The New Yorker – Fact Letters from Kashmir: After the earthquake, some strange new alliances

The New Yorker: After the earthquake, some strange new alliances.

FAULT LINES
by STEVE COLL
After the earthquake, some strange new alliances.

In Muzaffarabad, I found the main Jamaat ud-Dawa camp on the west bank of the Neelum River, in a part of the city that had been severely damaged. Mohammed Khalid, the youthful chief of the group’s regional media committee, welcomed me into a tent strewn with carpets and cushions. He had a soft beard that fell far below his chin. Unlike the Army, the group had mobilized quickly after the quake, and I asked how it had done so. “We had a seminary here, with two hundred students, and a hospital,” he said. “The hospital crumbled. We then dug out medicines, and doctors started working within thirty minutes.” The students handed out food and set up a generator. “It was all darkness and dust,” he said. “People saw the light and they started coming, and that was where our work really began.” By now, Khalid said, Jamaat ud-Dawa had about three thousand volunteers throughout the area struck by the earthquake.

The camp in Muzaffarabad covered about ten acres. In one tent, doctors set broken bones, and in a metal shipping container with power delivered by a generator, surgeons from Karachi and Lahore had assembled an operating theatre with an oxygen machine and medical monitoring equipment. Altogether, Khalid said, his group had brought dozens of doctors to Azad Kashmir, and they were seeing between seven hundred and eight hundred patients a day. When I asked if it bothered him that the American government had branded his group, or its predecessor, a terrorist organization, he said, “If you accuse someone, that doesn’t mean it’s true. I would invite the American doctors and medical staff to come and join us. Our doors are open. . . . Any American kid or boy can come work with us. They are most welcome.”

The earthquake that struck northern Pakistan on the morning of October 8th left some eighty thousand people dead, perhaps a quarter of them children. It was a catastrophe without precedent in the country’s history, and the government was slow to react. In the weeks that followed, President Pervez Musharraf, who is also the nation’s military leader, faced sharp questions from civilian politicians, Islamic leaders, and reporters about why the government, and the Army, had not organized relief more quickly. In much the same way that the Bush Administration’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina embarrassed the White House, the earthquake-aid effort has threatened Musharraf’s standing. In the first days, Pakistan’s offshore independent channels televised the suffering, and the images were inescapable: people waiting in vain to be rescued; hundreds of thousands sleeping outside in cold rain, waiting for tent camps to be built; the injured, with bleeding wounds or broken limbs, staggering about in search of treatment.

Musharraf seized power in a coup, six years ago, and at the time he described the Army as the “last institution of stability left in Pakistan”—the only body disciplined enough to fix the country’s ills. Since then, he has expanded the military’s influence in national life, yet, when the earthquake hit, the Army appeared neither efficient nor consumed by any sense of urgency. The Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, a coalition of opposition parties, demanded an official investigation into what its spokesman called “the failure of the Army high command.” The United Nations warned that thousands of earthquake survivors could die from exposure if relief did not reach them before winter, yet, ten days after the earthquake struck, Musharraf’s government signed a billion-dollar contract for Swedish military surveillance aircraft, a bewildering priority. The Friday Times, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers, suggested in a front-page editorial that Musharraf’s insistence on heavy defense spending might explain the slow pace of donations to the U.N. for earthquake relief: “If you were a Westerner asked to provide humanitarian financial assistance to a country led by a military government obsessed with the regional ‘military balance,’ what would you think?” A week later, Musharraf announced that he would postpone buying American-made F-16 fighter jets, at least until the financial pressures of earthquake relief had eased.

At a news conference, he dismissed criticism of his government’s performance as irresponsible harping by media skeptics and discredited politicians. “Panic and alarm in the face of a calamity are signs of weakness and defeat—let’s come out of that,” he said. He vowed to “prove the cynics wrong” by rallying the troops and attracting support from Western military allies. Adding to his difficulties was the fact that many of the hardest-hit villages were in Kashmir, whose land and people are at the center of Pakistan’s most emotional national cause—the fifty-eight-year conflict with India over its political destiny. He said that the Army was moving into Kashmir, and that aid would reach the region’s stranded victims by winter. The Army’s sluggish reaction may be explained, in part, by its own heavy losses in the area where the quake hit. According to an Army spokesman, four hundred and fifty officers and soldiers died on the first day, and seven hundred and eleven were injured. To judge by the damage I saw in Army camps in Kashmir, the actual toll may be higher; scores of Army wives and children also perished as cantonments and schools collapsed.

