Word: baluchistan
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Aside from the potential for Soviet agents to stir separatist sentiments in the Pakistan provinces of Baluchistan and Sind, the area of greatest danger is the North-West Frontier province, where 30,000 troops of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps form a thin defense line. For the moment, the prospect seems to be intensified bombing and occasional hot pursuit, though probably no major Soviet incursion into Pakistan. Says a Western diplomat based in Pakistan: "The Soviets will take every opportunity they can find --and there are many--for subversive operations. It has become a very dirty and deadly game...
...place to look for the Soviets, TIME has learned, is 300 miles north in a remote corner of Baluchistan, near Zahedan, where the Iranian, Pakistani and Afghan frontiers meet to form a triangular no man's land. For centuries, the mountainous border area had been controlled by fierce Baluchi tribesmen, who freely traverse the borders of the three countries. The area is also used by opium smugglers and roamed by packs of wild, emaciated desert dogs...
...sign of spring in Baluchistan's provincial capital of Quetta, as sure as the white blossoms bursting in the groves of almond trees, is the procession of caravans making its way up from the south. Through the 60-mile Bolan Pass in the Brahui mountains they come, nomadic families with their camels, sheep, donkeys, the beasts of burden laden with all their possessions. They march by day and camp at sundown while the animals graze on the stony, barren soil. Many will settle around Quetta for the summer: raising sheep, taking day jobs weeding the cultivated fields...
...nomadic Brahuis are among 60 tribes in Baluchistan. The Baluchi tribes constitute about half of the province's 2.5 million people. Roughly 40% of the rest are Pathans; the remainder are "settlers," as residents from Pakistan's other provinces are called. For more than a century, the policy of ruling governments has been to divide and disperse the tribespeople. In the late 19th century, when London ruled all of the area that is today India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the British pursued what was described as a "forward policy" in order to expand Britain's frontiers and sphere...
...border at will, with no passports, visas, checkpoints or customs to impede them. The Pakistan government has made no attempt to close what has come to be called the "silent border" with Afghanistan and Iran. To do so would invite an insurrection as bloody as the one that engulfed Baluchistan between 1973 and 1977, when the late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ah" Bhutto sought to impose the central government's authority on the province. That conflict cost the lives of 3,300 Pakistani soldiers and at least 5,300 Baluchi guerrillas. When General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto...