A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  Why is this important? The personality types of people in humanitarian work differs greatly from those of people in development work. By its nature ‘humanitarian’ work demands that people respond quickly to incredible demands, tight timelines and have a sense of urgency brought on by rapid onset disasters and conflict. Development work, on the other hand, requires people who manage slow incremental change. Given that ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ work can be done in the same country, these workers often clash around questions of speed, results and effectiveness. The process of the flash-funding appeal highlighted this difference.

  With the flash-funding appeal completed our attention turned to a larger question: How will the international community coordinate and interface their relief operations with government structures, institutions and the military? Jan Vandemoortele quickly established his leadership, relying heavily on UNDAC advice, particularly that of Gerhard and Arjun. Together, they had divided the senior tasks among themselves, with Gerhard taking responsibility for high-level government and diplomatic liaison, while Arjun concentrated on setting up the mechanics of the UNDAC team and initial coordination structures.

  To Cluster or Not to Cluster? Jan accepted that the cluster recommendations of HRR would be implemented for this natural disaster response. A new and experimental approach would be used. Clusters which were created, first for the situation report, then the flash appeal, now made a permanent mark on the relief operation. They were formalised, leaders appointed and coordination structures and mechanisms put in place. Experimenting with a new approach for a large emergency did have its drawbacks because no-one knew the rules of the new system. We were inventing it as we went along.

  One great strength of the cluster approach became apparent long after the event. Because no-one knew how it worked, no one knew how to stop it. This took away the great strength that some of those in the bureaucracy of the United Nations who seek to avoid doing “nothing wrong” by doing “nothing” had. This was the great defeat for the Yes Minster types. Those who normally know how to manipulate the rules to stop innovative action, new thinking or accountability found themselves out in the cold. Because no-one new the rules of the new system. We were inventing it as we went and as perverse as it sounds, this was a great advantage.

  Two key institutions developed. Firstly, the UN country team convened regularly to discuss UN administrative issues that were critical in solving problems such as customs clearances and visas for emergency workers.

  Secondly, the cluster heads forum brought together all cluster coordinators. With the backing of Gerhard and Arjun, I empowered the cluster leads to be the ultimate decision-making organisation at the initial stage of the relief effort.

  Key cluster coordinators represented emergency shelter, camp management, health, food, logistics, water and sanitation, emergency education, legal protection and early recovery. Most of those responsible withstood significant pressure from their agencies and chose to work in the context of the overall needs of the operation, not just the needs of their own organisations. Many were criticised by their headquarters for not putting their agency’s priorities first. It may sound ridiculous, but many within the United Nations’ system had still not got the point of the Humanitarian Response Review: we were supposed to act as a team.

  By now the reader may be wondering if this was becoming over complex? Have we moved too far away from the disaster and too far into the minutiae of the bureaucracy? The frustrating answer is that in the UN the bureaucracy is the point. This is the greatest frustration of the emergency response worker. You have to know how to navigate the interpersonal petty bureaucracy.

  By the end of the first week the Pakistan's Department of Economic Affairs had persuaded the military to meet us. The Pakistan High Command, meeting in Rawalpindi, came to that conclusion as well. One of the problems the Pakistani military had to wrestle with was the question of coordination of international aid organisations in a militarily sensitive area such as Kashmir. So how does a military operational commander seek and gain visibility and control over an entire operational area, if a key interlocutor in that operational area has skills and knowledge needed, is undertaking activities, but is reluctant to share information and will not be controlled? The military had to find a way through all of this.

  With lobbying from the Department of Economic Affairs, the UN offices and through expert diplomacy from United States officials, particularly Ambassador Ryan Crocker, USAID focal point Bill Berger and military liaisons Sandy Davidson and David Keefe, we were summoned to attend the Operations Room at General Headquarters Rawalpindi on the following day. This was good news.

  By this time we had also established a Civil Military Coordination Cell under Chuck Royce. Chuck managed to build links and confidence with the NATO military commanders, particularly US and UK officers. This gave additional credibility and strength to the attempts to win over the Pakistanis and played a critical role in convincing senior generals to take United Nations seriously. As the relief effort unfolded, civil military coordination officers were deployed to each of the field coordination hubs. They all played a critical role in building strong personal contacts with key army officers on the ground.

  The bad news was that almost no money was coming in through the flash appeal. No donor agency or government seemed to be interested in what was happening in Pakistan. Many people speculated as to why this was so. Some thought there was international donor fatigue created by the huge outpouring of funds to the Southeast Asian tsunami a little less than a year before. Stories of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the tsunami operation were starting to be reported in major international newspapers and some thought this was having an impact on funding available to Pakistan.

  Additionally, there is a concept called ‘proximity’. People take more interest and donate more money to things that are proximate to them. In the case of the Southeast Asian tsunami the perception of proximity was created as many in western countries could imagine themselves on a holiday resort beach and being struck by a wave. The fact that many foreign tourists died in the tsunami added to this impression. People simply couldn’t imagine what it was like to be in a remote village in Kashmir and so many in the West found it difficult to empathise with the people of Pakistan. Images of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism certainly didn’t help.

  The most empathetic of countries would be the closest – but the list of neighbouring countries is a roll call of difficulty. India: currently at war with Pakistan. Afghanistan: itself a basket case. Iran: on the opposite side of the Sunni/Shia divide. China (yes, Pakistan does border China) would provide bilateral aid (that is not through the UN system, but directly government to government). The fastest responding country was Turkey.

