Nightmare in the Mountains

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In Balakot, Pakistan, a town of 20,000 people that was reduced to a muddy smear, it took the army three days to arrive, even though its base is only 20 miles away. When troops finally converged on a collapsed school building to help dig out some 200 students trapped inside, enraged parents hurled stones at the soldiers. As choppers touched down in wrecked mountain hamlets, survivors mobbed the crews and fought one another for blankets and biscuits. Some Pakistani officials reported that several times stranded earthquake victims clung to a chopper as it lifted off, nearly causing it to crash.

In many cases, people didn't wait for the army. Thousands of volunteers headed into the mountains, carrying shovels, pickaxes and iron rods to dig for survivors. Down in the main cities, well-wishers donated tents, blankets, food and even cloth for burial shrouds. Among the first responders were militant Islamic groups, who seized on the catastrophe to blame Musharraf's alliance with the U.S. in the war on terrorism for incurring Allah's wrath. In Chehla Bandi village, members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an outlawed group sympathetic to al-Qaeda, cooked food, helped bury the dead and shoveled through the debris to find the living. "They saved us when nobody came from the government," says a survivor, Ali Geelani, 28. "Musharraf has given us the earthquake; they have given us life. And if they ask me, I will go for jihad with them." Others weren't given a choice. A teenager known only as Bobby was pulled from the ruins by Lashkar-e-Taiba volunteers. When they discovered that his family had died, he was taken to the group's headquarters in Lahore. "He's an orphan now," explains a militant. "So he's ours."

Like last year's tsunami, the Himalayan disaster presented a political opportunity for the Bush Administration, which hopes that by providing assistance to a Muslim country in need like Pakistan, it can help improve its image in the Islamic world. Washington has promised $50 million in emergency aid, and already C-130 cargo planes are parachuting an airlift of blankets, plastic sheets, medical supplies and disaster-survival kits to victims. But U.S. officials say the military can't afford to make an open-ended commitment to the relief effort without hampering antiterrorism operations in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, relief groups trying to raise money for the victims say they are encountering donor fatigue--perhaps caused by the massive private responses to the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s top humanitarian-aid official, is calling for worldwide donations of some $272 million. "We are losing the race against the clock in the small villages," he says.

It is in those tiny outposts that the horror is still being uncovered. The quake struck as children were in their morning classes, in shabbily built schools that crumbled under the first shock waves, crushing thousands of boys and girls. Four days after the quake, a teacher named Said Rasool traveled down from his village to seek help in Balakot, his cream-colored trousers still stained with the blood of his dead students. He wandered from one cluster of soldiers to another, pleading that they help him try to dig out his students. But there was still too much work to be done in Balakot before the soldiers could follow the teacher up into the mountains. For Rasool, as for so many still awaiting relief, hope has already run out.