Pakistan at a glance

The crisis and the response

• Military operations against Islamic militants caused the world’s largest displacement in over a decade: some 1.5 million IDPs have not returned.
• International engagement in the crisis response has been limited due to government access restrictions and UN security procedures.
• Military leadership of the response has created a dilemma: protest closure of humanitarian space or advocate for GHD Principles?
• The response has often not been transparently needsbased: entitlements have not reached many female-headed households and some communities branded as terrorist sympathisers.
• The government has downplayed the crisis and denied the applicability of international humanitarian law.
• The cluster system has been misused to allocate funds, rather than coordinate. Meetings have been time consuming and often unproductive.
• UN leadership has been disjointed: there are three senior officials with overlapping mandates.

Donor performance

• There was a 72 percent response to the revised Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan 2008-2009. As of October 2010, the 2010 PHRP is only 46 percent covered, with poor responses for protection, WASH and agriculture.
• Many donors remain silent about human rights violations by state agents, coerced IDP returns and government reluctance to use established international humanitarian terminology.
• Donors generally follow Pakistani policy by refusing to fund national NGOs.
• The US and UK have funded non-transparent Pakistani military-led humanitarian and recovery operations.

Key challenges and areas for improvement

• Donors must do more to collectively advocate for safe humanitarian access, protection of conflict-affected civilians and humanitarian workers.
• Donors need to understand the root causes of Islamic militancy, especially poor governance and landlessness.
• Generous support for early recovery – transparently delivered by civilian state actors – is imperative to secure local support for the War on Terror.
• Donors could play a role in forging development of guidelines for civil-military cooperation.

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