The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan The Institute for Human Security, Working Paper No. 1 Daniel Langenkamp© All Rights Reserved. Please do not cite work without author’s permission. Written in fulfillment of M.A.L.D Thesis and Human Security Certificate Requirements Under the Supervision of Prof. Peter Uvin, Director of The Institute on Human Security The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy May 2002 The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 1 Daniel Langenkamp The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Evolution of Humanitarian and Development Assistance: Critiques and Responses 4 A. Responses 7 1. Incentives for Peace: Development, Conflict Prevention and Peace Building 8 2. Good governance and capacity building 9 3. Market-based approaches 9 4. Rights-based approaches 10 5. Coherence and Securitization 12 Chapter II: The Aims and Impacts of Aid in the Taliban Era 15 A. The Search for Coherence 17 1. The Strategic Framework and Principled Common Programming 19 Box 2.1: Common Principles of the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan 20 2. Objectives 22 B. Rhetoric and Reality 23 C. The Political Dimension: The Heart of the Matter 25 D. The Radicalization of the Taliban 29 Can counter power work without high-level political involvement? 33 E. Challenges in Coordination 34 Box 2.2 Main Coordinating Bodies 35 F. The Proof is in the Pudding: Aid Flows and an Emphasis on Emergency Aid 39 Box 2.3 Yearly Response Levels to the UN’s Consolidated Appeals Process 40 1. Types of funding: Self Perpetuation of the Emergency 41 2. The Predominance of Emergency Aid 42 3. Camps, Urban Interventions and Pull Factors 45 4. A word about monitoring and evaluation 46 5. Other Impacts 47 6. Human Rights 47 Rights programming 48 Rights-based programming 48 7. Lack of local ownership and failed community-building 52 8. Development shura: placebo or panacea? 55 G. Some Conclusions on Taliban-Era Aid 56 Chapter III A New Era of Assistance 58 A. The Policy Framework: Coherence Redux 59 1. The New Agenda: The Immediate and Transitional Assistance Program 60 2. The Principles 63 3. Sectoral Activities 65 4. Comments on the principles, themes and sectors 65 The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 2 Daniel Langenkamp B. Coordination 69 1. A Complex Structure 70 2. An elective process, large demands, and challenged national authority 72 3. Donor Coordination: Refusal to be Bound 73 Box 3.1: A Textbook Case: Pet Projects and the New Afghan School Year 74 Box 3.2: Military Operations: When Politics Trump Humanitarian Principle 75 4. Poor field-level and NGO coordination 76 C. Programming Types and Funding Patterns 77 Box 3.3 A Jump in Funding: ITAP Funding 78 1. Even greater reliance on short-term emergency interventions 79 D. Agency Practices and Implementation 81 1. A flood of agencies 82 2. Inflation of rents 83 3. Focus on Kabul and Urban Areas 84 4. A Continuing Culture of Impunity 84 5. Afghan ownership still not taken seriously 84 E. Conclusion: Recommendations and Observations 89 References 95 List of Interviewees 101 I would like to thank Peter Uvin, Director of The Fletcher School’s Institute on Human Security, for invaluable direction and assis tance during the research and writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank Claude Br uderlein, Director of the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, at the Harvard School of Public Health, for advice and support in related research that contributed to this report. Finally, I would like to express deep gratitude to the many dedicated and courageous aid workers, both Afghans and others, who shared with me their thoughts, experiences and opinions about the response to the 23-year-old crisis in Afg hanistan. The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 3 Daniel Langenkamp The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan Daniel Langenkamp© MALD Thesis The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Introduction This study will examine the aims and impacts of humanitarian and development aid in Afghanistan during the Taliban and post-Taliban era, with the aim putting forward policy prescriptions for humanitarian and development actors. As will be demonstrated, the provision of aid during the period of 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban authority governed all but about 10 percent of the country, was characterized by a set of conflicting aims that deeply influenced the effectiveness of aid programming. Western governments, opposed to the Taliban’s fostering of terrorists, narcotics-related crop cultivation and lack of respect for human rights, effectively sought to destabilize the regime by isolating it politically and economically and by withholding any type of assistance the regime might use to consolidate power. Simultaneously, however, the same donor governments, along with the United Nations and humanitarian and development agencies, attempted to engage in a range of humanitarian and development programming to alleviate an intensifying humanitarian crisis stemming from the Taliban’s inept governance, international isolation, economic breakdown, widespread human rights violations, a severe drought, and ongoing warfare. While many thousands of lives were undoubtedly saved by humanitarian and development actors during this period, the effectiveness of the humanitarian and development program was often undermined both by these political goals and by disagreements between practitioners regarding the acceptable amount of cooperation to be undertaken with the Taliban authorities. At the same time it is also clear that several classic problems related to the provision of The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 4 Daniel Langenkamp aid in violent conflict existed: coordination proved extremely problematic, aid directly and indirectly assisted warring factions, encouraged displacement, and nourished dependencies among populations that will prove difficult to reverse. It can also be argued that various forms of aid made the Taliban authorities less accountable to the Afghan population, since major portions of the social welfare infrastructure came to be handled by international aid agencies. In addition, the determination on the part of several Western states to isolate the Taliban created a set of assistance programs that focused overwhelmingly on short-term, life-saving emergency assistance against the better judgment of agencies who knew that this programming would create dependences, undermine local coping mechanisms, and draw rural populations from their villages and into displacement camps. This occurred despite the knowledge that programming focusing on livelihoods strategies, education, and capacity building would have served the Afghan people better in the long run. As a new era of assistance to the country begins, both Afghan and international actors must address these problems if the process of true reconstruction and development is to occur. Unfortunately, as interviews for this study have made clear, many of the problems so obvious in past major humanitarian efforts continue to be propagated today in this new context. Aid agencies again seem to be rushing into Afghanistan with scant regard for coordination, minimal concern for existing programming or the local capacity to absorb new programming, and little experience of the highly complex political, social, and economic environment in the country. Rent-seeking behavior, including the charging of extortionate rents for housing and offices in Kabul and other major cities, has already begun with the complicity of the international community, and the interim administration in Afghanistan is facing deepening threats from warlords who might seek to manipulate or appropriate aid. Aside from these problems, an ongoing crisis of impunity, beginning decades ago and intensifying the 1990s, persists in the country. This atmosphere is The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 5 Daniel Langenkamp particularly worrying because, as humanitarian actors interviewed for this study have pointed out, few in the international community seem to want to confront the fact that security problems hampering the delivery of aid come from warlords that the United States armed and supported in order to defeat the Taliban in late 2000 and early 2001. The continuing tensions in the country along with the continuing humanitarian emergency should stand as a clarion call to development and humanitarian aid agencies: Aid providers need to radically re-conceptualize the processes by which they operate, perhaps by re-thinking the sacred notion that physical needs in any complex humanitarian emergency should outweigh the needs for community empowerment or for sustainable mechanisms of economic growth. This must be done lest the current aid operation contribute to the destabilization of the current regime. The study is divided into three chapters. Chapter I is a literature review providing a theoretical framework for the analysis. The chapter focuses upon the evolution of key ideas in humanitarianism and development thinking, looking in particular at criticisms (and responses thereto) of aid in complex emergencies. Chapter II discusses aid in the period following the withdrawal of Soviet troops until the fall of the Taliban in 2001. It will seek to discern—using available primary data, secondary sources, and interviews—the impacts that assistance has had upon the country. The aims will be examined from the perspective of donors, the United Nations, and aid agencies operating in the country. The chapter will look in particular at the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan and the Principled Common Programming and at the effectiveness of efforts to achieve coherence among the political, humanitarian and human rights objectives in the country. Chapter III examines the new context in which aid is now being provided in Afghanistan, with particular focus on the systemic deficiencies inherited from the past and the new dilemmas faced by NGOs, UN agencies and donors. It concludes with policy recommendations. The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 6 Daniel Langenkamp Chapter I The Evolution of Humanitarian and Development Assistance: Critique and Response The practice of providing humanitarian and development aid in situations of violent conflict has undergone radical changes in the last decades. The current chapter will provide a brief sketch of the development of aid theory and practice in an effort to provide the theoretical context in which billions of dollars of aid have been provided to Afghanistan in the last decade. Providers of humanitarian and development assistance have faced harsh criticism as a result of a string of highly public failures since the Cold War. As a result of these challenges, many humanitarian and development aid providers have abandoned the idea of their work as providing neutral, impartial and technical assistance in complex emergencies to a current understanding which takes much greater consideration of the potential negative impacts of aid (Anderson 1999; Brauman: 1997; De Waal 1995; Duffield 2001; Uvin 1998). Towards this end, agencies have begun to focus more seriously on human rights, on the complex relationship between relief and development, and on the deeply political nature of aid provision. The potential for aid to act as both an incentive and disincentive for processes of peace is integral to the new notion of humanitarianism and development, as is the idea of aid conditionality, an idea that has had a deep impact on the way assistance was provided to Afghanistan during the Taliban era. As a range of scholars have noted, humanitarian agencies in the post-World War II era initially aimed at providing neutral and impartial assistance to war-affected and natural disasters. During this period (defined here as lasting until the late 1970s), agencies took direction from the International Committee of the Red Cross and viewed themselves as providers of technical The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 7 Daniel Langenkamp services who would gain access to populations through their neutrality and impartiality. This apolitical view of humanitarian aid, however, was challenged by experiences in the late 1970s and 1980s demonstrating that relief and development work is in fact deeply and unavoidably political. Neutrality (defined as taking no positions that could be seen as favoring one side or another), and impartiality (defined as providing assistance to anyone in need regardless of affiliation), were seen as working at cross purposes in some cases, particularly in cases where governments sought to take advantage of aid agencies reluctance to take public stands on political issues and manipulate aid for their own purposes. As numerous studies have noted, this understanding came along with experiences in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Bangladesh and elsewhere where aid agencies were found to be inadvertently serving the interests of governments, warlords, and local elites, despite these agencies’ best intentions (Brauman; De Waal; Anderson). It is perhaps not coincidental that the development of thinking in practice came with an explosion of post-colonial conflicts throughout the world. These conflicts caused the number of refugees in the world to surge from three to 11 million by the late 1980s, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Today that number is above 20 million. The humanitarian crisis in Cambodia in the late 1970s and early 1980s deserves particular note because it was one of the first in a series of watersheds in the evolution of the humanitarian idea. In a nutshell, the dilemma in Cambodia was caused when the government, a puppet regime installed after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, began to appropriate vast quantities of aid from aid providers (Brauman). This was a moral dilemma that has since repeated itself over and over again: do agencies continue to provide aid in the hope that assistance will reach populations, even though they know that host governments or rebel forces controlling refugee camps will appropriate the aid and use it for their own purposes? The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 8 Daniel Langenkamp In response to the Cambodian government’s manipulations, almost all agencies decided withdraw from the country and begin operating only in the refugee camps established along the Thai-Cambodian border. A number of agencies—most notably Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC)—decided to go further and protest Phenom Phen’s behavior with a march along the Thai-Cambodian border in February 1980. These agencies knew that the protest would result in their losing all access to the country and to the populations they had wanted to help. They were right. In response, the government cut off access and agencies were forced to operate in the border camps, where they had to confront a wholly different set of political actors and issues. Along with this new understanding of the political nature of assistance came the criticism that aid agencies often unintentionally do harm by failing to understand their true impacts. Mary Anderson and Alex De Waal are perhaps the most prominent critics of humanitarian aid arguing along this line, though the list of critics is now so long that it is a generally accepted tenet of humanitarian aid. As they have written, agencies often serve to undermine the institutions and destabilize the populations they mean to help because of the complex ways in which humanitarian aid serves to unintentionally “institutionalize” violence, feeding the structures of power and warfare that caused conflict in the first place. De Waal draws heavily on the experience of agencies operating in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, where famine was used as a lever to gain access to vast amounts of aid generated by extraordinary media attention and the Live Aid benefit concert in 1984. Sadly, aid agencies in Ethiopia refused to acknowledge their own complicity in assisting a government whose corruption and malicious policy-making were more responsible for the famine than the drought. It is important to note that the criticisms leveled against humanitarian aid have also been aimed at development assistance. As Steven Knack, of the World Bank, Peter Uvin, and Mark The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 9 Daniel Langenkamp Duffield have noted, development aid can also feed into the exploitative processes that end up assisting corrupt local elites and harming vulnerable populations. As Uvin demonstrated in Rwanda, development aid can exacerbate social tensions, encourage bad policy making, make governments less accountable to voters, intensify competition for resources, and feed processes of structural violence in a country, ultimately empowering the very elites who benefit from exploiting marginalized segments of the country. In Rwanda’s case, Uvin notes, the relationship between development aid and genocide were direct: development actors essentially colluded with a corrupt and genocidal regime by turning a blind eye to widespread human rights violations committed by the regime, ultimately refusing to acknowledge that their assistance was detrimental to the poor. Responses to Criticism Criticism of development and humanitarian aid became increasingly acute as conflicts proliferated in the early 1990s following the end of the Cold War. Perhaps not coincidentally, the increased realization of aid’s unintended consequences came when agencies were taking on roles that were more ambitious than ever before. In response to these criticisms, relief and development agencies began to take new approaches to their work, and—not surprisingly—emphasize modes of action that aimed at addressing the underlying processes which lead to violence or armed conflict. This included programming that re-asserted the long-held (but not often practiced) belief that aid programming benefit particularly vulnerable populations such as rural groups, the extremely poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and women. The focus of these efforts is often on grassroots, community building or “counter power” initiatives that bypass state authorities or warring parties with the idea that such programming can circumvent the corrupt elites that have used aid for destructive purposes in the past. Other initiatives have emphasized capacity building and good governance programming, with the goal of encouraging efficiency and transparency and discouraging The Aims and Impacts of Aid in Afghanistan 10 Daniel Langenkamp