A long-term study of climate and conflict determined that in places with large populations and a history of political exclusion of ethnic groups, nearly one-third of the wars initiated in the last 40 years were preceded by a climate disaster.
So, what is the connection between climate emergencies and armed conflict? Why do climate disasters escalate political disputes? And what can we do about it?
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist, anthropologist, and New York Times bestselling author. Dr. Jason Miklian serves as a senior researcher at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Together they are the authors of The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Scott and Jason join Ross to discuss the geopolitical landscape of South Asia after World War II and explain how the 1970 Bhola Cyclone led to the genocide of 3 million people and triggered the Indo-Pakistani War.
Scott and Jason describe how the conflict between West Pakistan, East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh) and India played out geopolitically with the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union and offer insight into President Nixon and Pakistani President Yahya Khan’s roles in furthering the Sino-Soviet split.
Listen in to understand why climate disasters serve as catalysts for war, what lessons we can learn from the fight for Bangladesh, and what we can do to prevent armed conflict in the wake of climate emergencies moving forward.
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Resources
The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian
Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo
What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney
Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
‘Fortress India: Why Is Delhi Building a Berline Wall to Keep Out Its Bangladeshi Neighbors?’ in Foreign Policy
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori. Today I have with me Scott Carney, investigative journalist and anthropologist, as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller, What Doesn’t Kill Us. Hey, Scott.
Scott Carney: Hey there. How are you doing?
Ross Kenyon: Good. Thanks for being here. And I also have Dr. Jason Miklian, Senior Researcher at the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Oslo. Hi, Jason.
Jason Miklian: Hi. Thanks so much for having us.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my pleasure. I wanted to do more episodes on geopolitics and climate change, so I was really happy to have this book land in my lap. You are the co-authors of The Vortex, A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm and Unspeakable War and Liberation. So I think in order to set the stage, I don’t think people know a lot about Post-World War II, South Asia. I’m making that assumption. Maybe it’s wrong, but I think it’s a fine place to start. People probably know a little bit about the British Raj and Gandhi.
If you’re a little farther east, maybe they’ve seen Bridge on the River Kwai or the Red Burmese days or something like that. But I don’t think partition and everything after that is very well known. I think the only thing that I really know about it is I read Kushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan some years ago. Beyond that, I know basically what’s contained in this book and nothing else. So I’m going to make that assumption for our audience. And maybe you could set the stage a little bit for us, what the world looks like in this region after World War II.
Scott Carney: I do think that the world would be a better place if everyone had read Kushwant Singh’s works in general. So that’s great. I would say that probably most people aren’t super familiar with what happened. And we’ll give just a very brief historical overview of where South Asia was in 1970. You know, in 1947, India, which used to be, you know, under British control, partitioned into two major parts, right? There was India, where it was a Hindu majority country, and then Pakistan, which was a Muslim majority country. At least a million people died as they fled to either side of Pakistan and into India.
And that’s what actually Train to Pakistan is about. But, you know... When Pakistan came into existence, they split it solely on religious lines, and that actually made Pakistan a divided country when it first came into creation, where there was East Pakistan, which is present-day Bangladesh, and West Pakistan, which is present-day Pakistan, were actually one country divided by what soon became their mortal enemy, India, in the middle of them. And Pakistan more or less treated the Bengali-speaking East Pakistan as a colonial fiefdom. Much like the British used to treat India. And they were just hijacking resources out of there for close to 20 years before this book began.
So that’s sort of the geopolitical landscape of what that looked like.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s also, maybe we can introduce this later, but the Cold War dynamics of this are massively influential for how this all plays out. Why was it chosen to partition like this?
Scott Carney: Pakistan has Punjabis, has Balushis, has Pashtus. It has, you know, many, many ethnic groups inside of it, but they’re generally Islamic in general.
Ross Kenyon: So then the decision was made just on religious lines to lump the Muslims of Bangladesh and Pakistan together for governance reasons?
Scott Carney: Yes, exactly. And it was a terrible idea. You know, this was when the British policy of divide and rule, which had ruled in that area for almost 300 years, The British were always setting one community against another community, whether it was like Hindus versus Muslims or Rajputs versus Kshatriyas or these various groups in India, they were always backing one in order to beat up another. And that sort of those politics played out in the years prior to partition so that they wanted to essentially they had internalized it. And even though Islamic and Hindu communities had had been You know, coexisting for eons in India, these politics sort of went out of control.
And I don’t want to get too much into the weeds. I’m trying not to get into the weeds. But essentially, you know, there was a movement by the leaders of what became Pakistan and the leaders of what became India to divide their political centers.
Ross Kenyon: Jason, do you have any context you’d like to add before we just start at the beginning of the book?
Jason Miklian: Yeah, I think that what we’ve talked about so far is just we don’t talk about it too much in the book, actually, because of the exact reasons that Scott mentions. This is a really big and a really complicated issue. And it was driven by the fact that the British were actually trying to reduce violence. But, you know, as a peace and conflict scholar, you see this many different places around the world, where if you start dividing up arbitrary lines between people, between ethnicities, it can actually create a lot more violence down the lines.
So one of the hardest paragraphs that I think we had to write in the entire book was to distill all of these 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years of history into one quick paragraph. And I think it’s one that we wrote and rewrote like 15 different times. And this is all to say, if you’re interested in that portion of it, there are probably a dozen different fantastic books, both fiction and nonfiction, that address the particularities of why India was divided in the way it was. But for us and for this book, it’s just that historical background that helps to explain why the situation was what it was when we launched into the book in 1968.
Ross Kenyon: Why frame this book as one about climate emergency or climate crisis?
Scott Carney: Yeah, so in 1970, the deadliest storm in human history, which is the Bola cyclone, smashed into the coast of what was then East Pakistan and killed, again, half a million people in the course of a few hours. And over the course of what, over the plot of the book, we just basically trace how that When it landed on the coastline, its fallout was not only on the lives of the people who drowned that night, but in the political systems that it crashed into and how that fallout just sort of exacerbated and magnified as we went forward.
In time, two years later. And, you know, you can think of it as like a domino effect, right? You have the storm, and that flips a major election that was happening in Pakistan. When the election didn’t go the way of the established leadership, they decided to retain power by committing genocide, killed three million people in the course of a year. That kicked over into a refugee movement of historic proportions where people are fleeing into India. And then India responds by invading Pakistan. And this war is just, you see this sort of blowing up and this constant ratcheting up of violence all the way until we get to the Cold War powers are involved, where India is a Soviet ally, Pakistan is an American ally, and it ends up with a moment where we have the Soviet fleet facing off against the USS Enterprise, the capital ship in our arsenal.
And we come within an hour or so of firing nuclear weapons at one another. Now, this all starts because of a storm. And, you know, although we can’t say and would we say that the polar cyclone was caused by climate change, those aren’t the sort of statements that we really make in this anymore. But we can say that in a future of climate change where we have increasingly violent and destructive storms, that every one of those storms is a roll of the dice and where it lands and what sort of vulnerable political landscape it lands in.
And we’re going to be rolling those dice more and more frequently. So the entire book is looking 50 years into our past and saying this is an allegory for what we might expect in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Jason, as someone who studies peace and conflict, there’s maybe a theme that I could draw out of this that climate emergencies provide opportunities to escalate conflicts in very severe ways. Is that an okay generalization?
Jason Miklian: Sure. Yeah, you could say that about any sort of large-scale natural disaster of which we see more and more of now thanks to climate change. So anytime a storm like the Great Bull of Cyclone or even any other sort of very large scale natural disaster hits a country, the leadership and the leaders of that country have a choice. Are they going to help the people who are affected? Or are they going to neglect those people, perhaps for their own interests? And where we see the biggest danger of this, not just in 1970 in East Pakistan, but also today, is when those sorts of storms, when those sorts of events hit I’d also just like to add with what Scott was talking about, too.
You know, as we were doing research for this book, I mean, we did about five, six years of research. We were not only terrified by the way that the bola cyclone ended up triggering what almost became World War III, but also the fact that this relationship is something that it’s really hard for people to appreciate and understand and respect today. Because, you know, you know, we all know there are a lot of really important, powerful climate change books being written today. But a lot of them are from this academic side where they, you know, you’re overwhelmed with data.
The evidence is overpowering. But the audience for those books is very often people who already believe. And what we wanted to do was go beyond people who read David Wallace Wells, go beyond people who read Michael Mann. And reach those people maybe who aren’t as interested or don’t really understand or care about wanting to pick up a big, thick climate change book. So this book was written in the form of a nonfiction action thriller to help people understand what these relationships are through people that actually felt them.
Scott Carney: But it’s still a big, thick climate change book, to be honest. It’s 500 pages, so let’s just be here.
Ross Kenyon: There’s an audiobook version of it, too, if you’d like that instead. Yeah, writing this as a creative nonfiction exercise, assuming that’s the appropriate genre taxonomy to apply to this, it seems like this is kind of made for cinema too. Have you been interested in trying to sell those rights?
Scott Carney: From your lips to Riz Ahmed’s ears. Yes, we are absolutely out here trying to turn this into a movie because it was what Jason was sort of alluding to, that one of the problems with climate change and this narrative that we keep on pushing about it is that We have intense anxiety about something that’s very difficult to do anything about outside of like governmental large institution things. And it just feels so hard to do anything. And one of the beauties of the vortex in working on this project is that you see the effects of this storm and people have to take action right now.
