A national disaster
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Every province of the country, along with Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, has been struck by the unusual severity of the July 2010 monsoon. Some have been struck harder than others with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa currently bearing the brunt of fatalities and damage; but downstream troubles await Sindh as the floodwaters surge down the Indus river system. This is no localised disaster, this is going to affect virtually everybody in the country either directly or indirectly and its impact is going to be felt for months and years to come. The scale of the problem is such that in places the rescue and disaster response machinery has been overwhelmed both literally and metaphorically. Although there will be local failures to effectively organise or coordinate efforts, overall this event has to be seen in the context of a massive disaster such as an earthquake – but affecting far more people over a much greater area.
There are calls from all sides for helicopters and relief be it food, water or medicines. The number of helicopters we have that are suitable for flood relief work is probably no more than eight, ten at most. The relief that helicopters can provide is extremely limited – they cannot mass-evacuate casualties for instance, and their load-carrying capacity is too small to make a significant difference. There may be little point in relocating the majority of victims to camps because the floods will recede almost as rapidly as they rose once the monsoon abates. Camps are complex to set up and administer and would have a very short life anyway. There is no high ground for people to evacuate to in most of Sindh and Punjab, similar in much of Balochistan where the thin population is concentrated around river banks. We need fast short term help, especially helicopters, along with large quantities of water purification kits which can be air-dropped and culturally appropriate meal packs which can also be air-delivered. Mobile health teams which can be river-capable and portable health units that are air or water transportable – all of this we need soon. The real work will be done once the waters recede and the dead are buried. Homes, crops, livelihoods, infrastructure such as roads, bridges and water management systems – all are going to need to be rebuilt in all the provinces and this out of provincial and federal budgets that are already stretched. The 2010 monsoon has brought damage and loss of life on a scale beyond living memory. We need to ensure that if it happens again – and it might – we are better prepared than we were this time around.
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Shifting focus
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Much mention has been made in the last week of the Wikileaks revelations, and of specifically what they say about Pakistan and its our prime intelligence agency, the ISI. Viewed overall, the references to our contacts with the Taliban are but a tiny part of the volumes of material now in the public domain and all of it relates to the period 2004-2009. There is nothing that is current and it is thus unwise to extrapolate what was - to what is. The complexity of the dynamic that exists between ourselves, the Americans and the Afghan Taliban is ill-understood. Whilst on the one hand we need to work with the Americans, at some future date we are going to have to be working with the Afghan Taliban as, like it or not, they are going to be a part of the governance of any future Afghanistan. The Americans are not. It would be foolhardy in the extreme if we so alienated the Taliban as to lose contact with them completely. Rather than be surprised by our contacts with the Taliban we need to see this as an acknowledgement of our security services taking a long view. Difficult to swallow it may be, but geopolitical realities are rarely palatable.
This emerging reality is within the thinking of the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who has asked the ISI to “strategically shift its focus”. He refers to a past in which elements of the ISI clearly did have a relationship with extremist organisations, moreover one which was initiated and fostered by the Americans. That some of those relationships may have lingered into another time and are now seen as inconvenient may indeed indicate that a shifting of focus is in order. Mullen acknowledged that the process of shift was underway and not yet complete. What we have now is a geopolitical layer cake with the plates not all pulling in the same direction. It is not to our advantage to have a hostile government in Afghanistan and if a significant part of that future government is going to be Taliban – then keeping our options open with them makes all the more sense. Managing the dynamic tension between fighting terrorism and safeguarding our own long-term strategic interests is going to be one of the great challenges of modern diplomacy.
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Launching Bilawal
Sunday, August 01, 2010
In what promises to be a rather bizarre ceremony, young Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is to be ‘launched’ as PPP chairman in the UK. The event has little real meaning. The affairs of the party in real terms will continue to be controlled by his father. But the politics of dynasty continues. The message to all of us is clear. Only those with the right second name have the authority to control the fortunes of our parties and the people who form a part of them. This of course is damaging in more ways than one. We are still many miles away from the dream of democracy that so many desire as the most powerful tool available to change their destiny and the fate of the land they live in.
There is another aspect to all this. We do not know how much money is to be spent on the launch of the young chairman. But it will certainly amount to a sum that could have been far more wisely utilized. The explanation offered by a party spokesperson that the event is one involving the president of Pakistan does not justify the expenditure. For the future, the issue of quite how Bilawal Bhutto he thinks and what he believes in could determine a great deal in our country. He would do well by stepping in to cancel the ceremony and instead setting about to prove himself a worthy leader through more solid action rather than flamboyant gestures.
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