Disaster and management

THE people of Pakistan are living under double jeopardy. On the one hand, the scale of disasters caused by terrorists is escalating and, on the other, the management of emergencies is becoming more and more disastrous.

The havoc caused by last Saturday’s blast at Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel is truly colossal. Besides resulting in the huge loss of life and property, it led to an enormous erosion of the people’s confidence in the government’s capacity to deal with terrorist attacks and their aftermath. As a perceptive analyst has pointed out, in view of the mounting evidence of the authorities’ inability to handle terrorists, the latter’s attacks are likely to increase in terms of both numbers and the scale of devastation.

Quite a few ominous developments have been reported since the Islamabad disaster. The death of the Czech envoy has raised Pakistan’s rating as a hazardous assignment and foreign governments could downgrade their diplomatic relations with Islamabad. An important airline has suspended its flights to and from Pakistan and another airline had done so earlier. An IMF mission, on whose favourable report the managers of national finance were perhaps banking, is reported to have flown back.

Hopes of foreign investors’ coming to this country can hardly be sustained. The same can be said about the academics and professional experts that Pakistan might have been wooing. And, thanks to our sports czars’ decision to compete with the terrorists in demolishing whatever credit we had in the world of cricket, hockey and boxing, Pakistan’s isolation in the sports arena is nearly complete.

The terrorists’ demonstration of their ability to launch a massive attack on the federal seat of power comes after their unprecedented gains in the tribal areas allegedly administered by the federal government and their increasingly bold forays into the so-called settled districts of the Frontier province.

The blowing up of a grid station in Swat has multiplied the misery of its population many times over. Estimates of the time repairs may take vary from two to six months. What will happen to the people during a long blackout can only be imagined.

The abduction of the Afghan ambassador in Peshawar is likely to further deplete the morale of its citizens and their even more demoralised guardians. Now the Frontier governor has disclosed that terrorist groups are getting stronger in Punjab and that Punjab is the breeding ground for terrorist leaders and cadres, and not Fata as Islamabad’s Al Qaeda watchers are insinuating, as if we have been unaware of Punjab’s pioneering role in fostering terrorist outfits.

This grim scenario assumes more sinister dimensions if one takes into account the poverty of the disaster managers. Everything related to internal security appears to be a one-man show. However shrewd or gifted the present lynchpin of the interior establishment may be, the impression that the safety and security of the entire population depends upon him breeds more apprehension than trust.One has not heard of the Disaster Management Authority since it evinced some interest in the disturbances in Sindh following Benazir Bhutto’s assassination eight months ago. One hopes this body’s mandate is not limited to natural calamities and that it has something to do in the event of man-made disasters too. Further, it is time the security establishment tried to allay the people’s fears and anxieties by revealing its disaster management mechanisms and offering reasons for their claim to public trust in their effectiveness.

Reports that fire-fighting and rescue operations at the Marriott were not up to the mark, that some equipment needed for lifesaving tasks was not available or that what was available could not be efficiently used for lack of duly trained personnel are bound to fuel anxiety. It is possible that such reports are exaggerated and do not do justice to the functionaries concerned. But anyone who can recall the sufferings of the victims of the 2005 earthquake, or of the recent floods in Balochistan or of the floods in Sindh some years earlier will not be able to dismiss these reports altogether.

The agonising question that more skilled and better equipped rescue teams might have saved a few more lives will not go away easily. The fact is that our management of calamities has, more often than not, been pathetic and that there are dangerous deficiencies in both equipment and skills.

This was amply borne out at a recent high-profile conference at Karachi’s Aga Khan Medical University that received due attention neither from officialdom nor the media. Among the many inputs on the subject of managing disasters and injuries caused on roads and in closed environments, eminent surgeon Rasheed Jumma (now federal director-general of health) spoke of his plan to develop pre-hospital medical services of the kind that he said might have saved the lives of Princess Diana and Murtaza Bhutto, and the chief of Punjab’s Rescue 1122 service explained how this initiative is one of the best things to have happened in the province over the past many years.

Here are ideas that need to be adopted and further developed by the authorities responsible for saving lives and mitigating the suffering of disaster victims.

Despite the fact that we have been at the mercy of terrorists for quite some time, precautious against untoward emergencies in hotels, apartment blocks and offices do not go beyond installing a few fire extinguishers (often untested and unserviceable) here and there and giving warnings against the use of elevators in the event of fire.

Nobody has been told what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. Even proper alarm systems have not been thought of. Suppose an alarm system had been activated the moment the truck carrying explosives exploded at Marriott, would it have made the situation worse or could it have saved some of the victims from death and injury? The point is that not only security personnel but the whole population should be instructed and drilled in safety measures when under attack.

