LITERARY | Afghanistan: Providing Aid Safely
June 2010 | Archive | Written by Daniel J. Gerste, originally under a pseudonym
Humanitarian Bazaar (aka HELO Magazine)
“We’re making progress with community leaders,” Abdullah told me over a popping and hissing fire in his Kabul office last month. He is an angel-faced, black-bearded man in his mid-thirties who serves as an international humanitarian aid manager on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Here Abdullah took a tense pause, stroked his whiskers and sipped tea.
“We have worked hard to earn the tribe’s trust and we like helping them achieve their goals. But sometimes when we are on our way, the elder will warn us not to come because the village is hosting Al Qaeda.”
Abdullah, his deputy Anwar and I met to review our agency’s humanitarian and development efforts helping poor civilians trapped in isolated villages across the craggy ridges of the Safed Koh Mountain range. The duo regularly lug laptops and break sandals over high passes just to reach some of these tribal councils. The area is just a stone’s throw from the conflict-ravaged SWAT Valley in Pakistan.
Now after all his toil to help that village, Abdullah wants to know if foreign terrorists crossing paths with the team may accuse them of being Western spies and target them for assassination. They are not spies at all; they’re men of peace. And it’s now up to me to advise the agency on how best to protect them while continuing to help isolated families in their district.
I’m an American writer and international aid worker who likes to cut through the fog of crisis and help survivors get their stories out and stay safe. In this story, I would like to give you a peak into how my aid team was recently forced to re-evaluate our entire approach after crossing paths with foreign terrorists in Afghanistan.
For the last year, I’ve gotten deeply involved in humanitarian aid operations across the Middle East and West Asia, based in Washington, DC. I wanted to explore how combined foreign and Afghan field teams work together on frontlines with local traditional councils in the Safed Koh Mountains near Pakistan, deep in the Margow Desert beside Iran, along the Panj River border with Tajikistan, and in Kabul.
And in Washington, I wanted to learn more about policy debates on aid to Southwest Asia, particularly how the US and participating aid agencies are currently transferring efforts from Iraq to the Afghan region. But the deeper I got in this kind of work, I found few answers, just more questions.
Admittedly, I’m an uneasy traveler, an espresso junkie with a fear of flying and a trampoline stomach who spends much of his time wondering whether the lamb was poisoned rather than finishing that latest report.
But I love nothing better than to get on the ground in distant mountains and deserts to interview the passionate and the desperate about what they believe the world must know about their fate and then helping them emblazon these words on the public scroll.
Abdullah’s fear of assassination in the Safed Koh is representative of a strategic crisis faced by all international aid organizations in Afghanistan. And it is urgent.
Coffee-addled, jetlagged, but determined to learn, I arrived back in Kabul early in February to find the streets filled with mud and melting snow. My goal was to take a look at our portfolio of programs and consider how best to empower Abdullah’s team to save lives, aid recovery, and protect against disaster. More specifically, I wanted to know how the Afghan staff were individually navigating the minefields of peace-oriented work on the frontlines of a battle zone.
Kabul had changed a great deal culturally since I first came in 2004, indicating the greater influence of moderate Pashtuns, Westerners, and ethnic groups of the north like the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Wakhi. A poster of a woman in a revealing sari or the sounds of rapper Awesome Qasim echoing through the streets would never have been permitted under the Taliban government.
For some, these new freedoms indicate an improvement in security in Kabul and areas where international aid workers operate. But in fact many ultra-conservatives have become so angry about what they perceive as a libertinism ushered in with the Northern Alliance and US forces in 2001, that they blame foreigners and minorities for threatening their culture.
Behind the compound wall, I greeted Abdullah, Anwar and the rest of our exhausted staff. Right away, the team and I started talking about the struggles of work, our beards practically growing as we spoke. Above all our talk about trainings, tools, and supplies on the ground hovered the broader regional strategy pursued by our donors.
Western policy-makers, based on perceived successes not yet proven in civil-military operations in Iraq, have made a radical change in global humanitarian tradition over the past decade by merging military war efforts with humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.
The US government in particular is dramatically increasing funding for blended humanitarian aid, governance development, and political conversion programs across Afghanistan and Pakistan, focused on conflict areas.
For more background, check out: “Officials recommend civilian boost in Afghanistan,” by Matthew Lee and Anne Gearan of the Associated Press, March 18th, 2009.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090318/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_afghanistan
Now aid workers and their program participants, including thousands of Afghans who have long been peaceful and impartial, whose agencies or counterparts have gone after these new civil-military grants, are finding themselves targeted by insurgents who can no longer see the line between aid and their enemy.
