 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Abbey Williams, vice president of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at USIP. I have great pleasure in welcoming you to the Institute and this public event on Pakistan and the floods in Pakistan. The Institute is an independent, non-partisan organization created and funded by Congress, dedicated to preventing and resolving violent international conflicts. In fulfilling its mission, USIP works under the rubric Think, Act, Teach, and Train. The Institute has worked actively to promote peace and stability in Pakistan over the past several years. Our Pakistan program seeks to achieve three complementary goals. First, to strengthen capacity to mitigate conflict. Second, to promote peace building through education and civil society. Initiatives. And third, to improve mutual understanding between the United States and Pakistan. It is against this background that we have convened today's event. Pakistan has been hit by the worst natural disaster in its history. The floods this summer have submerged one faith of Pakistan under water and seriously affected millions of people. The flooding is estimated to have cost several billion dollars in damages and prompted an unprecedented 2 billion appeal for assistance by the United Nations. While the United States is by far the largest bilateral donor to relief efforts thus far, the overall international response has been new quorum. This disaster has come in the wake of an economic crisis and continuing security challenges. It is clear that Pakistan cannot get through this difficult period on its own. It will need a major recovery and reconstruction program and the continued support of the international community. We are fortunate to have three outstanding panelists with us this afternoon. I will introduce them in the order in which they will speak. Our first speaker is His Excellency Ambassador Hussain Hakani, who has been serving as Pakistan's ambassador to the United States since April 2008. Ambassador Hakani has had a distinguished career in the varied worlds of diplomacy, academia, and journalism. He is the author of the highly regarded 2005 book Pakistan Between Mosque and Military. Ambassador Hakani will speak about Pakistan's needs and requirements and the action taking thus far by the government of Pakistan. Our second speaker is Randy Martin, Director of Global Emergencies Mercy Corps. He has been engaged in international humanitarian work for over 25 years. He has just returned from a monitoring visit to Pakistan where Mercy Corps has been working for over two decades. He will speak about his agency's response to the disaster, especially in Sindh and the Swat Valley. Our final panelist is Mark Preslin, Regional Director for Asia Pacific Middle East in Europe in the International Services Department of the American Red Cross. He has spent half of his long professional career living and working in Asia. He will discuss the efforts of the American Red Cross in Pakistan and the opportunities and challenges in making the response successful. Ambassador Hakani will speak for 20 minutes. Randy Martin and Mark Preslin will speak for 10 minutes each. This will be followed by a question and answer period. Ambassador, you have the floor and welcome. Thank you very much, Mr. Williams. For the convenience of everyone, I just thought that I will make a PowerPoint presentation here, and I will begin right here. Let me just begin by saying that the Pakistan floods are a major catastrophe that has not yet been fully understood because of the way it has been reported. Based on that, let me just start my presentation giving you an idea of the scale of the catastrophe. The parts you see as severely affected and moderately affected are in red and in pink. And you will notice that the red covers a significant part of the inhabited parts of Pakistan. There are many images here which tell you about the scale of the tragedy. But nothing will grab your attention more than when I come to the exact numbers and when you realize that one-fifth of Pakistan is underwater as a result of these floods, which is actually the area the size of Italy. 20 million people have been affected. And the number of people who have been affected are more than the number of people that were affected by the tragedies of the tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, and the Pakistan earthquake of 2005 put together. It is the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history in terms of the population affected, more than 20 million. The area impacted 150,000 square kilometers. And it has affected 78 of the country's 141 districts. In terms of human suffering, we have more than 1,800 people dead. That, by the way, is much lower than the tsunami and the Haiti earthquake. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why this disaster has not received the kind of attention that the earlier tragedies did. It seems that these days, for a tragedy to get attention, there have to be large numbers of fatalities rather than the suffering of people in other ways. So in this case, 1,800 dead is, in comparison to the other tragedies, a lot less. More than 2,900 injured. More than 3 million children under five years have been affected, 600,000 expectant or lactating mothers. And they have been so far in the various scamps, more than 6 million consultations for skin diseases, acute respiratory infections, acute diarrhea, suspected malaria, and bloody diarrhea. So the post-flood disease fears are fears that are significant. But there are two important pieces of good news. Number one, the fact that the government was able to organize large-scale evacuations after the initial impact of the flood made sure that there were fewer fatalities and casualties. So the lower casualties reflect a successful evacuation strategy. And the second, while these diseases have been identified, in many cases have been identified, there has been no major outbreak of an epidemic. A cholera epidemic was feared. Diarrhea when it came was limited and restricted primarily because of the efforts of many NGOs, the government itself, and the Pakistani armed forces that were mobilized by the government. The damage to Pakistan's infrastructure is extensive. Roads, rails, bridges, canals, schools, more than 12,000 schools have been damaged. More than 500 health facilities out of 2,900 have been damaged or destroyed. It's important to understand, again, the magnitude of the infrastructure disaster. In the district of Swat, there were 43 bridges crossing the various rivers, spanning the various rivers. And the oldest of these was built in 1928, the newest in 2008. So that's 80 years of construction that was all washed away in the course of the flood. And will have to be rebuilt. Just to give you a further idea, this is like a graphic representation. I wish it was bigger and therefore could have been seen much more easily by people in the back of the room. But still, it gives you some idea that the worst affected province is the province of Sindh. That is in Purple and Khebar Pakhtunkhwa, which is the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which is in Maroon here. The number of houses damaged is exactly similar sort of patterns in terms of percentages. Although the number of people affected in Punjab are much larger. So there are fewer houses affected there and yet more people because of population density. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, when he went there, said that the scale of this disaster is so large, so many people in so many places in so much need. And then he said that Pakistan is a slow-motion tsunami. Make no mistake, this is a global disaster, a global challenge. When film star Angelina Jolie visited Pakistan, she said it's not just a humanitarian crisis, it's an economic and social catastrophe. And the foreign minister of Germany described it as an unparalleled catastrophe. The population affected, as I said earlier, is greater than the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, and the Haiti earthquake combined. This is just a comparative statement of the various disasters. And the purpose is essentially to give you an idea of the relative scale of the various disasters. So Pakistan's floods have affected 20 million people. The Pakistani earthquake of 2005 affected 3.5. Katrina, Hurricane Katrina affected half a million people. The Cyclone Nergis in Myanmar in 2008 affected 2.4 million. The tsunami affected 2.2 million. So it's at least 10 times the number of people affected by the tsunami have been affected by this catastrophe. And in terms of the damage to households also, which is the last line here, which probably only those with very good eyesight can see, even there you will notice that the number of households that have been affected and the house is damaged is far greater than that of the other disasters. This again is a comparative chart showing you the, in terms of the number of people affected, the