Help Pakistan today. Help the world tomorrow.
Your one gift will help us improve aid for people in need tomorrow, while helping Pakistanis today. Please click to donate, and we'll send 10% of every gift to Oxfam's Pakistan flood relief efforts.
When I first sat down to write this, I planned to ask you to support peaceful solutions in Afghanistan, but I can’t ignore what’s happening in Pakistan right now.
The floods have left nearly one in eight Pakistanis homeless. Imagine, for a moment, what that must be like.
The $170 million in aid the US has sent is dwarfed by the $8 billion we will spend on bombing and fighting in Afghanistan just this month.
It’s a staggering injustice. Peace Action West is gearing up a campaign to address the systemic reasons for this failure, and we need your financial support to do it. It’s a long-term fight, but I believe we need to create alternatives to war, not just respond to conflict as it happens.
But we also can’t ignore what’s going on in Pakistan right now. That’s why we will donate 10% of every gift we get in response to this email to our partners at Oxfam to support their Pakistani flood relief efforts. Please click here to help Pakistan today, while laying the groundwork for a new approach to global engagement tomorrow. Then read on to learn more about our campaign. THANK YOU!
Here’s the problem. The United States has invested billions of dollars in the machinery of war, while allowing tools for development and foreign aid to wither. People like you and me have generously donated in the face of suffering throughout the world, from Haiti to Afghanistan. But individuals can only do so much, and today, Pakistan has been left hanging. We need governments to do more.
And here’s the bottom line. We live in an interconnected world, and our fates are linked to those flood survivors in Pakistan. The US has made one massive mistake after another by trying to use war to “fix” Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. If instead of war, we help people in need, we can start to build a global safety net, and ultimately make ourselves safer.
It’s common sense stuff, but finally there are a handful of key policymakers who are waking up to the importance of aid work as a pillar of US foreign policy. We are part of a national network of groups that are using this opportunity to make foreign aid, not war, a real option for addressing serious global problems.
Please join this growing movement, and at the same time, pitch in to help Pakistanis when they are most in need of your help. Ten percent of whatever you give will go directly to Oxfam’s aid efforts in Pakistan.
Image credit: UN Photo/UNICEF/ZAK. www.unmultimedia.org/photo
