August 31, 2004 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The chief minister of Pakistan’s Balochistan province has blamed India’s intelligence agencies for running training camps in Iran, Afghanistan, and even in Balochistan itself.
“Conspiracies are hatched against Balochistan by anti-Pakistan forces who do not want Gwadar port to become economic hub in the region,” he said.
The Balochistan chief minister said that RAW was running terrorist camps in Iran and Afghanistan. “It has now set up 30 to 40 such camps in Balochistan, each with training facility for 30 people who are paid Rs10,000 monthly.
“The monthly expenses of each such camp are over Rs0.4 million. The money is being supplied from abroad,” he alleged. He promised that names of the held terrorists would be disclosed once the ongoing investigations concluded.[Dawn]Contrary to what India’s internal security chief thinks, the RAW must be quite a powerful organisation to be able to run so many camps within Pakistani territory. That’s one better than the ISI would could only manage to set up jihadi infrastructure in Pakistani and Afghan territory it controlled. Indeed, armed with such minutae of intelligence, the all-powerful Pakistani forces should have been able to get rid of those camps a long time ago.
Then again, Pakistan should not complain if India were to provide ‘moral, diplomatic and political support’ to the Balochi ‘freedom-fighters’ in their struggle against ‘state-sponsored terrorism’. Musharraf himself has shown no inclination to dismantle the anti-India jihadi infrastructure in Pakistani territory or to stop cross-border infiltration. While the breakup of Pakistan into smaller, potentially more volatile fragments is not in India’s interests, it may be useful for India to highlight Balochistan and Balawaristan to change the playing field of a propaganda war that has hitherto been dominated by Pakistan’s holier-than-thou concerns about human-rights violations in Indian Kashmir.
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