In the fuss the US Congress’s sudden interest in Balochistan has created in Pakistan, one small but telling fact has been overlooked: until very recently the CIA’s drone mission was based in an airbase in the province.
The now-closed Shamsi base tells its own story of the way in which Balochistan has been exploited as a conveniently discreet backyard by outsiders. Britain, the US, India, Iraq, China, Iran, Gulf states, not to mention the Taliban, have all lodged interests within its rugged, mineral-rich folds.
Shamsi was first established by an Arab sheikh who wanted a convenient base for his hunting trips. Then, in 2001, the United Arab Emirates government quietly sub-let it to the CIA, which used it to service the Predator drones that killed targets in the tribal areas along the Afghan border.
The full nature of the arrangement only came to light after the Pakistani military, enraged by the killing of 24 of its soldiers by a US drone strike, forced Asif Ali Zardari in November 2011 to kick the US intelligence agency out of the base, used principally to boost signals to the drones.
A senior security official in Islamabad told me that for years even senior members of the military were unaware of Shamsi’s existence, which was not marked on any of their maps. The claim, hard to believe, is impossible to verify since journalistic inquiry in the province is, to say the least, discouraged.
To read the compelling evidence submitted to the recent US congressional hearing on Balochistan by professor Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert based at Georgetown University, is to be presented with a list of subjects demanding further investigation. Are the Baloch being displaced by Punjabis settled on land grabbed by the army? Who controls the port in Gwadar, specifically, the new deep sea port built by the Chinese? What has happened to Baloch schools since so many teachers, often non-Baloch, have been killed? How much of Balochistan’s mineral and energy wealth is being diverted by corrupt generals in league with foreign investors? And above all, just how many people are being killed by the security forces, how and why?
With the little attention the West still pays Pakistan wholly taken with the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, these, sadly, are not questions high on the agenda in newsrooms in Washington, London or Paris.
If it’s hard for foreign reporters to get close to the story, it can be lethal for Pakistani journalists. A cameraman who captured the killing by Frontier Corps of five ‘terrorists’, one of them a pregnant woman, is on the run.
The near-hysterical reaction to a meaningless resolution in the US Congress calling for recognition of an independent Balochistan, meanwhile, proves once again how vulnerable Islamabad feels on the issue.
But the Obama administration, with its own dirty desert secrets and pressing need to coopt Islamabad in the Afghan endgame, shows no signs in stirring further interest in the subject. The chances are what happens in Balochistan will continue to stay in Balochistan.
Francis Elliot is South Asia Editor for The Times, London
