‘Pakistan Army determines NATO relief operations’
Staff Report

ISLAMABAD—The Commander of NATO’s mercy mission for earthquake survivors in the mountains of Kashmir said on Saturday he was relying on the Pakistan military to identify where the need for relief was greatest. Vice Admiral John Stufflebeem, of the US Navy, told reporters the NATO mission would be concentrated in Bagh district of Pakistani Kashmir were some 300,000 people are believed to be in need of help.
The NATO Response Force are bringing in water purification facilities, medical teams and engineers and equipment to Bagh, a district south of Muzaffarabad, the devastated capital of Pakistan Kashmir that has been the focus of relief operations. NATO’s other role was to keep aid flowing into Pakistan by the air bridges it has established from bases in Turkey and Germany, and to deliver aid to stricken villagers.
“The Pakistan army is out there in the hills. They’re taking measure of where the need is,” Stufflebeem said at a military air base in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. “We are responding to where we are asked to go and for that we rely on Pakistan to determine”. The October 8 quake killed 55,000 people, injured more than 78,000 and left over three million in need of shelter, and in many cases food, before winter arrives in Kashmir and North West Frontier, the two provinces worst hit. Islamist opposition politicians have criticized President Pervez Musharraf for accepting NATO’s offer to deploy up to 1,000 troops, chiefly engineering and medical units, to help his government cope with the disaster.
A NATO spokesman in Brussels said on Tuesday 32 helicopters belonging to alliance members should be in Pakistan by the end of this week. Stufflebeem said he was happy with the resources at his disposal and that there was a good chance of delivering relief to all the villages dotting the ridges and valleys in Bagh. “The only thing I want more of is time. The onset of the severe Himalayan winter will be upon us in a month or so,” Stufflebeem said as a cargo plane disgorged equipment for a Dutch medical team headed for Bagh. “That’s what the enemy here is — time”.
Aid would be delivered by road wherever possible, but helicopter drops would be made to more inaccessible villages, and fixed-wing aircraft could be used if weather conditions prevented helicopters from flying, he said. For now, Stufflebeem said, NATO had enough helicopters, because he felt Chaklala air base in Rawalpindi and Qasim further south were close to capacity. A better air management system and radar facilities would be needed in order to have more helicopters in the air. “There’s about as many helicopters that can safely operate in the valleys for the moment,” Stufflebeem said. Extra helicopters would give NATO more flexibility in terms of managing maintenance of the helicopter fleet.