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Pakistan’s Epic Monsoon Floods

Pakistan’s catastrophic monsoon floods of 2010 – which scientists link to climate change and global warming and which has mostly hurt the farmers who eke a living along the Indus River – have turned into a defining moment for the nation.

The world watched with disbelief as the torrential rains, which bloated the Kabul and Indus rivers, swept away hundreds of people, homes and livestock in the north of Pakistan. As bridges and hotels collapsed in the scenic Kalam and Swat valley, the northern areas of Gilgit and Baltistan were cut off from the world.

Despite this, crisis-ridden Islamabad appeared unaware and unprepared for the most devastating natural disaster in its history.

Only then – as the Indus River, swollen to nearly 12 times its normal size, wreaked havoc on villages and towns in its southward journey to the Arabian ocean – did the government wake to the existential threat to Pakistan.

“It’s like partition,” said a dazed PPP Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who compared the sheer scale of the devastation caused by the 2010 floods to the events of 1947, when Pakistan was carved out of India.

Prime Minister Gilani, who has stepped into the late Benazir Bhutto’s shoes, had the unenviable position of answering to millions of people who voted for the PPP because of its founder Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter, Benazir’s pledge to provide “Food, Clothing and Shelter” to the people.

The government came under global scrutiny as the media zeroed in on shirtless villagers stranded on highways, hands outstretched with vessels for food and drinking water. Modestly draped mothers, clutching their infants, waded through waistdeep currents, farmers sloshed through the waters with sheep on their backs and people waited for rescue helicopters on islands along river beds that looked like chapattis (an Indian flatbread) floating in gravy.

Adding insult to injury, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari chose the occasion to visit his family’s chateau in France. His meeting with President Nicholas Sarkozy was ill-timed, given that French prosecutors prepared a case against Sarkozy for funding his political campaign through kickbacks from the submarines provided to Pakistan. Zardari is also named for receiving kickbacks, although he was in prison when the French engineers building the submarines were killed in 2002.

But in July 2002, President Zardari was en route to London to coronate his eldest son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, as the party co-chairman. It was a program arranged ahead of time. As hundreds were swept away by the deluge and their sufferings appeared in the world media, his ill-timed foreign tour would send a message of disconnectedness with the people.

The US quickly demonstrated the importance it attached to Pakistan, becoming the first nation to respond with USD 50 million aid, helicopters, boats and halal meals. Helicopters were sent to the Gilgit Baltistan area to rescue stranded people. As torrential rains rushed down the denuded Koh-i-Suleman mountain range, the US coordinated with Pakistan’s federal National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and the army to save villagers fl eeing the rising Indus waters in southern Punjab and Balochistan.

Early into the disaster, US Secretary Hillary Clinton took to the airwaves in Washington DC to appeal to the American public to come forward and donate to the flood victims. It was a commendable move, laced only with the irony of being issued while President Zardari fiddled in London.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s visit to flood-ravaged Pakistan and his declaration that he had before never seen such devastation gave pause to those who were listening. As the UN declared that the disaster was bigger than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2010 Haitian earthquake and Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake combined, the world reached deeper into its pockets in a gesture on a scale that seemed like it might just fulfill the humanitarian needs of the flood’s victims.

But as weeks went by and the world media depicted poor, ill fed and homeless people displaced by floods, it did nothing to win global confidence. The UN’s first fund appeal for USD 460 million fetched 70 percent of its target with great difficulty. That forced the UN to launch a second appeal for USD 2 billion. Still, as winter set in, UN officials, working hard for flood victims in Pakistan, reported that they had already run out of essential supplies.

In his visits to Washington, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureishi told the world that if it did not help Pakistan in the flood relief efforts, the nation would fall prey to militants. It was an argument repeated like a mantra. Indeed, where the PPP government had fallen short of providing for the enormous needs of flood ravaged Pakistan, Islamic fronts for jihadist organizations had emerged to dispense relief aid.

If the world needed proof that floods had not washed away the militants, they did not have to wait long. Barely had the floodwaters stopped ravaging communities in the north of Pakistan and the Punjab than the suicide bombers began detonating. A succession of suicide blasts on religious processions in Lahore, Quetta and against security officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would convince the world that the bombers were alive and ticking.

As the Indus River made its south ward journey toward the riverine areas of Sindh – wiped clean of the marshy jungles cut down at the height of the dacoit menace in 1992 – it threatened the thickly-populated towns of upper Sindh. The PPP government issued flood warnings in its home turf – Sukkur, Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Shahdadkot, Dadu, Badin and the southern town of Thatta – forcing millions to evacuate their homes.

