Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (12 page)

Baluchistan, particularly the southern, coastal part, is a wild and woolly, Turko-Iranian, tribal stepchild of the Middle East that has chafed for decades under the domination of darker-skinned, urbanized, and, so it is alleged, sharper-in-the-ways-of-the-world Punjabis, who live close to the Indian border in Pakistan’s crowded northeast, and who essentially run the Pakistani state. Yet, the teeming hills of humanity that mark the
densely populated Indian Subcontinent feel far away here in
Arabian Pakistan
. To drive along the Makran coast is to experience the windy, liberating flatness of Yemen and Oman, with their towering, saw-tooth ramparts the color of sandpaper, rising sheer off a desert floor pockmarked with thornbushes. Here, along a coast so empty that you can almost hear the echo of the camel hooves of Alexander’s army, you lose yourself in geology. An exploding sea bangs against a knife-carved apricot moonscape of high sand dunes, which, in turn, gives way to crumbly badlands of black slag heaps. This is a more baroque seaboard than Dhofar, and the record of the winds and seismic disruptions takes the form of tortuous folds and uplifts, as well as of deep gashes and conical incrustations.

For hours on end, the only sign of civilization is the odd teahouse, a partly charred stone hut with jute
charpoys
(beds) and musty, Iranian-packaged biscuits for sale along with strongly brewed tea. Historically, this is a wilder, less visited coastline than Oman, and thus less marked with the cosmopolitan influences of the rest of the Indian Ocean. Into these road stops, on old autos and motorcycles, screech Baluch tribesmen wearing Arab headscarves, speaking in harsh gutturals, and playing music that, with its rumbling rhythms, is much closer to the spirit of Arabia than to the introspective twanging ragas of the Subcontinent.

But be not deceived, Pakistan exists here. The highway from Karachi west to the Iranian border area is a modern one, with only a few broken patches left to be paved. Government checkpoints are frequent, and major air and sea bases are being developed, respectively, at Pasni and Ormara, from where Pakistan can counter India’s projection of power into the Indian Ocean. Pakistan’s government may not control the vast desert and mountain fastnesses of Baluchistan, with their rebellious and smuggling tribes and dacoits (bandits). But the government can be where it wants, when it wants: to extract minerals, to grab land, to build highways and bases.

Indeed, as the government builds roads and military installations, Baluch and minority Hindus are being displaced forcibly from the area, for both groups are suspected of harboring sympathy for India, which, truth be told, in Baluch and Hindu eyes, acts as a necessary counterweight to a Pakistani state that oppresses them.

Studying the map of “rugged and moldy” Baluchistan, as the first adventurers of the British East India Company called it, nothing stirred my
imagination so much as Gwadar, a port town of seventy thousand close to the border with Iran at the far end of the Makran coast.
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If there are great place-names of the past—Carthage, Thebes, Troy, Samarkand, Angkor Wat—and of the present—Dubai, Singapore, Teheran, Beijing, Washington—then Gwadar might qualify as a great place-name of the future.

Getting to Gwadar was not easy. A special permit, or “non-objection certificate,” was required from the Pakistani Ministry of Interior. I waited nearly two weeks for one, and then was told I had been rejected. Thoroughly despondent, I was finally able to locate through an old friend a helpful bureaucrat who performed the seeming miracle of getting me the permit in two days. And so, because of the very difficulty in reaching the place, Gwadar was invested with great importance in my own mind before I even arrived.

Oman held Gwadar until 1958, when it ceded this western corner of the Makran coast to the new state of Pakistan. Gwadar immediately seized the imagination of Pakistani planners during the military rule of Ayub Khan in the 1960s. They saw Gwadar as an air and naval hub that would be an alternative to Karachi and that, when set alongside Pasni and Ormara, would constitute a string of Arabian Sea bases making Pakistan a great Indian Ocean power athwart both the Subcontinent and the whole Near East. Gwadar’s ultra-strategic location would help liberate Pakistan from its own artificial geography, giving it in effect a new destiny. But the Pakistani state was young, poor, insecure, and with weak infrastructure and institutions. Thus, the development of Gwadar would have to wait.