And, you know, the person who survives the cyclone has obvious things that they need to do. And I think that the era of climate change that we live in, it’s mostly about anxiety, right? It’s mostly about looking at what’s about to happen. And I’m sure it’s coming, right? It’s gonna be here in no time, but it doesn’t feel like what you need to do is obvious. Now, if you’re actually surviving a storm, The effects are so obvious. Look, I climbed up the tree and now I have to go give food to the people on my island who are surviving.
Well, 90 percent of the island dies. We have to go fight in the revolution. And I believe and I have this hope that once climate change kicks over into the next step. We’re going to be out of the age of anxiety, and we’re going to be into the age of critical and immediate action. And I don’t really see a way out of that. Jason, I think, is a little bit more optimistic than I am. But I am, for instance, a big proponent of the Thwatts Glacier, the Doomsday Glacier. And I really think that when that thing drops, And you see Miami disappear.
People are like, oh, climate change is obvious. And like this plays out in my life. This plays out in other people’s lives. And then the actions you need to take are going to be real and impactful and immediate.
Ross Kenyon: I think this is a powerful story and a good case study to point to. I think a lot of people, when they think about climate change and the dangers of it, it’s mostly things like polar bears or Miami going underwater or something like that, when really you see it as the catalyst for ethnic cleansing, for intergroup dynamics that are truly scary, war, refugee crises, populist backlashes against refugees, stuff. That’s really what I’m scared of. Am I correct to be scared of that principally? Yeah.
Jason Miklian: Yeah, I think that’s a really important component to this too. So are you right to be scared about it? Yes, absolutely. This is very much underrepresented in what we talk about when we talk about the damage of climate change today. And I think that one of the really important things we bring out in the book is that it doesn’t matter necessarily where the original climate event happens. In 1969, East Pakistan was not on anyone’s geostrategic radar. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union cared really much at all about it beyond caring about every little part of the world as part of either the domino theory or whatever theory you want.
But what happened is, as Scott mentioned, when larger and larger powers got drawn into the conflict, it became a global configuration. So the question is, does a storm in Mozambique today... Have the same sort of potential and we would argue that it does because it’s, you know, when these sorts of storms not only hit places that have, you know, as you mentioned, like low socioeconomic development, low state capability. They’re also hitting in different places. So Bangladesh, for example, is one of the world’s most prepared countries in the world for cyclones now.
They’ve spent 50 years preparing and becoming more resilient to them. But if a cyclone were to hit Yemen tomorrow, they wouldn’t be at all prepared in the same way. So that sort of very complicated relationship between a storm hitting and the potential for conflict is something that has been deeply studied in pizza conflict studies over the last 10 years. And it’s something that there’s no causal chain, which makes it much even harder to get into the media because you can’t say this storm caused that conflict. But you can say these sorts of storms in these sorts of places cause these sorts of conflicts.
Ross Kenyon: It might be too much to introduce given that it’s the bulk of the book or nearly so, but how does this play out geopolitically with the Cold War and the Soviet Union and the US taking sides and all of the political machinations that are happening? And I realize that’s probably an impossible question, but give us a taste.
Scott Carney: So India is a Soviet ally and Pakistan is a U. S. ally. And not only is Pakistan just an ally, Yahya Khan, who is this genocidal maniac president, is actually Nixon’s probably best friend in the world. And he has been, so right before the cyclone hits, he’s had a meeting with Nixon where Nixon assigns him this special project. He says, you want to be a global player. I have this mission for you. I want to open up... And because of a series of events that we won’t get into, Yahya Khan was the only person on earth who was friends with Mao and friends with Nixon.
So he was the perfect intermediary between these two men. And, you know, since the Cultural Revolution, Mao had been sort of shut off from trade relations and diplomatic relations with Americans. So what Yahya is doing pretty much through this entire book is in addition to the horror show, With his disaster response and flipping over elections and genocide and that sort of thing, he’s also ferrying notes back and forth to Mao and Nixon. He even smuggles Kissinger into China for the first official diplomatic meeting in like 50 years. So this is sort of the background.
And in return, Nixon is agreeing to send arms to Pakistan so that when we get to the point after the storm, Yahya Khan, you know, there’s this election that doesn’t go his way. And then he starts killing people and he kills three million people with American bullets, American tanks, American arms, American planes. And the American embassy who’s witnessing this, who’s actually, you know, the people in that, sorry, in that consulate are actually, their hearts are in the right place. They’re sending out all these telegrams to the world being like, oh my God, there’s a genocide going on.
