Nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown by Fatima Bhutto

The floods destroying Pakistan’s infrastructure are against a backdrop of corruption, impunity at the highest levels of political life and meaningless independence.

This is the month of Pakistan's birth, the month that a generation once claimed for freedom and liberty. But on 14 August, its 63rd birthday, Pakistan was submerged. There was no fanfare as on previous anniversaries - no noisy street festivals marked by flag-waving and family outings, no young men on motorcycles paying homage to national monuments and shouting slogans into the open air, little celebratory music on state television. Instead, there were vigils, quiet remembrances and a solemn accounting of what has been one of Pakistan's most turbulent years since its proud but bloody inception.

According to the UN, the flooding has affected more than 14 million people, making it Pakistan's worst ever natural disaster. The government claims 20 million people - roughly 12 per cent of the population - have been affected. As I write, six million people are in desperate need of food aid, more than three million children are at risk of contracting fatal waterborne diseases, and millions more are displaced. Over two million acres of agricultural land have been ravaged. With the monsoon season still upon us, Pakistan's food belt, Punjab and Sindh Provinces, has been hit especially hard.

As the country suffered, the entire top echelon of the Pakistani state - led by the rapacious president, Asif Ali Zardari - embarked on a tour of Europe. First up was a visit to France: a handshake with the Sarkozys and then a jaunt to the president's private chateau. London was next, and the itinerary barely unchanged - handshake, swanning around, photo opportunities at stately houses. When asked by the BBC why he had abandoned his country as floods raged from the northernmost province to the southern tip of Pakistan, Zardari cleared his throat and replied that parliament was in session and that he, as a munificent democrat, had empowered others to deal with the dis aster; the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, was on duty.

But even the city of Birmingham was not far enough away from Pakistan to protect Zardari from outrage at his feckless rule, as an old man, a supporter of his own party, lobbed two shoes at the president while he was addressing a crowd of British Pakistanis. Zardari's machine was quick to block reports of the attack appearing on Pakistani television channels and to restrict access to websites that carried accounts of how the shoe went flying towards the ducking president.

Back home in Pakistan, a scandal grew over parliamentarians who had fudged paperwork to claim that they possessed academic degrees - once a condition of participation in provincial or national politics. So far, of the 47 MPs shown to have bogus degrees, the largest number of offenders came from the president's Pakistan Peoples Party. One of its coalition partners, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), had almost as many.

In the southern city of Karachi, meanwhile, human rights groups estimate that roughly 300 politicians and political activists have been murdered this year. In the first week of August, Raza Haider, a Sindh assembly member for the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (another coalition partner), was gunned down at a mosque. Since then, more than 50 people have been killed and another hundred-plus wounded in ethnic and partisan attacks. The response of the state, through the unelected minister of the interior, Rehman Malik, was to empower Karachi's elite Rangers squad with "shoot on sight" orders. More blood to quell the bloodletting.

The disasters pile up

There is worse. This year alone, Barack Obama's White House has sanctioned 70 Predator drone attacks on the north of the country, with one suspected attack ordered while the floods raged, killing 12 people. The Pakistani state, eager to be as willing an ally as possible without adding 49 stars to the national flag, has allowed the US to kill and maim from on high, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 unnamed, unindicted and unconvicted Pakistani citizens.

In the past month, Pakistan has also suffered its deadliest civil aviation disaster. A commercial airliner crashed in the Margalla Hills north of the capital, Islamabad, killing all 152 passengers on board. Families were distraught when the interior minister appeared on television to announce the surprise discovery of five female survivors of the crash only to return and admit that he had made a mistake.

As the disasters pile up, Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmed, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, has estimated it will cost as much as £38m to fix the damage from the floods to highway infrastructure. Half that amount would be required for dam repair and maintenance. But the nation's coffers are empty. The hobgoblins at the helm of Pakistan's teetering state fail to remember the words of our founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to those who would build Pakistan from nothing, raising a new nation out of centuries of colonial rule and violence: "I may tell you that unless you get this into your blood, unless you are prepared to take off your coats and are willing to sacrifice all that you can and work selflessly, earnestly and sincerely for your people, you will never realise your aim."

