Aid workers have already baptised the earthquake in Haiti a “historical disaster”. It will rate high in the annals of the humanitarian aid world because of the number of victims and scale of the destruction. But the rescue operation is also becoming notorious for the slowness with which aid is reaching the victims. Five days after the quake hit, many places are still largely bereft of international aid.

Not through lack of funds, supplies or emergency experts. Those are all pouring in from dozens of countries. But most of the aid — and aid workers — seems stuck at the airport.

Rescue teams have pulled survivors from five-star hotels, university buildings, a supermarket and the UN headquarters, all in Port-au-Prince’s better neighbourhoods. In poor areas, where the damage appears much greater, apparently forgotten victims report on Twitter that they have yet to encounter the first foreign rescuer.

Many aid workers are reported to have orders not to venture out without armed guards — which are not there at all, or only after long debates with the UN military command. The UN has lost a number of staff in the quake, and is not keen to risk more lives.

But the Haitian people seem to scare aid workers more than Somali warlords, Darfuri Janjawid or Afghan Taleban. Frightened Dutch aid workers abandoned a mission without reaching the collapsed building where people were trapped, and frightened doctors have left their patients unattended.

The experience of CNN’s medical reporter, Dr Sanjay Gupta, is telling. In a makeshift clinic he encountered a Belgian medical team being evacuated in a UN bus. UN “rules of engagement” apparently stopped them providing security for the doctors. The Belgians took most of their medical supplies with them, to keep them out of the claws of robbers.

Dr Gupta and his camera team stayed the night, monitored the abandoned patients’ vital signs and continued intravenous drips — and they were not robbed. Some rescuers are leaning so much toward security that they will allow people to die.

The media are not helping. CNN rules in the rubble. “Outside of a military conflict, this is our biggest international deployment since the tsunami in 2004,” according to Tony Maddox, the managing director of CNN International. So the image of the aid operation being beamed back is primarily American — and one of the big problems is the American view of Haiti.

CNN won’t stop telling aid workers and the outside world about pillaging (the incidence of which — for the first four frustrating days at least — did not compare with what happened after Hurricane Katrina) and about how dangerous it is to distribute food, because of the likelihood of “stampedes”.

Nor is the US Government, the biggest player in the aid operation, doing anything to help to relax the atmosphere. On the contrary. When President Obama said that the US aid effort would be “aggressive” he meant it. The humanitarian operation is not led by civilian agencies, but by the Pentagon.

Mr Obama ordered 9,000 troops and a fleet of nuclear-powered ships to move in. Victims of the war in Congo (which has cost five million lives in the past years) and of the genocide in Darfur would love so much American attention — but it is Haiti’s fate to lay in America’s backyard and to have been a sore to American eyes for decades already.

One, perhaps even two million Haitians already live in the United States, but more try to come. Every day dead Haitian refugees wash up on Miami’s sunny beaches. Haiti is a constant pain for US taxpayers who feel that the billions of dollars that have been poured in should have at least lifted the country out of its position as one of the poorest places on Earth. Even when the earthquake struck, investigations were taking place into the fate of several million dollars of aid funds, sent to victims of a hurricane that hit Haiti in 2008, that have disappeared.

Furthermore, to the horror of many godfearing Americans, voodoo is an officially recognised religion in Haiti. And, perhaps above all, Haitians are poor and black. In the view of some Americans those two add up to … murderous gangs.

The invasion of soldiers and humanitarian workers at the airport of Port-au-Prince reminds me of the American military invasion of Haiti authorised by President Clinton in 1994. I’d lived and worked there for almost two years as a correspondent for Dutch radio. There were 20,000 soldiers but they were surprisingly nervous about what reception the unarmed Haitians might have in store for them.

It turned out to be a wave of slum dwellers streaming to the air and sea port to greet the American guests. In abundant conga lines they snaked through the city, tea cosies on their heads to express just how happy they were. “Liberté! Merci Beel Cling Dong!” they shouted. A terrified American GI, still a teenager, saw the mass of pitiful creatures approaching him, and asked me if the tea cosies were “some kinda voodoo?”. He calmed down only when a line of BMWs and Mitsubishis appeared and filed past to watch the invasion.

Where the soldier came from, the owners of vehicles like these are respectable citizens. In Haiti, they are likely to be the ones smuggling drugs and making US aid dollars disappear. The good guys in Haiti are the defenceless people in the slums. For Western city dwellers, this is the world turned upside down. “Back! Back!” the soldier shouted, aiming his weapons at the good guys.

The rescue teams that stay put at the airport are one reason why we still don’t really know what is going on. Seventy survivors had been pulled from the rubble so far, the International Red Cross said on Sunday. That’s 14 rescues per day as a joint result of the 1,739 international specialised rescue workers that are there. That number would surely jump if some of the professional equipment that they brought was made available to the countless groups of local people desperately digging for victims with their bare hands, day and night.

Let’s hope that the food distributors worrying about their safety know that yesterday hundreds of people in Port-au-Prince dropped to their knees praying outside a warehouse where workers for the agency Food for the Poor had announced that they would be distributing rice and beans. The crowd allowed children and the elderly to go first in line without having guns aimed at them first

The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.

The situation is ghastly to be sure. But, as Christmas approaches, the most intelligent response to this latest disaster is to quote Ebenezer Scrooge and cry “bah, humbug”.

African aid organisations have been in the grip of an hysterical number inflation game since the hideous images of the Ethiopian famine were brought to our screens 25 years ago today by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. For every year that has passed the scale of Africa’s problems seem to have grown.

Aid organisations and the media have inflated the scale of subsequent horror, regardless of the truth. This year the International Rescue Committee released data from its Democratic Republic of the Congo mortality survey. “Congo’s war and aftermath have killed 5.4 million,” The Washington Post yelled, quoting the IRC. Humbug.

The IRC isn’t deliberately lying, neither was the Post. But the idea that 5.4 million people have died as a result of war in Congo is nonsense. It needs to be peddled to help to generate funds to relieve the real and hideous suffering of Congo’s population, but nonsense it remains. As the IRC admits: “Less than 10 per cent of all deaths were due to violence, with most attributed to easily preventable and treatable conditions such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition.”

The IRC is saying, really, that the Congolese are dying because they are poor. Recent work by André Lambert and Louis Lohlé-Tart shows that the rising mortality rate predates the wars there. But combine “war’’ with “millions dead’’ and you have a donation-winning headline We all do it. We use statistics to highlight the horrors in Africa to drive home the unbelievable scale of the continent’s problems. But that’s the problem: the scale has become unbelievable. Twenty-three million? From my experience of two decades’ reporting from Africa, I can say with absolute confidence that this is humbug. Did anyone count them? No.

Oxfam says that 3.8 million Kenyans, more than 3.8 million Somalis, and 13.7 million Ethiopians “need aid”. Implicit in this is that they could perish through lack of food. In Kenya it might be possible to make this guess. But in Somalia, which has been in a post-apocalyptic state of anarchy since 1991?

There is a drought. Just as there is every ten years. This is the worst in a generation. But even if 23 million people do face starvation, please don’t reach for your cheque book. Foreign aid is the principal reason for Africa’s accumulated agony.

