Humanitarian Aid: Winning the Terror War

[Rex Brynen]

I have always felt that UNICEF has been one of the greatest contributors to instability and war in Africa. Through their fru-fru feel good efforts to save children who normally would have died because the environment/country could not support them naturally, without any assistance to give these additional young adults jobs or homes or help of any kind, they create breading grounds of young, homeless, jobless disgruntled young adults that gravitate towards crime and/or rebellion. Unless you have a complete plan for security, poverty reduction, employment, infrastructure, you are going to have instability.

I've never been much of a believer, on either ethical or practical grounds, of letting people die because "a country can't support them naturally." Most children in sub-Saharan Africa do not die because of some sort of Malthusian absolute limits on food or other resources, but because of preventable disease and, in the case of wars, man-made disaster.

Nor do the majority of UNICEF field workers that I know have anything particularly "fru fru" about them. Some of them see, and deal with, stunning degrees of human suffering on a daily basis.

Finally, while UNICEF is certainly engaged in immediate short-term humanitarian assistance, the vast bulk of that organization's efforts are directed at longer term and sustainable change. This is particularly true with regard to child immunization (where UNICEF has played a key role both in technical assistance and, through partnerships, in implementation), and in improving education (which is generally accepted to be the single best was to improve living conditions and reduce mortality rates in the longer term).

To cite but one example:

ATLANTA/GENEVA/NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, 4 December 2008 – Measles deaths worldwide fell by 74 per cent between 2000 and 2007, from an estimated 750 000 to 197 000. In addition, the Eastern Mediterranean region* which includes countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and the Sudan has cut measles deaths by a remarkable 90 per cent — from an estimated 96 000 to 10 000 — during the same period, thus achieving the United Nations goal to reduce measles deaths by 90 per cent by 2010, three years early.

The progress was announced today by the founding partners of the Measles Initiative: the American Red Cross, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Foundation (UN Foundation), UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO). The data will be published in the 5 December edition of WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Record and CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Issues of post-childhood employment typically fall outside UNICEF's mandate, and are taken up by other agencies--UNDP, the World Bank, bilateral donor assistance, etc. Obviously, however, the healthier and better educated children are, the more likely they are to make a successful transition into the job market. In Africa in particular, poor economic performance and high youth unemployment are often a product of poor political leadership and corruption, not a lack of natural resources. Do we let kids in Zimbabwe die of cholera because Mugabe is evil? Or should UNICEF being doing what it should to prevent these wholly preventable deaths?

Obviously, the aid and humanitarian assistance community is far from perfect. There are many example of poorly-planned and implemented projects, and incompetent staff. However, there are also many cases of successful projects—and its important not to lose sight of the bigger picture.

[Tom Odom]

Answer most excellent, Rex, I agree with most of what you say.

I will however admit to frustration with certain cultures that generate children as cannon fodder. I have met humanitarian workers who have voiced similar concerns/angst.

Of course before we blame such cultures for their mistakes we have to look at our own. As an Africanist I grew very frustrated with the limitations placed on our--US--efforts toward population control, limitations 100% driven by religious pressure against birth control. The Pope's proclamations against condoms were especially galling as they offered excuses for unprotected sex and at the same time created more children who would themselves be orphaned and possibly killed by the disease.

Like all things in life the answers are not simple, no matter how much we might wish them to be.

Tom

[TheCurmudgeon]

Rex,

First off I am glad to see that I got someone’s goad ... and for the thoughtful and information filled reply. Even though this season brings out the Nietzsche in me and I personally do believe that certain environments have a Malthusian limit on the size of the population it can sustain, I am really not advocating letting children needlessly die (and then using their skins for gloves ... hence the title of this entry).

What I am advocating is a coherent, congruent approach to a systems level problem rather than piecemealing solutions that tend to concentrate on what makes westerners feel good about ourselves; solutions that tend to invoke the law of unintended consequences.

The article cited by Jedburgh discussed trying to create a system where security and development work together similar to what is advocated in many nation-building references. Rand “A Beginner’s Guide To Nation Building” http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2007/RAND_MG557.pdf. A holistic, nation or state building approach is what I would advocate. How to get the various organizations, each with their own mandate and agenda, to work together in this fashion is the problem.

Two other points that are closely related. First, whatever we do must meet the needs and desires of the target population or it may all be for naught. What they see as important must be take into consideration or our meddling will be viewed with contempt. Where and when it fails, regardless of why, the backlash will be targeted at similar efforts in the future or at the west in general.

Second, whenever we intercede to assist a portion of the population (children, women, etc.) we are, in fact, injecting our values and morals into the target population, potentially subverting existing cultural systems. This is an arrogant approach. As outsiders how and why traditional approaches work may not always be clear to us. They MAY in fact NEED to be replaced if development is going to proceed. But if we plan on fooling with another cultures system potentially subverting traditional values we had better be ready to replace them in total or watch entire cultures slowly degenerate into chaos and then incorrectly blame it on whichever warlord ends up in control.