The exposure of shortcomings in disaster management should have a sobering effect on the crazy war-mongers who are unfortunately receiving unmerited respect in the media. Some of them want to take on the forces that are armed with the deadliest weapons of mass destruction and some others talk of a nuclear conflict as if that would be a repetition of the 1965 encounter in the Rann of Kutch.

And this while we cannot cope with a blast at a hotel! A little reflection on this matter will lead to the need to revisit the puerile theory of safety regarding nuclear capability and to the realisation of the prohibitive cost of keeping a nuclear arsenal that every sane person hopes will never be used.

A crucial meeting amid discord

A SUMMIT-level exchange between allies in the global war on terror would be important at any time, but the recent meeting between Presidents George Bush and Asif Zardari had an added significance, coming as it did at a time when US-Pakistan ties appeared to have entered a strained phase.

Either by coincidence or design, the Bush administration’s welcome for Pakistan’s elected government has been shockingly irreverent. Instead of giving it time to get a grip on myriad problems inherited from an authoritarian dispensation, Washington is indulging in missile attacks and cross-border raids on so-called terrorist targets. Resultantly, the government is confused and the people outraged.

In fact, the expectation in Pakistan after the army chief’s meeting with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, last month was that the anti-terror strategy would be reviewed and the terms of engagement determined. Obviously, this was not the case for Sept 3 witnessed the first US ground assault in South Waziristan. Attacks have continued amidst reports that Bush had issued an executive order in July authorising unilateral ground action in our tribal areas.

More worryingly, in a congressional testimony this month, Admiral Mullen presented a detailed roadmap of a new, comprehensive American strategy. Admitting that the US was not winning in Afghanistan, Mullen asserted that “these two nations are inextricably linked in a common insurgency that crosses the border”, indicating that the US would treat both Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single area of operations. Admiral Mullen’s testimony was a tacit admission of failure in Afghanistan, while also an assertion that the only way to win in Afghanistan was to open a new theatre of operations in Pakistan. Confirmation of this was contained in President Bush’s speech at the US National Defence University where he named Pakistan among the major battlegrounds in the global war on terror, clearly a warning to Islamabad that in the war on terror, it had no option but to continue to play the role assigned to it.

Around the same time, the American media reported that the Bush administration had approved a three-phase plan calling for a far more aggressive military campaign and authorising US forces to operate inside Fata to capture Al Qaeda leaders. The same sources stated that the CIA presence in the Pak-Afghan border areas was being beefed up. Later, Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher called for reform of the Inter-Services Agency (ISI) to increase the pressure on Islamabad.

US officials claim to be closely monitoring public and private reactions to cross-border operations. They explain that even though the stepped-up operations risked a backlash, the US had decided “to get to the areas where the terrorists rest, relax and train”. What then explains the American impatience with Pakistan? Is it the presence of safe havens in Fata that leave the US with no option or that “the initial Pakistani response has been relatively restrained”, as claimed by Pentagon officials? Or is it because of the administration’s confidence that the improved situation in Iraq and a power shift in Islamabad had widened the window of opportunity for more strikes?

The politics of US presidential elections involving a desire to achieve major success against Al Qaeda to brush up Bush’s negative legacy could also be one of the factors. Finally, is there any truth to the claim made by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a veteran American journalist, that Pakistan’s consent has been forthcoming — “with a wink and a nod”?

It is quite obvious that US “patience with Pakistan is running short”. Nevertheless, Washington needs to broach this issue cautiously. As the Marriott Hotel blast has demonstrated, this may not be the most appropriate time for Washington to give expression to its petulance.

America needs to appreciate that the Taliban resurgence is primarily on account of its own mistakes in Afghanistan, including failure to provide the men and material required immediately after the invasion; the inefficient and corrupt government of Hamid Karzai; and its support for an authoritarian regime in Pakistan that failed to ‘own’ the war on terror thus reinforcing the impression that it was America’s war and not ours.

Unilateral US attacks betray a sense of desperation and a misplaced reliance on brute military offensive to cover up a strategic failure. It is in this context that Zardari’s meeting with Bush assumes special importance. He would have done well to have ensured national consensus through parliament’s endorsement of government policy before embarking on this crucial visit. From Bush’s remarks to the media it appears that Zardari did raise Pakistan’s concern at the violations of its sovereignty.

Bush, however, avoided giving any commitment on this issue though Information Minister Sherry Rehman later claimed that Bush had assured Zardari that the US would respect our sovereignty, though she did not respond when asked whether Zardari had received assurance that the US troops would no more enter our territory while pursuing the militants.