According to Oxfam: “Food aid saves lives, but it crowds out other … initiatives that support communities’ strategies to prevent the next drought from becoming a disaster.” Exactly. If we send help now, we’ll be killing more people later because more people will be bred and no one will think to save any crops to feed them.

Kenya is having a terrible time. But it would not be doing so if the breadbasket in the west of the country had not been torn apart by ethnic violence. If the agricultural outreach programmes, which helped farmers to improve productivity through the 1960s and 1970s, had not collapsed, if the Government’s milk and beef marketing system was not ruined by corruption, and if people had not been settled on marginal land that can never sustain them, then Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought.

When the rains do come to Kenya there are not enough seed stocks. Kenya’s politicians have stolen much of the aid that we have sent them, and now we are expected to feed their constituents. Every time Kenya, or for that matter Ethiopia, has faced a food shortage the wealthy nations have come to the rescue.

Oxfam reveals in its latest paper, Band Aids and Beyond, that between 70 and 92 per cent of US aid to Ethiopia has been food aid — and almost all of that was the surplus product of American farms. So Ethiopia has had no need to feed itself. Worse still, Ethiopia and Eritrea spent billions that should have been used to develop self-sufficiency between 1998 and 2000 on a border war over a mess of barren rocks. They could do this because we in the wealthy North fed the populations of both countries.

So, what to do? For an answer I turn to Birham Woldu, who survived the (man-made) 1984 famine in Ethiopia.

“Constantly shipping food from places like the US is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency,” she writes in the Oxfam report. “We are a big country and when there is famine in one part of the country, there is plenty in another. So we need better infrastructure and communications to move food around to where it is needed. Above all we need education.”

If they want to badly enough, the Ethiopians can sort out their own roads. So that leaves education. We can help Africans to help themselves by donating to charities that ring-fence funding for education. If they don’t do it, don’t give. Mark all cheques “not for food” if you have to.

With education Africans can and will rid themselves of the incompetent and corrupt leaders that we have kept in power through foreign aid for decades. Educated Africans will bring an end to a dangerous cycle of humbug.

Six years ago today, my father, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed in a tragic attack in Baghdad that changed the face of the humanitarian world. A truck filled with bombs exploded in the United Nations compound, killing 22 humanitarian workers and wounding many more. Some who were not physically hurt were psychologically wounded. Even years later, many remain vulnerable.

My father headed the U.N. team in Baghdad. A few days before he was killed, he wrote: “The situation is indeed difficult. But we will succeed, because we will do it with the Iraqi people.”

His dedication to serving people in need is shared by thousands of humanitarian workers around the world who sacrifice their time, their energy and, too often, their lives to help those in need in places where wars kill and maim and throw innocent victims into refugee camps or exile. Darfur, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda are just a few of these areas.

In recognition of their commitment, my family sought to have Aug. 19 — the date my father and his fellow workers died while helping destitute people — designated as World Humanitarian Day. After discussions with our foundation, Brazil, France, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland sponsored a U.N. resolution that was adopted by the General Assembly on Dec. 11, 2008. So for the first time, today is officially an occasion to reflect on the situation for humanitarians deployed in the field.

Sadly, already poor conditions for humanitarian workers in many places are deteriorating. Since 2006, attacks on aid workers have increased sharply, the Overseas Development Institute reports. The Darfur region in Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia are the most dangerous places, accounting for more than 60 percent of violence against aid workers.

Last year was the worst in 12 years, with 260 humanitarian aid workers killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in violent attacks, according to the institute. This toll exceeds the number of victims among U.N. peacekeeping troops.

The Baghdad bomb attack that killed my father dramatically underscored a fact that humanitarian workers had dealt with since the early 1990s: The U.N. flag had ceased to be bulletproof. It no longer protected U.N. humanitarian workers as well as the staffs of nongovernmental organizations.

Before the 1990s, most wars in the developed world were proxy wars. There was a kind of tacit gentleman’s agreement whereby superpowers respected as much as possible the rights and the work of humanitarian personnel.

Now, this did not prevent the deaths of many humanitarians. But most casualties were those who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire. Rarely were aid workers targeted.

The situation, though, has changed dramatically. With the rise of nationalism since the fall of communism and the end of the proxy wars, humanitarian workers no longer benefit from protection, flimsy as it may have been before. Victims nowadays are often targeted.

We’re talking about the people who are serving on the front line for those of us who weep when we see children on TV crying beside mothers who have been killed by mortar fire — and believe that something must be done to help these victims and others like them.

Humanitarian workers are the unsung heroes of our time. They are not recognized as such. Yet consider their efforts, seeking to persuade warlords to let them help innocent civilians who are facing heat, cold, disease and other threats.

They never have the money and staff to fully respond to demands. They get up every morning knowing the enormousness of the task ahead of them, carrying on despite the gnawing feeling that whatever they attempt will always be a drop in the ocean. They can help, their efforts can and do save lives, but these workers are aware that their actions amount to little more than a Band-Aid on some of the world’s worst problems.

The reality of their tasks would make any of us despair. Not them.

As a humanitarian worker once told me: “We have no right to despair when we see that people who have lost everything, even their family, still have hope.”

It is high time for the international community to face its responsibilities and stop hiding behind humanitarian action. The world must stop using humanitarian efforts as a fig leaf. It can no longer avoid action while putting its conscience at rest by sending humanitarian actors into the killing fields. There are lives at risk.

And on this day, because of their courage, dedication, generosity and humility, humanitarian workers deserve our respect. We should not only praise their work but also remind the world that we must protect them, that we must impress on warlords that if they have any humanity left, they should protect and assist these workers. We must remind the world that humanitarian workers are neutral and help those in need, whatever their color, race, religion or political beliefs. They deserve our efforts and our thanks.

Last month, while I was visiting my family in southeastern Afghanistan, my mobile rang. I didn’t dare answer it.

I recognised the number — it was a colleague I work with at the World Food Programme (WFP) office in Kabul — but I couldn’t risk being overheard speaking to her in English.

Most of my relatives in Paktia province don’t know that I work for the United Nations. I tell them I run a private business — the same story I give to my neighbours in Kabul. The truth could put us all in danger.

I’ve never programmed the numbers of my international colleagues into my mobile phone because I don’t want someone to find them there if I’m searched at a roadblock. I leave my work phone behind when I travel to the south to visit relatives and friends.

None of this is unusual. Many of my Afghan colleagues at WFP do the same things, and some take even more precautions against the risks we face just coming to work every day.

There are people here who believe that working with non-Muslims is forbidden. Some are willing to use violence to enforce this belief, and may not differentiate between someone working for a foreign military force and someone working for a humanitarian agency.

The gap between rich and poor is also an issue. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth, and some people assume that those of us working for international agencies are wealthy — which could make us and our relatives targets for kidnappers seeking ransom.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a UN job was something people would be eager to show off. A position like mine would bring prestige and social status.

But for me and for so many of my colleagues, our motivation is something much deeper, and it inspires us to face the risks that now accompany the work we do.

