| 摘要 | FOREWORD
Both the landscape and the architecture of humanitarian assistance to refugees have changed dramatically in the last two decades. The proxy wars that flourished within the global struggle of the cold war have given way to internecine, factional fighting within countries. The destruction of civilian lives and livelihoods continues and, with it, large populations of refugees, internally displaced people, and recent returnees who are still dependent on external assistance provided by a bewildering array of public and private international organizations.
Afghanistan has been and continues to be a laboratory for these changes. One of the major theaters of cold war confrontation, it then became the archetypal failed state and still has no functioning central government. It does, however, have the attention of United Nations agencies, bilateral donors, and a plethora of nongovernmental relief and development agencies. Paula Newberg's paper analyzes in thoughtful detail the action and impact of international assistance to Afghanistan. She writes from the perspective of a long-time student of the region and a sometime practitioner of UN reform. Few people know the aid community, or the political context in which it operates, as well.
Dr. Newberg's paper was written as the centerpiece for one of a series of roundtables on the evolution of humanitarian response in the 1990s, convened by the International Migration Policy Program of the Carnegie Endowment. The series was generously supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and by the program support of the Ford Foundation. We are grateful to them, and to our colleagues who participated in the roundtable discussion and enriched the final paper with their insights.
Kathleen Newland
Co-director
International Migration Policy Program
INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago, Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, signaling a symbolic end to a proxy war that had lasted for almost a decade. It was a moment burdened by mixed messages. The cold war retreated from Afghanistan-and, Afghans would later argue, would end entirely because of that retreat-but with it went the interest and concern of the rest of the world. When foreign soldiers left, the world's largest refugee population lived in neighboring Iran and Pakistan, and only aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remained to help Afghans begin the process of rebuilding Afghanistan. Sadly, those who predicted that the worst was about to begin turned out to be correct. Ten years later, Afghanistan is still at war, but the world has become an even more complicated place in which to wage it.
This essay examines the environment, actors, and institutional choices that face the international assistance community working in Afghanistan today. The contexts in which it works and in which its collective decisions are taken are exceptionally difficult to define and reconcile, all the more so for the sheer length and accrued political histories of Afghanistan's conflicts. And if Afghanistan's travails present an array of moving targets, so too do the choices that aid organizations have taken during the past decade. UN agencies, international and local NGOs, and donor governments have offered a menu of relief and development alternatives that is often bewildering in its richness and complexity.
Assistance strategies have often been frustratingly reactive and often contradictory. The international assistance community has endeavored to correct some of its own weaknesses while still trying to serve a country and a people whose situation grows more intricate with every passing month. Almost by definition, these reform efforts are incomplete and may, in the end, be defeated by Afghanistan's domestic circumstances. Despite persistent attempts to insulate Afghans and Afghanistan from the worst excesses of fighting, negotiations among fighting factions have been limited in scope, duration, and effect. Moreover, the entanglements of security relationships between and among factions, the United Nations, and NGOs-Byzantine at the best of times-have affected the provision of aid and the content of political discussions among Afghan factions, as well as between them and their neighbors.
This essay argues for continuing institutional reform, led by the United Nations and necessitated not only by the familiar woes of the assistance world, but also by the imperatives of working in a state that has collapsed. It summarizes prior and current UN and NGO efforts, but diverges from them, in the manner of friendly critique, in three ways.
First: reform initiatives, whether based in the field or at headquarters, always assume that existing institutional mandates determine the substance of decisions, and will endure. Reform has therefore meant rearranging the way that existing organizations do their business, and is therefore necessarily oriented more toward process than substance. But existing institutional frameworks-for Afghanistan, for countries experiencing complex political emergencies, perhaps for most crisis countries-can neither deliver necessary aid nor address the critical reform tasks at hand.
Real reform requires relief and development agencies to reshape radically their responsibilities and the command structure within which they work. Failed states like Afghanistan may require the UN Secretary-General to take a far more active role than he has to date, not only in securing peace but also in organizing assistance. Until this happens, the Afghanistan experience suggests that the autonomy of UN agencies, funds and programs ultimately slows reform; by making policy problems harder to solve, this interpretation of autonomy thwarts the very change that agencies purport to support.
