Aid Workers Under the Gun

KABUL, Afghanistan-Taliban gunmen attack an aid vehicle outside Kabul, killing four workers including three Western women. An Afghan staffer for a French aid group is abducted and murdered in Kunduz. Insurgents kidnap and repeatedly shoot a Japanese agricultural specialist near Jalalabad. A United Nations convoy is attacked and two Afghan doctors killed in Kandahar province.

The steady drumbeat of brutal, targeted attacks over a single late summer month have put the Afghanistan aid community on high alert. Some agencies have pulled internationals, others suspended operations; the rest remain watchful, wary and concerned.

"Because of the attacks, because of the abductions, because of the killings," said M. Hashim Mayar, who's been working with non-governmental organizations in Afghanistan for more than 15 years, "this is the worst security environment I've seen."

Mayar is deputy director of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR), an independent aid coordinator that recently released a report revealing that insurgent attacks have increased nearly 50 percent this year. Total security incidents hit 983 in August, according to the United Nations, the hightest total since the fall of the Taliban. Through September, 30 aid workers have been killed - double last year's total - and in early October U.N. special representative Kai Eide appealed to Taliban leaders to allow aid distribution. Insecurity has spread into previously stable parts of north and central Afghanistan, encroaching ever closer to the capital.

"This is a new and recent tactic on the part of the Taliban," said Waliullah Rahmani, director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. First it was suicide bombs, he explained, and then isolating districts and provinces - now they've moved on to humanitarian agencies. "They see aid workers as furthering the government's agenda, and so they are enemy targets just like the U.S. and the Afghan army. The general security situation has never been worse, and until the military forces combat the Taliban, aid workers must learn to adjust."

Tactical shift

The ancient Persians called Afghanistan "the land of the unruly," and for the 21st century aid worker it is still no picnic. Some question what the insurgents accomplish by targeting people trying to help Afghanistan.

"In some cases it's because we're easier targets," said Ciaran Donnelly, country director for the International Rescue Committee, which suffered the vehicle attack that killed four staffers. "In some cases it's to instill fear in communities and in our staff and in the general population that nobody is safe, to create a heightened sense of intimidation."

In some cases, it's working. Shortly after the killing of 31-year-old agricultural specialist Kazuya Ito, Peshawar-Kai, which for 25 years provided medical aid and alternative livelihoods to Afghans along both sides of Pak border, pulled its 8 Japanese staffers out of Afghanistan. Several other Japanese aid organizations - including the Basic Human Needs Association and the Association for Aid and Relief - have done the same.

"Aid agencies play a crucial role in strengthening Afghanistan and helping its people," said Rahmani. "Losing them would be a major blow."

Facing greater insecurity

For the moment, most are planning to stay and continue much-needed, if circumscribed, operations.

"One very clear decision that has been made is that IRC is not leaving Afghanistan," said Donnelly shortly after the attack. IRC, which has been delivering aid in Afghanistan for 28 years, suspended operations after the attack but plans to slowly restart work by October.

"The situation is so fluid in Afghanistan these days that really to implement programs in any part of the country you have to be extremely flexible and reactive to a very fast-paced and dynamic operating environment," he said, citing plans for fewer field visits by staff and a quick trigger on suspending operations when necessary. "Any sign of threats to our staff and we'll be able to hopefully pull back in again."

Nigel Pont, country director for New York-based aid group Mercy Corps, offered a different perspective.

"The situation is worse than it's been in quite a while, across the board," Pont said during an outdoor lunch at one of Kabul's handful of high security, expat-friendly restaurants. Mercy Corps has been in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, working in agriculture and microfinance across eight provinces. "But we're confident because our national security management teams are very good."

Those teams meet regularly to make security decisions for operations across Afghanistan - about which places are safe, what precautions to take, and what time of day to move around. Like most aid organizations, Mercy Corps employs a low-profile approach, which essentially means going under the radar: no organizational signage and minimum security; unmarked cars with private plates that are used on a rotating basis and take a variety of routes to and from work; no razor wire, flags or armed security at the office; predominantly Afghan staffers who live in local housing, wear local dress and travel sterilized, without work identification, cellphone or any incriminating documents.

