In its Flood Response Plan, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) identified nearly $460,000,000 of funding needs for the humanitarian response. According to OneResponse, a humanitarian tracking website run by OCHA, 55 percent of those funding needs are still unmet.
How You Can Help
In the U.S. text SWAT to 50555 to make a $10 donation to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) or donate online from international locations.
Aid Agencies Taking Donations
ICRC
CARE
UNICEF
Save the Children
Islamic Relief USA
Relief International
American Red Cross
MERLIN USA
ACTED
OXFAM
International Rescue Committee
More...
Other Ways to Help
Google Person Finder
Report missing or found persons
Sahana Eden
Help enter data into Sahana's response coordination database
Pakistan Flood Incident Reporting
Contribute to a crowdsourced map tracking flood-related incidents.
Pakistan's government estimates some 15.4 million people have been affected by massive flooding this summer, making it the country's worst-ever natural disaster.
« Click to see a U.N. infographic on how the floods compare to other natural disasters in Pakistan (PDF)
In its Flood Response Plan, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) identified nearly $460,000,000 of funding needs for the humanitarian response. According to OneResponse, a humanitarian tracking website run by OCHA, 55 percent of those funding needs are still unmet.
How You Can Help
In the U.S. text SWAT to 50555 to make a $10 donation to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) or donate online from international locations.
Aid Agencies Taking Donations
ICRC
CARE
UNICEF
Save the Children
Islamic Relief USA
Relief International
American Red Cross
MERLIN USA
ACTED
OXFAM
International Rescue Committee
More...
Other Ways to Help
Google Person Finder
Report missing or found persons
Sahana Eden
Help enter data into Sahana's response coordination database
Pakistan Flood Incident Reporting
PAKISTAN FLOOD. HOW TO HELP !!!!
Pakistan: A Lifetime, Washed Away
New York Times
By DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN
A few days ago, I stood atop a 30-foot-high levee in Pakistan’s south Punjab, looking out as the waters from the greatest Indus River flood in memory flowed past, through orchards, swirling around a village on higher ground half a mile out. Twenty miles wide, the flood was almost dreamlike, the speeding water, as it streamed through the upper branches of trees, carrying along bits of brightly colored plastic and clumps of grass.
Many of the displaced people had left the area in the past few days, driving whatever was left of their herds, carrying whatever they were able to rescue. In Pakistan, your primary loyalty is to your biraderi, an untranslatable word, something like clan, but more visceral and entailing greater responsibility and connection. You marry among your biraderi, you must travel and be present when a member of your biraderi is married or buried and, in times of trouble, you stand by your biraderi. In Frost’s words, they are the people who, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
The hundreds of people camped on the levee were those who had no biraderi outside the flooded area, or who couldn’t afford to make the journey to them. Each family had claimed a little spot, made it home, rigged up some sort of shelter like a blanket on a frame of branches. Many had rescued a bag or two of grain, and they sat combing this out in the dirt, trying to dry it. As I walked past, I could smell that much of the grain had spoiled, a bitter loamy odor.
These families’ poverty and loss shone in the little piles of their belongings, the things they had carried with them when the water came: two or three cheap tin plates, a kettle. In one family’s encampment, discordantly, sat a dresser with a mirrored door — how did the man who had brought that through the floodwater think it would be useful?
I found most pitiful a family gathered around a prostrate brown-and-white brindled cow. The father told me that the cow had been lost in the water for four days, and the previous night it had clambered up on another section of the levee, a mile away. The people of this area recognize their cattle as easily as you or I recognize a cousin or neighbor — they sleep with their animals around them at night, and graze them all day; their animals are born and die near them. Someone passing by told the family that their cow had been found, and the father went and got it and led it to their little encampment.
In the early morning the cow had collapsed, and I could see it would soon be dead. Its eyes were beginning to dull, as the owner squatted next to it, sprinkling water into its mouth, as if it were possible to revive it. Its legs were swollen from standing in water, and its chest and torso were covered with deep cuts and scrapes, sheets of raw flesh where branches rushing past must have hit it.
