Is it really that surprising that the response of the Pakistan government/Army was woefully inadequate, unprofessional and devoid of any semblance of leadership?
Not our finest hour
By Ayaz Amir (
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/ayaz.htm)
</B>THAT we are nothing before the fury of the elements, that natural calamity reveals human insignificance, are trite enough observations. The difference in the age of instant television is that we get to view such experiences, and the resulting outpouring of emotion, visually, often in real time. The effects of a tsunami or a hurricane, and now the ravages of the earthquake devastating parts of Hazara in the Frontier province and whole swathes of Kashmir, brought into our living rooms.
But the fury of the elements is also a handy excuse. When human ineptitude is exposed, as in Pakistan where the government — including the army, by now the avowed vanguard of Pakistani society — was leaden on its feet and seemed overwhelmed by the catastrophe, it is easy to cite nature’s wrath as an excuse for twiddling one’s thumbs. This excuse is bandied about the more readily in a fatalistic society where the first response to tragedy of any kind is: God’s will.
Apart from the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, one of its more insidious consequences has been to provide a permanent alibi to bumbling governments everywhere. If help was so late in coming to the citizens of New Orleans, don’t be surprised if it is late in coming to, say, the victims of Pakistan’s earthquake.
George Bush, however, has not escaped pillorying for his response to Katrina and there is no reason why Pakistan’s military overlords, who run the country and on whose desk the buck stops, should escape criticism, or worse, for their response to Pakistan’s northern earthquake.
What to talk of the earthquake as a whole, the entire Pakistani administration seemed paralyzed by just one event in Islamabad: the collapse of a wing of the patently ill-constructed Margalla Towers. Everyone arrived, including police, CDA officials, army personnel, but to what effect? Only to put on a stunning display of collective ineptitude: before the mass of concrete, the entire machinery of government helpless. The debris began to be explored and some survivors pulled out when a British team, armed with sensors and concrete-cutting tools, seemingly unavailable in the whole of Pakistan, arrived all the way from the UK.
This was the public face of the disaster that first day of the earthquake but with all the helplessness and hand-wringing to be seen, it wasn’t an edifying sight. As if the confusion on site wasn’t enough, General Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz arrived to add some of their own, both making inane remarks before the assembled cameras and generally getting in the way of the relief efforts.
Pakistan has no problem importing all the bullet-proof Mercedes limos it needs for its ruling bonzes. But it lacks the resources and know-how to handle the collapse of a single high-rise. And if this was Islamabad, imagine the plight up north away from the cameras.
There’s no getting away from it: relief of any kind has been scandalously slow to reach the worst-hit areas. Forget remote and inaccessible villages. Even on the fourth day of the earthquake very little had arrived in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir, which gave all the appearances of a bombed-out city. And there was no word of relief to Bagh or Rawalakot, what to talk of the villages in between.
All right — to run through the usual excuses — coordination is difficult and mobilizing resources takes time. But for the first few days, with the inhabitants of the affected areas losing everything, what they needed were the essentials of life: water, some food, some blankets. Even if relief convoys couldn’t make it in a hurry, some semblance of supplies, even water, could have been air-dropped. Nothing was. Journalists, both local and foreign, made it to the worst-hit areas, no one, it seems, from the Pakistani administration.
As a Reuters report puts it plainly enough — this on Tuesday, the fourth day after the earthquake: “The only aid anyone from Bagh has seen from the government since the earthquake struck has been on television... Three days after the disaster the people of this once-prosperous little town set deep in the hills of Azad Kashmir have all but given up hope... ‘The government is only showing us the relief on television,’ said Abdul Razzaq, a storekeeper in the town. ‘We haven’t seen a drop of water or medicine coming to us, not even a single grain.’”
Criticism can run out of control, especially when delivered from the comfort of an armchair far from the scene of action or disaster, but in this case it is more than apt when the failure of government and armed forces — the armed forces in Musharraf’s Pakistan eclipsing the government — has been both comprehensive and visible.
Utterly baffling for most Pakistanis is why the army was not there sooner at the disaster points, if only to dole out sympathy and first aid. After all, Balakot and Azad Kashmir are difficult but not impossible to reach. And it isn’t exactly as if troops had to be airlifted from Islamabad and elsewhere. Azad Kashmir commands some of the densest concentration of troops anywhere in Pakistan. Where were they?
This ineptitude is all the more striking when set against the response of ordinary people. Money and relief goods are being collected all over the country and sent to the stricken areas haphazardly, without help or guidance from the authorities and often with little idea of geography: where exactly to go and how.
A leadership with a greater sense of national responsibility would have forsaken Islamabad, eschewed empty and meaningless television — there being no television in the quake-hit areas — and encamped in Balakot and Muzaffarabad. The corps commanders — in the case of Mansehra and Balakot, commander Peshawar corps, in the case of Muzaffarabad, commander 10 corps based in Rawalpindi — should have moved to the disaster areas the latest by Saturday afternoon to take personal charge of the relief operations. If they did no one saw them.
The Peshawar corps commander — he of the Waziristan operations — Lt Gen Safdar Hussain, has earned a reputation for the ill-advised remark. He lived up to his reputation again by saying that the number of casualties was probably exaggerated. As for the ‘Pindi corps commander, he must have been well camouflaged in his ops room because there was very little of him to be seen.
No doubt, excuses will be trotted out but few will do because the ineptitude of government and military was played out on television for the world to see. Instant, 24 hours TV may not be an unmitigated blessing but whether it is a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake, it is a spur to action when it homes in on delay and incompetence. Far from being in the way, television helps clear the way.
Incidentally, not only CNN and BBC have done a wonderful job. Some of the Pakistani channels have been equally good, quick to arrive and cover both the extent of the disaster and the inadequacy of the official response. But for independent television how would we have known all this so quickly?
George Bush has reason to rue the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It showed the emperor without his clothes. President Musharraf will have plenty of reasons to rue the coverage of the Pakistani earthquake because it has shown the entire circus of Pakistani government at its most incompetent.
Bush’s approval ratings already on a roll were hit further. Musharraf doesn’t have to bother about approval ratings but surely the aura of bumbling and dithering the world has seen can’t be very flattering.
And the timing of it, coinciding almost exactly with the sixth anniversary of the Oct 99 coup which brought this dispensation to power. Anniversaries are occasions for celebration, real or fake, not for such relentless exposure of weakness and failure. Successive military interventions have elevated the military to the status of premier state institution. This disaster has shown the premier institution at its most vulnerable, a circumstance which could lead more people to ask disturbing questions. If ever there was a time for wider national consultation it is this. The inadequacy of a single-man dispensation — aided by two or three close advisers, no more — has been exposed like never before. The nation has closed ranks, the opposition parties setting aside their differences as Pakistan copes with this tragedy. Question is, can Musharraf transcend the politics of self-interest and strive for genuine national reconciliation? It’s a safe bet he won’t.
Pakistanis are not just willing to give, they are desperate to give. But they are concerned that what they offer should go into clean hands and reach the needy. This is the paradox we face: a rousing of national spirit but, with it, a loss of faith in government and other institutions. In other words, a huge disconnect between people and government. What’ll bridge the divide? Certainly not one-man rule.
Tailpiece: Capt Irfan Jafri writes from Dammam, Saudi Arabia: This should be a helicopter-specific relief effort. We must shout for helicopters from everywhere and anywhere: a hundred of them, two hundred, even more. And they must be in the air all the time. Only thus would we be able to reach out to some of the inaccessible spots which have yet to receive a drop of assistance.
