PAKISTAN: Moving Inland

The bulk of our population in villages as well as towns gets the creeps when there is any mention of the politicians coming back into power again.

—General Ayub Khan

After eight months of cleaning out the political stables, the military government of General Mohammed Ayub Khan was ready to make future plans.

The first was to promise elections this year of village panchayats (councils) to take over local police, judicial and administrative duties. Once the panchayats are functioning, work will begin on a new constitution. By starting at the bottom, Sandhurst-trained Strongman Khan hopes to build democracy slowly, from the bottom up, so as to avoid reinstating the corrupt old top.

His second plan was more radical: to move Pakistan’s capital from hot, humid, and filthy Karachi to a cool, high (elevation: 5,264 ft.) valley surrounded by a crescent of hills on the Potwar plateau some 700 miles to the north. Uncomfortably sitting on the steaming Arabian Sea with only parched desert behind it, Karachi since 1947 has mushroomed in population from 350,000 to an overcrowded 2,000,000. Government offices are spotted awkwardly in rented space across the sprawling city; water supply is at best uncertain over 60 miles of sand; and in the ill-favored climate, several hundred thousand residents of Karachi have tuberculosis. Only two foreign powers have invested in permanent embassies in Karachi: India and the U.S. (which is building a million-dollar, four-story embassy).

To the military government, one incentive in moving is to get away from the business lobbies and commercial interests that tempted the old regimes, and from the street mobs that they were able to hire for slogan-shouting marches on the legislature. The new inland capital, 100 miles east of the Khyber Pass, will also be a scant 35 miles from Rawalpindi—headquarters of the Pakistan army.