THE year was perhaps 1973. There was a meeting of the federal executive council of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists in Quetta. Nawab Akbar Bugti was prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s choice then as governor of Balochistan.

We were all taken to the Governor’s House for lunch. Nawab Bugti, roguishly handsome, wasn’t in the best of moods. The Balochistan insurgency of the time was in full swing. He was alienated from his Baloch comrades and was seen as a stooge of the federal government.

But disillusionment had already begun to set in. When some of us sought to ask for details about the military operation, Nawab Bugti said: ‘Why ask me? Ask the men in the tin hats. They are running the province.’ They are still doing it, with ever more frightening consequences appearing daily before us.

Nawab Bugti wasn’t to last long as governor. He finally gave up in nine or 10 months.

Much later, perhaps in 1981, during the recording of a BBC Urdu Service series on Afghan refugees, the virtual doyen of Quetta journalists, Ghulam Tahir, had arranged an interview with Nawab Bugti at his house in the city. People sat, majlis-style, on spotlessly white cotton floor coverings. This time the nawab’s ire was directed at other things. He had withdrawn from active politics and sat fuming over events in Afghanistan. He said, ‘do you know if you go out on Jinnah Road and stand in the middle of the road and take into your embrace as many passersby as you can, seven out of 10 would be Afghans? What are we doing to ourselves?’

He was also angry at something else, a feeling that was widespread in Balochistan in those days. Nawab Bugti said: ‘Go to the civil secretariat and look at the name plates on the officers’ doors. You will either see the name Raja or Rizvi.’ He was suggesting, of course, that the civil servants were largely either from Punjab or from the Urdu-speaking community. There were few Baloch names.

These are quotations totally from memory, but the drift is clear in the mind and they give an indication of Bugti’s outspoken iconoclasm and also his sharp understanding of issues affecting Baloch society. The comments made by him remain valid, even about the Baloch/non-Baloch tensions, which the sardar’s killing has already exacerbated. A clear explanation of what happened has yet to emerge. There’s too much waffling and double-speak at the official level. If Nawab Bugti’s was not a targeted killing, and he died in a botched up attack, then the president’s references to a successful operation must be deplored even more strongly than they have been so far. There should at least have been a word of regret for the violent death of a politician who was one of the few now remaining who had a link with the country’s past and had a vision of what people had wanted and how their hopes for independence, self-respect and political progress were ground to dust.

There can only be regret at how so many pre-independence stalwarts from the smaller provinces who articulated nationalist sentiments and had an image of Pakistan different from the majoritarian idea of a state with one religion, one language, one centre of power, one strong ruler were sidelined and reviled. If leaders like Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Wali Khan, the Baloch sardars, the Pakhtoon leadership of Balochistan, the intellectuals and activists of Sindh, the Azad Pakistan Party and the NAP leaders of Punjab, and the Bengal stalwarts had been co-opted in the shaping of the country, rather than alienated and branded unpatriotic or even traitorous (Fazlul Haq, the mover of the Pakistan Resolution in 1940), we might have been living in a different country.

It is not a question of what kind of people they, or most of them, were. Of course many were self-serving feudals, many were provincialists, many wanted their own fiefdoms to run in the name of provincial autonomy, many wanted a share in the centre’s spoils. But that really misses the point, and should be largely immaterial to the political debate. Most politicians are scoundrels, but that doesn’t mean that army generals and dictators are not.

Where are we going to find a lily-white brigade of shalwar-kameezed, black-waistcoated virtuous, honest, selfless people who will lead us on the path of virtue? The effort right from the beginning should have been to ensure how the strong points of the leaders of those days, good, bad or indifferent, and their links with their tribes and clans could have been harnessed in the national interest, by making them feel wanted, by making them feel important, by mollifying their angularities of character and attitudes.

Instead we shunned them — all except those who fitted our idea of clones. The attack should have been on the system that prevailed in the regions that now comprise Pakistan; instead, the establishment found that it suited its instincts and its desire for power and all that was needed was to exploit it for its own benefit, by pushing all others out. Is it possible to bomb the sardari and tribal systems out of existence? We will develop the backward regions, it was said. We will take prosperity to the poorer areas. But it was not until 1970 that Balochistan, the largest province by size, was even given a provincial assembly. And does development simply mean building roads and infrastructure and cantonments? These are necessary, of course; economic development and progress is essential. But it is a sense of participation in the political process that is basic to any meaningful political progress.

Ayub Khan undertook the Decade of Development and poured (as well as take out) money into the then East Pakistan but did that prevent the emergence of Bangladesh? If you reduce provincial majorities to match your own numbers, if you consider other people inferior, if you think they are undisciplined, raucous, too demanding about their political and democratic and cultural and social rights to be worth your company in the great enterprise of building this great Islamic republic of Pakistan, then you will get what you have got.

Political inclusiveness too might have proceeded, even if haltingly, if the military had not decided, less than a decade after Partition, that the country was made for it. Once the course of normal politics was blocked, already existing distortions became sharper. Denial of democracy, pluralism and representative government, all excused with a heavy overlay of ‘ideology’ and religion, have ensured that we continue to employ all kinds of non-political means to solve essentially political problems.