Pakistan flood far outweighs the number of people affected by the other tragedies. The area affected is likewise. The number of deaths, however, is different. You will notice that the Pakistani flood, which is on the absolute left, has far fewer fatalities than the Haiti earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami. And that is an explanation for why probably the world has been waking up to this a little slowly. Now the response of the international community to various disasters. In case of the Pakistani floods, as of August 9th, $3.2, $3.20 was committed per flood affected person. In case of the Pakistani earthquake, within 10 days of the crisis, $70 per person had already been committed. In case of Cyclone Nargis of the coast of Myanmar, $46 per person affected had been committed 10 days into the crisis. And in case of the Haiti earthquake, within the first 10 days, $495 per person affected had been committed. So if you notice, even compared to the Myanmar cyclone, the commitment per person who has been affected, it's not like that the tragedy is any less for a person affected in Myanmar or in Pakistan. But in terms of the international commitment of resources, it's far less this time. And only $3.20 per affected person have been committed by the international community in case of the Pakistani floods. Similarly, you will notice this. It's a much more graphic representation. Per capita assistance, 10 days into the crisis is again the lowest for Pakistani floods compared with the Pakistani earthquake, with the Myanmar cyclone and the Haiti earthquake. And it is something that is particularly noticeable as we move beyond the early phases and go into these stages of rehabilitation and reconstruction, which is going to be another very expensive proposition. The United States has so far been the single most generous international donor. Pakistan is particularly and the people of Pakistan are grateful for international assistance and for the assistance from the United States. Before we go, let me just say that the US was first and in terms of committing resources as well as committing helicopters of the United States military that were moved in and that were particularly helpful in the rescue and relief phase and helped move people and save a lot of lives. But the rest of the international community has been slow to move and even in the United States, the one thing that is really lagging behind is private charitable donations. In case of the other tragedies, the corporate sector and private individuals in the United States were far more generous and I have an explanation for why that may have happened. We will come to that later on in my presentation that why has this particular tragedy received less attention and less from the generous people of the United States. The government of Pakistan's response which has been criticized quite a lot in the media needs to be examined methodically. First of all, when the floods first started in the northwest of Pakistan, they were a surprise. The last great flood in the Indus Basin was in 1929. In some cases in this flood, the water flows were six times larger than the water flows of the 1929 flood. So no government, no government, however competent, could have dealt with that given the magnitude and the scale. Second, historically, most major floods in the Indus Basin have always come as a result of the flooding of the eastern tributaries of the river Indus. So almost all of Pakistan's meteorological resources flood control resources, flood prediction resources are all geared towards the eastern tributaries of the Indus that flow from the northeast into the Indus Valley. In this particular case, the floods started as a result of heavy rains in Afghanistan and in the northwest. And the flooding came from the western tributaries of the Indus. So the prediction mechanisms, the flood control mechanisms that are historically in place were just not there to respond to this particular situation. And secondly, in small towns, in small villages, the government's presence is usually small. It's a police officer, a local administrator. That's the usual presence. And those people were themselves affected by the floods. So therefore, by the time the federal government could mobilize the resources and quite a lot of people have pointed out that it was the military that was the first responder in many cases. That is usually the case in Pakistan in many countries that the military is the institution that is used for dealing with disasters of this magnitude. After all, civilian members of parliament don't have helicopters. And the local government officials, municipal officials are not the ones with boats. So it has to be the military whose helicopters are deployed and whose boats are brought in. And that is why the military played such a significant role and a role that has been appreciated by everyone in Pakistan and outside. But the number of relief camps that have been created is about 5,392, covering the length and breadth of the country, depending on the area and the number of people affected. It probably took a while to get started, but I think that now the government has covered the entire population with the relief camps. There are several mechanisms dealing with the situation. The overall coordinator of the relief effort is the National Disaster Management Authority. It facilitates foreign teams, including I think the organizations that are sitting here. It produces daily situation reports of the status of health in different camps. And it's the main coordinator of the relief effort. It has also created a National Emergency Operations Center. It's overflows the logistics flow system and the distribution mechanism. And there's a high powered National Oversight Disaster Management Council that exercises oversight, which basically Pakistan's politics, like politics in many places, is rather polarized. And in such a situation, it's very simple for people to accuse each other of both incompetence and corruption. And therefore it was important to have an oversight mechanism that looked beyond the immediate politics and was able to give a level of comfort to both governmental and private donors, that the resources they were allocating for this were being utilized for the purpose for which they were being donated. Now a word about why this particular crisis has not received the international attention it should have. Why have people been reluctant to make the kind of contributions they did in the spirit of charity and humanitarian giving that they did in the case of the earthquake of 2005 and the Haiti earthquake and the tsunami? One explanation can be found in how the international media has covered the floods. So here are some of the themes of the media coverage. Most media coverage, and I'll give you numbers in a minute just to show you that this is not just a political statement but an actually empirically provable statement. Most media coverage focused on the political dimensions of the floods, governments incompetence, whether the president was present in the country at the time of the floods or not, what the different political parties thought of each other's response to the flood, will the militants take advantage of the flood, will the government survive the floods, et cetera, instead of the human dimension of the tragedy? In fact, very few people still, the average newspaper reader, does not know the scale of the disaster as I have explained it. They have been more concerned about will the militants take over? For example, nobody did a empirical story on how many camps did the militants, so-called militants, actually establish. Because if they had, it would have become obvious that compared to 5,300 camps of the government, nine camps by the militants which reporters showed up at are not necessarily comparable. But because it's a sexier news story to talk about a jihadi group showing up with relief and assistance, we saw more stories of that nature. And the other theme was the government insensitivity to the plight of people. Some of the, I'm deliberately not identifying the newspapers, but here are the headlines. Pakistani floods could further hurt unstable nation as military focuses on aid. So again, it's not that human beings are suffering, it's instability, military dimension, and the politics of it. With flooding, Pakistan focus on fighting terror at risk. Pakistan president recognizes floods potential to destabilize nation. Slow Pakistan response to flood hurts the Dari. Pakistan floods, minister says it won't go to extremists. Pakistani militants seeking to exploit flood chaos. Pakistan floods provide political boon to Islamic militants. World increases flood aid to Pakistan. US worried extremists may benefit from crisis. And then of course, the ultimate, which by the way, I'm sure in the good old days when you actually had to set up headlines and type, I think this is a headline. Some American newspapers would probably have kept in different fonts and kept it