Haiti - The Next Afghanistan?

Haiti has long been a beautiful but very poor country. It experienced a catastrophic natural disaster, and now money is pouring in to help save it's inhabitants (and visitors from abroad) whose houses have collapsed, and are living with sparse food, clean water and medical supplies - not to mention the corpses. There is practically no police force and the government seems to have disappeared. It's all a horrific picture, and what I am hoping is that money continues to pour in after the earthquake slips from the front page of the newspaper, when it's the twelfth item on The National instead of the first. If it doesn't, Haiti will not only return to the state it was in before the quake, but will in fact be far worse off due to the collapse of it's infrastructure.



If money does continue to be donated by the international community, will we step in further and try to rebuild Haiti's government? Will we get too involved in re-structuring a broken country? Will the army step in? Will the USA try and invade Haiti, as they have been accused of doing already? Will Haiti turn into another Afghanistan, with foreign troops running the whole place and trying to stabilize a government that doesn't want help from the West?

I hope not. I hope we can just get in there and help, first with rebuilding the lives of Haitians, then with the physical structures. I hope it doesn't become an awkward situation, and that we can focus on saving lives instead of remodelling governments.