The rest of the family sat nearby on a string bed, resigned, waiting for the end. This was their wealth, but when it died they would tip it into the water and let it float away to the south. Through the past few days they had seen it all, houses collapsed, trees uprooted, grain spoiled, and this was just one more blow.
Driving back to my farm, which has (so far) been spared from the flood, an image of the cow’s ordeal kept coming to me: splashing through the flood for hours and hours, at dusk or in the blank overcast night, with nothing around it but a vast expanse of water stretching away, an image of perfect loneliness. It must have found high ground, waited there as the water rose, then set off again, driven by hunger. In the immensity of the unfolding tragedy, this littler one, this moment of its death, seemed comprehensible to me, significant.
It is difficult to convey the scope of what was lost by those who had labored with ax and shovel to bring this land under cultivation. Fifty years ago, the area was all savanna, waving fields of reeds and elephant grass running for a thousand miles on both sides of the river. As a boy, I hunted there for partridge, walking among a line of beaters, the tall grasses so dense that I was invisible to the next man only 10 feet away. This was wild country.
But in the years since, these people tamed the land, leveling it by hand, expanding their plots acre by acre, until they had conquered it all. Last year, from where I stood on the levee, one would have seen orderly fields proceeding all the way to the river on the horizon. These lands had not been flooded in living memory, and so people built solid houses and granaries, planted trees, raised mosques. This was their life’s work.
Now all that has been swept away. In this area, the best-paying crop by far is sugar cane, which was to be cut in November but now stands submerged, except for the tips of the fronds, dead and rusty gray on the surface. When the water recedes, the people will, if they are lucky enough to have any, sell their cattle and their wives’ ornaments, their dowry gold, to rebuild the watercourses and to level the fields. Some will plant winter wheat, but it will be sown late and will not pay, not enough to cover the costs of reclaiming the land.
Others may plant another crop of cane, which will be sown in February and harvested the following October, 14 months away. Before that, they will have no income whatsoever. The generosity of these people’s relatives, their biraderi, cannot possibly carry them through. They are ruined, and there are millions of them.
This disaster is not like an earthquake or a tsunami. In the 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan, 80,000 people died more or less at one blow; whereas the immediate death toll from this flood is likely to be in the low thousands. The loss of property, however, is catastrophic. It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead, but instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive.
For months and even years, the people of the Indus Valley will not have sufficient income for food or clothing. They will rebuild, if they can afford it, by inches. The corrupt and impoverished Pakistani government cannot possibly make these people’s lives whole again. It’s not hard to imagine the potential for radicalization in a country already rapidly turning to extremist political views, to envision the anarchy that may be unleashed if wealthier nations do not find a way to provide sufficient relief. This is not a problem that will go away, and it is the entire world’s problem. It is said, the most violent revolutions are the revolutions of the stomach.
Daniyal Mueenuddin, a mango farmer, is the author of the story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.”
Imran Khan: a Taliban Goebbels?
By —Dr Mohammad Taqi
Daily times
The PTI and its leader are perhaps politically insignificant, but conceding space to such Ziaist propaganda has the potential to radicalise the nation, especially our youth. Fortunately, Mr Khan is not perceived as an American stooge — he is seen as a Taliban apologist
“The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage” — Carl Bernstein, US journalist.
Perhaps ordinary Pakistanis are not much better off either. But it is not just the journalists embedded with the jihadists who are peddling nonsense. Among the politicians, Mr Imran Khan keeps outdoing himself in the craft of black propaganda. He has been stuffing people with this Goebbels-speak for years and, unfortunately, the western print media is one such avenue he uses to push his outlandish assertions.
