U.S. military personnel say that their work with Pakistani troops has also gone smoothly, with many of the links cemented during their joint response to Kashmir's 2005 earthquake crisis. Pakistani military officials agree, though some admitted to early problems after the government requested assistance in Swat and Kohistan, parts of which are still considered conflict zones.
Two Pakistan Army officers at the Pathan helipad complained of delays and administrative hurdles in the early days of the disaster response as officials at the Pentagon worried that their forces might come into contact with hostile armed insurgents.
The government has since put in place tight security protocols. Landing zones are secured ahead of time, and each helicopter is assigned two Pakistan Army commandos to guard the flights. The locals help to unload supplies, but every civilian is patted down and searched for weapons or explosives before they are allowed near the helicopters.
Exhausted crews give 22,000 free rides
But the threat of armed elements remains, meaning that not all relief drops go smoothly.
After landing in one remote spot of Kohistan, in a designated Provincially Administered Tribal Area, the Pakistani leader of a flight ordered a hasty evacuation after less than a minute on the ground, before any aid could be delivered. The order came after local tribesmen warned him and the security detail that Taliban or other armed men were hiding behind a hill near the landing spot, apparently waiting for offloading to begin to launch an ambush.
The abandoned drop left both Pakistani and American personnel upset, not because of the near miss but because the three dozen men and boys waiting at the site desperately needed the food on board.
"Look, it's not the first time it's happened," said Pakistan Army Capt. Asad Mehmood, the safety pilot during the trip and the same man who ordered the hasty retreat. Mehmood downplayed the incident, insisting that it would be resolved the next day with a better security assessment and other precautions.
Thus far, no relief flight has come under attack. Rather, it's much more common for a drop to get called off because a landing simply can't be made, either because of wind or a lack of space. "There are several areas that we've flown over where we can't land and you see them waving at us like 'We need food,'" said Sgt. Ramos. "There's really nothing you can do."
After a day of constant flying, refueling, and loading and offloading of aid, pilots and flight crews are too exhausted to speak. It's a months-long operation that runs 24 hours a day, with maintenance crews taking over at the end of the day and working all through the night repairing aircraft and reading them for the next day.
The flights from Ghazi, about two hours northwest of Islamabad, continue. To date, U.S. forces have helped deliver more than 16 million pounds of humanitarian relief and provided rides to over 22,000 flood victims.
All soldiers and Marines interviewed agree that the work is remarkably similar to logistic operations in combat zones, with the exception that flights are kept to designated routes, there are no nighttime flights, and the risk of getting shot at is much lower, though not completely gone. No one expressed disappointment with the assignment; rather, they expressed pleasant surprise at finding themselves in a relief operation rather than the typical combat or defense roles military recruits are told to expect.
That's good, because if the February Pentagon defense review on climate change threats is correct, then future U.S. military personnel may find themselves doing much more disaster relief work than fighting.
"When I first enlisted, I thought I was going straight off to Afghanistan or Iraq on a combat mission," said Army Spc. William Rose, a new arrival from Fort Wainwright, Alaska. "It's way better than what I expected."
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4 Comments
Add Comment"There is no scientific evidence that this is the case"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry, but that is just plain false. There is an abundance of SCIENTIFIC evidence that climate change caused these extreme floods. You seem to be confusing "scientific evidence" for "absolute proof." No scientific conclusion is 100% guaranteed.
Early snow melts, from galciers like Puncak Jaya, meant rivers were already swollen. When combined with "historically high" rainfall there was no place for water to go.
Sunny today and rainy tomorrow is weather. What we're seeing is long-term climate change: spring is coming earlier every year, plants, insects and animals have extended their ranges northward hundreds of miles (bringing tropical diseases with them), the Northwest Passage is opening in the Arctic, and the polar ice cap getting smaller and smaller every summer. The decade from 2000 to 2009 is the hottest on record.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClaiming that the climate is not warming is simply a lie. Even the most vociferous semi-respectable global warming skeptics do not deny it's happening. They claim instead that humans are not responsible. They say it's the sun, the earth's orbit, or a normal cycle that we don't understand. They say that humans are too few and too insignificant to affect climate on a planet wide scale.
But that's just ignoring the facts. There are almost seven billion people on the planet. In the short span of 150 or so years we have been burning coal, gas and oil that took billions of years to lay down. Natural processes cannot absorb that huge influx of CO2. As China and India begin to consume hydrocarbons at higher and higher rates the process will only accelerate. That CO2 is staying in the atmosphere and producing greenhouse warming.
We also know that deforestation has dramatic effects on climate (look at the difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Humans have chopped down 20% of the Amazon rainforest. Crops such as corn and soybeans allow more moisture to evaporate from the soil and promote a hotter and drier climate than trees and other rainforest vegetation do. Worldwide we are cutting down trees, burning them for fuel or just letting them rot at an alarming rate. All of this causes CO2 levels to rise, while eliminating the carbon sink that these trees represent.
Finally, humans do control enough power to drastically change the climate: large numbers of nuclear weapons detonated simultaneously could send enough material into the stratosphere, which would cause a nuclear winter and another ice age. While burning fossil fuels doesn't have the same immediate impact, in the long term it's probably even more naked energy used to produce a gas that's choking our planet.
"There was no flooding last yr and there was this yr"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgain you are factually wrong. There was flooding last year, just not catastrophic flooding, like this year. The reasons why are many, the glacier melt was not as bad last year, the monsoons did not start as early and were not historically heavy.
Also, as another poster mentioned you seem to be confusing weather (short term, local effects) with climate (long term, global).
As I said before there is an abundance of scientific evidence to support the conclusion that climate change played a major role in this years flooding in Pakistan, and nobody is more convinced of that that many Pakistani's themselves.
Are Pakistan Relief Efforts a Training Exercise for Climate Change Disasters?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, it is a climate change disaster