The epicenter of the earthquake was about sixty-five miles northeast of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, in a mountainous region traversed by two narrow, perpendicular river valleys, the Neelum and the Jhelum. The Jhelum River flows from Indian-held Kashmir west into Pakistan, and, weeks after the quake struck, recovery still seemed far off. One afternoon, in a ragged encampment of tents and tarps on the south bank, several dozen displaced Kashmiri women squatted on rocky ground, sorting through heaps of donated clothing. Smoke drifted from smoldering piles of neckties and sports jerseys that had been judged unusable and set on fire, and a heavy scent of sulfur rose from piles of fallen rock where the dead still lay. Helicopters bearing aid and supplies passed back and forth overhead. In an open field across the road, a Pakistani Army brigade had set up an olive caravan tent dubbed Operations Center 212, where a colonel shouted exasperated instructions into a field telephone. A wiry young major named Fayyaz Ahmed led me to a map of Kashmir mounted on an easel to explain why the relief campaign was proving so daunting.

There were enormous geographical problems, he said. About eighty thousand farmers and herders and their families lived in scattered villages on ridges overlooking the Jhelum River in this district alone, and they were reluctant to leave their land. Rock slides had blocked many of the dirt tracks that connected them to the valley. There were military constraints, too, he pointed out. Pakistani and Indian forces were deployed in large numbers along the Line of Control, the undeclared border that has divided Kashmir since 1949; stripes of black Magic Marker on the Major’s map indicated their gridlocked positions. After several weeks of stilted negotiations, India and Pakistan had produced a modest plan to allow some relief supplies to cross the border, but, even with the agreement, passage by Kashmiris remains highly restricted. Each side has been tending its own victims. “The Pakistani Army is trained for any job that we are assigned—floods, elections, epidemics,” Major Ahmed told me. But, referring to the earthquake and its aftermath, he said, “It is the magnitude of a nuclear bomb.”

The only way to reach many of the most vulnerable survivors was to walk. The morning after my conversation with Major Ahmed, I joined an Army mule column as it climbed out of a base camp at Hattian Dupatta, along the Jhelum River, whose jade-green waters run between steep mountain walls. The column comprised twenty-nine Pakistani soldiers, nineteen mules, and two intrepid dogs. As Musharraf issued his pledges in Islamabad, the Army dispatched several fresh brigades into the mountains, and they fanned out into villages on the highest ridges. Mules that were normally used to haul ammunition to the Pakistani bunkers closest to the Line of Control were requisitioned for relief work. Each of the animals was loaded down with more than two hundred pounds of blankets, cardboard boxes bulging with clothes, and burlap sacks of grain. A dozen of the soldiers in this unit carried forty-pound canvas packs to supplement the mules.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Alam Khan, a weathered corporal from Pakistan’s Punjab province, said as we marched past lines of displaced villagers, some with their arms in slings, others with bandaged heads or legs. Khan enlisted in the Army nineteen years ago and knew these ridges as scenes of military conflict. “The villagers, when tensions run high, can’t even do free farming out on their terraces, because the Indians fire at them,” he said. “They and their animals are often wounded.” Half a mile up, a section of the gorge wall had collapsed. Small tombstones protruded at odd angles from a mound of dirt. A bloated corpse wrapped in a black shroud lay on top of the mound. Apparently, the person had been killed by a falling graveyard.

Kashmir’s mountains are the foothills of the Himalayas. They rise between four thousand and seven thousand feet above sea level, and mark a sort of tectonic intersection. For ages, the Indian subcontinent has been sliding northward at a pace of about one and a half inches a year, and the movement pushes up rough, crumbly surfaces; a web of fault lines runs beneath. Kashmiri villagers cut small terraces into the slopes to farm corn and rice, and most build their own huts from timber, stone, and mud. Not all of them are destitute. As Pakistan’s urban areas prospered, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, thousands of mountain villagers migrated to cities like Lahore and Rawalpindi to work as cooks, drivers, and domestic help, leaving their families behind to farm or herd goats. Some got as far as Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, where they prospered, and then returned to build houses with concrete foundations and Chinese-style peaked tin roofs—an odd sight amid the shabby lean-tos of their neighbors, and miles from any paved road. The earthquake demolished many of these houses; in the villages we visited, the only difference between rich and poor seemed to be the size of their piles of rubble.