While the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman, Muslim Khan, had the dubious courage to clearly own up to the savagery of his outfit, Mr Imran Khan, who is the head and de facto chief spokesman of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, stoops to the lowest levels of skulduggery in defending Taliban atrocities. Sheer disinformation, misinformation, contempt for truth, and an utter disregard for the realities of people’s lives, particularly of the Pashtuns, are what Mr Khan’s spoken and written words are all about.
He seems to have perfected the art of repeating half-truths and quite often just plain lies over and over again. In his article ‘Don’t blame Pakistan for the failure of the war’ (The Times, UK, July 27, 2010), he has some real gems to share. He writes: “Before the West invaded Afghanistan, my country had no suicide bombers, no jihad and no Talibanisation.”
Perhaps Mr Khan had been too busy playing cricket to take note of al Qaeda’s activities in the early 1990s at Abdullah Azzam’s Maktab-al-Khidmat — a base camp in Peshawar for Arab jihadists. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden met each other in Peshawar courtesy Professor Azzam. Suicide bombings were not a norm then, but Azzam himself was killed in a car bombing in November 1989, allegedly orchestrated by his more extremist friends. He disagreed with their concept of takfir, i.e. declaring people who did not meet their definition of Muslim as infidels, who they believed deserved to be murdered. Benazir Bhutto, Dr Najibullah, several Arab rulers and Muslim minorities were placed in this category.
The early 1990s were the formative years of world jihadism and these men in Peshawar were not confined to just Afghanistan. The Afghan-Arabs, as they became known, worked hand in glove with all varieties of Pakistani jihadists and after 1992, Afghan territory was used for their cause. For example, training and sanctuary were provided at the Al-Badr camp in Khost to terrorists who unleashed havoc in Pakistan and around the world.
Mr Khan has completely glossed over the terrorist acts of the jihadists trained in the Pak-Afghan border regions. Riaz Basra of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was one such figure who was involved in over 300 acts of terror on Pakistani soil, including an attempt on Mian Nawaz Sharif’s life, way before the US forces had set foot in Afghanistan. Along with Akram Lahori and Malik Ishaq, Basra had used the training facilities in Sarobi (near Jalalabad). This was the beginning of Talibanisation in Pakistan.
While the terrorist cadres were trained in Afghanistan, their leadership was groomed at various madrassas in Pakistan. However, Mr Imran Khan is either ignorant of this fact or is protecting such nefarious characters when he writes, “Until that point [army action in FATA in 2004], we had no militant Taliban in Pakistan. We had militant groups, but our own military establishment was able to control them. We had madrassas, but none of them produced militants intent on jihad until we became a frontline state in the war on terror.”
Only two entities from what is literally the Ivy League of the jihadist network need a mention to refute Mr Khan’s claim. Karachi’s Jamia Islamia aka Binori Mosque has produced hundreds of jihadist leaders that include Maulana Azam Tariq of Sipah-e-Sahaba, Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the leaders of Harkatul Jihad Al-Islami, and the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Maulana Masood Azhar. The association of this madrassa’s patron (Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai) with the Afghan Taliban, especially Mullah Omar, is well known.
It might not have dawned on Mr Imran Khan but Jalaluddin Haqqani carries the title Haqqani for a reason — he had spent six years at Darul-Uloom Haqqaniah in Akora Khattak. Among the top 32 officials in Mullah Omar’s government, 11 — including six top ministers — were educated in madrassas in Pakistan. Out of these 11, seven were students at the Haqqaniah seminary. The US was nowhere in the picture when the alumni of these madrassas were on a killing spree in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Mr Khan betters himself still when he claims, “After the WikiLeaks revelations yesterday, reports are being floated that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is aiding the Afghan militancy. The fact is that the ISI is not that powerful, but certainly in an environment of chaos and uncertainty Pakistan will need to protect its interests through all means necessary.” Even the ISI may take serious offence to this, as it is positioning itself as the power that can deliver the Taliban, especially the Haqqani network, provided the new set-up in Kabul is to its liking.
