the floods in Pakistan, the U.S. effort doesn’t compare in any way. And that’s a major problem, considering Pakistan may be the most strategically significant country on the planet right now.

The flood waters along the southern reaches of the Indus River are starting to recede. But with 20 percent of Pakistan still underwater, some of the lessons of Haiti for civilian-military coordination look like washouts. In Haiti, the U.S. military, civilian agencies and non-governmental organizations made innovative use of information technology and social media, partnering in ways that were closer than in previous disaster-relief efforts — and certainly closer than the military has ever worked with civilians in such a context.

But it’s not putting those lessons to use in Pakistan. “No one has spoken to us,” says an officer with the U.S. Southern Command, the regional command in charge of Haiti’s earthquake relief, somewhat surprised by the lack of interest in learning how the military in Haiti opened up its reconnaissance and data-sorting tools to civilian partners.

The Pakistan floods didn’t kill nearly as many people — 1600 fatalities is the current estimated death toll — as the Haiti earthquake’s estimated 230,000 fatalities. But the floods’ impact is still huge. Six million Pakistanis are now homeless, and about 17 people are in some way affected. Judging from this innovative mapping tool the BBC developed, a similar natural disaster in the United States would stretch from the southern Minnesota border down to central Texas. And the flooding continues, bringing with it the prospect of water-borne illnesses like cholera.

In other words, the flood may define an epoch in Pakistani history. And as Pakistan goes, so too does America’s fortunes against al-Qaeda and its allies. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a schizophrenic attitude toward violent Islamic extremists, hunting the Pakistani Taliban while continuing to sponsor the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, and very-slowly-possibly-maybe warming to the idea that its army ought to assault al-Qaeda’s remaining safe haven. Already, terrorist-linked charities are delivering assistance to people in need, undermining a year and a half of painful confrontations with extremists. And the government’s relationship with the United States is deeply unpopular. According to Pew, the last time U.S. approval ratings jumped in Pakistan was after the United States pitched in to help with earthquake relief efforts in 2005. That underscores the opportunities for the United States — and the danger of missing them.

But according to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, a month after the flooding started, the United States has provided an aggregated $200 million for Pakistan. That’s less than half of what it gave Haiti’s much, much smaller population. (Nine million Haitians; 166 million Pakistanis.) With military operations supporting an embassy-led relief effort, the United States set to work rebuilding washed-out bridges, providing  plastic sheeting for temporary shelter for over 150,000 people, and getting 13 water-filtration units into the country.

The Air Force has been flying C-130s filled with two million pounds of food and medicine from nearby Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. (Two weeks ago, I was told the planes took the 90-minute trip to Pakistani military bases once or twice daily.) And not just the Air Force: On Saturday, a Marine C-130 got 11,000 pounds worth of supplies into Gilgit, a mountainous area in the Pakistani north that hadn’t previously seen non-Pakistani aid arrive.

In fairness, flood relief isn’t like earthquake relief. An earthquake is a one-time disaster; the floods continue. Getting access to flooded areas is harder than getting access to collapsed ones. The already-unpopular government has a political need to direct the aid effort. And Pakistan’s traditional uneasiness with U.S. troops on its territory have rendered a Haiti-style ground force unfeasible.

So the U.S. military is helping in other — notably smaller — ways. On Friday, the Defense Department announced that by mid-September, its fleet of 15 helicopters at work on Pakistan relief, including evacuating over 9,000 people so far, will be augmented by 10 Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters from the Army. The U.S.S. Kearsarge,carrying the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, left Norfolk for Pakistan on Friday, about a month ahead of schedule.

But the access problems in flooded Pakistan make it all the more conspicuous that the United States isn’t using a lot of innovative technology that it put to work in Haiti.

After the Haiti earthquake, the military took the unprecedented step of letting civilian aid organizations log in to its All Partners Access Network, a web-based communication tool for uploading and sharing situation reports, maps and basic text messages. All of a sudden, the Red Cross and other NGOs had the kind of situational awareness that the military previously hoarded: The iteration of APAN used in Haiti acquired 1,700 members. Some within U.S. Southern Command considered APAN access a big leap forward for civil-military disaster relief cooperation. “I think we’ve stepped through the door, I don’t know if we’ve fully gone inside the room yet,” SOUTHCOM tech expert Ricardo Arias told Danger Room in January.