all because they run this story so frequently. Is Pakistan heading for a coup? So they can keep that headline and every three months when somebody sort of feels like doing a story. Hey, can you bring out the Pakistan and not a coup, not yet headline and then put it in? Especially one major newspaper in the United States has a tendency to do that and has done that with alarming regularity over the last two years. And so these are the kind of headlines. And again, it's Pakistan's instability puts army and US on edge. So nowhere is it about the 600,000 pregnant and lactating women who are having to give birth or bring up children, deal with infants in makeshift, tented villages. It's not about the children whose immunizations are going to be jeopardized as a result of this. It's not about the poor whose homes have been washed away. It's not about the great infrastructure damage. It's only about the politics. And I'm not saying that in the case of a human tragedy, the politics is not relevant, it is. But I think that is not the only thing relevant and I think I can at least through a sort of shaking of heads in this room get acknowledgement of that fact that that is correct. It's not correct just to focus on the politics of a human tragedy of this magnitude and totally ignore the humanitarian dimension of the tragedy as has been done. Now, again, we did a comparison of the earthquake and floods comparing Haiti and Pakistan. And this is actually Elizabeth Ferris at the Brookings Institution has done a study and she said that within the first 10 days, the earthquake in Haiti got 3000 stories in the print and broadcast media in the United States. In case of the Pakistani floods, there were only 320 broadcast news stories and 730 print news stories. And of course, as I pointed out, a bulk of the print news stories focused more on the politics and not the humanitarian crisis. Just to introduce a reality check here. There's a very interesting study that has been conducted by Dr. Tahir Andrabi of Pomona College and Jishnudas and it's called In Aid We Trust, Hearts and Minds in the Pakistan earthquake of 2005. I introduced this deliberately because just for people who get worried about the media coverage, one thing you learn when you're my age and have been around the block a few times, you realize that you've read it somewhere. And so it's important to kind of compare that all the things that are being said today have been said before as well. So in case of the 2005 earthquake also, the same things had been said. The militants arrived first with aid. The international donors were worried, will there aid be really used for the purposes for which it's being assigned, et cetera, et cetera. What are the political consequences of the earthquake? And they had a very interesting finding. And that finding was that the hard line Islamist charities did little to help despite the publicity they generated. This is the Andrabi Das study which says that when they went and they conducted, they had 70 researchers going to 28,000 households in the four rural districts of Kashmir, took 126 randomly selected villages and they specifically asked questions about who came to help you during the earthquake. Now that the earthquake is over, everybody's kind of back to normal. It's not just the daily news story. It's, this is about people's lives. And you ask them, and so what do you remember most? Who came to your help? And it turns out that more than 60 people of the people living close to the fault line said they trusted foreigners, specifically Europeans and Americans, people from Mercy Corps, I'm sure, and from other organizations and the various international NGOs that showed up to help. People said we trusted them. Only 5% said they had received any assistance from the various Islamist charities. 95% didn't have any interaction with the Islamist charities, even though in terms of news coverage, at least one third of the news coverage of the earthquake went to the Islamist charities and their activities, totally disproportionate to their activity. Closest to the fault line, 80% said that the Pakistan Army showed up to help them. And 40% reported receiving assistance from foreigners and the United Nations. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to suspend disbelief when it comes to Pakistan. People are willing to always believe that there is a coup in the works. They are always willing to believe that all that happens in Pakistan is politics, in which people are extremely hostile towards and suspicious of whatever is the government of the day. There is a readiness to assume the worst about Pakistan. But the fact of the matter is that, correct, we bleed like the rest. We have seen the suffering and our suffering has to be seen outside the negative political context to be news. Pakistani pain is just sometimes not enough to make it to the front page of the newspaper of record of the United States. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much Ambassador Hakkani. Now give the floor to Randy Martin, Director of Global Emergencies of Mercy Corps. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to sit on such an esteemed panel. It's been a long time since I've been engaged in Pakistan. I lived there about 20 years ago for about three years and still have some near and dear friends from those days. But this recent visit back to Pakistan has been my first trip back since and it's been a very touching one. And I have to say it's, I don't have the deep background that a lot of people here have in Pakistan but I certainly have a very warm place in my heart and it's very concerning to see Pakistan face with such a challenge. I wanna talk a little bit about the NGO perspective on this crisis. Again, I'm not a Pakistan expert but more from the emergency side of international NGO work. Mercy Corps is primarily a development organization. We focus on the intersection between government and business and civil society and where they interact is where we find the foundation pieces for development. We've been in Pakistan for nearly 25 years working primarily in development work. But we have also responded to in emergencies and like many development organizations we view emergencies as opportunities for change as opportunities for doing something different and we view the situation now in Pakistan with that optimism, if you will, that this is an opportunity to do things differently. We responded to the earthquake in 2005, the cyclone in 2008, and in 2009 we responded to the conflict, the displacements in the Swat Valley. This, as the ambassador pointed out, dwarfs all of that and many other conflicts. This is huge. This is enough to break many countries but I think the thing that's been really remarkable to me having lived in Pakistan and having also watched Mercy Corps respond to these different emergencies is that Pakistan has an incredible resilience. It has ability to rebound. It has this robust professional class. It has an active economy. It has a very active civil society. So I think there's a lot of things that are encouraging there and that we see indeed being engaged in this response. Again, though, this is a huge crisis and it's going to be very, very challenging. And I think if I came back from this visit and realizing the challenge is even bigger than I had originally thought. A lot of the data has been shown. There's not a need for me to go over that again but 20 million people affected is really huge. Two million homes destroyed is massive. 12 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. 10 million people needing food. This is 20% of the land underwater. This is huge. It's a huge, huge crisis. I wanna talk a little bit about how it plays out in different parts of the country because it's not all the same. And Mercy Corps is working in two areas of the country and they're very different from each other and what the problems are and what the challenges are that we face. We're working in the Swat Valley in the North and we're working in Northern Sind in sort of the neighboring areas of Luchistan. They're very different geologically. They're very different politically. Very different ethnically, socioeconomically. The Swat Valley in the North, it's a very narrow, deep valley. The flood hit there like it was sort of a flash flood. As the ambassador pointed out, it knocked out massive amounts of infrastructure, many, many bridges, municipal water systems, these kinds of things. But the floodwaters have rescinded fairly quickly and there's been a considerable amount of repatriation or return of the displaced already. So the flooding is by and large over there and people are already starting recovery there. We're doing cash for work programs there, which is really a recovery kind of program, not a relief program. There are ominous threats. It's already started to snow in the northern parts of the Swat Valley so there's a need really to get shelter moving very quickly. The other significant part about the Swat is sort