by Tom Bamforth
On this day, once a year, Pakistan Rail ran a celebratory train ride from the grand Saracen Gothic central station in Peshawar through the Khyber Pass and down to the border with Afghanistan. I had been invited to stop off along the way to have lunch at the mess of the famous Khyber Rifles regiment, where a colleague’s brother was stationed. I was bored and this seemed the ideal way to break the lockdown monotony. So we hired a taxi and for a jittery moment I hid in the boot to avoid detection at the fairly cursory military road checks before starting on the road to Peshawar. It was sheer joy: the oppression of largely solitary confinement was behind me as we sped away from the village towards the tumult of Pakistan’s most exciting city.
When I arrived at the station I was confronted with the sight of a beautiful nineteenth-century steam engine shunting and tooting into view. Uniformed attendants scurried around, enthusiastically waving flags and blowing whistles. Amid waving of streamers, cheering onlookers on the platform, and whistling and hooting from the train we wheezed out of the station, past serried rows of eucalypts and out onto the Gandhara plain towards Afghanistan. Knowing that I would lose my job immediately if anyone found out I had run away, I slid down in a seat at the back and was soon lost in a dreamlike state, gazing out onto the stretches dun-coloured plain and the pale blue of the Frontier sky.
‘Come with me,’ someone said enthusiastically, shaking me from my reverie. ‘You can’t sit here all the time, it’s much more fun at the front.’ I followed, head slightly bowed to preserve my anonymity, trying not to make eye contact with the Independence Day revellers. We walked through several carriages before coming out into the shaking, clanking engine room, where the driver was busy cranking up the temperature, closely monitoring it through an ancient brass gauge. With a nod and a shaking of hands, we climbed out of the train as it slowly gathered speed, clinging on to a railing at the side of the engine, and clawed our way through bursts of steam and dust up to a small ledge in front of the train. And there I sat for the next five hours, in front of a hurtling steam train watching the vast plains fold into the mountain passes that divide Pakistan from Afghanistan, thundering through villages and careening into seemingly unending tunnels as we made our way through the tribal no man’s land of the Frontier. It was the ride of lifetime, enlivened by hordes of children who pounded the train with rocks as we passed. I discussed this with my new friend who had suggested this caper—did the pleasure of riding in front of the train outweigh the pain of being hit by a speeding rock?
‘Yes,’ was the immediate and unhesitating reply, ‘although if they look like hitting us, you can dive under the grille and I’ll turn my back.’ With this plan of action and a sudden surge in speed, I felt reassured. ‘Let’s just hope they don’t start shooting,’ he added after a well-timed pause to set my nerves on edge again, and pointed out that many of the small rock-throwing boys were also carrying the ubiquitous Frontier Kalashnikov.
As Peshawar slowly vanished into the distance, a new political, social and economic reality became evident. We were now beyond the ‘writ of the state’—in the tribal areas that form so much of the land of what was then know as the North West Frontier Province. These areas were self-governing, and the resources of the state, such as they were, had ceased to exist. There was no electricity and only one road, which ran alongside parts of the train track; there was no law enforcement, hence the almost compulsory bearing of arms by men and boys. Even the villages were different: settlements constructed from the dust mud and daub of the local environment were built around family compounds, each with high windowless perimeter fences and a tall watchtower. They were small family-based fortifications rather than houses in the more conventional sense. Instead of greeting the strangers who were now travelling bizarrely through their midst on a steam train, the locals met this intrusion initially with rocks, smashing as many windows as possible, before those inside the carriages could pull down the specially constructed wire screens, until at last the train came to a halt and smiling childish faces immediately leap off the embankments and formed a cheery welcome party for the strangers they had been attacking a moment before. In the distance I heard a high-pitched wheeze followed by a cacophony of shrieks and increasingly dominant drumming. And over the brow of a nearby hill, the massed bagpipes and drums of the Khyber Rifles Regiment appeared led by a stick-twirling drum-major dressed in a lion skin, from inside whose great jaws he shouted warlike musical commands.
‘Are you Tom?’ said a voice at my elbow amid the blare of bagpipes and the chatter of the frontier rock-throwers. ‘I’m afraid Captain Shahab is fighting today but he has left instructions that you are to be our guest,’ and I was presented with a curved dagger. And with that, covered in dust and soot and eyes still wild and bloodshot from the charging train, I was led clutching a gleaming steel knife to an ancient green jeep and driven to another army mess—an oasis of green, with manicured lawns bordered with roses and lazily resplendent peacocks. Inside, I toured the photo gallery, an unlikely who’s who of the twentieth century with every president, prime minister, king and shah imaginable having visited the Khyber Rifles, whose HQ’s strategic location had made it important on a world scale—a sort of South Asian Berlin Wall.
‘Come,’ said my new host. ‘I’ll show you the sights.’