All this is extremely cliched, but unless we repeatedly hold a mirror to our faces we will never fully understand what we have done to ourselves or why the killing of Nawab Bugti is being viewed with such grave foreboding by so many. Even whatever development we plan for Balochistan is now in jeopardy, and certainly the future of Gwadar Port, a project already a subject of dispute in the local/non-local context, has a big question mark over it. Things can be steamrollered through force and curfews, but will they prove durable and benefit the people?

Can we change? Can even at this time the rulers, primarily the military, realise that they have to pull back and pull out? If the coming elections have to have any substance and can help in bringing about a more meaningful and democratic future, then preparations for a neutral caretaker administration should begin immediately. Parliament and the political parties must be taken into confidence and made partners in the enterprise. The decision not to proceed on the recommendations of the parliamentary commission on Balochistan was a grievous mistake, and no plausible explanation has been offered so far why its report was not implemented. It is unfortunate that the opposition’s no-confidence motion was pushed into the background by the Bugti tragedy and a debate on the performance of the government could not be publicly held. Many of the queries raised need to be fully answered, and the government must be kept on the mat on privatisation and other linked issues.

The motion was bound to be defeated, and the mutual congratulations being exchanged between the president, prime minister and their ministers are utterly meaningless and will remain so until the rulers become honestly conscious of the lack of direction and a sense of disillusionment among large sections of the people. The Bugti episode may yet shock us into sensibility. But will it? We don’t need to be run by a small band of people with a misplaced sense of their own importance. Let’s rather find our own blundering way in our own fashion.

AS the smoke clears from the battlefield of the 34-day war in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to count the cost only in fallen masonry and fresh graves. All is changed, changed utterly, by the defeat that the whole of Israel is now debating, from the cabinet through the lively press to the embittered reservists at the falafel stall.

Practically, the only person in the world who claims Israel won the war is George Bush — and we all know his definition of the words “mission accomplished”.

Reports that the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed regret this week at having underestimated Israel’s response to the capture of two of its soldiers were misleading. In fact, Nasrallah thanked God that the attack came when the resistance movement was prepared, as he was convinced Israel would have otherwise invaded later in the year at a time of its choosing.

If the fierce thicket of the Iraqi resistance stopped the Bush war spreading to Syria then the extraordinary Hezbollah victory has surely made the world think again about an attack on Iran. But the main — and maybe the most welcome — shift in the 40-year-old paradigm of the Israeli-Arab conflict is the puncturing of the belief in a permanent and unchallengeable Israeli military superiority over its neighbours and the hubris this has induced in Israeli leaders — from the sleek Shimon Peres through the roughhouse of Binyamin Netanyahu to the stumbling Mr Magoo premiership of Ehud Olmert.

The myth of invincibility is a souffle that cannot rise twice. Over the past week I have picked my way through the rubble of Dahia in downtown Beirut, now resembling London’s East End at the height of the blitz, and across the south of Lebanon in towns such as Bint Jbeil whose centres look as if they have been hit by an earthquake. Here the litter of banned weapons lies like a legal time bomb — evidence of war crimes alleged by the UN and Amnesty International that in a genuine system of international justice would put Israel in the dock at The Hague. This, together with the beating Israel has received in international public opinion, is the collateral damage suffered alongside military humiliation.

Israel announced the capture of Bint Jbeil several times, but in truth it never held the town — or anywhere else for that matter — throughout the war. Despite raining down thousands of tons of high explosive on homes, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, ambulances, UN posts, oil storage depots, electricity plants and virtually every petrol station south of Beirut (the bombers seemed to have a crazed thirst for petrol stations, while telling the world that they were kindly inviting the residents of south Lebanon to get into their cars and leave their homes for a little while), the Israelis were given a severe mauling by Hezbollah fighters when it came to boots on the ground.

Paradoxically, some believe that all this has blown open a window in which it is possible to glimpse the possibility of a comprehensive settlement of the near-century-old conflicts which lie behind the recent war. Now that the status quo ante has been swept away, we may even see an FW de Klerk moment emerge in Israel (and among its indispensable international backers).

The leader of the white tribes of apartheid South Africa waited until the critical mass of opposition threatened to overwhelm the position of the previously invincible minority, and sold the transfer of power on the basis that a settlement later, under more severe duress, would be less favourable. Israel’s trajectory is now heading towards such a moment.

A comprehensive settlement now would of course look much like it has for decades: Israeli withdrawal from land occupied in 1967; respect for the legal rights of Palestinian refugees to return; the emergence of a real Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital — a contiguous state with an Arab border, with no Zionist settlements and military roads, and with internationally guaranteed Palestinian control over its land, air, sea and water. In exchange there would be Arab recognition, normalisation and, in time, acceptance of Israel into the Middle East as something other than a settler garrison of the imperial West.

Just as you can’t be a little bit pregnant, a settlement can’t be a little bit comprehensive. Attempts — like the one more than a decade ago in Oslo — to obfuscate, shave and sculpt such a package to the point of unrecognisability will founder on the new reality.

The Arab world is waking up to its potential power. It has seen the Iraqis confound Anglo-American efforts to recolonise their country, the unbreakability, whatever the cost, of the Palestinian resistance, and now the success of Hezbollah. If there is no settlement there can only be war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders’ intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads.

Nor is it only Israel that will pay the price for continued conflict: the enduring injustice of Palestinian dispossession has already poisoned western-Muslim relations and helped spill violence and hatred on to our own streets.

There is still time to choose peace. But make no mistake, with the victory of Hezbollah, a terrible beauty is born.—Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is a Respect Party MP in Britain.