Second: overlapping relationships between the United Nations and NGOs, and between assistance actors and donor governments, may defeat prospects for institutional reform, as currently defined. Donor government interpretations of complex political emergencies are often at variance with each other, and their political agendas are often at odds with those for whom a broad concept of humanitarianism is paramount. Reform efforts to date have tried to accommodate all of these sensibilities, and all at once. But the process of inclusion does not lead inevitably to consistent theories, policies, or practices. Political mediation and assistance policies alike will succeed or fail on their substance, not just on the methods by which decisions are taken.
Third: the United Nations now finds itself in the business of relief and social welfare in places like Afghanistan, where its political and assistance roles are very difficult to coordinate, let alone reconcile. No amount of humanitarian assistance will by itself solve the basic problems of a failed state and ongoing military engagement; the provision of aid almost inevitably complicates the relationships between and among donor governments, military allies, and the United Nations. This in itself should not deter those who provide assistance. But in states like Afghanistan, where complex political emergencies determine the structure of assistance in unusual ways, it is necessary to reassert the primacy of politics.
The United Nations-much more than its partners among NGOs and donor governments-must decide whether its most important mission in complex political emergencies is political or philanthropic. This essay argues for the primacy of the political, and for a limited humanitarian agenda that can be followed with integrity and independence. Otherwise, in countries like Afghanistan, its many activities are likely to remain confusing and its ultimate goals elusive.
Some of these conclusions and proposals parallel those of observers to other conflicts, and all inevitably raise more questions than they answer. Perhaps even more than the grueling experiences of the Balkans or Great Lakes regions, Afghanistan's problems-and the difficulties that international aid providers encounter-provoke us to rethink the meaning of politics in and among intergovernmental organizations. Even more, they move us to reexamine the deeper meaning of politics for the citizens of countries living through political crisis.
Washington, D.C.
March 1999
AFGHANISTAN'S COMPLEX POLITICAL EMERGENCY
Few conflicts span the vast political changes of the post-World War II era as do those that have been waged in Afghanistan. Beginning with civil strife in 1973, continuing through a decade of anti-Soviet war, and re-emerging as internal conflict for the last decade-albeit with significant foreign interference-Afghanistan may have helped to end the cold war, but it is now a portrait of a state that the cold war lost. The wages of war have placed enormous burdens on the country's residents and displaced populations: millions of refugees and displaced persons, millions of land mines, millions of malnourished children and adults alike, and, seemingly paradoxically, unchecked population growth in a place almost defined by its poverty. The sheer numbers seem far too large to those distant observers for whom Afghanistan is simply a small country suffering through big troubles.
The story of Afghanistan is more than a simple tale of fighting that forgot to stop. Its cautionary narrative raises many questions about the theory and practice of international assistance and the complex relationship that aid bears to politics. It tell us about the perils of uneven development planning in the 1960s and 1970s that contributed to political backlash in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s. It reminds us of development disputes that turned into armed battles, and of the dangers that are created when relief is designed simply to accompany political agendas. And its condition today describes the perilous place of peripheral countries during the cold war, whose proxy wars about diplomacy have now been transformed, at least in part, into proxy wars about profit. The story of Afghanistan is a parable about the hazards of outsiders' good intentions in an environment which seems unable to support them: when wars sour and emergency aid continues for too long; when political agendas change but the victims of war remain; when the viability of domestic political discourse is risked by the devastating effects of war on civil society; and when neighboring countries become protagonists in a proxy war while international assistance actors try to plan for a country whose future seems frightfully insecure.
