MUZAFFARABAD, Oct 21: Nato said on Friday it would send up to 1,000 troops to help hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors who have been waiting for two weeks for help in the rugged mountains of northern Pakistan.

But it rebuffed a UN call for a massive airlift to rescue stranded survivors on the scale of the 1948-49 Berlin airlift to the beleaguered people of Soviet-blockaded West Berlin.

“There is no question of the alliance doing that. That was Berlin after World War Two and this is Pakistan now — there is absolutely no comparison,” said one Nato source.

The top UN aid official, incensed by what he saw as a woefully inadequate response to the most difficult relief operation the world has seen, had called on the military alliance to launch a huge airlift to get survivors to safety.

Helicopters are the only means of getting quickly deep into the Himalayan foothills of Azad Kashmir and North West Frontier Province where 51,000 people are known to have died.

That toll, in addition to some 1,300 killed on the Indian side of Kashmir, is expected to climb much further with large areas still unreached and the harsh Himalayan winter looming. The number of known injured, now 74,000, could also leap.

Nato ambassadors agreed to send 500 to 1,000 soldiers, including an engineering battalion.

“It’s been approved,” a Nato official said in Brussels.

The official said the help would include just a small number of helicopters.

A Nato spokesman said earlier that while aid work was not the alliance’s “bread and butter”, it had already transported over 1,000 tons of supplies to Pakistan’s quake victims and 40 per cent of the helicopters flying there were from Nato nations.

ROADS SMASHED, BURIED: The closest source of helicopters would be India, but Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf told India he would accept helicopters, but only if they came without crews given the enormous political sensitivity.

India said ‘No’, and UN aid chief Jan Egeland, in addition to calling for a Nato airlift, said the two governments ought to figure out a compromise fast.

“These discussions are now holding up a bigger operation and they shouldn’t. I would want them to work out a compromise immediately,” he said.

The few roads into the hills were crumpled and buried by landslides by the Oct 8 quake, and aid officials fear many more people — cold and without adequate shelter — will die.

Lt-Gen Salahuddin Satti said he hoped the road up Azad Kashmir’s Jhelum valley would be re-opened in a week but it would take six weeks for the nearby Neelum valley.

The lack of roads means supplies cannot be delivered in significant quantity by an aid fleet of fewer than 100 helicopters. Soldiers are using mules, horses and donkeys, even carrying supplies up on their backs, so are villagers.

US army helicopters began dropping survival kits in sacks padded with mattresses and blankets to isolated hamlets clinging to the slopes of the Pir Panjal mountains of Azad Kashmir.

TENT CRISIS: But tents able to stand up to the harsh Himalayan winter are scarce and Pakistan pleads daily for the world to send more.

UN coordiNator Jesper Lund said international aid agencies planned to send 83,000 tents — “all they have in the world”.

“But it’s still a drop in the ocean. We need hundreds of thousands — at least 450,000, but that’s only a rough estimate.”

Pakistani tentmakers said they were struggling to meet a government demand for 8,000 a day. “All the tentmakers in Pakistan cannot produce more than 5,000 tents a day,” said M.J. Aftab of the Sheikh Mooruddin company.

So the UN was looking at alternatives, starting with shelter kits of plastic sheeting, a saw, bamboo, rope, a shovel and axes. “They are cheaper, more cost effective,” Lund said.—Reuters