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THE tempest has hit again. But it was not unforeseen. Bangladesh is typically located at the route of the landfall of cyclonic storms. With the development of technology and with increasing exchange of information with other parts of the world, we now know their specific names and specific characteristics. The last one is named Sidr and it is anticipated that another one named Nargis may hit in coming December.
   How many people have died? This will never be known. The government counts bodies. They depend on the reports prepared by upazila nirbahi officers. Missing people are not considered as ‘dead.’ The missing are also the forgotten people.
   It is not true that Bangladesh is particularly targeted by the nature to inflict its curse. In fact, many more storms with even more severity regularly visit the coast of Japan, the Philippines, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. The striking difference between Bangladesh and these regions is that too many people in Bangladesh live in vulnerable areas, not by choice, but out of compulsion. There are too many people and there is little land to dwell. Mostly the poor die as they live in makeshift shanties in the coastal chars to harvest rice in November-December. Most of them are tenant farmers, farm labourers or fishing labourers. They are the first victims.
   I had been roaming around the coastal areas of Bangladesh since 1981. I had so far been deeply involved with at least three major projects of the Ministry of Water Resources, namely the Land Reclamation Project (1981-90), Char Development and Settlement Project (1997-2000) and Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan (2003-2006). I also researched and co-authored a book with Professor Gouranga Dev Chowdhury and Dr J Talukder that was published by the Community Development Library in 1991 titled Living with Cyclone, which was undertaken soon after the devastating cyclone of 1991. I personally experienced the cyclone of May 1985 as I spent the fateful night at Urir Char. Besides, I prepared the final report on a proposed Cyclone Proofing Project for the Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Committee (2000). While working with the ICZMP, I had the opportunity to visit all the 19 ‘coastal’ districts as defined by the government of Bangladesh that gave me a rare chance to interact with cross-sections of population in almost all islands and chars in the Bay of Bengal. All these I tend to mention only to emphasise that I can say something on the coastal zone of Bangladesh with relative precision and authority.
   While presenting the final report together with Md Saidur Rahman, a disaster management expert and former country director of Oxfam Bangladesh, to the senior officials of the Disaster Management Bureau in early 2001, I tried to emphasise ‘cyclone proofing,’ rather that post-disaster response.
   The concept of cyclone proofing in Bangladesh is new. Sometimes it is difficult to draw a line of demarcation between preparedness and proofing on the one hand and proofing and protection on the other. Although they are different, there are also elements of overlapping.
   The modus operandi of the existing organisations is generally tuned to preparedness and relief activities. The core activities in terms of preparedness are warnings and evacuation packages, while protective activities mostly correspond to structural interventions like cyclone shelter and sea dyke.
   In contrast, proofing may be envisaged as a package that combines an array of non-structural and minor-structural interventions to minimise cyclone damages and to help restore normal life, which are
   l simple
   l low cost
   l involves or modifies indigenous technology
   l can be managed locally
   However, the core issue is how to reduce cyclone damages to life and property and how to restore normalcy in terms of livelihood within the shortest possible time. Based on our sample survey, we learned who the most vulnerable people are and what are their main suggestions to cope with the disaster (see figures 1 and 2).
   According to the BDPC study, the children are the main victims followed by the old, the disabled and the women. What is most important for them is to build shelter within ‘reach.’
   Most people suffer, as their houses cannot withstand severe storms with high wind speed. Strong-houses are a major solution. Although the people need to be evacuated to the shelters at times of emergency, material losses can be minimised if houses are well-designed and strong.
   To my knowledge, not a single cyclone shelter was built in the coastal zone in last ten years except a few by the CDSP in Noakhali. In the meantime, population increased significantly in the cyclone-prone areas. This is a criminal offence and the planners and managers of the country have to take the responsibility.
   The ICZMP researched for over four years to draft a ‘Coastal Zone Policy’ that was approved in a cabinet meeting chaired by the Prime Minister in January 2005 and a ‘Coastal Development Strategy’ that was adopted by the government in an inter-ministerial technical committee headed by the water resources minister in 2006. The CDS includes a priority investment programme to deal with coastal issues including livelihoods development and disaster management. The Water Resources Planning Organisation under the Ministry of Water Resources is the coordinating agency for implementing the PIP in collaboration with line agencies. Since then the PIP has been shelved and only Allah knows what the WARPO and the Ministry has been doing since then.
   Dr Ayub Qadri, a former secretary of the Ministry Water Resources, has been instrumental in steering the process for approving the Coastal Zone Policy. Dr ATM Shamsul Huda, former secretary of the Ministry of the Water Resources and an adviser/consultant of the ICZMP (presently the chief election commissioner) has also been deeply involved in the drafting of the Coastal Development Strategy and the PIP. They are now in the government. Will they adhere to what they had been suggesting?
   Mohiuddin Ahmad is a writer and a researcher. He is the chairperson of the CDL. Presently he is teaching at Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. He can be reached at mohi2005@gmail.com

