Pity the U.S (or what 08:50:39, 10/08/2005 tells us about aid).

The sudden slew of "Stop Work" emails shows that the basic decency of providing some warning before cutting off aid was not afforded to the poorest in the world. Having trusted the U.S., many have been left with no backup at the time they need it most.

But why ask for decency from despots? Why ask for loyalty from those that know not the meaning of the word? (Ghalib: "Hum ko hai un se wafa ki umeed, jo nahin jante wafa kya hai").

What the U.S. has forgotten though is that, even as it is the poorest who are suffering now, it is the U.S. that will feel the brunt of this breach in the long-run, undermining the very logic of this short-sighted and brutal approach.

To understand why, go back to 08:50:39, 10/05/2008 when the ground shook in Northern Pakistan with one of the largest earthquakes in the region in a century. Ryan Crocker, the then Ambassador to Pakistan swung into action immediately.

On October 20th, at his news conference at the Chaklala airbase:

"We are now 12 days into what I think for all of us remains a disaster of virtually unimaginable proportions. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and to all the tens, indeed hundred of thousands, of people affected by the October 8 earthquake. It is a disaster of incredible magnitude and it deserves a response proportionate to that disaster and that is what we’ve been working on since the day it happened."

By the end of their relief effort, U.S. aircraft had flown more than 4,000 sorties, delivering over 11,000 tons of relief supplies, U.S. medical units treated 32,000 patients, and crews cleared more than 50,000 metric tons of debris with more than $200 million in aid. The U.S. response, spurred on by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, was rapid and unequivocal in terms of its humanitarian objectives with "near unanimous sentiment by local respondents that these organizations responded for humanitarian reasons rather than to promote hidden political, cultural or religious agendas." I still remember the hundreds of Chinooks flying over the valley carrying much needed supplies to villages that had been entirely cut off from markets.

Four years after the earthquake, Tahir Andrabi and I led a team back to the earthquake regions to understand the recovery process. In many aspects, things had returned to normal, particularly for adults.

What had not returned to normal was just how much the local population in the affected regions TRUSTED Americans even after this long time. As the headlining figure shows, trust was very high close to the fault-line and declined exactly in proportion to the aid that the population received. As we found, "exposure to the earthquake (...) increases levels of trust (...) from those typically found in Pakistan (one of the lowest in the world) to those found in Sweden (one of the highest in the world)."

This matters.

In any number of settings, trust is in the invisible lubricant that underlies our lives, our commitments, and, yes, our market transactions. Study after study shows that all sorts of market transactions--from credit to supply chains--require enormous trust and where that trust evaporates, so do the conditions for successful trade.

Once it is broken, it takes years, centuries, to repair. From the legacy of colonial medical campaigns to the slave trade, scholars have shown time and again that a breach of trust becomes part of the cultural lore that is passed on from generation to generation.

In a time when the immense global challenges that we face require us to build trust across nations and communities, the U.S. has decided, instead, to take a hammer to that most fragile and invisible of threads that holds us together. Fundamentally decent people like Ryan Crocker understood this and they understood that trust cannot be fostered through narrow-minded interventions based on strategic interests, but was instead a reflection of the deep humanism and care that the U.S. has always shown in its best moments.

It seems that those days are long gone. In the long run, unfortunately, like all of us, the U.S. will have to pay a price.

Indeed, pity the U.S.

Read more:

U.S. Cooperation to Pakistan Earthquake Relief Efforts - An Update. October 20th, 2008. https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/2005/55438.htm

Andrabi, Tahir, and Jishnu Das. "In aid we trust: Hearts and minds and the Pakistan earthquake of 2005." Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 3 (2017): 371-386.

Nunn, Nathan. "The historical roots of economic development." Science 367, no. 6485 (2020): eaaz9986.