As our mule column followed a dirt track along the ridge, we handed out blankets and food. After six miles, we reached Bandi, a village of about a hundred and fifty houses scattered on the slopes. Nearly all of the houses had been destroyed, and the villagers said that eighty people had died there on the morning of the earthquake. Some of the injured rested on open ground. About a hundred and twenty people in the next village had died. Up and down the hills, the story was the same.

A dozen Bandi men surrounded a Pakistani major and shouted that rival villagers who lived closer to the military base camps were stealing their aid allotments.The major, a tall, clean-shaven man who wore a black baseball cap, said he would make sure that those who had been left out got their share. Mohammed Yousef, a slender man of about fifty with a wispy beard, watched from nearby, standing above a rock shelf that had been the foundation of his house. He had stacked all that was salvageable—three metal trunks, a dartboard, and half a wooden door—on one side. The Army hadn’t reached this ridge until ten days after the earthquake. Then the officers had handed out slips of paper entitling each family to a tent, to be picked up at a base camp in the valley. “When we went down, they didn’t have any,” Yousef said. Too many of his Kashmiri neighbors “are not afraid of God,” he added. “If you are a muscleman, a bully, you can get what you need. But if you are a gentleman, if you wait, you suffer.”

Salman Rushdie, in his recent novel “Shalimar the Clown,” about the history of Kashmir’s multiple betrayals, imagines an American diplomat in Los Angeles who is invited to appear on a late-night talk show. He seizes the opportunity to expound on the fallen paradise of Kashmir, and his appalled host can hear only “the sound of channels being changed all over America round about midnight”—anticipating the history lesson to come. In the summer of 1947, Pakistan was carved out of British India, which had more than five hundred princely states; one of them, the predominantly Muslim Kashmir, was ruled by a Hindu maharaja, who could not decide whether to join India or Pakistan. In October, tribesmen from the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan invaded Kashmir, arriving in British trucks. That hastened the maharaja’s decision to join India, and India quickly responded by airlifting troops into the region. Sir Douglas Gracey, the British general in command of Pakistan’s new national Army, refused to lead the Army into Indian-held Kashmir; he did not want to fight British officers who were assigned to Indian units. Nevertheless, the fighting continued, until the U.N. endorsed a ceasefire line, in January, 1949. Since then, two more wars, several insurgencies, and countless political maneuvers have failed to settle the issue of the “ownership” of Kashmir. Pakistan and India have strengthened their armies over the years; in 1998, both tested nuclear weapons. Although the struggle is supposedly about the interests of ordinary Kashmiris, they have little to show for it. If the conflict is ever settled peacefully, the ceasefire line—which was named the Line of Control in 1972—will likely become an international border; as a practical matter, it already is.

One afternoon, I boarded a Pakistani Puma helicopter that was to ferry displaced villagers and supplies to the northern reaches of the Neelum Valley, a river gorge that snakes about a hundred and twenty miles toward the Himalayas, often very close to Indian territory; landslides had sealed off the valley and blocked the only road in or out. Our pilot, Major Qasim Abbas, zigzagged north through steep canyons. In many places, the sides of mountains had fallen down, as if they had been sliced off with a giant axe. Boulders lay on the narrow dirt roads below us, and hundreds of people walked in uneven lines along the slopes, with bundles of donated food or clothing on their shoulders, collected from the valley’s helicopter-supplied relief depots.

As we approached the Line of Control, Abbas lost his way. He made a U-turn in the gorge, swung right into another canyon, and then hurriedly made a second U-turn. A soldier assigned to spotter duty pointed down at a tricolor Indian flag flapping directly underneath the helicopter. “I never knew that the Line of Control was so close there,” the Major told me later, with an insouciant grin. As one of the small coöperative measures to aid earthquake relief, India and Pakistan have agreed not to shoot down each other’s helicopters if they fly close to the line on relief missions. It’s hard to imagine how the two militaries keep track of the line in any event. The border twists from side to side and up and down, as if tracing the fingers of a very thick hand.

