A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  But then if the military is so good, why use NGOs or other agencies at all? While the military may have some expertise in fighting wars, peacekeeping operations and control in civil strife, they don’t have knowledge or expertise specific to humanitarian operations. Nor do they have the understanding of the political paradigm that exists in the middle of a humanitarian operation. The military specifically lacks advance practice and training in critical standards, such as the SPHERE Standards (international humanitarian standards), which are the minimum standards for humanitarian delivery and cover such practical issues as how many litres of water per day a person needs, how to set up an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, how to ensure food distribution equitably, and a whole plethora of other indicators and standards.

  Death, cold, starvation and thirst are enemies in humanitarian operations, not an opposing military force. When operating in the humanitarian environment, the military needs to change its mind-set. Does the army collect sex-disaggregated data and understand its importance in planning, monitoring and ‘mid-course corrections’ based on gender and age? Does the military know how to set up an IDP returns process and ensure that aid deliveries in a relief operation don’t cause a long-term ‘dependency syndrome’? Most military personnel would have received no training in any of the above concepts, let alone know how to implement them. Yet the military has an enormous capacity to provide logistical support. Nevertheless, without the help of humanitarian experts, it cannot use its logistical and manpower strengths to their best advantage. It must be willing to learn and adapt.

  Knowledge and experience in humanitarian and natural disaster response exists within NGOs, both national and international. It must be tapped into so that the maximum benefit is gained from the military’s logistical skill. Their respective skill sets and intrinsic capabilities must combine to produce optimal results. Additionally, particularly in a large disaster, international organisations can help to mobilise more resources, give understanding of the political dimension and provide a coordination network.

  While humanitarian organisations and the military may not be natural bedfellows, they both must learn to adapt and coordinate with each other in disaster settings. Civil-military co-operation is critical in natural disaster settings, even more so than post-conflict settings. I mentioned in earlier chapters that in the mid-1990s the world of civil-military coordination was new. By the mid-2000s progress had been made.

  Although it took some days in the affected region to re-establish full command and control mechanisms to replace senior, middle level and junior level commanders who died in the earthquake, the Pakistan army was able to respond in varying degrees, depending on the strength and ability of remaining personnel in each location.

  Initially though, these responses were localised and ad hoc, based on the skill of the officers on the ground. Military forces were activated for search and rescue for civilians and soldiers alike, to assess damage, and secure the frontier, which had been brutally fought over in previous years. In those first few hours and days, as communication links were out of order, as command structures had been decimated and key personnel wiped out, order had to be restored, law enforced, and most importantly, thousands upon thousands of medical emergencies had to be dealt with. These early interventions were coordinated and commanded by well-trained professional officers who were among the survivors in the affected region. Pakistan did well with the strong response of local people acting independently, while centrally information started to come in and coordination began.

  Geneva Mobilises In November 2004, I had bought a small chalet on 2,000 square metres of land at the foot of the Jura bordering Geneva, but just inside France. Fifteen minutes’ drive from Geneva airport and 22 minutes’ drive from the UN base in Geneva, this house was perfectly located for me.

  In mid-2005 I had started some significant renovations, which took most of my weekends. By October 2005 the house was close to uninhabitable. The previous weekend saw my old kitchen hit the dust heap in preparation for a new one, on the weekend of October 8, 2005. It was my turn to be the United Nations duty officer that weekend, but nothing ever happens on a weekend, does it? It was 5.30 am, October 8, 2005, Geneva time, when my phone rang to give me the first hint of the unfolding tragedy.

  Just over 100 were said to be dead and one building had collapsed in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. By 7.30 am reports started to filter in about the impact – a few hundred people had died. No panic yet. Experienced operators know that you need to completely ignore initial death toll reports for they are extremely unreliable. To determine the size of a natural disaster and the likelihood of international response, one needs to examine, in the case of an earthquake, the size of the earthquake, its depth and proximity to population centres. Everything in my background had prepared me for what would happen next. My time in the military, legal training, my 1990s aid work with the Red Cross in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, my political stints around 2000 and the time in UN Headquarters from 2003–05 would all contribute.

  This earthquake was big, shallow and close. It would need help from the outside, but only if the Pakistanis were to ask for it. An international assistance team cannot be deployed without the support of an affected government. We needed the UN to get ready. At 7.45 am I headed off to UN headquarters in Geneva to discuss the response to Pakistan, assuming it wouldn’t escalate and I would be back working on my house before long.

  I never slept a night in that house again.

  In the early stage of a natural disaster, especially one on a massive scale, accurate information is always scarce and yet assumptions and actions need to be made. By 8 am I found myself with Arjun Katoch in the office of Gerhard Putman-Cramer.