And Nixon squashes that, Kissinger squashes it and stops these notes from getting out into the world so that actually the genocide sort of happens below the international radar. So all of this is occurring. And then as the pressure ratchets up and these refugees go out and India finally decides to invade with the help of the Mukti Bahini, who are the freedom fighters, who are the people who are armed, sort of like our Ukrainian, the people who are defending Ukraine right now. This army flies over the border and is about to take Dhaka, which is the capital of East Pakistan at that time, it’s about to become Bangladesh.
And Yahya Khan says, look, I need to call on my big friend Nixon, and he needs to send in ground troops to East Pakistan. And Nixon actually sort of responds to this. Vietnam is waging, not so far away, and he sends in the American carrier fleet, the USS Enterprise, which is the strongest military vessel on the planet, has hundreds of nuclear bombs on it. Has an air wing that could totally eradicate a nation’s air force in no time. And that comes steams into the Bay of Bengal with orders to destroy the Indian Air Force and potentially launch nuclear weapons if it needs to.
Indira Gandhi, who’s the leader of India, sends, asks for help, and the Soviets respond as well. And they send in this fleet of submarines and missile cruisers from Vladivostok, and they actually cut off the Americans. And then we get into this very, very tense moment where... The Soviets have said that you cannot let the American carriers move past this arbitrary red line in the sea, but they haven’t communicated where that line is to the American fleet. And as the USS Enterprise motors forward, the soldiers The Soviet captain realizes he’s in this really, really tough spot because he has to start World War III if they just propel themselves forward a little bit.
And he makes what is tactically a very, very dumb move is he sends three of his nuclear subs. He has actually quite a few vessels under his command. Three of his nuclear subs in front of the Enterprise and he surfaces them in front of the Enterprise as sort of like a visual signal to be like, do not pass us. Tactically, that’s really dumb. If you’re in a submarine, you want to go fire your nuclear torpedoes from secrecy. But he actually surfaces them in front. And we have this sort of Wild West gunfight going on in the Bay of Bengal.
And the only reason that we don’t get to the next step, because Kissinger is saying maybe we should just start lobbying nukes, that we’ve collected that from the Watergate tapes. The only reason that doesn’t happen is because the Mukti Bahini and the Indian forces take DACA, And it’s like, oh, well, there’s nothing to fight over anymore. And you and me and everyone here is listening to this podcast and everyone else, you know, is alive because those freedom fighters actually took the strategic objective. And it’s not a story that we talk about very much anymore.
And it’s crazy.
Ross Kenyon: I think people have probably only heard about this if they’ve seen the... What’s the George Harrison show? Is it Concert for Bangladesh? Is that what it’s called?
Jason Miklian: That’s right. And that’s one of the things that’s so interesting from at least a historical perspective about this is because in 1971, the fight for Bangladesh was... You know, almost every bit as big in the media as the Ukraine conflict is today. So, I mean, it was on time and Newsweek every single week, especially in the second half of the year. So this, you know, so everyone knew about it. There were, I mean, children were doing hunger strikes in Michigan. Guys were hijacking planes in France for the Red Cross to send supplies down.
There was this huge outpouring of support for the Bangladeshis. Yeah, you mentioned George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The Beatles, they put the world’s first humanitarian aid concert on. And it was in the public eye and it was something that everyone cared about. But then now, 50 years later, we’ve almost totally forgotten about it. And that’s what happens sometimes with some of these conflicts. We collectively start to lose our understanding and appreciation for the lessons of the past. Because, you know, especially now with 24-hour news media, it seems like every three or four years there’s a conflict like this.
And it can be overwhelming. But it’s still so important to look into the past if we want to understand the links between conflict, what causes it, and what it can become.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s easy in hindsight to look back and be quite cynical, especially with these Cold War alliances. And the communists, of course, are not so nice either. And I think that’s very clear to say as well. How fair should we be to Nixon and Kissinger? Are they just war criminals and terrible people? Or is there more nuance that we should be thinking about this with?
Jason Miklian: One of the interesting things about, you know, the book, of course, but also Nixon and Kissinger in general is they have thousands of hours of recorded tapes that Nixon recorded himself. So, you know, we don’t have to make a judgment about, you know, their role in history. They tell us themselves in these tapes what sorts of massacres they want to do. What they feel about certain ethnicities and people and the way in which they see the world and the way in which they act gives much stronger evidence to that question that you ask than anything Scott or I could say as far as our perceptions.
I mean, you only have to look at the actions that they did during that time in office to be able to make that assessment.
Scott Carney: Yeah, genocidal maniacs with no redemptive qualities. Let’s just be clear.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah. I guess I caught some whiffs of that reading the book. That’s how you thought.
Jason Miklian: Yeah. You may be able to detect the slight differences between the academic and the journalist between the two of us here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Much more measured. Investigative journalists, you guys are known to have axes ready to grind, right?
