The US stopped showing up to disasters. The results are horrifying.

An earthquake in Afghanistan killed over 2,200 people last Sunday, with some rural villages still unreachable by rescuers. | Wakil Kohsar/AFP By the time the earthquake struck, flattening mud-brick homes across Afghanistan’s eastern mountains last week, many nearby health clinics had already been shuttered for months. Mushtaq Khan, a senior advisor for the International Rescue Committee, felt his building jolt from all the way in the capital, Kabul, on Sunday night. He woke the next morning to a horrifying death toll slowly trickling in. First, 200 lives lost; then 500; 800; 1,000; an...

6 months ago

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