of the political and the security element of that. As you all know, there's been, the government's been fighting an insurgency there. A year and a half ago, well over three and a half million people were displaced by that conflict there. And when the flood hit, there were still a million people displaced from that conflict. So this emergency on top of that emergency has created sort of two layers of crisis. The other thing about sort of the political and security nature of the conflict in the Swat is it makes it very difficult for NGOs to find the space to operate. It's very difficult for us to operate with neutrality, to maintain our independence, to be seen as neutral actors. I think the NGO community in Pakistan has suffered some very tragic losses in the last couple of years. And much of that is related to the perception that people have that we're perceived as sort of political agents in this broader struggle that's going on, particularly in that part of Pakistan. So going into the future, it's hard sometimes to see how NGOs will be able to participate fully in the reconstruction in the Swat Valley and other parts of the Northwest. Sindh province is a very, very different kind of dynamic. Just visually, it's not this narrow valley, it's actually a very broad flat plain that stretches for miles and miles. And the normal times, the flow of the Indus is controlled by one of the most extensive irrigation systems in the world that takes the water and spreads it over millions of square kilometers. Ironically, this flood, basically that same irrigation system is what spread the flood waters far and wide and sort of caused that image that we've seen of Pakistan, of Southern Pakistan, these miles and miles and miles of flooded land. It's the water that was carried inland by the irrigation system. The other thing about that is that the irrigation system, even while I was there, it was a good six weeks after the initial flood crisis started, there were still breaches in the dykes that hold in these waters. So there were still new areas being flooded, even that late after the initial deluge of water from the north. So it's geologically very different, it's a very different environment to work in. There's still even rescue efforts going on right now in the Sindh. So I think three quarters of those impacted by the floods are in the Sindh. So this is how you get some of these superlatives that you've heard from Ban Ki-moon and Rajiv Shah and others who have visited there saying it's the worst crisis they've ever seen and really describing this massive, massive flood disaster which is really very impressive to see indeed. The troubling news I found during my visit is I think we were assuming that the floodwaters would rescind rather quickly and we'd be able to help people repatriate or return to begin reestablishing their houses and in particular to get seeds in the ground for the November winter wheat crop. But what I discovered to my dismay and I think is becoming more and more evident to everyone who's watching the situation is the floodwaters are not going to rescind that quickly. The estimates that we heard from local officials were as much as 80% of the land in the southern part of Pakistan was going to remain either waterlogged or flooded well into the planting season which will preclude the planting of the winter wheat crop. So the impact of that of course is going to be enormous. It means quite a number of things. It means there's going to be a protracted emergency phase. We're going to have to provide temporary relief for a long time instead of using those resources to help people return to their homes and reestablish their homes. We're going to have to maintain a food pipeline throughout the winter rather than investing those same resources and seeds and tools to get planting going again. We're going to see the impact of all those farm workers who would be normally cultivating their lands right now, they're instead going to be going into the labor market and we're already seeing the value of labor plummet which of course is going to have an impact not only on those who have been displaced but those who have not been displaced, the other people impoverished in the send who have not yet been affected by the flood will be affected by that. So we're going to see there's still 1.2 million people that haven't received shelter assistance. We're going to have to provide them with temporary shelter rather than working with them on transitional shelter to help them reestablish their homes. So this delay and the crisis I think is going to have really very much a monumental impact on the relief situation that we face going forward. I want to talk about the importance nevertheless of shifting away from traditional relief and handing things out which is basically what we're doing right now and send to more market oriented relief and I think this is very imperative for us to do in the coming weeks to get away from importing and distributing massive quantities of stuff and instead begin working in market-based interventions like cash for work programs which will help get people engaged in the cleanup which will be very important, get money in people's pockets which they can take into the local market to keep the local economy going. I think that we need to make this shift very quickly. I'm very encouraged by the meetings that I had with the Provincial Disaster Management Authority, the government authorities that are coordinating the response and send. They are very enthused by this kind of approach, very supportive of this kind of approach but they're also warning that the NGO community needs to get itself coordinated on how to institute that. It's very important that the NGOs and the government work very closely together to monitor the value of labor and markets to make sure that we're paying a consistent amount that does not damage the local economy but in fact props it up so it's gonna require a lot of coordination from us. And I think related to that is the overall theme that as we shift from handing things out to more of a recovery approach to working in the send, it's very important that NGOs work to support the capacity of the government, to support the initiatives of the government and to empower it as much as we can to pursue its reconstruction objectives. And this is sometimes a challenge for NGOs who kind of like to work on their own or who sometimes have trouble coordinating with each other so I really implore my own organization and the many others that are there to begin to work much more closer together. The final point I wanna make is sort of to comment to the rhetoric that we often hear coming from our own community that you should never waste a good crisis, that we need to build back better. And I think the send presents some special challenges. Just to rebuild send back to the way it was is not very compelling to me. There's endemic poverty, there's a system of feudal land ownership there which has made poverty endemic to that area for many, many generations. This is a great opportunity to rethink that. It's a great opportunity to look again at land reform. It's a great opportunity to look at ways that we can use micro enterprise for example to break this cycle of farmers having to borrow from their landlords to buy seeds and then never being able to pay them back. It's a great opportunity to rethink that relationship between farmers and landowners and I implore my colleagues in government to create an environment that allows that to happen and I implore my colleagues in the NGO community to help think of creative ways to support that coming about. So in conclusion, I think you can see there's many different ways that this emergency is playing out. In the north, the IDPs have already begun returning. It's gonna be very difficult for NGOs to engage there because of the political and the security environment. In the south it looks like we're gonna have a prolonged situation where relief is going to continue to be necessary for parts of the community while other parts begin to move back closer to their homes. I think it's gonna be a long and challenging struggle for us. And finally, there just needs to be a way, a more creative way, a more just way of finding a more durable solution for the people of the center. So thank you very much. Thank you, Randy Martin. Now we'll give the podium to Mark Presslin. The scale is indeed immense. It's hard to see the colors on this slide, but the ambassador showed a slide that showed the same thing which is just the amount of the country which is affected. Which is hard to take in, really. Talking about the Red Cross, Red Crescent response, I find I always need to step back for a minute and explain how the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement works internationally. There are three components of the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement. The National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies of which the American Red Cross