Rescuing the Refugees

Arthur C. Helton

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  The world's focus in Afghanistan is shifting from waging war to picking up the pieces and helping the long-suffering Afghan people. But can action follow words? Modern refugee crises require solutions that pair crisis response with nation building, and private agencies with national and international actors. But the organizations devoted to such tasks remain outdated, uncoordinated, and shackled by politicians and bureaucrats. The system is broken, and it cannot be fixed from within.

Arthur C. Helton is Senior Fellow for Refugee Studies and Preventive Action and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the forthcoming The Price of Indifference.

Coordination of international humanitarian operations has been a problem in Afghanistan for many years. The U.N. tried to set out an overall strategic framework for aid to the country in 1997, but a November 2001 World Bank report concluded that this effort had been ineffectual because there was no budgetary process in place to distribute resources according to the priorities identified. (In international humanitarian operations, as in much of the rest of life, money often dictates coordination and effort.)

The system was all the more inadequate, therefore, to handle the rapid deterioration of conditions in Afghanistan immediately after September 11. All foreign U.N. staff and other non-Afghan aid workers left the country voluntarily or were expelled, leaving stripped-down local teams to deal with an increasingly hostile Taliban. Even before the bombing began on the night of October 7, many Afghans, particularly those in cities, had begun abandoning their homes and dispersing throughout the country. As of early January 2002, approximately 200,000 Afghans had made their way to Pakistan, and 1.2 million more were estimated to be internally displaced. The bombing ruined much of the country's remaining infrastructure, and now approximately 50 percent of the houses in major Afghan cities are destroyed or damaged. New unexploded ordnance, including 25,000 cluster bomblets, was added to the many hundreds of thousands of land mines and shells with which Afghanistan has been seeded over the past two decades.

By late December 2001, the Taliban had been defeated and, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist. A political agreement among contending factions brokered by the U.N. in Bonn, Germany, created an interim government and launched a process of state building. A British-led International Security Assistance Force with a six-month charter was deployed in January. Twenty-nine new ministries are being organized, and ministers have been appointed. A new constitution and elections are planned once the situation stabilizes. These interim political arrangements should pave the way for recovery and reconstruction, but the hard part is yet to come.

In the wake of the Taliban's collapse, the relief system is reviving. International aid workers are returning to the country and funding commitments have increased dramatically. In January, U.N. agencies alerted donors that $1.33 billion would be needed to address the basic needs of 9 million Afghans over the next year. But some may still die this winter from famine, cold, or disease. The U.N. is nominally an adviser to the interim government, but it will have to play an active role at the outset, given the lack of indigenous infrastructure, trained personnel, and government institutions. It must help ensure public safety, facilitate the return of refugees and displaced persons, establish a judicial system, provide at least minimal public services, rebuild the country's infrastructure, create a sustainable public administration, manage the transition to democratic governance, and spur economic growth. If the global experiences of the past decade are any guide, however, expectations in most of these areas should be realistically modest.

OUT WITH THE OLD

The reasons to worry about Afghanistan involve both the intractable nature of the problems themselves and the inadequacy of the institutions responsible for addressing them. The hard work of good people within the U.N. system is often smothered by a cumbersome and dysfunctional bureaucracy, and international action is often hamstrung by politicized disputes between industrialized and developing countries. A typical example is the wrangling over the implementation of a 2000 report on reform of U.N. peacekeeping operations authored by Lakhdar Brahimi, currently the secretary-general's special representative for Afghanistan. In that report Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister, bluntly concluded, "Over the last decade the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge; and cannot do any better today."

This failure arises from both policy and international architecture. Although over the past decade the U.N. has been thrust into dealing with postconflict situations in places such as Cambodia, Kosovo, and East Timor, member states have been reluctant to grant it the capacity needed to accomplish much on the ground. No doctrine exists to regulate state building, and even if one did, the U.N. would not be able to apply it. Its operations are invariably ad hoc, with the system struggling to address a wide variety of responsibilities ranging from international policing to economic reconstruction. Reams of "lessons learned" reports are prepared, but they are rarely followed and may not even be applicable in new situations. Action often comes too late, local human resources are frequently ignored, and a lack of public order and personal security often frustrates operations.

The best response to these problems would be to find a way of making the U.N. system work well in the field. But successful reforms are unlikely. Even relatively modest adjustments in U.N. personnel rules designed to better match staff to emergency needs have not been put into effect, thanks largely to institutional torpor and complacency. Much of the direct action these days, moreover, takes place outside the U.N. system -- including the work of not just NGOs, but also international bodies such as NATO, the European Union, and the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Individual donor governments also undertake a wide variety of bilateral humanitarian initiatives, and they increasingly coordinate these actions in informal forums outside more cumbersome U.N. structures.

Even if improvements in the international humanitarian action system can somehow miraculously be made, they will be too late for Afghanistan. According to the World Bank, $10 billion to $15 billion will be required for Afghan reconstruction over the next decade. The country is desperately poor, and its people have suffered long. The will and capacity exist to help them, but the present array of humanitarian and development agencies can neither mobilize nor effectively direct that help. A new, more flexible mechanism is needed through which the United States and others can organize and channel humanitarian action.

A major step toward this goal would be the creation of an intergovernmental policy research center designed to enhance the international humanitarian action system. Such an organization -- let's call it SHARE, for Strategic Humanitarian Action and Research -- would identify impending crises before they erupt, promote preventive action, support comprehensive protection for all displaced people, and devise strategies to secure their lasting return. All these activities would fill gaps in the current system of international humanitarian action.