Baluchistan Is Just Like Colorado!

Or so says renowned global affairs expert Robert Kaplan. Seriously?

To travel the Makran coast is to experience the windy, liberating flatness of Yemen and Oman and their soaring, sawtooth 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 echoing 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. Farther inland, every sandstone and limestone escarpment is the color of bone. Winds and seismic and tectonic disruptions have left their mark in tortuous folds and uplifts, deep gashes, and conical incrustations that hark back far before the age of human folly.

Oh, wait, that’s when he calls it Yemen or Khorasan.

The Pakistani government might not control the desert and mountain fastnesses of Baluchistan, with their rebellious and smuggling tribes and dacoits, or bandits. But it can be wherever it wants, whenever it wants: to extract minerals, to grab land, to build highways and bases. Think of the Pakistani government’s relationship to its southwestern province of Baluchistan as similar to that of Washington to the American West in the mid-19th century, when the native American Indians still moved freely, though decreasingly so, and the cavalry had strategic outposts. (Emphasis mine)

Right, there we are: the Baloch are just like the American Indians, only without all those parallels. Kaplan gets around to saying that the analogy really isn’t appropriate, but by then he’s 600 words in, and I’m left wondering why he bothered. To be fair about the grandiloquent language in the first extract, there actually are a number of Baloch merchants in Oman.

But when he says things like how all the Russians wanted when they invaded Afghanistan was access to Gwadar—an appalling mischaracterization of a war he once described in starkly different terms—or that Benazir Bhutto decided to support the Taliban in 1994 not to try for a stable power next door but to build a Unocal pipeline to (you guessed it) Gwadar four years before Unocal even tried pitching the idea to Ashgabat or Islamabad, or imagining a future Gwadar with oil and gas pipelines that will never be built, you have to wonder just what the hell he thinks he is talking about.

As my friend Nitin Pai has noted meticulously (and repeatedly), it is remarkable how very wrong he gets it… especially considering that in the 1980s he was quite insightful about the forces shaping the area. What gives?

No, I did not read past, “What was so fantastic about Gwadar was its present-day reality.” I wanted to preserve the arteries in my head.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use