Still despite trains and bus services run by the government for the flood affected to go to Karachi, the victims preferred to take temporary shelter with relatives or simply move to higher ground. Indeed, with floods coinciding with the ethnic flare-up between Pashtuns and Mohajirs in Karachi, the rural Sindhis, already battered and robbed of their life savings, took chances with the vagaries of nature rather than a tense ethnic situation in the city.

There was high drama in Bhutto’s birthplace of Larkana, where the government worked frantically to make cuts in Kirthar canal to save the graves of Zulfi kar Ali Bhutto and his children – Benazir, Murtaza and Shahnawaz. PPP officials rushed to create a four-kilometer-long embankment around Garhi Khuda Baksh in Larkana to save the graves of the Bhuttos, whose murders have come to symbolize the eternal sufferings of the people of Pakistan.

Sindh and southern Punjab swirls with tales of feudal lords, including those from the ruling party, who arm-twisted irrigation officials to breach the dikes and save their lands. A pattern emerged where the most influential managed to protect their assets at the cost of the weakest. It would increase resentment in an environment where millions lost their crops and livestock and became internally displaced persons in their own territory.

In October 2010, a survey conducted by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank said that Pakistan’s floods caused an estimated USD 9.7 billion damages to homes, roads, farms and personal property. PPP officials called the figures grossly under-estimated. There were fears that in an agriculturally based economy like Pakistan the damage to the crops alone could be as high as USD 43 billion – 25 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product the year before.

About two thousand were killed in Pakistan’s floods – dramatically lower than the estimated eighty thousand casualties caused by the earthquake five years before. Still there was more bad news ahead, as hundreds of thousands fell victim to acute diarrhea, respiratory infections, skin disease and malaria. Children who saw their parents being washed away had been traumatized and put up for adoption.

Under world scrutiny, Pakistan made payments of PKR 20,000 (USD 233) in four installments to each family. The United Nations and civil society networks injected a modicum of transparency that involved disbursing aid after verifying the national identity cards of flood victims. Still, double payments occurred, as did complaints from families that they had received no money. With food supplies running out, the UN was faced with the difficult choice staggering the aid or giving people less than their nutritional requirements.

For the US government, the biggest concern is that the economic devastation created by the floods will fuel militancy. The army operation against the Taliban in Swat, for example, resulted in massive losses of infrastructure and livelihood for 2.9 million residents of Malakand division. Barely had government surveys reported that the division would need USD 1 billion for recovery, when the floods struck.

Awami National Party’s Minister for Information, Mian Iftikhar Hussain touched a note with the people when he declared, “First we were devastated by the terrorists. Whatever was left was finished by the floods.” For the ANP minister, it was a particularly emotional time, when, just prior to the floods, the Taliban had killed his only son.

The US would prioritize its aid programs to Pakistan with a view to thwarting potential militant attacks. In September 2010, the Obama administration diverted USD 831 million set aside under the Kerry Lugar Berman act for Pakistan’s developmental needs like energy and water and earmarked it instead for humanitarian assistance in FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

But with the US and Europe waging their own financial battles for recovery, the US Coordinator for Economic and Development Assistance, Robin Raphael urged Pakistan to pass meaningful reforms, including expanding its tax base. There was a muted response from the government. The feudal ruling elite has traditionally shunned land reforms, even as the urban industrial class is hostile to suggestions that it should pay more taxes. There was consensus to raise sales tax, which would have the consequence of raising prices for already stressed consumers.

The fact that the floods struck in the post-9/11 scenario and not when the world was busy somewhere else should give pause to Pakistan’s observers. With aid coming in, the civilian government has gone into autopilot – leaving flood recovery and civilian development to foreign and international organizations. As people watch to see if the leadership cuts back on their extravagant lifestyles, the international community, too, has put Pakistan under a microscope to see if it is able to get its act together.

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DÉJÀ VU in SINDH

Badin Flood. Courtesy Manzoor Mirani
Badin Flood. Courtesy Manzoor Mirani
Badin Flood. Courtesy Manzoor Mirani

Barely had the people of Sindh recovered from the scars of the 2010 floods, when walls of waters returned knocking on their mud walls, drowning the most vulnerable women and children, sweeping livestock and destroying crops – leaving millions without shelter.
Almost as grave as the crisis unfolding across Sindh, is that it could have been contained. In July, the international donor agency Oxfam warned Pakistan that it was not ready for another natural disaster. To which governmental officials responded that dykes were plugged and embankments strengthened – and there was no cause for alarm.

