By Patricia Lee Sharpe
If one needed a demonstration of how self-interested factions callously, ruthlessly vie to take advantage of human suffering, the Great Indus Flood of 2010, which increasingly seems to rival the inundation described in Genesis and Gilgamesh, provides an absolutely dandy case study.The Pakistani Taliban are evidently going to attack foreign aid workers because they don’t belong in Pakistan. So much for any devotion they may have to what I thought was a major selling point of Islam: Allah the Merciful. U.N. workers say they’ll carry on. Let’s hope they can.
In any case, the Americans have, after an unconscionable delay, decided to divert the unmanageable billions (or gee! was it only millions?) intended to buy friends and thus stave off Islamist influence to flood relief. Any residue, hopefully, will go to rebuilding roads, bridges, irrigation infrastructure and perhaps grain storage facilities. Nevertheless American officials continue to vent their fears that Islamists will gain brownie points for helping people instead of killing them, thereby undercutting any good feelings the timely application of American aid might produce. A little more discretion, please! When the flood waters recede, I expect the Pakistani people, however illiterate or allegedly brainwashed by this or that faction, will be able to figure out who’s helped from the heart and who’s mostly tried to make hay out of flood waters.
Meanwhile, the government of Pakistan, ever unmindful of the best interests of its own people, will not be issuing visas to Israeli or Indian persons or organizations hoping to help out. So a few more people will die, but the ideological purity of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan will have been maintained.As for individual Pakistani politicians, they seem to be conspicuous mainly by their absence from scenes of suffering, and Ali Sethi’s op-ed in today’s New York Times gives a vivid picture of a typical landlord-politician’s preferences: save my crops, forget the city down river. In that case, evidently, there was also this consideration in deciding where to create strategic levee openings: save the Pak air base and the U.S. drones; to hell with the people. That bit of infamy won’t burnish the U.S. reputation in Pakistan, where drones are already much resented for their indiscriminate killing power.
The Pakistani Army, as paranoid as ever, seems to be more interested in fighting India than in fighting the floods. It’s no secret that Pakistan doesn’t have enough helicopters to ferry supplies to the nearly one million people marooned by the rampaging Indus and its tributaries. After endless-seeming shilly-shallying in Islamabad, mostly having to do with sovereignty and pride, U.S. helicopters from Afghanistan were finally permitted to participate in rescue operations. Nevertheless, there’s still a helicopter shortage, which could be alleviated, except for one little problem: the offer comes from India. Here’s how that sad story shapes up:
The United Nations has appealed urgently for helicopters to reach tens of thousands of Pakistanis marooned by the calamitous floods while scores of choppers idle in Indian hangars in the face of Islamabad's reluctance to accept aid from New Delhi.
Amid reports that nearly 800,000 people stranded by the floods can now be reached only by air, the UN put out an SOS for choppers for a disaster that has markedly rendered Pakistan's fetish for F-16 fighter jets irrelevant. "We need at least 40 additional heavy-lift helicopters, working at full capacity, to reach the huge numbers of increasingly desperate people with life-saving relief," Marcus Prior of the World Food Program said in a statement.
India meantime is sitting on some 300 utility choppers spread across its air force, navy, coast guard and army without moving a muscle because of Pakistan's obvious reluctance to accept help from New Delhi. Even that acceptance came after pressure from the US and the international community that hinted that Pakistan could not expect the world to come to its assistance while it selectively spurned help from close quarters.
Help from the Indian military for Pakistan even amid its national disaster is a non-starter in the eyes of many because of the adversarial relationship between the two countries. Islamabad's move to accept the $5 million assistance from India has been met with scathing criticism from Pakistan's pro-military circles, with one commentator trashing the government for accepting aid under US pressure and invoking the Kashmir issue even as Pakistan is going down the tubes.
"This money has the blood of Kashmiris on it and one wonders how our Kashmiri brethren must be feeling as they face the bullets of Indian forces every day and see us taking Indian 'aid'," Shireen Mazari, editor of the Nation newspaper, who is said to be close to the Pakistan military, wrote earlier this week.
Better that their brethren in Pakistan die than be rescued by Indian helicopters? How insulting to the people of Kashmir!
But I do understand why Pakistanis who profit from a perpetual state of war with India might fear the long term effects of generous monetary and material aid from India. Those who live to tell the tale of their survival or rescue may emerge from the flood with a positive, non-demonic image of India. If that ever happens, Pakistani politics will be turned upside down.
When catastrophe happens, the hope is that all parties will unite to mitigate the suffering. One further hopes that, in the process of assisting those who desperately need help, the antagonists will discover that they can work harmoniously and wholeheartedly to meet the most basic human needs of sustenance and shelter and health care. Even as the Indus continues to ravage the country, that's not the spirit of things in Pakistan.