These floods are the cost of Pakistan's endemic corruption and political malfeasance. The vast numbers of people affected by the disaster multiply every day. They join the millions of other forgotten Pakistanis living in fear, hunger and homelessness.

This year, we marked our birth in silence.

Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/08/pakistan-floods-state-million

Fatima Bhutto: How the War on Terror is Hurting Flood-Weary Pakistanis

As Pakistan’s floods continue to rage, there seems to be no respite from the natural disaster compounded by poor infrastructure, corrupt and inept leadership and what Amnesty International USA is calling a ‘crisis of empathy.’

This weekend, Pakistan’s government assured Washington that our nation’s troops charged with aiding the War on Terror effort in the northern parts of the country would not be redeployed to bolster the relief effort as estimates now place the number of affected Pakistanis at twenty million.

One-fifth of our land is submerged, upwards of two million acres of land in Pakistan’s food belt destroyed, thousands of livestock and the threat of a cholera epidemic looming. The UN estimates that 3.5 million children are at risk of contracting fatal water borne diseases, such as dysentery and diarrhea; the World Heath Organization places the number of at risk children at six million.

In the southern city of Sukkar alone, four million people have been displaced and the agricultural southern province of Sindh has been described as the worst hit area. Pakistan has grappled with food inflation for the past three years; as food prices rise sharply and the summer’s crop is destroyed by the waters, millions of Pakistanis are in desperate need of food aid.

Five hundred thousand pregnant women, conservative estimates say, are among the most desperate of flood survivors.

Merlin USA provides medical relief work and has operated across Pakistan, including the tribal regions, since 2005. Merlin provides emergency health care, mobile medical units and antenatal care and also works in Sudan, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Please visit their site site and give what you can.

Copyright 2010 Fatima Bhutto

Source: http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/1993/fatima_bhutto_how_the_war_on_t/

Please don't leave my country to drown. by Fatima Bhutto

A FIFTH of Pakistan has been devastated by monsoon floods in the past three weeks. But aid is failing to keep up with the unfolding disaster.
Pakistani author Fatima Bhutto, 28-year-old niece of the assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, warns that without help West-hating militants will step in and take advantage of the catastrophe.

IN Kambar, villagers live in stagnant, fetid flood-water between five to 8ft deep - an ideal breeding ground for malaria, cholera and dysentery.

Jacobabad is a ghost town. What locals remain can be found living on roadsides, with no shelter over their heads, begging for food and water.

Seventy-year-old Araba Bibi spent four days on top of a tree outside Peshawar as the waters drowned everything in sight.

Nasirabad is virtually cut off from the rest of Pakistan. Transport officials say the swamped town is unreachable.

My country has always paid heavily with the lives of its people - natural disasters, terrorism and political violence.

My father, Murtaza, was killed in a police encounter, his brother, Shahnawaz before him died under mysterious circumstances, their father, Zulfikar Ali, executed by the state and my aunt, Benazir assassinated two years ago.

But Pakistan has never witnessed such horror before.

Tens of thousands of villages are under water - estimated by the United Nations to have surpassed Haiti's recent earthquake in terms of damage.

The floods have affected one in ten Pakistanis.

A fifth of our country is submerged and aid officials are warning of a second wave of deaths by waterborne diseases.

No one knows when the water from the burst Indus river will change course, when the monsoon will end and how long it will take Pakistan to rebuild.

Aid efforts have been stymied, not least because of the incompetence of the government, whose President Zardari has continued with his foreign trips to Dubai, Europe and Russia.

And, there is the impression that any money sent to Pakistan ends up in the hands of extremists.

In fact, the opposite is true - local reports point to politicians saving their own constituencies at the cost of neighbouring towns and villages.

But if the world community turns its back on Pakistan, then relief efforts will fall to militant outfits who are adept at providing basic services quickly, including roving medical vans and tent villages.