Many of the critical issues that now face international assistance actors in Afghanistan could occur elsewhere, and often do. Afghanistan's political fragmentation and the concomitant difficulties of organizing assistance to its people echo similar problems in Somalia, and its politicized refugee population resembles those in Cambodia and Rwanda. Its environmental devastation calls to mind the ecological nightmares of war-torn societies in central America. And Afghanistan's poverty-as much a cause as a consequence of its wars-places it squarely among those poor countries that hover at the bottom of the UN human development index. Moreover, the problems that long-term assistance so often exhibit-duplication, contradiction, policy inconsistency, and the pervasive problem of institutional mandate creep-are present in goodly number across the Afghan countryside. For all these reasons, Afghanistan offers a case study of the long-term effects of complex political emergencies and the profound difficulties that they present to all its foreign interlocutors.
But Afghanistan shows us more than this. Its complex emergency-profoundly political in its origins and effects-illuminates many difficult questions about the role of international assistance in building or breaking peace, in protecting populations against domestic and external enemies, and in creating a foundation not simple for stability, but also for free political choice. The architecture of international humanitarian assistance has played a significant part in the structure of ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, even if this is often subtle and only occasionally intentional. The governance of international assistance agencies, their decisions about the nature and scope of relief and rehabilitation, and the sometimes precarious and often contradictory relationships between UN member states as relief donors and as political actors provide an unwieldy venue for securing protection or peace. Afghanistan has been an unwitting laboratory for experimentation in international assistance. By virtue of its persistent conflicts, inconvenient location, and the unfortunate indifference of the post-cold-war world community to its current plight, it has become a test case for the viability of integrated assistance planning in complex political emergencies.
AFGHANISTAN'S POLITICAL ECONOMY: THE ASSISTANCE CONTEXT
The Period to 1995
War has been a persistent feature of Afghan politics for more than twenty years. The revolutions and counter-revolutions of 1973 and 1978 left an array of disenchanted proto-politicians who found encouragement in neighboring Pakistan and in a nascent international Islamist movement that grew in resources and organization during the heady days of high oil prices in the 1970s. Some political observers date Afghanistan's conflict in its slightly more distant history: in disputes over the establishment of a central state and the powers and prerogatives of monarchy in an agrarian nation moving slowly toward urbanization, and in the contrary relationships between weak local devolution and the state-building efforts of foreign donors from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The pressures that this historical Asian crossroads confronted as the cold war divided Afghanistan from its closest neighbors in Soviet central Asia repositioned it in an uneasy axis between Iran and Pakistan. Like so many discussions about continuing conflicts in old societies, Afghan commentators date their histories to suit their politics. Regardless of party affiliation or tribal identity, however, almost every Afghan sees the last two decades as a series of challenges to national sovereignty, territorial identity and the concept of Afghan citizenship.
The anti-Soviet war created a broad spectrum of mujahideen-based parties and fighting factions, based primarily in Iran and Pakistan. Their ideologies varied, as did their memberships. Their sponsors-the United States, Pakistan, members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and a host of far-flung allies and aid conduits-managed a clever contest of balance and attrition that kept each party competing with the others for weapons and funds, even while they fought against a common enemy. Money, however, was rarely a problem. The total cost of the anti-Soviet war reached hundreds of millions of dollars each year, with the sophistication of weaponry and the network of suppliers rising as the weaknesses of the Soviet military became more evident. By the time the Soviet army withdrew across the Uzbek border in February 1989, the mujahideen were prepared for a long future war.
The Geneva peace accords that facilitated Soviet withdrawal were not designed to secure peace. They created a way for the Soviet army to leave, in part by assuming that the communist government in Kabul would continue to rule-and, presumably, that the mujahideen would oppose that government. As a result, no provision was made for rebuilding Afghanistan, demobilizing fighters from any side, or organizing locally plans for post-conflict relief. At the time, the United Nations was keenly aware that the mujahideen did not include relief wings, as did fighting factions in the Horn of Africa, for example. It therefore helped to organize Afghan groups that would provide assistance in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, and continue cross-border assistance that had begun in the early 1980s. These nongovernmental organizations-many of which survive today, with vastly differing levels of skills, effectiveness, funding, and popular outreach-contributed to short-term relief, but more important, became part of an evolving problem about Afghan political voice and presence that continues today.
War continued between 1989 and 1992, and in 1992, a western-backed plan required the Afghan head of state, communist leader Najibullah Ahmedzai, to step down in favor of a rotating cast of mujahideen leaders whose idiosyncratic consociationalism belied both democratic idealism and administrative realism. The next years witnessed the erosion of civil security, social cohesion, economic stability, and political opportunity across Afghanistan. Fighting factions led by a changing group of commanders pillaged the countryside and destroyed the capital (which had remained relatively secure during the decade of the 1980s). Government in Kabul functioned in name alone, with each faction committed only to maintaining its title without taking responsibility for running the state.
Throughout this period, as before, international assistance was concentrated on the millions of refugees based in Iran and Pakistan. To facilitate the delivery of cross-border assistance, agencies worked on the basis of expediency rather than long-term planning. This meant that relief was provided with the help of anyone who could help-tribal leaders, local shura, military commanders-to serve the immediate needs of populations under siege. The disjunction between hope and reality was made clear in 1992, when the mujahideen government took office. The modicum of rehabilitation assistance that had been planned by the UN Development Program( UNDP) -designed on the basis of a thorough evaluation of the decayed infrastructure of war-torn Afghanistan-was effectively canceled when the United Nations relocated to Pakistan. Diminishing security scotched these prospects for rebuilding, establishing a cycle of dashed assistance wishes, unrealized desires for international legitimation by office-holders, and a captive population under the sway of fighting factions. These patterns of political and social interaction-made visible by the Taliban movement when it later gained control of Kandahar, Herat and Kabul-were in place long before the Taliban arrived in Kabul, and the Northern Alliance tried to consolidate its fragile command.
Two other trends emerged during this period. First, the geography and demography of Afghanistan became more fragmented. Many observers have suggested that Afghanistan's tribal and ethnic mix led to its previously weak federalism, and some believe that disintegration is inevitable. This is not usually an opinion offered by Afghans. But the effects of political and economic fragmentation-combined with patterns of refugee displacement that rely on familial, tribal, and village support systems-did seem to reify a projected ethnic division of the country. For the most part, however, fragmentation was the result of military movement and political outlook. The rule of commanders was almost necessarily uneven, with fiefdoms ranging from a few city blocks to entire provinces. With transport slowed by degraded infrastructure and undetected land mines, each locality assumed an autonomy that was difficult to maintain but even harder to contest. This kind of division-physical at the outset, increasingly political over time-became one to which outsiders tacitly acceded, since the distribution of goods and services required the good graces of commanders and local leaders. It is from this period that some, if limited, popular opinion arose, suggesting that the United Nations, for example, was complicit not only in commander rule but also in the future breakup of Afghanistan.
Second, the difficult distinction between war and peace became even harder to discern. Large portions of the country, while insecure, were nonetheless free from direct military engagement after 1992, and military stalemate became more common in these areas. This relative quietude led aid agencies to view Afghanistan as a post-conflict arena rather than one seized by war, and to concentrate their concerns on refugee return and the first stages of rehabilitation. The initiative, however, was political. The immediate impetus was Pakistan's desire to have 3.5 million refugees return home (Iran harbored similar hopes for the 1.5 million refugees living there); the real push may well have been to support the 1992 post-communist accord that, however shakily, had been fostered by the United States, Pakistan, and like-minded states. At no time were humanitarian decisions taken without reference to a political climate that was, for the most part, engineered (or imagined) by external powers.
UN political intercession was therefore conducted with less hope than resignation. For many Afghans, the express purposes of future negotiations-establishing a cease-fire that could lead to representative government-were illusory at best: few fighting factions seemed interested in pursuing non-military objectives. Even as the factions themselves split and weakened, they directed their attentions to military achievement rather than popular legitimation. As a result, negotiators-tireless, but often seen as quixotic by Afghan civilians-engaged in endless entreaty with gun-toting commanders. For the most part, they devoted little if any attention to the civilian population or to the popular prerequisites for peace. When UNDP proposed in 1996 to devote some of its program resources to peace-building and governance, there was little evidence that the United Nation's political negotiators had given this subject much thought. Not surprisingly, there was little, if any, discussion about what would happen within Afghanistan should a cease-fire actually occur.
As a result, the political economy was influenced by two factors, and both were outside the control of Afghans. On the one hand, international activity was based on what Afghans perceived to be foreign interference, in which international aid was simply the handmaiden for political connivance. For many Afghans-including, it later transpired, disaffected mujahideen who formed the vanguard of the Taliban movement-the vaunted neutrality and impartiality of the United Nations was sullied by its expedient pacts with local commanders. On the other hand, there were few resources in Afghanistan available for relief, rehabilitation or redevelopment. Production rates plummeted, and transit trade-which had continued through the 1980s with minimal impediment-declined. A generation-long brain drain had exhausted personnel resources, and the indirect effects of war were startlingly clear. Rampant poverty, displacement, infrastructure damage, and the devastating consequences of land mine penetration had left large portions of the local population without sanitation, potable water, basic medical care or, in some instances, food. Mortality and morbidity figures placed Afghanistan among the world's most vulnerable countries, preventable diseases were recurring at rapid rates, and internal displacement was creating one of the world's fastest rates of urbanization.
Economic fragmentation took a political toll. With international assistance primarily devoted to the immediate, human dimensions of relief-inoculations and wheat rather than roads and communications-the structural prerequisites for developing and sustaining an Afghan economy were limited indeed. Although the debate about the relationship between relief and development was effectively entered in 1991, when UNDP began its survey of the war-damaged economy, there was little to suggest that relief providers expected to be able to do much more than provide basic relief. Those in the development business either participated in relief or went out of business.
The period leading up to the entry of the Taliban as a significant actor offered ample evidence of institutional confusion among assistance actors. Humanitarian activities were colored and controlled by political interests during the anti-Soviet war, and this relationship persisted after the communist government fell in 1992. The independence, neutrality, and impartiality of UN humanitarian bodies seemed at odds with the express political nature of some of its partners, but seemed insincere when compared to some NGOs that were servicing both refugee and cross-border populations. Additionally, the UN political mission seemed to occupy a world that assistance agencies did not inhabit. In short, formal foreign policies defined the assistance environment and informal politics colored the provision of aid, although a political vocabulary was missing from the language of aid providers. Most important, however, politics was absent from Afghanistan.
Contemporary Afghanistan
With the advent of the Taliban movement and its swift entry into the Afghan military terrain, most of these trends were accentuated. Nevertheless, Taliban policies underscore the difficult calculations that Afghan civil society has faced and will continue to confront in coming months and years. By extension, these same factors continue to affect the scope and depth of international assistance, the ways that the international assistance community organizes itself, and the contexts within which it chooses to define its work.
Retrospective conventional wisdom often describes the entry of the Taliban movement into Afghanistan as almost inevitable, suggesting that a new kind of military force was required to repair the chaos and unrest within Afghanistan. At its inception as an organized movement, however, the Taliban was described as a lackey of Pakistan and the United States. Together, these two points of view offer a partial description of Afghanistan in late 1994 far more than they do of the Taliban, whose genesis predates the anarchic 1990s. Indeed, the Taliban-with its cousin parties, the Harkat-ul-Ansar (which fights in Kashmir) and the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (a militant Sunni party within Pakistan)-is an offshoot of the Pakistan-based Jamiat-i-Ulema-Islami, and is an almost natural outgrowth of religious schools based in Pakistan that catered to young refugee men who, at earlier points, formed the backbone of the mujahideen. The transnational character of the Taliban movement-ranging from the sources of its funding to the recruitment of fighters-was integral to its founding, its successes, and its weaknesses. Its origins within Pakistan, and the seeming relief with which many Afghans greeted their initial exploits in Afghanistan, are important elements of its status and behavior today.
