Kalabagh & the water crisis

“WATER is precious, use it wisely” says a notice placed in the bathroom of a five-star hotel in Karachi. There could not be a sounder piece of advice but it should be given not only to the guests at five-star hotels but to the entire citizenry of Pakistan. As I wrote in this space last week, Pakistan is rapidly moving to the situation when it will begin to be ranked among the countries that have severe shortages of fresh water. Wise use of this precious resource is one way of dealing with this crisis.

There are three basic uses of water — agriculture, industry and human consumption. Using water wisely in these three uses is one way of saving the country from economic and social disaster. The greatest waste takes place in agriculture where vast amounts of water are lost to evaporation and seepage or used in such water-intensive crops as sugar cane. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to invest the government’s scarce resources in improving the efficiency of water use in agriculture rather than commit them to the construction of large dams such as the one Kalabagh? This is a fair question but it should remembered that improving the efficiency of water use and increasing its supply are not mutually exclusive solutions to the coming crisis. They should be done simultaneously.

I recall a conversation with the late S.S. Kirmani, the father of the Indus Water Replacement Works. It was his remarkable engineering vision that gave shape to the replacement works. It was the persistence and stubbornness of Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was then the chairman of Wapda, and Kirmani that finally led to the agreement of the donor community to finance the construction of Tarbela on the Indus. After serving as Wapda’s chief engineer, Kirmani went to the World Bank and became director of projects in East Asia. He was of the view that by simply lining the canals and tens of thousands of distributory channels, and straightening them, and levelling the fields that received water from the irrigation system and changing the cropping pattern, Pakistan could double the availability of water for irrigation.

The expenditure needed for such a programme would be considerably less than that to constantly ensure an increase in supply. But such a programme can only be completed over a long period of time. Its success will depend on the education and skill development of the farming community, largescale commercializing of agriculture, the removal of implicit and explicit government subsidies on inputs such as water and power and privatization of all commercial operations. Meanwhile the water shortage will continue to become more serious. Islamabad needs to focus immediately on the supply side.

There are several reasons why the policymakers in Islamabad need to worry about the coming shortage of water. The most significant of these relate to the availability of food supply for a population that is already being fed by imports. According to the government’s water sector investment planning study, unless this situation is addressed, the country will face a deficit of 12 million tons in grain output in 2013. In other words, having once become the granary for all of British India, within a matter of a few years Pakistan will become one of the largest food deficit countries in the world. In today’s prices, it will have to spend $4 billion to $5 billion a year to save its population from starvation.

The immediate response to this developing crisis is to increase the supply of water by tapping what is available in the impressive system of rivers that run through the country. This is where the construction of large dams such as the one at Kalabagh enters the picture. The proposed dam at Kalabagh is a critical component of the strategy to help Pakistan face a catastrophic shortage of water.

I was reminded by a member of an audience to which I spoke in Karachi on the day Dawn published my first article on the subject of the coming water crisis that I should not underestimate the sentiment in Sindh against the construction of the dam. All the more reason why we should look at some of the arguments that have been advanced against Kalabagh as well as those put forward in its favour. I will spend the rest of this article on looking at the “cons” of Kalabagh and indicate why I believe most of the criticism advanced are not grounded in facts.

The dam site is located 210 km downstream of Tarbela and 26 km upstream of Jinnah barrage on the Indus. When completed, the rock fill dam will rise to a height of 260 feet and will be 4,375 feet long. It will create a reservoir with usable storage capacity of 6.1 MAF. This will almost fully compensate the anticipated losses at Chashma, Mangla and Tarbela and bring back the amount of water available for use to the point reached in 2004. The dam will have spillways on either side; on the right it will have two spillways to discharge flood waters with the capacity of two million cusecs.

On the left side, a spillway will feed water to a power station that will generate 3,600 MW of electricity. The project, by adding significantly to the contribution of power from hydro sources, will bring about a significant savings in foreign exchange. Since hydro power is much cheaper than thermal power, it will also reduce the price charged to the consumers.

