The End of the World, Part III

High above the valley city of Muzaffarabad, the view is at once terrible and awesome. Stretching for miles along both sides of the turbid Jhelum River is what's left of a major city -- in every direction piles of rubble and dust and glass, still hiding thousands of corpses, with all the standing structures giant deathtraps mined with fatal cracks. Above all that, on a piece of exposed earth on a mountain plateau now home to a sprawling tent city of displaced persons called Tariqabad, a young man shows me his new home. His eight-member family's tent is on the edge of a dirt slope. There is no plastic sheet on the ground, no blankets, nothing. The family simply sleeps on top of one another in their clothes, their only possessions. At the first rainfall, I'm guessing, their floor will turn to mud and they will all slide some 1,500 feet down the cliff in the middle of the night. I ask about that.

"But what about the rain?" I say. "What will you do?"

The young man shrugs. "We stand," he says.

"All night?" I ask.

"Yes, all night," he says.

Ten yards away, a woman named Shamim Iqbal is holding a baby. She has six more children and they all live with her in her tent, which is open at two ends. Shamim's husband was killed in the earthquake. She does not have a single rupee to her name and no idea where she is getting her next meal. The only thing she and her children have eaten today is tea.

At her feet, one of her daughters is putting handfuls of mud in a steel bowl. I look down at her. She looks up and smiles.

"Biryani," she says.

Biryani's that stew, you know. We've all seen it in Indian restaurants.

"Oh," I say. "Biryani."

A young male tent-city resident who is acting as my translator interrupts. "Is not biryani," he says. "Is dirt."

"Yeah," I say. "I got that."

"Biryani like a stew, can be made with beef or chicken, very tasty," he continues, ignoring me. "But this not biryani. This dirt."

I turn to face him now. "OK, gotcha, not biryani," I say. "Thanks."

We walk a little farther in silence. "You want to see man who dying?" the young man finally asks.

"Sure," I say, sighing. "Let's go see man who dying."

We go see man who dying. Man lying on cot in tent, hands pressed on wounded side, screaming in agony. Man old, sixty or seventy. Big piece concrete fall on man. Doctors give man Tylenol tablets. Man need operation, not Tylenol tablets. Man not getting operation, no fucking chance. Man screaming, reaching hands in direction of journalist, like man want grab journalist neck. Man eyes afire, mutter frantically in Urdu.

Journalist step back, ask young man what old man say.

"He say," says the young man, "'God bless you.'"

The age of the International War on Terror seems to have turned itself into an unusually grim time in world history, an era of awesome and unforeseeable catastrophes, giant steps backward in the journey of civilization, ruinous and far-reaching political blunders and violently disillusioning confrontations with man's limitations. Even the most godless among us has to tremble before the biblical scale of the past twelve months' headlines: the tsunami that swallowed south Asia, the deadly lady named Katrina (also known as America Not Immune) and now this. We do not seem to be going forward very much, but every few months we lose, somewhere, a big piece of the world map, a mysterious and enervating process that is becoming like an ominously steady drip that can be heard all over the planet.

And this, the massive earthquake that rocked Kashmir on October 8th, is the worst by far of the troika. It is a calamity the dimensions of which the world so far has completely failed to appreciate or understand. Coupled with the geopolitical nature of the misfortune -- testing the nerve of two antsy nuclear antagonists and the political health of a somewhat notorious but also critically important American ally regime -- the continuing disaster known as the Kashmiri earthquake threatens to be a world-shaping event as important as the Iraq War itself.

The official death toll of the quake in Pakistani-controlled or "free" Kashmir is something like 73,000 people as of this writing, and even that number is considered a cruel joke -- ridiculously optimistic -- by most aid workers and close observers of the situation. But the immediate death toll is not the story in Kashmir. It is a two-stage disaster whose second act will happen away from the cameras.

The world watched the corpses pulled out of the rubble, sent a check (maybe) and said its prayers, and mistakenly assumed the worst was past.

