The Pakistan disaster

The devastation in Pakistan and Kashmir after the massive earthquake there is being called the biggest humanitarian disaster of recent times. Considering that last year’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed 270,000 people, according to Wikipedia, this means that the death toll for the recent earthquake will go much, much higher than the official figure now, which rose to 79,000 as of Oct. 19.

Why are so many more expected to die? Because 15,000 villages in a very undeveloped area were flattened, leaving some 3 million people homeless in mountains where the temperatures will soon be way below freezing. UN aid organizations are saying there are not enough winter tents in the world to shelter them. And if there were, how would they get them? Many of the roads are impassable because of landslides.

Pakistan is a nuclear power, but it is still an underdeveloped country where millions, especially in the uplands, live on the edge. In the best of times, they suffer hunger, practically no health care, and little contact with the world. Now, in these worst of times, millions can fall over that edge. There are untold thousands whose injuries sustained in the earthquake can kill them if not treated. Their relatives desperately try to find a place for them on the few helicopters reaching the remote mountain areas.

With buildings demolished, so is much of the food supply. How will people eat? How can they cook without homes? If food from outside reaches them, will they be able to afford it? The dire predictions of mounting catastrophe are assuming the worst.

New Orleans opened the eyes of many in the United States to the extreme poverty that exists here alongside enormous wealth. Pakistan is a much poorer country, but it too is shaped by the laws of capitalist development. Money flows to where a profit can be made, not to where it is most needed to raise up the people’s economic and cultural level.

And Pakistan is an oppressed country with a colonial past, meaning that so much of the development it has made is gravely influenced by the dictates of the imperialist world banks. It has also spent a great deal on its military and on nuclear weapons because Britain divided the Indian subcontinent when it left, fueling years of strife between India and Pakistan.

The U.S. encouraged Pakistan’s military development when India was close to the Soviet Union. In recent years it has demanded that the Pakistani military play a big role in Washington’s so-called “war on terror.” All this had to take precedence over setting up clinics and schools in rural areas, so that now, in this crisis, there is no medicine there to keep an injured child from getting gangrene, or doctors to assist those with broken bones and fractured skulls.

The world is rapidly becoming a much more dangerous place. As we write, Hurricane Wilma is churning up the sea between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula. It is the most intense hurricane, measured in atmospheric pressure, ever recorded in the Atlantic, and the 12th hurricane so far this season. It is threatening Central American countries still reeling from floods and mudslides from the last storm.

Scientists are nervously predicting that as flu season approaches, the avian flu virus, a very deadly strain, could mutate so that it could be passed among humans. And they warn that even developed countries lack the health systems to manufacture or deliver enough vaccines to protect most of the people. After Katrina, everyone knows what this means: the poor, at home as in the rest of the world, could be left to die.

Nothing is inevitable. Human effort, will, labor, planning can avert catastrophes. But it takes thinking out of the box. And the box is capitalism.

In that magnificently macabre film of the 1960s, “Dr. Strangelove,” the world is about to be blown up by a crazed anti-communist general at a U.S. nuclear missile site. Two soldiers are trying to stop him. They need to call the White House to avert a nuclear exchange with the USSR. But they don’t have a dime for the pay phone. The captain orders the sergeant to shoot open a Coke machine to get the coins. With Armageddon approaching, he is torn. “But captain, that’s private property!”

In New Orleans, the police and National Guard were obviously ordered to protect property first. At the UN, the U.S. and other imperialist powers make sure to fund troops to control Haiti, but cry poverty when humanitarian agencies ask for tents and blankets for Pakistan, or relief for the Central American flood victims.

It’s no joke. Capitalism has to go.