He was not joking. We took the jeep to the top of a nearby hill and through the rangerfinder of a Pakistan Army howitzer I got my first breathtaking glimpse of the awesome mountain beauty of Afghanistan. Through the rangefinder I could see every detail of the border checks occurring at the Tulkarem border as people and cars passed through. For ease of artillery direction, each hill had been marked with a clearly visible number in white stone. It was a hair-raising moment as I stood, not on a geological fault line that had caused an earthquake, but on a geopolitical frontline that had so dramatically shaped the politics of the present.
Afghanistan is in many ways the Achilles heel of humanitarianism. It is a war that draws on, unwinnable—as so many invaders had found for centuries before 9/11—and it is a war that places aid agencies in the position of working alongside the armies of governments they are often so dependent on for funding. ‘We’re all on the same side, after all,’ one military official in Islamabad said when questioned about the humanitarian consequences of the invasion. While I never crossed the border into Afghanistan, I was familiar with the ramifications of the war on our work in Pakistan. The Norwegian government, which funded my own aid agency, had made a decision to make troop deployments to Afghanistan and debate ensued among outraged colleagues as we came under pressure to work alongside Norwegian troops as parts of an NGO ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Here civilians were seen, in crude Pentagon terminology, as ‘force multipliers’: organisations that would extend the reach, influence, and legitimacy of the ‘liberators’ and who, in the words of another commander, would ‘win it for us’.
But if the NGOs were concerned about cooptation to broader military goals, armies themselves wasted no time learning development-speak and employing the controversial Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) with enormous funds to engage in pseudo-development projects designed partly to rebuild civilian infrastructure and partly to create goodwill—sometimes in exchange for political information and intelligence sharing. But in obvious conjunction with military ends, these development programs were inherently tainted and frequently mistrusted. Based largely on the need to spend cash and buy favour rather than on sound development principles, their funds and effort went on white elephant projects that blurred the lines between independent humanitarian assistance and military strategy: school buildings without teachers, for example. In one province five MSF aid workers were killed by the Taliban because they were accused, falsely, by the local commander of ‘spying for America’. On pulling out of Afghanistan following the attacks, MSF stated that ‘independent humanitarian action, which involves unarmed aid workers going into areas of conflict to provide aid, has become impossible.’
Th
e development of new military ‘doctrines’—‘hearts and minds’, ‘force multipliers’, and the 3D approach (in which armies were involved across the spectrum of work from defence and diplomacy to development)—added to deepening and at times fatal unease about the future of neutral and impartial humanitarian space. The political pressure and financial incentives to be on the ‘same side’ were intense.
Despite the generosity of my hosts and the sparkling late afternoon on the regimental lawns, I suddenly felt tired. I had escaped the tedium of lockdown more than I ever imagined, but having moved briefly among the military side of the humanitarian divide I felt a deep urge to get back on the train and head as fast as I could to my own compound and to aid work delivered on the basis of need rather than political or military objectives.
JOSIAH WEDGEWOOD’S 1787 medallion advocating the abolition of the slave trade is emblazoned with the famous line: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ It features an African man in chains, down on one knee, raising his hands together in supplication. This urgent appeal to humanitarian universality, ‘man and brother’, is made by the benighted poor, who in Wedgewood’s view could be liberated from the economic chains of slavery and set free by religious conversion. It illustrates a significant departure from the amoral commercial mentality that dominated the Western empires until the end of the eighteenth century and lingered well into the nineteenth.
The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade was one of the great humanitarian achievements of the nineteenth century, yet it also granted ethical legitimacy to Western imperial expansion. Echoing themes in aid and development practice today, early humane societies sought to liberate Africans from oppression while staking the claim of imperial powers to govern the continent as they liberated souls.
In a contradiction that has dogged humanitarian work from the outset, the poor and those affected by conflict and disasters are often seen by aid agencies and charitable institutions as being both in need of a saviour and, to some degree, there for the taking. Disasters, in this view, can be seen as opportunities: to change behaviour, to reimagine a long-term future amid the destruction of the old, and to gain access and influence. For secular institutions, there is often an interventionist rhetoric of ‘change, development and empowerment’; for religious ones there is the desire, ultimately, to convert the people they help by promoting something called ‘human transformation’—in the language of World Vision, by ‘bearing witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God’.
Both these views, as well as the starker humanitarian commitment of the Red Cross to uphold the laws of war, owe their origins to the universalised conceptions of aid and charity that arose during the nineteenth century. While assistance and charity were by no means new—neighbourhood associations, trade and manufacturing guilds, and associations of almsgivers had existed in varying forms for hundreds of years—the great revolutions of the eighteenth century had begun to suggest the language, if not the content, of a universal political and ethical ambition. The American Declaration of Independence invoked the idea of ‘inalienable rights’ to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which it found ‘self-evident’; this was echoed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in which rights were deemed ‘natural, unalienable and sacred’ and, more specifically, amounted to ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’. While these declarations radically paved the way for more rational and secular state structures, they were also exactly what they appeared—rights for ‘man and the citizen’, in which there was no apparent contradiction between espousing the pursuit of happiness and owing slaves or having an inalienable right to freedom from oppression while maintaining slave-run sugar plantation colonies such as Haiti; meanwhile, rights for women could wait another 150 years.