CHAOS shrouds the minds of Pakistanis, more so of those associated with the Musharraf regime or at its receiving end. There’s no telling what the general will unleash next and how those involved will react to it. He has kept everyone guessing, and that includes his American backers. US diplomats have been at pains to explain to Pakistanis that Washington does not support emergency rule, nor the curbs placed on the media.
   Their silence on the booting out of an independent judiciary, however, is not lost on the average Pakistani. To him it says more than words could, hence a hectic people-targeted diplomacy on the part of US envoys here. What the Americans fail to understand is that after their invasion of Iraq they have little credibility left in the Muslim world. Saddam did not back al-Qaeda for him to be ousted anymore than the axe falling on an independent judiciary in Pakistan which was accused of protecting militant extremists. The two judges who did give relief to the Lal Masjid suicide bombers-to-be are on Musharraf’s handpicked, new Supreme Court. US diplomats do not have an enviable job to do in Pakistan.
   Here’s why: While life seems normal on the streets, it takes less than a superficial scratch to sense what’s simmering beneath the surface. Young, upwardly mobile urban men and women, speaking English with a foreign accent and attending private schools and colleges – the lot everyone thought were irredeemably depolitised – are dealing with what for all practical purposes is martial law in a garb their predecessors a generation ago never knew. Their resistance manifests itself in subtler ways than taking to the street in a fit of emotion. They are choosing to discuss matters, organise seminars, hold candlelight vigils, start email and SMS chain petitions, and wearing black bands on their arms to register their protest. Yet, police barge into campuses, beat up the students black and blue and arrest them by the truckload every day.
   The feeling is most tangible in Lahore, which has a tradition of a strong and vibrant academic culture. In many privately-managed colleges and universities, the faculty have joined the students. The protests are confined to the safe environs of the campuses whose state-of-the-art buildings are owned by big businessmen, and sitting ministers, including foreign minister Khursheed Kasuri, and the mayor of Lahore, amongst others. Many of the institution owners have made a fortune under Musharraf’s liberal economic policy and also, of course, by staying on the right side of the general.
   What is brewing is indeed unprecedented, and lends credence to the cliché that within every disaster lie the seeds of opportunity. The situation gives hope to Pakistan’s hopeless millions, that even if these protests don’t turn the tide of autocracy anytime soon, they will have invested in the academia a point of reference for students of politics in the future. This will serve as a solid base after the restoration of democracy whenever that happens. This is no small feat achieved in a country where democratic institutions have failed to take root, and eschews the fear of ending up with a politically ill-prepared creed now in colleges, who will constitute the intelligentsia of tomorrow.
   One says this because the students involved are very much the children of the market-based economy. They believe in achieving the American dream here: freedom to live the way they choose and live well at that. Most attend business schools and tertiary colleges imparting education in IT, multimedia, art studies and corporate law – the engineering and medicine counterparts of the generation before them. Globalisation of the young mind has come home with just the right mix of the heart, which is in the right place.
   The rest is the job of the politicians. Whether they have their finger on the pulse of the emerging new voter – voting age in Pakistan is 18 – is doubtful. Mainstream secular parties with any roots in the people are headed by the feudal class. If it is the Bhuttos, the Pirs and Chaudhries in Sindh and Punjab, the Frontier and Balochistan have more than their fair share of the Maliks and Sardars.
   Even those that claim to be sympathetic to the middle class such as the Muttahidda Qaumi Movement led by Altaf Hussain and the one-man Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf Party of Imran Khan behave in explicitly feudal terms. Both vest absolute power in their respective leaders, and operate along that gem of a Bush one-liner (with canonisation attached): ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ The obvious recipe for tyranny cloaked in the garb of brave, new democracy that they stand for.
   Only if these feudal-minded parties sweep the polls in their areas of influence, will the election be hailed as being fair. Any setback to their vote count leads to violent allegations of rigging, giving no consideration to the possibility of a change of heart on the part of the teeming voters. The process is well under way in Punjab and the Frontier, where Benazir’s PPP will be in for a rude shock and the old blue-eyed boy-turned dissident Nawaz Sharif is gaining the popular vote at the former’s expense.
   Musharraf remains the unpredictable man with a penchant for brinkmanship that he was on the eve of the Kargil crisis. Only now he has more under his belt: a friendly US and a neutralised, if grudgingly so, India. For both all’s well, as long as Musharraf’s own people keep bearing the brunt of his adventurism. The man has an amazing capacity when it comes to doublespeak or even telling outright lies.
   The varying narration of many a same event in his book In the Line of Fire in its Urdu and English editions betray blatant doublespeak; his promise to clean up corruption when he ousted Sharif in 1999, his account of Kargil, promises to doff the army uniform… the list of lies goes on. That is why nobody believes him now when he says he has imposed emergency rule to root out terrorism, when in fact his henchmen in plainclothes have been locking up secular opposition leaders and torturing the lawyers and students of elite schools – people who are more westernised and enlightened in their worldview than our top commando-cum-jihadi-turned Mr Saviour of Pakistan fancies himself to be.
   That Musharraf considered stepping down at some point but decided against it, as he revealed to a British TV host recently, is the latest in the series of lies he’s been telling himself and the world. The choice of the foreign media for this revelation tells of the man’s fear that none of the banned Pakistani news networks would have bought the dubious admission. His best allies remain the US and Britain, and the best they can do by him and Pakistan is to airlift him to security before all runs amuck, and Pakistan starts becoming the nightmare no one wants to dream.
   Murtaza Razvi is a senior editor of Dawn, Pakistan

