By Rahul Bedi, IANS
A steady collapse of governance across Pakistan and the resultant loss of state control over large swathes of its territory have heightened insecurity in the country, triggering ominous portents for the future.
The Pakistani state – represented almost exclusively by the army and the larger security apparatus – exercises limited control over the western Balochistan province, parts of neighbouring Sindh province and portions of North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Recent events have clearly but starkly revealed that Islamabad has virtually no control over most of the seven largely lawless and semi-autonomous federally administered tribal territories (FATAs) strung along the Afghan border.
Taliban fighters regroup in the FATA belt, particularly in the wild Waziristan area, before crossing the Durand Line, the unformulated demarcation between Pakistan and Afghanistan, to attack the US Army and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in a bid to regain control of the war-torn and benighted country.
According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), Pakistan has experienced over three decades of corruption, drugs, military rule, rising Islamist extremism and a general decline in education and health standards.
The country is ruled by the military – some 1,200 serving and retired officers run a web of banks, transport and road building companies, communication facilities and construction businesses worth billions of dollars – and much-needed social, economic and political reforms had faltered.
“Religious extremists play an increasingly important role in providing education and other services to the poor, resulting in the radicalisation of areas of the country,” the ICG states. The forthcoming general election, it adds, would be crucial in deciding whether Pakistan continues on this path or whether moderate forces assert themselves.
Considering Islamabad’s steadily decreasing decline of state authority, security experts and analysts do not entirely rule out the possibility of Pakistan’s geographical boundaries being redrawn at some point in the not too distant future.
Professor S.D. Muni, formerly of the School of International Relations at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, said an “alteration” in population patterns will dramatically manifest itself over the next two to three decades, bringing with it enhanced turmoil and problems of ethnicity.
“Borders remain an open question,” Muni told IANS.
Other security experts said Balochistan province remained one such vulnerable area, where the native Balochis are fast becoming a minority as a result of the continuing influx of Pashtun refugees from war-torn Afghanistan.
Alongside, resentment among locals was also fuelled by the Pakistan government’s deliberate policy of settling outsiders from the dominant Punjabi community in the sparsely populated but vast and resource-rich desert province in order to “dilute” Balochi numbers.
In turn, analysts believe the Balochi unrest could “kick-start” the long-running but presently dormant separatist movement launched by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in neighbouring Sindh province.
Urdu-speaking migrants from northern and eastern India who moved to Pakistan at independence formed the MQM nearly three decades ago.
Currently aligned with Pakistan’s ruling party, the urbanised MQM has no strong religious ideology but is committed to gaining additional power for Sindh’s mohajirs or migrants at any cost. For nearly a decade in the 1990s MQM cadres had turned the port city of Karachi into a war zone in pursuit of its agenda to impose its omnipotence.
Triggering a potential Baloch separatist movement could be the long-running Pakhtunistan movement for a Pathan-dominated region straddling the NWFP and southern Afghanistan that seems to be gaining credence in view of the hateful US presence in the region.
The widely disregarded Durand Line, drawn arbitrarily in 1893 and casually agreed to by Afghanistan’s then ruler Amir Abdur Rehman, has over the years kept alive the Pakhtunistan issue.
This “line in the sand” satisfied the colonial craving to define the boundaries of the British Empire, making the tribal areas the buffer between the settled British territories (NWFP and Punjab) and Afghanistan, should the Russians move on Kabul, a stratagem Rudyard Kipling termed the Great Game.
However, the tenuous border failed to divide the Pathans or stifle their desire for independence, which, despite frequent intra-tribal feuds, has survived to the present. Belonging to over 80 tribes, the Pathans are a semi-nomadic people with over 15 million living in Pakistan, including the tribal areas, and around 11 million in Afghanistan.
Though Pathan tribes and sub-clans are forever in conflict, they invariably unite when faced with a larger threat, like that posed presently by Pakistani and US and Western forces raising the 21st century bogey of the New Great Game.
Apart from Balochistan, the FATAs, NWFP and Sindh, Pakistan is only left with Punjab, its largest and most prosperous province, in a region where geographical boundaries have often been redrawn via conquests and political agitation, almost always with disastrous consequences.
It is always relevant to recall that the subcontinent’s division into predominantly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan by the colonial government in 1947 led to the largest migration in history and sectarian rioting in which over a million people died in addition to causing untold misery.
The resolution of India’s dispute over Kashmir and its borders with China also retain the possibility of territorial changes, despite New Delhi vehemently opposing any such prospect. The issue, however, is further complicated by Pakistan having transferred a large portion of the disputed Kashmir principality to China in 1963.
Its settlement, for now, defies resolution as the territory is strategically crucial to Beijing, which is highly unlikely to hand it back to India, leading eventually to a re-drawing of maps.
(Rahul Bedi is a writer on strategic affairs. He can be reached at [email protected].)