The less aid that reaches Pakistan in a transparent manner, through organisations such as Oxfam, the UN and relief charity Merlin, the easier it will be for extremists to fill the gap.

We can't let that happen.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called Pakistan's floods a "slow motion tsunami".

Please don't leave my country to drown.

Merlin will match donations to their Pakistan Flood Appeal for a limited time at merlin.org.uk. Or text GIVE to 70707 to donate £5 to the Disasters Emergency Committee.

Source:http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3105475/Fatima-Bhutto-on-Pakistan-fllood.html

MISSING YOU ALREADY

Missing you already by:
Fatima Bhutto

Pakistan is at war with itself, with blackouts, corruption and terror attacks. Now there are calls for the return of the reviled Musharraf.

Pakistan has become a very unusual place. In Lahore, the heart of Pakistani cricket, the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in broad daylight by masked gunmen carrying guns and rocket launchers, because you never know when a rocket launcher will come in handy during an urban attack. The government had been warned of a potential terror threat but, true to form, ignored it. After killing eight people, mostly policemen, and wounding several others including the foreign cricketers, the gunmen ambled leisurely away. They were caught on CCTV camera calmly mounting their motorcycles and surveying the scene before deciding they had other places to be.

Immediately the cacophony of ludicrous claims hit the media. “The attack is to ruin our [the ruling party’s] image,” bellowed Raja Riaz, a Pakistan People’s Party hack. Er, no. “The motive was to damage the state of Pakistan and end cricket here,” said Imran Khan, head of the Tehreek-e-Insaf party. Er, no. The Pakistan cricket team are perfectly capable of ruining the state of cricket in the country on their own; masked gunmen are not required, thank you very much. Incidentally, on Monday night local police attacked the offices of Khan’s party brandishing Kalashnikovs and pistols. It’s probably not a coincidence that Khan has been openly critical of the Zardari government.

It’s fear. That’s what it is. It’s the state of a nation at war with itself. When vigilantes armed with sophisticated weaponry can attack a team of cricket guests (and there are no guests more esteemed in south Asia) in the middle of the afternoon, what they’re telling you is that no one is above the reach of the terror that has taken over Pakistan. It’s startling how adept this government has been at losing control of law and order, leasing out Pakistan’s stability for an increased role in the war on terror in preparation for the troop surge in Afghanistan, and generally running the country to rot.

“Droned” is a verb we use now in Pakistan. It turns out, interestingly enough, that those US predator drones that have been killing Pakistani citizens almost weekly have been taking off from and landing within our own country. Secret airbases in Balochistan – what did we ever do before Google Earth?

The PPP-led government, hailed as being “democratic”, capitulated to the Pakistan Taliban’s demands for sharia law in the Swat Valley in February. There was no vote, no referendum, nothing. The government, tired of fighting those pesky militants who’ve been burning down Sufi shrines and local girls’ schools, just declared that a part of the country would be ruled no longer by federal law, but by a myopically interpreted and Taliban-approved “Islamic” code. And verily it shall be.

We’ve just had senate “elections”. Of course, there are no actual elections involved: the ruling party puts forward winners and they end up in parliament. On Monday, in a shock move, President Asif Ali Zardari’s former attorney, who defended the erstwhile criminal on corruption and murder charges, was made chairman of the senate. What a gas!

Meanwhile, with Delhi still beating war drums over the November Mumbai attacks, our former dictator/president Pervez Musharraf travelled to India recently, and there he warned our neighbours of an all-out war should they strike Pakistan. He also let us know that he is ready to return to the call of political duty. Outsiders might be confused at this change in the situation – what’s he doing there? Didn’t he resign in August? Here’s the beauty of it all: Musharraf’s re-emergence has many middle-class Pakistanis excited and hopeful. Is he back?! A series of op-eds in a local English newspaper (not highly censored because no one reads them) was titled “Why I miss Musharraf”. When a dictator tickles your fancy, you know something has gone very, very wrong.

