The role of aid agencies in war

Isabel Hilton, Guardian News Service, London

The story of Jonathan Idema, the ex-Green Beret arrested in Kabul for running his own private Abu Ghraib, would be comic if it were not so grotesque. Idema represented himself as a "security adviser", a euphemism, it seems, for his private pursuit of the US$25 million bounty on the head of Osama bin Laden. Had he chanced upon bin Laden in a teashop in Kabul he would have been a Rambo-style hero. Instead, he's under arrest. His defense should have a field day.

In the war on terror, the market dominates with scant regard for process or rules. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions between private and public armies, between war and business, between military and humanitarian efforts, have all been blurred.

Private "contractors" have free run of military prisons. If you want cooperation from the locals, get soldiers to offer blankets as well as bullets. If there are not enough troops to win over hearts and minds, use aid agencies -- in Colin Powell's sinister phrase -- as "force multipliers".

The consequences of this last category have been disastrously counterproductive. The distinction between armed and civilian personnel, between aid workers and soldiers, between NGOs (non- governmental organizations) and government, exists for good reason.

The Red Cross pursues the welfare of prisoners without distinction: Otherwise it would be unable to work at all. Doctors are obliged by oath to treat patients regardless of which faction they may support. Humanitarian and development aid should not be allocated or withheld on military or political grounds. But since the war on terror was declared, that autonomous space has come under attack as governments try to co-opt the humanitarian effort into the war on terror.

Winning hearts and minds is also a military tactic: When Lt. Reid Finn gave blankets and food to destitute villagers in Afghanistan earlier this year to encourage them to give him information about the Taliban, his generosity had a clear motive. "The more they help us find the bad guys, the more good stuff they get," as he put it.

Why then, are international NGOs so worried about what they see as a blurring of the distinction between humanitarian and military efforts?

Last year an OECD report argued that development work should be calibrated to the counter-terror effort. For the NGOs, many of whom derive funds directly from governments, it was an unwelcome echo of the cold war, when government aid budgets were frequently an instrument of politics.

From there the Bush administration took a major leap to the assertion that U.S. NGOs should consider themselves a branch of the government's anti-terror effort. The consequences of this approach are obvious -- NGOs are associated with U.S. military policy, and where that fails, so does the humanitarian effort.

Nor is it only in Afghanistan and Iraq that governments are trying to force NGOs to toe the line. In Colombia, the government repeatedly attacks NGOs that monitor its human rights abuses and has tried to pressure international aid givers to channel aid through Plan Colombia, a predominantly military program designed to fight guerrillas.

In Britain, a government minister earlier this year told human-rights NGOs that continued dialogue would be adversely affected if the government disapproved of an NGO's priorities.

In Afghanistan, according to Christian Aid, the U.S. has spent $40 billion on military operations, while the international spending on aid is $4.5 billion.

Experienced NGOs such as Oxfam, Christian Aid and the Red Cross now complain that in Afghanistan it is difficult to distinguish combat troops from the peacekeepers who provide security for humanitarian projects.

In Iraq it is worse. Last week the U.S. government admitted that only 2 percent of last year's $18 billion reconstruction budget has been spent and that insecurity has forced western NGOs to pull out. At the same time, the British government has now acknowledged that funds are being diverted from other development programs to Iraq.

If the NGOs that are now suffering the consequences of too close an identification with the war on terror wish to recover their neutrality and independence, they face some hard choices. The first step is a recognition that they have, in part, been responsible. In the past two decades, western governments have retreated from many areas of direct participation and ceded programs to NGO partners.

The NGO sector has long outgrown its charitable beginnings and is now a global player: Recent estimates suggest that globally some 26,000 NGOs employ 19 million people and dispose of around $1 trillion in finance, much of it directly from governments. Individually, NGOs are bewilderingly diverse; collectively they are a huge force that can change government agendas.

But the trade-off for power on this scale has been partnership with the governments that largely fund them. In areas where western governments see vital interests at stake, those same governments can now condition the terms under which NGOs operate. When governments overstep the line, the NGOs now share the opprobrium.