So this monsoon, when Sindh hit the ice-berg, officials shifted the blame for their unpreparedness on the changing weather pattern. They contrasted the historical scale of the down pour with the 2010 floods. Then, the torrential rains in northern Pakistan had caused the Indus River to swell and burst its banks – taking huge waves toward the more urban settlements.

It is an argument that environmentalists in Pakistan refuse to buy. After last year’s floods, they cautioned the government that what was once considered “abnormal” weather should now be considered the “norm.”

Today, with water, water everywhere, relief agencies are at a loss to find dry land to pitch tent shelters. While the army and non governmental organizations like the Pakistan Fisher folk Federation ply rescue boats, they have few places to deposit the rescued. In the process, pregnant women have died for want of medical care.

The human sufferings have mounted as the roads leading from Karachi and Hyderabad have been inundated, cutting off assistance from urban dwellers. The administration claims that villagers are reluctant to leave their districts, hoping the waters will recede and they can go home.

Weeks after the monsoon rains lashed down in southern Pakistan, UN relief has begun coming in. The officials will tell you the request for assistance was made rather late by the government. Moreover, now that foreign aid is evident, the top brass are reportedly diverting it to their own home towns, rather than across the board.

All this is going on at a time when many villagers complain they have still not received compensation for the devastation they suffered last year. This time round, the destruction to livestock and almost 70 percent damage to the crops, threatens to push the peasants deeper into the unending cycle of poverty.

Back in 2005, when the earthquake struck in Kashmir, Pakistan created a National Disaster Management Authority. Today, the NDMA and its provincial branches struggle to cope with changing weather patterns. For a start, the government claims that its national meteorological service plans to take assistance from Japan to modernize its ability to predict and issue early warning systems for imminent disasters.

At this stage though, when the government appears to have abdicated in favor of foreign donors and philanthropists – the danger is especially pronounced for Sindh. This region of peace loving, mystical cultivators barely gets noticed while Pakistan draws attention to itself – albeit for the wrong reasons. As the waters pass over Sindh, there is a real possibility that the world will forget people in its most remote corners.

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9/11 Became Genesis of Book

By a stroke of chance, the 9/11 terror strikes against the US became the genesis for my book. Having arrived in the US from Pakistan on a teaching fellowship shortly before the horrific attacks, I was drawn into the narrative. It was a narrative waiting to be told. As a journalist in Pakistan, I had for decades witnessed the huge influence of the US on my region. While inside America, I recognized that the media and educational institutions discussed domestic subjects – which to my mind nurtured a tunnel vision.

That changed a decade ago, as airplanes turned into missiles and crashed into the World Trade Towers. It was a high price that ordinary Americans paid for foreign involvements that were not of their choosing. And yet, 9-11 raised a clamor among people that they be told how US foreign policy was conducted. As popular demand forced the media to zero into the world – and Afghanistan and Pakistan became house-hold names – the globe grew more connected.

In undertaking to write `Aboard the Democracy Train,’ I went back in time – from the Cold War days when the US and Pakistan had combined to defeat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then, as a front line reporter for the daily Dawn newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, I had chronicled how the weapons funneled to the Afghan Mujahedeen next door, were used to settle ethnic and tribal feuds inside Pakistan. It was the period when US-Pakistan collaboration hastened the rise of the Taliban.

Back then, I was one of the nation’s few women reporters to document Benazir Bhutto’s meteoric rise to become the nation’s first woman prime minister. Fast forward nearly two decades later. Based in Washington D.C. in the post 9/11 era, I was privy to another historical event. This time, it was Benazir – adored by Pakistan’s masses – attempting to convince the US that she would be a better candidate than President Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf in tackling Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in the region.

The tight rope that Benazir walked between the US and Pakistan military’s interests – not to mention the antipathy she aroused as a woman within the terror network – led to her tragic and inevitable end. Her murder fed into the clamor for change by the masses, grown more impoverished and brutalized by the spill over of the Afghan war. `Aboard’ documents how after Benazir joined her family of martyred Bhuttos, and her Pakistan Peoples Party was swept into power – it catapulted husband, President Asif Zardari into new and unchartered territory.

But the world too changed after 9/11 precipitated the US invasion of Afghanistan a decade ago. The US’s longest war – with numerous soldiers’ deaths and combat related suicides – has taken a toll on American society. While the economic recession sweeping across the US and Europe has triggered demands in the West to draw back in its foreign involvements and focus on jobs and growing the economy at home.

