Pakistan in crisis: left to help themselves

Drive along the newish motorway from Islamabad to Peshawar and for a time things seem normal. Until you approach the bridge straddling the Jindi River.

There, on the reservation dividing the two carriageways, is a village created overnight by families who fled there to escape the floodwaters that engulfed them in the night. For eight days they have lived like this, in tatty tents without groundsheets, only a few hours' drive from their country's manicured capital, yet bereft of help from a government seemingly indifferent to their fate.

Saif Ullah is 25 but looks older, aged by a life of near-subsistence farming. Still, the crops of sugar cane, wheat and maize grown on his two hectares of land kept his wife and two young children fed. Then, last week, the Jindi, swollen by torrential rains not witnessed in Pakistan for 80 years, broke its banks, inundating the surrounding villages and farmland.

"I woke up at 3am and got out of bed. I was standing in two feet of water," said Mr Ullah. "People started crying, screaming. We had to swim to the motorway to save ourselves. Our animals drowned."
Mr Ullah can see his ruined house from the road. The few possessions he could call his own lie there under stinking mud and stagnant brown water. A stench of rotting everything – dead animals, contaminated vegetation – fills the nostrils.

The 13 families who inhabited the village of Chatri Tapu slept in the open for a week, with nothing but stones for a bed, until members of the

Kuwaiti Red Crescent

arrived with tents. A bowser provides occasional drinking water, but no food – that comes from motorists who show their pity by throwing packages from their lorries and cars. Drive a little further and the tented village on the motorway, built on a raised embankment, the only high ground around, becomes a town. Scores more tents line the reservation, while animals stand tethered to the crash barrier.

Chaos and Pakistan go together. This country of 170 million souls has plenty to go round. Take the floods, which have killed at least 1,500 people and displaced or affected some 12 million, and add an outbreak of bloody political violence in the port city of Karachi. Then add the ongoing and much bloodier insurgency waged by the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and you have a potent brew.

Jihadist groups, who this week claimed the life of a senior police officer in Peshawar, blown up by a teenage suicide bomber as he sat in his car, spy an opportunity in the chaos. Islamic charities, most of them relatively moderate but some more extreme, have shown themselves, with Western charities and NGOs, to be the only effective means of relief during the flood crisis, which shows no sign of abating. While the government, hobbled by bureaucracy, remains invisible, the charities, funded by private donations and injections of cash from the Middle East, are only too visible, proclaiming their presence on banners and at roadside help points.
The seeming insensitivity of the Pakistani ruling class is nowhere better illustrated than by the decision of President Asif Ali Zardari to carry on with a visit to Britain, despite the progressive immersion of his country. Standing alongside David Cameron following bilateral discussions at Chequers, President Zardari, widowed husband of Benazir Bhutto and one-time jailbird, brushed aside the controversy sparked by the Prime Minister's description of Pakistan – during a visit to India of all places – as a duplicitous exporter of terrorism.

"This is a friendship that will never break, no matter what happens," Mr Zardari assured the press. "Storms will come and storms will go, and Pakistan and Britain will stand together and face all the difficulties with dignity."
The storms aren't going anywhere, for the moment. The heavy monsoon rains returned to Pakistan yesterday, grounding rescue helicopters – including a small detachment of US Army Chinooks flown in from Afghanistan – and threatening yet more destruction. Since the first floods in the mountainous north, the progress of the disaster has been simple to predict. The Indus, the mighty waterway that forms Pakistan's backbone, is breaking its banks further and further south as the flood waters roar downstream.

In Sindh, the great southern province, 70 villages were flooded within the space of 24 hours yesterday as the flood tide made its way to the Indian Ocean. Around 200,000 people fled their homes, leaving half a million oblivious to the fate approaching them, according to the Pakistani government. The army, the real powerbroker in Pakistan, has deployed some 30,000 troops to help in rescue and relief operations, but outside Peshawar yesterday the only military convoy in sight was a regiment of artillery making its way north.

Nearby, in the town of Pabbi, 800 refugees crowded into a decaying high school converted into an aid post by the Al Khidmat Foundation, a charity affiliated to the Islamic Jamaat-i-Islami Party. Shahid Wali Khattak, the charity's tall, bearded, imposing general secretary, was scathing about the government's performance.
Maybe these rains are a test from Allah, a test of those who claim to help the people. Zardari – where is he? In Britannia. The government is not here; it has done nothing for these people. We must help ourselves More extreme is the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, which is carrying out relief work in the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, known until recently as North-West Frontier Province. Falah is an offshoot of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, which in turn is accused of being a reincarnation of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

The poor farmers made destitute by the floods are in no mood to worry about the credentials of those helping them. More than 252,000 homes are thought to have been damaged or destroyed across Pakistan, and 558,000 hectares of agricultural land flooded.

Mohammad Bakhsh is one of the faceless millions. "Our cattle died and the cotton crop was destroyed," he said. "I've got calls on my mobile saying 20 to 25 children from our family are stranded in the village and are holding on to tree branches. Two of my children have drowned and we don't know where they are."

Outside Peshawar, Afghan refugees driven from their country by the fighting of the 1980s have been left to fend for themselves, colonising the raised railway line to escape the flood waters. Stinking mud-soaked blankets lay on the sodden ground yesterday, their only rescued possessions.

Shah Wali, 28, was in despair: "We have never been helped and we are again alone." Yet adults managed to laugh as boys chased parcels tossed from cars. Others scrambled out of the way as the Peshawar to Rawalpindi express chugged into view.

With masterly understatement, army Major-General Athar Abbas summarised the situation. "We do not have the kind of resources to cope with a situation like this, and I think the international community should come to our help."
Zardari, the frontman for the army, is on trial. Waiting in the wings is General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the general staff and the man the Americans listen to. He has just been granted an unprecedented second three-year term in office. The army is said to be the only institution that really works in Pakistan – a debatable proposition, given its own performance during the floods.

Zardari is this weekend meant to be anointing his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who turns 22 next month, as the next inheritor of the Bhutto political legacy at a rally in Birmingham. In order to minimise the domestic fallout from his father's foreign sojourn, Bilawal will instead be attending a fundraising event in London in aid of the flood victims.

But there is no doubt that Zardari's reputation at home is tarnished. The News newspaper put it thus: "When millions are drowning in flash floods and when Karachi is burning in a bloodbath and when terrorists are roaming around with abandon, he has decided to insult the nation by his abrasiveness and arrogance."

Zardari, with his wealth, is at one end of the spectrum; Gulab Rahim is at the other. Surveying the ruin of his home, he said: "Our whole life passed in difficulties and we have never seen prosperity. May Allah give us happiness in the life hereafter."