is one, the Pakistan Red Crescent is another, and of which there are 186 throughout the world. And there is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies to which we all belong. And there is the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC based in Geneva, like the Federation, which works primarily in conflict situations. When a large disaster happens in a country, it is that country's National Red Cross or Red Crescent societies responsibility initially and then prerogative to ask for assistance internationally if they feel they need it. In this case, the Pakistan Red Crescent immediately did, through the Federation, issue an appeal for assistance. And in the case of these disasters, all three elements of the Red Cross, Red Crescent movement, the National societies led by the Pakistan Red Crescent society, the Federation and the ICRC are all there working together in a coordinated operation. Just some figures. The Pakistan Red Crescent has about 300,000, or I'm sorry, 130,000 volunteers, all of whom are working in the operation. As you can see from the map, the movement, as we call it, is operating throughout the flood zone on a variety of different sort of foci. First of all, relief. There are relief teams throughout the area working on distribution of first need food and non-food items. There are health teams, both Pakistan Red Crescent and International Federation deployed throughout the region, providing first line assistance for the main conditions, which as the ambassador pointed out, include acute respiratory infection, diarrhea, as well as skin infections. Water sanitation, there's an ongoing need for potable water. The Red Cross, Red Crescent has a number of Watt San teams out there. One anecdotal story I heard the other day, treating water, of course, in the camp situation, involves chlorine and treating the water. A number of stories we're hearing are that people are choosing not to drink the treated water because they don't like the taste of the chlorine. This was an unanticipated problem that's being met right now by the Pakistan Red Crescent deploying, I think, a hygiene education teams, working mainly with mothers and children in the IDP camps, just disseminating very basic messages about just talking to people really about the fact that why does the water taste strange and why is that actually a good thing? This is often the intervention that the Red Cross, Red Crescent finds itself engaged in in the health field. Dissemination of very, very basic messages which really can save lives. Another area is restoring family links. In any large disaster, people get separated from their families, from their loved ones, and then are sometimes not able to reestablish that communication, find out if my sister or brother is even alive. The Red Crescent Society on the Ground has established a number of, usually by phone, reuniting families in that way. Challenges. I'm gonna go through these quickly because there are quite a few. Challenges we've come up against of course physical access with all the bridges out, with all the roads out, with in the early days weather making it difficult for helicopters to fly, just simple physical access has been particularly in the early days a real problem. Security, generally okay, but it does continue to be a concern and at times an issue. We stood down on September 24th after the announcement of the sentencing in the US of the neuroscientists anticipating potential unrest that didn't happen by and large and we were back operational the next day. Also significantly, the Pakistan Red Crescent of course is a local institution. Its volunteers in its offices are permanent fixtures throughout the country and they are the front line of the Red Cross, Red Crescent response and so they are part of the community and then they know their community. Third challenge is the slow down response and I'll speak to that a bit at the end of my remarks but it has certainly had an effect directly on our ability to respond. The fourth was that this was and continues to be a disaster response within an unfolding disaster. This is what we term slow onset disaster in that while the disaster was unfolding in the early days and the response activities were ongoing, that disaster moved down the country and expanded and you had displaced populations who were moved to one location. The disaster response mechanisms started to support them there and then floods expanded and they had to move again and the disaster response operation had to move with them and so it has been a disaster response within an unfolding disaster and that's been an added challenge. Just the sheer number of people affected. And as somebody else mentioned, the disaster response infrastructure has been affected the Pakistan Recreation Society had a number of warehouses flooded. That's a challenge that of course one always faces but with the scope and scale and spreading nature of this disaster it's one that's really impacted our response. Health, lack of enough clean drinking water continues to be a challenge that we're all trying to meet but which still needs more done. And the third is what my colleague started to speak to in terms of the recovery phase, two major concerns, food and winter. Winter is coming, it's right around the bend especially in the north. There are still a lot of people who need shelter and because of the ongoing nature of the disaster response and the scope and scale, our goal, we are going to be challenged simply to see that everyone who needs shelter has at least transitional emergency shelter when the winter arrives. And last but not least, certainly the challenge of food as my colleagues have referred to. One estimate we've heard this past week is that it may take up to two years for all land that has been affected to be arable again. That means, as my colleague mentioned, that we are looking at a long-term focus of an emergency nature where food is concerned which will have to be addressed and by definition that will take the focus off of other recovery efforts which are nonetheless important. Last, I would speak to just the fact, I think, that in fact donor response has been not what one would have hoped. Very impressive analysis, Mr. Ambassador. I hadn't broken it down in that much detail but I can certainly verify, although no verification is needed, that just from the experience of the American Red Cross, that has been our experience. Just for the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, we the American Red Cross raised three times more dollars than we have to date for this disaster. The other comparisons are really incredible when you look at both the tsunami, Haiti, the incredible donor response just within the American community and particularly within the piece of that which you referred to, American private citizens and corporations who I think are quite driven by what they see in the media. I think it does come down to the media. I think that I would introduce an additional notion which is slow onset versus sudden onset disasters. Unfortunately, I would say we're not surprised that this disaster which is seen by the world I think as a slow onset disaster by definition hasn't garnered the media attention and therefore the donor response that the more, I hesitate to use the term newsworthy but the more media covered sudden onset disasters like the tsunami, like the Haiti earthquake have garnered. I would just put forward the notion that in addition to all the other factors mentioned, I think it's been our experience that again, unfortunately it's a reality that we see lower donor response generally in slow onset disasters as opposed to sudden onset. That's an unfortunate reality. Thank you very much, Mark. Well, we've had three very impressive and stimulating presentations and three different but I think complementary perspectives on the situation in Pakistan. Now we'll open it up to the question and answer session. We have roving microphones and so if you could just raise your hand and a microphone will get to you, identify yourself and your institutional affiliation. Thanks, Mike Posner, I work for US Senate staff. Ambassador, thank you very much for your analysis and certainly our sympathies with your country. But I wonder if it's possible to disaggregate the humanitarian from the political aspects, especially I would posit that perhaps some of the unwillingness for private donors to come forward may have to do with that particular political dimension, specifically referring to obviously the insurgency in the Northwest but even more recently the closing of the Torquham Gate. I think there's a real question in the minds of many Americans whether the Pakistani stance on that issue and on working together with the United States which is engaged in the fight of our lives across the border in Afghanistan matches the assurances that we believe we should have. So I wonder if you would respond to that, thank you. First of all, I would say that the two are not normally