Behind their battlements, India and Pakistan have tried to build up political structures to promote their claims to all of Kashmir, while tightening their hold on the ground that they already possess. On Pakistan’s side, this approach has given birth to what it calls the state of Azad (or “Free”) Kashmir; it has its own constitution and Prime Minister, but “azad” is mainly just a branding strategy. Kashmiri politicians who hold office in Azad Kashmir must swear a loyalty oath to Pakistan—they are not free to seek independence. Tens of thousands of Pakistani troops roam Azad Kashmir, and its budget is supplemented by Islamabad. The capital, Muzaffarabad, a hilly, smoky town of about a hundred thousand that spills across bluffs at the intersection of the Jhelum and Neelum Rivers, presents a strange blend of commercial flair, kitschy decorations, and a culture of Islamic martyrdom. A mock ballistic missile on a launcher points down the Srinagar Road, toward Indian forces on the Line of Control, and large, brightorange synthetic palm trees with orange coconuts have been placed at some of the town’s major intersections. The earthquake brought much of this political whimsy to a halt. Muzaffarabad was devastated; buildings and markets collapsed, and thousands of residents were killed.

Late one afternoon in Muzaffarabad, I visited Azad Kashmir’s Prime Minister, a center-right career politician named Sardar Sikander Hayat Khan, at his official residence, a one-story bungalow with several annexes. The Prime Minister himself had been displaced by the earthquake; his bungalow was badly cracked, and one of the annexes had collapsed. He was now living on his front lawn in a large white tent. On the grass, near a rose bush, Khan had placed some blue cushioned chairs and couches in a circle, to replicate his reception room. He has a white mustache and an enormous belly, and he wore a traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez, an olive sports coat, and plaid bedroom slippers.

Kashmiri Muslims who seek independence for their region regard politicians like Khan, who want to keep ties to Islamabad, as Pakistani quislings. He himself argues that Kashmir legally belongs with Pakistan and that it will develop faster under Pakistani oversight. He described himself as a practical man who has worked “day and night” for years to lift Azad Kashmir out of poverty. “I promised to the nation that no house shall be without electricity,” he said, and he claimed that he had almost reached his goal this year. But when the earthquake struck, he said, “what we achieved in forty years, that was gone in forty seconds.” A minister in his cabinet, twenty senior civil servants, and hundreds of other government employees died.

Khan said that the earthquake would bring Pakistan and Azad Kashmir even closer, explaining that aid pouring in from Islamabad would remind Kashmiri Muslims where their future lay. The previous night had been chilly, and I asked the Prime Minister if he was cold sleeping in his tent. “At three o’clock, I was freezing,” he said. “I was wearing my sweater and blankets. At four o’clock, I went inside.” His servants insisted that he go back out. Aftershocks continued to shake the city, and they feared that his house would fall on him. The Prime Minister shivered in his tent until dawn.

For the past fifteen years, the Pakistani Army has supported rebellion on India’s side of the Line of Control by aiding violent Islamic groups, some of them with ties to Al Qaeda, that are seeking to unify all of Kashmir with Pakistan. One of the most prominent of these groups has been Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), which, in December, 2001, the Bush Administration designated a foreign terrorist organization. Lashkar-e-Taiba was—and still is, depending on whom you ask—a radical jihad and proselytizing organization that has carried out persistent and sometimes spectacular attacks against Indian targets, both military and civilian, in Kashmir and elsewhere. Under American pressure, President Musharraf formally banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in early 2002, but he allowed it to create a domestic charity under a new name, Jamaat ud-Dawa (the Preaching Society), but with the same leader. The new group runs conservative madrasahs and promotes an austere vision of Islam through preaching and social work, and, according to a spokesman, it has hundreds of thousands of members throughout Pakistan. Azad Kashmir had been an important base for Lashkar-e-Taiba, because the region offered sanctuary and a convenient launching ground for anti-India operations.

In Muzaffarabad, I found the main Jamaat ud-Dawa camp on the west bank of the Neelum River, in a part of the city that had been severely damaged. Mohammed Khalid, the youthful chief of the group’s regional media committee, welcomed me into a tent strewn with carpets and cushions. He had a soft beard that fell far below his chin. Unlike the Army, the group had mobilized quickly after the quake, and I asked how it had done so. “We had a seminary here, with two hundred students, and a hospital,” he said. “The hospital crumbled. We then dug out medicines, and doctors started working within thirty minutes.” The students handed out food and set up a generator. “It was all darkness and dust,” he said. “People saw the light and they started coming, and that was where our work really began.” By now, Khalid said, Jamaat ud-Dawa had about three thousand volunteers throughout the area struck by the earthquake.