I look around and see a country that desperately needs development, stability and growth. In 30 years of war, we were kept separate from the world. Afghanistan now needs continuous engagement with the international community to repair the damage done. It also needs people with skills and education to build Afghanistan a better future.

I feel a sense of responsibility to help my country grow. My work at WFP is one way of facing up to that responsibility and the challenges that go along with it. Not only are we feeding more than eight million people, we are also rehabilitating irrigation canals and feeding children through our school meals programme; laying the groundwork for sustained recovery and development.

Today is the first annual World Humanitarian Day, which honours the dedication of the many thousands of aid workers around the world who have devoted themselves to humanitarian service. We remember especially our colleagues who have lost their lives while bringing assistance to others.

Here in Afghanistan I am reminded every day that the places where humanitarian needs are greatest are often the places where we face the greatest dangers in meeting those needs. I, for one, am determined to continue the fight against hunger in Afghanistan.

The announcement that the United Nations has a record $4.8bn funding gap for its 2009 aid programmes may not strike some observers as news. For the last two decades, in particular, the UN has lurched from one financial crisis to another. Although the size of the latest shortfall is unprecedented, the basic problem is that the world’s politicians have consistently failed to stump up the resources that the UN needs to fulfil the tasks that they demand of it or to set up a system of effective managerial oversight and planning in the organisation.

The current global recession has clearly put pressure on the aid budgets of all donor countries and the UN’s humanitarian assistance budget has faced two recent unexpected calls on its resources. Last December the UN’s world food programme announced that the spike in food prices meant that it was struggling to meet its commitments to feed 49 million people in 12 of the world’s most hunger-stricken countries. Warehouses for some of its most critical operations were running out of food and it was planning to cut rations, including to Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. More recently, the Pakistani army’s offensive against Taliban militants has caused more than two million people to flee their homes, causing a ten-fold increase in needs in the country.

The UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator John Holmes said that he had received less than half the $9.5bn sought for humanitarian work this year. “It is clear that the global recession puts pressure on the aid budgets of all donor governments, but of course it puts immeasurably more pressure on crises-stricken people in poor countries,” he added.

The problem is one of political will rather than lack of money. The UN funds its operations through a mixture of assessed and voluntary contributions by member states. Its specialised agencies depend on a combination of these sources to fund their operations. The regular budget now only accounts for around 10% of total expenditure, with agencies relying on voluntary contributions for the rest, which makes the process of budgeting extremely difficult.

In 1994 the entire UN emergency peacekeeping and humanitarian aid budget was around $4bn – about the size of the New York fire brigade’s. However, even then the United States government was complaining about the UN’s “astronomical costs” and withholding funds in protest. The following year, it unilaterally cut its contributions and forced the rest of the world to agree a cap on its contributions. Since then, peacekeeping costs have more than tripled, but the UN’s regular budget has completely failed to keep up, which has led to a constant round of alarmist-sounding financial appeals ever since.

The UN has faced similar problems throughout its history, although on a lesser scale. There were disputes over how to pay for its first big peacekeeping operation – in Congo – in 1970, and the UN had to issue bonds to tide it through. In those days, it was the Soviet Union who headed the list of defaulters, withholding money in protest at its policy difference with the rest of the UN general assembly.

By the 1980s the pattern had been reversed and it was the Reagan administration in the US that had adopted a policy of “withholding” its contributions as a form of exerting political leverage. The US deliberately underpaid its dues, withdrew its support entirely from one UN aid agency and delayed other payments as a means of creating financial crises within the organisation. Although most of Reagan’s successors adopted a more constructive approach, hostility to the UN had by then become an article of faith in the US Republican party, which have continued their campaign of financial disruption in Congress and the Senate.

By choking off funds at critical junctures these greatly exacerbated the problems faced by UN peace-keeping missions in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina and so turned many of their criticisms of the UN into self-fulfilling prophecies. Even today the big operations in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo remain grossly under-resourced. The hollowness of Republican attacks on the UN’s supposed “waste and inefficiency” have also been highlighted by the mind-boggling costs of US operations in Iraq and now Afghanistan.

While President Obama has reversed the entirely counter-productive approach of his immediate predecessor, any serious attempt at UN reform needs to address the issue of financing in a more systematic way. The current set-up probably ends up generating far more waste and inefficiency since it forces each agency to compete for short-term funding, which encourages inter-agency turf-wars and militates against long-term planning in the UN system as a whole. It would cost around 1% of the money thrown at western banks in the last six months to bridge the current humanitarian deficit. Yet politicians will continue to play a game of cynical brinkmanship over where the money should come from, confident that it will be the UN itself that gets blamed for the resulting deaths and human misery.

The new commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, announced: “The Afghan people are at the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission.” The four-star general was wearing military fatigues, but his wording sounded civilian. Indeed, when President Obama explained in March how the United States plans “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he ordered a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan. But make no mistake: The civilian part of the coalition operations here is subservient to the military arm, and the two are known together as an “integrated approach.”

The problem with this approach is that when military structures perform or oversee civilian tasks, the nonmilitary humanitarian work often gets politicized and militarized, and the difference between the two is blurred. If executed as planned, the “civilian surge” may worsen the situation here.

Integrating more civilians into military structures means further militarizing what has traditionally been humanitarian work. This is not in the interest of the Afghan people, who expect security from coalition forces and assistance from civilian aid agencies.

The main destination of this “surge” will be the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs), whose performance in Afghanistan has been criticized by humanitarian groups on the ground: One aid worker from a European nongovernmental organization said they behave like “Humvees in a china shop.”

While working in the eastern city of Jalalabad last year, I heard many tales that amounted to such porcelain-breaking. The main victims were the communities the PRTs were seeking to help. An Afghan working for an Asian NGO recounted how 15 Humvees entered their compound unannounced and the uniformed “farenjee” (Afghan for “foreigners”) began conducting quick medical examinations — 45 seconds per patient — while photographing the process to document their outreach. (After complaints from the NGO, the Americans said they spent 105 seconds per patient, not 45.) There was the time that armed, uniformed Americans arrived at an orphanage, I was told, to distribute pencils and notebooks. In the process, the Americans terrified the female employees of the orphanage and the young children. An Afghan doctor from an American NGO told me his concerns about the welfare of communities where the PRTs distribute medicines from their Humvees: The labels are in English or Urdu, he noted, not Pashto, the language spoken in the region.

I visited Jalalabad again in May. The aid agency I work for, the International Rescue Committee, continues to implement programs there, but even now the ever-deteriorating security environment means we mostly have to rely on our trusted staff of Afghans. I did get to visit the American PRT in Jalalabad, where I was received by a senior civil affairs officer. He told me and an Afghan colleague of mine that Americans were no longer going out to villages uninvited. I suggested that the danger still existed for locals contacted by the PRTs — these Afghans could be branded collaborators. But the officer saw no problem. “Our presence forces them to make a choice: Either they support the government or they support the Taliban,” he said. And he added, “It takes a little bit of courage if you want to be free; freedom does not come free.”