Scott Carney: No, I know. I think like Jason said, there’s data that proves it. I mean, you know, when you’re willfully aiding and abetting a genocide and you know it’s happening and because of your actions, three million people die. I don’t think we need to mince words and be more nuanced. I think we just need to say this is genocide and Nixon helped perpetrate it. Like, I don’t find that a problematic statement whatsoever.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re not interested in rehabilitating his reputation?
Scott Carney: I am not.
Ross Kenyon: I am not. That’s not a research project of yours? Okay.
Jason Miklian: But one of the things I think that comes across in the book too is the, you know, everyone, pretty much everyone knows now that Kissinger, He did so many evil things in Bangladesh and more notably in Cambodia, Latin America, so many different places. One of the things that I really wanted to get across through his own words is he’s not the brilliant strategic thinker that everyone assumes he is. He’s just a hothead who has the, you know, him and Nixon weren’t that different in terms of what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it.
One of the more important things of the last few chapters of the book, especially, is just to show that Kissinger was not brilliant here. He was not strategic. He was not forward thinking. He was going by his gut. He was telling Nixon to go lob some nukes. He wasn’t the intelligence that is often perceived for him to have wasn’t there in 1971. That’s for sure.
Scott Carney: Yeah, I mean, that’s actually a really interesting thing about history in general is that oftentimes we look at leaders and say they knew how it would all pan out, right? It’s like some guy in a political office knew how 10 years from now, all of those events would fall into their favor. Nixon and Kissinger actually had a pretty great run up until Watergate where Nixon is remembered as a diplomatic genius for what he did in China. He’s remembered like, wow, I can’t believe we have Chinese relations because of what he did.
But he sort of like thugged his way through a lot of this. And I think a lot of this is happenstance and a lot of his reputation is in many ways unearned.
Ross Kenyon: That Sino-Soviet split, though, is so famous. And I don’t think it was a fait accompli or something that was historically inevitable without that sort of vision. But again, I might be way off here. You might correct me.
Scott Carney: No, I’m not saying that it would definitely have happened. History does involve actors doing things. But I wouldn’t say that him doing that and the way he did it. I mean, if you’re really Machiavellian and you say, OK, well, it was OK that he opened up China relations that was worth three million lives in Pakistan. Then I guess we have a different viewpoint.
Jason Miklian: Yeah. And I think that you could just add to that, that the fundamental player that made that happen wasn’t even Nixon. It was Yahya Khan. And that’s what that’s what I think is really interesting about that. It’s like all Nixon did is make some phone calls and write some letters. Yahya was the one who actually spent those six months at the cost of his own country’s solvency to do this for him. And as we show in the book, I mean, there’s a pretty strong anecdotal evidence, at least, that Mao was basically playing Nixon all along because China had so much more to gain by this opening up than the US did if it was on their terms.
So did Nixon do something here that was beneficial for the United States? Possibly. But was it more beneficial to other players in the saga? Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Why do you think we attribute such superhuman 10-dimensional chess level skill playing here to someone like Kissinger? Also, relatedly, I remember hearing that about the Trump White House, but then all of the staffers who resigned were all like, no, it’s chaos in there. It’s not some sort of deep plan. It’s very reactive. It’s very driven by the news cycle. Why do we do that?
Jason Miklian: Kissinger’s most exceptional skill is being able to promote his own brand. So in that way, he was very much like Trump. I mean, this guy wrote several thousand page memoirs about all the amazing things that he did. He had this great ability to be seen as a thinker, but talk to politicians in a way that made him think like it was his idea, but he could make it their idea. You know, just buttering up people in a way that gave them credit for the idea, but then gave Kissinger credit for the overarching vision.
This simplifies Kissinger a little bit. Of course, he was a monumental figure in American foreign policy, but his record isn’t necessarily one that you would want to be proud of or write a memoir about. He was able to, you know, and he’s still alive. It’s, you know, when you’re dead, people tend to then write the more critical reflective essays. So, you know, he’s still there. He’s still in foreign policy. He still goes to China. He still talks about developing US-China relations. So since he’s still such an active player, maybe this is something we’ll see more five, 10 years down the line with more critical reassessments of Kissinger’s legacy.
Ross Kenyon: I might be a bit of a dilettante here, but I associate him quite strongly with its continuity with Kenyon, right? And George Kenyon’s containment. And I don’t know that there was a lot. I mean, he’s talking to me as pretty squirrely and pretty smart. Maybe he’s not. Maybe he was just blundering through it, like you might say. But I don’t see a ton that was novel relative to just basic Cold War thinking.
Jason Miklian: It depends on who you ask.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah.
