Letter From Mardan: A War of Unintended Consequences

"There is no administration here," said Mehboob Khan, a student at the University of Peshawar and one of a hundred students who have assumed administrative control over a large section of the Mardan camp, gathering and distributing donations of food, water, clothes, and bedsheets for refugees. "We could manage this whole camp better than the authorities," he said. That morning, he told me, he had watched trucks loaded with supplies roll into the camp. A member of Pakistan's parliament spoke to the press outside the camp's entrance before disappearing with the trucks and supplies as soon as the cameras were turned off. "They conveyed the message that they are trying to bring relief to the people," he said. "But they didn't give anything."

Meanwhile, rumor and conspiracy theories are quickly taking hold. Many refugees I talked to were convinced that the Pakistani army was letting in shipments of arms and ammunition to the militants and were deliberately missing their targets as part of a war of show.

Two days later, I visited an unofficial refugee camp that had been set up on a parcel of private land, tucked around the corner from a modest neighborhood in Islamabad. Since the February cease-fire, refugees had been slowly trickling in from Swat. A few days earlier, there had been only 100 or so in the tents erected on a hill above a polluted stream. On the day I visited, there were more than 400. A doctor who was making rounds at the camp told me that people were suffering from water-borne illnesses and depression. "People have been here for two months, and still they have nothing," one refugee told me, pointing to the dusty, sun-baked slope beneath his feet. "There is no life here." 

The refugee crisis is bolstering claims that the government is unable to protect its citizens, especially in light of the U.S. drone attacks in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed a large number of civilians along with militants. Khalid Rahman, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Islamabad, told me that the war could plunge support for Zardari to dangerously low levels. For the moment, his approval rating is 19 percent, lower than that of Pervez Musharraf when he was pushed from office in August 2008. "They can take Swat militarily," Rahman said. "But the issue is whether they can sustain the credibility of the people and isolate the extremists." 

Even if the army is able to win the military battle, it will face a substantial challenge in resettling refugees. Zardari has made a plea to the international community for $1 billion to care for refugees. But the tab for relief and post-conflict reconstruction could likely total more than $3 billion, according to Hussain. "Without that kind of support for this area you will have a lot of resentment and a lot of anger among these people." So far, Hussain told me, the government's efforts have been too little, too late. "The whole idea is to make the military operation a success," he said. "The rest can come later."