by Steve Coll

A few days after an earthquake, you feel immediately the presence of the state—or its absence. People have reasonable expectations that their government or military or social or religious charities will scramble into action and make themselves felt after an earthquake. Where are the bulldozers? Where are the portable hospitals? Open those roads! If a government doesn't perform, people can get agitated pretty quickly.

Daniyal Mueenuddin had a terrific piece in this morning's Times about how the flooding in southern Punjab and northern Sind is likely to play out in the lives of the marginalized farmers who predominately live there. It made me think about the politics of floods. They're different from the politics of earthquakes or hurricanes or cyclones, or so I would hypothesize if I could start life over as a doctoral candidate in political science. I trolled around on the Web this morning looking for academic papers on the subject. I found a few interesting abstracts, including a provocative one about how political responses to natural disasters may promote the militarization of nature, but nothing that addressed what I had in mind.

When you travel in an earthquake zone there is a sense of violence all around, a visible shattering. Survivors are calling out and ambulances are rushing around and people are digging in rocks—there is a lot of activity. With the activity comes possibility and hope—survivor miracles, even. The silence and slow pace of a flood is different. Somehow, being inundated seems more hopeless. People slip underwater out of sight. They climb into a tree and sit for days, contemplating the loss of all their property. The politics of a flood must be distinct in some analogous way.

A few days after an earthquake, you feel immediately the presence of the state—or its absence. People have reasonable expectations that their government or military or social or religious charities will scramble into action and make themselves felt after an earthquake. Where are the bulldozers? Where are the portable hospitals? Open those roads! If a government doesn't perform, people can get agitated pretty quickly. Governments rise and fall over earthquakes. In a flood zone people and flooded villages are generally hard to reach, except slowly or by boat. You can lift people out by helicopter, and that might produce a few survivor miracles, but the provision of aid, especially to address the loss of property, is not easy to organize.

The newspaper coverage of the Pakistani floods reflects this sense of distance and opaqueness; because of the access problems (and maybe because it is vacation season), there have been many fewer eyewitness reports from the front lines than at a comparable point in an earthquake crisis of similar magnitude and geopolitical importance.

When I travelled in Kashmir after the 2005 earthquake, one of the main impressions available was that the Islamist charities had outperformed President Musharraf's military government in responding to the crisis. The Army had itself been devastated by the quake, and was slow to take care of civilians after tending to its own. Some Pakistanis trace the gradual decline and fall of Musharraf to the army's performance then. The United States did well, for its part, in 2005. The only time Pakistani public opinion has registered approval of the U.S. above twenty-five per cent was in early 2006, after the U.S. military used helicopters and other airlift to visibly dispense supplies that Musharraf had struggled to deliver. The relief campaign had only a temporary halo effect, however: When the helicopters returned to Afghanistan, American approval ratings fell back into the single digits.

Something similar is certainly happening now in Pakistan, after the floods. President Asif Zardari, whose abysmal approval ratings would give President Obama some comfort, turned in a characteristically tone-deaf performance during the first week of crisis, choosing not to interrupt his visits to Paris and London to return home. His performance would damage his political future except that he doesn't seem to have one. There has been some reporting that Islamist charities have again substituted themselves for the Pakistani state in providing relief in Southern Punjab. If true on a substantial scale, that would be an unhappy aspect of the crisis, since the most dangerous aspect of the Taliban insurgency within Pakistan itself these days is its spread into the mainland province of Punjab. The Obama Administration, alert to the lessons of 2005, is trying to outperform expectations and get itself right with Pakistani public opinion by providing visible relief to flood victims.

All that makes for a good Washington narrative. What was welcome about Mueenuddin's essay was the way it described what the flood means in Punjab and Sind. Power, life, and death in rural Pakistan turn on land, particularly the neo-feudal and corrupt practices that govern its ownership and control. The Pakistanis who are being washed away in the worst ways now—the ones least likely to own cattle or shops or have a hectare of their own—lived on the margins of a terrible rural political economy in the best of times. Mueenuddin fears they will become radicalized by their latest suffering. I wonder if the politics of floods might leave them, instead, stifled and muted, and as they have so long been, slipping under.

As published in New Yorker