Canadian Consortium on Human Security

Lara Olson*

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan cannot be called a post-conflict country and still faces immense relief and recovery needs. Among the multitude of international agencies, foreign military forces, and donors involved, NGOs are a key player in Afghan reconstruction. More than 800 NGOs, both international and indigenous, work on health, education, economic development, human rights, gender equality, peacebuilding, governance, and mine action, to name just a few programs. As the main implementers of aid at the community level, NGOs are indispensable to the overall international effort.

Such work in Afghanistan has become very dangerous. Over 90 aid workers have been murdered since 2003, making Afghanistan the most dangerous country for aid workers in the world. This insecurity for NGOs has a direct impact on the level, reach and quality of assistance. Some NGOs have ceased operations altogether, as in the case of Medicins Sans Frontiers in 2004 after five of its staff were killed. Other international NGOs have curtailed programs in certain regions, and keep international staff bunkered in Kabul, working in the provinces mostly through local NGO partners. However, local NGOs face equally high risks - most of the aid workers killed in recent years have been Afghan nationals.

Beyond the tragic loss of life itself, the major cost of this insecurity is the disruption in urgently needed projects that affect millions of Afghans. As the May 2006 riots in Kabul illustrated, public anger at the lack of visible results from the reconstruction effort is mounting. If the most volatile areas of the country receive very little aid, the resulting discontent can fuel more resentment toward the foreign community and its partner, the Karzai government. This, in turn, helps recruit for the insurgency and fuels more insecurity in a vicious cycle.

NGOs differ on what they perceive to be the causes of insecurity. Most agree that NGOs are widely seen as ‘soft targets’ - they are visible in communities and reject using armed guards. But clearly there are other reasons. Some point to the overall context in which all outside assistance is seen as political support for the Karzai government. As one NGO advocate put it, “If the lives of regular Afghans improve, more ordinary people would support the government and that is what the insurgents do not want.”[i]

Many international NGOs also point to the troubling overall donor framework that has merged security, relief, reconstruction and development. This has occurred from the earliest days of the U.S.-led coalition, which had military officers engaged in reconstruction work wearing civilian dress and driving unmarked vehicles. It occurs through the many ‘hearts and minds’ aid projects to win the goodwill of the population towards the foreign troops. It occurs institutionally through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, small bases of foreign troops outside Kabul tasked with both establishing security and undertaking reconstruction. Critics claim that such military-led assistance is more driven by political and security criteria (such as bolstering the credibility of the national government, gathering intelligence, force protection, or pacifying a region where insurgents are more active) than by humanitarian need.

Many NGOs believe that such approaches have compromised public perceptions of humanitarian assistance as politically neutral and have led the population to see NGOs as simply an arm of the foreign military presence. NGOs do not dispute the need for security assistance to Afghanistan for the transition period, before effective domestic security forces are established. But they advocate for a stricter separation of roles, where the military focuses on establishing security, and in turn allows aid agencies to focus on relief and reconstruction.

These concerns about the overall framework for Afghan reconstruction have led to much soul-searching among international NGOs committed to political neutrality and independence. Historically, humanitarian NGOs have been more insistent on separating military and humanitarian responses, so that if war resumes they can access needy civilians on all sides. At the same time, development-oriented NGOs have always been more open to working with governments, recognizing the necessarily political nature of much of their work. However, many of the largest international NGOs in Afghanistan are now multimandate agencies involved in both relief and development, and so face serious dilemmas as to what their role should be with respect to the government, the foreign military and donors.

Over the last few years, the major NGOs in Afghanistan have formed networks to coordinate approaches and undertake advocacy with donors and the military to respect ‘humanitarian’ space. This notion refers to the separation of political/military and humanitarian responses in order to preserve the right of needy civilians to receive assistance on the basis of need, and independent of political affiliation.

Through such advocacy, there have been some improvements in the communication between NGOs and the military, with some accommodation of NGO concerns. However the overall framework of Afghan reconstruction is a larger issue that goes beyond NGO-military dialogue in the field. It requires a wider engagement with donors and some evidence-based research on the benefits, pitfalls, and tradeoffs of the model of international assistance that dominates in Afghanistan.

[i] Moh Hashim Mayar, deputy director, Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR), interview with author, September 12, 2006.

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