  Gerhard ran the Emergency Services Branch of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He was always well groomed and meticulously dressed, and was very senior. Some people assumed that Gerhard was pompous, or that he would be completely disinterested in any field operation that might get mud on his shoes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Gerhard loved the days when he could go to field operations and get deeply involved. While some would argue that he was too senior to be allowed, Gerhard believed that you did need to have senior operatives on every mission. There is no doubt that his deployment was made easier, given that it was a weekend, by the absence from headquarters of people who may have sought to block his departure.

  Arjun worked for Gerhard and was responsible for the Field Support Section which, among other things, ran the deployment of United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams. Arjun was a man of good humour, and as a retired colonel from the Indian Army, had always hankered to see the Pakistan side of Kashmir.

  In the normal course of events, if the earthquake hit on a working day, people would be buzzing around the office trying to look busy in fear that they would get in trouble for not looking busy, regardless of whether they had something to do or not. This is real Yes Minister stuff. But being earlier than 9 am on a Saturday, most people in the United Nations system in Geneva were still at home, blissfully unaware of what was taking place in Pakistan. This was to work in our favour! Rather than wasting time running from meeting to meeting, informing people of something they didn’t really need to know, but feared not knowing, Gerhard, Arjun and I were able to make decisions without dealing with unnecessary bureaucracy. The only people involved in the early planning were those we wanted to be involved. No baggage. Consequently some people would later query some of the decisions we made because the bureaucrats had not been ‘informed’.

  UNDAC teams cannot deploy without an official invitation from the host government. There are a number of practical reasons for this, the first of which is that the host government issues the visas. If the government doesn’t want support, there is no point sending a supporting team.

  As soon as Arjun heard of the earthquake he contacted Air Marshal Toor. Toor was Director General of Civil Defence in Paki
stan, based in Islamabad, who was well aware of UNDAC. This early contact played a critical role in the early hours, acting as the interface between the United Nations system and the office of President Musharraf, who was also an army chief. Toor passed information to us about the size of the natural disaster and also persuaded General Musharraf that he should formally request support from an UNDAC team.

  In many ways dealing with military dictatorships can be easier than dealing with civilian governments in times of emergency. A good military commander understands that it is much easier to return unneeded resources than to mobilise them late. The best response to a crisis is to mobilise a team without waiting to be fully sure you need them and cancel the resources later if they aren’t needed. The alternative of waiting for certainty of need, hesitating and delaying, can cost lives.

  We were quickly given very strong indications from Toor that a formal request from Musharraf would come sometime during the afternoon. This was a good start to the response, and we needed to put an UNDAC team on standby.

  The way an UNDAC team normally deploys is as follows: there is a roster of pre-existing trained personnel, some of whom are UN staff members and some of whom are staff of donor governments and agencies. When it seems likely that an UNDAC team will be needed, an alert SMS and email is sent to the entire roster asking who is available and where they are located. Members of Arjun’s team would then go through the replies and determine the best make up of an UNDAC deployment, based on language skills, previous experience and location. That is the normal process, and Arjun swung it into action, but with one difference. Arjun, Gerhard and I were standing in Gerhard’s office as we were discussing potential team deployment.

  “I would like to go,” said Gerhard.

  With a twinkle in his eye, Arjun responded, “Me too.”

  It was an interesting exchange with an underlying dynamic. Many have argued that Arjun shouldn’t have been deployed to an earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir given his history in the Indian armed forces. Even though United Nations staff members travelling on a United Nations passport have technically “no nationality”, diplomatic niceties would normally dictate a little bit more discretion in choosing the nationality of a team member.

  However, it was becoming more and more clear that Pakistan was going to be a major natural disaster in which the best people would need to be deployed even if there was a risk in their deployment. If the earthquake had hit during working hours, on a working day, there would have been many other people crowded into Gerhard’s office. Many would have had a view on Arjun’s nationality and the appropriateness of his potential deployment. But it was a Saturday, Arjun would know part of the terrain and culture, but would also be a welcome senior interlocutor for incoming search and rescue teams. There were only three of us in the room, and we all got on well – an essential prerequisite for an emergency response team.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Although I wasn’t qualified to go on an UNDAC team as I hadn’t been UNDAC trained, my role was the Asia Pacific Desk Officer so it could be my responsibility to write the initial situation reports for the earthquake. A silent deal was done. All three of us had confidence in the other in playing a significant and effective role in an UNDAC team. My role would be to write the situation reports and coordinate the initial communication back with Geneva headquarters, and I would be labelled the “desk officer in place” and thereby get around the “no UNDAC training” hurdle. Boy, did this change, big time, once we hit the ground.

  When other senior officials discovered the make-up of the UNDAC team there were attempts to stop the deployment of both Arjun and I, with Gerhard having to go all the way to the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland to stop the blockers. These late attempts really made us glad that the earthquake had hit on a Saturday. For most of the day we prepared, freed from the unnecessary hindrance of intervening bureaucrats.