As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my ‘Bush’s Last Day Countdown Keychain’ tells me there are 433 days, 11 hrs, 50 minutes and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about the fate of the republic, I wonder what the Bush legacy will be.
   Many commentators have written about how the domestic politics of this administration have left the United States more divided than ever; or perhaps the unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush will be most remembered for – with an unfinished barrier across the US-Mexican border as the main monument to his eight years in office.
   To some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era will be remembered most for the acceleration of America’s putative march to empire. Advocates of such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the US has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan, its massive sea power, and its all-volunteer professional army; the inordinately expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being evidence that the US is engaged in a ruthless effort to control the world’s oil resources); the threats of possible military action against Iran (interpreted as a desire to control the Middle East in collaboration with Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in former Soviet areas in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (seen as a reflection of America’s determination to remain the global hegemon); the increasing frictions with China (proof that the US will not tolerate a competitor in Asia); the constant disagreements with the Europeans (a reminder on our part that we – not they – are the boss).
   Indeed, there is little doubt that the military, economic, and cultural impact of the United States continues to be enormous. Calling this global footprint ‘imperial’ is certainly tempting. But for a nation to be an empire, its leaders must have a plan or vision for how to deal with the rest of the world – as, arguably, Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage did with their ‘large policy’ for American overseas dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as the beginning of an American-style empire that led to ‘the American century,’ a period that now seems so long ago and so far away. (Are we not now, in fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)
   
   Bush and visions of empire
   The immense (but declining) global power of the United States notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage required to engage in truly imperial ambitions has simply not been a part of the Bush administration’s mindset. This remains so despite its assembly-line-style production of countless ‘national security’ reports on a vast range of global security matters – committee-written, unreadable documents marked by a total lack of intellectual coherence or clear direction. These can, if anything, be seen as a collective ‘cover-up’ for the administration’s obvious lack of thought beyond the here-and-now.
   To be sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or implemented (as Theodore Roosevelt himself realised), but the Bush administration’s version of such now appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or reason – on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven by a self-aggrandising Pentagon budgetary process and ‘priorities’ strikingly determined by shifting domestic politics (what Congressional district or crony corporation had put in the best, or most influential, bid for a base, military-style activity, or war-production plant). True, our generals remain engaged in the fearsome-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ by order of the White House – but this has proven a helter-skelter example of global confusion, regularly renamed by an administration clueless about what its ‘war’ really is.
   Put another way, the Bush administration was never able to define, shape, or direct in an ‘imperial’ fashion the powerful forces, negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American democracy.) As for the once-dynamic duo who characterised much of this administration – vice-president Dick Cheney and secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their ‘offices’) – the only – ‘empire’ that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the vice-president and secretary of defence had the urge to dominate with their ‘unitary executive,’ ‘wartime,’ commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the US, however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandisement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.
   