These assertions by Mr Khan might even be amusing if he was not capable of even worse assertions. Blaming the US for all ills is one thing, but he has as easily blamed the victims of terrorism. Writing about the Karsaz bombing in ‘Benazir Bhutto has only herself to blame’ (The Telegraph, UK, October 21, 2007), he noted, “I am sorry to say this, but the bombing of Benazir Bhutto’s cavalcade as she paraded through Karachi on Thursday night was a tragedy almost waiting to happen. You could argue it was inevitable...it is different for me campaigning in public, even in the frontier region, because I am not perceived as an American stooge, or a supporter of the war on terror.” Benazir and not the takfiris were to be blamed as per Mr Khan’s views!
The PTI and its leader are perhaps politically insignificant, but conceding space to such Ziaist propaganda has the potential to radicalise the nation, especially our youth. Fortunately, Mr Khan is not perceived as an American stooge — he is seen as a Taliban apologist.
Ahmed Wali Karzai..... The King of Kandahar.
By Janis Mackey Frayer, South Asia bureau chief, CTV News
The most powerful man in Kandahar is alone in his reception room with two mobile phones and a string of prayer beads pinched between his finger and thumb. He rises to greet his visitors, shakes hands, and sits again with a slight sigh. He checks his very gold watch. Then, in keeping with some unspoken routine, Ahmed Wali Karzai begins a ritual discussion of weather and war as they both make Kandahar a harsh place this time of year. "Mainly the Taliban want to have an address," he explains from an armchair, "they want to show something this summer. To show they are still around. That is why there is a good need for a military operation." I ask him if the best way to beat an insurgency is to kill. "You have to show muscles," he says, with a fist pump. "You have to hit them hard, as hard as you can because they have no mercy for anyone." Karzai's detractors might say the same of him. The indisputable don of Afghanistan's hostile south, he has been called a lot of things: a drug profiteer, a thug, a warlord's heavy who threatens critics (or worse). Karzai's well-nurtured notoriety spawns a list of accusations that include paying off the Taliban to grease an empire built around convoys and private security with international contracts from countries like Canada. There is also that business of the CIA and reports that Karzai, the younger half-brother of the country's president, has been on the payroll for years in part to mount a U.S.-funded paramilitary force to kill Taliban. Is any of it true? "My problem is never a legal problem," says Karzai. "It's always a political problem … those international media, they are doing it for some political reason." In the assessment of one coalition official: "Nothing in Afghanistan is clean." Any attempt to reveal incriminating evidence against Ahmed Wali Karzai has so far failed. No government or intelligence agency has ever produced the smoking gun or least nobody has dared. "There is always politics," Karzai says of the accusations leveled against him. "Everybody wants to be in front. Some people, they spread rumours, they stab you in the back." Karzai is a 'fixer'. In Kandahar, that can mean a lot of things. What has been proven over years is that real power in Afghanistan is less a function of government or public service than a spoil of private fiefdom. Guns, money, and control of foreign support are the true benchmarks. To that end, Ahmed Wali Karzai is unstoppable and NATO has no choice but to need him. In diplomatic circles and among the military leadership here, the younger Karzai and his unanswered questions are distilled to the initials ‘AWK' and words like ‘issue' or ‘problem'. "AWK is a concern," sighed a diplomat, "but he is a fact of life." It is an open secret that the international community would like Hamid Karzai to rein him in. AWK is said to be a common worry of the U.S. president and other foreign sponsors whose countries bear the financial and human costs of the war. Karzai the president dismisses any criticism of his brother as baseless, but at times does so at a cost to his own credibility. "It is hard to listen to one and look at the other and be convinced of a virtuous leader," a senior official told me. When most people are asked about AWK, their opinions are shared in hushed voices on the condition they will not be named. Among Afghans, Ahmed Wali Karzai is regarded with complementary doses of respect and fear. On the day I visit his home, men with long beards and hard stares sit quietly in the unofficial waiting room. Their