THE TRUTH ABOUT AFGHANISTAN

One of the silent casualties in the war on terror has been the diminished ability of aid agencies to deliver life-saving assistance to people living in the midst of conflict. This failure to meet a moral and legal obligation to provide relief is increasingly due to the misuse of aid by powerful political actors who are finding themselves desperate to win the hearts and minds of those who might otherwise turn against them.

Although the politicization of aid has been a hot topic within humanitarian circles since the early nineties, by 9/11 it had become a staple tool in the global war against terrorism. Humanitarian aid should be delivered based on need alone, and not be a means to reaching long-term military and political ends such as stability and nation-building. This misappropriation is not only jeopardizing the security of thousands of humanitarian workers, but is also making it more and more difficult for them to deliver aid to the millions who depend on it for their survival.

Take Afghanistan for example. It is the poorest country in the region and has an average life expectancy of 45. With one in five children still dying before the age of five, millions of people rely on aid provided by the United Nations and the international NGOs. To make matters worse, due to rising food prices and the global financial crisis, this year’s approaching winter season is expected to have an even more dire effect on humanitarian needs.

As the need is rising, the security situation in the country is deteriorating. In addition to an increased civilian toll we are also witnessing more and more attacks on international NGOs and most recently on a Kabul based UN compound which killed several foreign UN workers. The threat of violence has led to the suspension of hundreds of aid programs which were providing access to schools and clinics.

When looked at from the perspective of the Taliban, and a rising number of other Afghanis, the ongoing presence of U.S. and NATO forces is yet another foreign invasion aligned with both the West’s economic and religious interests. Every military and political blunder which compromises the well-being and security of the Afghani civilian population further ingrains this belief and makes it more difficult for a transformation of the conflict to take place. What is extremely damaging for humanitarian actors and those whom they seek to help is the local population’s perception that they are non-neutral and are in fact working together with the invading military and political forces.

By providing humanitarian aid and closely associating themselves with humanitarian actors, Western militaries are sometimes able to achieve short-term stability and troop protection objectives, in what otherwise seem like impossible circumstances. Yet how high of a price are they willing to pay? If they seek long-term political stability in Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO must ask several difficult but practical questions; how can aid be perceived as neutral when the majority of it is channeled to the politically unstable South and millions of people in other parts of the country are left to their own demise? How are Afghani people expected to facilitate the delivery of aid into their communities, when the same soldiers who are seen as foreign invaders are also building schools and hospitals? And most pragmatically, considering that humanitarian work is not part of the training of military components and that the results of these efforts have been at best mixed, why waste so much money which in the end leads to further destabilization?

Powerful political forces must make the entire population’s humanitarian needs a priority in both their tactical and strategic planning. This means staying away from humanitarian work in countries where these same forces are also directly (or indirectly) fighting a war. The increased attacks on aid agencies working in conflict situations prove that there needs to be a reform in the way humanitarian aid is delivered in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. The new status quo of systematically integrated military, political, and humanitarian objectives goes far beyond compromising people’s short-term survival needs. It has already started to backfire and made it harder to reach both the longer-term stability objectives sought after by Western policy makers and the human security ones needed by local populations.