Ten years after the events of 9/11, the lesson taught by the loss of innocent lives – whether in the US or in Afghanistan and Pakistan – is the need to stop all wars. Indeed, even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down and the internet provides new tools, the West has learnt a great deal about traditional cultures like Pakistan. It is with the simple moral compass in me that I have written `Aboard,’ – knowing we are all in this together.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up – John A. Appleman

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Terrorism: Searching for Answers

Why would anyone carry out such a horrible crime as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? How should the United States respond? What would be the likely results of a military attack on Afghanistan ?

Searching for answers to these and other questions, more than 200 students, faculty, and staff gathered in Gamble Auditorium on September 19 for “After September 11: The Hard Questions,” a teach-in sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Office of the Dean of the College and the Dean of Faculty.

Offering their perspectives were three authorities on the situation: Nafisa Hoodbhoy, a former journalist with an English-language daily in Pakistan, now producing programs for WFCR radio, Michael Klare, the Five College professor of peace and world security studies, and Sohail Hashmi, Alumnae Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and an associate professor of international relations at MHC.

Moderating the discussion was Kavita Khory, associate professor of politics at the College.

Taliban in Bajaur, FATA (Photo Credit : Anwarullah Khan)

Taking pains to condemn the terrorists’ actions, the panelists explored the events that led up to those acts, and generally agreed that the United States would have nothing to gain by waging war in Afghanistan.

The nation seems to be moving ahead with a military response, Klare said. “The machine has been set in motion,” he said, warning that a military campaign would be “a disastrous course of action that will lead to certain deaths [in the Muslim world] and stir up more hatred of us.”

A better alternative, he argued, would be pursuing and prosecuting Osama bin Laden and his accomplices as criminals in an international court.

Klare said the seeds of the current conflict were sown in 1945, when the United States pledged to protect the royal family of Saudi Arabia against external and internal threats in exchange for unfettered access to Saudi oil.

That pledge has led to United States-supported suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia, as well as a growing military presence that has fanned opposition among Muslims angered by the perceived defilement of Mecca and other holy places.

“There is absolutely no sense in bombing Afghanistan, because this is a country that is already in the Stone Age. It has nothing,” Hoodbhoy said. Military action, she said, would likely push Muslim moderates into the camp of the hard-line fundamentalists, and “cause more sympathy for a regime which people are sick of and would like to be rid of.”

Hashmi said that if the terrorists are carrying out a holy war, they probably see it as a defensive action against the expansion of the West’s power and influence in the Middle East.

Others, including many non-Muslims, share their views, he said, but split with the terrorists over the method of addressing those concerns. Although the Qur’an teaches that killing one innocent person is like killing all humanity, Hashmi said, the hard-liners have taken the position that no one in the United States is innocent in this struggle—a justification for mass murder.

The United States, he said, should not respond in kind. “The idea of an endless series of events that could be the source of grievance is one that would perpetuate the cycle of attack and counterattack,” he said.

The teach-in was one in a series of events by which the College is responding to the attacks of September 11.

On October 17, at 7:30 pm in Hooker Auditorium, Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, will speak on the relation between human rights and terrorism.

Source: Mt Holyoke College

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Pakistani Journalist’s Course Spurs Thought

Nafisa Hoodbhoy

There was palpable excitement among students crowding 137 Hasbrouck at University of Massachusetts Amherst — the classroom designated to me to teach “Gender Politics and Mass Media in Muslim World” this past spring. It was a course I had designed after Sept. 11 to cater to the tremendous interest generated in Islam and the region I’d taught about at Amherst College a year ago — Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Photo Credit: University of Texas, US

Students from more than a dozen departments at UMass enrolled in my course — offered through Women Studies and cross-listed with journalism. Apparently my own background as a journalist from Pakistan had attracted many — including a handful of males — interested in root causes of terrorism. Women, already interested in the gender politics of the Muslim world, now enrolled to study these countries from a global perspective.

Among those who arrived for the course — young, white and working class — many had grown up on a steady diet of television entertainment news. Lately, television was throwing out names that were difficult to pronounce: Tally Ban, Af-Gan-is-Tan, Pak-is-Tan. They stared at the world map, unable to locate the countries. Why had I expected anything different? Not long ago, presidential hopeful George W. Bush, when quizzed about the Taliban, had asked, “Are they a pop group?”

Apparently, a few were looking for ready-made answers. They appeared bewildered as I began my lecture from 6th century A.D. — about a foreign religion with foreign believers. In my opening lectures about the rise of Islam and the Caliphate, an exasperated young woman at the back of the room yelled: “What does that have to do with 9/11?” My answer was “Everything.”