My Afghan colleague later told me of recent incidents in which a mullah was killed in Chaparhar, apparently for working with government and coalition forces, and another mullah was decapitated in Khogyani for allowing his two sons to serve in the Afghan National Army, which was trained by the U.S.-led coalition.

Contact with the foreign troops, it seems, does not come free, either.

The PRT in Jalalabad has not had significant run-ins with nongovernmental organizations over the past year, but problems persist. Staff changes are frequent, and the handovers are poor, so Afghans watch the civilians who are arriving continually try to reinvent the wheel. I am confident that the civil affairs officer I spoke with and his colleagues from the National Guard have the best of intentions, but theirs is a mission impossible. The PRTs’ directive to “win the hearts and minds” — known as WHAM — and to implement “quick-impact projects” is better suited for charity handouts than a strategy for reconstruction and development.

Simply put, PRTs are a military tool attempting to perform civilian tasks. Inherently, they undermine the necessary distinction between the development objectives of humanitarian aid workers and the political-military objectives of coalition forces.

Relief and development work is more effectively done by experienced and independent aid agencies, working in partnership with the communities they serve. Staff members at the main NGOs in Afghanistan are mostly national (99 percent of IRC staff is Afghan) and know the local languages and culture. As such, they do not require expensive protection. They are also experienced in aid delivery. Most NGOs have been working with Afghans for many years and are committed to long-term stabilization and recovery.

Civilians in Afghanistan are caught between the Taliban and coalition forces. Humanitarian groups cannot be “force multipliers” or “post-battle cleanup” teams; they are the only ones with enough impartiality to provide assistance to the Afghan people. And for the aid community there is no question: The Afghan people are definitely “our mission.”

Even before the explosion Tuesday at the Pearl Continental Hotel killed at least 16 people in Peshawar, Pakistan was at the center of global attention. Yet for all the concern about terrorism, the world has been stunningly indifferent to the plight of the more than 2.4 million people who have fled the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani army is for the first time seriously attacking the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

If the internally displaced Pakistanis are not properly cared for, public opinion, which has shifted dramatically in recent weeks to support the offensive against the Taliban, could once again turn in support of compromise. Last week, the Taliban launched a series of devastating suicide attacks to both divert security forces and cower public opinion. The truck bomb Tuesday night in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan’s provincial capital, reportedly injured 70.

The mass exodus from the battle zone to the southern plains has been the largest and fastest displacement of people since the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago, U.N. officials say. Most of the displaced fled the Swat Valley in just two to three weeks last month.

While the government response has been mixed, ordinary Pakistanis have reacted en masse, loading up trucks in Karachi and Lahore with wheat, sugar, electric fans and bedding and sending them north to towns such as Mardan in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the center of the crisis. Yet their efforts seem meager next to the enormity of the humanitarian disaster.

President Obama seems to be the only world leader concerned about the displaced civilians. The United States allocated $110 million and then an additional $200 million after Obama’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke assessed the situation last week.

Holbrooke castigated Europe for its lack of support and then sought to raise funds in the Arab world, which has not responded to the Pakistanis’ plight. Islamabad says that no European or Muslim Arab country has sent any major aid.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the United Nations may be forced to cut all its services, including food supplies, by July if its appeal for $543 million in emergency aid goes unmet. After nearly a month, donor countries have pledged only 20 percent of that. The International Committee of the Red Cross — the only aid agency working with civilians wounded from the fighting and with those civilians who have remained in the destroyed towns of Swat — seeks $38 million, which would double its Pakistan budget for this year.

Strategically, much is at stake. The fighting in Swat is not just against extremism but for the hearts and minds of future generations. “Pakistani public support for the campaign against the Taliban and help to the [internally displaced] could dissipate fast if international aid is not forthcoming,” a senior U.N. official told me. “Moreover, dissatisfied [displaced civilians] could become targets for recruitment by the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

Already, police here have caught more than 50 Taliban adherents among the displaced, either hiding or trying to coerce youngsters into becoming suicide bombers. Worryingly, among the many secular Pakistani charities working here are extremist organizations such as Falah-i-Insaniat, as the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group that carried out the massacre in Mumbai last year is now known. Falah-i-Insaniat also supports the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Such groups — which are heavily funded by extremist sympathizers abroad — are not likely to run out of money soon.

The humanitarian situation is bleak: Only about a tenth of the displaced are living in proper refugee camps. The rest have been taken in by relatives or locals and are living in private back yards, homes, fields, mosques and school buildings. This amazing public generosity and concern are part of traditional Pashtun culture, but they cannot last indefinitely. While Pashtuns are the major ethnic group in the region, the Taliban — whose followers are largely Pashtun themselves — has sought to denigrate and destroy traditional Pashtun culture.

The U.N. World Food Program has devised an innovative system to feed those displaced who are living outside the camps. It has set up 25 “humanitarian hubs” within walking distance of most of the people, and families who have registered with the government can pick up supplies.

“We bring food to where the people are, instead of people coming to where the food is,” says Wolfgang Herbinger, head of the World Food Program in Pakistan. “But we will run out of food in a few weeks if pledges are not made now.” The program is feeding 2.1 million people and is 60 percent short of its estimated costs to buy more food.

The fresh thinking in placing such hubs where other aid agencies provide electric fans, cooking utensils and other supplies could also prove useful in war zones in Afghanistan, where direct civilian aid is lacking.

The real battles this summer against the Taliban and al-Qaeda will be fought in Pakistan as much as in Afghanistan. By refusing to see this humanitarian crisis as an exercise in winning hearts and minds, however, the world seems to be sleepwalking its way to defeat.

Almost every day the news out of Pakistan offers evidence of growing support for military action against the Taliban in Swat, and growing antipathy ­towards the Taliban itself. The rightwing media, which had urged the government to make peace deals, is falling over itself in praise of military advances.

But straightforward approval for military action is not the whole story. An article in one of Pakistan’s papers a few days ago reported that tribesmen in Upper Dir had besieged 200 Taliban and killed a number in response to the Taliban’s bombing of a mosque. The newspaper cited this as further evidence of growing anti-Taliban sentiment. There is no reason to doubt the tribesmen’s genuine anger – yet near the end of the article there was a telling admission that cannot be left out of the picture: a tribal elder said that allowing the Taliban to stay was asking for trouble as it would invite a military offensive that they ­certainly didn’t want.

This is where the story of wholehearted support for the military ­offensive breaks down. The army’s ­success has come at a horrific cost: there are estimated to be 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan. Who can blame the tribesmen of Upper Dir for taking up arms to prevent the army from adding their families to the swelling numbers of IDPs? The ­editorials of relief and approval about the army’s decision to “finally” do what is ­necessary contain the implicit message that the suffering of the 2.5 million is the price that must be paid. Around the world, leaders and opinion-makers have reached the same conclusion.

But what of the 2.5 million? When their numbers were less than half that amount – just a few weeks ago – the IDP camps could house less than 15% of them. The rest had to rely on the kindness of relatives and the even more extraordinary kindness of strangers. Families with roofs over their heads have been taking in large numbers and sharing what little they have. Their ­generosity is shaming, particularly when placed against the horrifying indifference of the rest of the world – a world that for months urged the Pakistan ­government to send its army into Swat and surrounding areas.

