AFGHANISTAN: OPTIONS FOR HUMANITARIAN ACCESS		Download as PDF file
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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Access is the central question facing the international community in its efforts to meet the urgent needs of some 7.5 million Afghans affected by the current crisis. Despite the on-going civil war, and the U.S.-led military strikes, the humanitarian community should make every effort to substantially increase its aid deliveries into Afghanistan, particularly in advance of winter. The strategy for reaching Afghans in need should continue to focus on large-scale movements of food by road across as many of Afghanistan's borders as possible. If security conditions, or other factors, make it difficult to move food across one border, all efforts should be made to increase as quickly as possible deliveries across other borders. Given the uncertainties associated with moving enough food by road in the coming months, some level of capacity to deliver food by air will need to be in place to fill gaps and respond to changing conditions on the ground. Finally, in the event that these options can not be geared up quickly enough, or prove inadequate to the task, more extraordinary measures—such as humanitarian corridors or safe zones—should be swiftly implemented by the international community. To fail to solve the problem of humanitarian access is to fail to serve the needs of the millions of long-suffering Afghans caught up in their country's crisis.

2. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to lay out options by which the international community can increase the amount of critically needed aid reaching the some 7.5 million Afghans affected by the current crisis. The greatest humanitarian need in Afghanistan can presently be described as situated in a wide belt across the northern half of the country, stretching from Badghis in the West to Badakshan in the far northeast. Included in this belt would be the relatively large affected populations in the central areas of Hazarajat and Kabul and its environs. Winter is rapidly approaching, and the amount of aid currently being delivered into Afghanistan is, due primarily to security conditions inside the country, much less than the 50,000MT per month required. It is critical to find ways and means of substantially increasing the volumes of aid being delivered if a dramatic worsening of the humanitarian crisis is to be avoided. We can not assume that U.S.-led airstrikes against Taliban/al Qaeda targets will be suspended before the onset of winter in mid-November, so we must look at what options might be feasible under prevailing circumstances.

3. OPTIONS FOR HUMANITARIAN ACCESS

Following is a menu of options for CARE and other humanitarian organizations to consider for getting increased assistance into Afghanistan in the critical weeks and months ahead. These options are not mutually exclusive, and the humanitarian community will need to adopt multiple strategies at any point in time in order to maximize the flow of aid. The viability of various options is subject to change rapidly with security conditions on the ground, which will be influenced by the results of the ongoing military action.

1. Immediate Options to be Employed in the Current Context

At present, we can not operate on the assumption that military action will be halted prior to the onset of winter. Following are a number of options, appropriate to the current context, for increasing aid deliveries to Afghans in need:

• Option #1—Utilize traditional humanitarian delivery mechanisms from Pakistan—In response to the drought of the last several years, the World Food Programme (WFP) and international NGOs, including CARE, had established good mechanisms for the delivery of food aid into Afghanistan, often in partnership with local NGOs and community leaders. Over the last month, many of these programs were suspended due to the withdrawal of international staff and unsafe working conditions for Afghan staff. WFP continues to try to deliver food into Afghanistan, as security conditions permit. CARE has also recently decided to try to resume such deliveries, by reactivating relationships with partner organizations and calling our Afghan staff back to work. If an initial pilot convoy of 100MT is successful in reaching the intended beneficiaries, we should try to rapidly replicate this success as often as resources and security permit. In the immediate-term, priority should be accorded to making direct deliveries to communities that may be inaccessible by road once winter sets in.

  This mechanism depends on our ability to contract Afghan truckers willing to make these deliveries. At present, there seem to be some truckers willing—for a price— to make deliveries to at least selected areas. These operations also depend on the ability of CARE's Afghan staff and partner organizations to organize such deliveries without taking excessive risks. Such risks will need to be monitored and reassessed on an almost continuous basis. To reduce the risk to CARE staff and partners from being inadvertently targeted by U.S.-led airstrikes or other military operations, information on the locations of CARE facilities, staff and operations should be provided regularly to the Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Center.

• Option #2—Step up deliveries from the North and West—A large percentage of the affected population is located in the north and west of Afghanistan, so it is logical to try to increase the flow of aid coming into the country from these directions. WFP and a number of NGOs are already moving some humanitarian aid into Afghanistan across the borders of Iran, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. There is a growing consensus that these efforts should be stepped up. CARE already has operations in Tajikistan, and we are fielding a team to do a comprehensive assessment of our potential to increase aid flows into Afghanistan via the central Asian states. Among the possibilities to be explored is the potential for a dramatically increased flow of aid were the Uzbek authorities to open the border crossing at Termez. Since many analysts expect the opposition to try to expand the territory under its control in the coming weeks, particularly in the north, there is a sense that this could increase the space for humanitarian operations into the country from Iran and the Central Asian states. In the event that Mazar-e-Sherif were to come under opposition control, it could become a major hub for humanitarian operations, possibly opening an important aid pipeline through Uzbekistan.