interconnected. After all, during the course of the earthquake of 2005 similar issues were present. And the Torquham Gate issue is only three days, four days old, so therefore that couldn't have stopped anybody from making donations earlier. The debate about is Pakistan an ally and a full ally and our perspective that we are allies but not satellites is another ongoing debate. So I do not think that that is directly connected. I would say that it is directly, I think disasters now have become Anderson Cooper covered disasters, Anderson Cooper not covered disasters and this falls in the latter category and that is the reason why people haven't been as generous as they would have if they had seen images of children suffering on television because instead of, because people are driven by the media and because of, to the extent that Pakistan is an intensely political story and it is an important national security story, I do agree with you that the reason why so much political coverage has focused on this story is because of its national security and political importance of Pakistan's national security and political importance but I don't think that that is how it should be. I think that people should be able to pay attention to the humanitarian disaster. If anything, the escalation of the humanitarian tragedy could actually escalate the national security disaster that some people in this city are constantly looking towards Pakistan. I'm reminded of this line from one of the Godfather movies of all things in which Mike Corleone turns around and talks about Hyman Roth and says he's been dying of the same heart attack for 20 years. So as far as the Washington think tank community and the national sort of security community in this town is concerned, they've been talking about Pakistan in more or less similarly stark terms for the last 20 years. Thank you, another, okay, why don't you take the one from this side, the gentleman in front. Thank you, Mike McDonald, Global Health Initiatives. I guess there are two comments that I'd be interested in a response to. One is the cycle of financial support of these kinds of disasters may be hitting just wrong. Haiti, for example, we put a huge amount of resource in and the public is in political sphere is also not impressed with the outcome. We also are hitting in the more uncertain economic time right now. So that may be playing against the circumstance. It may be more complex than just the political issues which obviously are playing in. The second part is the comment that we can unify all of the relief. And I'm not clear that the relief and response can be unified. I'm wondering if we can create a unity of effort that does include all of the entities with the government of Pakistan more engaged to not think of this as being a hierarchical unity of command because I don't think that's likely to happen. And I'm just wondering if there's a comment in regards to the ability to create a common operating picture that will allow many different players to respond from where they're coming from rather than through a single channel. Why don't I ask Mark Presslin to perhaps address the question about the impact of the economy on perhaps donor assistance and then perhaps whether there can be a unity of relief effort on this matter? Sure, I've thought about that too. And I think that there's probably no one reason or even no few reasons why exactly the response for Haiti was so much larger than for this disaster. I think I've developed a sense over the years of these things and we were sitting around frankly the day after this disaster in Pakistan with the sense that we're not gonna raise much money for this, we're afraid. Whereas within the last, Haiti happened about five PM DC time by nine o'clock that night. We sort of had the sense there's a lot of money that's gonna come in for this. The Anderson Cooper factor is certainly a big one, frankly. I think there are other factors the proximity of Haiti which led I think to both more of a feeling of there are neighbors for Americans as well as ease of access for the media. I've puzzled about the economic part of your question. All I have is a gut sense. I haven't done the analysis, I'm sure someone has. My gut sense based on years of experience is that if the Pakistan floods had been perceived as and reported as more of a sudden onset disaster with the drama that goes with that, I think the American public and corporations would have responded at least to the level that they did for the 2005 Pakistan earthquake because I think all of the things being equal. I think if a disaster happened tomorrow that was sudden onset and had that kind of dramatic impact, I think we would see that response. It's just a gut feeling. Maybe I can turn it over to my colleague to talk about the unity question. Leave me with a tough one, huh? NGO coordination is often seen as an oxymoron. It's a real challenge and I think right now we're kind of in the thick of the emergency response still in the send and what you see in a sense it's really impressive, especially in Pakistan there's just a huge diversity of an outpouring of giving that comes naturally from the community in Pakistan. You see groups from a mosque bringing together their stuff and driving it out and delivering it. We saw this in the earthquake too and the cyclone a couple of years ago in Bluchistan, you see actually I was meeting with a company that sells pumping equipment of all things in Karachi because we were talking about getting some stuff from that and he had organized neighbors and some other people that are in business and they were bringing things together and organizing their own convoys and delivering them up to the send and it's just a really remarkable outpouring of giving and then there's any number of international organizations that are also there contributing. So in the one sense you don't wanna discourage that. In the other sense it's very difficult in the thick of an emergency like this to actually rope that together and make it coordinated and make it work together and I think the government of Pakistan has done a actually pretty remarkable job. It's the National Disaster Management Authority and the Provincial Disaster Management Authority have come together, they're working with OCHA to try to get some coordination going and it's very rudimentary. It's actually, I don't see it as hugely different than other crises where it's taken a long time to get the clusters organized and to get us all sort of on the same page. It's a much larger disaster so it's gonna be all the more challenging. So that unity of response is gonna take a while but I think what's gonna happen as we go forward is the number of actors is gonna decrease dramatically. These smaller groups are gonna run out of steam, are gonna run out of fuel, are gonna run out of things to give. So that's gonna decrease. The smaller NGOs will probably fall by the wayside except for some of the ones that are really locally rooted and what's gonna happen then and it's already beginning to happen. I'll give you a really good example. There's an effort that came out of the NGO community called EMA, it's the Emergency Market Mapping and Analysis. It's a tool that was developed by the NGO community over the last couple of years. Oxfam and IRC were leading it. Mercy Corps participated, several other NGOs. It was actually piloted in Pakistan about a year and a half ago. It's been rolled out by the NGO community and it probably a dozen NGOs are working together to look at, to do a market analysis of how this crisis is impacting on the economies in the Northwest as well as in Sin. They're doing five different areas, they're looking at six different markets, agricultural labor, fodder, wheat, I forget what all the bamboo, because bamboo is a shelter material. So it's actually, you see as we work towards recovery, there's more organized efforts that are taking place to get a more unified response. So maybe it doesn't need to be such an oxymoron this NGO coordination is actually starting to happen. I think it's just gonna take time and hopefully as we go forward we'll see a more efficient and more effective coordination of the rehabilitation phase. Good, another question? The lady right there at the back. Hello, I'm Chris Bassett from the Georgetown Conflict Resolution Master's Program. I understand that the Pakistani government, both of your NGOs and the other international actors in Pakistan are doing great work with limited resources under extraordinary circumstances. You've begun to touch on this but I'm interested to know how realistic you think it is as you shift from relief and as you do relief but as you shift into reconstruction to integrate capacity building for Pakistani civil society organizations, for Pakistani government agencies, to strengthen them as institutions and to build their capacity to respond to these endogenously in the future. Thank you. I think that will be a question. Ryan, did you want to take a crack? And