Page 1 of 2 The great deluge never happened
By Juan Cole
The great deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States,
despite President Barack Obama's repeated assertions that the country is
central to American security. Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting
Sindh province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has
washed almost completely off American television and out of popular
consciousness.
Don't think we haven't been here before. In the late 1990s, the American mass
media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda. In
2002, it parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way
for a senseless war. No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability
the
Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications
for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here
pays much attention, it will already be too late.
Few Americans were shown - by the media conglomerates of their choice - the
heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of
the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New
Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged,
or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and
opportunistic militant bombings continuing. The boiling disgust of the
Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance and cupidity of their
corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.
The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever
experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned. Unlike, say, BBC Radio,
corporate television did not tell the small stories - of, for instance, the
female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on
which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who
is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the
land.
That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown
off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a
further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate
news-for-profit. (The print press was better at covering the crisis, as was
publicly-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)
In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week,
Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, "But we must
never lose sight of what's at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot
against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of
Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Even if Pakistan were not a major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally
of the United States, it is the world's sixth most populous country and the
44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.
The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country's
modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water
and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air
north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid. If the
floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a
milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.
News junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice
with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was
nearly invisible on American networks. I did a LexisNexis search for the terms
"Pakistan" and "flood" in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American
networks) from July 31 to September 4, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.
A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search
results in the same period and one for "Iraq" more than 3,000 hits (the most
the search engine will count). A search for "mosque" and "New York" yielded
1,300 hits. Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial
frenzy by people like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and
Republican Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction
of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old
World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani
flood victims.
Some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity,
including CNN's Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air
time and poor time slots. (Gupta's special report on the Pakistan floods aired
the evening of September 5, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time
when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)
As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored. On August 13,
reporter Dan Harris interviewed National Aeronautics and Space Administration
scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC's Good Morning America show at 7:45 am.
The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the
Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt
pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms were going to become more
common later in the 21st century. Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment
at 4 pm on August 16. My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was
about it for commercial television.
The 'worst disaster' TV didn't cover
It's worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:
The deluge began on July 31, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused
mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan. Within two days, the rapidly rising
waters had already killed 800 people. On August 2, the United Nations announced
that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the
affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of
refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani
Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan
alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless
villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.
The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver
aid, as public criticism of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister
Yousuf Raza Gilani surged. Zardari's opulent trip to France and Britain (during
which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was
pilloried.
On August 8 in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both
his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi
journalist threw a shoe at president George W Bush. Fearing the response in
Pakistan, the president's Pakistan People's Party attempted to censor the video
of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or
sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it. Few or no
American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident,
though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their
elected government. (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid
work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound
popularity into yet another in the country's history of military coups.)
By August 5, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid
officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far
larger than reported. Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was
initially greeted by the world community with a yawn. The following day, the
government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward
southern Punjab.
At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected. On
August 7, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through
some of the country's richest farmlands just before harvest time, another
million people were evacuated. Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of
the flood-stricken regions.
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