The entire project is estimated to cost $6.1 billion and will take six years to construct. The project is estimated to yield benefits amounting to $1 billion a year — it will pay for the cost of constructing it in less than six years. Both, the estimates of cost and benefits, are outdated. The dam would probably cost $8 billion in today’s prices but its benefit particularly when we factor in the changes that need to be made in the pattern of cropping, will be much higher than $1 billion, perhaps twice as high.

Kalabagh became controversial from the time it was proposed; the opposition to it is based on a number of apprehensions, some of which have changed over time. Initially, the most serious objection to the dam was on the basis of the number of people who were likely to be displaced by the creation of the large reservoir. Most of the affected population is in the NWFP there was apprehension that the lake would almost totally submerge the important city of Nowshera.

However, two experts, one Chinese and another American, produced models to show that the lake would end about 16 kms downstream of Nowshera. The city would not be inundated even by the recurrence of the record flood of August 1929. The two experts concluded that the city would not be affected even after the bed of the lake was raised by sedimentation over a period of 100 years.

Another objection to the dam is that even if Nowshera is not submerged, the sheer size of the lake — about 420 square kilometres — would still displace a large number of people. My estimate is that the number of people who will have to move if the dam’s construction were to start today would be about 150,000. This is not a small number but there is now enough experience from around the world to draw up a resettlement plan that would leave the displaced people economically and socially better off compared to their present situation.

The Chinese, for instance, have done a commendable job of caring for the displaced population from large dams. The Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze alone has displaced 1.1 million people, more than seven times the number likely to be affected by the Kalabagh dam and the Kalabagh lake.

Wapda’s plans for resettlement call for housing the displaced population in new towns and villages — 27 in number — to be located along the periphery of the lake. Some $800 million have been allocated for resettlement works which, from the perspective of international standards, is a generous amount. It is equivalent to $550 per head of the population.

Sindh’s opposition to the project is based on the flow in the Indus expected after the completion of the project. Once again, expert opinion regards these fears as largely unfounded. After the completion of Tarbela, some 35 MAF of water flowed into the sea. The Kalabagh reservoir with a total capacity of 6.1 MAF would still leave 29 MAF in the river. However, it should be recognized that dams don’t consume water; they only store water during periods of abundance.

In fact, by regulating the flow they can actually increase the supply during dry seasons. This was amply demonstrated by Tarbela dam. According to Wapda, the total canal withdrawals from the Indus in 1960-67 were 35.6 MAF. These increased to 44.2 MAF after 1976, following the completion of Mangla and Tarbela. The same is likely to result from the construction of Kalabagh. A computer model has estimated that canal withdrawals in Sindh would increase by about 2.25 MAF after the construction of the dam which would allow for its greater regulation..

Then there is the fear that Kalabagh, by holding back water, would affect the ‘sailaba’ crops, watered by floods that occur practically every year along the wide banks of the Indus. There are at this time about 660,000 acres under this type of cultivation but water availability is uncertain and farmers normally augment the supply by tubewells installed in the area. By regulating the flow in the river, Kalabagh would help this class of farmers.

There is also some apprehension that by reducing the flow in the river in the initial phase of the project when the reservoir is being filled, the construction of Kalabagh will result in the backflow of sea water into the Indus estuary. Even in this case, experts believe that the intrusion of water from the sea has already reached its maximum level and is not likely to increase further following the construction of the dam.

On the positive side, the additional storage that will become available after the construction of Kalabagh will make it possible to implement the Water Apportionment Accord of 1991 that assumed availability to be maintained rather than depleted through silting of the Mangla and Tarbela reservoirs. Without Kalabagh, inter-provincial tensions on water distribution would be exacerbated since the amount of water to be distributed would be significantly reduced.

