Pakistan floods: ‘beyond human control’

Aid workers in Pakistan said the disaster is getting worse by the day. A member of Médicins Sans Frontières in Pakistan told Channel 4 News: “It is raining again today – it seems to get worse every day. More areas are flooded – and there are still those that were affected from the first day. The magnitude of the disaster is gigantic.”

The UN says it is a race against time to reach the unreachable, and feed the unfeedable, as people remain stranded as heavy rains continue.

Exasperated aid workers told Jonathan Miller the situation is now “beyond human control” as they are unable to deliver vital supplies to those affected.

In the town of Muzaffargarh, near where rivers bloated with rain from as far away as Afghanistan and India merge with the Indus to flow south to the sea, army helicopters dropped packets of rice to people who had moved to higher ground to a cemetery.

Some latched on to helicopter skids as the aircraft took off. An elderly man fought his way inside one. He looked down and wept.

“Things are getting worse. It’s raining again. That’s hampering our relief work,” said UN World Food Programme spokesman Amjad Jamal.

In Nowshera, a man told Channel 4 News: “Still most of the people are living beside the roads, they do not have houses and most of the children are sick.”

President Zardari’s visit to the UK during the crisis left many angry and frustrated.

Haji Anar Gul said: “Just look at our condition… and our president is out visiting foreign countries while we drown here in the water.

“The government is doing nothing, we have no drinking water, nothing to eat, nothing! We’re sitting in tthe rain, we have no tents.

“We’re not getting anything from anywhere.”

Michael O’Brien, of the Red Cross in Islamabad, told Channel 4 News that relief workers were having problems getting to some of the areas hit by the flooding.

“The problem is the devastation is so severe in some areas, for instance in the Swat Valley every single bridge has been destroyed so it is extremely difficult simply to get to places to assess the scale of the damage, let alone to manage to get relief to these people,” he said.

“A disaster of this scale needs a response from the international community, and that in itself provides some coordination challenges.”

'The army is certainly winning the PR battle'
The role of the army in Pakistan is always significant, now as much as ever, it is a very influential player. The scale of the crisis is huge, and while this is a mitigating factor for the civilian government they do appear to have been slow off the mark even though you would expect at this stage for the armed forces to be in the lead after all it is the only organisation that has the right equipment to deal with the situation, says Dr Tim Bird of the Defence Studies Department Kings College, London. 

There will have been co-ordination between the army and the Pakistani government but the army will have had a certain amount of independence too. When the US had to deal with Hurricane Katrina, it was the US armed forces including the National Guard that were to the fore in the search and rescue and immediate relief efforts. It is significant that the tribal areas where the army is co-ordinating the relief effort are also areas which it has so far struggled to control. It has lost many men while trying to maintain order here. It is difficult to tell whether or not there may be a legacy to the army's role in helping people of these regions. 

In the long term, I would say that the Pakistani president Asif Zardari is a loser rather than the army being a winner but the army is certainly winning the PR battle in the media. In such a volatile political system, it's hard to say if this will have any lasting effect however.