Floods in Pakistan not ‘natural’
U.S. militarism’s role in the disaster
By
Sara Flounders
Published Aug 18, 2010 3:09 PM
Even in a time of global climate change, the immense suffering of the Pakistani
people due to vast floods did not have to happen. Investment in infrastructure
and a timely emergency response program could have minimized what has become
one of the world's worst disasters. But decades of U.S. intervention to
keep corrupt and reactionary military regimes in power against the will of the
people have left this country one of the poorest and least developed in the
region.
Aug. 15 — The United Nations a week ago rated the floods in Pakistan as
the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, with more people affected
than by the Southeast Asian tsunami and the recent earthquakes in Kashmir and
Haiti combined.
In the week since this Aug. 9 estimate, the number of people affected has
doubled to more than 20 million left homeless and utterly destitute.
The floods will grow far worse in the coming week as record high waters move
further downstream toward larger population centers in south Pakistan.
U.N. emergency relief coordinator John Holmes said the numbers would reach 40
to 50 million people in need of immediate assistance, out of a population of
170 million.
Millions of people are stranded without access to potable drinking water, basic
food or shelter. Millions are on the move seeking higher ground or are packed
onto the roofs of buildings or small hills on the wide floodplains of the Swat
and Indus rivers.
Floodwaters cover all the cultivated land in Pakistan. Every major food and
cash crop is lost. The agricultural heartland, the breadbasket of Pakistan, is
wiped out.
Floodwaters have knocked out electricity and communication in large parts of
the country.
Although this year there were record monsoon rains, this massive widespread
flooding is no natural disaster. Angry commentators in Pakistan are calling it
“a man-made catastrophe.”
The floods are not just an accident of nature. Dire warnings of the massive
scope of this flood were predicted in late July, weeks in advance, when
unusually heavy rain hit the upper reaches of the Swat River and the highlands
in the north. It was the heaviest rain in 35 years.
Months before, flooding and heavy monsoon rains had been predicted. But even
after 10 days of early floods had impacted 5 million people in a large area of
the north, after the news media had given daily coverage of families clinging
to tree branches, fields inundated and houses collapsing, no government
organizations had even begun to prepare for emergencies or for the evacuation
of large numbers of people.
This includes the Pakistani military, the dominant force in Pakistan.
An earthquake, whether in Haiti, China, Chile or Kashmir, usually strikes with
little warning. A tsunami prediction after an undersea earthquake gives people
only a few hours’ notice. There might be just a few days’ notice
that a hurricane or typhoon of great magnitude is brewing.
But the fact that massive floods would inundate vast areas downstream in
Pakistan was known well in advance. Yet Pakistani officials took no steps to
notify the population at risk or move emergency equipment into the region, from
boats to portable bridges, potable water, emergency tents and medicines.
All the words of concern from humanitarian agencies are starting to pour forth.
But so far the amount of aid reaching Pakistan from the U.S., NATO countries
and U.N. agencies is among of the smallest ever for disaster relief.
Washington has promised $55 million for emergency aid and the use of six
helicopters. What an insult! Just this year Congress allocated to the Pentagon
more than 1,000 times this paltry amount to continue to fight its wars in the
region.
Partnership with U.S.
The disastrous floods that have inundated large parts of Pakistan are a graphic
example of how Pakistan’s unequal, dependent relationship with the U.S.
has left the country backward, distorted, totally unprepared and unable to deal
with unusually heavy rainfall at a time of global climate change.
The alliance with the U.S. has been of absolutely no help in the
country’s hour of greatest need. The corrupt feudal officials and even
more corrupt repressive military, all kept in power by enormous amounts of U.S.
military aid, have proved totally unable to even notify the millions of people
who were clearly at risk or to move into place the most basic emergency
equipment.
Washington is more than willing to sell Pakistan F-16 jets, hundreds of
surface-to-air missiles and surveillance planes. This is enormously profitable
to U.S. military contractors and Pakistan ends up ever further in debt.
Meanwhile, Pakistan today lacks the most basic flood control system. There is a
total lack of investment funds or foreign aid for flood control. A basic system
of dams, reservoirs, containment basins, embankments and levees could have
contained the water and prevented out-of-control flooding in the vulnerable
region.
Major rivers throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan and now China have
well-organized flood control.
The lack of flood control in Pakistan has destroyed hundreds of miles of roads
and railroad lines, bridges, schools, hospitals and electric generators. More
than 6,000 villages have been swept away. Towns and now even cities are
submerged.
For decades Washington has made generous funds available to Pakistan for police
and intelligence agencies, but infrastructure development, education, health
and other social needs have been neglected. Pakistan is more than $40 billion
in debt, much of it for U.S. military equipment.
According to figures of the United Nations Children’s Fund, even before
the flood devastation 30 percent of Pakistani children were chronically
malnourished; only half of the 19 million children of primary school age were
enrolled in school; and two-thirds of the women are illiterate.
There has been a heavy presence of the Pakistani military in the Swat region
and the Northwest Frontier Province, where the flooding began. But their role
was entirely focused on the most brutal repression, not emergency relief.
Last summer, under enormous political pressure from the U.S., Pakistan’s
military launched intensely destructive counterinsurgency campaigns against the
Taliban in northern Pakistan, Bajaur, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.
In the Swat Valley, which has many cities, the Pakistani military faced
resistance from an urban population of 4 million people. Two million refugees
were forced to flee their homes during the battles there. Millions rushed for
cover from the intense bombardment, yet the government had no relief plans for
these desperate war refugees.
None of the U.S.-supplied heavy equipment in the region was used to build one
bridge or one dam. It was used only to lay waste to the region.
The very Islamic organizations that have been able to provide emergency relief
for the refugees, both then and now during the flooding, are what the U.S. and
Pakistani military are trying to destroy.
As floodwaters were roaring on Aug. 14, U.S. drones struck again, killing at
least 13 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan district, close to the
Afghan border.
U.S. and NATO forces are an overwhelming presence in Afghanistan, just across
the border. Their technology is so sophisticated that the Pentagon can maneuver
a pilotless drone from the other side of the planet and have it fire a missile
into Afghanistan or Pakistan.
But it does not even take complicated technology to measure rainfall or
communicate weather threats to millions of people. The equipment to do this has
been around for decades.
However, this simple task appears to be impossible because the U.S., the most
powerful of the exploiting capitalist countries, subverts popular governments
while promoting those who collaborate with its system based on maximizing
profit, where technology is at the service of imperialist military
oppression.
To respond to natural and human-made emergencies, what is needed is the
uprooting of this capitalist system of exploitation and national oppression so
every country can establish planning to meet its people’s needs.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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