Rather than allow a great deal of political emotion to seep into the debate on the construction of the dam at Kalabgh, President Musharraf needs to move forward with firmness, indicating that he has consulted, listened, reflected and decided to proceed in the larger interest of the nation. It was only with this approach and attitude that the administrations that oversaw the previous major developments of the water of the Indus river were able to succeed. There is a lesson to be learned from experience.

Hamas causes terror in US

HOW, one wonders, can the Bush administration, with its huge intelligence apparatus and large diplomatic corps, keep getting everything wrong about the Muslim world? US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s flustered response to Hamas’s stunning electoral victory in Palestinian elections was: ‘I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming.”

Many of us saw Hamas’s victory coming. Rice didn’t because she would not face facts. Her boss, President George W Bush, made similar lame excuses when trying to explain his embarrassing failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by claiming all western intelligence services believed Iraq had them — which was patently untrue. For a nation that spends $40 billion annually on intelligence to be so wrong about so much is utterly inexcusable. Condoleeza Rice now has made almost as much a laughing stock of herself as the disgraced former US secretary of state, Colin Powell.

Hamas won because of Washington’s total failure to push Israel into any meaningful concessions under its dead-ended roadmap to peace, fatally undermining Bush’s favourite, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party. While Israel dragged on the so-called peace talks, they kept building settlements on the West Bank and evicting Palestinians from their homes. During 10 years of the Oslo peace accords, the number of Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank grew from under 100,000 to 450,000.

Palestinians were fed up with the corrupt Fatah leadership which appeared too cosy with the US and Israel. The more Washington bribed or arm-twisted Fatah leaders to comply with its wishes, the more Palestinians backed the hardline Hamas. The feuding gang bosses running Fatah stood in sharp contrast to Hamas’ disciplined, efficient, uncorrupt cadres. When it became clear Israel’s leadership would continue Ariel Sharon’s plans to colonize the West Bank and confine Arabs in three isolated tribal reservations, the Palestinians voted for Hamas.

Why didn’t Ms Rice see this obvious fact? Because, like the rest of the administration and the US media, her view of the Mideast is warped by ignorance, inexperience, and intense pressure from pro-Israel neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christian groups pressing for war against the Muslims.

America’s shocked reaction to Hamas’s win shows how misinformed and misled it is about the Mideast. The propaganda term ‘terrorism’ has so fuddled the minds of Americans that any rational analysis of Mideast events has become as impossible as it was during the 1950s and 1960s to rationally analyze enormous developments within the communist world, like the Sino-Soviet split. The government of Pakistan has adopted this same propaganda ploy, thus ensuring the permanent alienation of all those who disagree with its US policies.

Hamas’s victory provoked hysteria in New York last week. Local papers trumpeted, ‘Terror nation,’ and ‘Terror wins,’ absurdly claiming Hamas threatens the very existence of Israel.

Hamas is responsible for many bombings of Israeli civilians that it claims was in retaliation for Israeli murder of Palestinian leaders and resistance fighters. Hamas refuses to recognize the existence of the Jewish state. Israel and the US brand Hamas as ‘terrorists,’ but to Palestinians, Hamas and its parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, are reformers and resisters of the occupation.

Hamas has around 2,000 men with rifles. Israel has 200 nuclear weapons, armed forces of 568,000, 3,687 tanks, 10,400 armoured fighting vehicles, 5,432 heavy guns, and 402 superb combat aircraft. Hamas bombers have killed Jewish civilians, but they do not threaten the Jewish state, as Israel and its American supporters ludicrously claim.

During the Intifada, twice as many Arab civilians were killed as Jewish civilians. Ironically, Israel helped create Hamas as a rival to the PLO, and aided the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon for the same reason.

Mideast observers and this writer have predicted for years that true democratic elections in the Arab world would produce Islamist governments. Even the recent US-engineered elections in Iraq backfired, creating a pro-Iranian Shia religious regime.