The Taliban has already murdered dozens of aid workers. Recently, they’ve come out with a broader call to kill us since they incorrectly believe we are spies:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/03/15/afghan.taliban.threat/index.html?iref=24hours
Our agency management, to be quite frank, was so excited to get a large new grant for work on the frontline that it ordered Abdullah’s team out there before even considering the bigger picture and how to keep our team and beneficiaries safe. Some had weighed the options, but believed that the risks to local staff and families were worth it – this time – because our work could help bring an end to the Taliban and its persecution of women.
Abdullah opens his laptop to a photo stream. He scrolls through the recent photos of his group standing in the snow with some of the tribal elders of a Safed Koh village.
“You see, we have the advantage because we are from the same tribes. We come dressed the way they are, speak the same dialect and we pray with them. They know they can trust us because we are like them. But now—,” here he flips to a photo of Anwar standing on a hillside with a Kalashnikov; my eyes pop open in dismay, “—with these new risks from Al Qaeda, we have to try to blend in even more, so we do what they do.”
Our agency has a no arms policy. We are peaceniks, flower children, and we simply want to help marginalized people survive the cold, the flu, and hunger. Abdullah and Anwar do not carry guns, but when a local asked them to pose for the camera they felt obliged to do what they were asked.
What is meant to happen is this: Abdullah openly explains to the tribe over tea how we will arrange trucks and donkeys to carry medical supplies, how we will schedule trainings to help them achieve the goals they agreed on with us. After earning their trust, we reduce suffering, improve their lot, smile for photos, and go home.
But there is a very real possibility that one or two members of the community are leaving the tea party to alert Al Qaeda or the Taliban that the guys sitting with the elders work on US government funding and are apparently trying to woo the population toward the Western style of government, alliances, and general freedom and prosperity which the insurgents loathe.
Thirty years into their civil war, many Afghans do not wish to be on any side. Some prefer the US-backed Karzai government. But very few want to be rumored to have shaken hands with an alleged foreign agent, even one offering gifts. Once our team gets painted the color of a foreign agent – true or not – they’re dead.
What could I do? Call off the program for security risks at the cost of the community’s trust and welfare? Report the sightings of Al Qaeda and have US and Afghan forces run raids through the area?
Al Qaeda was, to be honest, everywhere and nowhere. So befuddled were many on our team and in the aid community about what to do in these situations, the most popular choice seemed to be to pretend we did not know about it. But Abdullah wanted an answer on how he should proceed.
As any other foreign aid worker would do, I trudged over to the expatriate coffeehouse locked away behind a fortress wall in Qalai-Fatullah. I relaxed on the plush couch listening to the trance techno on the stereo, and savored a nice espresso. Comfort in denial. From here, like at home, it was easy to forget how painful and arduous was Abdullah’s hike into the Safed Koh. He was not the kind of aid worker who could just go home.
I wrote a recommendation to my aid agency’s senior leadership on behalf of Abdullah’s team. We, as an organization, have to sit down and really wrap our heads around the growing US civil-military strategy. Was it our role as humanitarians to take funding which was more focused on counter-insurgency in the long-term than it was on saving lives and reducing suffering in the short-term? Many agencies had already sorted this out when the trend began in 2001.
If it was indeed our role to assume a bias toward the US-backed Karzai government, particularly in political development programs, how would we protect our local staff like Abdullah from the fallout of taking sides in the war on the local level?
Based on Abdullah’s and other team members recommendations, I urged the agency to suspend any remotely political activities in the frontline areas and only work on humanitarian aid without insurgent presence for the purpose of protecting our local staff and beneficiaries from being targeted.
The donor would not like it, we might lose money, we might even be seen as not supporting the war against the Taliban, but we would be able to do what we came to do. That was to save lives and reduce suffering of the most vulnerable who were trapped in the conflict. And keep the staff who are out there doing it safe.
Right after I sent the memo, the Taliban launched the three-pronged suicide attack on government ministries across town in Kabul. Then separate suicide bombers hit very close to the second office of our agency located on the other side of the country. Here’s the BBC coverage of the Kabul attack:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7883129.stm
So our grand strategy and security talks on Afghanistan for the next month would be focused instead on compound walls, evacuation procedures, and radios for the urban areas. We never reported the sightings of insurgent activity and had little time to improve the situation in the Safed Koh.
Abdullah and Anwar left Kabul for the provincial capitol. They have gone back to doing what they do, despite the risks. After enduring thirty years of war, they have a much better grip on this than I do.
Even as I got aggravated that we could not reinvent our approach, they were already back out there doing what they do with smiles on their faces. After all, it was their tribe, their mountain range, and their country. And they cared too much to let organizational debates and personal risks get in the way of helping their people.