US Edition The floods in Pakistan have killed 1,600 people and affected millions more, unleashing a dreadful cycle of hunger and disease. By any standards, this is an authentic disaster, and one of which anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television will be well aware. Yet the rich world has responded to Pakistan's suffering with a puzzling lack of generosity.
Just compare the amount of money given to relieve the damage caused by the floods with the donations that followed other recent catastrophes. In the first 10 days after the earthquake in Haiti, international organisations raised $742 million for the victims; this time, they received less than one 16th of that sum. In the first week after the tsunami hit South Asia in 2004, the British public alone donated £100 million. The amount we have given so far to alleviate the suffering in Pakistan? Less than £10 million.
One explanation for our relative stinginess may be the lack of evocative images on television. Flood damage simply doesn't look as disastrous as the aftermath of an earthquake. Pity and compassion are not primarily rational responses, and a dry argument that people need help is rarely sufficiently powerful to persuade anyone to donate. For that, your emotions have to be engaged – and few things generate pity like images of people in agony. Haiti's earthquake provided plenty of those, as did the Asian tsunami. The Pakistan floods have not.
Another obstacle may be the time of year. Both the tsunami and the earthquake in Haiti happened within a month of Christmas, when people in Western countries are still thinking about giving, and perhaps about those less fortunate than themselves. By contrast, the height of summer is a time for lying on a beach and trying to forget your responsibilities. The annual summer holiday is also one of the biggest expenditures for every family. That cost, combined with the uncertain times in which we now live, may make people think twice before donating. And second thoughts can be fatal to generosity.
But then it's always easy to find justifications for doing nothing. One of the considerations which may be surreptitiously – and wrongly – inhibiting our generosity is the thought that parts of Pakistan are a recruiting ground and training camp for terrorism. There are indeed terrorists in the Indus Valley, but if we look at the issue purely in terms of our own interests, and not of the millions of Pakistanis who are not involved in violence, the best thing we can do to diminish any threat is to help. Militant organisations, many tied to al-Qaeda, are already stepping in to fill the gap, and gaining new adherents as a consequence.
A more plausible excuse for withholding your money is the incompetence of many aid operations, and the corruption of the governments with which they have to work. In Afghanistan, the failure to monitor how aid money is spent has led to huge sums disappearing into the pockets of the powerful, rather than being used to build the roads, schools and hospitals that it was meant to. The corruption is so widespread that aid workers call the place "Afghaniscam".
Something similar is likely to happen to a proportion of whatever is donated to the flood victims. The terrible earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 prompted Britons to hand over more than £20 million. A lot of that money was misappropriated – as was much of the cash given by the World Bank to the Pakistani government to build flood defences which could have mitigated the current crisis.
But does the possibility that some of the aid will be wrongly used prove that it is better to give nothing and watch people die? Not even aid's fiercest critics think the failure to eliminate corruption means you should turn your back on mass suffering. Is there actually any good reason for not giving something, however small, to the victims in Pakistan? I don't think there is – but I still haven't opened my wallet yet. Why not? That's what I'm trying to figure out…