Rebuilding Haiti

17 January 2010 |permalink | email article

George Packer, in The New Yorker’s January 25 issue, offers some thoughtful comments on the earthquake in Haiti which he says seemed to follow a malignant design.

In a country without a building code, it wiped out whole neighborhoods of shoddy concrete structures, took down hospitals, wrecked the port, put the airport’s control tower out of action, damaged key institutions like the Presidential Palace to the National Cathedral, killed the archbishop and senior politicians.

At the White House, President Obama, and most noticeably conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, was thinking about divine motivation. But the president’s answer was different. Rather than claiming to know the mind of God, he vowed that America would not forsake Haiti, because its tragedy reminds us of “our common humanity.”

Packer believes that beyond rescue and relief lays the harder task of figuring out what the United States and other countries can and ought to do for Haiti over the long term.

It strikes me that the issue of rebuilding Haiti is an entirely different proposition, and a far more worthy effort, than American reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the cost to U.S. taxpayers is $26 billion a year for several more years, absurd to justify in a functioning state.

If Haiti is to change, Packer suggests, the involvement of outside counties must also change. Rather than administering aid almost entirely through the slow drip of mostly private organizations, international agencies and foreign powers should put their money and their efforts into a more ambitious project of building a functional Haitian state – a burden that some nations may not want to take. “But to patch up a dying country and call it a rescue would leave Haiti forsaken indeed, and not by God.”

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