Pak friends & foes call for more quake aid

One on Sunday evening, at magnitude 6.0, was among the strongest of nearly 900 recorded since the October 8 quake, but there were no reports of new deaths.

Equally important, there were no reports of major landslides in the rugged hills where army engineers are working around the clock to reopen roads destroyed in the quake which killed at least 53,000 people and left more than 75,000 injured seriously.

Only when the roads are rebuilt -- and in some cases this could take weeks -- can aid be delivered in sufficient quantities to an estimated 2,000 still unreached villages to allow hundreds of thousands of people to survive the rapidly approaching winter.

The fleet of aid helicopters, although growing, cannot reach them all, or deliver sufficient supplies to the worst-hit areas of Pakistani Kashmir and adjacent North West Frontier Province.

In Rajkot, a two-day trek from the destroyed Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad but just a 10-minute helicopter ride, Farid Ayub complained it took 13 days for any aid at all to reach his village.

Aid officials complain the world is being very slow in coming up with the money needed to help up to 3 million homeless people who must be sheltered and fed through the winter. The first heavy snows are just five or six weeks away.

But aid is flowing in faster, said chief United Nations aid coordinator Rashid Khalikov, two days before rich countries were to meet in Geneva to discuss help for Pakistan.

"The amounts are increasing -- tents, food, non-food items," he said.

Much more is still needed, and Khalikov said the UN was talking to Nato about what it might provide -- "everything from excavators to gloves" -- in addition to an engineering battalion and medical teams already promised.

Time is short, with night temperatures already below freezing in the hills.

India has offered to open three relief camps on the heavily militarised divide in Kashmir, over which it has fought two of its three wars with Pakistan, which has proposed opening five crossing points to help aid reach the desperate.

But there has been no word yet on when the two nuclear-armed rivals will translate words into action.

US General John Abizaid promised that the United States would send more helicopters, while al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, urged Muslims to help even though Pakistan's government was a US "agent.”