Some organizations go even further. Employees of the Afghan Health and Development Services, a Kabul-based aid group, travel without any paper or writing tools, thinking the Taliban assume that if you are literate, you must work with an NGO. The Spanish-funded Association for Cooperation with Afghanistan bars staffers from moving more than 10 kilometers outside the western city of Herat. Several of the female Afghan employees of Arghand Cooperative, an NGO run by former National Public Radio reporter Sarah Chayes that sells soaps and oils made from local products, have been prodded by greater insecurity in outlying districts to move into Kandahar.

The debate over low-profile operations continues apace. The attacked IRC vehicle and U.N. convoy bore identifying stickers and signage, but no protection. The Afghan government has recommended that all NGOs travel with armed escorts, while ACBAR advises all NGOs and aid organizations to operate with a low profile.

"We want overall security so that our NGOs can move freely, so that they don't need to be escorted," said Mayar. "The first goal of the [NATO-run] provincial reconstruction teams and the military forces is to bring stability, security, and that's what they should do."

In late August the civilian and military actors in Afghanistan signed a new set of guidelines, laid out by the United Nations, intended to prevent the blurring of lines between humanitarian agencies and the military. Many are hoping the new agreement will improve aid worker safety, but it may be too late.

"The Taliban, they are spreading these night letters now that whoever works for NGOs, they are spies and they should be punished," said Mayar. "They will not believe in us anymore."

But local communities might. The majority of aid workers in Afghanistan are Afghans: IRC has 550 national staff and only 10 foreigners; Mercy Corps has about 400 nationals and 10 foreigners; and the worldwide conflict zone and reconstruction staff of the United Nations is nearly 80 percent local nationals. Particularly in hostile environments, a reliance on local communities - to help guide projects, address security concerns and communicate new developments - can make or break aid efforts.

Around the capital, the noose tightens

For the first time since the Taliban left eight years ago, Kabul is becoming one of those hostile environments. A series of fierce attacks - a Taliban assault on Kabul's finest hotel, the Serena; an April assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai; the Indian Embassy bombing in July, which killed 40; a massive insurgent attack that killed 10 French soldiers not far from Kabul - has residents feeling under siege.

"Day by day the attacks are closer to Kabul," Rahmani said. "If not inside Kabul city, the Taliban are certainly active very near and around Kabul. If they are not pushed back they will come to the capital."

Further, crime has been on the uptick along with a profusion of small arms. Kidnapping, murder, theft and other violent crimes have increased steadily in Kabul over the past year. As a result, security restrictions on international staffers within the city have become extremely tight.

"When I first arrived we were able to walk around, but now it's different," said Richard Nash, a development consultant who spoke to Devex in September.

Like most foreign workers, he is barred from walking outside, even a few hundred meters. And although the banged-up white-and-yellow Corollas are ubiquitous, cheap and generally safe, public taxis are off limits - transport is strictly via armored SUV.

"All the organizations seem to be cracking down more and more," Nash said, "especially over the last few months."

Most agencies have instituted phased arrivals at work or no-movement zones outside their offices in the morning, when most attacks occur. They maintain a very short list of safe cafes and restaurants and keep close tabs on their workers via mobile phones and radio networks as well as a strict curfew. Thus most expat staffers live their lives sealed inside high-riding vehicles and air-conditioned homes and offices, cut off from the very people they've come to help.

Field work in the surrounding area is nearly impossible. Provinces close to Kabul, such as Wardak, Ghazni and Logar, were easy to visit even last year. But the Afghanistan NGO Security Office has since summer been urging journalists and aid workers to fly to Bamiyan and Jalalabad instead of taking the increasingly dangerous roads. On September 12, Logar Gov. Abdullah Wardak was assassinated near his home in the town of Paghman, about 20 kilometres west of the capital.

"I'm from Wardak, right close to Kabul, and I can't even go home," said Mayar. "Last year I could, but now the road is just terrible because of the Taliban."

Roads going out of the capital in every direction but one - north, to Panjshir and the stronghold of the Northern Alliance - are now off-limits, effectively cutting off access to the central and eastern regions of the country.

What's at stake

The escalating violence has kept aid groups from many of the most needy, forced the closure of dozens of schools and health clinics and impaired vital development projects. And the timing of the aid attacks couldn't be worse; a terrible harvest, a drought, and predictions for a harsh winter have left up to 9 million Afghans facing a food shortage, according to the British charity Oxfam, which is warning of a "humanitarian crisis."

It's not just in Afghanistan. Aid workers working in conflict zones have always been aware of the threat of kidnappings and violent attacks. But the problem has doubled in the past five years, in direct relation with the need for aid and development assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some 1,000 have been killed worldwide in the past 15 years, according to some estimates.

For every aid worker injured or killed, thousands of locals are left without assistance. After the killing of several Medecins Sans Frontieres workers in Somalia this year, aid agencies cut back their programming severely, further endangering the estimated 3 million hungry Somalis. Rahmani and other observers worry that if the attacks continue, the humanitarians will pack up and go home.

"People say this all the time," said Mayar, of ACBAR. "'If the security gets worse the NGOs will leave Afghanistan,' but it's not the case. The NGOs know that if they leave the insurgents will be very happy - and that's not what they want."

Either way, aid work in Afghanistan will require more safety - and courage - than ever before.

-- posted on devex.com on October 10.

Living the Life II

My second night in Afghanistan I stroll a few blocks down the street to grab a beer at Gondamack Lodge, the high-end guesthouse and resto-bar run by a former Australian journalist. The Afghan government banned alcohol earlier this year, but they turn a blind eye to several foreigner-friendly establishments in the capital, all of which are heavily secured.

First I'm asked for my passport on the sidewalk. American, check. Then a man peeks through a sliding eye-level panel in the exterior door, sees me, slides a heavy bolt and opens. Finally a third security guy buzzes me thru two steel doors and into a tranquil green garden, where aid and development workers sip room temperature pinot, quacking ducks amble after healthy portions of pasta and beef and, from rather robust stereo speakers, Yaz worries “we're moving farther away.” I secure a picnic table next to a tree and gape.

So here it is, I think to myself, the other side of Kabul. I'd go on to find a similar scene at other ex-pat frequented hotspots – Cabul Coffee House, where the coffee is from Italy and the banana juice is swoon-inducing; Chaila, where the burgers, wraps and coffee are first-rate and missionary workers are thick on the ground; La Cantina, which has excellent burritos for the low low price of $15 and any beer you like as long as it's Heineken in a can; and the ultimate in ex-pat decadence, L'Atmosphere, a sleek indoor/outdoor restaurant/bar/cafe complete with ping-pong table, well-oiled battalion of ever-present servers and, in case the Kabul heat is getting to you, a cool, shaded swimming pool.

I order a beer and start reading the local newspaper. By the time I've finished my second cold one darkness has fallen and the novelty has waned considerably. On the walk home I fall in step with a chatty young Afghan. “You have no bodyguard?' Safeed asks me. “You are here alone? That is not good idea; there are many bad Afghans.”

Must be why the foreigners need their little islands of fantasy.

In Conflict Zones, Aid Gets Defensive

By David Lepeska

The end of humanitarian innocence arrived with a bang on August 19, 2003, when a truck bomb gutted the United Nations’ Baghdad headquarters, killing 22 staffers and wounding more than 120. There had been gruesome and deadly attacks on aid efforts in the past, but none had been so devastating and pointedly directed. The blast tore off the building’s façade, exposing its guts to the dusty city. Parts of desks, chairs, and bodies were strewn about the grounds of what had so recently been the Canal Hotel.

Among the dead were Special Representative and highly regarded career humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello and a host of selfless and determined young Arabs. Then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the attack “brought us face to face with danger in a new and more intimidating form.” It also removed any lingering doubt about the sanctity of the humanitarian space and irrevocably altered the aid security dynamic.

Even so, the Baghdad bombing was just an exclamation point in a steadily building drumbeat. Major attacks on aid workers more than doubled from 1999 to 2005, according to a joint study by the British government-supported Overseas Development Institute and New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Even adjusted for a considerable increase of field workers over that span, the incidence of attacks per 10,000 workers rose more than 50 percent. The report, “Providing Aid in Insecure Environments,” also found that aid workers were attacked more for political than economic reasons. “The perception that aid workers are associated with political processes clearly exists in the minds of local belligerents,” the authors state.

As the line between humanitarian and military activity has blurred aid worker security has eroded along with neutrality, jolting humanitarian actors into action. Some of their security decisions have raised ethical questions about equal treatment for all national and international staff. This report dissects what international development organizations have done to adapt, which strategies have been most successful, and what still needs to be done.