Yesterday nine major aid agencies – ActionAid, Cafod/Caritas, Care, Concern Worldwide, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision – issued a press release to say their aid projects face ­closure due to a shortage of funds. Oxfam will have to shut down its programme to assist 360,000 people if more funding doesn’t arrive by next month. The United Nations is faring no better – its $543m appeal has only received $138m so far. The United ­Kingdom has given only 1.6% of the amount the UN requires.

A change in attitude is needed urgently; if humanitarian grounds aren’t reason enough, consider the fact that refugee camps are prime targets for those trying to radicalise the disaffected. When the Pakistani film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was in the IDP camps earlier this year she found the young boys who make up such a large population of the camps equally split between those who support the army and those who support the Taliban. A vital “hearts and minds” battle is being waged in the camps, where groups such as the extremist Jamaat-ud-Dawa (linked to the Mumbai attacks) have been very visible in giving aid.

Many in Pakistan who still oppose military action are likely to claim that “the west” is pressurising the army to kill and displace its own people, uncaring of the suffering it causes. Time now for “the west” to show a different face to those who are desperate for assistance, and will not forget where it comes from.

In the Gaza Strip, over one month on from the end of the conflict, tens of thousands of people are still struggling to rebuild their lives. We in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, supported by large donations from the British public, mounted a massive response during the conflict with thousands of staff and volunteers delivering medical care, clean water and food. These unsung humanitarian heroes got to work as soon as fighting began, often risking their own lives, and haven’t stopped since.

Throughout my time in the region I have asked myself how our organisation can get the people of Gaza back on their feet and to live a life free of fear? The simple answer is that we cannot. This is not a job for aid agencies alone. Humanitarian action is vital, but insufficient to resolve the crisis. Ordinary Gazans have struggled under 18 months of restrictions, making daily life almost impossible – access to healthcare, petrol, electricity, secure food supplies – things we take for granted.

Next week in Sharm el-Sheikh politicians and leaders from around the world will come together to discuss the reconstruction of Gaza: but how do you rebuild Gaza? No building materials are allowed in, so no work has started on the 10,000 new houses that will be needed, nor on repairs to vital facilities such as the hospital. As one father said: “Cement alone is not enough. What use to rebuild if we don’t have a guarantee of peace and safety?”

His words struck home as we found a dozen large cement trucks in a builder’s yard, all turned over on their sides and smashed, tank tracks still visible in the sand. Any hope of rebuilding seems a distant dream.

I talked to two families who preferred to live crouching under the rubble of their former homes. They had lost four family members, as well as their subsistence farming business across the border, now beyond reach.

The saddest sight was Samouni Street, home to the extended family of the same name, and now a pile of smashed concrete. Three small girls told us a heartrending story of terror and death: troops moved them out of their houses; their new shelter was bombed; a brother was run over by a tank; and a mother decapitated, her daughter left sitting by the body.

The task of reconstruction is daunting and the magnitude of the work cannot be underestimated. However, the truth is that efforts to rebuild Gaza can only succeed if accompanied by credible political steps to resolve the crisis.

It is not enough to just go back to the way things were before the conflict. What is needed is sustainable economic development; but this will be possible only if political steps prepare the ground. The first and most urgent measure should be to end the isolation of Gaza, particularly the restrictions on the movement of people and goods. In Israel, the targeting of civilian areas must also end.

The role of politicians and world leaders and the role of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement must not be confused. However, we share a common goal that can be reached only if we all work together, so that the delivery of humanitarian aid is complemented by the commitment of all involved in bringing about lasting peace.

Our mandate requires us to provide aid on the basis of need, and need alone, without recourse to ideology, politics or difference. But from political actors an honest and courageous peace process is required: to stop the destruction of thousands of civilian lives and to enable people to rebuild their communities and live with dignity. We will continue to fulfil our mandate. I urge the politicians and world leaders to fulfil theirs.

While world leaders gathered here to unleash soothing words on the financial tsunami swamping their economies, the daring “responsibility to protect” doctrine adopted by U.N. members three years ago was being buried in the killing fields of eastern Congo.

For the sake of your bank account, hope that the international community can protect dollars, euros and yen more successfully than it protects the lives and safety of people who happen to live in failed or rogue states.

In three years, “never again” has become “sorry about that.” Humanitarian intervention — proudly proclaimed as a universal mission by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other Third Way leaders and eventually adopted at the 2005 U.N. summit — has fallen into serious disrepair.

The slaughter, looting and forced removal of defenseless Congolese civilians around the city of Goma this month — even though they were theoretically under the protection of 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers — are grim testimony to the consequences of making righteous-sounding promises without thinking enough about the means to carry them out. The money men and women of the Group of 20 should take note.

So should the incoming Obama administration, which will have to fashion a new basis for the use of force abroad for a Democratic Party that has been divided by that issue since the Vietnam War.

The responsibility of the world’s nations to act together to protect citizens against massive human rights abuses by their own governments was shaped by Clinton, Blair and Kofi Annan out of the sickening failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the successful military campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo later in the decade.

Humanitarian intervention provided Democrats with a unifying, and comfortable, middle ground from which to support military action abroad. Even U.S. cities, including Barack Obama’s own Chicago, have adopted resolutions demanding that the responsibility to protect — known to its advocates as R2P — be made a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

But wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched thin the military capabilities of the United States and its allies and made public opinion much more negative about intervention abroad in any guise.

Reams of pious words have been written or uttered, including by Obama, about the need to do something to halt the brutal ethnic conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. But the failure of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other regional organizations to intervene effectively there and now in eastern Congo may be the final nail in the coffin of R2P.

The civilians around Goma have been effectively abandoned by Congo’s dysfunctional national army, which more often victimizes them than protects them. They are caught between this feckless force and the far more efficient, better-armed and absolutely ruthless rebel movement led by Laurent Nkunda, who declared on BBC television last week that he intends to overthrow President Joseph Kabila.

Nkunda’s bid to go from regional warlord to national leader is covertly backed by neighboring Rwanda. Kabila has the support of Angola, which may have already secretly provided troops to the Congolese army. This conflict could erupt into an international crisis about the time that Obama is being sworn into office.

If it does, there will be plenty of blame to go around. Alan Doss, the adept U.N. special representative in eastern Congo, asked the Security Council on Oct. 3 for an increase of 3,000 troops. The blue-helmet force also needs relief from crippling rules of engagement that prevent it from defending civilians. But there has been no response by the council to Doss’s plea.

“What is happening in Goma is very damaging for the responsibility to protect. It could be a turning point,” says Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister and one of the doctrine’s founders through his own humanitarian work. “We are witnessing the consequences of the arrival of nationalism on a continental level.”

That is, African governments accept humanitarian disasters rather than give foreign-led forces the support or freedom to carry out massive rescue operations. Kouchner, visiting Washington last week, also cited Zimbabwe as a tragic case in point.

He does find one ray of hope — the election of Obama, who has a direct family connection to Africa and promises a fresh start in U.S. foreign policy. “This could change everything,” Kouchner said, “and not only for Africa. You Americans have just held a world election. President Obama should not wait to show what that means.”