then perhaps see. I can. It's aspirational. I think it's very, very important to Pakistan, more so than any place that NGOs must find ways to work in ways where they're not just out there working on their own but they're putting energy, putting resources, putting training, putting coordination through government, through government institutions. I, as I alluded to in my talk, I think that's gonna be easier to do and send. I think there's a lot of interest in doing that and in fact right now you see it happening in the way health services are being delivered. Mercy Corps is actually doing, implementing our diarrhea treatment centers in hospitals. So we have our staff working alongside hospital staff to implement these specialized programs to control diarrheal diseases at a very critical time. So you see it in send and I think it's very important. The SWAT and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, I'm glad I made it through that. You did? Northwest Frontier Province was much easier. For you. Yeah, for me. And that was the reason why it was changed. Local people wanted the name that they would identify. They could say, exactly. And congratulations to them. I'm not a fan of the Canadians or the British gardeners anymore. So anyway, I think there it's gonna be a lot more troublesome. I think that the most prominent government actor in the SWAT Valley is still the Pakistan military and it's in the prominence and the sort of the political nature of relief and reconstruction there is so great that it's very difficult for NGOs to engage there without being perceived as part and parcel to a political struggle. And so I'm really concerned that we will not be able to engage there as much as we would like to. And I'm still looking for the way through that. But I think it's gonna be a real challenge for us. My short answer to that question is that yes, it would be very desirable to build capacity as we provide relief and rehabilitation and reconstruction because we just don't need to replace what was destroyed but to build something better. And that would include the building of institutions which Pakistan has been lacking and something that Pakistanis themselves feel very strongly about. Now the question made in front. My name is Samira Daniels, Ramsey Decisions. Ambassador Hukhany, nice to see you. Since you've drawn this linkage between the media exposure to Pakistan and the charitable response, how are you dealing with the whole media because the thing that has been concerning me for several years is that to the extent that other groups have taken active role in their communities when the immigrant experience to take active role in changing media or get more engaged. Do you feel that the Pakistani community is engaged on this issue of the media exposure of Pakistan and these relief efforts and charitable donations? I could attempt an answer to this but actually that would distract us from the fundamental subject of our discussion today and that is one of the things I don't want to do. In the last few days on many an occasion it has happened that I've tried to get people focus on the floods and instead we wander off into the alleys of counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, media, et cetera. So I think this is a topic for another conversation of, but I think that the Pakistani community in the United States plays a very positive role. It's a community that is still organizing and will take some time to be able to realize its full potential within American society in all areas including the political arena in terms of responding to the media and also in being able to organize and mobilize resources for supporting efforts such as the effort for flood relief in Pakistan. How are you doing? My name is Nilab Kumar and I represent the Institute for Multitrack Diplomacy in Arlington, Virginia. And our organization, our small NGO, is currently working with our contacts in Indian Punjab to get the Sikh farmers to donate heads of cattle to their Pakistani brothers on the other side of the border to help with the relief efforts once the emergency phase is over so that they can go back to sowing their fields and things like that. So my question is, how many heads of cattle would you approximate would be good to help them with their needs? Well, I can tell you the number of heads of cattle that have been lost, if I'm not mistaken, that's more than a million, right? 1.2 million heads of cattle have been lost in all of this throughout the country and I'm not segregating the various provinces including Punjab. So when you talk about, it's just a massive scale. So any number of cattle that you can figure out and call, bring them to us. We'll see what we can do. Thank you. Question. Yes, hello, my name is Jay LeMonica, I'm a journalist. I was just wondering, Ambassador Akani, if you could comment on Mr. Martin's belief for hope that this crisis may lead to sort of addressing some of the larger systemic problems in Pakistan, I think you touched on it a bit, but you have land reform. I think that the scale of the crisis has definitely prompted debate. The debate may not necessarily so far have gone in the direction that many of us would have liked it to, but I think debate in itself is good. It is making people wonder what can and ought to be done in everything from the technical management of the Indus Water System to, you know, we first had a drought and then we had 10 years of average rainfall within one week in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. So obviously climate change implications are to be discussed, et cetera. All I'm saying is that this whole crisis has focused the Pakistani political class, the Pakistani intelligentsia and the Pakistani technocrats, all to start thinking about various dimensions of Pakistan's immediate problems from climate change and its implications to flood management, to land tenure, to how to spread our population out in a manner in which we don't have the kind of sort of, you know, population density in certain parts, how to sort of lay the foundations of our future towns in sort of relation to our river system, et cetera, et cetera, because a lot of the population growth of Pakistan over the last several decades has been relatively unplanned and haphazard. We are one of the fastest growing population, fastest growing countries in terms of population in the world. And so this has created a debate. And that debate, I hope, will bring some ideas to the fore that will help us build a better Pakistan with the help of the rest of the world. How do you see that unfolding in political terms then? I think that one of the reasons why I chose not to become a pundit is because I don't like the game of sort of, you know, predicting things and then having to explain why my predictions didn't come true and then making a new set of predictions and then doing the same game over again. So I leave the political dimensions to unfold as they come. I think we will see demographic shifts. I think we will see a shift from rural areas to the cities in some parts. And since, for example, I think it will change the demographic patterns of the cities as the population relocates. I think there will be greater call for land reform. I think that the political alignments might change in different parts of the country. There will be the relief effort will also have an impact. For example, the political leaders who have been prominent in providing relief will probably gain political support. I think that the international community, and this is an opportunity wasted for especially the United States in that sense, although the US has been the single largest donor, but there's tremendous potential for the US to change opinions about itself. The same study I was referring to, the Anurabhi Das report also points out that the area where the earthquake relief, that was a smaller area, 30,000 square kilometers, that was only three million people who were affected, that in that area, the approval rating for the United States today is many fold more than the approval rating for the United States in the rest of the country. Meaning that when the part where the Americans came and actually helped, those people like the United States. So I think that that is another dimension in which things might change when people realize that being integrated with the international community and receiving assistance from the international community and having people like Randy and others going in there and providing them assistance, people will be less likely to listen to xenophobic ideas and anti-globalization ideas that have characterized some of the political discourse of Pakistan in the last few years. Now you have a question, Muid Yusuf here, who is with us here at USIP. Thanks, thanks, Abby. A question to the ambassador. From what I'm hearing on the panel, it seems to me that the Pakistan government has done a fairly decent job in at least giving the access to organizations, NGOs, to go out and work, which