   The president and his diplomats
   To make some sense of all this, let’s start at the top. With his utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of Mexico), George W Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff, ‘Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing.’ The president’s major foreign-policy decision – to invade Iraq – was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander-in-chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to ‘kick ass’ overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.
   Kicking ass – playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards – has remarkably little to do, however, with anything that might once have been defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement such plans. For example, a year after his ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union Address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and Shiites in their country, ‘emperor’ Bush allegedly responded that he thought ‘the Iraqis were Muslims.’ (No way, after all, that you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarises George W Bush’s preparation for putative empire building than the following nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:
   ‘When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word “Taliban” – the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and repressive version of Islamic law – during a verbal Rorschach test, Mr Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the writer gave him a hint (‘repression of women in Afghanistan’) that Mr Bush replied, “Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.”’
   Given the tabula rasa in Bush’s mind regarding the world outside ‘the homeland’ (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser and, as secretary of state, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in 2000 that, as a ‘Europeanist,’ ‘I’ve been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope;’ and Powell’s qualifications were based on his military savvy – and loyalty – not his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times reported in 2001, was ‘a problem solver, not a visionary.’
   As became clear after the horror of 9/11 – a foreign policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that no ‘empire’ in its right mind would have allowed – Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point briefers on day-to-day events they had not foreseen and did not control. Compare them to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their positions at some point in his White House career. A cynical manoeuvrer who may not have been to everyone’s liking, he nonetheless worked in the realm of global strategy. In the way he attempted to play off the Soviet Union against China in relation to the Vietnam War, he was an imperial planner of the first order (if not always with the greatest success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich and on nuclear weapons to the sole tome that Rice authored by herself – a bland monograph on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the scholarly American Historical Review in 1985. What her sad little historical ‘study’ demonstrated, if anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch, anything but a geo-politician of Soviet – or any other – affairs.
   Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision – or even of grasping essential global cause and effect – they doubtless would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process: ‘Why exactly are we doing this?’ ‘Is it really in our interests to invade a third-world country thousands of miles from our shores?’ Or, put another way: ‘How does this invasion preserve or expand the American empire?’
   
   All the president’s men: Cheney and Rumsfeld
   According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were vice-president Cheney and secretary of defence Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they – and their neocon poodle and second-in-command at the Defence Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neocons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the US – were the true framers of a Bush empire.
   To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas – or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas – about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney’s former position as CEO of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.
   Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand US influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld’s utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there (‘events’ which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq – or success in that country – was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.
   For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, ‘war’ would mean the loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything – which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC’s self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts – both personal and political – to settle. ‘Foreign policy,’ in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63 per cent of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the vice-president and secretary of defence (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.
   If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren’t the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays – the State Department and the CIA – perhaps because those organisations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush ‘kicked ass’ in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to ‘kick ass’ among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney’s treatment of ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration’s claim about Saddam Hussein’s search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the ‘imperial’ aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy ‘experts’ and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual US national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.
   To see how Washington-centred this cast of characters actually was, just recall the secretary of defence’s self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, ageing neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq – any more than it did when George W Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his ‘mission accomplished’ moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was – for a while – the rest of the outside world.
   Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The US, he wrote, made ‘foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein.’
   In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W Bush’s national security ‘homeland.’ That may be the president’s ultimate legacy.
   Tomdispatch.com, November 18. John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com

Climate change and the changed world

The people who DENY manmade climate changes are either do not understand the science or have a vested interest to deny it. If you have studied it you will understand if we don’t change the way we do things it is not sustainable. Do people honestly think that the combined billions of people, industries and pollutants on this planet do not affect its climatic state?! Educate yourself and wake up.
   MG
   On e-mail
   

Recently the law adviser opened the issue relating to the tenure of the caretaker government. It is almost well understood that the caretaker government might hand over power to the elected government in January 2009. Of course, the caretaker government should in the meantime make the reference to the Supreme Court regarding the changes in the constitutional provision of 58C regarding the tenure of caretaker government. If they fail to do so, history will not forgive them.
   Kumar Prithwiraj Nath
   Canada

Next on Quick Comments

a. Death toll keeps rising: Tens of thousands go hungry as relief inadequate (New Age, November 19) b. Remote areas in three worst-hit districts yet to receive any relief (New Age, November 19) c. Unimportant projects to be dropped to divert money to relief operations (New Age, November 19) d. Sidr destroy about 6000 educational institutions (New Age, November 19) e. SRO on English medium schools issued finally: Changes still ensure dominance of school-owners (New Age, November 19)