What we failed to realize was that the quake left behind 3 million utterly impoverished people to live in tents -- in tents if they're lucky, under the stars if they're not -- in a region where heavy snowfall and severe winters are the norm. Aid organizations that exist to deal with these sorts of situations recognized the danger immediately and began a desperate drive to at least get tents to as many people as possible before winter made aid operations impossible.

They called it the "window of opportunity," this month or so between the quake and the expected onset of winter, and for the international aid community it would be their Normandy, the toughest single emergency rescue operation in history. Like Normandy, the success or failure of Operation Window of Opportunity would hang on the first crucial weeks. Unlike Normandy, most insiders agreed that anything like success was unlikely at best.

It was that inevitability of failure, that probability of further mayhem and catastrophe, that loomed everywhere and lent these last weeks in Kashmir the peculiarly terrible character I witnessed. If it was Normandy for aid workers, it was a season of unimaginable dread and panic for those living on the ground -- 3 million people abandoned by fate, winter on the way, the clock ticking, children everywhere, no game plan. I thought New Orleans was bad, but this . . .

I arrive in Muzaffarabad -- the largest city in the quake zone and the one with the most casualties -- at the end of October, getting there by means of a hellish six-hour drive from Islamabad.

It is still a novel trip for a Westerner to make. Prior to the earthquake, foreigners for the most part were restricted from entering the disputed Kashmiri territories. Kashmir is divided into two distinct geographic territories: an Indian side to the south and east, a Pakistani side to the north and west. The Indian side is known as Indian Jammu and Kashmir (IJK); the Pakistani side is called "free" or azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).

The two provinces are divided by a tense, heavily armed border known as the Line of Control, which is roughly the cease-fire line observed at the end of a Pakistani-Indian war in Kashmir in 1949. Until the earthquake it had been a more or less impermeable border between the two states.

The Line of Control, which runs through a valley of statuesque snowcapped mountains, is the hottest military border in the world, dwarfing in drama and violence places such as the 38th parallel and the Zalambessa front in the East African horn. As recently as 2002, both India and Pakistan implemented a full mobilization that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict; prior to that and since, the LOC has been home to limited wars and skirmishes virtually without pause since 1949.

At its roots, the conflict could perhaps be described as a dispute between two nations -- one Muslim and one Hindu -- both of which claim natural stewardship over the Kashmir and Jammu provinces, and both of which accuse the other of crossing the border to aid domestic insurgents and other political pests.

But the problem of Kashmir has always been that it is far more complicated than that. There are really three sides to the conflict, not two: a pro-Pakistan movement, a pro-India movement and a Kashmiri independence movement, all with substantial bases of local support. While predominantly Muslim, the regional map has no firm ethnic boundaries or lingual consistency; the place is a mosaic of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of numerous stripes and political affiliations, who together might speak as many as two dozen different languages, without even mentioning the sub-dialects -- Kashmiri, Punjabi, Urdu, Shina, Khasi, Dogri, Ladakhi, Zangskari, Gujari . . . the list goes on and on.

So it is not a question of one front, and passions run strong in all directions in pockets across the whole of Kashmir province. Only hatred and a faith in the enemy's eternal deviousness remain consistent from region to region, valley to valley.

Before the earthquake, a foreigner wishing to enter the AJK had to obtain a humiliatingly titled form called a "No Objection Certificate" from the intractable Pakistani bureaucracy. The No Objection policy was just one more symptom of the maniacal suspicion that has crept into the cultures of both sides of Kashmir, where fears of spies and traitors is a constant public concern of both governments. This paranoia held up for a month the critical process of India and Pakistan opening the Line of Control to ease rescue operations and refugee travel.

The Pakistani government found the scads of international reporters and aid workers in Islamabad for earthquake operations too tempting to overlook. On the day of my arrival in Islamabad, at the very moment the government was negotiating with India over the relaxation of the LOC, huge banners featuring anti-Indian messages appeared everywhere on the streets of the capital: INDIAN BRUTALITIES IN KASHMIR MUST CEASE; KASHMIRIS ARE NOT CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD; INDIA MUST QUIT KASHMIR.

The signs are in English, which leads longtime local residents to conclude the obvious: "Clearly, all of this stuff is for your benefit," an American political adviser tells me.

