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Humanitarism: The unilateral
approach
By Joel R Charny
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy In Focus)
Operation Iraqi Freedom,
the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States
and its coalition partners, embodies a new approach to
post-conflict humanitarian action. This approach unifies
security, governance, humanitarian response and
reconstruction under the control of the US Department of
Defense. Humanitarian action is unilateral in character
and linked inextricably to the US security agenda in the
context of the global "war on terrorism". The United
Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), traditionally the coordinators and implementers
of humanitarian assistance and post-conflict
reconstruction programs, are expected to play supportive
roles within an effort managed by the Pentagon.
While public attention has focused on the Iraq
war as the expression of the George W Bush
administration's new national-security policy of
preemptive self-defense, there has been virtually no
public discussion of the far-reaching implications of
the administration's new approach to humanitarian
assistance and post-conflict reconstruction. These
implications include:
Militarizing humanitarian assistance to a degree not
seen since the founding of the UN and the expansion of
the capacity and impact of global NGOs.
Giving the military responsibility for diplomatic,
political and humanitarian tasks that it is unqualified
to perform effectively.
Minimizing the contributions of donor governments
and independent agencies, since most foreign
governments, UN agencies and NGOs are reluctant to
collaborate with the US military, thus vastly increasing
the financial and administrative burden on the United
States.
The extent to which this approach
constitutes a new US doctrine, widely applicable to
humanitarian emergencies in the post-September 11 world,
is unclear. NGO discussions with deputy assistant
secretary of defense Joseph Collins, who runs the
Pentagon's Stabilization Office and who has been the
main Defense Department interlocutor with the NGO
community, suggest that at the very least the department
will be in the lead in humanitarian operations in
emergencies involving the US military. Collins told NGO
representatives after the start of the war that the
placement of the management of humanitarian and
reconstruction work in post-conflict Iraq within the
Pentagon reflected an assessment of lessons learned from
recent post-conflict reconstruction efforts.
The
primary lesson, according to Collins, is that lack of
clarity on who held overall authority and the
difficulties of coordinating diverse actors - government
leaders, peacekeeping forces, UN agencies and personnel,
and the commanders of belligerent forces - plagued the
efforts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The Pentagon's
conclusion was that a single command of all aspects of
the post-conflict response was essential, and who better
to exercise this authority than the Department of
Defense?
This approach represents a radical
break from the multilateral character of post-conflict
efforts over the past decade in places such as Cambodia,
East Timor, the Balkans and Afghanistan. While the
record of these operations is mixed, with only East
Timor being an unequivocal success, UN leadership on
balance has been positive, especially in establishing
the legitimacy of the emerging post-conflict political
authority. In Afghanistan, the UN demonstrated that it
could work on political issues within the framework of a
US-led military campaign. The UN secretary general's
special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, brilliantly
managed the post-Taliban political consultation process
that resulted in the creation of the internationally
recognized Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai.
Unilateral political management by the United States
would not necessarily have resulted in the same outcome.
The early results of this approach in Iraq have
not been promising. The Pentagon's Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA)
excluded the UN and NGOs from its prewar planning on the
grounds that its plans were part and parcel of the war
effort and therefore had to be confidential. ORHA
personnel were kept waiting in Kuwait on security
grounds for several weeks after the destruction of the
Iraqi government. When ORHA personnel finally did enter
Iraq, they isolated themselves from the Iraqi people and
established themselves in one of Saddam Hussein's
palaces, in essence assuming the symbolic trappings of
his rule. With no policing capacity and the military
unable to establish law and order, ORHA has been slow to
restore basic services and perform what was supposed to
be its top objective, establishing a legitimate Iraqi
authority that could govern locally as a national
political dialogue was being prepared.
Indeed,
one of the ironies of the experience in Iraq to date is
that the engagement of the Pentagon in humanitarian
management has not been matched by a similar commitment
to apply military assets to the task of establishing
security for Iraqi civilians to enable them to go about
their daily lives. The United States failed to deploy
military police, nor did it request its main coalition
partner, the United Kingdom, to send its military police
units to Iraq. The decision not to call on the British
was especially puzzling, since its military police have
a reputation for effectiveness in post-conflict
environments such as that prevailing in Iraq. As a
result, the lack of local-level security has plagued the
reconstruction effort from the outset and has deeply
disappointed Iraqis yearning for a sense of normalcy in
their country.
Faced with the immensity of its
task, ORHA is finally turning to the UN and NGOs for
assistance. According to Refugees International's
representative in Iraq, recent meetings between ORHA and
the NGOs in Baghdad have included requests to NGOs to
organize the clearance of military debris, including
damaged tanks, as part of their efforts to re-establish
sanitation services in the capital. ORHA personnel have
also approached NGOs about the possibility of their
managing day-to-day operations in local hospitals. The
United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq is
finally established in Baghdad, and he is trying to
define his responsibilities in relation to the head of
the US occupation authority, L Paul Bremer.
The
problem is that roles and responsibilities are being
defined on an ad hoc basis throughout the country, in
the face of immense practical difficulties, rather than
having been planned collaboratively in advance. The
damage of the failure to give the UN and the NGOs a
leadership role in the post-conflict reconstruction
process cannot be easily repaired on the fly. The
attempt to have the United States unilaterally manage
the reconstruction process in Iraq has been so
problematic that it is jeopardizing US credibility as
the occupying power with the Iraqi people.
The
US operational NGOs face real dilemmas in determining
how to respond to unilateral humanitarianism. The
largest US NGOs accept and, indeed, depend on US
government funds to mount a large-scale humanitarian
response. The very act of accepting US funding in Iraq
is a tacit endorsement of the unilateral US approach,
though to their credit, several of the best-known
members of the US NGO community - notably CARE, Save the
Children and the International Rescue Committee -
insisted that a phrase be added to their agreements with
the government stating that they would engage with and
report only to civilian agencies. These NGOs also joined
other members of InterAction, the membership
organization for US NGOs involved in international
relief and development work, in calling consistently and
forcefully for coordination of the humanitarian and
reconstruction effort in Iraq to be the UN's
responsibility.
Iraq demonstrates that the new
US approach to humanitarian action is unsustainable.
While the war was a military success, creating a
peaceful and democratic Iraq is proving to be a
challenge beyond the resources of the wealthiest and
most powerful country on the planet. An honest
post-operations analysis of the performance of ORHA, an
analysis that NGOs and congressional leaders will insist
on, will perhaps reduce the hubris of the Department of
Defense and lead the administration back toward a more
inclusive, multilateral approach that builds on the
positive aspects of the nation-building efforts of the
immediate post-Cold War period.
Joel R
Charny is vice president for policy with Refugees
International, a Washington, DC-based humanitarian
advocacy organization. He wrote this for Foreign Policy
in Focus.
(Posted with permission
from Foreign Policy In Focus)
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