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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Sep 23 2010 - 03:29:51 EDT
Linda Polman on "Afghaniscam": Is US "Aid" Making Things Worse?
Wednesday 22 September 2010
by: Robert Naiman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
(Photo: U.S. Marine Corps / Flickr)
It is frequently acknowledged that US policy in Afghanistan is "failing."
But a sharper question is less frequently posed: are the actions of the US
government making Afghans worse off than they would be if the US were doing
nothing in Afghanistan?
If Afghans would be better off if the US were doing nothing in their
country, that is not only a powerful indictment of current policy; it
strongly suggests that the direction that US 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 US 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 US are worse for them than if the US did nothing, over time
they can take actions which will compel the US 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 US 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 US 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 US policy than they
would be if the US 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.
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A key subquestion about the "more harm than good" counterfactual in
Afghanistan has been far from fully aired: is US "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 US "humanitarian aid" to groups fighting the Nicaraguan
government fueled armed conflict during the Reagan administration. But
while supporting a guerrilla war was clearly the aim of the Reagan
administration, supporting a guerrilla 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, US officials have described US 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 US
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 to 40 percent 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 percent wrongly
spent, which fueled violence more than canceled out, in its negative
effects, the 60-65 percent that was not wrongly spent.
And this ignores the question of to what extent 60-65 percent 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 US and leaders of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. I hope these
reports are meaningfully true and that they will create an opening to
reorient US 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?"
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