So, the mood in Pakistan is one of confusion. How did we come to this? How do we get out?
On the eve of spring, it is the same problems that blight the country’s poor – there is no electricity, there is no potable water, and food inflation continues to rise. The newspapers warned us this week that “load shedding” in the summer will be some 15 hours long, which is not that bad considering the fact that we’re sitting in darkness for 12 hours a day now. Pakistan has long missed its millennium target goals of eradicating polio, largely because we can’t keep the electricity going long enough for the vaccines to be properly refrigerated, so they keep going bad. And we’re a nuclear country, a grossly corrupt one at that.

The press censorship continues unabated with future threats of an absolute blackout on any criticisms of the government safely enclosed within the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act that the parliament is currently sitting on. The bill, which imposes jail sentences from three months (for having an email account not registered in your real name) to the death penalty, and criminalises the acts of “spoofing”, “spamming” and “character assassinating”, will apply to the width and breadth of the country and to any person, regardless of nationality or citizenship. It will crack down on all objectionable – the definition of what is objectionable is typically vague – messages sent via, but not limited to, “electrical, digital, analogue, magnetic, optical, biochemical, electrochemical, electromechanical, electromagnetic, radio electric, and wireless technology”. So any subversive content found on cell phones, computers, or toasters will soon be illegal. Your head should be spinning by now.

Pakistan is in a dire situation. Religious extremism, violence and a faltering economy have made the state of affairs here decidedly grim. Joe Biden and John Kerry see American dollars as the only way of helping Pakistan stave off extremism; but Yankee aid donations and senatorial money will not help us now. It is estimated that President Zardari and his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, stole between $2bn and $3bn from the country’s treasury during their two previous stints in power. Now Zardari has claimed his personal wealth to be somewhere in the ballpark of $1.8bn. Nawaz Sharif, leading coalition partner and head of the Pakistan Muslim League, declared his fortune to be not as grand, at only $1.4bn. You do the maths.

OBAMA IS PART OF THE PROBLEM

Obama is part of the problem
by: Fatima Bhutto


War rages in the North-West Frontier and the poor are embracing the Taliban because they at least fix roads and discipline criminals. But if catastrophe is to be averted in Pakistan it is the corrupt elite who must be confronted

Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian writer, Marxist and guerilla revolutionary, could have been talking about Pakistan’s present-day civil war in the North-West Frontier Province when he said: “It is necessary to turn political crises into armed crisis by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the military situation into a poli­tical situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”

Pakistan’s government, in the small league when it comes to the brain department, does
not understand that it has just entered into a guerrilla war in the Swat Valley and surrounding
areas, such as Buner, Mingora and Bajaur. The prime minister, Yousef Raza Gilani, who exists solely for photo opportunities as opposed to policy decisions, has declared a military offensive to halt the growth of the Taliban along Pakistan’s northern frontier. This comes after the government ordered the release of Maulana Abdul Aziz, one of the ideological masterminds behind the infamous occupation of the Red Mosque in Islamabad in 2007 – a siege that ended bloodily when the Pakistan army stormed in and recaptured the building by force.

In addition, the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, who on a recent state visit to Washington pronounced himself “commander-in-chief”, unilaterally declared sharia law in the Swat Valley. Behaving in the manner of well-heeled south Asian dictators past, Zardari did not allow the citizens of the Swat Valley a vote. He did not call for a referendum. He simply capitulated to Pakistan’s indigenous Taliban.

Now, the country’s internally displaced population, estimated at one million-strong after US predator drones started flying freely over Pakistani skies last year, has shot up in the course
of just a few recent days. The United Nations is reporting the creation of an additional 500,000 refugees since the government began its own airstrikes against the people of the North-West Frontier Province. Not that this is necessarily disturbing for the government in Islamabad: in the same breath as Prime Minister Gilani declared war against his people, he asked international donors to pony up some cash to deal with the imminent human fallout from the crisis.

