The art of learning nothing

The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
Earthquakes are mighty: they can turn everything upside down. Politics is mightier: it can turn national gaze and focus away from earthquakes. The nation’s heart may still be heavy with grief but political considerations weigh heavier on the minds of small men with big roles.
As self-appointed saviours with fake hair and poor styles shove themselves before the cameras, the national discourse is yet again either about the results of the phased local bodies polls in Punjab and Sindh or about a broken marriage that everyone knew was based on perfect lies but none said so.
As for the October 26 earthquake, the state and governments are impressed by their own propaganda of how they have dealt with its aftermath. The general mood in political quarters is this: the affected populations have been given tents, food, and money – and of course face-time – and that is where matters should rest; no need to remind ourselves of the horrific happenings as it demoralises the nation. So let us get on with life.
Getting on with life is exactly how we had responded ten years ago, after the October 8, 2005 earthquake with its apocalyptic destruction. Yes we mourned longer because the loss was greater and the trauma stronger. But as time passed we missed the existential point Mother Nature was making to us – we can become history in no time if we do not prepare for natural disasters, and reduce the grave mass risks they pose to our collective lives.
Then General Pervez Musharraf used the October 8 event to his political advantage and portrayed himself as a leader who rose to the occasion. In 2005 the debate was changed from what policymakers ought to do in the long-term to deal with future disasters to how well the government was doing at present.
Today, the political and military elite are harnessing the earthquake to propagate their credentials of efficiency and bleeding hearts. Just as 2005, today too it is all about the present response and practically nothing about the future challenge. This myopia is deepened by a sense of satisfaction that, unlike 2005, our system responded with much more alacrity and vigour. This is true, but only partially.
The system has worked but for reasons that have little to do with preparedness. We were fortunate that October’s jolt was deep and caused limited damage in a limited number of districts. The deaths have been in the hundreds rather than in the thousands, and destruction of buildings in a few thousands rather than touching a million as was the case in 2005. This allowed concentrated deployment of effort and swift release of resources.
Further, in 2005 the affected areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then NWFP) did not have the kind of fuller presence of the army that was available this time. In Azad Jammu and Kashmir, where the army’s elaborate structures were present, the 2005 earthquake’s ferocity practically neutralised them. That is why for days and weeks, 2005’s affectees found no help. Many perished due to absence of any response.
This time none of the earthquake-hit districts faced the problem of absence of state machinery. Except for some villages in Chitral, every other area was covered well because of past and present military operations and the precarious situation in Afghanistan requiring greater monitoring and check-posting of border districts. Bajaur, Shangla, Swat, Upper and Lower Dirs are all regions that are logistically integrated into our counterterrorism and border defence strategies. Running up emergency aid and relief goods to the people in distress therefore became easy.
A tense political environment also helped. Locked in grim competition to be one-up against the other, the Imran Khan-led Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Nawaz Sharif-led federal government did not waste any time to get going. This race for public approval ratings was welcome news for those trapped in the race against time in remote villages. They did not have to wait for bureaucracy to get its act together; the political bosses were cracking the whip in order to save themselves from being whipped by the opponent.
TV tickers and Twitter pages became active even before the tremors had subsided. In a little under 30 minutes of the shocks, ISPR was telling the nation that relief efforts had started – an amazing claim. No less amazing was the army chief’s command to his commanders that they should not wait for his command to act. Exceptional circumstances call for exceptional orders and this certainly was one of them considering that the army as an institution is totally command-centric. Yet another fantastic sight was the first briefing (which by definition has to be substantive, based on facts rather than conjecture) in the first three hours on earthquake damage even though information was in short supply on the affected areas and the intensity of the earthquake – 7.5 or 8.1 – was in doubt.
But all said and done, it was the coming together of the fortuitous, the fantastic and the fabulous that made the substance of the relief and rescue response and its perception in the public mind to be positive and praiseworthy. It was this combination and not our preparedness that saved the day for the hapless and the needy.
A slightly bigger tragedy hitting some urban centres or striking a few weeks later in the rural areas under heavy snow could have revealed ugly facts about how ill-equipped the system really is to cope with disasters. The checklist of how well the disaster risk reduction system (DRRS) actually responded makes for frightening reading. Ask any basic question about DRRS concerning the earthquake and the answer will make you sit up at night.
There is no central strategic planning and coordination body that automatically takes charge of the situation in case of a national emergency and issues broad guidelines for relief action. There is neither a collective pool of information nor any processing of information mechanism that could provide swift initial data to direct official response. There is no institutional link for emergency response coordination purposes between the provinces and the centre.
Almost a decade after the 2005 disaster and billions of dollars of expenditure later, there is no authentic micro-seismological profile of the country to pin-point danger zones. The broad colouring of zones (red, orange, blue and green) is a scandal. It provides zero guidelines for construction of infrastructure and housing planning because it is too broad and unspecific. Building Code 2007 is based on borrowed wisdom that leaves out critical areas such as local construction practices and elements such as corruption.
The UNDP’s report, ‘Seismic Design in Pakistan: The Building Code, Bylaws, and Recommendations for Earthquake Risk Reduction’, provides a scathing review of building bylaws that define and determine the nature of construction requirements for all types of structures. In a nutshell, it shows how poorly governed the construction sector is in Pakistan. No rules specific to natural disasters like earthquakes and floods exist and those that do are rarely implemented.
Pakistan’s building landscape, both in urban and rural areas, rests on simply the hope and the prayer that disasters won’t be severe. In fact in rural areas it is just the prayer that holds the balance between life and death at a mass scale.
There is no reason for any hope that, come crunch time, the structures would last even five seconds. Communities and local governments in these areas are least aware and not equipped at all to manage even a day without distant help. There is no training for them to cope in the initial crucial hours of any mass-scale tragedy.
Forecasting on the basis of seismological data is poor and academia and field experts are totally aloof from policy planning. Our idea of disaster management is to simply appoint a general or a brigadier as the head of an organisation and then assume that miracles will happen. The whole science of disaster management and disaster risk reduction based on integration of the social, economic, political, administrative arms of the state and governments – flexible enough to allow for top-down interventions and decentralised enough to respond on its own – does not exist.
What we have learnt from the earthquake last month is exactly what we learnt from October 8, 2005 or other episodes like floods, fires, accidents, heatwaves and other such calamities – that we don’t want to learn anything. Now that is a straight 16 on the scale of suicidal stupidity – much more destructive than any natural disaster can ever be.
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