Jason Miklian: Like I said, I might be a bilatant here. No, no, no. That’s absolutely true. He was very influenced by Kenyon. And of course, you have this Cold War framework that he was involved in and who acted in. But I think a lot of the decisions that Kissinger made, he was looked upon at the time very often as someone who was willing to make those tough decisions. As you would say, ones that involved killing thousands or millions of innocent people in foreign lands to secure United States objectives. So that willingness to do those sorts of horrible things and support those sorts of horrible leaders was viewed in a weird Cold War way as a sort of strength to save the American way of life by destroying anyone who might be interested in going over to the Soviet side.
Ross Kenyon: I want to go back to the basic premise of the book here and unpack this a little bit for listeners who may have lost this thread, but what was Yahya Khan’s objective in Bangladesh? Because he wanted to cover it up for as long as possible and use this moment that he has for increasing the prestige and status or just domination of West Pakistan over East Pakistan. It struck me as really short-sighted. Surely the truth of this would come out and totally backfire. Am I reading history wrong? Is that not the correct way to see this?
It didn’t really seem that coherent to me. It just seemed like a crazy gamble. I mean, he plays a lot of poker in the book, so maybe he’s okay with that.
Scott Carney: I mean, his quote is, I want the land, not the people. And I think that Pakistan had this essentially a colonial fiefdom that they were treating just like the British treated people. India beforehand, and they were taking all the resources out. So it was like this cash cow that he didn’t really have to care about the folks who were there. And it was well known, and all the protests that had happened before were violently shut down. And this was just a ratcheting up of, you know, maybe this is an insane policy to begin with, right?
You know, certainly it’s not a very good policy. But it was more of an extension of a logic that had already existed and existing prejudices from these people who were essentially foreigners, even though they were in the same country. But they were essentially foreigners operating the military industrial complex of Bangladesh. And you said that, you know, was there a way he could have gotten away with this? Well, maybe. Right. I mean, there are a lot of genocides that happen where those parties still sort of stay in power after they succeed in quelling resistance.
So, I mean, and how many people are really talking about the Bangladesh genocide anymore? Three million people died, right? That’s half a Nazi Holocaust, right? That’s a really, really bad thing to have happened. And yet you don’t get those memorials all through DC. You don’t really have this talked about. Like it’s something that was just sort of like forgotten by history. So maybe there was a way that it could have worked. I’m glad that it didn’t. I’m glad that India was able to, and the freedom fighters were able to win If Indira Gandhi had not invaded, this may have been just the massacre in East Pakistan.
I mean, you probably also haven’t heard about the massacres in Baluchistan, which is actually in what we think of as Pakistan now, where hundreds of thousands of Baluchis were killed. And again, we don’t remember this.
Ross Kenyon: Jason, I’m wondering if you have any lessons we can draw about statecraft and design and capacity that might minimize future incidents like this in light of climate change that will soon be upon us in more increasingly dangerous ways.
Jason Miklian: Yeah. And apologies to your listeners. We started with climate change and now we’ve gone all the way over into 1970s geopolitics. It’s all connected.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my show and I want to know about it. So it’s fine.
Jason Miklian: Great. We’ll take a few more left turns and then get back on the right road. No, I think that, you know, getting back to what we were talking about earlier, I think that one of the most important lessons that we have right now is something that There was a recent academic article by Tobias Aida, which I think summarizes really succinctly. It was a 40-year study of climate and conflict. And it said that in the sorts of places like we talk about in the book here, like anywhere that has large populations and political exclusion of ethnic groups, And perhaps under development, almost one third of the conflicts and wars that have started in those places over the last 40 years were preceded by a climate disaster within seven days.
So this is a huge and super important trigger. That we are not reflecting upon at all right now. And it’s so, so important not only to recognize how quickly conflict can start after these events, but the role of local political leaders in either sparking I mean, we also have thankfully, you know, that is still two thirds of the of the data set says that did not happen. And very often that’s because political leaders make the choice to help people that are suffering who maybe aren’t in their ethnic group. You know, if you think about it, like in the United States, imagine, you know, you know, if a hurricane hit Texas right now, there’s no question that the Biden administration would help Republican leaders.
Held areas. But, you know, that was a big question during the Trump administration. Like, would he use the power of the office in order to punish his political opponents in a time of crisis? Thankfully, we didn’t have that sort of big example and America’s institutions.
Scott Carney: Well, we sort of did when he pulled wildfire funding out of California.
Jason Miklian: In a way, but not to that scale and not in a way that would trigger conflict between Groups in America. So our institutions are stronger, but that doesn’t mean that they are completely immune. And if we keep putting stresses, even in a place like the United States, it can be a trigger for conflict. So that’s the most important contemporary lesson I would say, is to recognize this relationship and to recognize that helping those who are of a different ethnic or political group than your own during these times can make the difference between An event that can bring people together and one that tears society apart.
