Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (24 page)

Yet as the case of Bangladesh shows, the future is not strictly about rising sea levels. It is about the interrelationship between them and political phenomena such as religious extremism and the deficiencies of democracy.

Atop the Bay of Bengal, the numberless braids of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers have formed the world’s largest, youngest, and most dynamic estuarial delta. Squeezed into a territory the size of Iowa—20 to 60 percent of which floods every year—lives a population half that of the United States and larger than the population of Russia. Bangladesh’s Muslim population alone (83 percent of the total) is nearly twice that of Egypt’s or Iran’s. Bangladesh is considered small only because it is surrounded on three sides by India. Actually, it is vast: a veritable aquatic culture where getting around by boat and vehicle, as I learned, can take many days.

First come the spring floods from the north, originating with the snowmelt in the Himalayas, swelling the three great rivers. Then in June, and lasting for three months, comes the monsoon from the south, up from the Bay of Bengal. Calamity threatens when the amount of water arriving by river, sea, or sky is tampered with, whether by God or by man. Nepal, India, and China are all ravished by man-made deforestation. The result is silt, or loose soil, that traps water in place: hence waterlogging, which prevents water from flowing onward into the great rivers. Moreover, India and China, are appropriating Ganges and Brahmaputra water for irrigation schemes, thus further limiting freshwater flows into Bangladesh from the north, causing drought. Meanwhile, to the south, in the Bay of Bengal, global warming appears to be causing a sea-level rise. This brings salt water and sea-based cyclones deeper inland. Salinity—the face of global warming in Bangladesh—kills trees and crops, and contaminates wells. And with insufficient fresh river water coming down from India and China, this hydrological vacuum is only quickening the ingress of salt water northward into the countryside.

But Bangladesh is less interesting as a basket case than as a model of how humankind copes with an extreme natural environment, for weather and geography have historically worked to cut one village off from another here. Credible central government arrived only with the Mughals from Central Asia in the sixteenth century. But neither they nor their British successors were truly able to penetrate the countryside. The major roads were all built after independence. Hence, this is a society that never waited for a higher authority to provide it with anything. The very isolation effected by floodwaters and monsoon rains has encouraged institutional development at the lowest level. The political culture in rural Bangladesh is more communal than hierarchical, in which women especially play a significant role.

A four-hour drive northwest of Dhaka, I found a village in a mixed Muslim-Hindu area where the women had organized themselves into separate committees to produce baskets and textiles, and invest the profits in new wells and latrines. They showed me a cardboard map they had made of where they would install them. They received help from a local nongovernmental organization that, in turn, had a relationship with CARE. The initial seed money came from outside, but the organizational heft was homegrown.

In a tiger-infested mangrove swamp in the southwest, I found a fishing village where people lived in bamboo-thatched huts along a river. Here I watched a play performed by a local NGO, which taught about climate change, the need to conserve rainwater through catchments, and the importance of planting trees to prevent erosion. Hundreds of villagers were present; I was the only foreigner. Afterwards, they showed me the catchments that they had built to direct rainwater into the wells.

Through similar bottom-up, purely voluntary means, the population growth rate in Bangladesh has been cut from 7 percent per year after independence to 1.5 percent now—an unprecedented achievement, given the value placed on children as laborers in a traditional agricultural society. Polio has been nearly eradicated several times, failing only because of perennial reinfection from India. Despite all of its predicaments, Bangladesh has risen from a state of famine in the mid-1970s to a nation that now feeds itself.

The credit for coping so well under the circumstances rests ultimately with NGOs. NGOs have become a familiar acronym because of the work of relief charities like Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, and
so on. But in Bangladesh the word connotes a new organizational life-form, in which thousands of local NGOs help fill the void between a remote, badly functioning central government and village committees.

