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  • Chinook Diplomacy

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110007711

    AFTER THE QUAKE

    Chinook Diplomacy
    The U.S. military wins hearts and minds in Pakistan.

    BY BRET STEPHENS
    Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

    ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--From the air, the town of Balakot, at the lip of the Kaghan Valley in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier Province, resembles pictures of Hiroshima circa late summer 1945: All but a few buildings have been reduced absolutely to rubble. There were some 50,000 people in this town on the morning of Oct. 8; a six-second earthquake that day killed an estimated 16,000 outright. Now survivors live mainly in scattered tent villages, not all of them properly winterized. And winter has begun.

    The people of Balakot and dozens of other devastated towns are much on the mind of Rear Adm. Michael A. LeFever, 51, the man in charge of the U.S. military's 1,000-man, $110 million-and-counting relief effort here. "I'll never forget landing and smelling gangrene and smelling death," he says of his first trip to the disaster zone where 73,000 died. "The first couple of days were overwhelming."

    It was Pakistan's good fortune in those critical days that Adm. LeFever could call in heavy-lift helicopters, particularly the tandem-rotor Chinook, from bases in nearby Afghanistan. Every road into the Frontier Province and the neighboring Azad Kashmir region had been rendered impassable by huge landslides. Every hospital in the region except one had been destroyed. The Pakistan government, which lost nearly its entire civil administration in the region as well as hundreds of soldiers, lacked the airlift capacity to bring adequate relief north and the critically injured south. The Chinooks were among the few helicopters able to reach, supply and evacuate places that, even under normal conditions, are some of the most inaccessible on earth.

    Since then, U.S. helicopters have flown 2,500 sorties, carried 16,000 passengers and delivered nearly 6,000 tons of aid. Just as importantly, the Chinook has become America's new emblem in Pakistan, a byword for salvation in an area where until recently the U.S. was widely and fanatically detested. Toy Chinooks (made in China, of course) are suddenly popular with Pakistani children. A Kashmiri imam who denounced the U.S. in a recent sermon was booed and heckled by worshippers. "Pakistan is not a nation of ingrates," a local businessman told me over dinner the other night. "We know where the help is coming from."

    The extent of the U.S. military's assistance, well-known to Pakistanis, barely registers on the radar screens of most Western news outlets. That's a pity, because it overlooks one of America's most significant hearts-and-minds successes so far in the Muslim world. The assistance also illustrates another frequently overlooked fact: When it comes to foreign aid, the Department of Defense is one of the biggest contributors, and what it provides is something no other country can replicate.

    Consider Col. Angel Lugo's 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, currently deployed in the devastated city of Muzaffarabad. On Oct. 8, Col. Lugo and his team were in Angola on a humanitarian assistance mission. It took 17 flights to move its equipment and 220 personnel to Islamabad, all of which (and whom) then had to be transported through the mountains by truck and helicopter convoys. Emergency operations were set up within six hours of arrival; the entire hospital was up and running within a day.

    The 212 is today the only fully functioning, adequately equipped hospital in Azad Kashmir. Under its quarter-acre of green-gray canvas are 84 beds, 24 intensive-care units, an operating suite, a lab, digital X-ray machines, a pharmacy and an outpatient facility. In less than two months, MASH doctors and nurses have treated some 7,000 patients, performed 330 major surgeries, written 14,000 prescriptions and given nearly 10,000 preventive vaccinations.

    Word about the MASH is out. Sgt. First Class Mohammed Tabassum, a 15-year U.S. Army veteran and one of a dozen Pakistani-American servicemen brought in for the relief mission (the MASH also recruits civilian Pakistani-American doctors for two-week stints), tells me he's seen patients who walked three days to reach the hospital. "They cannot believe the kind of care they get," he says. What surprises them most? Not, he says, the dozens of women soldiers and officers here in their battle fatigue, a fact of American life they've come to know from watching news reports from Iraq. Rather, it's "officers clearing their bedpans. In Pakistan, that would be a job for orderlies."