• Option #3—Make greater use of market mechanisms—A number of experienced, well-informed observers have advocated the delivery of a portion of international humanitarian aid through "market" mechanisms. USAID, the single largest donor to the Afghan aid effort, has expressed its interest in monetizing some food aid by selling it to Afghan traders, with those traders taking delivery in Pakistan and making their own transport arrangements to get the commodity to urban markets where there is still some purchasing power. Such an arrangement has the advantage that Afghan traders assume responsibility for the safe delivery of their own goods. Monetization proceeds could then be used to cover other costs associated with the relief effort that might be incurred by the participating humanitarian organizations. Traders could also be contracted to transport and deliver aid to remote areas for a fee. In past years, cash has been transferred to affected communities via the "hawala" system, thereby giving them the ability to purchase wheat and other necessities through local traders. Combined with the traditional delivery systems of humanitarian organizations, such market mechanisms could allow a significant increase of the flow of food into Afghanistan, making it more readily available directly to those most in need while stabilizing market prices for those that still have some purchasing power. Pilot efforts to monetize food aid, or otherwise use market mechanisms to increase aid flows, should be initiated as quickly as possible.
2. Other Options that Might be Needed in the Weeks and Months to Come

If all of the above options are pursued aggressively, it should be possible to increase the total amount of humanitarian aid being delivered into Afghanistan during the coming month. Even under the best of circumstances, however, the increase may not be sufficient to meet the needs of the 7.5 million Afghans affected by the crisis. Under the worst-case scenario, the above options could fail to deliver any significant increase in aid, or they could even completely dry up, if the security situation in the country deteriorated sharply. What are the other options that need to be developed in the event that those identified above prove insufficient?

• Option #4—Develop a substantial capacity for airlift operations—It is already prudent to assume that the international humanitarian community will not be able to collectively deliver by road 100% of the food needed in all locations before and during Afghanistan's long, cold winter. While we can not fully anticipate where the gaps may be, it is reasonable to assume that airlifts could help fill at least some of the gaps. The ability to operate airlifts into Afghanistan from one of more of its neighboring countries would assume that planes could land safely and that runways damaged by recent airstrikes can be quickly repaired. Air operations established for such airlifts could also be used for airdrops, where it is determined that this is the only possible means for reaching selected badly affected communities. WFP has already begun planning for such air operations, and this planning should proceed and be accelerated so that a viable alternative is available to road transport should urgent need arise. Humanitarian air operations should be under civilian leadership and management and should be clearly distinguished from any similar actions undertaken by U.S. or other military forces.
• Options #5a and b—Take extraordinary measures if required—In order to move 50,000MT of food per month into Afghanistan, delivery by road will be essential, even if air operations are available as a back-up. Therefore, if security conditions cause deliveries by road transport to be either suspended or sharply curtailed, the international community must be prepared to resort to extraordinary means to ensure that large numbers of Afghans do not starve this winter. This may require putting in place some sort of negotiated guarantees of access or some form of international military protection for humanitarian operations. Arrangements of this sort have been tested in a variety of forms during the major complex emergencies of the last decade, with varying degrees of success. While the international community should not immediately resort to these extraordinary measures, contingency planning for their implementation should begin right away. In the event that humanitarian access does not significantly improve in the coming weeks, or in the event of a significant deterioration of security conditions, the international community needs to have contingency plans already developed and ready for rapid implementation. Following are a couple of scenarios that make sense in Afghanistan, depending how events unfold on the ground in coming weeks:

  Option 5a—Establish Humanitarian corridors—Key routes connecting major supplies of relief goods and major pockets of need could be identified. The United Nations, or some other appropriate civilian entity, could then seek to negotiate safe passage for relief convoys along those routes with all local and international military entities whose operations might pose a risk, intentional or inadvertent, to humanitarian operations. In the event that adequate security guarantees could not be obtained through negotiations with all parties, some sort of international military protection of the designated corridors or actual convoys, could be sought. The international community can call on a range of positive and negative experiences with negotiated access and escorted convoys, including southern Sudan and Somalia, in developing an approach to humanitarian corridors that makes sense in Afghanistan.

  Option 5b-Establish Safe zones—At least two different scenarios might be envisaged in Afghanistan, and they are not mutually exclusive. To a large extent, humanitarian organizations already operate quite freely in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance. In the event that the area under opposition control grows in the north in the coming weeks, it is possible that a broad swath across northern Afghanistan could become, relatively speaking, a safe zone for humanitarian operations. To the extent that the safety of this zone were guaranteed in some way by international military forces, the degree of security for aid workers would obviously increase. One model for this sort of operation could be found in northern Iraq shortly after the Gulf War, where hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees were able to move quickly and safely back from refugees camps in Turkey under international military protection. A second possibility to explore would be some sort of demilitarized, protected status for Kabul. A number of the proposal currently being put forward for future political arrangements call for the demilitarization of Kabul under UN or other international auspices, so as to give Afghan leaders time and space to determine the country's future direction. The creation of some sort of protected status, if effectively guaranteed, could prevent a large-scale displacement of people from the capital.

4. CONCLUSION

The international community should be aggressively pursuing all available mechanisms for increasing the flow of humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. This includes maximizing deliveries through traditional mechanisms from Pakistan, opening up as many alternative pipelines through other neighboring countries as possible, and making maximum use of monetization and other market-based approaches. Significant capacity for airlift operations should also be put in place immediately, and contingency planning should be undertaken for the establishment of humanitarian corridors or safe areas. The latter extraordinary measures should be implemented quickly if the flow of aid into Afghanistan can not be increased and sustained over the next several weeks.

CARE USA Policy and Advocacy Unit
Final Draft October 25, 2001