The US House appropriations committee has approved a speedy $1.9bn of aid for Pakistan, aid that it assumes will go towards the cause of our growing problem with internally displaced people. It won’t. This government’s history of corruption is well known. Unlike Khaleda Zia and Hasina Wajed in Bangladesh, who are accused of graft in the measly hundred-thousand-dollar range, obtained through kickbacks from government contracts, Zardari’s record is the stuff of legend and sits somewhere between two and three billion dollars, allegedly looted from the national treasury during his late wife Benazir Bhutto’s two terms in power.

Zardari’s sometimes ally/sometimes opposition leader Nawaz Sharif also allegedly worked in the big-stakes ballpark when it came to corruption. It doesn’t take an exceptionally sceptical mind to doubt where this frantic US handout of almost $2bn is going to end up.

Pakistan is not going to win this round of conflict, not with this government in charge, not with the army battling an entrenched guerrilla force that is fighting on this terrain, with the added benefit of doing so in neighbourhoods that the guerrillas grew up in and in towns where their families live. The Pakistani Taliban, frightening as they are, are not an army fighting on
the orders of US Admiral Mike Mullen; they are defending a cause that they believe in. Fundamentalism does that to a soldier. Pakistan is going to lose out for many reasons and President Barack Obama’s complicity will not change anything.

So far, the “Yes We Can” president has strictly upheld George W Bush’s modus operandi when dealing with Pakistan. The evidence is frustratingly damning: he signalled to Pakistan and the world during the White House buddyfest, which saw Zardari at his most unctuous, that he and his government will prop up their men in the region; that they will do so with “see no evil”
billion-dollar handouts and military support; and that, faced with fostering democracy in Pakistan, the US will always come down in support of the strongmen instead of the people.
Asif Ali Zardari is unelected. He was brought to the presidency in the same way as General Pervez Musharraf was – by the vote of a reliant and powerless parliament. Zardari did not stand for election in 2008. He does not represent a constituency, and he does not have the mandate of the people. Ditto Sharif who, unlike Zardari, was disqualified from contesting elections.

Yet this did not seem to get in the way of Obama’s pronouncement of generous support for the government.

Perhaps, as Pakistan “fights for its survival” (the catchphrase for this war), this is a moment for political pause. Two weeks ago I met a man who had just returned from South Waziristan. I asked him about the situation in his home village and he complained about the arbitrary and constant US drone attacks. After telling me that his house had been all but obliterated when a drone missed its mark, he continued, more upbeat, “But the situation there is improving. The law-and-order situation is very good, better than Karachi.”

He told me about the case of a young girl who had been molested by three men after being kidnapped from the market near her house. When the Taliban forces discovered the crime, they not only rescued the girl and returned her to her home, but also took care of the three men.

“They shot them,” my visitor told me, impressed that some form of retributive justice had been served, quickly and easily.

I shifted in my seat and, uncomfortably, disagreed that what had happened was the right outcome. For one thing, I said, women have been suffering greatly under the rule of these extremists. “Oh they’re fine,” he said, waving a hand in the air. “They are grateful for the fact that they finally have basic justice and services, you know. They don’t suffer year-long court delays and mercenary police like we do in Karachi.”

So, Carlos Marighella was spot-on. The solution does not lie in the army fighting its own civilians, generating more hatred for a force that has been acting on the orders of foreign powers for the past eight years and alienating the people whom they are sworn to protect in the process. The solution does not lie in the United States funding and propping up corrupt and illegitimate governments in the face of incompetent leadership and unrest across the country. The
solution is not more money.

The solution lies, rather, in recognising that the residents of Swat didn’t choose the Taliban. They did not vote for sharia law. The Taliban are only there because they built roads that had been unpaved for decades. They provided education, for boys at least, when the government schools failed millions of local children. They opened medical centres when the government hospitals shut down because of lack of funds. They meted out justice when the courts started protecting the government and not the people. It’s corruption, stupid. It’s the force we need
to be fighting now; it’s the head of the monster, the wellspring of the Taliban’s strength in Pakistan. I for one don’t plan on putting on a burqa any time soon...