Ross Kenyon: Is there anything that can be done by a listener ahead of time on that besides just talking with people who may not see eye to eye with you on everything, trying to have trans group, I don’t know, solidarity or at least just affinity? Is there more to it than that?
Jason Miklian: It’s a great question. And, you know, at the individual level, like this was Scott was talking about a little bit earlier, too, is like this question of more of climate change in general. But also with the climate conflict in particular, do we want to scare people into action? Do we want to say, look, this is going to destroy society unless you make friends with someone across the aisle? Or do we try to tell a story of hope? And we recognize that even in these impossible situations, there are people who are able to achieve the impossible and bring societies together.
Now, it’s a really difficult question, I would say. I think that at an individual level, you can, of course, support the sorts of people and the sorts of institutions that are designed to not only provide aid after big events, but also recognize the political consequences of it. But I don’t know, Scott, do you have any suggestions? I’m a little bit stumped on that one.
Scott Carney: With many things in this world, it comes down to some level of empathy, which is also the reason why we wrote our book through the eyes of these characters and these people who live through these events. Because, you know, one person dying, that is a tragedy. A million people dying is a statistic. And it becomes sort of a them versus more the subjective understanding of what people are going through. The way we got onto this book initially is Jason and I were on the Indo-Bangladesh border doing a story for Foreign Policy magazine about a wall that India had built all the way around Bangladesh.
It’s a 2300 kilometer wall. And every kilometer there is an armed guard who has orders to shoot somebody who crosses the border and people get shot all the time as they cross the border fence. And we came after this 13 year old girl had died actually on the wall or she was actually caught in the barbed wire and they shot her while she was on the barbed wire and her corpse. Hung there for three days as both the Indian border security force and the Bangladeshi border security force were trying to negotiate how to take her down.
And we sort of arrived right on the heels of this moment and we’re trying to figure out, well, why did India build this wall? And it all traced back to the Bola cyclone, right? It all traced back to the deadliest storm in history when millions and millions and millions of people crossed this border. And so what India has essentially done here is they have said, look, That we know that there’s going to be climate refugees at some point in the future. And that’s their stated purpose. They’re like, this is for climate refugees.
And they’re anticipating that this fence will be a critical barrier in stopping that, which is on the face of it, insane, right? If you have millions of people trying to cross a border, a bunch of barbed wire with some armed guards is not the way you should be dealing with that situation. And I think that we... To some degree, we need to start looking at other humans as people instead of just objects of damage to our own society. And how we solve that, I don’t know. Maybe we all sit around campfire and sing Kumbaya.
I mean, that’s a possibility. But we can start by just telling their stories. And that’s really what I am as a storyteller, is we need to get into people’s lives and you need to have some level of empathy. And that’s going to be one of the many places it starts.
Jason Miklian: And I just add to that, especially in the American context, I mean, it’s not that you think about this just happening in faraway places, you know, a big driver of, you know, of what the Trump administration called the climate caravan or the migrant caravan was driven by climate change. You know, these are these are people coming from Central America who have been forced off of their land for a number of different reasons. Many of which are due to slow burn climate factors. So when you have thousands of people trying to get to the United States, what is your level of empathy for those individuals, like Scott is saying?
And this is something that very much transcends political lines because there is a relatively strong anti-immigration belief by many people in the United States today. So what is your opinion of those people? And have you thought about why they are at And what can we do to help those people both increase in immigration, for example, or also providing more support and aid to the countries that they’re coming from to help them adapt and be more resilient to climate change so they don’t have to move in the first place?
Scott Carney: What should bring humanity more together than climate change, right? I mean, at some point when we talk about the most disastrous outcomes that climate change could wreak on us, whether it is through warfare or even just the, we hit 5C in like 150 years, which is still a possibility, right? You know, at that point, what do your borders mean, right? What does it mean that you have a nice little retreat in New Zealand, right? What does any of that matter? And I think that we need to get a little bit beyond at some point our own selfish, internal looking, short focus mindset and get a little bit outside of ourselves and realize that we are all in this together.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I thought you said you didn’t want to get by the campfire and sing Kumbaya, Scott.
Scott Carney: Yeah, I don’t really like the campfire idea, but I do want to say that Look what happens in Ukraine right now, okay? In Ukraine, you know, we have a pretty clear aggressor here, Russia, right? But in this moment of crisis, a lot of the world, which was very fractured beforehand, you know, the NATO alliance was getting frayed, you know, both sides of, you know, America, like a year ago was terrible. And now we have this sort of hinting that we’re actually, we realize that there are bad things that can happen.
And that if we work together, you know, We can do something about it. There’s a great deal of hope right now. You know, it’s too bad that this has to happen only through war. But climate change is essentially also a war. It’s also the stakes really are death and destruction. It causes wars. It will create... Immense human fallout. And I hope that the acute events as they occur, such as the Flats Glacier or whatever else, I think that these things can provide the impetus that we need to get together and do things, whatever those things might end up being.
