From Foreign Policy’s AfPak “Daily brief“:

…
Assessing the damage

Some 800,000 Pakistanis are reachable only by air as “superflooding” passes through Pakistan’s Sindh province near Hyderabad and the weather forecast predicts more rain in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa [formerly NWFP], central Punjab, and Kashmir (NYT, Daily Times, ET, Geo). Pakistan’s vast water irrigation infrastructure has been badly damaged by the floods, and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said yesterday that 3.5 million children are at risk from disease (Geo, Dawn/AFP). The Pakistani government has reportedly shut down at least 16 aid camps in K-P that were allegedly being run by charities affiliated with Islamist militant groups (Tel).

The head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, told the AP that Pakistan must demonstrate “real transparency and accountability” in spending the some $800 million in emergency aid that has been delivered or pledged to flood relief efforts so far (AP). Shah also said that much of the five year, $7.5 billion Kerry-Lugar aid package will now be spent on rebuilding. The U.N. has reportedly made the unusual request of asking donors to flood relief efforts to wire money directly to a Pakistani or Swiss bank account that does not have the standard monitoring safeguards, at the request of the Pakistani government (AP).

Two articles today [Aug. 25] assess some of the broader implications of the flooding: Carlotta Gall observes that the supply lines through Pakistan to the war in Afghanistan have been slowed down (NYT), and David Roman writes that because of the floods, Pakistan’s economic growth estimate may be revised down to 3 percent or 3.5 percent from 4.5 percent, Pakistan’s budget deficit could increase, and cotton exports could decrease (WSJ)…

While in the country’s largest city (see also second quote here):

Crush of Refugees Inflames Karachi
Local government says it can accommodate one million, but with some 30,000 in camps, ethnic tensions are rising

KARACHI, Pakistan—Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Pakistan’s devastating floods are seeking refugee in this city of 18 million, exacerbating ethnic strife that has already escalated this year and threatens to destabilize the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Most of the refugees are ethnic Sindhis from areas outside Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed in the flooding that began more than three weeks ago.

The United Nations says 800,000 people are stranded by the flooding, which has severed major roads in Sindh and nearby Baluchistan province. Some 1,500 people have been killed and six million made homeless by the deluge, which started in the north but swept south along the Indus River and continues to threaten to submerge towns and villages in Sindh and Baluchistan.

Sindh’s provincial government has set up camps on the outskirts of Karachi, where 30,000 people are trying to keep their families together under tarpaulins in the searing heat.

The local administration says it is expecting and can cope with up to one million of the refugees. But many others who have made it to Karachi say they are being turned away from shelters on the outskirts and are pouring in to the city, deepening ethnic rivalries with Karachi’s majority ethnic community that have simmered for years…

For Karachi’s dominant group, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, the influx of Sindhi refugees poses a threat to the established order.

“If they come in hundreds of thousands, how will they survive?” says Khawaja Izhar ul Hassan, a member of the provincial assembly from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, which is largely a Muhajir political party and forms part of Sindh province’s ruling coalition government.

The refugee crisis is adding a new dimension to a running struggle for control of Karachi between the MQM and ethnic Pashtuns, a group with origins in northwest Pakistan. The number of Pashtuns in Karachi has swollen in the past few years as many have fled fighting between the Pakistan Taliban and the military in their homelands bordering Afghanistan.

Almost 1,000 people have died in Karachi since the start of the year, many in violence largely between Muhajir and Pashtun armed groups. Mr. Zardari’s administration has been unable to stem the violence…

Have they sinned?

Plus, moving to Pakistan’s wild west, Baluchistan, a lengthy piece well worth the read:

Pakistan, Drowning in Neglect
…
I had accompanied a TV crew to this submerged village in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The floodwater had dissolved the villagers’ mud houses, turned the rice fields they tilled into a lake and the road above into an embankment…

At dusk, just as we were heading to the relief camp, a police officer called from the nearby town of Dera Allahyar. “It’s an emergency,” he said. “Please come to my office right away.”

His office glowed at the end of a lightless road, a large whitewashed building with low outer walls and a long driveway — an eerie reminder in this desolate province of the British-colonial pretensions (and origins) of Pakistan’s omnipresent bureaucracy. Inside, through a slender corridor with high ceilings, we were led to the officer’s room: he was sitting at his desk in the soundless, air-conditioned cold, a plump, uniformed man with perfect black hair and mustache, an enormous, highly detailed map of the district hanging on the wall beside him. “The water is coming this way,” he said wretchedly, his elbow on the desk, his plump hand on his brow.

We sat in the chairs arranged around his desk.

There was a highway, he explained, on a berm above the fields and towns nearby, that ran on the border between Baluchistan and Sindh Province to the south. On the Sindhi side lived a land-owning politician who wanted to cut a hole in the highway that would divert the water to this very town. The politician was claiming that he needed to protect Jacobabad, an important small city on his side of the highway, though he was obviously trying to save his 400 acres of rice fields.

“When will he divert the water?” I asked.

“Now,” said the police officer. “He’s trying to breach the highway right now.”..

Update: Then there’s the ineluctable Terry Glavin:

Who’s To Blame For Pakistan’s Agonies? ‘Hindu Zionists and American Think-Tanks.’

Mark
Ottawa