A fragile country

Maybe it's the holiday season? Maybe the fact that, relatively, not that many people perished ("only" 1,500 so far)? Or, maybe, it's because it is a possibly-dangerous Muslim country? Whatever the reason, one of the most severe humanitarian crises in years is inflicting Pakistan and the UK and world media barely mention it.

Unusually harsh monsoons have caused the Indus to overflow and flood 1/4 of the country leaving 20m people homeless and destroying crops and killing the livestock that feed 185m Pakistanis. Diseases and starvation are threatening the lives of tens of thousands. And still, whilst the Secretary General of the UN declared this the greatest humanitarian disaster he's ever seen (and he's seen the 2004 tsunami and the Haiti earthquake), governments and individuals around the world are slow to react.

On the face of it one would think that richer nations will be especially driven to assist the Pakistani government and people. The country is a fragile, swinging like a pendulum between democracy and military rule. The Afghanistan war has fuelled the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban threatening to convert a secular nation into a theocracy. And, worse of all, Pakistan is a nuclear power with a rich and notorious past of driving nuclear proliferation from North Korea in the east to Libya in the west.

So why are most countries slow to react? I tend to believe the answer lies in the failures of such interventions in the past. Partly it's to do with corruption and lack of governance; the funds donated often find their way to the wrong hands. More significant, however, is that the richer countries have realised, finally, that they actually know very little about places like Pakistan. Countries like Iraq, Afghanistan or North Korea, we've learnt "thanks" to the NeoCons, is to foreign govenrnments like a Pandora's box; you really want to open it, but have no idea what you will find when you open it. More importantly, you have no idea how to undo the harm created by opening the box to start with. As a consequence, doing nothing feels safer than doing the right thing. In the meantime, 20m people are suffering.

PS 700km down. 300km to go.