  Other members of the UNDAC team were notified of mobilisation from Britain and other parts of Switzerland so they could join our team in Geneva for an initial deployment of seven. By 10 am we started our mental and physical preparations for a deployment. Jesper Lund, one of Arjun’s staff, began to put together the emergency response kits, which included communications, laptops, tents and clothing necessary for us to be a fully self-sustaining unit upon deployment. He activated a pre-existing standby agreement with the government of Switzerland for an air ambulance to be converted for immediate transport. The Learjet was reconfigured and sent to Geneva in readiness for flying us to Pakistan.

  I rushed home to pack.

  The Unfolding Story While billions of dollars were donated to support the tsunami victims, funds given for Pakistan earthquake relief would turn out to be slow and scarce. In addition, the international relief community was part way through a process of self-examination following poor coordination and massive duplication of effort seen after past operations. The Humanitarian Response Review discussed above finalised its recommendations in September and were due to be discussed and agreed at the meeting on December 12, 2005. In between the September recommendations and the December meeting was the October earthquake. It was limbo-land for international disaster response. No one knew which system to use: the old discredited one or the new yet to be endorsed one?

  So this was the challenge: A massive natural disaster, a military dictatorship, questionable security, international terrorism, and a flawed humanitarian system part way through a reform process that no one fully understood and with no systems yet in place and no one willing to fund the response. How would you like to be caught in the middle of that?

  At Pakistan Army General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi, just outside Islamabad, senior commanders became more and more aware of the size and scope of the disaster as information flowed in from village after village. The Joint Chiefs convened meetings to coordinate data collection and response, mobilise forces and analyse the continuous flow of new information. It soon became clear that this crisis was too big for any country to handle alone. Hence the reason they were open to a deployment of an UNDAC team.

  While some have criticised the Pakistan army for its ‘slow’ response in the first few hours, the forces were coordinated and largely functional within three or so days – this compares very favourably to other natural disasters in other parts of the world. It compares much better than other armed forces, particularly after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, and in the 2004 tsunami-affected countries. On that first day the initial response by civilians, local military commanders, and communities banding together, saved many lives well before any international support could possibly be mobilised. Criticism of Pakistan in the early days is not warranted.

  Three key factors helped to produce an unusually fast UNDAC mobilisation. Firstly, Pakistani officials such as Air Marshal Toor had been trained in the UNDAC system. Secondly, a pre-existing standby agreement with the government of Switzerland was activated to provide a special aircraft for our team. Thirdly, a potential UNDAC team was identified from pre-existing rosters, and members were put on four hours’ notice to move. Personal and institutional preparations began.

  By the middle of that Saturday afternoon the President of Pakistan officially requested the United Nations to mobilise support, including the UNDAC team. Our standby became real. The British-based members took a connecting flight from London to Geneva. By 10.30 pm we all gathered at the private craft section of Geneva airport to pack our emergency gear aboard the Swiss plane.

  I had forgotten to lock the front door of my house. The last thing I did in the country was to telephone a friend whom I asked to go around and lock-up. Just before 11 pm we taxied to the end of the runway, and took off, headed towards south Asia.

  “Good evening,” said the pilot over the intercom. “Our flight time will either be eight or 12 hours. We will either be landing in Islamabad or Dubai depending on whether we get over-flight permission for Afghanistan. I’ll let you know.” It was the fi
rst and only time I’ve got on an aeroplane without being sure where we were actually going to land!

  We tried to get some sleep during the flight, but we also had some very big questions. Would we be welcome in Kashmir or was this merely a diplomatic exercise? How would terrorist groups respond to foreign people on their soil? Would the Pakistan military be cooperative or uncooperative? How were we going to work with a military dictatorship, and who in the government would we be dealing with? Would the international community be providing financial support? For Gerhard there was an additional question. Eight hours without a cigarette: “Will I be able to smoke on landing?”

  UNDAC Arrives We arrived around 8 am, barely 24 hours after the earthquake. Gerhard rested in the arrivals hall of Islamabad airport, cigarette in hand, comfortably sitting, puffing gently directly under a no smoking sign while our goods were cleared by customs. Only one other foreign team, the Turkish Red Crescent Society’s search and rescue team, reached the affected zone as fast.

  We were given 72-hour visas, presumably because those who were in power thought the problem would be resolved within three days. Such under-estimations are not uncommon in natural disaster responses.

  The first thing we needed to figure out was who we would be dealing with in the government of Pakistan. The Department of Economic Affairs in conjunction with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been historically the focal point for dealing with foreign organisations and NGOs, but we knew the power was with the army.

  In Rawalpindi the joint chiefs of military staff met again at the general headquarters of the Pakistan army. They, like everybody else, had a lack of information and a growing sense that the disaster was larger than was first expected. Some of the generals even began to feel that the disaster was bigger than they could handle. A sense of hopelessness is extremely frustrating for a military commander, particularly one that is used to being in complete command. Some senior army staff had a temptation to continue with their own plans without building a partnership with the United Nations or foreign NGOs. For them, it made more sense to leave the international collaboration to the civilian and bureaucratic arms of the government.