How the war would affect the common man

Columnist MALIK AYAZ HUSSAIN TIWANA says that not much is known about the horrors of war.

As the drums of war are sounded, it is not only the truth, which becomes one of the first casualties, but also sanity itself.   War is madness and human beings, in their madness, are capable of going to extremes.  In the military jargon, such things get covered under the term of professionalism.  To kill and destroy the enemy and his war-making capability and infrastructure has been the foremost aim of opposing forces since the beginning of armed conflict. 

Wars have always affected innocent civilian populations, but since the beginning of “Nations at war”, starting especially in the last century,  the civilian population automatically becomes a participant, even if unwilling.  Collateral damage has become a sinister term to cover up mass murder of innocent civilian population.  Here we are not talking about nuclear war or nuclear weapons because that is a completely separate subject of horrendous proportions, tried only in a limited action at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the closing stages of World war II.  Here we are concerned only with the lethality and destructive power of conventional weapon systems employed by professional armies of countries such as India and Pakistan.

Most people (an emotional lot) in the South Asian subcontinent, have a romantic concept of war. This is due to ignorance, Hollywood war movies and the extremely short duration of Indo-Pakistani wars fought since partition (generally border conflicts).  War in the real sense has not been experienced by us,  the people of India and Pakistan.  War has not come “Home” to us.  Ask the Iranians, ask the Iraqis and ask the Afghans — we need not go too far.  There have hardly been any anti-war demonstrations  in either of the two countries.  Unfortunately, it has been just the opposite, especially in India, due to misplaced and misdirected government propaganda. Even here in Pakistan, people think that a conventional war will not affect them and their way of life.  Any future Indo-Pakistani conflict is not likely to remain limited in time and space and is likely to cause great damage to infrastructure, affecting our lives and ruining the economies of both countries.

As the armies battle it out to a stalemate, with occasional limited dents into each other’s defence lines, efficient targeting by both air forces, especially with precision guided munitions (PGMs), is likely to play havoc with dual use infrastructure. This would include electric power houses, electric grid distribution systems, rail and road bridges, water pumping stations, natural gas grids and purification plants, oil refineries and oil storage depots and major industrial units supporting the war effort. 

The worst affected would be the population in the urban centres of the subcontinent.  With no electricity,  there are going to be no lights, no fans, no airconditioning, no television, no fridges so no  cold water, no deep freezers so no food storage and no internet.  With no natural gas, cooking would become most difficult.  If the main water pumping stations have escaped enemy attention or survived his attacks and the people are lucky to get water in their underground water tanks, it would not be possible for the majority of population to pump it up to the overhead tanks.  The people living in the high-rise buildings would be the worst affected.  Those depending on generators would soon realize that diesel and petrol would be initially rationed and later disappear completely because the oil refineries would be under constant attack and would be destroyed or damaged.  Most petroleum products available would be diverted for the war effort.  Due to this, travelling would have to be curtailed and even going to work would become difficult because ultimately even all public and private transport will be affected.  Even water tankers would not be available. 

The destruction of rail and road bridges will affect long distance rail and road traffic. With the closure of airports and seaports, undertaking travel to other countries would become extremely difficult and trading impossible. Soon enough the food distribution system would be disrupted due to non-availability of  transport.  There would be no vegetables, no meat, no poultry and no milk supply. There would be no supply of even dry rations like rice, lentils and flour(atta). In a prolonged conflict, flour mills would close down due to non-availability of electricity.  Most industrial activity is likely to  come to a standstill and the workers would have to be laid off causing unemployment, accompanied with various social problems of law and order. 

The situation in the rural countryside is likely to be equally bad.  Although the rural population is more resilient and can live off the land, the non-availability of electricity and petroleum products (diesel  etc) is going to affect the sowing, watering (where dependent on tube wells)  and harvesting of major crops and movement of agricultural products to appropriate markets. 

The big question is what type and quality of life would we be living in the subcontinent.  How efficiently would our hospitals operate, how quickly would our fire fighting services react (they do not react well even in peace time!), how efficient would our postal system be, would our trains run on time, that is if they run at all, would our telephone system work, how efficiently would our police and judicial systems serve the people (there is never much hope in them even in peace time).  Would there be enough space in our crowded graveyards and would there be enough firewood for funeral pyres along the Ganges river.  Who would wipe the tears of mothers, losing their sons on the battlefronts and who would care for the widows and orphans left behind after a long drawn out major conflict.  In the end there is likelihood of a complete breakdown of social and economic order in the subcontinent where only pimps and prostitutes would thrive, reviving the memories of the 1947 partition with even greater ferocity. 

These are some of the questions we must ask ourselves before we indulge in rhetoric and brinkmanship, arousing illiterate masses to frenzy and then not knowing how to retract out of that situation.  Those who advocate war must know how war would affect not only their lives, but lives of millions of other citizens in the subcontinent and in the end it would not achieve anything (because it would be a stalemate) and leave only death, destruction, and misery, forcing coming generations to foot the cost of recovery.   Mind you, this would have been only the result of a conventional war and not a nuclear conflict.