Why? Because they’re down with Pakistan at the bottom of lists of countries that pollsters say hate the United States. And, according to students — and some administrators — of foreign aid, recipients of disaster relief fall in love with America, at least briefly.

Disaster relief as geopolitical valentine “has an unseemly aspect,” said J. Brian Atwood, President Bill Clinton’s chief of U.S.A.I.D., the United States Agency for International Development, who is now dean of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. “We shouldn’t be using it to proselytize. Helping others has always been an American value.”

But, he added, let’s not be unrealistic. Politics does creep in.

It is rare that America finds itself so overtly facing off against an ideological foe as it is said to be now in Pakistan’s flooded river valleys. Discussions of the global response inevitably mention that Islamic charities were first on the scene, often adding some have “links to militant fundamentalists” or words to that effect.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, pushes this line while pleading for aid, warning that “negative forces will exploit the situation.”

Some consider this an exaggeration. Of course Islamic charities are at work: Pakistan is Islamic, and Islam lauds charity just as Christianity and Judaism do. “There are a whole range of people working here, largely quietly and unsung,” Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, a Pakistani public health expert who wrote an editorial on the crisis in The Lancet medical journal, said in an e-mail. “They are neither Taliban or Al Qaeda, and to call them such is a travesty.” Nonetheless, the idea that the Taliban and the American Army are fighting to see who can hand out tents faster is firmly present in the debate.

Pressed on the issue by PBS Newshour, Richard C. Holbrooke, special representative to the region, said the administration was “not oblivious to the political and strategic implications” of its aid. But, he said, “We’re doing this because the people are in desperate need.”

Do those other implications matter?

Yes, some experts insist. Mark L. Schneider, a former Peace Corps director now with the International Crisis Group, noted that in polls taken by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project three years before the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, only 10 percent of Pakistanis viewed America favorably. In the year following the quake, in which American helicopters flew dozens of rescue missions, 27 percent did.

Predator drone strikes have since weakened that goodwill, but “my guess is that it will come up again,” Mr. Schneider said. “The U.S. is the single largest donor to this effort.”

Andrew S. Natsios, U.S.A.I.D. director under George W. Bush, now teaches at Georgetown and is an even more fervent believer in using aid to sway minds. “To suggest people won’t have a reaction when they see us feeding our enemies and our friends at the same time is silly,” he said.

Before the 2004 tsunami, he said, only 28 percent of Indonesians admired the United States, while 58 percent admired Osama bin Laden. Three months later, after Navy helicopters had flown rescue missions and delivered thousands of aid packages, “and after there was a big debate in the papers about where ‘our friend bin Laden’ was,” he said, approval of the terrorist leader had fallen to 26 percent and approval of Americans was at 63 percent. (Mr. Natsios cited local newspaper polls gathered by America’s embassy; polling by the Washington non-profit Terror Free Tomorrow shows the same trend.)

Every aid package, he pointed out, bore a “From the American People” label his local mission chief had printed. The United States had stopped branding its aid in the 1990s because charities wanted to use only their own labels.

“I found that a little hypocritical,” Mr. Natsios said. Now an “American People” label must be used unless it puts a charity’s workers in peril.

Other American agencies, he said, envy U.S.A.I.D.’s friendly blue clasped-hands logo, which it inherited from the Marshall Plan.

State Department aid is marked with its eagle, while the logo of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is a globe with a big red ribbon. The first can be seen as militaristic; the second confuses Africans who don’t instinctively connect lethal diseases with fabric trimming.

The history of disaster relief goes back at least to 226 B.C., when an earthquake struck the island of Rhodes. Ptolemy III of Egypt, according to the Greek historian Polybius, offered “300 talents of silver and a million artabae of corn,” plus help rebuilding the famous Colossus.

Such aid doesn’t always stem from charity alone, said Carol J. Lancaster, dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. England helped Portugal after Lisbon’s 1755 earthquake, tsunami and fire. Both were rivals of Spain, she said, “and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Americans who wanted to help Ireland during its potato famine had to use their own money because President Polk wouldn’t use tax dollars, Dr. Lancaster said, though he let the Navy carry grain to Cork. American Protestants ran soup kitchens, but pressed diners to convert. (Irish Catholics sneeringly called those who did “soupers.”) The most generous gesture may have been $710 sent by the Choctaw Indians, who knew starvation from their own Trail of Tears.

After World War I, taxpayers did feed shattered Europe. That included Russia in its famine of 1921; the two-year American mission fed and vaccinated millions. But, however many hearts they won, Lenin’s was not one. The Soviets pushed the mission out before the famine ended.

Overall, the Pew polls tend to bear out what aid officials believe: that help wins friends. Countries that steadily get lots of American aid with few strings attached — African nations, South Korea, Israel — tend to top the charts of pro-American feelings. And one nation really stands out. Ever since Barack Obama was elected, Kenyans have loved the U.S. In fact, they like it even better than Americans do.


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