In any case, the restrictions on foreigners were relaxed once the millions in aid money began flowing in from around the world -- relaxed to the degree that my driver is exempted from a ten-rupee (roughly eighteen-cent) highway toll into the region when he shows that he has a paleface passenger.

So I am let through, and I take a winding six-hour drive (complete with falling rocks on the mountain passes) to Muzaffarabad, where I'm to meet up with workers from the Irish aid agency Concern Worldwide. There, I see firsthand what happens when Mother Nature conspires with war and poverty to create the ultimate disaster.

Afternoon in Muzaffarabad. I'm sitting on a stone fence with a Pakistani aid worker named Syed Sulieman-Shah, who has been thrust into the role of my guide for the day. He is one of three workers for Concern Worldwide, which is providing support and supplies for another agency called Islamic Relief, a group that has long had a local presence in this place.

A somewhat mischievous-looking man with an enigmatic smile, Sulieman-Shah has been doing this -- field relief work -- for most of his life. He has worked all over, from a stint in Afghanistan with International Red Crescent during the days of the anti-Soviet insurgency, to time in southern Pakistan with Concern, to this; and he now has the look of a man who has reached a kind of existential crossroads with a trying profession.

Making matters worse are two factors. One, he is fasting for the Ramadan holiday, which leaves him both hungry and thirsty. The second factor is that on this particular day, he has, simultaneously, two of the worst jobs in the world: inspecting latrines in the tent cities of Muzaffarabad, and acting as tour guide to an American journalist in Islamic Pakistan.

But at the moment he's relaxing, sitting on the stone fence as we wait for our car to arrive. This is about as good as it gets in Kashmir these days: sitting on a fence with nothing to do. When a pair of young boys come up to stare at the foreigner, Sulieman-Shah strikes up a conversation with them, then turns to me and laughs a sad laugh.

"Look at his hand," he says, pointing to one of the boys. I lean over.

The child is missing a thumb and two middle fingers, leaving his left hand in an eerie fork shape. Further up his arm is a cast made of plaster of Paris.

"He was in a village closer to the Line of Control," Sulieman-Shah says. "He found a rifle round in the ground and was playing with it, and it blew up."

"What about the cast?" I ask.

"Earthquake," he says blankly. "Something fell on him. Where's your driver?"

"He'll be here," I say.

"My name Zubair," the boy says spontaneously, in English.

"His name Zubair," Sulieman-Shah says, laughing.

"Hello, Zubair," I say.

The boy looks at me, takes off running.

The driver arrives finally and we head out, making our way through the city. Downtown Muzaffarabad lacks the surreal visual quality of a post-hurricane New Orleans submerged in an otherworldly cape of black water, but it is a terrible spectacle nonetheless, with huge chunks of stone and concrete jutting out of the ground at strange angles, people crawling like ants over mounds of stone and in and out of holes. This sea of blocks and concrete slabs that was once infrastructure is now something alien and malevolent, unwelcome, that has chosen to slink into the valley and fall asleep on top of everything here, and which unfortunately might stir at any moment.

The city remains a giant land mine, vulnerable everywhere to the whims of the powerful aftershocks that still plague the region daily. The tremors tend to hit at night. In fact, only the night before, an aftershock around midnight woke me out of sleep by tossing me halfway out of my tent. Because of these, virtually no one in the city or in the region dares go to sleep under a roof. As a result, aid workers estimate that between 95 and 100 percent of all people living in the earthquake area are now sleeping out of doors.

So even aid workers like Sulieman-Shah will be in tents here not only for the near future but likely for the whole winter as well. Aid workers have no place to wash, no real place to stretch their legs, and their toilet is a hole in the ground. It's a miserable assignment, and the overwhelming nature of the challenge in this area makes it even more exhausting. More than once here I've come across aid workers who've confessed to a fantasy of a corporate office job, and three weeks into this rescue effort most already seem unimpressed by the moral upside to their professional commitment.

"Look there," says Sulieman-Shah, as we pass what used to be an office building. "You can detect the smell . . . of human beings."