Biting the hand that feeds the world doesn’t seem like a great strategy. But at the United Nations, it’s normal. Last year, in a masterstroke, the UN General Assembly put Zimbabwe in charge of Sustainable Development. Yesterday, the world leaders who gathered at the UN in New York found a new excuse to rage against America, the world’s biggest aid donor, for having the cheek to try to save the West from recession.

“Using the bailouts of the international banking system,” the Chilean President said, “the scourge of hunger on the planet could have easily been eliminated.” She moved straight on to complain that “financial instability is threatening to generate a worldwide recession in which, as always, those most affected will be the world’s poorest”. Yup. The world is a complicated place. Sadly, you can’t keep economics and poverty in separate compartments.

Aid officials understandably worry that wealthy nations are falling behind in their promises. But they need to remember the terms of the deal that was done at the G8 three years ago. A doubling of aid to Africa was supposed to be contingent on clean government, and respect for democracy. That deal has not always been honoured. Last November, to take one example, Britain announced a new partnership with Uganda worth “at least” £700 million. This is the country whose President changed the country’s Constitution, so that he could stand for a third term. Who jailed the opposition leader. Who has been bankrolled by the West for so long that half of his Government’s budget is now foreign aid. It beggars belief that we are still pumping money into the Swiss bank accounts of his cronies. But we are, because we fear it will hurt the poor more if we withdraw. Or is it because it will hurt the aid industry?

The past few years have been boom years for aid, just as they have been for banking. The aid industry has not been entirely free of reckless lending, nor even from moral hazard. When we wrote off Nigeria’s debt in 2005, did we really want that country to think of debt as a free lunch? Did we know that it was about to become the world’s sixth-biggest oil producer? If so, how could anyone have thought that a $1 billion write-off was value for money? Or was value for money not an issue?

When I graduated in the 1990s, I thought that my career would be in aid. I studied development economics in America. I did stints at the World Bank and in Bangladesh. I left the aid industry because I feared it was just that – an industry weighed down by vested interests.

In Bangladesh I met Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, which gave small loans to poor women to start businesses. It has since given eight million of the poorest people in the world the means to build and control their own lives. I naively offered some of my agency’s cash. But Yunus didn’t want my money. He didn’t need our staff. He clearly thought it would be corrupting. And I feared he was right.

Humanitarian aid is different. In situations of desperate extremity, long-term economic considerations, or the morality of a country’s leader, must be put aside. And humanitarian aid is relatively effective, because Oxfam, Save the Children and the World Food Programme distribute aid directly to those who need it. Yet only 16 per cent of Britain’s aid spending is humanitarian. Most of the £5 billion spent by our Department for International Development each year goes to governments. Some of it is working – in places such as Zambia and Mozambique – but some is not. We need to ask why. And if we can justify nearly doubling the budget to £8 billion by 2010.

In recent years, British aid spending has shifted away from infrastructure projects towards health and schools. Vaccinations against malaria and treatments for HIV have a demonstrable and dramatic impact. They are powerful emblems of our obligation to our fellow human beings. They also offer the real hope of eradicating disease – one of the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN in 2000.

But when it comes to eradicating poverty, there is only one answer. That is to create jobs. For that you need to create businesses, which need access to credit, non-punitive tax regimes and recognition of contract law. If those conditions do not prevail, we should be calling governments’ bluff rather than throwing in more cash.

The statistics on economic growth are staggering. The rise of China has lifted 400 million people out of poverty, more than have been helped by any aid programme. That is why the number of people below the poverty line is falling even while the world’s population is booming. The average rate of growth in poor countries is now outstripping that of rich ones.

China is transforming the landscape that has dominated aid thinking for decades. Its hunger for natural resources is pushing growth in many African countries to unprecedented levels. In 2006, the Chinese President hosted the largest Africa summit held outside the continent. He promised to double aid to Africa, cancel much of its debt and – crucially – to lift trade restrictions, which will do more to help than any other single measure

Fareed Zakaria, in his book The Post-American World, tells an instructive story about the Nigerian Government negotiating a $5 million loan for railway systems with the World Bank. Before the deal was done last year the Chinese Government stepped in and offered $9 billion to reconstruct the entire rail system with no strings attached. That means no impact assessments or capacity-building workshops. It cuts the rug from under the World Bank. It also suggests that Nigeria should no longer be among the top ten recipients of British aid.

We can do a great deal to save people from starvation and infectious diseases. But we need to demand the same stringency about aid that we do about other government spending.

More than 60,000 people may have died as a result of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, and at least 1.5 million are homeless or otherwise in desperate need of assistance. The Burmese military junta, one of the most morally repulsive in the world, has allowed in only a trickle of aid supplies. The handful of United States Air Force C-130 flights from Utapao Air Base here in Thailand is little more than symbolic, given the extent of the need.

France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has spoken of the possibility of an armed humanitarian intervention, and there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.

As it happens, American armed forces are now gathered in large numbers in Thailand for the annual multinational military exercise known as Cobra Gold. This means that Navy warships could pass from the Gulf of Thailand through the Strait of Malacca and north up the Bay of Bengal to the Irrawaddy Delta. It was a similar circumstance that had allowed for Navy intervention after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.

Because oceans are vast and even warships travel comparatively slowly, one should not underestimate the advantage that fate has once again handed us. For example, a carrier strike group, or even a smaller Marine-dominated expeditionary strike group headed by an amphibious ship, could get close to shore and ferry troops and supplies to the most devastated areas on land.

The magic of this is that an enormous amount of assistance can be provided while maintaining a small footprint on shore, greatly reducing the chances of a clash with the Burmese armed forces while nevertheless dealing a hard political blow to the junta. Concomitantly, drops can be made from directly overhead by the Air Force without the need to militarily occupy any Burmese airports.

In other words, this is militarily doable. The challenge is the politics, both internationally and inside Myanmar. Because one can never assume an operation will go smoothly, it is vital that the United States carry out such a mission only as part of a coalition including France, Australia and other Western powers. Of course, the approval of the United Nations Security Council would be best, but China — the junta’s best friend — would likely veto it.

And yet China — along with India, Thailand and, to a lesser extent, Singapore — has been put in a very uncomfortable diplomatic situation. China and India are invested in port enlargement and energy deals with Myanmar. Thailand’s democratic government has moved closer to the junta for the sake of logging and other business ventures. Singapore, a city-state that must get along with everybody in the region, is suspected of acting as a banker for the Burmese generals. All these countries quietly resent the ineffectual moral absolutes with which the United States, a half a world away, approaches Myanmar. Nonetheless, the disaster represents an opportunity for Washington. By just threatening intervention, the United States puts pressure on Beijing, New Delhi and Bangkok to, in turn, pressure the Burmese generals to open their country to a full-fledged foreign relief effort. We could do a lot of good merely by holding out the possibility of an invasion.

The other challenge we face lies within Myanmar. Because a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse, we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath. And just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not supposed to lead to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein was not supposed to lead to civil war, the fall of the junta would not be meant to lead to the collapse of the Burmese state. But it might.

