In Pakistan floods, U.S. must step into breach
(CNN) -- The U.S. response to the increasing natural disaster in Pakistan is, like so much else when it comes to American relations with that country, too little and too tentative.
Epic flooding now hitting Pakistan is an unfolding humanitarian crisis on the scale of its 2005 earthquake, which claimed some 75,000 lives, or the 2004 Asian tsunami, in which more than 200,000 people died. And because of the gradual nature of flooding, as opposed to the sudden impact of an earthquake, the devastation over time could overwhelm those earlier crises
One in nine Pakistanis -- some 20 million people -- are already homeless, lacking food or medicine. Health officials warn that a cholera epidemic is likely, with 3½ million children now at risk.
Despite the cataclysmic scale of this disaster, the Obama administration is not responding with the same direct, comprehensive and large-scale effort that the Bush administration undertook in response to the 2005 Pakistani earthquake and the 2004 Asian tsunami.
This current approach of primarily relying on the Pakistani government and local aid groups will not work -- either in terms of meeting the scale of the crisis or swaying Pakistani public opinion toward the United States.
American aid to the flood victims is a clear humanitarian imperative. Some have argued that it is also in the national security interest of the United States to win friends and stabilize the country. This is of particular concern since, according to my contacts in Pakistan and reports in South Asia media, radical Islamist groups allied to al Qaeda are on the front lines in providing direct aid to the flood victims.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, linked to the terrorists who carried out the 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, has already reportedly established 13 relief camps, with some 2,000 members providing help.
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