Shifting Policy, Coordinating Security

Within weeks of the Baghdad bombing, the United Nations pulled 600 staffers out of Iraq and assumed a lower international profile, as did the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their share of attack victims has decreased considerably in the past five years, the aid worker security report found, but progress towards entrenching adequate security in policy and planning has been fitful.

On the plus side, the U.N. and Interaction, a consortium of U.S.-based NGO’s, have each created Minimum Operating Security Standards, which have been broadly mandated and widely applauded. Furthermore, in 2006 the U.N. joined together with a network of non-governmental organizations to enact a security framework called Saving Lives Together.

Interaction Security Coordinator John Schafer related a tale of the project’s effectiveness. When the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted in violence this past summer a U.S. citizen found himself stuck alone in his compound after local staff left to take care of their families. “Fighting was continuing the whole time,” recalled Mr. Schafer. “It was right outside his gate – there were bodies in the street.”

The American field worker called the U.S. embassy, which told him there was nothing they could do as their doors had already been locked. He called the local U.N. peacekeeping mission, which told him they didn’t know where he was. Finally he called his own headquarters, which in turn contacted Mr. Schafer, who called the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at U.N. Headquarters in New York and gave him the field worker’s position. The U.N. relayed the American’s position back to the field and UNDPKO quickly mounted a rescue mission and saved the worker.

The entire process took six hours, during which Schafer kept up the aid worker’s spirits via Skype chat and used Google maps to pinpoint his location. Mr. Schafer was pleased with the result but acknowledged that Saving Lives Together was more Plan B than anything else. “We can talk all we want about the importance of having security plans on the ground but when the actual emergency hits rarely is it within the parameters of what we planned,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to have a little bit of flexibility in our plans.”

Other efforts have been less successful. As part of the post-Baghdad bombing shake-up the U.N. created the Department for Safety and Security in 2004, which replaced the Security Coordination Office, established in 1988. The new department was given higher-level leadership, additional resources, and tasked to create a new and innovative vision for defining, assessing, and enhancing security for its own and other humanitarian operatives.
Reports of UNDSS have been unfavorable. “Many complain that operation restrictions remain the principal security strategy used by the U.N. in many field-settings,” says the ODI study, adding that the department suffered “from considerable distrust among international NGOs, both in terms of capability and intent.”

Programmers and policymakers have long wanted a database in which to report, record and analyze attack incidents and security failings. Used universally, such a tool would offer a wealth of invaluable security and planning information. But initiatives such as UNDSS’ Security Incident Reporting Service have fallen short of expectations. “It looked like we were about to get going with this universal shared database of incidence and analysis but it’s just completely stalled,” Abby Stoddard, senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the ODI report’s lead author, said in an interview. “It hasn’t gotten up and running, either at the U.N. or through NGOs.”

Nationals in Harm’s Way, Ex-Pats Far Away

Inevitably, the burden has fallen to international NGOs to provide field security, which, according to the industry bible, Koenraad Van Brabant’s Operation Security Management in Violent Environments, is marked by three elements: protection, deterrence and acceptance. The first means reducing vulnerability, the second involves presenting a counter-threat, and the last is about cultivating positive relationships with locals.

For example, Somalia is one of the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environments. An ODI backgrounder advocated community-based strategies yet noted that such practices are often ineffective because “local authorities do not accept national staff members, but want to interact directly with leading expatriate staff.” And with only a few locations accessible for internationals and a heavy reliance on nationals, such interactions seem unlikely anytime soon.

In a perfect world strategies would stress acceptance, but growing security concerns often render acceptance-heavy strategies too costly and difficult to implement. In such areas some aid groups take extreme steps, such as removing all identity markers from facilities, staff, and vehicles to maintain an ultra low-profile. Others take the opposite tack, arming staffers and fortifying offices or hiring military protection. “Both of these approaches can compromise security,” write Ms. Stoddard et al. “Once an organization has confined its staff to a compound, accepted military protection or adopted clandestine programming, its access to security information becomes extremely limited.”

In high danger zones most actors have kept the aid flowing by localizing their efforts. “The way they’ve done this is through remote management, where they will have their national staff or other national organizations that they’ve subcontracted to, or private contractors, do the work,” Ms. Stoddard said in an interview. “The plus side of that is more aid getting to more people because they’re operating.”

