Anger builds as 800,000 families still homeless a year after Pakistan floods

Nowshera was one of the hardest-hit towns in Pakistan's mountainous north west, where flash floods wiped out entire villages leaving behind tangled branches, mud and many thousands of people needing help.

Ali and his family, have been living in tents since the flood seriously damaged their home.

"We have just received 20,000 rupees (140) and are building a room to live in," Ali said as his 14-year-old son slopped cement on a wall of the room.

"No politician visited us throughout the year to see how we were living. They may have gone to influential and rich people and given money to them, but we just got the 20,000 rupees, nothing else."

It's a refrain heard all over Pakistan a year after the floods were triggered by several days of torrential rain over denuded, over-grazed mountains.

Muddy torrents raged down valleys in the upper Indus river basin, destroying almost everything in their path, then spread and flowed south for weeks, inundating expanses of Punjab and later Sindh provinces.

About 2,000 people were killed and 11 million left homeless. In all, more people were affected - 18 million - than in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Pakistan's 2005 earthquake, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined.

The country suffered more than 6 billion in damage to infrastructure, irrigation systems, bridges, houses and roads.

More than 800,000 families remain without permanent shelter, according to the aid group Oxfam, and more than a million people need food assistance.

Fears that hungry, angry hordes up and down the Indus river basin would rise up in revolution or throw their lot in with Islamist insurgents have proved unfounded. But with so many struggling to rebuild their lives, the impact of the floods has yet to play out and bitterness might still undermine a fragile civilian government.

"[Foreign minister] Hina Rabbani Khar came here about a week after the flooding but she did not visit the flooded area," said Rana Farmanullah, 28, of Mehmood Kot, a badly-hit village in Punjab province.

"We're not going to vote for her in the next election."

The disaster certainly hasn't helped those Pakistanis striving to shore up the shaky foundations of civilian democracy in a country where the army has ruled for more than half its 64-year history.

President Asif Ali Zardari was strongly criticised for pressing on with a European visit and refusing to fly home as the disaster unfolded.

Only 28 per cent of Pakistanis express any confidence in their government, a recent poll by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Centre found.

Only 19 per cent approve of leaders such as Mr Zardari and prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who head the Pakistan People's Party-led coalition.

The military, on the other hand, which led flood rescue efforts as government officials dithered, is much more favourably viewed, with 78 per cent having confidence in it.

"After the floods people were living on sandbanks," said one survivor, who gave his name as just Farmanullah.

"The army rescued them and helped them return home. So we are more grateful to the army."