The Humanitarian Invastion of Afghanistan
Occupation by NGO

By YVES ENGLER

They’re called NGOs — non-governmental organizations — but the description is misleading at best, or an outright lie generated by intelligence agencies at worst.

In fact, almost all development NGOs receive a great deal of their funding from government and in return follow government policies and priorities. While this was always true, it has become easier to see with Stephen Harper’s Conservative Canadian government, which lacks the cleverness and subtlety of the Liberal Party who at least funded some “oppositional” activity to allow NGOs a veneer of independence.

The example of the NGO called Alternatives illustrates these points well. This group, which has ties to the progressive community in Canada and Quebec, has done some useful work in Palestine and Latin America. But, at the end of 2009 the Canadian International Development Agency failed to renew about $2.4 million in funding for Montreal-based Alternatives. After political pressure was brought to bear, Ottawa partly reversed course, giving the organization $800, 000 over three years.

Alternatives’ campaign to force the Conservatives to renew at least some of its funding and CIDA’s response tell us a great deal about the ever more overt ties between international development NGOs and Western military occupation. After the cuts were reported the head of Alternatives, Michel Lambert, tried to win favour with Conservative decision makers by explicitly tying the group’s projects to Canadian military interventions. In a piece claiming Alternatives was “positive[ly] evaluated and audited” by CIDA, Lambert asked: “How come countries like Afghanistan or Haiti that are at the heart of Canadian [military] interventions [and where Alternatives operated] are no longer essential for the Canadian government?”

After CIDA renewed $800,000 in funding, Lambert claimed victory. But, the CIDA money was only for projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti — three countries under military occupation. (The agreement prohibited Alternatives from using the money to “engage” the public and it excluded programs in Palestine and Central America.) When Western troops invaded, Alternatives was not active in any of these three countries, which raises the questions: Is Alternatives prepared to follow Canadian aid anywhere, even if it is designed to strengthen military occupation? What alternatives do even “leftwing” NGOs such as Alternatives have when they are dependent on government funding?

One important problem for Alternatives and the rest of the “progressive” government-funded NGO community is that their benefactor’s money is often tied to military intervention. A major principle of Canadian aid has been that where the USA wields its big stick, Canada carries its police baton and offers a carrot. To put it more clearly, where the U.S. kills Canada provides aid.

Beginning the U.S.-intervention-equals Canadian-aid pattern, during the 1950-53 Korean War the south of that country was a major recipient of Canadian aid and so was Vietnam during the U.S. war there. Just after the invasions, Iraq and Afghanistan were the top two recipients of Canadian aid in 2003-2004. Since that time Afghanistan and Haiti were Nos. 1 and 2.

For government officials, notes Naomi Klein, NGOs were “the charity wing of the military, silently mopping up after wars.” Officials within the George W. Bush administration publicly touted the value of NGOs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Three months after the invasion of Iraq Andrew Natsios, head of USAID and former World Vision director, bluntly declared “NGOs are an arm of the U.S. government.” Natsios threatened to “personally tear up their contracts and find new partners” if an NGO refused to play by Washington’s rules in Iraq, which included limits on speaking to the media.

International NGOs flooded into Iraq after the invasion and there was an explosion of domestic groups. The U.S., Britain and their allies poured tens of millions of dollars into projects run by NGOs. Many Canadian NGOs, such as Oxfam Quebec and Alternatives, were lured to occupied Iraq by the $300 million CIDA spent to support the foreign occupation and reconstruction.

In the lead-up to the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell explained: “I am serious about making sure we have the best relationship with NGOs who are such a force multiplier for us and such an important part of our combat team.”

Up from a few dozen prior to the invasion, three years into the occupation a whopping 2,500 international NGOs operated in Afghanistan. They are an important source of intelligence. In April 2009 U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that most of their information about Afghanistan and Pakistan comes from aid organizations.

Canada’s military also works closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.” Some Canadian NGOs even participated in the military’s pre- Afghanistan deployment training facility in Wainwright Alberta.

As Paul Martin’s Liberals increased Canada’s military footprint in Afghanistan they released an International Policy Statement. According to the 2005 Statement, “the image that captures today’s operational environment for the Canadian Forces” is the “three-block war”, which includes a reconstruction role for NGOs. On the third and final block of “three-block warfare” troops work alongside NGOs and civilians to fix what has been destroyed. (The first block consists of combat while the second block involves stabilization operations.)

