The worst floods in a generation in northwestern Pakistan have killed more than 1,400 people, left as many as 1.3 million others homeless and destroyed as much as 70 percent of the region’s livestock. Responding to the needs of the region and its desperately vulnerable people is not something the Pakistani government or the United States can afford to get wrong.
The region, in the volatile province of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa, formerly the North-West Frontier Province, borders Afghanistan and is a central battleground in the struggle against militants in both countries. And neither the weak civilian government in Islamabad nor the United States stands high in Pakistani public opinion, New York Times says.
World Food Program (WFP) spokesman Amjad Jameel said the organizations' workers were urgently trying to reach flood areas in the northwest cut off from food supplies, which a U.N. aid agency said devastated the lives of over 3 million people.
Before the floods hit, a million people were already forced from their homes in the Pakistani northwest because of fighting between the army and Taliban militants, Reuters informs.
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