52 



up to very close to the surface, as you can see from this 

 picture here, [refers to materials] The water table was 

 always right at the surface under the river, but between the 

 river, where the canals were, here's the river, here's the 

 river [pointing] , a lot of these canals were put in all the 

 way across that country, in between the rivers. All of 

 them leaked and the water table rose. 



Well, you can see the canals. Here, these little 

 lines are supposed to be the canals. The water table rose 

 under each one of these canals, and eventually, all the way 

 across the doab, the water was only a few feet below the 

 surface. The aquifers had just filled up, the sponge had 

 just filled up right close to the surface. The water then 

 rose by capillary action to the surface. The water 

 evaporated, and the salt in it accumulated on the surface. 

 They had crusts of salt on the surface, or near the surface. 



It was a devastating sight to see it from the air. 

 You would fly over this country. These canal colonies which 

 were on this grid system looked as if they had been struck 

 by a disease of some kind. Some of the villages had just 

 literally disappeared, in others there were just a few 

 houses left. What had happened was that the farmers had 

 been starved out. They couldn't grow any crops in this 

 salty soil. And large areas were flooded. There was 

 standing water over very large areas. 



Jerry Wiesner was along on that first trip. We went 

 there in September of 1961. We met with Ayub Khan, and we 

 were very well entertained by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had a 

 beautiful Persian wife, and his daughter I later taught at 

 Harvard, Pinky Bhutto. 



We were entertained by Malik Amir Mohammed Khan, 

 meanwhile the governor of West Pakistan. I'll show you a 

 picture of him. Let me repeat his name: Mohammed Khan, the 

 nawab of Kalabal and governor of West Pakistan. He was 

 about my size and so was Ayub Khan, for that matter, the 

 nawab was well over six feet tall, a heavy-set man, dressed 

 in Punjabi costume, baggy pants and a shirt sort of like 

 this, only not fancy decorated and a turban. He always wore 

 a turban; he had a huge mustache. 



He was a university graduate and a specialist in 

 agriculture, an expert in agriculture, also a violent feudal 

 lord. He was, eventually killed by his son, murdered by his 

 son. But he had murdered lots of people himself, killed 

 lots of people. He was a tyrant, a dictator, in Kalebagh 

 but he was Ayub Khan's representative in West Pakistan, the 

 governor of West Pakistan. He entertained us in the 

 governor's palace in Lahore. 



Ayub Khan himself lived in Rawalpindi, in the military 

 camp there. He never got over being a soldier. 



We took a trip across the Punjab in a series of jeeps 

 I think provided by the local AID organization. One of the 

 two memories I have of that first trip is that we were 

 scared to death by the driving, it was absolutely awful. 