Where the rubble is piled high enough, you can be sure there are corpses underneath; machines are required to move the concrete, and most have not arrived yet. And the smell is another unmistakable clue. In some places the presence of bodies under the rubble has been marked. In numerous schools around town, for instance, locals have thrown children's bookbags on top of the rubble, a sign of who is trapped underneath.

One of the great tragedies of this disaster -- and one of the challenges for the government of General Pervez Musharraf, which, like the government of George Bush after Katrina, has come under severe fire in the wake of the catastrophe -- is the fate of government-constructed buildings in the quake zone. A great many buildings were leveled in the quake, but government buildings were flattened at a disproportionate percentage. The general consensus among observers here is that widespread corruption left too little money for properly safe construction, leaving the state with shoddy infrastructure.

The first consequence of this is that most of the local state apparatus was killed instantly in the disaster, leaving the state initially unable to even call to Islamabad for help. This was part of the reason for the belated arrival of rescue and recovery teams, which, in an eerie echo of Katrina, were four whole days late -- only in this case the delay was even more fatal, with victims not marooned in water but trapped under stone and earth.

But a second consequence was that schoolchildren died at a disproportionate rate. Jamil Ahmed Awan, the jovial head of the local Islamic Relief agency effort, actually broke down and lost his usual humor and composure when explaining this phenomenon to me.

He says, "It happened just after nine in the morning. Schools were open, classes were going on. They used bad material, built these buildings too cheaply, and in some places 400 to 500 students in a school were killed." He pauses, wiping his eyes. "Four hundred to 500 kids!"

With all the buildings uninhabitable and most of the best flat real estate occupied by wreckage, there was nothing left for the people to do but set up camp in every open space they could find -- and there were comparatively few such spaces. There is no campaign of mass exodus, no Underground Railroad to the Astrodome, in the Pakistan disaster; the only people who had left the region before winter are those who have enough money to find new homes and livelihoods elsewhere, and this number is not great.

A common answer I got to the question "Why don't you just get the hell out of here before it starts snowing on your kids?" was something along the lines of "My family doesn't have land anywhere else" -- an answer that seems strange to the longtime citizen of a Western social democracy but that makes perfect sense here, where the process of building a home and a life for one's family is a multigenerational effort.

So what was once Muzaffarabad is now an archipelago of tent cities, perhaps 200 of them. The first challenge of the aid workers during the Window of Opportunity is to get these up to speed and make them as habitable as possible before the arrival of wintry weather in mid- to late November. Sulieman-Shah's role in all of this is to work on the sanitation situation in a series of camps; he is racing around today to check on a group of latrines he had built in a pair of camps called Lower Plate and Tariqabad.

We get to the latter camp just before dusk.

As a survival gambit, the Tariqabad tent camp high above the Muzaffarabad valley has to be one of the worst ideas of all time. It would seem only a madman would come here, to this floating atoll of densely packed tents on a whistling high plateau completely lacking in shelter from wind, rain or snow, to wait out a savage winter under a single sheet of canvas. It would be like preparing for a Gulf of Mexico hurricane by standing in roller skates atop a beachfront telephone pole in Galveston.

But they are here, more than a thousand of them, packed eight to ten people to a tent. Weeks after the fact, most are still getting over the shock of the earthquake. Most of these people are not farmers or hardy outdoors types, but civil servants and paper-pushers. A month ago all were living what was considered here a middle-class existence; now they are living outside, on top of one another, and most have not come to grips, psychologically, with their new status. So when they speak of the accident they speak in apocalyptic terms, like the quake was an unnatural phenomenon, something outside of God.

"When it happen, I afraid heaven has come to earth," says Arfan Ahmed, a twenty-two-year-old police constable. "I feel world is cut between two pieces. I feel it is end of time."

The young man's situation is about the usual for this place. He shares a tent on the edge of a cliff with his sister, mother, father and a few other relatives. He has two changes of clothes and no blanket. He lost his family home ("Toil-tally dee-stroiled," he says, using the English phrase that somehow has become quite common in this place), has no money and no prospects for getting any, and is wholly dependent upon nongovernmental organizations for food.

