The Worst Nightmare

The Pakistani earthquake has quickly become the UN's "worst nightmare," and as we've talked about here, funding has been abysmal for the needs of the second great global disaster in one year.

In the rural landscape of Pakistan, the death toll has sharply risen to 50,000. A huge number of fatalities. The earth has become cracked, scarred, crumbled- roads largely do not exist. The only way to get aid to the survivors is airlifts, which, largely, aren't quick to happen.

Mr Egeland said an airlift was needed of the proportions of the Berlin blockade of the 1940s, when Allies flew in supplies to the divided city in communist eastern Europe. He said aid had to be sent in, and tens of thousands of homeless and injured people flown out, of remote regions before winter set in.

Mr Egeland said of the aid sent so far: "This is not enough. We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was the worst we could get. This is worse."

The tsunami, which struck on 26 December, killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

Mr Egeland, speaking in Geneva, said the quake situation was becoming worse by the day.

"Tens of thousands of people's lives are at stake and they could die if we don't get to them in time."

The disaster will stretch into months in Pakistan because of the remoteness of the worst-affected. This is the risk: if aid does not reach these people, they will simply starve to death. This is the death quotient deemed "unnecessary" in earlier warnings- those who die because they are constrained by the earth, who could be helped, but help reaches them far too slowly to provide.

One of Katrina's most important lessons could have been, should have been, the intricate compassionate connection between Americans and the world. But we watched in horror as we discovered how terrifyingly disconnected American leadership is from citizens, how much we are disconnected from ourselves, much less from the suffering of the rest of the world. There is sympathy, of course, at a certain bargaining price. And yet, as predicted among the post of the "unnecessary," without the quake on the tv screens, we've all already lost touch. Back to our own fears.