By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; A02

We're two weeks into Defense Secretary Robert Gates's new campaign for more "coordination and discipline" in the military's public statements -- and everything seems to be going according to plan.

On Monday, six months after the earthquake in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people, the Pentagon hosted a "Bloggers Roundtable" teleconference to release some coordinated and disciplined information about reconstruction in that country. The commander of the U.S. military's task force in Haiti and his deputies delivered some news that should satisfy Gates's wish to have only varnished information coming from the Defense Department.

"Incredible humanitarian efforts" are underway in Haiti, where "significant progress" has been made and "a great effort" has been mounted, reporters were told. "The U.S. forces here in Haiti are doing a tremendous job," said the commander, Col. Michael Borrel, and "we are doing some very tangible things here in Haiti and truly helping the people of Haiti."

And what are these incredible and tremendous things? Well, the U.S. military is building four -- count 'em, four -- schools for the Haitians. Each has two or three rooms and comes with a similar number of latrine stalls. Oh, and the work is concentrated in an area that wasn't directly affected by the earthquake.

"Are you aware of any other American units in Haiti who are helping with rubble removal or relocating people into permanent structures?" one of the participants in the teleconference asked.

"I am not," Borrel replied. "Currently, we're the only U.S. military force that is in Haiti."

This is not to belittle the efforts of Borrel and his 550 troops, who are honorably executing the mission they were assigned. But the paltry scale of the Pentagon's reconstruction endeavor -- 1.6 million people displaced and the American military is contributing a few classrooms? -- is emblematic of the international response, which seems to have stalled at about 2 percent of what it needs to be.

Only 2 percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered. Only 2 percent of the rubble has been cleared. And not quite 2 percent of the dislocated have been moved into housing. Others live under fraying tarps and tents in a situation that Bill Clinton, spearheading the reconstruction campaign, calls "horribly frustrating."

Obama administration officials and aid groups point out, correctly, that much of the holdup comes from the Haitian government, which had little competence even before the quake. But that doesn't diminish the human misery in Haiti, documented in the many six-months-later reports in the media.

"There are camps on median strips of roads; there are camps on very steep hills," Sam Worthington, chief executive of the aid organization InterAction, said at a Haiti conference held Monday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I've witnessed two football/soccer fields with 5,000 people living on them."

President Obama, meeting in the Oval Office on Monday with the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, ignored a reporter's question about the pace of the rebuilding efforts.

In Foggy Bottom, State Department officials observed the six-month mark by briefing reporters on what spokesman P.J. Crowley called the "enormous response" to the disaster. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, described the successful efforts to prevent starvation and large-scale disease.

"I take your point about the food situation seems stabilized, the medical situation the same," one of the reporters pointed out. "But it seems like the real urgent problem right now is housing."

"There's a lot more that has to be done," State Department counselor Cheryl Mills allowed. "We really need to be on a pacing of building a fair number of these transitional houses a month, and we're not on a pace yet to do that."

The military isn't even trying to pick up the pace. After its heavy response to the earthquake, the Pentagon is devoting all of $1.7 million for its "New Horizons-Haiti" mission to build schools and a few medical facilities.

A reporter on the Pentagon's teleconference asked why the mission was concentrated in northern Haiti, outside the earthquake zone. "With over a million Haitians still without even a temporary shelter, why are we conducting the mission in the Gonaives area, when there are so many people in the earthquake-stricken zone that could use the support?"

Borrel explained that "there are many, as you are well aware, nongovernmental organizations working in the Port-au-Prince area."

"It seems like the more pressing tasks right now are rubble removal and moving people from their tarps into more permanent structures," another questioner pointed out. "Is this something you plan to do?"

"No, it's not," Borrel said. After the four schools and 10 "med-ready" sites are built, "we will redeploy back to the home station. Our mission is only till the 18th of September."

Seems Haiti may be stuck at 2 percent for a while longer.