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the international community, I was sent north to the town of Balakot to assess the effectiveness of our operations there. I had never seen a disaster zone like this before: the scene was shocking and unreal, familiar to me only from the grainy footage of post-apocalyptic Hiroshima after the flight of the Enola Gay . Towering snowcapped peaks were etched sharply against the sky like monumental tombstones, standing guard over the remains of a city of 30,000 people now compacted to little more than knee height. No structures remained standing. Even in the ruins of the town the air was so clear it crackled with each breath and the vertiginous scale of the mountains lent a paradoxical clarity and euphoria to a scene of confusion, disorientation and loss. Men and women walked through the former streets at once familiar and yet now vanished, displaced strangers amid the destruction of their own home.
    Strangely, given northern Pakistan’s conservative patriarchal society, I saw a young girl leading her father, bleeding from the head and evidently unable to see, towards a Pakistan Red Crescent field hospital. As if responding to the absurdity of a world turned upside down, fruit sellers had set up stalls in the rubble of a collapsed market, offering their oranges to non-existent crowds. A green-domed mosque—the sole surviving building—emitted a call to prayer, a lone human voice that echoed hauntingly in the brutal grandeur of the valley.
    Our set-up in Balakot was dysfunctional and needed almost as much assistance as the homeless former residents themselves. Huddling in leaky canvas tents, wallowing in sludge, already coughing from bronchial infections and ineffectually led, our team of Pashtuns was demoralised and at breaking point. I had been sent up in an effort to take control of the local operation and get evidence to dismiss its venal and incompetent international manager—Jabba the Hutt, as he had become known. On arrival I had received a message from headquarters in Islamabad to ‘rock no boats’, and I had no authority to intervene in the operation or the treatment of staff. ‘I will eat him,’ roared one of my Pashtun colleagues in rage, having just been dismissed for the unpardonable crime of being competent. It was a mess: the city was destroyed, our operational response was useless, and its field management beyond redemption. As I walked out of yet another freezing tent I stumbled into a muddy and treacherous area by the riverbank that turned out to be an open sewer. Everything in that place on that day seemed cursed.
    Back in Islamabad I met with our new operations manager, an American with pale blue eyes and slightly bucked front teeth whose number was listed in my phone as Bugs. New to the business of aid and overwhelmed by the enormousness of the task ahead of us, I hoped he would give me some clear direction and advice. We discussed the weather and his recent visit to Indonesia, and before heading off he handed me a brown envelope. ‘Read this on your way back,’ he said. ‘It’ll give a you a good idea of what we’re all about.’ In the car I tore open the envelope, looking for the instructions that would solve the earthquake and provide winter shelters for the almost one million people who were now homeless. ‘Proposal for Rubble Removal,’ the document said. Back at base—amid the debris of the former primary school—my emails addressed to ‘Rubble Rouser’ and ‘Rubble with a Cause’ went unanswered.
    1 Now known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) in deference to Pashtun ethno-nationalist aspirations.
    2 In Pakistan today, the remote Kalash Valley is inhabited by an animist tribe of fair-skinned, light-eyed people who drink wine from amphorae and who are said to be the descendants of Alexander’s armies.

‘YOU KNOW, TOM,’ said Colonel Mohsin, ‘I was once a POW.’ The colonel was in an expansive postprandial mood as we settled on the verandah of the Frontier Force Officers’ Mess in the