It doesn’t need to be kumbaya. It can just be also self-interest. I’m fine with that.
Ross Kenyon: Are either of you willing to speculate about how climate crisis might play out between the countries named in this book, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China? How might an incident in one of these countries affect the others? Are these relationships? I imagine Pakistan and Bangladesh probably still are not super close. I know Pakistan and India are famously one of the, if nuclear war breaks out, there’s like a one in three chance it starts there. I don’t know, speculate wildly for us.
Scott Carney: Oh, I mean, it’s pretty obvious that climate conflicts are enormous there right now, right? I mean, one of the reasons that India and Bangladesh became enemies again only a few years after the liberation war where Bangladesh got its freedom was over water rights coming down from the Himalayas. You know, China has a border conflict with India as well. I mean, we could absolutely see any number of Climate driven horror shows. I mean, there is no aquifer under the state of Rajasthan anymore. Rajasthan is where the cities of Jaipur and to some degree Delhi is sort of like right next to it.
We are in major, major climate crisis. Salinization is coming up throughout the Ganges River Delta where, you know, freshwater resources are in trouble. Yeah, we’re going to see stuff. But I will say, here’s the note of hope. Is that when we asked the sort of one of the top climate change ministers in Bangladesh, like essentially your country is in a lot of trouble, right? Like even if you’ve figured out the storm stuff, you’ve got the rising tide stuff, which is messing up people and everyone is now crowding into Dhaka, which is the fastest growing city on earth right now.
What are you going to do? And his response I really liked, which was, we’re going to adapt. Of course we’re going to adapt. We’re not going to give up, throw our hands into the air and die. We’re going to figure this out. And I know that there’s a lot of people in this climate change space They hate the word adaptation, right? They hate the idea that we have to adapt. No, instead we just suck carbon out of the air and fix it like utopia next week. That’s not going to happen.
This is going to be a measured and slow thing and humans have to adapt. You have to adapt by being empathetic with other humans and realizing that these movements of people and changes in economies are going to affect us all. And when you say it will affect us all, that means you have to change, which means you also have to adapt.
Jason Miklian: And I would just add to that, as Scott was alluding to, this isn’t a question for rampant speculation for 10 years from now or 20 years from now in South Asia. This is happening right now. This is a question of right now. There are massive heaters. All over the Indian subcontinent right now, millions of people are migrating from the Delta of Bangladesh to the capital because they can no longer grow crops right now. So all of this is happening and causing societal stress in this exact moment as we are having this podcast.
So it’s not something where we can think about, oh, well, what sort of thing might happen in the future that can cause conflict? These sorts of conflict actions, both, you know, between countries, but also more importantly, within them, those triggers are being set and they are going off right as we speak. So it’s so, so essential to not only recognize the relationship between, for example, heat waves in conflict or desalinization or desalinization in conflict, but also recognize, as Scott said, the adaptation component has to be done immediately. It’s not something you can build in over a decade.
Ross Kenyon: I found it very plausible in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future that once there’s a heat wave, and I believe it’s in northern India, it goes beyond the dew point, people start dying. It’s not going to be a surprise when someone roguely... Starts doing solar radiation management or other adaptation things that are a bit spookier than watching out for rising tides and better cooling systems. Once that stuff starts happening and the geopolitics of all that, I find that pretty believable and frankly, pretty terrifying.
Scott Carney: A hundred percent. I mean, you know, we’re all on this ride together. We’ll see how it goes.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. We forced a little optimism there at the end. Well, we can start wrapping it up here. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you’d like to, or you feel pretty happy with it, both of you?
Scott Carney: No, I feel like this is great. You know, I’d love you guys to check out the book. It’s called The Vortex. We also have like a YouTube channel. It’s on mine. It’s SG Carney. And we’ve got some related videos and content on this and, you know, mailing lists, all of the things that people generally have. We’d love you to check it out and appreciate your time.
Ross Kenyon: Anything from you, Jason?
Jason Miklian: I’ll just copy everything Scott said and say thank you so much for having us on. And we really appreciate the chance to talk about the book and also about this very tricky and difficult climate conflict relationship because it’s something that I think perhaps many of your listeners especially maybe want to try to contextualize and understand and even do something about. And that’s really what we’re all here for in the end.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s my pleasure. The book is called The Vortex, A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm and Unspeakable War and Liberation. Definitely recommend it. I wish more stories like this were being told. I feel like many of the stories do not take this sort of human societal intergroup conflict lens. I think it’s really important. It’s a great book. There’s also a great audio book version of it too. Thanks so much for listening. Share this podcast with a friend and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated.
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