The Arab world has suffered some of the world’s most brutal and corrupt regimes. Mideasterners yearn for honest democratic governments that represent them, not foreign interests. Islamic parties appear to offer these qualities, though they have yet to be proven.

In the Mideast’s only fair election before Palestine — Algeria 1991 — the Islamists won a landslide. Algeria’s military junta declared martial law and annulled the vote, igniting a ghastly civil war that killed 150,000. Now Palestinians have held the Arab World’s second honest vote.

It’s both sad and amusing watching the White House, which has championed democracy as a cure-all to its Mideast problems, threaten to cut off aid and contacts with a new democratic government because it disagrees with Washington. Cutting aid will only strengthen Hamas.

Hamas needs to renounce bombing civilians and limit its armed resistance to Israeli military, police and settlers. The US and Israel need to begin talking to Hamas’ moderate wing. Name-calling is not policy. —Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006

The right to abuse and insult?

THE odious cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Hazrat Mohammad (PBUH), lit a fuse that Osama bin Laden would have loved to ignite. That this happened in the land of the Danes, a people who are in the forefront of extending aid and helping the less fortunate, is bewildering.

The publication of the cartoons almost coincided with the 17th anniversary of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The culture editor of Jyllands Posten (Jutland Post) was well aware of the sensitivities involved and intentionally solicited cartoons, contending that religious feelings there less important than freedom of speech, and that “we must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule”.

If Muslims were being targeted or stereotyped, as they far too often are, it would be another matter, but what was intended here was far, far more significant. “Since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly” (Frithjof Schuon). The cartoons are profane; they mock and ridicule Islam and its Prophet.

The right to insult and abuse, falsely propounded as freedom of expression, despite the considerable loss of life and property in the aftermath of ‘The Satanic Verses’ affair, was left unbridled. The United Nations could have been persuaded to proscribe satanic expression.

Fiftyseven Muslim countries, members of the Organization of Islamic Conference, have failed to exert their influence on the world stage, the acronym (OIC) becoming an apt “Oh, I See”! Recently the self-described “kings, heads of state and government and emirs” of the OIC member states formulated only a single specific in their declaration issued at Makkah, and this was to “combat terrorism” by a “staunch counteraction [against] any miscreants” and “to develop our national laws and legislations to criminalize every single terrorist practice and every single practice leading to the financing or instigation of terrorism”.

If the Muslim world can do all this then the world can surely reciprocate by criminalizing propagation of religious hatred and ridiculing religion. And if the OIC can’t even achieve this, it may as well disband itself for it serves no purpose.

The newspaper which published the sacrilegious cartoons says that these “were not intended to be offensive” and that “offending anybody on the grounds of his religious beliefs is unthinkable for us”. However, former American President Clinton commenting on the 12 cartoons said: “None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions ... there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark ... these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam,” he said.

The US State Department spokesman stated: “These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices. We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility.”

Incidentally, there is no absolute freedom of expression in Denmark. Section 140 of the Criminal Code prohibits any person from publicly ridiculing or insulting the dogmas of worship of any lawfully existing religious community in Denmark. Section 266(b) criminalises the dissemination of statements or other information by which a group of people are threatened, insulted or degraded on account of their religion. However, the Regional Public Prosecutor decided to discontinue the police investigation as he found no basis for concluding that the cartoons constituted a criminal offence.

He stated that in assessing what constitutes an offence, the right to freedom of speech must be taken into consideration. In other words, the Danish government elected not to apply the law in this case.

The drawings were commissioned by the Jutland Post. This was done to accompany an article on self-censorship which was written because a writer was unable to find artists willing too illustrate his children’s book with depictions of the Prophet. As the newspaper stated, this was to make the point that “we are on our way to a slippery slope where no one can tell how the self-censorship will end”. The right to insult, coupled with self-righteousness; humanitarianism of the ‘Brave New World’.