shoes -- I count 37 pairs -- are parked neatly at the steps near the door. They wait with their concerns and needs on the blue-carpeted floor until fate might yield the chance to see him. Karzai is a ‘fixer'. In Kandahar, that can mean a lot of things. "I'm very close to the people, the tribes," says Karzai. "I earn it. I work hard… this is the major thing that I am doing is to keep these things… calm." The Karzai hold on Afghans is firm. His control of for-hire security businesses has effectively created a private army that has thwarted the growth of a viable Afghan National Police force. While patrolling the muddy warrens of a Kandahar neighbourhood, Canadian soldiers walked past the funeral of a young man shot dead that day in the market. Through an interpreter a group of male relatives said he was "killed by one of AWK's men." They told the story of armed security guards looking to settle a score, and that their cousin was hit with a stray bullet. Will they go to police? No, it's AWK, they said. They seemed shocked both by the suggestion they would utter a word and that police would actually listen. Collaborating with Ahmed Wali Karzai is among NATO's bigger gambles in the south. Yet now, more than ever, he is crucial to the mission if it hopes to win anything close to stability in Kandahar. In a report titled ‘Politics and Power in Kandahar', the Institute for the Study of War (www.understandingwar.org) concluded that, "Ahmed Wali Karzai's influence over Kandahar is the central obstacle to any of ISAF's governance objectives, and a consistent policy for dealing with him must be a central element of any new strategy." Its author, Carl Forsberg, went on to predict that Karzai's behaviour and waning popularity among locals will only stir the sort of unrest and vacuum that allows space for the Taliban to exist. Sources hint that Karzai and the need to remodel him form part of the reason why military operations slated for the summer are now effectively delayed until September. There has been an off-the-cuff comparison to the prohibition era of 1930s America, where family cartels thrived on illicit trade and then looked to polish their image to the veneered appearance of legitimacy. It is a trickier venture in Afghanistan. Yet it appears Ahmed Wali Karzai now sees himself as a dean of tribal dynamics and unofficial envoy to international players. "We are winning," Karzai says, with an emphasis on the inclusive. "Taliban is no longer a movement that can threaten the stability of Afghanistan. They can create problems. But I'm not worried sitting in Kandahar with my family that the Taliban will take over." (He claims nine assassination attempts against him in the past three years.) In our interview that stretched nearly an hour, Karzai commended Canada for its efforts, and for bearing the challenges of serving in "the capital of Taliban and Al Qaeda." He raves especially about Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, who has returned as Commander of Canadian Forces for a few months. "I really hope to see General Vance," he says, "maybe he will come for lunch." I asked Karzai if 2011 was too early for Canadian troops to be leaving Afghanistan. He explained that with 30,000 American troops here now it is no longer the concern of numbers that it was in 2006. Still, he believes it sends the wrong message about commitment, and the Taliban benefits. "It's up to them," Karzai says of Canada's political decision-makers. "If they know the war is over they can leave. The war is still going on. War is still happening." According to some estimates, the war has meant a billion dollar commercial network for the Karzai family through businesses dealing in food, fuel, construction, and security. Canada has one of his firms on contract to guard the Dahla Dam project. As for being a paid operative of the CIA, Karzai never flatly denies the allegation. He says he meets with everyone -- Americans, British, Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians, Dutch. "We are partners in this war, you know," he says. "I didn't sign a paper with a contract that I work for this agency or this person or this organization. I met with your Special Forces, I met with your military, I met with your generals. Can someone accuse me tomorrow that I was working for the Canadians?" At the end of our discussion, Ahmed Wali Karzai wished us well. His next guests were already waiting on the couch. He checked his very gold watch and shifted his attention. We left Karzai's villa, walking past the barefoot men still waiting, and returned to the weather and war that make Kandahar a harsh place this time of year.