Because they are nonprofit enterprises with for-profit elements, some ethical questions have been raised about Bangladeshi NGOs. Take Muhammad Yunus, who, along with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering micro-credit schemes for poor women; he also operates a cellphone and Internet service. Then there is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), which besides its bounteous relief work, operates dairy, poultry, and clothing businesses. Its head offices, like those of Grameen, occupy a skyscraper that constitutes some of Dhaka’s most expensive real estate. Yet to concentrate on the impurities of these NGOs is to ignore their transformative function.

“One thing led to another,” explained Mushtaque Chowdhury, BRAC’s deputy executive director. “In order not to be dependent on Western charities, we set up our own for-profit printing press in the 1970s. Then we built a plant to pasteurize milk from the cattle bought by poor women with the loans we had provided them. Now we’ve become a kind of parallel government, with a presence in sixty thousand villages.”

Just as cellphones have allowed third world countries to make an end run around the need for a hard-wired communications infrastructure, Bangladesh shows how NGOs can make an end run around too often dysfunctional third world governments. Because local NGOs are supported by international donors, they have been indoctrinated with international norms to an extent that not even the private sector in Bangladesh has been.

The linkage between a global community on the one hand and a village one on the other has made Bangladeshi NGOs intensely aware of the worldwide significance of their country’s environmental plight. “Come, come, I will show you the climate change,” said Mohan Mondal, a local NGO worker in the southwest, referring to a bridge that had partially collapsed because of rising seawater. To some degree, this is a racket in which every eroded embankment becomes part of an indictment against the United States for abrogating the Kyoto accords. But in almost every other way Muslim Bangladeshis are pro-American—the upshot of historical dislike of former colonial Britain, frequent intimidation by nearby India and China, and lingering hostility toward Pakistan stemming from the 1971 liberation war.

Nevertheless, for the United States to strictly argue the merits of its case is not good enough here. Because it is the world’s greatest power, the United States must be seen to take the lead in the struggle against global warming or suffer the fate of being blamed for it. Bangladesh demonstrates how third world misery has acquired—in the form of “climate change”—a powerful new political dimension, tied to the more basic demands for justice and dignity. The future of American power is related directly to how it communicates its concern about issues like climate change to Bangladeshis and others. This matters just as much as the number of warships it has; maybe more so.

NGOs would not have the influence that they do in Bangladeshi villages without a moderate, syncretic form of Islam. Islam arrived in Bengal late, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, with Delhi-based Turkish invaders. It is but one element of a rich, heavily Hinduized cultural stew. In Muslim Bengali villages,
matbors
(village headmen) do not carry the same authority as sheikhs in Arab villages. And below these figureheads, the other layers of social organization can be dominated by women whose committee mentality has been both receptive to, and empowered by, westernized relief workers.

But this mild version of Islam is now giving way to a starker and more assertive Wahabist strain. A poor country that can’t say no to money, with an unregulated, shattered coast of islands and inlets, Bangladesh has become a perfect place for al-Qaeda affiliates, which, like westernized NGOs, are another sub-state phenomenon filling the vacuum created by weak central government. Islamic orphanages, madrassas, and cyclone shelters, which operate much like CARE or Save the Children, are mushrooming throughout the country, thanks largely to donations from Saudi Arabia, as well as from Bangladeshi workers returning home from the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula.

But rather than representing something unique in Bengali history, the radicalization of Islam shows how Bengal is part of a heavily Islamized Indian Ocean cultural system. Just as the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta journeyed from Arabia to Bengal in the fourteenth century to gain the spiritual blessing of a renowned holy man, Shah Jalal, Saudi ideas and texts now infiltrate Bengal in the twenty-first century, and Bangladeshi workers, linked by air and sea to the Arabian Peninsula, return to their homeland with new ideas.
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From jeans and T-shirts a decade ago, women in the capital of Dhaka, in the port city of Chittagong, and throughout the countryside are increasingly covered in burkas and
shalwar kameezes
. Madrassas now outnumber secondary schools, according to Anupam Sen, the vice chancellor of a private university in Chittagong, who told me that a new class of society is emerging here that is “globally Islamic” rather than “specifically Bengali.” Islam is especially acquiring an ideological edge in urban areas, where rural migration is 3 to 4 percent annually, as people flee an increasingly desperate countryside, ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest. In the process, they lose their tribal and extended family links as they are swept up into the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments. Here is where global warming and man-made climate change indirectly feed Islamic extremism.