The modern humanitarian ideal is consequently a curious mid-nineteenth-century amalgam of state-sponsored imperial expansion, the professionalisation of military medicine, the rise of evangelical religion and the universalising ideals of the great eighteenth-century revolutions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau could write in the middle of the eighteenth century about an ‘innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer’). The rise of colonialism in the nineteenth century was also linked to the ‘passion for compassion’ that underpins contemporary humanitarian action.
Contemporary ideas about international assistance have emerged from humanitarianism’s complex historical traditions, and despite claims to the universality of human needs and suffering, humanitarian organisations reflect their ideologically and institutionally eclectic past. In the post–Cold War world, in which aid agencies have increasingly taken on the role of guardians of public conscience, these origins are problematic—they pose challenges where ideological position, political positioning and dependence on donor funding undercut claims to universal and impartial humanitarian assistance delivered on the basis of need rather than other ideological, religious or political imperatives.
Just as there is an increasing professionalisation of aid delivery, in a bizarre move agencies and governments have started to redefine core concepts of humanitarian assistance along Orwellian lines. Meeting with officials from AusAID, the Australian aid agency, I was informed that the agency’s humanitarian policy was based around the principles of ‘humanity, independence, neutrality, and impartiality’—core humanitarian concepts derived from the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Yet it is also a government agency formally operating in the ‘national interest’ in conjunction with Australia’s foreign policy objectives—a fact that has been underlined, in a breathtakingly retrograde step, with the agency’s recent abolition and absorption into the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. ‘Disaster relief’, as Henry Kissinger noted in an American context as early as 1976, ‘is becoming increasingly a major instrument of our foreign policy’.
Unstated in the desire to do good works that bring respect and legitimacy to the doer is the equally important need to be seen to be acting. The predominance of logos, hoardings and awnings advertise the generosity of the aid agencies and their donors with ever greater assertiveness in refugee camps and settlements for the internally displaced after disasters. It has become increasingly important, if you are a beneficiary of aid and need access to emergency food, shelter or other basic necessities, to know that this aid ultimately comes from the British/Australian/American people. The moral sanctity of aid confers goodwill, legitimacy, and ultimately and most importantly a ‘seat at the table’—and thus influence for the delivering agencies and governments that fund them.
This moral and political power is part of the daily terrain that aid agencies must navigate in order to remain genuinely neutral, and it is complicated by frequent financial dependence on partisan donors—such as governments, the military or private philanthropic organisations. Such dependence has seen aid agencies adopt numerous counterpositions in order to guarantee their independence. These have included raising revenue independently through regular donations, of which the most spectacularly successful has been ‘child sponsorship’, as well as making conscience-based appeals for public funding in order to respond to emergencies. Both these activities, however, are fraught—the expropriation of the images of children and the portrayal of suffering to shock audiences into making donations is understandable but problematic. ‘Only compassion sells,’ as an aid worker from the French aid agency Action Against Hunger said. ‘It is the basis of fundraising for humanitarian agencies. We can’t seem to do without it.’
In their search for identity and points of distinction that might impress donors, core support groups or the public, NGOs have devised a series of stances and positions: some idealistic and ambitious, some technocratic, and some faith-based appeals to higher powers, all of which range from the admirable to the cant—‘mission statements’, in the fused missionary, military and business terminology of the aid world. Oxfam, for example, takes a rights-based approach that seeks to empower individuals and
communities and to provide the material means for people to make meaningful choices about who they are and how they live. Oxfam’s ‘mission statement’ says that:
Oxfam’s vision is a just world without poverty. We envision a world in which people can influence decisions which affect their lives, enjoy their rights, and assume their responsibilities as full citizens of a world in which all human beings are valued and treated equally.
In contrast, World Vision announces its intentions in a form of religious incantation whose humanitarian agenda is openly evangelical. Rather than attempting to create a world in which the people living in poverty have power over their future, World Vision draws deeply on Christian traditions of the benighted poor. Despite the sophistication of some of this well-funded organisation’s aid programs, its goals are other-worldly ones that are aimed to promote (preferably Christian) spiritual wellbeing rather than, for example, mere access to safe drinking water:
Our vision for every child, life in all its fullness;
Our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so.
World Vision is an international partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice, and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God.
At odds with both Oxfam’s empowerment approach and World Vision’s evangelising mission through good works, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sees itself as the grandfather clock of humanitarianism, whose stately but resonant ticking echoes through the generations to remind humanitarians of the essential imperatives of their cause. The oldest and largest humanitarian organisation, the ICRC and the Red Cross Movement more generally is the institution mandated under the Geneva Conventions to uphold the ‘laws of war’, which support the key elements of neutrality and impartiality of humanitarian actors in armed conflict. In keeping with this legal mandate the ICRC describes itself in the following way: