John Metzler Archive

Crisis overload hobbles Pakistan relief efforts

The upcoming annual 65th session of the UN General Assembly will immediately be confronted by these humanitarian crises.

While millions of Pakistani have been displaced from the Monsoon flooding in the Punjab and Sindh, international attention towards the ongoing crisis has dramatically ebbed. “The world’s attention is waning at a time when some of the biggest challenges for the relief effort here are still to come,” said Valerie Amos, the UN’s new Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. She added, “After a strong start, funding for the Pakistan floods response seems to have reached a plateau.”

Ms. Amos later warned, “In some parts of Pakistan, a new disaster is happening every few days and millions of people are still waiting for the support they need to survive.”

While international donors have been tasked to pledge a minimum of $460 million for the millions of displaced persons, much of the aid is simply not forthcoming. The UN says only about two thirds of the pledged assistance has been received. The deep recession affecting key donor countries such as the USA, Japan and the Europeans may be one such reason.

Massive floods in Pakistan have created one of the largest humanitarian crises the UN and its humanitarian partners have ever responded to, and flood waters are still spreading, adds the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Besides washing away homes and precious crops, the rising waters spread disease and undermine civil society.

So far the U.S. has provided massive humanitarian assistance in the form of halal meals, pre-fabricated steel bridges, as well as air support to and within Pakistan to transport food and rescue people. Washington’s aid is estimated at $28 million so far. The European Union has pledged $90 million in assistance.

In an unprecedented press conference Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Abdullah Hussain Haroon appeared with Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of India’s independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, to appeal for aid in response to floods. “We have to get the conscience of the world working on this jointly,” Mr. Gandhi, a Research Professor at the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, told correspondents.

Amb. Haroon stressed that the people who had been most affected by the disaster, however, were not militants, but those citizens he described as “the uncomplaining hard core” of Pakistani society. In other words those millions who are unseen, suffer in silence, and are sadly often the victims of their own government’s corruption.

As an earlier column of mine argued, significant American humanitarian assistance to Pakistan is a crucial long-term investment in a fragile country wracked by terrorism, inter-Islamic violence, and weak institutions. While the terrorist Taliban has threatened international aid workers, the stark fact remains that not helping Pakistan and leaving the humanitarian task to charities aligned with Islamic fundamentalists, allows the militants a propaganda windfall among the very people they wish to recruit.

For a myriad of reasons an unstable Pakistan poses a clear security challenge not only for neighboring Afghanistan and democratic India but for the USA and Europe too. Islamabad’s already weak government affects the stability of all South Asia and given Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile, the ramifications of such instability extends well beyond the region. Washington would do well to heed such warnings.