About a third of Myanmar’s 47 million people are ethnic minorities, who have a troubled historical relationship with the dominant group, the Burmans. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the democracy movement, is an ethnic Burman just like the generals, and her supporters are largely focused on the Burman homeland. Meanwhile, the Chins, Kachins, Karennis, Karens, Shans and other hill tribes have been fighting against the government. The real issue in Myanmar, should the regime fall, would be less about forging democracy than a compromise between the Burmans and the other ethnic groups.

Of course, Myanmar is not the Balkans or Iraq, where ethnic and sectarian rivalries were smothered under a carapace of authoritarianism, only to erupt later on. Myanmar has suffered insurgencies for 60 years now, and may be ripe for a compromise under a civilian government. But neither can we be naïve. Just because Myanmar is not Yugoslavia doesn’t mean it isn’t like Russia; it is a mini-empire ruled by the ethnic-Burman military that could crumble into its constituent mountainous parts, especially as the democracy advocates have demonstrated little ability to run a country. Here in Mae Sot, a center for non-Burman ethnic dissident groups, complaints over the disorganization of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement are rife.

It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

You don’t have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west’s chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big – big enough to trump Burma’s cyclone.

To add to the relief, Beijing was behaving better than it has over past calamities. Since this might have been thanks to the west’s “positive engagement” with China’s dictators – even awarding them the Olympics – we could possibly take credit from the week’s tally of disaster. Sorry about that, Burma.

The Burmese cyclone of 11 days ago has already slid into liberal interventionism’s recycle bin, a purgatory called Mere Abuse. The regime’s refusal to aid some 1.5 million people reportedly facing starvation in the Irrawaddy delta has been subjected only to a “shock and awe” of adjectival assault.

Gordon Brown called the refusal “utterly unacceptable” (which means accepted). The aid minister, Douglas Alexander, professed himself “horrified”. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, used the words “malign neglect … a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions”. The UN secretary-general registered “deep concern and immense frustration”. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy found the inaction “utterly reprehensible”, and in Germany Angela Merkel found it “inexplicable”. George Bush declared the regime “either isolated or callous”. As Kipling would have said, if Kruger could be killed with words the Burmese regime would be dead and buried.

What is it about Burma? The very same politicians who spent the past seven years declaring the virtue of intervening wherever the mood took them are now, if not tongue-tied, hands-tied. Where are the buccaneers of Bosnia, the crusaders of Kosovo, the bravehearts who rescued Sierra Leone from its rebels, the Afghans from the Taliban and the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein? Where are the gallants who sent convoys into Croatia in 1992, to relieve human suffering in conditions of chaos and hostility?

Overnight they have become signed-up members of the “you-can’t-solve-all-the-world’s-problems” party. Those who claim the lunatic Afghan adventure “a good war” and remark that “we cannot just leave these people to their fate”, find no problem in “leaving” hundreds of thousands to die abandoned by their rulers in Burma. It is said to be a long way away, a matter of national sovereignty, very difficult, a harsh environment, not covered by international law.

The same legal experts who burned midnight oil trying to justify invading Iraq are now doing overtime to justify not sending relief into Burma. In 2005, the west’s leaders boasted the UN’s “responsibility to protect” principle, claiming that this “R2P” justified the security council in authorising action against negligent states. It would provide cover for intervention if, for instance, a government in Kabul or Islamabad or Khartoum was experiencing domestic massacres but were denying access to aid workers.

Legal opinion now asserts that this meant only cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing and “crimes against humanity”. It did not embrace deliberate negligence following a natural disaster, but rather acts of overt violence. The R2P doctrine is (I am told) “an immensely delicate instrument” that would be better tested somewhere other than Burma. Burma’s dead, in other words, are just the wrong sort of corpses.

All the UN’s fine print was not needed for a contested humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1998. It was not needed to topple the Taliban or Saddam Hussein when political retribution demanded it. Anyone who wants to help the Burmese within the law need only summon Lord Goldsmith from retirement. He does exonerations to order.

Regular readers know I do not favour inappropriate interventions in the affairs of foreign states. They usually breach the UN charter on national sovereignty without meeting any of the tests legalising such breaches, including the informal one that a breach must at least work.

Burma validates any breach. If ever so-called humanitarian intervention were justified, it is now. As many civilians may already have died as were lost in the entire 2004 tsunami, when 230,000 were unaccounted for. Over a million civilians are at risk as a direct result of decisions made by a dictatorial government that places pride and security ahead of the care of its people.

On the most optimistic estimates, only 30% have yet received any help at all. As the French veteran aid worker, Pierre Fouillant, of Comité de Secours Internationaux, reportedly said yesterday, “It’s like they are taking a gun and shooting their own people.”

Yet there are ships, planes, helicopters, supplies and doctors aplenty waiting offshore. They do not want to topple any regime. The American commander aboard the one relief plane allowed into Rangoon at the weekend offered three ships and two dozen helicopters, which could land supplies and leave Burmese territory for Thailand each day by nightfall. Burmese soldiers could be on the planes. He was sent packing.

I am not in Burma and am not an aid worker. For that reason I am ready to be convinced that there are logistical reasons why dump-and-run operations from ships offshore are impractical, even if Rangoon airport remains closed. I am less persuaded by the Pentagon’s reluctance to extend possibly hostile activities this far into south-east Asia, or by some aid agencies who value their relations with odious regimes too much to welcome unauthorised drops.

After days of hand-sitting and abuse-hurling, the thesis that “diplomatic pressure” is going to burst the dam of Burma’s hostility seems naive. I have read not one observer who believes this regime will admit aid workers, while many accept that it would be unlikely to contest a dump-and-run airlift under appropriate air cover. If the west refuses even to plan such an operation, it would be more honest to admit to doing nothing and stop counterproductive abuse of the regime.

What is sickening is the attempt to squeeze a decision not to help these desperate people into the same “liberal interventionist” ideology as validates billions of pounds on invading, occupying, destabilising, bombing and failing to pacify other peoples whose governments also did not invite intervention.

Offending national sovereignty is apparently fine when it involves oil, opium, Islam or a macho yearning to boast “regime change”. It is not to be contemplated when it is just a matter of saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

They are “cruel, power-hungry and dangerously irrational,” in the words of one British journalist. They are ” violent and irrational,” according to a journalist in neighboring Thailand. Our own State Department leadership has condemned their “xenophobic, ever more irrational policies.”

On the evidence of the past few days alone, those are all accurate descriptions. But in one very narrow sense, the cruel, power-hungry, violent and xenophobic generals who run Burma are not irrational at all: Given their most urgent goal — to maintain power at all costs — their reluctance to accept international aid in the wake of a devastating cyclone makes perfect sense. It’s straightforward: The junta cares about its own survival, not the survival of its people. Thus the death toll is thought to have reached 100,000, a further 1.5 million Burmese are at risk of epidemics and starvation, parts of the country are still underwater, hundreds of thousands of people are camped in the open without food or clean water — and, yes, if foreigners come to distribute aid, the legitimacy of the regime might be threatened.

