations include giving Balochistan’s inhabitants a bigger share of gas revenues and more jobs in gas exploration. The committee wants the government to pay the province arrears, estimated at 6 billion rupees ($100m), and to give Balochis a far bigger part in the building of a new deep-water port on the province’s coastline, at Gwadar. The website said that these recommendations, if adopted (for it is by no means certain they will be adopted) would signal a big concession from Pakistan’s central powers, dominated by a mostly Punjabi military elite, to the country’s unhappy margins. They would also be long strides towards ending a conflict that has recently started to cause serious unease around the region.
The Economist said the people of Balochistan have good reason to resent their government—or “Pakistan” as they sneeringly refer to it, as if to a foreign country. Eight out of ten lack safe drinking water and nine out of ten have no gas. This last rankles especially, given that Balochistan produces most of Pakistan’s gas, including about 1 billion cubic feet (28m cubic metres) per day—roughly 45% of total production—from a single gas-field at Sui, on Bugti’s estate. The neighbouring fief of Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri, the most belligerent of Balochistan’s sardars, contains oil and coal, but the government has not dared exploit it.
In a province flush with guns—and ruled by them in its most tribal parts—insurgency has flickered in almost every decade of Pakistan’s existence. In the mid-1970s the government sent 80,000 troops to crush an uprising of Marri tribesmen and Marxist guerrillas, with great bloodshed on both sides. In each of the last two years, around 100 policemen, soldiers and civilian officials have been murdered, and pipelines and railways blown up. In January, the Sui gas-field was closed after an attack by gunmen. A little-known group, dominated by Marri tribesmen and calling itself the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), has often claimed responsibility for these actions. Perusal of the province’s newspapers suggests that most districts of Balochistan see an insurgent attack every few days.
The foreign hand: Unwittingly, outsiders have stoked the conflict. Thirsting for oil, America and India want to build a pipeline through the province, running south from the wells of Central Asia, or, in India’s case, east from Iran, said The Economist. India’s dynamic Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar—who also dreams of a pan-Asian gas grid—has suggested that the second pipeline could be completed by 2011. On reaching the coast, the Central Asian pipeline would disgorge into super tankers gathered off the emerging port at Gwadar. Chinese engineers are building the port with an initial loan from China of $200m. As its capacity increases, Gwadar will halve the distance between Xinjiang, the westernmost province of China, and its nearest accessible port—currently some 2,000 miles (3,000 km).
Balochi nationalists, and especially the BLA, take particular exception to the emerging port. Last May, three Chinese engineers were killed and 11 injured in Gwadar by a car bomb. The nationalists consider it another avenue for the government to plunder their resources. But more important, with an eye on the teeming slums of nearby Karachi, they fear it may draw in millions of outsiders, making the Balochis a minority in their own land.
Under the current system, this increased population would at least give the province a bigger slice of the national pie: 37 percent of the budget is divided among Pakistan’s provinces on the basis of population size, with Punjab taking over half the total, and Balochistan’s current population of 6.5m a mere 5 percent, said the news website. Shujaat’s parliamentary committee recommends distributing such revenues according to need, with the most backward areas receiving most money. It also proposes a raft of measures to make Gwadar’s development more palatable to locals: a majority of jobs in its construction would be reserved for them and special scholarships awarded to their children. Yet even all this may not placate the nationalists whose real fear is of becoming an ethnic minority and so losing their influence at the polls.
Conspiracy unlimited: Where the pipelines are concerned, the nationalists appear to be gripped by a common delusion that America secretly wants Balochistan to secede from Pakistan, in order to secure the superpower a new source of oil, claims The Economist. Indeed, the uniformity of the nationalists’ expressed grievances and conspiracy theories, is striking. Traditionally, the government found it easy to use patronage to divide the warring tribes. Of late, however, a greater coherence has emerged. Last year, the four Baloch nationalist parties, including three headed by sardars, formed an alliance to put their demands to the parliamentary commission. Also last year, the Bugti and the Marri ended a 50-year feud. No Balochi nationalist seems to condemn the BLA’s murderous campaign. In his handsome Karachi home, Ataullah Mengal, the third senior sardar—and another grand old man—says: “The armed struggle has begun, the Chinese engineers have been killed, bomb-blasts are going off every day. The cost will be dear, but we are asking for something dear and for that we must pay dearly, even with our lives.”
The website said that another novelty in the nationalists’ campaign is the part played by Bugti, in his blood-splattered town. A former minister of interior and of defence, Bugti is no separatist. He has long sparred with successive governments for money and political influence, and has spent nearly a decade in prison. But the status quo has given him untrammelled power over his tribe and a fund of gas royalties amounting, by one estimate, to Rs 120 million a year. Nonetheless, since Bugti tribesmen arose against the government in January, to decry the rape of a female doctor at the Sui gas-field, he has appeared to adopt the nationalist cause. “It’s not all about pounds, shillings and pence. Man cannot live on bread alone,” he told the website’s correspondent—“though I’m sure it was not an Englishman who said it.”
After shelling its own citizens in Dera Bugti, the government backed down. The Economist said that in effect it agreed to a truce with Bugti and withdrew some troops from his area. Even before considering the parliamentary committee’s recommendations, in fact, the government had some sensible policies on Balochistan in place. There is a plan to raise a 25,000-strong Balochi border force, whose recruits will be subject to less stringent educational requirements than normal. Several new army bases are also planned for the province. Though unpopular with the nationalists, these will boost local businesses.
If such measures were to be reinforced by the adoption of at least some of the committee’s recommendations, Pakistan’s government could go a long way towards satisfying the demands of Balochistan’s aggrieved people, says the website. All the same, when Bugti says that money is not the whole answer, he has a point. In Quetta and other towns, the BLA has strong support among educated young people. Typically, they are not only unemployed but also—since Musharraf launched his coup in 1999—disenfranchised. At a dubious election in 2001, the president’s supporters ensured that a coalition of Islamists from the Pushtun minority took over the provincial government. Without restoring real democracy, Musharraf may find that the gifts he can afford to give Balochistan are never quite enough.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