Reliance on national staff in the most dangerous and distant aid environments is not new. Oxfam used what some called “long-arm programming” over 50 years ago in India and others employed similar techniques in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Afghanistan throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In theory, such practices decrease risk. But Ms. Stoddard says these practices mean less efficient delivery, a loss of strategic focus, and increased corruption and accountability concerns.

Yet remote management has boomed. Overall, field-based international staff dropped 20 percent from 1997 to 2005, and some of the bigger humanitarian organizations went much further: international field staff for the U.N., CARE and World Vision hovers around three percent today. Most local staff, or foreign nationals, work without adequate training, resources and support. “It’s very uncommon that you would leave them your radios, that you would give them training, that you would give them any of the security assets that you would have,” said Ms. Stoddard.

As a result, national staffers have been left twisting in ever more dangerous winds. While total aid worker victims rose from 66 in 1999 to 211 in 2006, the number of international victims dropped while national victims jumped four-fold. Moreover, of 83 aid workers killed in 2006, 78 (94 percent) were nationals. “What they are doing is abdicating their responsibility for protecting people that work for them,” said Mr. Schafer, pointing out that life insurance payments are considerably lower for a national worker.

Ms. Stoddard explained some of the reasoning behind remote management. “These are local organizations that are doing this work anyway,” she said. “It’s employment for one thing but also they have incentive to help and to partner with internationals… The nationals haven’t really thought through what it means ethically. They’re more concerned with, ‘we want to keep the aid flowing.’”

Protecting Your Own

Although remote management is problematic, it does do precisely that. And because building local capacity has long been a key goal of humanitarian work there is little debate about the utility of nationalizing aid and relief. It simply has to be done better. “The true definition of security is providing it for the entire community,” said Mr. Shafer, referring to internationals and nationals as well as their friends and family. “There can’t just be an evacuation plan only for your ex-pats.”

Ms. Stoddard concurred. “There needs to be some way of assessing what risk you’ll be putting these nationals in,” she said. “They have different vulnerabilities than international staff – that has to be part of your risk assessment. I haven’t seen any evidence that people are now looking at their national staff and coming up with better remote management strategies.”

Conor Foley, a veteran aid worker writing a book about humanitarian aid, said many NGOs were increasing training and resources but that these improvements had been generally ineffective. “Security has become a buzzword,” he said. “But it’s been a bit un-thought out.”

Recently, a major NGO bid on a $300 million USAID project in Pakistan without consulting their security director about the budgeting. “The problem is most people don’t have the systems in place to even make educated decisions on what is acceptable and unacceptable risk for their organization,” Mr. Schafer said. “They don’t have a management system for their security program.”

Thus, many key questions are left unanswered. What is the line of acceptable risk, for instance, and how do you draw it? How much will aid delivery cost you in a higher threshold of risk? What security info are you gathering to quantify the security situation, make programming decisions and put together an operational plan? And if you pull out, how do you assess risk and game plan for nationals, as opposed to internationals?

Because the security risks are not assessed beforehand there’s no funding leeway in the event of a worsening security situation. “First and foremost the NGO’s have to develop systems internal to their organizations,” said Mr. Schafer. Once funding had been tied into security, he added, donors would fall in line.

One hopes they appreciate the urgency. In late October, CARE International’s Battagram, Pakistan compound was riddled with machine-gun fire mere hours after the office of a nearby NGO was bombed, wounding eight Pakistanis. Unknown gunmen attacked and shot dead two Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development staff in Uganda’s Amuru district on Halloween.

In late November unidentified gunmen shot up a Medecins sans Frontieres car in south Sudan, killing four. And in early December top U.N. aid official John Holmes visited Somalia, the world’s most high-risk humanitarian environment. “It is very hard for aid agencies to operate in Somalia because of the general security situation,” Holmes told reporters. He pointed out frequent checkpoints, at which aid workers were harassed and halted, and sharply curbed operations overall. “We need to do more.”

Indeed, multilaterals, aid groups, and donors need to better adapt to a world in which humanitarians wear bullseyes and another Baghdad bombing constantly looms. Adapt, that is, or continue losing ground.

-- posted on devex.com on 17 March 2008