The camp in Muzaffarabad covered about ten acres. In one tent, doctors set broken bones, and in a metal shipping container with power delivered by a generator, surgeons from Karachi and Lahore had assembled an operating theatre with an oxygen machine and medical monitoring equipment. Altogether, Khalid said, his group had brought dozens of doctors to Azad Kashmir, and they were seeing between seven hundred and eight hundred patients a day. When I asked if it bothered him that the American government had branded his group, or its predecessor, a terrorist organization, he said, “If you accuse someone, that doesn’t mean it’s true. I would invite the American doctors and medical staff to come and join us. Our doors are open. . . . Any American kid or boy can come work with us. They are most welcome.”

Later, we drove to the banks of the Neelum, where, beside an Army camp, Jamaat ud-Dawa had established a ferry service using motorized rubber rafts trucked in from the group’s headquarters, in Lahore. Normally, the boats were used “basically for training purposes,” one volunteer told me. He did not say whether this training was for guerrilla war or some other mission—fishing, perhaps. We stood on a cliff and watched young volunteers playfully race a raft between ferry runs, tossing up wide wakes. I asked if we could ride across. As we climbed on, our captain, a boy who appeared to be in his teens, handed us empty water jugs to use as flotation devices in case we capsized. Also aboard were two Austrian soldiers toting water-purification equipment for isolated villages on the other side. I asked if they knew who was giving them a ride. One answered yes, with a smile, but added that there was no other way across. On the opposite bank, dozens of villagers had gathered in another Jamaat ud-Dawa camp. Mohammed Sharif, an elder of a village several miles away, said that the group’s volunteers had reached them three days after the quake, and that the Pakistani Army had never turned up. “They are very good to us,” he said. “They did everything on their own.”

The Jamaat ud-Dawa volunteers I met offered only mild criticism of Musharraf and the Army, merely wondering why it had been so slow to organize. They said that they had been coöperating extensively with Pakistani troops in the relief work. Later, I asked an Army spokesman, Major Farooq Pirzada, if this was true, and he replied that all charity groups, foreign and Pakistani, were welcome in the earthquake zone. The Army coördinated with them to avoid duplication. “We’re helping everyone,” the Major said. “We’re not stopping anyone.”

Musharraf has said that as long as the jihadi groups concentrate on peaceful social work, he is prepared to tolerate them; at the same time, he says that he intends to keep a close watch on them. The earthquake-relief effort in Muzaffarabad has made plain Musharraf’s dilemma, and has drawn together the two sides of his ungainly balancing act: his coöperation with the United States in fighting terrorism and his attempt to appease, or at least manage, Pakistani groups that the United States has identified as terrorists. Less than a mile from the main Jamaat ud-Dawa camp in the Azad Kashmir capital, the U.S. Army has erected a field hospital. American Humvees on break from chasing remnant Al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan were sharing Muzaffarabad’s streets with ambulances from the Al Rashid Trust, a Pakistani charity whose funds were blocked by the Bush Administration in 2001 because of accusations that it aided Al Qaeda. Musharraf’s political position has been perilous ever since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when he supported the United States; members of one group that Musharraf has singled out, Jaish e-Mohammed, attempted to assassinate him in December, 2003. The success of jihadi groups in providing earthquake relief have only strengthened their claims to legitimacy in Pakistan.

At Musharraf’s invitation, soldiers and relief workers from European and NATO countries have also come to Azad Kashmir. Two months earlier, the region was a closed security zone, to which foreigners typically could not travel without an escort and a special permit. Now small crowds of local men gathered to watch with apparent admiration as female European soldiers shopped in their food stalls. Pakistan has unsuccessfully sought to turn the conflict into an international matter, with the United States and European powers directly involved, and helping to push for a settlement; at least temporarily, the outside world, thanks to the earthquake, has finally come to Kashmir.

Near the school, in a tent set up to trace the missing, village men clutched photographs of relatives. A religious teacher from a distant village held a color passport photograph of his younger brother, a law clerk who had dressed for the picture in a blue suit. He had lived across the street in an apartment block that had fallen down a cliff.

I walked over and watched men pulling apart the metal and broken concrete slabs of the building’s remains under a warm sun. Mohammed Sain, a white-bearded man in a soiled turban, said that eight of his relatives had lived in this building. So far, he had recovered one body, that of a brother who worked in town as a baker. “You have to remove the bodies on a self-help basis, because the Army isn’t here,” Sain said. “You dig for your own bodies, and then you carry them.” At his side were two boys, brothers ten and twelve years old, one wearing a blue sweater, the other a red velvet shirt. He had brought them from their village, where their mother had been killed in the earthquake, to dig in the rubble for their missing father.