Where they stand
A quick rundown of what I've dug out of the news on Haiti:
The Good News
The good news is that the international response is kicking into gear. Many countries have sent SAR teams, rescue dogs, doctors, rapid-deployment medical units, and aircraft with supplies. MSF is sending an inflatable hospital. The Dominican Republic has erected an air bridge in order to evacuate people, and is sending medical personnel. Most of the countries with troops already in the country are contributing more, and others who lack personnel are sending monetary contributions. In terms of weight, the US is leading, having dispatched the USNS Comfort, and a naval task force, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vincent, two LSDs, and the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, along with a promise of a 2,000 man Marine Expeditionary Unit to help with restoring order. Those ships will provide beds for personnel, massive stores of supplies, and landing decks for helicopters, which will serve as the best form of immediate transportation with the roads blocked by people and debris.
The Bad News
Not much more will be coming. Not supplies, those will be emerging in a torrent. Not personnel either, volunteers, trained and otherwise, will probably surge for some time. But equipment. The rescuers arriving in Haiti have experience and expertise, but operating in a destroyed city requires hospitals and operating rooms, it requires construction equipment to clear paths and deal with demolished buildings, and heavy helicopters for transportation. And there's not that much more of that to be had. For example, the US is sending the USNS Comfort, a single hospital ship. It has 1000 beds, but that still might not be enough to hold all those people. The US probably will not be sending another for some time though, because the Comfort represents half of our hospital ships. In terms of blue water ships with large patient capacities, it might represent half of the ships in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly a quarter of the deployable hospital ships in the world. The gear needed for rescue operations, the heavy metal, the cranes and bulldozers, the helicopters and the field hospitals, just aren't available in enough numbers to deal with a disaster that could have killed 100,000 people.
The Worse News
And most of that will eventually be leaving. Haiti has not been damaged, Haiti has been destroyed. Those buildings still standing are probably now so structurally weakened that many of them should be torn down and rebuilt. Ideally, most of the city would be reconstructed from the ground up. Port-au-Prince has needed that for years, but we can't even do that for New Orleans. Forget about doing it overseas. Haiti's government, already a train wreck before the disaster, is in shambles. The tax collectors not only need new records, they need a new building to put them in. The National Palace has been destroyed. The government is finding itself without the proverbial pot to piss in, and possibly without the literal pot to piss in.
And rebuilding that, and restoring the kind of vibrancy that Haiti has not experienced in decades, would require a massive undertaking, billions of dollars, decades of labor, and a lot of work in re-establishing the government and people of Haiti. And I don't see it coming. I don't see where it can come from.
And What It Means
This is the big one. This is the thing that Iraq and Afghanistan were just practice runs for. All that talk about the threat posed by Failed States, so large that we had to intervene to prevent them from forming half a world away, and now there's one right on our doorstop. If Haiti goes down it will be the locals, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, and especially the United States who will bear the brunt of the effects. If there was a place to apply all those lessons we learned about nation-building in failed states, all that we sacrificed soldiers to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the place.
But mostly what we learned was that this is a messy business, a lot of people die, and mostly it's a pain in the ass. So look for us to go home, and leave Haiti in a cycle of disability and chaos that will radiate out to the rest of the region. I hope that I'm wrong, but right now the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be coming at us a bit too fast to be the way out.
The Good News
The good news is that the international response is kicking into gear. Many countries have sent SAR teams, rescue dogs, doctors, rapid-deployment medical units, and aircraft with supplies. MSF is sending an inflatable hospital. The Dominican Republic has erected an air bridge in order to evacuate people, and is sending medical personnel. Most of the countries with troops already in the country are contributing more, and others who lack personnel are sending monetary contributions. In terms of weight, the US is leading, having dispatched the USNS Comfort, and a naval task force, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vincent, two LSDs, and the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, along with a promise of a 2,000 man Marine Expeditionary Unit to help with restoring order. Those ships will provide beds for personnel, massive stores of supplies, and landing decks for helicopters, which will serve as the best form of immediate transportation with the roads blocked by people and debris.
The Bad News
Not much more will be coming. Not supplies, those will be emerging in a torrent. Not personnel either, volunteers, trained and otherwise, will probably surge for some time. But equipment. The rescuers arriving in Haiti have experience and expertise, but operating in a destroyed city requires hospitals and operating rooms, it requires construction equipment to clear paths and deal with demolished buildings, and heavy helicopters for transportation. And there's not that much more of that to be had. For example, the US is sending the USNS Comfort, a single hospital ship. It has 1000 beds, but that still might not be enough to hold all those people. The US probably will not be sending another for some time though, because the Comfort represents half of our hospital ships. In terms of blue water ships with large patient capacities, it might represent half of the ships in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly a quarter of the deployable hospital ships in the world. The gear needed for rescue operations, the heavy metal, the cranes and bulldozers, the helicopters and the field hospitals, just aren't available in enough numbers to deal with a disaster that could have killed 100,000 people.
The Worse News
And most of that will eventually be leaving. Haiti has not been damaged, Haiti has been destroyed. Those buildings still standing are probably now so structurally weakened that many of them should be torn down and rebuilt. Ideally, most of the city would be reconstructed from the ground up. Port-au-Prince has needed that for years, but we can't even do that for New Orleans. Forget about doing it overseas. Haiti's government, already a train wreck before the disaster, is in shambles. The tax collectors not only need new records, they need a new building to put them in. The National Palace has been destroyed. The government is finding itself without the proverbial pot to piss in, and possibly without the literal pot to piss in.
And rebuilding that, and restoring the kind of vibrancy that Haiti has not experienced in decades, would require a massive undertaking, billions of dollars, decades of labor, and a lot of work in re-establishing the government and people of Haiti. And I don't see it coming. I don't see where it can come from.
And What It Means
This is the big one. This is the thing that Iraq and Afghanistan were just practice runs for. All that talk about the threat posed by Failed States, so large that we had to intervene to prevent them from forming half a world away, and now there's one right on our doorstop. If Haiti goes down it will be the locals, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, and especially the United States who will bear the brunt of the effects. If there was a place to apply all those lessons we learned about nation-building in failed states, all that we sacrificed soldiers to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the place.
But mostly what we learned was that this is a messy business, a lot of people die, and mostly it's a pain in the ass. So look for us to go home, and leave Haiti in a cycle of disability and chaos that will radiate out to the rest of the region. I hope that I'm wrong, but right now the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be coming at us a bit too fast to be the way out.