The next people to dream of Gwadar, or at least of its coastal environs, were the Russians. The Makran coast was the ultimate prize denied them during their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s—the fabled warm water outlet to the sea that formed the strategic raison d’être for their Afghan adventure. From Gwadar the Soviet Union could have exported the hydrocarbon wealth of Central Asia, thus liberating the most landlocked portion of the Kremlin’s empire. But Afghanistan proved to be the graveyard of Soviet imperial visions. Rather than expand the empire, it destroyed it. Gwadar, still just a point on the map—a huddle of stone fishermen’s houses on a spit of sand—was like a poisoned chalice.

The story goes on. The 1990s in Pakistan were a time of successive democratic governments struggling to cope with the country’s intensifying social and economic turmoil, aggravated by the spread of urban slum
populations and the increasing scarcity of water. Violence was endemic to Karachi and other cities. But even as the Pakistani political elite turned inward, it remained obsessed with the related problems of Afghanistan and energy routes. The anarchy in Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet troop withdrawal was preventing Pakistan from establishing roads and pipelines to the new oil states of Central Asia—routes that would help Islamabad consolidate a vast Muslim rear base for the containment of India. The final egress of this energy network would be Gwadar. So obsessed was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government with containing Afghan chaos that her interior minister, the retired general Naseerullah Babar, conceived of the newly formed Taliban as a solution to Pakistan’s problem. Bhutto’s government provided the Taliban with money, weapons, vehicles, fuel, subsidized food, and volunteers from Pakistan’s own Islamic madrassas, all of which eased the extremist movement’s path to power in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban provided stability of a sort, but it was that of the grave, something that Unocal (Union Oil Company of California) and other firms, intrigued by building an energy pipeline from the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad natural gas field across Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Indian Ocean ports like Gwadar, all found out to their dismay.

Then in October 1999, army general Pervez Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup precipitated by years of gross civilian misrule. In 2000 he asked the Chinese to consider funding the development of a deepwater port at Gwadar. A few weeks after 9/11, as it happened, the Chinese agreed. Thus, with little fanfare, Gwadar became an example of how the world began to change in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in ways far different than Americans and the administration of George W. Bush ever imagined. The Chinese spent $200 million on the port project, completing the first phase on schedule in 2006. In 2007, PSA Singapore (the Port of Singapore Authority), was given a forty-year contract to run Gwadar port. It appeared that Gwadar was finally moving beyond the stage of dreams to become twenty-first-century reality.

So imagine now, a bustling deepwater port with refueling and docking facilities at the extreme southwestern tip of Pakistan, more a part of the Middle East than of the Indian Subcontinent, equipped with a highway and oil and natural gas pipelines that extend northeast all the way through Pakistan—cutting through some of the highest mountains in the world, the Karakorams—into China itself, from where more roads and pipelines connect the flow of consumer goods and hydrocarbons to
China’s middle class fleshpots farther east.
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The pipelines would also be used to develop China’s restive, Muslim far west; indeed, Gwadar looked poised to cement Pakistani and Chinese strategic interests.
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Meanwhile, another branch of this road and pipeline network would go from Gwadar north through a future stabilized Afghanistan, and on into Iran and Central Asia. In fact, Gwadar’s pipelines would lead into a network extending from the Pacific Ocean westward to the Caspian Sea. In this way, Gwadar becomes the pulsing hub of a new silk route, both land and maritime: a mega-project and gateway to landlocked, hydrocarbon-rich Central Asia—an exotic twenty-first-century place-name.

But history is as much a series of accidents and ruined schemes as of great plans. And when I got to Gwadar, it was the pitfalls that impressed me as much as the dreams. What was so fantastic about Gwadar was less the futuristic vision mapped out for it than the present-day reality of the town itself. It was every bit the majestic frontier town that I had imagined, occupying a sweeping, bone-dry peninsula between long lines of soaring ashen cliffs and a sea the color of rusty tap water. The cliffs, with their buttes and mesas and steeple-like ridges were excruciating in their complexity. The town at their foot could have been mistaken for the sprawling, rectilinear remains of an ancient Near Eastern city: low, scabby white stone walls peeking up amidst the sand drifts and mounds of rubble. People sat here and there in broken-backed kitchen chairs, sipping tea under the shade of bamboo and burlap. Everyone was in traditional clothes; there were no Western polyesters. It evoked a nineteenth-century lithograph of Jaffa in Palestine or Tyre in Lebanon by David Roberts, with dhows emerging out of the white, watery miasma, laden with silvery fish thrown ashore by the fishermen, who were dressed in filthy turbans and
shalwar kameezes
, prayer beads dripping out of their pockets.
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Indeed, there truly was a dreamlike aura to Gwadar, owing to the haze that fused sea and sky into a unitary shroud. If Gwadar does develop as advertised, then the Western visitors who are trickling in now and then might be among the lucky ones, seeing it in its final days as a time-honored fishing town like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and the other storied ports of the Persian Gulf as experienced by the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger in the 1940s and 1950s, just before Big Oil changed everything.
“Here life moved in time with the past,” Thesiger writes of Dubai, describing naked children romping in the shallows between the dhows alongside armed Bedouin, “Negro slaves,” Kashgai tribesmen in their felt caps, and Somalis just off small boats from Aden. In Dubai, Thesiger felt ill at ease in his European clothes.
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His description is a lesson in how rapidly things can change.

Meanwhile, the Chinese-built deepwater port with its neat angles, spanking new gantry cranes, and other cargo-handling equipment appeared charged with expectation, able to offer accommodations for the largest oil tankers, even as the complex stood silent and empty against the horizon, waiting for decisions to be made in the faraway Pakistani capital of Islamabad. I was shown a scale model of a vast housing project with tree-lined boulevards and a Marriott resort. “Come back in a decade or two and this place will look like Dubai. You won’t recognize it,” a businessman visiting from Karachi assured me. Yet Gwadar’s airport was so tiny that it lacked even a conveyor belt for luggage.

Little seemed to be happening here, except at places like the fishermen’s wharf. I watched as piles of salmon, trout, snappers, tiger prawns, perch, bass, sardines, and skate were dropped into straw baskets and put ashore through an ingenious pulley system. A big dead shark and a similarly large swordfish were being dragged by ropes into a vast, stinking market shed filled with fish, shiny and slippery, slapping on the bloody cement floor beside piles of manta rays. Donkeys, waiting patiently with their carts, stood at the ready to drag the mountains of fish away to smaller markets in town. Until the next building phase of the port and pipeline project began, traditional fishing was everything here. And the wharf was only part of the spectacle.

At a nearby beach I watched as dhows were built and repaired. Men used their fingers to smear the wooden seams of the hulls with epoxy while others, nestled next to scrawny dogs and cats, took long smokes in the shade. With all the talk of a geopolitical nerve center, here there were no generators, no electric drills, just craftsmen making holes with manual drills turned by bowlike devices, as though they were playing string instruments. A few men working for two months can build a forty-foot fishing boat that lasts about twenty years. The teak wood is imported from Burma and Indonesia. Cod liver oil is painted on the outside to make it waterproof. New boats are launched on the first and fifteenth
days of the moon cycles to take advantage of the high tides. This was Arabia before the modern era.

As-Salem Musa, a turbaned Baluch graybeard, told me that his father and grandfather before him built boats. He fondly remembered the “freer” days of Omani control of Gwadar because “we were able to sail all around the Gulf without restrictions.” He harbored both hope and fear of the future: change could mean even less freedom for the Baluch, as Punjabis and other urban Pakistanis swept down here to take over the city. “They don’t have a chance,” a Pakistani official in Islamabad told me, referring to the fishermen in Gwadar. “Modernity will wipe out their traditional life.”

In the covered bazaar, amid the most derelict of tea, spice, and dry goods shops, with their dusty jars filled with old candy, I met more old men with beards and turbans who spoke with nostalgia about the sultan of Oman (Qabus’s father, Sa‘id bin Taymur), and how Gwadar had prospered under his rule, however backward it was in Oman. Many of these old men had dual Omani-Pakistani nationality. They led me through somnolent, burlap-covered streets and along crumbling mud-brick facades, past half-starved cows and goats hugging the shade of collapsed walls, to a small and round stuccoed former palace with its overhanging wooden balconies used by the sultan during his infrequent visits. It was like everything else in Gwadar, in some advanced stage of disintegration. The sea poked through at every turn, now a bottled chlorinated green color in the mid-afternoon.