Balochistan: no time to lose
By Ghulam Asghar
Quackery gives birth to nothing; but gives death to all.
Balochistan's present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums
by which Balochs vainly hope they may get more time to waste.
In February, 2005, the US Intelligence Council predicted that
Pakistan would be driven by political instability in the next decade
and alleged that there was a possibility of Pakistan nuclear assets
might be stolen by the Islamist extremists. This mischievous report
was posted on CIA's website with a detailed chapter on Pakistan. The
council's reports are supposedly updated every 5 years. One
assessment in the report was that by the year 2015, there could be
political instability in Pakistan with the possibility of a civil
war. Instead of taking a firm stand against such CIA slanders,
Musharraf's foreign office spokesman, Masood Khan just described
these assessments as highly speculative and implored that a
responsible institution like the CIA should not have put them on its
website. At the same time, instead of protesting to Washington, he
criticised the Indian media for propagating the report that had
described Pakistan as a "failed state." The spokesman forgot that
Indian media couldn't control the CIA.
Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been
hoodwinked; contra wise, no amount of force can control a freeman, a
man whose mind is free. Not the rack, not the fission bombs, not
anything; you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is to
kill him. Balochistan is being pushed into a conflict, virtually a
civil war, which would ultimately push it to a breaking point in
accordance with Washington's plan for ultimate hegemony in South and
Central Asia. It is now well established that both Washington and
London are trying to Balkanise Pakistan into three zones; a new map
is being proposed by the US Armed Forces Journal, which shows that
only Sindh and Punjab would remain as Pakistan, while NWFP and
Balochistan separating to constitute greater Afghanistan and greater
Balochistan with Iranian Balochistan amalgamated with it. This would
directly involve Iran in the conflict and would open a door for
US-Israel to destabilise Iran.
The Obama administration is increasingly treating its growing
intervention in Pakistan as another counterinsurgency war for which
it is demanding the same kind of extraordinary military powers that
Bush had used in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this was the message
delivered by Pentagon officials to Capitol Hill over the last few
days, along with increasingly calamitous warnings that without
immediate and unconditional US military funding, the Pakistan
government could collapse.
Recently, Defence Secretary Gates warned Congress that unless it
quickly approved some 400 million dollars requested by Pentagon for
a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, the Pakistan army
would run out of funding within weeks for its operations against
insurgents in NWFP and other areas of the country.
The Nation:Thursday ,May 14,2009
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