The Taliban moved toward Kandahar in late 1994 and early 1995, when fractiousness had reached its peak in Afghanistan. Between early 1995 and September 1996, it was able to gain control of most major cities. In each region, commanders either fled into exile or joined the Taliban. The movement therefore built its network of control from the detritus of disaffected mujahideen factions as well as from its own ideological adherents. In most of the areas, the Taliban has secured a kind of repressive control over cities, relied on a looser command structure in the rural areas, and devoted its efforts to extending its military control and determining an ideological path for future rule. By the end of 1998, the Taliban had secured as much as 90 percent of Afghan territory by the deft management of manpower, including growing foreign recruitment, and materiel. Like its opponents, the Taliban movement relies on external support for arms and fuel supplies: fighting patterns often reflect the capacities of each faction to muster resources from (or through) neighboring countries and the availability of air and land access to border supply routes. The sharply contested front line traverses the Hindu Kush, dividing northern areas from the south, isolating transport routes, and endangering the availability of international assistance as well as war supplies.
Although the Taliban movement was originally thought to be exclusively Afghan and entirely Pukhtun, the accession of local commanders changed the complexion of the Taliban forces, if not its leadership, and the recruitment of foreign fighters among young men across the Muslim world has transformed its membership as well. With time, the Taliban has acquired the liabilities as well as the assets of its new recruits. This has meant that ideological consistency, once assumed, now sometimes appears imposed, as rigor enforced through a regime of edicts substitutes for full-scale governance. It also means that both popular support and underground resistance-both difficult to measure-complicate the political terrain more than the Taliban might hope. Recruitment for fighting is increasingly difficult, with villagers reportedly resisting forced conscription and often finding ways to elude, rather than confront, unpopular edicts. Although the maintenance of local order seems universally appreciated, for personal safety as well as economic opportunity, the ruling shura's puritanical edicts suggest that the rigid, conservative ideological interests of the Taliban's founders and fighters take precedence over the more practical (and therefore flexible) concerns of the civilian population. These impressions-garnered as much from Taliban statements and actions as from those of their opponents-have led observers to surmise that the governance vacuum left by former faction commanders may lead to longer-term crises of governance.
The availability of military support, the desire for victory, the tenacity of ideological contest, and the lure of future rule and profit have all led to continued military engagement. The Taliban believes that victory is possible, and its opponents believe that continued fighting will secure their place at a future bargaining table. Although the primary contest is therefore a political one, almost no one has, until now, felt the need to suspend military activity in favor of serious political negotiations. Occasional parleys between the Taliban and its opponents-including a heralded meeting in Turkmenistan in March 1999-have flirted with the idea of peace, but have generally succumbed to the habits of war. As a result, UN political negotiations have concentrated on persuading Afghanistan's neighbors-and primary arms suppliers-to withhold support for these factions. Changing political sensibilities in the neighborhood-the recent security split between Uzbekistan and Russia, Turkmenistan's continuing faith in prospects for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline, tentative political change in Iran, and economic crisis in Pakistan-may ultimately help the political to triumph over the military. The nature of the political compact that may result, however, has been discussed in only vague terms.
For years, the civilian population has been held hostage to the direct and indirect consequences of war. Political negotiators have been drawn into a handful of important humanitarian problems-securing access to isolated and vulnerable populations, securing agreement from the Taliban to respect the privileges and immunities of UN aid agencies-as a coda to their primary responsibilities. These activities have brought the political and assistance wings of the United Nations together more closely than have other, more formally choreographed efforts in the past, but they have highlighted misgivings on several sides.
Those doubts are well founded. The interplay of international politics and domestic confusion that the Taliban has both encountered and instigated is one that the international assistance community does not fully understand. The Taliban has become well known for the zeal with which it pursues its ideological goals and the cloak of religion that covers its political strategies. Its human rights record has become its public signature, even though its predecessors also abused rights with impunity. The edicts that its governing shura has issued since 1995 range from the personal to the political-regulating the length of beards, female attire and access to public services and public life, and the availability of news and entertainment. The Taliban has tried to control all aspe
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