The recent floods in Khyber Pakhtankhwa Province, triggered by unusually heavy monsoon rains, has killed at least 1,100 while another estimated 27,000 are still stranded in their homes, already washed away, wiped away from every map but that of one’s mind.
The casualties in Peshawar and the surrounding areas will surely mount in the days to come. In the mean time, at least 1 million people throughout the nation have been affected by hte floods, the U.N. estimated.
It has already been a few days since the rains wiped away the livelihoods of those tens of thousands of villagers and farmers. And so far the government has not been able to provide immediate relief, even though it has deployed a sizable military contingent to help with the local rescue and relief effort. The forth-coming aid and reconstruction effort will be an important test of Islamabad’s competence and commitment to Pakistan’s economic and social development. In many areas, the government has the opportunity to build communities from scratch. It should not miss nor dismiss this opportunity to engage in sheer community building and aid dispersion, perhaps, of lasting value.
While the U.S has pledged a $10 million in humanitarian relief, this terrible flood holds out, improbably dizzlying consequential choices to the people of the region, and the various political and militant groups involved in day to day moves in the province.
Though the U.S. commitment to aid might be rebuffed, due to widespread condemnation for the deeply unpopular U.S. drone attacks, the government of Pakistan needs to take any pledge aid seriously. It must, then, quickly martial that aid to the most badly affected areas to bring swiftly resolution to the people’s misery.
Otherwise, the Taliban will have been given a rich opportunity to show up their claims of faith and their avowed interests in a social movement. If then, the loosely aligned groups that constitute the Taliban actually invest in the reconstruction of discrete towns and villages, they could win the allegiance of the people through a means stronger and richer than fear or pay-outs: respect.
Consider Nabi Gul’s bitter complaint, as reported in the New York Times:
A resident of the town of Charsadda in Peshawar, “Nabi Gul, who estimated that he was about 70 years old, stood shaking at the site of a rubble heap that just a day earlier had been his house.”
“I built this house with my life’s earnings and hard work, and the river has washed it away,” he said in a trembling voice. “Now I wonder, will I be able to rebuild it? And in this time, when there are such great price hikes?”
As the rescue effort turns into a relief effort and more people are given shelter in make-shift communal areas, the threat of a public health will begin to loom, a threat to life and limb. Islamabad must get ahead of the curve and show itself to be strong in its capability, willful in its capacity.
**Update**
The government has updated its casualty numbers to reflect 730 dead. It has claimed that the earlier AP reports were not credible. It’s not difficult to think that the final numbers will easily outstrip the higher figure, 1,100 dead.