Pakistan: unlucky in everything then? really?

"The worst flooding in Pakistan's history has now affected more than four million people and left at least 1,600 dead, says the UN."

• "All wells have been contaminated and water-borne diseases are spreading, officials say."
• "In Punjab, known as Pakistan's "breadbasket" for its rich agriculture, more than 1,300 villages have been affected and at least 25,000 homes destroyed, said disaster relief officials in the province."
• "Meanwhile, forecasters warned of further downpours for the north-west; the region has not seen such flooding since 1929."
• "Victims have bitterly accused the authorities of failing to come to their rescue and provide sufficient relief."
• "Particular scorn has been poured on President Asif Ali Zardari because he pressed ahead with a visit to Europe. Mr Zardari is due to launch his son's political career on Saturday in the British city of Birmingham."
• "The disaster has piled yet more pressure on an administration struggling to contain Taliban violence and an economic crisis."
• "Meanwhile, local Islamic charities with unconfirmed links to militant groups have reportedly been stepping into the breach to help flood victims."

^^^^^^^

Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, A Research Paper Presented To Air Force 2025 in August 1996, 14 years ago.

via Ahrcanum

In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications

Table 1 – Operational Capabilities Matrix

DEGRADE ENEMY FORCES	ENHANCE FRIENDLY FORCES
Precipitation Enhancement	Precipitation Avoidance
- Flood Lines of Communication	- Maintain/Improve LOC
- Reduce PGM/Recce Effectiveness	- Maintain Visibility
- Decrease Comfort Level/Morale	- Maintain Comfort Level/Morale
Storm Enhancement	Storm Modification
- Deny Operations	- Choose Battlespace Environment
Precipitation Denial	Space Weather
- Deny Fresh Water	- Improve Communication Reliability
– Induce Drought	- Intercept Enemy Transmissions
Space Weather	- Revitalize Space Assets
- Disrupt Communications/Radar	Fog and Cloud Generation
- Disable/Destroy Space Assets	- Increase Concealment
Fog and Cloud Removal	Fog and Cloud Removal
- Deny Concealment	- Maintain Airfield Operations
- Increase Vulnerability to PGM/Recce	- Enhance PGM Effectiveness
Detect Hostile Weather Activities	Defend against Enemy Capabilities

Chapter 1, Introduction begins: "Scenario: Imagine that in 2025 the US is fighting a rich, but now consolidated, politically powerful drug cartel in South America...."

 

Chapter 2: Required Capability, Why would we want to mess with the weather?

According to Gen Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff, "As we leap technology into the 21st century, we will be able to see the enemy day or night, in any weather- and go after him relentlessly."³ A global, precise, real-time, robust, systematic weather-modification capability would provide war-fighting CINCs with a powerful force multiplier to achieve military objectives. Since weather will be common to all possible futures, a weather-modification capability would be universally applicable and have utility across the entire spectrum of conflict. The capability of influencing the weather even on a small scale could change it from a force degrader to a force multiplier.
People have always wanted to be able to do something about the weather. In the US, as early as 1839, newspaper archives tell of people with serious and creative ideas on how to make rain.⁴ In 1957, the president's advisory committee on weather control explicitly recognized the military potential of weather-modification, warning in their report that it could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb.⁵
However, controversy since 1947 concerning the possible legal consequences arising from the deliberate alteration of large storm systems meant that little future experimentation could be conducted on storms which had the potential to reach land.⁶ In 1977, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution prohibiting the hostile use of environmental modification techniques. The resulting "Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Technique (ENMOD)" committed the signatories to refrain from any military or other hostile use of weather-modification which could result in widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects.⁷ While these two events have not halted the pursuit of weather-modification research, they have significantly inhibited its pace and the development of associated technologies, while producing a primary focus on suppressive versus intensification activities.

Remember this was in 1996.

...Today, weather-modification is the alteration of weather phenomena over a limited area for a limited period of time.¹¹ Within the next three decades, the concept of weather-modification could expand to include the ability to shape weather patterns by influencing their determining factors.¹² Achieving such a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability in the next 30 years will require overcoming some challenging but not insurmountable technological and legal hurdles.

A giant social engineering experiment then?

The following notional scenario postulates how weather-modification might become both technically feasible and socially desirable by 2025.

Between now and 2005, technological advances in meteorology and the demand for more precise weather information by global businesses will lead to the successful identification and parameterization of the major variables that affect weather. By 2015, advances in computational capability, modeling techniques, and atmospheric information tracking will produce a highly accurate and reliable weather prediction capability, validated against real-world weather. In the following decade, population densities put pressure on the worldwide availability and cost of food and usable water. Massive life and property losses associated with natural weather disasters become increasingly unacceptable. These pressures prompt governments and/or other organizations who are able to capitalize on the technological advances of the previous 20 years to pursue a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability. The increasing urgency to realize the benefits of this capability stimulates laws and treaties, and some unilateral actions, making the risks required to validate and refine it acceptable. By 2025, the world, or parts of it, are able to shape local weather patterns by influencing the factors that affect climate, precipitation, storms and their effects, fog, and near space. These highly accurate and reasonably precise civil applications of weather-modification technology have obvious military implications. This is particularly true for aerospace forces, for while weather may affect all mediums of operation, it operates in ours.

In other words, after the weather causes "massive life and property losses," people will finally demand that Something Must Be Done about the crazy, deadly weather.

So of course it would be completely ridiculous to suppose that halfway through this plan 1) they already have the technology, and 2) they use it to cause "massive life and property losses," so that 3) we will beg them to develop the technology and save us from the weather. That would betray an extremely cynical understanding of social engineering and psychopathy.

No. Better to think it's all just Mother Nature and Acts of God and Remarkable Coincidences and Bad Luck.

As far-fetched as this subject may seem, leaders in the elite global establishment have intimated the existence of this technology and its capabilities. In 1970 Zbigniew Brzezinski published a book titled Between Two Ages. Brzezinski is one of the founding directors of the Trilateral Commission. In this book he said, "Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised…Technology of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm."

How to Wreck the Environment, 1968

Among future means of obtaining national objectives by force, one possibility hinges on man’s ability to control and manipulate the environment of his planet. When achieved, this power over his environment will provide man with a new force capable of doing great and indiscriminate damage. Our present primitive understanding of deliberate environmental change makes it difficult to imagine a world in which geophysical warfare is practised. Such a world might be one in which nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe. As I will argue, these weapons are peculiarly suited for covert or secret wars.

...As far as military applications are concerned, I conjecture that precipitation enhancement would have a limited value in classical tactical situations, and then only in the future when controls are more thoroughly understood. A nation possessing superior technology in environmental manipulation could damage an adversary without revealing its intent.