“When humanitarianism is no more than the expression of an over-valuation of the human at the expense of the Divine, or of the crude fact at the expense of the truth, it cannot possibly be counted as a positive acquisition. It is easy to criticize the ‘fanaticism’ of our ancestors when one has lost the very notion of a truth that brings salvation or to be ‘tolerant’ when one despises religion” (Frithjof Schuon).

One acquires an understanding of the Quranic avowal persecution is worse than death in this caricature of Islam, calculated to vilify, slander and wound. The ‘god’ of free expression ruling over “a world culture of consumption and communication, a culture that is secular, atheist, and ultimately empty; it has no values or strategies... it is a code not a civilization” (‘The Failure of Political Islam’, Olivier Roy). A culture of free and insulting speech and expression idolized, receiving abject obeisance.

The primary attestation of Truth (shahadah), that, “There is no god but God” (La ilaha illa-Allah) is ever relevant. In the days of Prophet Mohammad, the deities adorning the altar were made of clay and stone but the demigods of today are far more insidious; freedom of expression veiling the profane right to insult.

A setback for Washington

WHILE the United States has become fixated on the Muslim world, a region much closer to home has been quietly spinning out of American control.

“Who lost Latin America?” is the question the next Democratic contender for the US presidency may legitimately be able to ask. Since the election of Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in 1998, there has been a drastic erosion of US influence south of the Rio Grande.

The most recent manifestations are the election victories of the coca-chewing populist Evo Morales in Bolivia and of the socialist Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Some polls point to similar victories for the militant Ollanta Humala in Peru’s elections in April and for the anti-US Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico’s in July.

The question “Who lost Latin America?” might seem to imply that the US once owned or controlled it. That was indeed one of the very earliest aspirations of US foreign policy. In 1823, President James Monroe enunciated his doctrine “that the American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

By 1904, that had mutated into the claim that the United States had the right to invade and “police” Latin American states if their internal politics took a turn unpalatable to Washington.

Repeatedly thereafter, the United States has exercised that supposed right: In Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Panama ... how long have you got? In fact, the only Central American state that hasn’t found itself on the receiving end of at least one US military intervention is Costa Rica. At first, George W. Bush kept up the tradition of prioritizing the Americas, naming Mexican President Vicente Fox as his main man among foreign leaders.

Yet since 9/11 all that — more than a century of consistent US foreign policy — has gone out the window. This is the really big story of 2006 — and yet no one is paying it any attention. And it’s not as if the new populists in Latin America aren’t looking for attention.

Only last week, Chavez declared: “The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the US president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush.” Now if Chavez were a Muslim leader, this would be front-page news. But because he says it in Spanish, everyone yawns. Come on folks. It’s just over 2,000 miles from Washington to Caracas. It’s nearly 7,000 miles to Kabul. And Chavez is sitting on top of 6.5 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves.

The naive explanation for this strange indifference to Latin America is that, since the end of the Cold War, it just doesn’t matter. Rubbish. It mattered to Monroe, and it should matter to us. One reason I’ve already mentioned: Latin America accounts for 8.5% of the world’s oil reserves. Then there’s democracy; to be precise, the fate of President Bush’s project to spread democracy around the world. And there’s immigration too.

The new regimes in Latin America are throwbacks to the bad old days of anti-global economics. They may not nationalize oil and gas fields, but the new populists are keen to “renegotiate” (i.e. repudiate) existing contracts with foreign companies — and not just in the energy sector. Such policies are almost certain to be counterproductive, scaring off foreign investors.

The new populists are coming to power in large measure because of the successful mobilization of indigenous peoples against the elites of European/mestizo ancestry who have dominated regional politics since the era of conquest and colonization. What we are seeing is the result of the democratic process, albeit - in the Venezuelan case - a process that is being undermined by those it has brought to power. So you don’t need to go to the Middle East to find evidence that democracy doesn’t always produce liberal governments. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service