Water-soluble roads; and consciences

The Iran pipeline project will go ahead if it is for the good of Pakistan, Insha’allah.

Anyone seeing the broken Kashmir Road (yes, yes, I KNOW that it is also being widened but I am talking of those parts of it which were built over a period of three years, not more than seven years ago) that links the Islamabad Toll Plaza with the city should be forgiven for thinking that Pakistani roads being built these days are built badly: they don’t know that our roads were always built this way! So, I am going to take you 38 years back in time, to Khuzdar in Balochistan and the then famed RCD Highway which also connected Quetta with Karachi via Kalat; Khuzdar and Lasbela. My battalion was stationed in Khuzdar in 1973/4 as part of 70 Brigade, Brigadier (later Lieutenant General, DMLA, and Governor of NWFP) Fazle Haq commanding, with one company each at Mashkai, Nal, and Jebri. I was the Second-in-Command and the CO was the very good and upright man Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Cheema, whose moral and intellectual courage was absolutely admirable. He always stood for what was right and just. My respects to him.

Khuzdar was a non-family station and we used to travel every two weeks or so for long weekends to Quetta where our families lived, using any transport that was heading Quetta-way. A helicopter going back after a ferrying mission; or one of the two L-19s (aka Cessna Bird-dogs) single-engine aircraft attached to Brigade HQs, and piloted by two of my course-mates at different times: Majors Javed Khan of Rehana (later senior captain in PIA and the airline’s director) who has remained a life-long friend, and the most pleasant Khurshid who is from Karachi but with whom I lost physical contact some years ago, only exchanging messages on the internet.

And last but not least, the modes of travel were the good old army Jeep or 3-tonner; but mostly (civilian) Bedford trucks rented from transporters, and used mainly to haul rations from one place to another. This truck was the most available for it was used to ferry rations from Quetta, but it was also the most uncomfortable. Whilst as the only officer travelling you got to sit with the driver up front, the seat was uncomfortably hard; for some reason so high that you had to stoop forward to see the road; and for the reason that because these trucks were built to be over-loaded (as all trucks are today!) they had very hard suspensions.

So, you can picture an empty truck, or one with very little load, painfully bumping along on what was then known as the RCD (the organisation that has now morphed into the ECO) ‘Highway’. The road was so badly designed and constructed that large swathes of it had been washed away by hill torrents. Indeed, even where there was no evidence of a torrent the road was pot-holed. A mere look would tell you that the asphalt was no more than an inch thick! I actually took along a foot-ruler once: it averaged between three-fourth to one inch.

Which reminds me: my former, and now late father-in-law, Captain Muzaffar Rashid, 16^th Light Cavalry, and later a senior banker and Prince among men, used to call our roads ‘water-soluble’ … and how right he was. I challenge anyone to show me one road in the length and breadth of Pakistan (barring the Motorway) which lasts more than four years, if that. Indeed, two days of a light drizzle and you’ll see our roads fall apart in several places.

I’ve lived in Japan for five years, where it rains incessantly and never have I seen their roads in the pathetic condition ours are in after rainfall. Look at the United Kingdom, where too, it rains ‘all the time’ as my friends who live there say: do their roads fall apart every second year? Or the United States; or France; or Germany; even Thailand and Malaysia and Sri Lanka? When will our contractors stop skimming off so much money that they can only present us our pathetic roads?

And now on to other things: the government’s detractors are, to use my friend Ayesha Siddiqa’s expression, ‘jumping up and down’ pointing fingers at the Prime Minister’s visit to the United States derisively, completely missing the point that the Americans know they are talking to an elected leader, and that they have repeatedly affirmed that it is great that Pakistan has transitioned from one democratic government to another. According to a report, Vice-President Joe Biden “congratulated the PM on his historic election in May, which led to the first democratic transfer of power between elected governments in Pakistan’s history”. What could be better news for all Pakistanis?

There are also irresponsible insinuations by senior opposition figures that the Iran pipeline project might be shelved. Nothing could be further from the truth: from what I have read in the press the matter a) was not even brought up, and b) Pakistan’s stated position has always been that it is its own affair and that no international agreements and conventions militate against it. The project will go ahead if it is for the good of Pakistan, Insha’allah.

I must add here that it is sad to see these senior ‘politicians’ wax eloquent about what Pakistan should, or should not do vis-a-vis the Americans, now that they are near withdrawing from Afghanistan, without a trace of embarrassment or shame at what they did when they sat in Musharraf’s lap. It was sad to see them dare the present government, even suggesting we had the Americans by the throat since they had to use Pakistani land routes to take their material home.

Now these are so-called ‘senior’ journalists and ‘politicians’: do they not know that while the bulk of the equipment is American, Nato is involved too? And that the ‘mission’ in Afghanistan has UN sanction? Do they wish to turn the whole world against us? I simply have to ask if their consciences are water-soluble too, just like our roads?

Published in The Express Tribune, October 25^th, 2013.

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