During a media briefing in the capital, Islamabad, a uniformed and medal-bedecked spokesperson for Erra argues that all is under control. On the surface, Erra's programme looks impressive, right down to the five-tiered auditing system, externally monitored, to ensure the money goes where international donors want it to go. In fact, some have argued the military's role has been extraordinary and is one of the great, unacknowledged success stories of the post-quake campaign.

But, on the road between Muzaffarabad and Mansehra, things don't seem quite so seamless. A World Food Programme organiser is leaning out of our minibus shouting at bemused-looking soldiers, telling them we are going the wrong way.

'The military is taking us where they want to take us, not where we wanted to go,' she tells the bus passengers, frustration lining her brow. This is nothing to do with security, she laments, more about politics and spin.

The motorcade moves off, predictably not in the argued direction.

Earlier, the food programme's director in Pakistan, Michael Jones, noted with a tinge of frustration that Muzaffarabad is not where the major work is. The real story as the second six-month period after the quake gets under way, he says, is up in the highlands. He points a little wistfully in the direction of the white-capped Himalayas as he speaks. Food crops in these areas need to be planted and developed for the November harvest, he says, or people will starve, implying Erra is not on the case.

Further to the north and west, as the winter sparseness gives way to the spring thaw, the effects of the earthquake are still manifest. There are still daily landslides, for instance, and helicopters are still required to get supplies and people in and out. Erra has recently cut back on available helicopters, much to the chagrin of the aid agencies and civil groups.

The food programme, for instance, aims to get 670,000 repatriated people back to their villages in the northern regions through food-for-work and food-for-training initiatives. Only when basic social and physical infrastructure is rebuilt, they say, can people return home. Three major campaigns, set to cost US$35 million, have been initiated by the food programme, many targeting the highland regions.

Many civil groups believe the problem is not necessarily being solved but is just being shifted further north, away from prying eyes and cameras.

In Muzaffarabad, as in nearby Mansehra over the Jammu and Kashmir border and into the Northwest Frontier Province, things look well on the way to being on the mend, physically at least. Full psychological recovery, of course, may never come.

Twenty-two year-old Muhsim sits disconsolately on a plastic chair in a tiny camp in Mansehra. The camp is more or less deserted as all the other earthquake victims have headed home. He looks straight ahead as he tells his story. It is of family members lost, chaos and destruction. The shock of the moment still seems captured in his eyes, lending them a harrowing stare.

Muhsim and his remaining family, his mother, sister and four brothers, have been here since December and he is fearful of returning home to Pares, 60km to the west, because the area is still highly unstable and is susceptible to further tremors.

His experience is not uncommon. The government provided him a grant of some 25,000 rupees ($3,240) as a form of support, for which he and his remaining family are grateful. But funding provided by Erra to repatriate refugees back to their villages and to rebuild their homes will not be provided to Muhsim's family because they had built on someone else's land. Officially, therefore, they don't own their own home.

'We had permission from the landowner to do that,' he says. 'But in the government's eyes, this means we do not own our home.

'We want to rent a place here in Mansehra but we can't afford it. I have found work in a furniture makers, but I can't make enough there to pay for rent, so we must stay until something changes.'

He has nowhere else to go but this sad and somewhat desolated camp. Many of the previous inhabitants were pushed out, he says, as part of the military's desire to shut down the camps and get people back home. Many camp-dwellers have baulked at the move, arguing it is still unsafe to go home. Also the camps provide free health care, education and food, something none get in normal circumstances.

Muhsim remains unsure of his family's fate. Suffice to say, the military would prefer the media did not talk to people like him.

In the past few months, reports have emerged of families being evicted from government-run camps in the earthquake area.

At a new hospital in Mansehra funded by the Saudi government - one of the largest donors to the quake appeal - gun-toting military accompany the media throng as newly built demountable structures, each ready to accept patients within days of opening, are examined.

It is again a reminder of the realities of the post-quake politics in northern Pakistan. In the streets and alleys just outside the Saudi hospital complex, life goes on in a sublime, tumultuous wall of noise, colour and movement. Off the main thoroughfare, a village of mud huts explodes to life as a hurtling bevy of children, all keen for their picture to be taken, emerge excitedly.

The majestic Himalayas provides a dramatic backdrop to a scene unchanged for decades, maybe centuries. Pictures are taken of posing children, draping arms over friends' shoulders like old portrait professionals.

It is here, in these back blocks, especially outside the main urban centres, that the recovery process will be won and lost. For all the efforts of the military and the aid organisations, it is only the people themselves who can get the region back on track. Whether the politics between the military and civil groups will undermine their efforts is very much the issue of the moment in northern Pakistan.