Massive flooding has taken place across Pakistan for nearly
two weeks. Provincial Information Minister Mian Hussain has called it “the
worst ever calamity in our history.” The devastation has been amplified by
covert and overt imperialist intervention.
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Evacuees escape flood in Pakistan |
Over 1,600 people have died and 4 million have been
displaced throughout the country, with the worst destruction in the North-West
Frontier Province. This area has been ravaged by years of heavy fighting
between government forces and insurgent fighters resisting U.S. domination over
Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.
This conflict has wreaked havoc on local infrastructure and
made an effective response to the disaster nearly impossible.
The flooding has since spread south, threatening key
agricultural regions of the country and leading to the evacuation of hundreds
of thousands.
The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, is a loyal
servant of the imperialist U.S. government and has been away in Europe during
much of the disaster. Local officials in flood-hit areas have often proven to
be corrupt. One Pakistani man affected by the floods lamented, “For three days
I have waited here from dawn till dusk, but haven’t received a single grain of
wheat. They only give it to their potential voters.” (BBC News, Aug. 5)
Groups affiliated with resistance organizations have mobilized
thousands of volunteers to provide assistance to those impacted by the
disaster.
Hoping to win ‘hearts
and minds’
The U.S. government is attempting to trump these efforts
with a transparently insincere and bitterly ironic $35 million aid package. The
hope is that the aid, delivered by helicopters used in the occupation of
Afghanistan, will win the “hearts and minds” of the Pakistani people, who have
suffered for centuries under Western colonialism and imperialism.
The destruction caused by the floods would have been
significantly milder had the United States not backed successive military
dictatorships and submissive “democratic” leaders. Since 2004 these regimes,
first Pervez Musharraf’s, then Zardari’s, have waged a war in the Northwest and
the neighboring Federally Administered Tribal Areas to support NATO forces in
Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most blatant and devastating violations of
Pakistani sovereignty are the constant bombings carried out by unmanned aerial
vehicles, or drones, controlled by the U.S. military. Drones have killed over 1,700,
nearly 98 percent of whom were civilians.
If the U.S. government truly wanted to ease the suffering of
the Pakistani people, it would immediately end drone attacks and withdraw support
to the corrupt Zardari administration. The people of the United States can show
solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Pakistan by fighting imperialism,
which causes misery abroad and at home.