In Pakistan, we’re not even in the building. SOUTHCOM hasn’t been consulted by anyone working with the flood relief efforts for its lessons-learned. Several public-affairs officers for commands dealing with Pakistan didn’t respond to questions about the use of APAN. Linton Wells, a former Pentagon chief information officer who’s long advocated for the military to work more closely with civilians in disaster relief, worked with SOUTHCOM in the days after the Haitian earthquake. While he cautions that he doesn’t have the same visibility into U.S. Central Command than he had into SOUTHCOM, he doesn’t see the same kinds of tech-based coordination from CENTCOM to aid workers — which, in fairness, has the other gargantuan tasks of running two wars shortly after a command change.

After the earthquake-relief experience, Wells, now at National Defense University, proposed that regional military commands create standing IT infrastructure for coordination with aid groups when disasters hit. “SOUTHCOM used APAN and set up an open-technology team who got the information out of the cloud and applied it to the situation,” he observes. Wells argues that that model, which he calls “bridge-filter-channel,” should govern how commands sync up the disparate efforts of aid groups in post-disaster environments. “It’s an organizational design issue,” he says. “SOUTHCOM built the bridge-filter-channel. As far as I can tell, CENTCOM hasn’t.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t military-civilian coordination in the flood relief effort. It’s just notably 1.0. that U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson works with her Defense representative, Vice Admiral Mike LeFever; the USAID representative in Pakistan, Bob Wilson; and USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team chief, Bill Berger. NGO outreach is through USAID. And everything runs through the Pakistani government. It might work, but it doesn’t build on the earthquake relief effort’s panoply of wikis and distributed satellite images.

It’s probably not a direct response to the lack of APAN, but the State Department is nevertheless pushing crowdsourced flood news — something it put to use in Haiti as well. The Islamabad embassy encourages people to share flood information through texting FLOODS to 7111 through a network called Humari Awaz, which also carries news of “valuable NGO grant and business opportunities.” On the support side, celebrities like Tom Cruise and Alicia Keys have been tweeting information about SMS-driven relief donations, something the State Department’s tech-tweeter (cautiously) endorsed.

More broadly, there’s at least one huge exogenous difference between the U.S.’s ability to help Haiti and Pakistan: sovereignty. In Haiti, the beleaguered and overwhelmed government of Rene Preval had no problem accepting help from its nearby American neighbor. Not so in Pakistan.

In Haiti, “We took over the landing strips. We took over completely the provision of assistance. There was not even a fig leaf of Haitian sovereignty,” observes Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at Georgetown University who just returned to D.C. from three months in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The Pakistani military in particular is walking a very thin line. They do not want to take responsibility for this fiasco, nor be seen as overridden by American demands and further dependent on a country that a lot of people hate.”

What’s more, Pakistan’s endemic corruption makes it unreasonable to presume that a dollar sent in aid is a dollar spent on aid. “Going into this you had a governance disaster,” Fair continues, since Pakistan’s ministries are staffed by dollar-shearing bureaucrats under normal circumstances. That’s led government officials to try and avoid prying eyes, making it problematic for the United States to ramp up its aid packages. “The Pakistanis have been denying visas to U.S. personnel to execute and oversee the distribution of those [aid] resources … the Pakistanis are kind of reaping the whirlwind of their demurrals to allow the U.S. to expand its personnel presence to execute [the aid bill known as] Kerry-Lugar-Berman with the appropriate oversight that Congress is demanding.”

That’s not to say that U.S. aid is the only difference between disaster and renewal in Pakistan, nor that objective constraints on the U.S.’s ability to help can simply be waved away. But from the perspective of U.S. security interests Pakistan trumps Haiti by far. It’s a nuclear power in a crucial strategic location that serves as an inadvertent (mostly) epicenter for al-Qaeda to export terror, as well as a major frenemy that may have the power to broker an end to the Afghanistan war through compelling its insurgent proxies to negotiate. Maybe it’s time to at least bring in more APIs?

Credit: DOD

See Also:

• Military May Crowdsource Haiti Relief
• Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for Haiti Relief
• Haiti Relief’s Secret Weapon: Google Earth
• Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources …

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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