The most recent report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) states that the floods in Pakistan have now directly impacted nearly 21 million people. The death toll in Pakistan has reached 1,752 and over 1.8 million houses have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the flooding. As the floodwaters wreck a path of devastation across large swaths of the country many are beginning to compare the resulting humanitarian calamity to the forced migration of millions that occurred in 1947 during partition. Indeed, though it has been more than a month since the floods devastated Pakistan’s northwest region—one of the poorest and least literate parts of the country—over half of the affected population has still not been reached by aid workers. This translates into a staggering 17 million people who, thanks to the unsanitary conditions and lack of clean water, are falling prey to outbreaks of diarrhea, malaria, cholera and skin disease. Most small towns remain inaccessible, as the floods have damaged roads and bridges.
The floods that began in July 2010 have impacted the poorest parts of Pakistan where extremists and separatist movements thrive: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North Western Frontier Province), the poverty-stricken plains of southern Punjab and northern Sindh and finally, Balochistan. Ironically, Central Punjab, where literacy and income levels are at least double those of other areas, has mostly escaped the calamity. What this means is that these floods, in addition to being a humanitarian crisis, also represent an unparalleled challenge for not only the national security of Pakistan but also regional and international security.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is where both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban are based and also where the Swat valley is located. Once a popular tourist destination, by late 2008 the valley was almost totally under Taliban control. While the systematic military offensives conducted by Pakistan’s army in 2009 successfully took back control of the area, almost 64 percent of the inhabitants of Upper Swat were forced to join Pakistan’s already swollen ranks of internally displaced persons as a result of the fighting. By March this year almost 90 percent of those who had left had trickled back into the region only to be pushed out again by the devastating floods. The floods have destroyed roads, bridges and other infrastructure across the province, which has effectively disrupted communication and loosened the state’s control over the area. There now exists a very real danger that the Taliban could quickly capture outlying areas, especially those that lie close to the Afghanistan border.
The rains have similarly devastated the areas of southern Punjab and northern Sindh. Flash floods have washed away millions of acres of crops and hundreds of villages. Power stations in this region are flooded; electricity pylons and gas lines ripped out, and over half the livestock destroyed. These poverty-stricken provinces are already a key recruitment center for extremist organizations, and these militants are now busy portraying the floods as Allah’s wrath against the government. Without a doubt, the floods are contributing to the acute joblessness and poverty in this region and may well serve to push more young men into joining extremist groups.
Resource-rich Balochistan is Pakistan’s poorest region. Beset with a separatist insurgency, which is driven primarily by the political and economic marginalization of the Baloch tribes, Balochistan is also where the Afghan Taliban is active. Indeed, many analysts believe that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leaders of Al-Qaeda (AQ) and the Afghan Taliban, respectively are in all likelihood hiding in the Balochi city of Quetta. The floods have destroyed what little infrastructure existed in this province and its below-subsistence economy. Not only do hampered communications and infrastructures promise to strengthen the Quetta Shura, i.e. the top leadership of the Afghan Taliban, but Baloch separatists are already berating the Pakistani government for its poor relief efforts and calling for an escalation in their struggle for independence.
In short, the floods are exacerbating what is an already tense internal security situation. The fact that the Pakistani government is unable to provide effective and timely relief aid is further intensifying this existing discontent. Indeed, the floods have effectively exposed the government’s incompetence and corruption. Flood victims are seething at what they see as the government’s sluggish and inadequate response. President Asif Ali Zardari lost considerable public support and was intensely criticized when he left Pakistan on 2 August for a scheduled tour of France and the United Kingdom despite the fact that his country was so obviously in the midst of a crisis. At the same time, while the government struggles to meet the needs of the millions of homeless, its credibility is further weakened by various organizations, such as the banned charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), which has set up relief camps providing food, medicine and wads of money to flood victims. JuD has known ties to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that was responsible for the deadly 2008 attacks on Mumbai. Makeshift camps run by groups such as Falah-e-Insaniat, JuD’s latest reincarnation, are operating across Pakistan and effectively filling a vacuum left by the democratically elected government. Similarly, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban) has also been quietly operating in the northwest, extending aid to flood victims in this area. The government, in turn, has responded by shutting down a number of such camps in the name of fighting the spread of extremism. While no group claimed responsibility it is believed that the half a dozen terror attacks in the northwest and eastern Punjab provinces of Pakistan in late August were conducted in response to this crackdown. However, unless and until the Pakistani government can provide sufficient and timely assistance to the hundreds of thousands of victims still waiting for aid such crackdowns will do no more than lead to social unrest, food riots and perhaps even fuel enough resentment to engender a challenge to the government’s rule before its term ends in 2013.
Of course, all of this also has serious implications for the rising militant activity in Pakistan’s populous Central Punjab province. While much has been written about the fight against terrorism in Pakistan’s tribal areas the rising militant activity and growing AQ and Taliban influence in Punjab has been largely ignored. However, thanks to US drone attacks and the Pakistani army’s unrelenting offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FETA), both AQ and the Afghan Taliban are looking at Pakistan’s heartland for refuge. As a result, new alliances are being forged between banned Punjabi extremist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and TTP and AQ. Rural districts in southern Punjab are increasingly being used as sanctuaries and training grounds for not only banned Punjabi terrorist groups but also for the Pashtun and AQ fighters escaping the FATA. The Punjabi militants undoubtedly pose a more serious threat to both Pakistan’s stability and global security. For one, they are much more hard-line and more closely connected with the global jihadi agenda. Second, they provide both the Taliban and AQ access to Pakistan’s heartland where the growth of terrorist activity can effectively weaken Pakistan in a way that terrorist activity in its border regions cannot, and has not.
This also has serious implications for regional and international security. JeM, for instance, is believed to have recruited the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad. In short, long-sheltered by the Pakistani army and intelligence agency (the ISI), the Punjabi militant groups are now expanding their operational reach beyond South Asia and constituting a direct threat to European and US security. Furthermore, given that nearly the entire Pakistani helicopter fleet and over 60,000 Pakistani troops that were engaged in fighting the Taliban in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been pulled into flood relief activities, it is unlikely that the army will be in a position to hold the areas that it had recently regained from the militants in the near future. As the US and NATO attempt to secure southern Afghanistan and more US troops are deployed in eastern Afghanistan, the fact that the Pakistani troops have been pulled away from the border means that the 1,500 mile long Durand Line is once again porous enough to afford fleeing Taliban fighters access to refuge and safe havens. For the Taliban then, these floods have offered a great opportunity to cross the border into Pakistan in order to train and recruit new fighters. For Pakistan, the floods have made clear that its political future is dependent upon bringing the very militants it has so long used as proxies back under its control. Of course, the real question is if it has already let the genie out of the bottle.
Rashmi Singh – Lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews.
