Pakistan is facing a crisis of major proportions. One-fifth of the country is now under water and two million people have been forced from their homes. All told, the flooding of the Indus river has affected 20 million Pakistanis?nearly 12% of the population.

The UN has asked for $460 million in donations to deal with immediate disaster relief. But the total economic costs of the flooding will certainly climb into billions. Farmers have lost standing crops and seeds for the autumn planting: their losses and debts may kick-off a cycle of indebtedness that damages their ability to buy seeds for future crops. Up to 20% of Pakistan?s cotton crop has been lost and job losses are a certainty in the textile industry, which provides over 60% of the country?s export income. The damage to the country?s infrastructure?power plants, roads, rail lines, canals and weirs?has yet to be calculated.

Some have begun to question whether Pakistan?s democracy will be able to survive this latest crisis. Others fear that the government?s sluggish response has created an opening for militant activist groups to boost their popularity by providing aid in affected areas.

In reality, the aftermath of the floods has reinforced what many Pakistanis already believed. According to a poll released before the floods, only a quarter of Pakistanis think that their national government is having a positive effect on the country; the military, the media and religious leaders are the only institutions that enjoy the trust of a majority of the population. Victims of the floods have expressed anger at their government?s absence. Public suspicions run so deep that some have suggested that the government deliberately breached flood barriers to save prominent politicians? land and create scenes of devastation to impress foreign aid donors. For many Pakistanis, the government lost its legitimacy long before the floods.

Harvard?s development economist Lant Pritchett has described India as a ?flailing state? whose national administrative ?central nervous system? fails to control limbs at the district and local levels. By this yardstick, Pakistan is a failing state, not just in the localities but at the Centre, too. Despite a major earthquake and flooding that affected more than eight million people in 2005, the country?s National Disaster Emergency Authority has been chronically underfunded and is completely unable to reach down to the district level. Even worse, experts estimate that nearly 70% of the money allocated for flood protection since 1977 has been embezzled.

Pakistan?s political classes and the Pakistani state have shown that they lack the will to provide safety for Pakistan?s citizens. Of course the Army can?and does?step in at times of crisis as a proxy for the administrative state, but often without much grasp of local needs and realities. The only groups that can match the political will to provide aid to the cadres of effective local workers are the legitimate Islamist political parties and banned militant groups. Their rapid response to the floods (as well as their work after the 2005 earthquake) has allowed them to be seen to fill a gap left by a state that does not care for all of its citizens. A similar strategy worked well for Egypt?s Muslim Brotherhood, whose relief work in Cairo?s slums after the earthquake of 1992 burnished its reputation as an alternative to the ruling party.

The militant groups? industriousness is eminently practical on another level. Many of the affected areas in southern Punjab are relatively poor and dominated by rich landlords. This has made them prime recruiting grounds for work in the Gulf, as also for sectarian militant groups and Kashmir-focused jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. If the government continues to fail to help people, the recruiters? job will become much easier in the future. Many in southern Punjab already resent the greater prosperity of the central and northern parts of the province and believe that the only way to avoid being shortchanged by Lahore and Islamabad is to carve out a new Saraiki province in the area. This feeling will only increase if the government mishandles relief and reconstruction work.

The situation in Khyber Pakhtunwa is equally delicate. In the short term, the logistical demands on the Army throughout the country mean that it will be unable to keep up pressure on militants along the frontier or press forward into North Waziristan. This will complicate NATO?s efforts to squeeze insurgents in southeastern Afghanistan in the autumn. Over the longer term, if the state fails to meet people?s expectations, it will undermine efforts to bring the tribal areas within the legal and developmental ambit of the nation-state.

These very real dangers are compounded by the fact that the international community has failed to respond to the UN?s appeal for funds, with donations so far falling really short of the immediate target amount. Some have suggested that potential donors are wary of Pakistan?s reputation for corruption, but this cannot be the whole story: Transparency International?s yearly surveys rate both Haiti and Burma as more corrupt than Pakistan, and both received proportionately more donations in the wake of natural disasters than Pakistan has so far.

The real issue is image. Haiti got a celebrity boost from Bill Clinton (who spent his honeymoon in Haiti); Pakistan cannot call on a similar source of high-octane goodwill. Nor can it count on the kind of public sympathy that the Burmese people received by dint of the ruling junta?s behaviour in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis: the return of democracy means that foreign publics expect Pakistan?s government to be on the side of its people. Pakistan is trapped by the unfavourable image that its complex behaviour over the past two decades has created: according to a global poll released this April by the BBC World Service, more people around the world have a negative view of Pakistan than of Israel or North Korea.

This image problem carries with it another set of dangers: that Pakistanis and others in the Muslim world may come to see global reticence as a sign that the world is unwilling to help Muslims. Perceptions are notoriously difficult to manage. Although the US has given Pakistan $6 billion in economic and development aid since 2002, 16% of Pakistanis believe that the US gives their country absolutely no aid at all. If the world fails to respond to the devastation created by the floods, Pakistanis will not rush to examine the roots of international antipathy: nuance is one of the first casualties of geopolitical myth-making. Nor will those who believe this narrative stop to consider that the Islamic world has not rushed to Pakistan?s aid any more eagerly than the rest of the world (Kuwait is the only Islamic country among the top ten donors to respond to the UN appeal). If this perception takes root, the consequences for diplomacy could be very severe indeed.

The floods have devastated large swathes of Pakistan and blighted millions of lives. If Pakistan?s government and the international community continue to fail to come to grips with the situation, the damage will not stop there.

The author is a researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge