By Aamer Ahmed Khan BBC News, Karachi

The military says every survivor has now been reached

Three months on, the massive relief regime spawned by the 8 October earthquake seems to be losing direction.

Military officials vehemently claim there is "not a soul" who they have not been able to reach with the required relief goods.

But everywhere you go, there are incessant complaints from survivors who say they are still awaiting the rations or shelter promised by the authorities.

In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the atmosphere is fraught with discontent and suspicion.

A senior military commander in the Jhelum valley says: "They are behaving like beggars now."

He argues that the 70,000 tons of dry rations and more than 250,000 tents distributed among survivors over the past three months in the Kashmir region "should have been more than enough to take care of everyone".

But that does not seem to be the case on the ground.

'High expectations'

"We have been reduced to begging," cries a survivor in one of the umpteen tent villages to have sprung up all over Muzaffarabad.

Kashmir now has some of the best healthcare in the region

"Everyone has collected money in our name but nothing reaches us till we beg for it."

As winter sets in, it seems resentment will remain the reigning sentiment across the quake-affected zone.

Part of the reason could be what many describe as the "unreasonably high expectations" encouraged by the international relief agencies that descended on Kashmir after the quake.

Government officials say 108 international and local relief agencies are still working in the zone.

"Unfortunately, their initial blueprint for dispensing relief was not drawn up in consultation with the local authorities or the local NGOs," says one senior official.

"That has led to promises that were perhaps not required and a relief timeframe that has now exceeded its utility."

Distribution of cash turned out to be a hugely successful policy

Senior officials say that in the days following the tragedy, two parallel relief efforts were initiated.

On the one side was the Pakistan army, working on what its own officials describe as a short-term relief plan.

In a three-tiered strategy, the army focused its efforts on setting up a healthcare network with the help of international agencies such as Merlin, MSF and military hospital units from across the developed world.

Cuba alone sent more than 1,200 doctors with instructions that they were to leave all their medical facilities behind when they wound up their work.

"No-one can deny that Kashmir currently has the best healthcare facilities compared to anywhere else in the region," says one commander.

The second step was to deliver enough dry rations to survivors to help them through the Himalayan winter.

Military officials say they managed to accomplish that by the end of November, and the 74 distribution points set up by them all over Kashmir now have a seven-day reserve supply in case of a closure of roads due to bad weather.

'Hot meals'

For the third step, to deal with the issue of shelter, more than six billion rupees ($100m) were distributed among more than 240,000 households to help them raise new shelters.

The distribution of cash turned out to be a hugely and visibly successful policy.

In most of the villages visited by the BBC News website, anyone who had received cash compensation had managed to get some sort of a shelter up and running.

The generosity of the international community seems to have pushed these people into a kind of a time warp Senior government official Send us your comments

As far as the army was concerned, the relief phase should have ended there, something many international relief workers also privately admit now.

The military had planned to wrap up its relief activities and hand over the management of quake-affected zones to local civilian authorities by 1 December.

"We wanted to concentrate all our resources on repairing the roads and keeping them open during the winter," one senior commander told the BBC News website.

But international relief agencies had other plans.

They ended up promising food aid throughout the winter months besides helping to raise shelters in high-altitude areas.

They promised to continue their assistance to at least 31 March, when the snows start to melt in early spring.

The result was that tens of thousands of survivors, despite their basic needs having been met, were not motivated to get on with their lives.

Thousands are now settled in tent villages in and around the cities of Bagh and Muzaffarabad when there is no reason for them not to be back in their villages, rebuilding their homes.

Most of them get three hot meals a day as well as a monthly subsistence allowance.

"The generosity of the international community seems to have pushed these people into a kind of a time warp," says one senior official with the government of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.