Coping with calamity

Attempting to describe the scale and impact of the current flooding in Pakistan is no more possible than trying to describe the colours of a butterfly's wing to a blind man. This is a calamity that will touch – either directly or indirectly – every man, woman and child in the country; and touch them not only in the here-and-now but for generations to come. As Himal goes to press, the disaster is still unfolding, and there is still no clear picture of what the final toll will be in human or material terms. The magnitude of the disaster prompted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to urge member countries to speed up aid, and on 11 August he launched an appeal for USD 460 million to feed people for 90 days. After the initial slow response, the international community has now 'stepped up aid for flood victims and by 18 August, the United Nations had been given USD 227.8 million, representing 49.6 percent of total requirements,' according to the UN Information Centre spokesperson in Islamabad, Ishrat Rizvi. (By 23 August, the UN had received USD 490.7 million.)

First off, it is important to note that no country on Earth could have responded appropriately to the cataclysm that started in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (the former NWFP) and subsequently made its way down the Indus river system in Punjab and Sindh, inundating parts of Balochistan along the way. It would not have been possible to ensure an appropriate level of preparedness, because the immensity of the inundation and the power of the waters were beyond any planning model. To have responded appropriately to a once-in-a-century flood would have required the pre-placement of resources beyond the capacity of the state. Pakistan has done what any state faced with a similar emergency would have done – the best it can with what it has. Does that fall short? Unfortunately, yes – by a long shot.

Relief operations currently have been a mixture of tightly controlled and coordinated aid programmes, and local self-help, individual or small-group initiatives. International NGOs all have their own disaster plans. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, there is a long institutional memory of providing for the needs of refugees and displaced persons on a large scale, leaving the provincial government probably the best equipped to cope.

Aid distribution has been haphazard in many places, particularly where the local administration broke down due to the floods and district coordination officers had no control over information mechanisms or resources. In terms of preparedness, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) was aware of the weather forecast, mentioning the probability of a 10 percent increase in monsoon rainfall, but little is known about what it did to prepare for this. Even if it had done its utmost, however, it would not have been possible to accurately predict the magnitude of the deluge. The best that can be said for the NDMA is that it has been doing its best; but had it not been for the military, flood relief would have been very patchy indeed. The Pakistan Army, Navy and Air Force have all been involved in relief work, heavily augmented by US helicopters in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh. In the current phase of emergency response, helicopters, amphibious vehicles and boats have been the key vehicles – and there have not been enough of any of them.

Militant win
Comparing the governmental and agency response in 2010 to the response to the 2005 earthquake is inappropriate. Dreadful as that event was in terms of lives lost, its economic impact was modest. The 2005 quake was on a far smaller scale than the current event, was more easily managed in the short term, and attracted substantial international support very quickly. The current flood is going to trigger a financial crisis. Most development resources are going to be redirected into rehabilitation. Unfinished projects will stay unfinished. General sales tax (GST) is almost certain to be revised upwards and feed into inflation. Non-development budgets are rumoured to be looking at cuts of up to 30 percent. Food insecurity is going to increase for several million people, and there is a real possibility of starvation in some areas. The earthquake of 2005 produced nothing like these knock-on effects.

Reactions within the Pakistani population are also very different from those after the earthquake. At that time, there was a huge outpouring of public sympathy, and aid convoys organised by people from every province were on the roads within days – so much so that much of what was donated was ultimately wasted. The military had resources that were close to the needs of the disaster in terms of scale; and where they fell short, they were quickly supplemented by foreign aid in cash and kind. In relation to the Indus flood, there have been several noteworthy small efforts organised by extraordinary ordinary people; but in Punjab, where at the time of writing the flood is subsiding, the aid-collection points at city chowks already had a deserted air about them.

The government's handling of the flood as a public-relations exercise, meanwhile, has been a disaster within a disaster. Whatever the political justification of President Asif Ali Zardari's visit to France and the UK during the crisis, amid displays of ostentation that were more appropriate to visiting royalty than the president of a poor country overtaken by a natural disaster, it simply looked and felt wrong. The president got a drubbing in the international media; an old man threw a shoe at him in Birmingham, UK. There followed a nasty – and ongoing – spat between the presidency and sections of the Pakistani media. Anti-government TV channels have been blocked and the website of one newspaper, The News, has been the subject of a sustained Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, making accessing the website next to impossible. The national distrust of politicians in general was ratcheted up several notches. Civil society has made the ritual bleatings from the sidelines about how badly the government has done, but once again failed to provide alternative visions on how things should be done.

And then there are the militants and the extremist political groups and parties, for whom the curse of the floods has been a blessing in disguise. Where the government was slow to react – just about everywhere – groups with well-known linkages to banned organisations were able to deliver appropriate aid quickly, not in the same quantities as the government or the INGOs, but very visibly. They will be among the very few winners in this dreadful race. The losers will trail towards the finish line in their millions for years and years to come.

~ Chris Cork is an editorial consultant and columnist at The News. He has managed aid and development projects in Pakistan for 15 years.