The excellent Acorn a few weeks ago posted a series of entries on the sad, nay alarming state of Balochistan. And now this analysis seems a bit late in the coming but is thought-provoking.

Amidst regular uprisings fuelled the more by atrocities by the army, Balochistan is another Bangladesh in the making. The thug Musharaff the dictator will certainly use all his might to quell every uprising but that’ll only incite ‘em more.

The insurgents are prepared for night attacks from advanced US-made helicopters given to Pakistan to fight Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists…

Caught between the US and Iran, the world’s shrewdest dictator is banking only on brute strength.

Indeed, the fear expressed in diplomatic circles is that Iran may be stoking trouble in Baluchistan to make it unviable as a base for US operations against it. While all Baluchis want greater autonomy from the Pakistan federation, the Shias want at least separately earmarked districts, which have been fiercely rejected by the Pakistan military. “You cannot oppose the Pakistan military for long,” said a diplomat, in respect of Baluch resistance, but he admitted that this could mark the beginning of Pakistan’s fragmentation. The CIA has already assessed that Pakistan will be a failed state by 2015, collapsing to inter-provincial rivalries, Shia-Sunni clashes, and civil war

But this state of affairs in Balochistan was only inevitable. If you read this really insightful background aptly titled The Lawless Frontier written by Robert Kaplan who visited the area five years ago, you’ll find it prophetic. He visited Balochistan exactly a year before September 11 happened.

The week I was in Quetta, there was also a series of bomb blasts in government buildings, relating to the arrests of a hundred members of an ethnic-Baluch clan who were wanted in connection with the murder of a judge. A few weeks before that two bombs had gone off inside army bases in Quetta. Musharraf’s regime was trying to extend taxation and the rule of law to this tribal area hard by Afghanistan, and it was encountering stiff resistance. Chiefs here were nervous about Musharraf’s plan to hold local elections, which could threaten their power. [...] “I will not disarm, because I do not trust the government to protect me,” Mir Lashkari told me. He added, “Only the army needs Pakistan.” The tribes and ethnic groups, he said, can defend themselves without the state. Indeed, the international arms bazaar and the unrestricted flow of drugs and electronic goods have increased the tribes’ autonomy. (emphasis added)

Compare the words emphasized with this sentence from the India Reacts’ analysis.

Pakistan has a network of underground nuclear installations in Baluchistan, apart from its notified test site at Chagai Hills, and if the Pakistan military loses control, then the strategic assets may fall into wrong hands. This is a very real fear expressed by foreign nuclear experts, but Pakistan is, as usual, blasé about it.

Indeed, if these tribes get total control over nuclear weapons, Pakistan will find a new enemy carved out of its own body, threatening its existence. But the terrorist leader isn’t bothered about this. His fear lies elsewhere.

More than the loss of nuclear assets, it (Pakistan) fears the separation of Baluchistan with Iranian assistance, or the creation of a Shia-majority region in Baluchistan…

Musharaff’s promises of generating employment via the gas pipelines has not fooled the locals. It has only resulted in the contrary.

In this desert of lost chances, the Sui gas fields are the lone beacon of hope, but they have not provided as many jobs to the locals, and consequently, the pipelines delivering gas all the way to Karachi have come to represent state-directed pauperisation of the province. In the past year of Baluch unrest, Sui gas installations have been attacked with rockets, and now the military, which guards the facilities, is accused of protecting an officer who raped a local lady doctor.

The desert of lost chances wasn’t always that way earlier. To get a glimpse of how it was, we’ll have to turn to Robert Kaplan again.

I had last visited Quetta in 1988, when it was a clean, relatively quiet place of fewer than 500,000 people. Now it was noisy and dirty, crowded with beggars and drug addicts, and its population was unofficially estimated at 1.2 million. A three-year drought afflicting southern Asia from Afghanistan to India had provoked an exodus from the surrounding desert into the city. The delightful water channels I remembered from the 1980s are now dry and filled with crud. Traveling outside Quetta, I saw empty riverbeds and dam catchments. Desperate men equipped with nothing but shovels dug ninety-foot-deep wells in the 110° heat, searching for water near Hanna Lake, which was once beautiful and full, and is now brown and diminished. With irrigation canals dry, aquifers are being depleted by overuse. Agriculture is in decline because of the water shortage, with cultivation reduced in many areas by 70 percent.

If this is the state of Quetta, the capital city, one can only imagine how the other, more impoverished towns and villages will be. And it speaks volumes about the quality of governance that has contributed to making this a desert of no chances. Pakistan’s only development agenda is to create trouble for India. The few prosperous/developed cities are totally isolated and want to remain that way.

And nobody wants to–or is powerful enough to–challenge Musharaff. Musharaff cannot carry on his balancing act indefinitely, based solely on his equation with Bush Jr. Balochistan will erupt.