unfortunately would be a surprise to many in this town. As you've mentioned, there's a lot of media coverage on the politics. The question really is, is there a way or perhaps has this been done? Has the Pakistan government brought out clearly in black and white what it has done, even in terms of transparency, et cetera? Can there be something that can be the talk of the town here which could convince people that whatever politics there is, whether Pakistan is an ally or not on that front, in the flood, this is how we're becoming transparent and thus there shouldn't be any concern. Muid, I'm sort of somewhat older than you and therefore been around the block a few times. And well, and so as a consequence, I've reached the conclusion that any attempt to try and sort of change the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC is not always easy. This town believes things, this town believes sometimes that certain wars have been lost when they haven't. This town sometimes believes that certain wars are being won when they are not. This town believes that sort of somebody's failed. And that is how this town works. So I'm not going to spend all my time and energy trying to sort of convince this town as far as the people of Pakistan are concerned. It's very obvious. We have already read there will be riots in the street. There'll be blood where we haven't seen a single riot, single riot in their flood affected areas. We read in the newspaper coverage that people are going to die of starvation. Well, with all due respect, you've been there. I don't think we see signs of starvation yet. There will be epidemics because the government, so I think that we will let people decide on the competence of a government or not themselves. And eventually people do. In this town, when I first arrived, there were people in this town who thought that General Parvez Musharraf was the best thing that happened to Pakistan and Pakistan's electable leaders were all sort of, you know, have beens. I remember that time. I remember that time, it's not too long ago. In fact, you and I were around at the same time and you and I did not always agree on the same points as well at that time. So we can only put out the information. I've done it today. I'll make an effort, make an effort. But the fact of the matter is that the empirical, a sort of, you know, facts that are provable show that the government's performance has been adequate that apart from the early stories, you know, if you frame a story in a very simplistic term, the president was in France when the flood started. Well, with all due respect, could he have come and served as a dam in front of the mighty Indus, you know? No, but the people have moved, the people of Pakistan have moved beyond that story. But some people won't move beyond that story. As far as the transparency is concerned, it's very obvious. I mean, my one liner has always been, okay, so what's the transparency problem? Somebody is going to steal water purification tablets and make an empire out of that? What's going to happen? A lot of these things are just simplistic sort of one liners that are for the evening news. The big picture is you have 20 million people affected. You have saved a lot of lives, very few people have died. So obviously somebody did something right that people were not drowned in the floods, even when they lived in small sort of houses that got inundated. Somebody managed to evacuate them. Who was that? Well, certainly, you know, it was the government of Pakistan and the provincial governments that did it. Similarly, somebody has been able to prevent the epidemics in the camps. It is obviously the NGO community and the government working together. Somebody has been able to provide enough food for people not to starve. And I think that is the performance. As far as the transparency is concerned, the 2005 aid that came for the earthquake, $6 billion came in for relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction. All of that has been accounted for. Now, I know that there are some people who make a living out of just commenting on sort of, you know, the question of transparency in third world countries. I don't grudge them they're living. Everybody's got to live off something. But the fact of the matter is that beyond a certain threshold, if there is wastage, it becomes very obvious because things don't work. And in Pakistan so far, there is no sign that things have stopped working. Hi, Kate Trambo from CSIS. I'm curious how you would characterize the response of Pakistan's neighbors to the disaster or particularly that of China and India's? I think that all of Pakistan's neighbors have been forthcoming in support of Pakistan and its people. China, in fact, provided a field hospital for sale. It provided cash assistance and assistance in kind. India provided $25 million through the United Nations to assist the people. Iran has been very forthcoming and it was very pleasant for people of Pakistan to see Afghan helicopters come in and rescue people at the height of the crisis. The Afghan helicopters came into sin and they helped. So I think that all our neighbors have been forthcoming, which is very reassuring that the picture that is painted of Pakistan being in some kind of perennial conflict with all its neighbors or having alliances with neighbors only in the context of some kind of a conflict-related strategy is not necessarily correct. That we do respect our neighbors and their willingness to be cooperative and our neighbors are forthcoming when the need and the time arises. We'll take a final question before we wrap up. Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Jill Marie Gershoots with Catholic Relief Services. My question's for the ambassador. I wonder if you have a sense of the Pakistani people's understanding of just how much aid the U.S. government and implementing agencies have provided to the people there. And if so, if you could just provide a sense of how they might know that and what requests of any of the U.S. government has made to the Pakistani government to help with that. And I asked this question in the self-interest of aid agencies who are being pressured to be the front face of that marketing strategy sometimes at security risk for our own agencies. Thank you. I think that every agency has to make its own determination about whether it is or is not a security risk, but by and large the people of Pakistan, when they do know nobody, I don't know of any family that will refuse to take a meal for political reasons because it's coming from a U.S. non-governmental organization or for that matter, even from the United States government. So I think a lot of politics, essentially, like everywhere else in the world, is in the heads of those who are engaged in it. And the ordinary person essentially wants to feed his family, protect his children, get back to his normal life. And so the American assistance has been widely welcomed. The study that I referred to about the earthquake shows that people have a positive view of those who provided them the assistance and they exactly knew who brought them the assistance and who didn't. So I think that a lot of these concerns in my opinion are concerns that are essentially the concerns of the analysts rather than of the people on the ground. I don't think that anybody turns the out of a camp randy because people don't ask you, are you coming from the United States or are you a Canadian? And if you're a Canadian, we'll take your assistance and if you're an American, we won't. I don't think the politics plays into the acceptance of assistance by ordinary Pakistanis, does it? No, but I don't really think that's the issue though. I don't think we've had any problem handing out aid as you pointed out, regardless of who it comes from. The issue has been that there's elements within Pakistani society who have some serious issues with those who partner with the U.S. government and by branding the assistance that we deliver with U.S. government brands that puts our staff at risk of retribution from those elements. That's really what the issue is and we've seen a play out of. We've had staff killed, we've had offices attacked, we've had some very serious security problems in the last couple of years due to the perception that we are agents of foreign powers or that we're agents of the Pakistani government or whatever and so that's really what the issue is and not whether or not people accept our assistance. Well I'd like to thank Ambassador Harkani, Randy Martin and Mark Presland for being with us this afternoon for giving us a better understanding of the situation in Pakistan, the floods and some of the challenges and opportunities confronting the government and people of Pakistan and the international humanitarian agencies. And I'd also like to thank you, our audience, for being with us this afternoon and for your active participation and we look forward to seeing you at other USIP events in the future. Thank you very much indeed.