Perhaps disasters have a way of finding those least able to cope with them. As the New York Times The Lede blog notes, Irish media coverage for the last week has been dominated by the fate of Gerard McDonnell, the first Irish climber to scale K2 but who died in the hellish every-man-for-himself descent.
But from the perspective of Pakistan, the K2 deaths put its military in the position of -- in addition to fighting a hot border war on its Afghan frontier and a simmering bordering war on its Indian frontier -- sending highly dangerous helicopter flights to rescue surviving climbers (successfully so for Dutch climber Wilco van Rooijen, above) on the same day that it was running a massive flood relief operation in Peshawar (above left). Hopefully they didn't have to choose between the two.
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