Canadian military personnel have repeatedly linked development work to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described CIDA’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”

If even a “progressive” NGO such as Alternatives can be pushed into working as a tool of the military, shouldn’t we at least come up with a better description than “non-governmental” organization?

http://www.counterpunch.org/engler08132010.html

Linda Polman on "Afghaniscam": Is US "Aid" Making Things Worse?

by Robert Naiman

It is frequently acknowledged that U.S. policy in Afghanistan is "failing." But a sharper question is less frequently posed: are the actions of the U.S. government making Afghans worse off than they would be if the U.S. were doing nothing in Afghanistan?

If Afghans would be better off if the U.S. were doing nothing in their country, that is not only a powerful indictment of current policy; it strongly suggests that the direction that U.S. policy ought to move in is in the direction of doing much, much less in Afghanistan.

If current policy is not making Afghans better off than if the U.S. were doing nothing, after nine years, two Presidents, two Secretaries of Defense, different generals, different force levels, many revisions of policy, thousands dead and maimed, and a huge expenditure of resources, we should be skeptical that any proposed policy which purports to be better than doing nothing is actually feasible. We should consider the possibility that our inability to do better than nothing in Afghanistan has deeper causes than Presidents or generals or Secretaries of Defense, causes which are more difficult, perhaps impossible, to change.

While Afghans have little effective voice in our current policies, it is apparent that the interests of the Afghans do matter, even from the point of view of Washington, because if the majority of Afghans conclude that the actions of the U.S. are worse for them than if the U.S. did nothing, over time they can take actions which will compel the U.S. to move in the direction of doing nothing in their country.

And if this is the likely future - that the majority of Afghans will take actions to compel the U.S. to move in the direction of doing nothing in their country - then it is obviously in our interest to expedite this process, by taking domestic actions to compel the U.S. government to move more decisively in the direction of doing much less, to minimize the human suffering and waste of resources caused by our current policy.

Whether Afghans are worse off as a result of current U.S. policy is than they would be if the U.S. were doing nothing is a counterfactual, comparing the state of the world under a particular policy to what the state of the world would be if the policy were not present. Since it implies assessing a state of the world that does not exist, one shouldn't expect to answer it in a way that will end all debate. Someone can always say: "Well, if we hadn't done this, the situation would be even worse," and such a claim can't be proved or disproved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But making reasonable judgments about counterfactuals is an essential, daily, and unavoidable task on Planet Earth. Every time a new policy is introduced, or a present policy is maintained, a judgment about a counterfactual has been made.

A key sub-question about the "more harm than good" counterfactual in Afghanistan has been far from fully aired: is U.S. "aid" to Afghanistan doing more harm than good? If so, is "more harm than good" likely to change or persist? If "more harm than good" is likely to persist, should we not move decisively in the direction of doing much less in terms of "aid" specifically?

This is a key question raised by Linda Polman's new book, "The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?" It is not primarily a book about Western policy in Afghanistan, but a book that urges us to ask of each proposed Western "aid" intervention whether it is likely to do more harm than good.

Nonetheless, in her ninth chapter, "Afghaniscam," she does specifically address the question of Afghanistan. And putting the question of Western "aid" to Afghanistan in the context of the broader debate over the efficacy of Western aid is a starting point for consideration which should be much more common than it is. More often, it is simply assumed that we know in general how to do "aid" effectively, while Afghanistan may present particular challenges, which we may or may not be able to surmount.

But as Polman recounts, there is a longstanding debate in the aid community over whether some major Western aid interventions have done more harm than good, and in the examples that she recounts, the presence of armed conflict - a frequent cause of humanitarian disasters - and the question of whether Western aid actually contributed to the armed conflict which brought about the humanitarian disaster to which the aid was supposedly responding, make a regular appearance.

The fact that there is a longstanding debate about the consequences of Western aid interventions, especially in the context of armed conflict, doesn't tell you that a particular humanitarian aid intervention in the context of armed conflict is wrong. But it does suggest that there is always a question to be asked about whether a particular aid intervention in the context of armed conflict will do more harm than good, and in Afghanistan, that question has not received the airing it deserves.

And it should go without saying that consideration of that question in Afghanistan should be informed by the history of the question elsewhere.

For example, as Polman recounts, the Western aid intervention in the refugee camps in then-Zaire to which had fled Hutu leaders who had just carried out genocide in Rwanda was so controversial among aid groups who participated in it that Fiona Terry of MSF France described it as a "total ethical disaster." It is by now broadly accepted that the aid intervention did indeed fuel armed conflict. Western aid was subsidizing Hutu militias, as surely as U.S. "humanitarian aid" to groups fighting the Nicaraguan government fueled armed conflict during the Reagan Administration. But while supporting a guerilla war was clearly the aim of the Reagan Administration, supporting a guerilla war was not in general the intent of the aid groups operating in Zaire.

