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 But the organizations devoted to such tasks remain outdated, uncoordinated, and shackled by politicians and bureaucrats.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.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Another critical task in Afghanistan will be to overcome the disjuncture between relief activities, which have a long history there, and development activities, which have been largely dormant since the 1970s. Relief programs address basic humanitarian needs immediately, leaving everything else for later; development policy works the opposite way, looking at how to build the capacity for governance and economic growth over the long term. But rarely has there been a focus on how to link the two. Relief and development organizations are beginning to cooperate, but there is as yet no institutional bridge between them. Share could provide it.

The development challenges will be daunting. Afghanistan's central and commercial banking system has collapsed. Electricity consumption is among the lowest in the world, and there is only one telephone per 500 people. Less than one-quarter of the population has access to safe water, and only half of that total has adequate sanitation. A largely subsistence agricultural sector has been destroyed and is increasingly devoted to growing poppies for drug production. Child and maternal mortality as well as fertility rates are among the highest in the world. Only 38 percent of boys and 3 percent of girls are enrolled in primary school. The roads are shoddy, and environmental degradation in rural areas is widespread. To address these issues, a new policy research center such as SHARE could pool relevant experience from international operations elsewhere and produce approaches suited to Afghanistan's unique circumstances. The goal would be not sets of static planning documents, but rather a well-functioning process to anticipate potential unintended consequences and enable flexible responses to rapidly evolving events.

Local human rights NGOs are likely to play a crucial role in Afghanistan's future, and the international community should do what it can to nurture them. SHARE could help by disseminating and building on important lessons learned from the U.N.'s experiences in Cambodia and elsewhere. A U.N. peacekeeping operation with broad powers was deployed in Cambodia in 1992. The mission's small human rights unit recognized the importance of encouraging local NGOS so that it would have somebody to whom it could hand over responsibilities at the end of the mission. It offered financial, technical, and administrative assistance -- and the impact of all these efforts turned out to be perhaps the most tangible legacy of the entire Cambodian mission.

In Afghanistan, local human rights NGOs could be an important constituency pressing to reverse the pervasive exclusion of women from public life under Taliban rule. NGOs could also step in to fill the gap when foreigners move on to the next emergency. In places such as Kosovo and East Timor, international operations have found it difficult to cede authority to local officials. Afghanistan is more likely to exhibit the reverse problem: a temptation by outsiders to get out early, letting the problems persist while the world's attention wanes. Not far down the road, a robust NGO sector that insists on official accountability could be an important antidote to local officials who prove corrupt or abusive.

Public security and the rule of law, finally, will be crucial issues for Afghanistan in the wake of the crisis; insecurity can thwart humanitarian assistance as well as the return of refugees and internally displaced persons. An institution such as SHARE could collect information and disseminate advice on how to combat lawlessness and restore public security. Some 4,000-5,000 multinational peacekeepers are to be initially stationed for six months in and around Kabul, but questions about their mission are certain to arise. Will the peacekeepers intervene and arrest locals who commit murder or mayhem against other locals? If so, what will they do with those they arrest? Similar issues vexed international operations in Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, and East Timor.

Afghanistan lacks even the rudiments of a formal judicial system, and the U.N. has little capacity to deploy effective police, much less court and prison personnel. Brahimi's 2000 U.N. peacekeeping report included a package of recommendations for how to establish the rule of law, but little real progress has been made in thinking through how to develop them. Here the international community may have to again reinvent the wheel to be an effective adviser in Afghanistan. The problem is that although building sustainable legal institutions rooted in local traditions is a long-term project, the failure to address such issues early on, before indigenous law enforcement is established, can cause an interim government to lose much of its credibility. An organization such as SHARE could not only identify the problem but also take a stab at addressing it, developing packages that could be applied in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Merely listing the sorts of challenges that the international humanitarian action system will confront in and around Afghanistan during the months and years ahead is disheartening. Matching an understanding of the problems with an understanding of the weaknesses of the institutions set up to tackle them only makes it worse. Still, there are silver linings. As bad as Afghanistan may have it now, conditions are finally improving for the first time in two decades. The country's future will inevitably be brighter than its past. Slowly but steadily, moreover, knowledge is accumulating about how the problems of refugees and development can best be addressed, what kinds of partnerships are necessary among humanitarian organizations, and how operations can be carried out most effectively. Until that knowledge can be assembled in one place and brought to bear on specific tasks, however, it will not have much positive impact. The creation of a small but responsive entity such as SHARE might just have such beneficial consequences. For the sake of the millions of poor, suffering, and displaced people ill served by the current system, it is an experiment worth trying.