    The surprise works both ways. "The things we see here is what they tell you in nursing school you'll never see in the U.S.," says Lt. Jeanette Johnson, 24, of Flagstaff, Ariz. Touring the facility, I watch Maj. Eric McDonald, an emergency medical physician from Maryland, treat a two-month-old boy with lacerations on his stomach and a herniated umbilical stump that looks like a deflated balloon. Other unusual cases being treated by doctors here include scabies, lockjaw and children born without rectal openings. One man, who had been improperly treated for his injuries, was found to have seven rocks lodged in his femur. The incidence of burn wounds and cases of smoke inhalation is increasing, apparently because displaced earthquake survivors are waterproofing their tents with kerosene, to predictable effect. The MASH is also seeing more cases of pneumonia, signaling the approach of winter.

    The 212 is not the only U.S. military hospital in the region; the Marines' Third Medical Battalion, based in Okinawa, Japan, has set up operations of nearly equal size in Shinkiari in the North-West Frontier Province. There is also a battalion of naval engineers, colloquially known as the Seabees. They have removed tons of debris and built tent villages, field kitchens and a school in their "adopted" village of Miani Bani.

    On Friday, Adm. LeFever presided at a ceremony for one group of departing Seabees at Chaklala airbase in Rawalpindi. Among those going home was Lt. Jerry McNally, 36, a 15-year Navy veteran whose home is in Gulfport, Miss. In September, Lt. McNally, whose battalion is stationed in Okinawa, was recalled to the U.S. with 3,000 other Seabees to help in the post-Katrina clean-up operations. The roof of his home had been wrecked by a collapsing tree while the ground floor had been flooded in a foot-high storm surge. Yet the responsibilities of the general clean-up left him almost no time to deal with the family travail, and within a few weeks he was called to Pakistan. How does his wife feel about his rebuilding other people's homes in Pakistan while she's there to rebuild theirs? "She understands what we do and she supports what we do," he says.

    I do not mean to convey the impression that the U.S. military is single-handedly carrying relief efforts on its back. Dozens of humanitarian NGOs such as Caritas and the Aga Khan Development Network are at work, as is USAID, as are U.N. agencies such as the World Food Program and the World Health Organization, as are military units from Germany, Australia, Britain and elsewhere. Pakistan's military and civilian officials have launched a massive relief effort of their own, and Adm. LeFever has high praise for their competence and cooperation. The Jamat-ud-Dawa, a jihadi front group, is also in the mix, a fact about which Pakistani leaders are altogether too nonchalant. Even so, the role it has played is comparatively minor, and the credit it has gotten among Pakistanis is correspondingly small.

    Now there is winter, and three million refugees who must get through it somehow. The Pakistan government seems to think it has turned a corner in preparing for it, thereby averting a second humanitarian calamity. For his part, Adm. LeFever intends to stay on till spring to deal with whatever may come. In the event of a bad winter, he will be able to call upon airlift capabilities and logistical resources that no other country can match, and do so with the kind of dispatch that saves lives in a way that cannot be counted in mere dollars. It's a point worth noting the next time the U.S. is hectored for its alleged stinginess in foreign aid.

    On a recent inspection tour of U.S. facilities here, Gen. Steven Whitcomb, commander of the U.S. Third Army, gave a series of pep talks to the soldiers. His remarks bear repeating:

    "We're fighting two wars. We're still doing recovery operations from our own natural disaster. We still have soldiers manning the DMZ on the Korean peninsula. We still have sailors manning the flight decks of aircraft carriers at two in the morning. And we can still do this kind of thing. . . . You are all here for no other reason than that the United States asked you to be here. You've come to a place you can't find on a map. But you are making a difference."

    Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

  • #2
    In hindsight what realy shocks me is that some thought helping the Pakistani's, or "Muslims" ect. was a stupid idea, stating they hate the west, they will gladdly take our money and then kill us when they get a good chance.

    Nice to see those people were horribly wrong.
    Facts to a liberal is like Kryptonite to Superman.

    -- Larry Elder

    Comment


    • #3
      Politics has no place in front of human suffering. When someone is suffering in this manner, the right and moral thing to do is to reach out and help. Which the world at large in this instance including the US has done.
      "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time. "

      "Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed."

      Sir Winston Churchill

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      • #4
        Thank you, Chinook

        Comment


        • #5
          I see Chinooks flying over my house everyday, on their way to the effected area, though the frequency is a lot less now.

          Thanks alot!
          "Any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality." ~ George William Russell

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