I let on quite early in the course that in order to understand Islamic fundamentalists, one needed to study the rise of Islam. While the industrial revolution has catapulted the West into the 21st century, traditional Islamic societies — with their tribal and feudal structures — are still deeply influenced by Islamic and pre-Islamic values.

For the majority of students who stayed on, we journeyed to understand Islam. Fatima Mernissi’s book, “The Veil and the Male Elite,” would lay out the historical conditions of 627 A.D. when Prophet Mohammed issued Q’uranic injunctions like the veiling of women — “splitting the Muslim space.” Under colonial rule, the Islamic bloc would experience only superficial modernization. Leila Ahmed’s book, “Women and Gender in Islam,” and Deniz Kandiyoti’s “Introduction to Women, Islam and the State” would provide valuable insight into how 20th-century colonialists used the low position of women in Islamic countries to put down foreign cultures — contributing to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

My course would cover the revival of Islamism by the regimes that seized power in Pakistan (1977), Iran (1979) and Afghanistan (1992) . The political use of Islam grew toward the end of the Cold War when the West supplied billions of dollars worth of arms to Pakistan to assist Afghan Mujahideen and mobilize Islamists from around the world to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. This was the embryo of the Al Qaeda network — which has today come back to haunt the United States.

There was special interest in my five-week series of lectures on the United States and the regional media’s coverage of 9/11. Having recently returned from a fact-finding survey of the media in Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta, Pakistan, I was able to update students on the regional media’s reaction to Sept. 11.

On their part, the students combed the internet for the U.S. media’s response to 9/11 — creating an interesting juxtaposition between the two. We had interesting discussions on current topics. While I condemned Palestinian suicide bombings of civilians, students put down Israeli expansionism. They were most critical of the U.S. for spending billions of dollars to bomb Afghanistan while giving a pittance for reconstruction.

“If we, as college students can understand that this is only going to breed terrorism, why can’t the State Department understand that?” a student was asking.

Since my course title covered so many topics — being as one put it “three to four courses rolled in one” — I gave my class the option of writing about their topic of interest. For those who did well in the first short paper, I was careful not to inflate their mid-term grades. This strategy appears to have worked well — allowing 17 students (about half the class) to secure A’s or AB’s on their final papers. Although student evaluations suggest they struggled to keep up with the readings, there were many appreciative comments.

“This is the best course I’ve taken in three years,” was one. A few stayed back after the final class to thank me. “This is a wonderful course, I’ve learned so much,” one woman — a journalism major — told me. For me, the student feedback — conveyed orally, e-mailed or written on paper — made the teaching worth while.

Nafisa Hoodbhoy taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this spring. She was a staff reporter for the Dawn newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, from 1984 to 2000 and is writing a book on the last 20 years of Pakistan’s politics.

Source: India New England

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Pakistan in the Shadow of 9/11 (Excerpt from Aboard the Democracy Train)

It was 9:15 am on September 11, 2001 when the phone rang. There was a strange urgency to the ring. It made me spring out of bed in my tiny apartment in Sunderland, Western Massachusetts and run to the other room to quiet it.

JUI chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman addressing a rally in Pakistan. Photo Credit: Dawn

It was my relative, Shabnam, who had left Pakistan decades ago and lived in Houston, Texas. In the instances when we met on either side of the globe, I shared with her my adventures as a journalist. Given our mutual background, she reveled in the exciting stories I told her as a reporter for the nation’s leading newspaper.

Evidently, she knew me well enough to sense that this day – a day that changed the US – would change my life as well.

“Quick, turn on the television,” she said.

Alas, I told her, we didn’t have a television. My husband and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and had only the sparse belongings of new immigrants.

We had arrived about a year ago from Pakistan and I had just finished teaching a course at the Women Studies Department in Amherst College, Massachusetts on Gender Politics in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The trade towers in New York are burning. They say it was hit by an airplane,” she was saying.

Sensing it was a terrorist act, I rushed to turn on the radio. I was immediately drawn into the drama unfolding in downtown Manhattan, where I had worked as a journalist for two years during the 1980’s.

National Public Radio contributor, Ginger Miles, whose apartment overlooked the World Trade Towers, was on air.

I knew Ginger from my reporting at WBAI radio in New York. There was unmistakable excitement in her voice, sounding like journalists do when they inadvertently turn into part of the story.

Ginger fought her way through the smoke and debris blowing in through her windows as she spoke.

Her commentary about thick ash, which blew into her apartment from the collapsing trade towers, conjured up vivid images of the attack into the heart of capitalism.