Between a rock and a hard place: integration or independence of humanitarian action?

This article looks at the tension between principles and politics in the response to the Afghan crisis, and more specifically at the extent to which humanitarian agencies have been able to protect themselves and their activities from overt instrumentalization by those pursuing partisan political agendas. After a short historical introduction, it focuses on the tensions around the issue of ‘coherence’ – the code word for the integration of humanitarian action into the wider political designs of the United Nations itself and of the UN-mandated military coalition that has been operating in Afghanistan since late 2001. The article ends with some more general conclusions on the humanitarian–political relationship and what Afghanistan ‘means’ for the future of humanitarian action. The international community’s response to the Afghan crisis spans a thirty-year period that saw the end of the cold war, the ensuing disorder and reshuffling of political, military, and economic agendas in Central and South Asia, and the tentative emergence – and now the likely decline – of a hegemonic order built around globalization and securitization. Thirty years of failed interventions, civil wars, and aborted nation-building attempts have resulted in unprecedented levels of human suffering and volatility in Afghanistan, an unending crisis now spreading in the surrounding region. The high hopes of peace and stability raised by the US-led Volume 93 Number 881 March 2011 doi:10.1017/S1816383110000639 141 intervention after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States have given way to widespread despondency, disillusionment, and the likely evaporation of the mirage of a pax americana. Humanitarian action has been a constant in Afghanistan’s troubled recent history. It has, of course, been affected by the structural changes in the nature of the conflict and by the wider developments in the international community’s approaches to conflict and crisis. Humanitarian action has waxed and waned, depending on the vagaries of the local and international political contexts. There have been periods of extreme politicization and manipulation, and times when humanitarian principles were relatively easy to uphold. The political and military vicissitudes that shaped the crisis gave rise in turn to massive humanitarian needs. The manner in which the international community responded to these assistance and protection needs, as well as the fluctuations of the response over time, were heavily influenced by political agendas that were often at odds with humanitarian objectives. From the start, as in most complex emergencies, the space for humanitarian action was determined by politics. This intrusion of the political has ranged from the relatively benign to the overt manipulation of humanitarian action for partisan purposes. As we shall see, there are two important lessons to reflect upon. They are quite obvious and commonsensical but all too often disregarded. The first is that there is a negative correlation between direct superpower involvement and the ability of the humanitarian enterprise to engage with crises in a relatively principled manner. In Afghanistan, the ‘highs’ in politics (cold war and post-9/11 interventions) correspond to ‘lows’ in principles. Conversely, superpower dis-attention to the Afghan crisis, as in the 1992–1998 period of internecine conflict, allowed more space for issues of principle and for significant innovations in how the United Nations (UN) and other external players could do business in a crisis country. The corollary to this law is that when great-power interest is high, policy and decision-making, including on humanitarian and human rights issues, are taken over by the political people in the donor and UN bureaucracies, thereby displacing the humanitarian folk who often have a better understanding of realities on the ground. The second lesson is that the ‘instrumentalization’ of humanitarian assistance for political gain, besides being in itself a violation of humanitarian principles, rarely works. Subordination of humanitarian principles to so-called higher imperatives of realpolitik may allow short-term gains, but in the long term the chickens come home to roost. And, in Afghanistan, the blowback from the politics and the manipulations of humanitarian assistance in the 1980s continues