Especially foreigners in large numbers, using high-tech vehicles that don’t exist in Burma, distributing cartons of rice marked “Made in the USA” or even “UNDP,” of course. All natural disasters — from the Armenian earthquake that helped bring down the Soviet Union to Hurricane Katrina, which damaged the Bush administration — have profound political implications, as do the aid efforts that follow them. The Burmese generals clearly know this.

Hence the “logic” of the regime’s behavior in the days since the cyclone: the impounding of airplanes full of food; the initial refusal to grant visas to relief workers or landing rights to foreign aircraft; the initial refusal to allow American (or, indeed, any) military forces to supply the ships, planes and helicopters necessary for the mass distribution of food and supplies that Burma needs. Nor is this simply anti-Western paranoia: The foreign minister of Thailand has been kept out, too. Even Burmese citizens have been prevented from taking food to the flood-damaged regions, on the grounds that “all assistance must be channeled through the military.” The result: Aid organizations that have workers on the ground are talking about the hundreds of thousands of homeless Burmese who may soon begin dying of cholera, diarrhea and other diseases. This isn’t logic by our standards, but it is logic by the standards of Burma’s leaders. Which is why we have to assume that the regime’s fear of foreign relief workers could even increase as the crisis grows, threatening the regime further.

If we fail to persuade the junta to relent soon — despite what I hope are assurances that Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. military will bring only food, not regime change, much as we all might like to see it — then we have to start considering alternatives. According to some accounts, the U.S. military is already considering a variety of options, including helicopter deliveries of food from ships and supply convoys from across the Thai border. The U.S. government should be looking at wider diplomatic options, too. The U.N. Security Council has already refused to take greater responsibility for Burma — China won’t allow the sovereignty of its client to be threatened, even at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives — but there is no need for any country to act alone. In fact, it would be a grave error to do so, since anything resembling a foreign “invasion” might provoke military resistance.

Unfortunately, the phrase “coalition of the willing” has been forever tainted — once again proving that the damage done by the Iraq war goes far beyond Iraq’s borders — but a coalition of the willing is exactly what we need. The French (whose foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, was a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders) are already talking about finding alternative ways to deliver aid. Others in Europe and Asia might join, too, along with some aid organizations. The Chinese should be embarrassed into contributing, asked again and again to help: This is their satrapy, after all, not ours.

Think of it as the true test of the Western humanitarian impulse: The international effort that went into coordinating relief after the 2004 tsunami has to be repeated, but in much harsher, trickier, uglier political circumstances. Yes, we should help the Burmese, even against the will of their irrational leaders. Yes, we should think hard about the right way to do it. And, yes, there isn’t much time to ruminate about any of this.

We were four men of a certain age, sitting above the pews at the altar end of Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, late last Friday afternoon.

The doors were open to the sunshine outside and to King’s College opposite, and the occasional cultural speculator would look in and then, usually, wander off again. We speakers said what we liked. The audience asked what they liked. And, given that the Burmese disaster was relevant to our discussion, we might as well have been on the Moon.

The first speaker argued that we had to be very careful, we in the West, about assuming that we knew what other peoples wanted, or that we could give it to them – unless there was some kind of regional or local connection, we could rarely intervene to good effect. The second speaker, also an academic, took the line that given “our” history of rapacity in the Third World, our intervention was neither wanted nor needed, and we should butt out. I burbled on in the warmth about these being counsels of despair, but aware that my own arguments for interventionism looked rather more exotic and unrealistic than back in, say, 2002, before Iraq.

Meanwhile, on Earth, the Burmese junta – which does not permit such discussion – was preventing outside aid reaching its own people hit by Cyclone Nargis, failing itself to act on their behalf, refusing to take calls from the UN and all the while finding the necessary manpower to police a rigged constitutional referendum. The result is likely to be that tens of thousands of people have died as a consequence of deliberate governmental neglect, to add to those killed directly by the cyclone.

It was easy to understand the impulse that led David Cameron to agree with some Americans, that aid ought to be dropped to needy Burmese in defiance of their dreadful Government. For some reason Mr Cameron’s deadline for the junta’s co-operation with the international community was today, though he is in no position to set one. And despite there being a wartime SOE-type romance in dropping supplies into occupied territory, it is hard to see how such assistance can benefit people on the ground. Even so, I applaud the sentiment.

Not everyone does. There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular. I first heard it from some professor interviewed on the Today programme, and have read it several times since. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West’s hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks.

In a way I prefer this adamantine daftness to the slippery arguments of those who have used the Burmese disaster to attack liberal interventionism, while suggesting that in this particular instance there are grounds for some kind of uninvited action. Their reasoning runs like this: Burma’s crisis is different and more urgent than was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, because of the immediacy of the humanitarian disaster. So the stakes are clear, and whereas it would be illegal to remove the Burmese junta, it is somehow legal to invade Burmese air space and docks to deliver and defend supplies. Presumably (though the anti-interventionist interventionists don’t spell it out) we would protect our aid convoys from attack, so the possibility of military action is implicit.

But they must secretly know, as we all do, that it’s too late. It’s too late again. A country may, of course, be hit by a natural disaster, no matter what the ideological nature of its government. But the way it reacts to a catastrophe will be entirely consistent with its form of administration. For several decades Burma has had a Government whose authoritarianism and isolationism has made it almost inevitable that the consequences of any natural disaster would be magnified by its craziness. We have all known this because we watched on our screens just eight months ago as freedom protests were suppressed.

True, after the Second World War there grew up a kind of admiration of the mobilisatory capacities of totalitarian governments. Stalin had saved Soviet heavy industry from the Germans by moving it physically from Belorussia to the Urals. The command economy had proved its worth by building gazillions of T34 tanks. By the late 1950s and 60s this was translated into praise for the Sputniks and Gagarins of the Soviet space effort and in the 70s into warm words about Cuba’s health system.

It was a hallucination. The democracies had done as good a job in war production as the dictatorships, and were to prove massively superior at technological innovation. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the only thing real communism – or any totalitarianism, including theocracy – was good at, was repression.

The Burmese Government acts the way it does not because of any action by the West, but because it inhabits a fearful, but uncontested world. Its assumptions cannot be tested by a free press, let alone challenged by alternative political parties. The only sounds are its own pronouncements; it exists in an echo chamber in which it hears its own voice and imagines that it is listening to the authentic voice of Burma. Utterly isolated from the real needs of the ordinary Burmese – who dare not express their desires – it nevertheless identifies its own hold on power with the abstract interests of the people. The junta imagines it is the people, and therefore imagines that those who oppose it are against the people. It will deny, to the last moment, that there is a disaster, and when forced to acknowledge it, will blame outsiders and traitors.

We see this from Robert Mugabe, who has probably already planned the means of his “victory” in the second round of the Zimbabwean presidential election. If he is permitted to get away with this, then the Zimbabwean catastrophe – whatever its cause – is only a matter of time.

How often do we need it proved? The issue isn’t whether we have the right to intervene – because the consequences of vicious dictatorships usually catch up with us in time – but whether or not, practically, we can. Everything else is a polite conversation in a sunny church.