Pakistan's misery made worse by political failure

The Pakistan floods underline the impossibility of dealing separately with the three interconnected and interdependent ecological, financial and political crises now affecting every country.

Climate change is obviously implicated in the tremendous levels of rainfall, but the impact of the floods has been exacerbated by economic and political failure and corruption at local and national level.

A study conducted by the Pakistan Forest Institute reported on Al Jazeera shows a 0.85°C increase in temperatures in Peshawar between 1985 and 2009 - an increase of 0.034°C each year.

The seasons have changed, with spring starting 15.6 days earlier and becoming 17.8 days shorter. The extreme summer season, with a mean maximum temperature of 35°C, has grown longer, running for five months, from May to September.

There was a 30 per cent decrease in rainfall, with a shift towards a dry tropical climate where for eight months of the year less than 25mm of rain fell. This year’s unprecedented monsoon rains are a further indicator of climate change, according to Bashir Khan, the director-general of the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency.

The people in the Swat Valley have been most cruelly hit. Last year the Pakistan army, urged on by the Obama administration, launched a punitive assault on the Taliban, who were getting above themselves in the area, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were forced to flee.

They returned in recent months, only to have the floods and timber wreck more than 50 villages completely. Many people have died, and will die as they are cut off from aid, medicine and clean water. The government has failed to show as much vigour mobilising the army to get aid to the area now.

The Taliban were working with, or indeed WERE the “timber mafia” in the Malakand region where they were allowed to stay in control from 2007 to 2009. During that time more than 70 per cent of forests were cut down, contribuing the present disaster.

But everywhere, local politicians, police and military are either powerless to stop the loggers and big landowners, or are in their pay – or both. Bribery, corruption, and complicity with terror go hand-in-hand to undermine any environmental protection.

The loss of forests transforms even a normal monsoon from a benefit to a curse. Forests absorbs water, and help refill aquifers. Without trees, flash floods run off into rivers, with no benefit for next year’s crops and without replenishing wells and springs. Fertile top soil is washed away.

Controlling illegal logging and promoting reforestation are G8 Millennium Goal priorities, yet the regulatory regime fails to prevent illegally logged timber being laundered into the official world market. A report published by Chatham House in 2002 warned that regulation of the trade was problematic as it might be subject to challenge at the World Trade Organisation.

The promise of Pakistan independence has been realised only for the rich. In a country which invests vast resources in nuclear weapons to sustain a nationalist, sectarian dispute with India, almost half the population are getting by on just one meal a day according to the United Nations.

Pakistan’s failed state system, exempified by the huge wealth amassed by the president Asif Ali Zardari, with his banks accounts and properties in a number of countries, cannot deliver rights, food and ecological protection. The same state and security services works hand in glove with the reactionary madrasas and the Taliban, when it suits both parties. It cannot be reformed to serve ordinary people’s interests.

The way forward must be to develop a new kind of revolutionary organisation to represent the interests of the masses, replacing those like the Pakistan People’s Party who merely manipulate them to gain power. A new organisation will have to think globally, becoming part of an international movement, and act locally and to put ordinary people in control of their own lives, their local economies and ecology.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

US and Pakistan military - a deadly embrace

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s current visit to Britain must be one of the most unfortunate ever by a head of state. He has rightly come under fire for lavish junketing while millions of his people are suffering from the worst floods for nearly a century.

In addition, Zardari’s meeting with Cameron behind closed doors this Friday is bedevilled by the Prime Minister’s remark that Pakistan should not be “allowed to look both ways” or be permitted to “promote the export of terror”. Cameron, who remains unrepentant, has himself been attacked by Tory grandee Lord Tebbit who has accused him of running “a sloppy, slap-happy government” a propos these remarks.

Just another spat between the old and new Tories? No, this runs far deeper. Cameron in fact provided a glimpse into the deadly embrace that is the reality of Pakistan’s relationship with the United States and Britain.

The heated exchanges between Cameron and Zardari come hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary affair. The 91,000 reports from US military units in the field, embassies, intelligence officers and informers have been denounced as fabrications by Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

An astonishing investigation by veteran reporter Christina Lamb in last weekend’s Sunday Times provides chapter and verse about the real nature of this sinister body. Lamb, who was twice expelled from Pakistan after pre-dawn raids on her, first in on her flat in Islamabad and later in Quetta, explains how and why Pakistan’s military intelligence has become the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice and the ultimate nightmare for both the US and Britain.

As Lamb points out, the WikiLeaks documents show that “Pakistan has been accepting billions in US aid while ISI, its military intelligence service, had been arming and sheltering members of the Taliban. The man who headed ISI during the height of this activity was none other than Kayani.”

Kayani is none other than General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, who, Lamb says, is the “real power in the country”. She was present on Kayani’s C17 executive jet when he met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, just as the WikiLeaks Afghan war diary affair broke.

Mullen used the opportunity to denounce WikiLeaks. He tweeted from the aircraft: “Appalled by classified docs leak to WikliLeaks and decision to post. It changes nothing on Afghanistan strategy or our relationship w/Pakistan.”

It was, Lamb writes, Mullen’s 19th visit to Pakistan since 2007. The complexity of US-Pakistan relations goes back to the 1980s when the CIA provided billions of dollars of aid to the Afghan resistance movement fighting the Soviet army of occupation. These funds were channeled through the ISI, often to the anger of the mujaheddin fighters, many of whom who paid the ultimate price for the double-dealing ISI.

But the ISI’s activities were not confined to Afghanistan. They also targeted politicians, especially secular ones like former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. An official UN investigation into the Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination accuses the ISI of having an agent in the operating room where doctors tried to revive her. There is a body of evidence suggesting that the agency was responsible for terror bombings in Kabul and the Mumbai massacre during 2008.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the flood-stricken areas of Pakistan are dismayed by the lack of concern and help from their government. Reporters on the ground say that while the state has failed to act, Islamist organisations of all kinds, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the 2008 assault on Mumbai, have stepped into the breach.
But while Washington’s support for Pakistan’s military - £11 billion since 2001 – continues to provide succour to the very forces that are killing US troops, the US and NATO cannot withdraw their support. They view the collapse of Pakistan as a worse option than an out-of-control Afghanistan. No wonder that Cameron and Zardari will be meeting behind closed doors!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary