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

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?"