“We will not have anarchy at the village level, where society is healthy. But we can have it in the ever-enlarging urban areas,” warned Atiq Rahman. Such is the abject failure of central authority in Bangladesh after fifteen years of elected governments.

Nearing the second decade of the twenty-first century, Bangladesh is a perfect microcosm of the perils of democracy in the developing world because it is not a spectacular failure like post-invasion Iraq, but one typical of many other places. As in many a third world country that officially subscribes to democracy, civil society intellectuals play almost no role in the political process, the army is trusted more than any of the political parties, and although many champion historic liberalism, everybody I met also dreaded elections, which they feared would lead to gang violence. “We have the best constitution, the best laws, but no one obeys them,” lamented one businessman. “The best form of government for a country like ours,” he went on, “is a military regime in its first year of power. After that, the military fails, too.”

The military was the power behind a caretaker civilian government in the fall of 2006, when the political system appeared on the brink of chaos, with strikes, demonstrations, a spate of killings, and an economy going nowhere. The ruling party was in the process of fixing the upcoming election, even as the opposition was planning a series of attacks by armed gangs in return. Up to that point, democracy had served up two feudal, dynastic parties: the Awami League, headed by Sheikh Hasina Wajid, a daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding
father who was assassinated in a military coup in 1975; and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), headed by Khaleda Zia, the widow of another of the country’s founders, General Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in another coup in 1981. The personal animosity between the two women harks back to the pardon given the killers of Begum Hasina’s father by Begum Zia’s late husband. This was darkly Shakespearean politics driven by personal vendetta, and as such, very reminiscent of Pakistan.

Because both parties are weak, both require alliances with various Islamic groups, and consequently turn a blind eye to al-Qaeda affiliates such as Jemaah Islamiyah that use Bangladesh as a transit point and training base. When in early 2007 the military-backed caretaker government hanged six militants from the Jama’atul Mujahideen—a local Islamic group responsible for literally thousands of terrorist attacks up through 2005—the conventional wisdom had it that neither political party could have carried out the sentence, compromised as they were by their Islamic coalition partners. In the eerie calm that characterized the time of my visit, with the country more orderly than it had been in years—with no terrorist attacks, with the ports operating without strikes, with army checkpoints everywhere, with hundred of arrests of politicians on charges of corruption, and with technocrats getting promoted over party hacks—nobody I met was enthusiastic about a return to the old two-party system, even as no one wanted the military to continue to play such an overt role in the nation’s affairs. The military eventually withdrew from power and Sheikh Hasina was elected prime minister, though soon after her election, she had to deal with a violent mutiny by paramilitary border guards.

Bangladesh illustrates how the kind of government a state has is less important than the degree to which that state is governed—that is, a democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can. Again, one does not need the extreme example of Iraq to prove this point; the less extreme example of Bangladesh will do. Functioning institutions—rather than mere elections—are critical, particularly in complex societies, for the faster a society progresses, the more and different institutions it will require.
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Military intervention in Bangladesh is, ultimately, a response to the lack of capable institutions.

Furthermore, while democracy may provide the only cure for radical Islam over the long term, in the short term in Bangladesh, it was the very
fear of radical Islam taking advantage of a political void that kept the military from initially returning to the barracks. This is a country where 80 percent of the population subsists on less than $2 per day, even as Jama’atul Mujahideen budgets $1250 per member per month. In addition to the financial incentive of becoming a militant, Bangladesh has porous borders with a barely governable part of India, where more than a dozen regional insurgencies are in progress. Rather than be eliminated in the military crackdown, it was thought that Jama’atul Mujahideen mutated temporarily into smaller groups operating in the frontier zones.