He is a tall, skinny young man with an advanced education and the exquisite politeness and sense of hospitality of a well-bred Muslim, for whom a guest must always be a blessing, no matter how abject the circumstances. Like many others who lost their homes and livelihoods in the quake, Arfan also seems to bear his situation -- homeless, abandoned, close relatives lost or dead -- with a strange impassivity that could only come from a culture where an ordered spiritual life never takes a holiday, not even during a terrible disaster. But ask about the near future, what will happen when first the upcoming Eid holiday (the end of the Ramadan fast) and then winter comes, and a slight panic enters his voice.

"We not think about future now," he says nervously.

Nearby, a young boy of eight named Mobin Hussein plays tag with friends in the camp. He was in school when the quake came ("Toil-tally dee-stroiled," the boy reports) and only shrugs when asked about winter, but he does have an answer ready for what he wants to be when he grows up.

"I want to be with God," he says.

Everywhere you go in the Kashmiri tent cities you will find the same impassivity and resignation, an unwillingness to think about the approaching harsh season. "There is a sense that, you know, God did this to us and that is what happened, nothing to be done," one aid worker told me. "It's as if they want to find a spot and sit there until a landslide buries them."

That said, there are some who are taking extreme survival measures. Next to Arfan's tent is the tent of a man who came with his family from a village many days away, walking dozens of miles over mountains to get here. There are several such people in the camp, and they highlight the most dreadful aspect of the catastrophe. What is happening in the cities is bad enough, but in the villages the situation is worse. They feature all the same problems as the cities, with one crucial difference: In most cases, the NGOs will never make it to the remote villages more than once, if at all. The roads are blocked off by new landslides, making transportation to and from most of them impossible. And when the snow comes, heavy accumulation will isolate the villages until spring. Most of the villages are on the faces of mountains, leaving no place for helicopters to land to distribute supplies or take away the wounded.

A few weeks after the quake, the government imposed a ban on the sale or distribution of tents, commandeering all the tents ordered by NGOs for itself -- the idea apparently being to make the Pakistani government appear to be the primary benefactor in the region. But the government, for the most part, will not bring tents to the regions; instead, it is encouraging people to come down from the hills and live in tent cities, where the rescued can be seen by TV cameras. So if you're in an isolated place and have no tent, the choice will soon be to walk or sleep outside.

I visit about a dozen villages in areas up to an hour outside Muzaffarabad. There is a remarkable statistical similarity in the village quake experiences; virtually all have lost between forty and fifty people out of populations near 2,000, and in most places eighty percent of the mud-and-brick houses were toil-tally dee-stroiled.

In the village of Hassan Gallian, about forty minutes from Muzaffarabad, forty-three were killed and 130 houses were destroyed. Here, I find a woman named Farhat Ashhar, a single mother of three, who is lying on a wicker bed on what in other circumstances would be a picturesque mountain veranda far above the city floor. Her mud house flattened and her new concrete house badly cracked, she is wounded from falling debris, and along with her children she has been sleeping under the sky. Because of the altitude, the aftershocks are more severe here. And there's another thing:

"It's already snowed here," she says. "But we're still sleeping outside."

She needs medical treatment, but transport to a field hospital in Abbottabad will cost 3,000 rupees (about fifty dollars), which she doesn't have. When I ask her again what her plan is -- is she going to sit on her bed with her kids and wait for the end? -- she stares at me quizzically, like I'm insane.

"Well," she says finally, frowning, "I do worry about the children."

We end up giving her the rupees, but this is an unworkable approach. No one in this part of the world has any money; there are only varying degrees of destitution.

There are millions of these stories.

The best-case scenario for the aid effort is to get everyone a tent and some food and hope the majority of them make it. But few believe it is going to go well. Back in Tariqabad, a young aid worker named Raja Faisal Majeed is wiping his forehead in exhaustion. Just behind him, a bunch of tent-city residents have killed a bull, and people are walking up to the fly-covered carcass which is half-buried in mud, hacking off bloody bits, carrying them away. This place is filthy, unlivable, no one here will have a bath until spring . . .

Majeed, who has been living here on behalf of a group called Muslim Hands, shoots me a look as if to say, "You have no idea . . ." When asked about the winter, he shakes his head and looks ready to cry.