There are of course exceptions where immediate and targeted action is required; the genocide in Rwanda being the most obvious. But wherever possible our efforts need to be designed to put the entire country on a long term (plans should be based on a twenty to fifty year time frame) development into a stable, self-sustaining state.

Again, Happy Holidays.

PS I would wish you “Peace on Earth” but that would put me out of a job

[Rex Brynen]

Just as militaries have their doctrines, so too the humanitarian aid community has its principles and best practices. Like military doctrine, it can be imperfect, poorly understood, unevenly accepted, and badly interpreted and implemented, but they do provide some indication of how things should be done--including the issues that Curmudgeon raises (need, coherence, coordination, stakeholder consultation, host country ownership, not imposing external values).

Some links and light reading,for those so inclined:

Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship (the "Stockholm Declaration," 2003).

Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005).

OECD, Guidelines on Helping Prevent Violent Conflict, Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States, among many others.

On top of this, almost every specialized international agency has a "lessons learned" or "best practices" department, and many of their publications and reports can be found online.

What we tend to be missing is a systematic examination of "worst practices" and why they occur and reoccur. I've always thought that understanding the pathology of repeated errors is critical to correcting them.

[Surferbeetle]

Rex,

Your well-timed post the other day on the Iraq Reconstruction Experience is certainly a systematic examination and so is the Rand Nation Building paper authored by Amb. Dobbins and referenced by TC.

It would seem that many of us in the small wars/nation building arena are aware of these issues but as we often joke, getting everybody on the same page is akin to herding cats or perhaps as easy as running with the squirrels.

All jokes aside when will the 'fusion cell' idea come to fruition in our coalitions nation building efforts? I am well aware that doctrinally the CMOC or CMIC is where this is supposed to happen, however I have yet to run across an effective vertically and horizontally integrated effort which truly synchronizes coalition efforts in the nation building/CA/PSYOP/IO arena. Have you?

Hope springs eternal and maybe this next year in Afghanistan will be when it all finally comes together for us...

Regards,

Steve

[TheCurmudgeon]

All jokes aside when will the 'fusion cell' idea come to fruition in our coalitions nation building efforts? I am well aware that doctrinally the CMOC or CMIC is where this is supposed to happen, however I have yet to run across an effective vertically and horizontally integrated effort which truly synchronizes coalition efforts in the nation building/CA/PSYOP/IO arena. Have you?

As much as I love the US Military as an organization capable of handling any mission given the right support, I think this one is outside of our realm. With the possible exception of Afghanistan any fusion at this level needs to come from the UN (or possibly the African Union on that continent). Even if the target country sees our actions as legitimate and accepts our help its neighbors may view it as neocolonialism and use it as grounds for their own intervention into the country either presently or at some future date (ala Iran in Iraq).

I would like to see the UN create license bureau (so to speak) for IGOs. Calling it what it would be, this new, additional bureaucracy would have the mission of coordinating efforts in target countries. At some future date I would even advocate giving it the power to bar IGOs from entering a country where that IGOs intended actions in the country run counter to other efforts.

[Rex Brynen]

would like to see the UN create license bureau (so to speak) for IGOs. Calling it what it would be, this new, additional bureaucracy would have the mission of coordinating efforts in target countries.

I think licensing would be a political nightmare, to be honest.

The UN does have an agency dedicated to coordinating humanitarian assistance, OCHA. It tends to be eclipsed in peace and stabilization operations by whatever UN SRSG or PKO body has been established (such as UNAMA in the Afghan case). Moreover OCHA specializes in humanitarian assistance, not so much longer-term development.

The ideal case is that donor coordination is undertaken, even imposed, by the host country—after all, they are the ones who have to live with the long-term consequences of assistance. Of course, countries suffering from major insurgencies usually have weak governance to begin with, and lack human and technical capacities. Ministers and ministries may be biased by ethnic or political preferences, corrupt, have little sense of conditions of the rural and poor (and be reluctant to consult or listen), and/or be engaged in empire-building constant bureaucratic warfare with each other. BUT the whole point of the process is to get the locals to take eventual ownership, and all to often donors (and foreign military forces engaged in local aid efforts) short-circuit host governments in the name of short-term efficiency, with deliterious long term effects.

Effective donor coordination across multiple international organizations, NGOs, host governments, donors, and others is, I think, is less based on structures and organigrams than it is on incentives, attitudes, personalities, and leadership. All the meetings in the world won't result in harmony of effort if the participants use them as little more as an opportunity to tell each other what it is they have already decided to do. The coordination process has to benefit the participants—whether through the provision of information that wouldn't otherwise be available, access to technical support services, or whatever. It also requires human resource systems that identify the kinds of individuals that can deal with 20 people in a room, each of whom has different views, mandates and specializations, independent budgets, and personal idiosyncricies —hence Surferbeetle's apt reference to herding cats.

I'm not sure we do this very well, whether in civilian agencies or in the military. Indeed, I think in some cases the established promotion system for normal and peacetime settings might actually select the wrong kind of people—those who go by the book (even when the book is wrong, or doesn't apply), are risk averse, don't reach outside their own organization, and can spout organizational ideology better than they can examine a problem from multiple competing perspectives.