In fact, US policy is not likely to change as evident from the vigour and conviction with which Bush dwelt on the issue of terrorism in his speech to the General Assembly, claiming that “bringing terrorists to justice does not create terrorism; it’s the best way to protect our people”. Zardari did well to play on Bush’s ego and public attachment to democracy by claiming that “democracy was the answer to the problems”.

Hopefully, Zardari would have also emphasised that Pakistan’s democratic government cannot react with the same disregard for public opinion as did the earlier authoritarian regime. For the first time, the federal and Frontier governments have publicly ‘owned’ the war on terrorism and supported military action in the tribal areas. National support for this policy that was greatly strengthened after the Marriott blast, could, however, be quickly diluted if the US persists in disregarding Pakistani sensitivities.

The US has to be persuaded that commando raids and missile attacks that result in civilian casualties are likely to raise anti-American sentiments, make extremists more popular, discredit the civilian set-up and weaken the effectiveness of government. All this could jeopardise Pak-US cooperation in countering terrorist groups. The US should concentrate on providing Pakistani forces with advanced equipment, sharing credible and timely intelligence and extending massive economic assistance, especially to the affected areas, and then letting the Pakistanis deal with the situation.

Pakistan, in turn, has to get its own house in order, formulate a well thought out strategy, sell it to the people through building consensus in parliament and then implement it forcefully.

Farewell Mbeki

It was widely believed of South Africa’s outgoing president, Thabo Mbeki that the only time when he wasn’t plotting was when he was asleep. More than his bizarre views on Aids or even his failure to do much for South Africa’s poor, it was that reputation as an inveterate plotter that finally brought him down.

Mbeki’s humiliation has been very great. First the governing African National Congress (ANC) refused to re-elect him as its leader last year, which dashed his hopes of winning a third term in next year’s election. But he would still have remained president until early 2009 — until last weekend, when the ANC leadership, convinced that Mbeki was using the courts to pursue a private vendetta against his rival Jacob Zuma, ordered him to resign early.

Mbeki’s immediate replacement as president is Kgalema Motlanthe, deputy leader of the ANC, but Zuma is universally expected to be elected president of South Africa in the election due early next year.

Mbeki’s fall from grace has been spectacular but hardly surprising. He was Nelson Mandela’s chosen successor, but his style was very different: aloof, intellectual — and endlessly scheming against real and imagined rivals: the upper ranks of the ANC are full of men and women who have been sidelined or betrayed by Mbeki. He also didn’t pay much attention to the opinions of the broader public, particularly in two areas that are vital for South Africa: curbing the Aids epidemic, and creating jobs for the black poor. His stubborn denial that Aids is transmitted by the HIV virus delayed the state-aided provision of retrovirals to HIV-positive patients for years, and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of South Africans. His neo-liberal economic policies gave the country a relatively high growth rate (five per cent last year), but created very few new jobs. Some people respected Mbeki, but nobody loved him.

What ultimately brought Mbeki down was his feud with Jacob Zuma, which was a self-inflicted wound. Zuma is the antithesis of Mbeki — he’s a left-leaning populist with little formal education and a record of financial and sexual indiscretions — so it’s natural that the two men should dislike and mistrust each other. But the party had forced Mbeki to accept Zuma as his vice-president, and a wiser politician than Mbeki would have gone along with that typical ANC compromise.

Mbeki didn’t, and he seized the opportunity of a corruption charge against Zuma in 2005 to dismiss the latter from the vice-presidency. It was an error that finally brought Mbeki down, for it made Zuma the rallying point for all the elements in the party that could not stand either Mbeki’s policies or his personality. Even Zuma’s allies suspect that there was something to the corruption charges, for his close associate Schabir Shaik is already in the third year of a 15-year prison sentence for his actions in the same case. But the government’s case against Zuma depended on documents seized in a raid on his home and office for which the search warrants may have been invalid, and several judges have dismissed the case on legal technicalities connected with that issue.

Every time, the government prosecutors reinstated the charges or appealed the judgement, and to many Zuma supporters within the ANC it began to look like Mbeki’s private vendetta against their man. Two weeks ago the Constitutional Court dismissed the case against Zuma on the same technicality, and Judge Chris Nicholson openly voiced his suspicion that it was pressure from Mbeki that was keeping it alive.

When government prosecutors appealed the case yet again, the party’s patience with Mbeki snapped, and within days he was gone. So now Jacob Zuma, who is, to put it bluntly, much closer to the popular stereotype of an African politician than either Mandela or Mbeki, is coming to power in South Africa.

But corruption is nothing new in South Africa (it was rife under the apartheid regime) and neither is populism. The country has a free press, independent courts, a modern economy, and a good deal of political sophistication. The left had to get a turn in power some time, and there is some reason to hope that Zuma’s worst instincts will be curbed by his allies.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.