"Without shelter, they will suffer greatly," he says. "Suffer greatly. It will be very hard on the children and the old people."

He pauses. "Just look at this place."

Pakistan is an uncomfortable place for a Westerner. The poverty is so extreme that it hovers as an accusatory fact under every human interaction. In the capital, Islamabad, a Westerner is treated with extreme deference and obsequiousness on the surface, but there is something underneath as well, a defensiveness and readiness to take offense that borders on menacing. It is a country that feels sneered at and surrounded by enemies and would-be colonizers -- which it is -- and there is plenty of fuel here for crippling national complexes.

Before the rubble had even settled, it was firmly expecting to be left behind by the West at the aid-donation party. Even at the level of the individual earthquake victims, there was a perception that the West was uninterested in helping Muslims. Time and again I was asked by quake victims why America hates Muslims, is always making war with Muslims, etc. Two refugees insisted that Osama bin Laden did not exist; one college-educated Muslim aid worker asked me if it was true that Americans called Muslims "dogs."

This sentiment is so widespread that it made it relatively simple for Islamic fundamentalists, in the wake of this accident, to connect three obvious dots. Just like the Falwells after 9/11, local Islamic political groups were quick to ascribe the quake to divine punishment by a politically active God -- in this case one angry with Pakistan's West-leaning policies. They then quickly settled on a rhetorical formula that went something like this: The quake was brought upon Pakistan as punishment for the pro-American policies of Musharraf, who was too corrupt and busy helping the infidel war on terror to help the victims, the proof of which you can see in his incompetence and sloth in sending aid.

This formula was formally codified by bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahri, who on October 23rd broke his mountain cover to "call on all Muslims and Islamic charities in particular . . . to help their brothers in Pakistan," even though "Musharraf's government is an agent of the United States." Radical Islamic parties like Jamaat-e-Islami took similar lines, and then went to the hills to make their case, bringing relief and also spreading the persuasive three-headed gospel of government corruption, Western evil and divine retribution.

It just so happens that this process is taking place at a time when, in the wake of the tsunami and Katrina, giving from the West is unusually phlegmatic; to date, only about $131 million of a U.N. target $550 million has been raised, an embarrassment that has prompted U.N. officials to issue statements actually chiding tight-fisted Western donors.

The U.S. Army was active in Muzaffarabad and other places, making nearly thirty helicopters available. But while it gives aid with a grunt at the end of a stick, or out the bay door of a chopper, fundamentalist Muslim organizations and Pakistani political parties are traveling high in the mountains by foot to give it by hand, with a kind word and a few more in the mother tongue.

Though the ultimate victims will always be the people who live in the affected areas, there is no doubt that this is a dangerous situation for the United States. The greater the disaster, the more incompetent the response, the worse the political fallout for its contemptible ally Musharraf, a much-loathed poseur (his chief post-earthquake gesture was to wear his military uniform in public) whose government recently ranked 15th out of 158 countries in Transparency International's list of most corrupt administrations. Would a second winter catastrophe be enough to topple the government of the lone Islamic nuclear power, so far locked in an uneasy truce with American interests?

Who knows? But the pieces are set up to fall that way, illustrating the impossible predicament of the United States in the Muslim world. A hole opens in the earth beneath the Himalayas, and though it is not our loss, we still lose; everyone loses. That makes this a characteristic event of the war on terror, in which the victors are death, extremism and chaos, the losers innocent poor people and civilized geopolitics. What will it take to make an earthquake just an earthquake again?

When I got home from Pakistan, there was an e-mail waiting for me. Amazingly, one of the Tariqabad residents, the young police constable Arfan Ahmed, had made his way to town and found Internet access. When I left him, I'd told him a photographer would be coming during the Eid holiday to take his picture.

Hello Matt!
Yes i am Arfan Ahmed from Tariqabad. I a well and i hope that you are also well. Eid greeting you. we did not celebrate Eid very good because our close ralitaves become die on that James has also their pictures when we takes him on bed.

They're starting to pass away already. Get ready for a long winter.