The current Western "aid" effort in Afghanistan is somewhere in between "contra aid" and the Western aid intervention in Zaire after the Rwandan genocide. Like "contra aid," it is an explicit part of a war policy. But like the Western aid intervention after the Rwandan genocide, it is not the explicit intent of many aid groups operating in Afghanistan to contribute to a war policy.

Nonetheless, if even a humanitarian intervention that is not part of a war policy can exacerbate armed conflict, it seems reasonable to suspect that an aid intervention that is part of a war policy is likely to do the same.

As Polman notes, U.S. officials have described U.S. NGOs as a "force multiplier" in the "War on Terror" and as "part of our combat team." It is not surprising that many in Afghanistan, including insurgents, perceive U.S. NGOs the same way. Polman writes:

"[With Western funding, NGOs] are supposed to run projects...that are aimed in part at depriving terrorists of their grassroots support...Warring parties at the receiving end are not dumb, deaf, or blind. Like those who give it, they see aid as an instrument of war and therefore regard aid workers collectively as part of the opposing force."

A report from MSF France noted:

"After the defeat of the Taliban, many institutional donors required NGOs and UN agencies to help stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan. The vast majority of humanitarian actors placed themselves at the service of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and of the interim government. Both of these actors receive varying degrees of support from coalition forces.

NGOs and UN agencies thus abandoned the independence essential to providing independent aid and modeled their priorities on those of the new regime and its Western allies, who were still at war with the Taliban."

The fact that aid workers have been perceived as combatants has obviously contributed substantially to a lack of security for aid workers. This lack of security makes it extremely difficult to supervise projects in an environment where theft, corruption, and deceit are rampant. Polman writes:

"Neither the donors nor their [NGOs] dare to visit the projects they finance. The result is an unfathomable channeling of billions of dollars of aid that is highly susceptible to fraud."

Jean Mazurelle, former director of the World Bank in Kabul, estimated in 2006 that 35 to 40 percent of all international aid to Afghanistan was "wrongly spent."

If you could be sure that the 35-40% that was "wrongly spent" was safely ensconced in the pockets of Westerners and Afghans who simply wanted to live well, it would be still be outrageous from the point of view of the interests of US taxpayers and the majority of Afghans. But it wouldn't necessarily make life worse for the Afghans than setting the money on fire.

But we don't know where that money went. Some of it went to people with guns, who do not just want to live well. Since we don't know where the money went, we don't know if Western aid, on net, did more harm than good. It is possible, even likely, that the amount of the 35-40% "wrongly spent" which fueled violence more than canceled out, in its negative effects, the 60-65% that was not "wrongly spent."

And this ignores the question of to what extent 60-65% was "wrongly spent," even if every dollar was used for a promised project, if the projects were subordinate to an overall political goal of backing one side in a civil war.

The concerns raised in Polman's book should inform debate about what we are going to do in Afghanistan now. It has been common to counterpose a greater focus on humanitarian assistance as an alternative to the war policy we are currently pursuing. Polman's book shows it is not that simple.

Some reports have recently suggested that serious negotiations have begun between the U.S. and leaders of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. I hope these reports are meaningfully true, and that they will create an opening to re-orient U.S. aid from support of a war policy to support of a peace and reconciliation policy. I hope that in the near future, every aid project funded by the West in Afghanistan will have a good answer to the question: "how will this project efficiently contribute, in its likely net effects, to de-escalating the conflicts in the country that produced the civil war in the first place?"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/21

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41EikSqlE7L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

A no-holds-barred, controversial exposvé of the financial profiteering and ambiguous ethics that pervade the world of humanitarian aid

A vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid: a cavalcade of organizations—some 37,000—compete for a share of the $160 billion annual prize, with "fact-inflation" sometimes ramping up disaster coverage to draw in more funds. Insurgents and warring governments, meanwhile, have made aid a permanent feature of military strategy: refugee camps serve as base camps for genocidaires, and aid supplies are diverted to feed the troops. Even as humanitarian groups continue to assert the holy principle of impartiality, they have increasingly become participants in aid's abuses.

In a narrative that is impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman takes us to war zones around the globe—from the NGO-dense operations in "Afghaniscam" to the floating clinics of Texas Mercy Ships proselytizing off the shores of West Africa—to show the often compromised results of aid workers' best intentions. It is time, Polman argues, to impose ethical boundaries, to question whether doing something is always better than doing nothing, and to hold humanitarians responsible for the consequences of their deeds.