  While the cluster coordinators hoped that we would get money, we had to devise an alternative. The early ideas of a contingency plan based on no funding started to form in our minds. If we didn’t get funding we would need to pull out most of the UN staff and leave a small number of experts to advise the government of Pakistan. It was critically important to develop a strong relationship with the military in case our role would shrink to humanitarian advisers to a military operation. This first meeting with the military would be critical to develop strong relations in case we did get funding, and develop even stronger relations in case we did not.

  The most senior UN official and global head of OCHA, Jan Egeland visited Pakistan at about this time. His gathering of knowledge added weight to the importance of coordination and strength to his calls internationally for additional funding. He appointed Gerhard as Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator and in so doing strengthened Gerhard’s capacity to get things done. Egeland is a good and sensitive man. On the return helicopter flight from Muzaffarabad we crammed a number of injured people in to take them to hospitals in Islamabad. With great sadness one small child died with us en route. Egeland continued to work tirelessly to get whatever support he could for us in field operations. We knew we
had an ally in him in headquarters. His visit also helped in building relations with the Pakistani military.

  Gerhard knew of my military background and knew that there was no way Arjun, being Indian, would be allowed inside the Pakistan army headquarters. Given that Gerhard had made the decision that I was to stay in Pakistan, and had created the title ‘Chief of Operations’ for me to gain credibility with the military, he asked me to lead the negotiating group.

  These are moments when, given my background, I wonder how I arrived in my current situation. Having been a young officer cadet and commissioned officer in the Australian Army a decade and a half earlier and after being in Pakistan a little over a week to make situation reports, I now found myself inside the super-secret operations room of the Pakistan military. How the heck did I get here? With me were half a dozen or so other UN officials representing the World Food Program, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, all of whom had roles as cluster coordinators. Critical among these people was Philippe Martou, the focal point of the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS), the providers of UN helicopters.

  On the Pakistan side, the delegation was led by Major-General Mohamed Yousaf, the Director-General of Military Operations. For the first 20 minutes of the meeting we were comparing notes on how big we thought the disaster was. Even then we were still operating on incomplete information and were underestimating the scale of the problem. Then Yousaf did the bravest thing I’ve ever seen an army general in any country, in any time, do. He put his head in his hands and said, “Honestly, we do not know what to do”.

  In most countries an army general would never admit to a foreigner that he didn’t know how to handle a problem in his own country. Such lack of admission and realisation of a lack of capacity to respond to a natural disaster was a contributing factor to the poor response of the United States to Hurricane Katrina.

  It takes an enormous amount of strength, confidence, self-awareness and selflessness to realise the needs of your people are greater than the pride of your organisation. One cannot underestimate the strength and courage of Major-General Mohamed Yousaf.

  I looked across at him and said, “Sir, honestly, neither do we.” I asked Philippe to outline the type of resources we could bring to assist. With a UN helicopter airlift supplementing that of the Pakistan army, and with the assistance of UK and US military forces from Afghanistan, perhaps there was a light at the end of the tunnel?

  While Philippe was outlining how and what sort of rotary wing airframes the United Nations could bring to bear, I wrote a small note to General Yousaf. “Sir, this is the biggest challenge of your life, but together we will win.” I passed the note across the table. When he read the note he smiled. He walked over to my side of the table, put his arm over my shoulder and said, “We can work together.” Yousaf asked us to give the army 48 hours to consider the framework that we would put in place.

  General Nadeem: Didn’t Want His Arse Kissed Either We were called back within 24 hours. This time the meeting was led by Major-General Nadeem Ahmad, the Vice Chief of General Staff. This was to be the first meeting with a man who I later came to know as one of the most ‘rolled gold’ human beings I have ever met. He is a man with few character flaws, a prodigious sense of service and was incorruptible. He is a brilliant, empathetic man who is like a big brother to me. This bond would take time to develop. There are few, if any, people I have as much respect for as this man.

  General Nadeem proceeded to tell us that he would instruct the NGOs on what and where they would work and he respectfully welcomed our assistance. I knew two things. Firstly, never contradict a senior army officer in public. Secondly, there was no way NGOs would take orders from the Pakistan army.

  “Sir, can we have a word alone for a moment?” I asked. We went into a side room. I told General Nadeem the story of Brigadier Rowe, Commander Ninth Brigade and how he hated when people tried to kiss his arse. Nadeem laughed his agreement.

  “So let me tell you when I think you are wrong,” I said. Nadeem appreciated that. Mind you, he was right more often than me. We developed a level of trust and friendship between us such that he expected me to disagree when I thought he was wrong. It was my job in his mind to do so. It is a rare asset for a general to have people speak their minds. Nadeem wanted facts, honest interpretation and strong opinion. While we were still in the side office, Nadeem asked me to share my thoughts. It is my view that one of the greatest dangers is if a decision-maker makes a decision based on a wrong assumption. The Pakistan army had assumed that the international aid world was a homogeneous and well coordinated group that could be treated as a single interface. This was wrong. If the Pakistan army were to plan on a flawed basis, they would only be disappointed and disillusioned with the assistance that could come. In my mind it was very clear that Nadeem needed an accurate perception of the partnerships that he could, and could not, rely upon. I had to take a punt and be blunt.

  “The first thing you need to understand, sir, is there is no such thing as the United Nations. There are a whole bunch of organisations with the letters U and N in front of their name, a fascination with the colour blue and an organisational structure that means they are more likely to compete than collaborate.

  “Secondly, the NGOs will guard their independence and will leave the country before they take a tasking order from you.

  “Thirdly, NGOs are often thought to be a homogeneous group that can be handled in one category. This is wrong. NGOs are a huge range of different organisations, from ‘one-man’ operations to multinational professional organisations. It is simply not possible to assume they are all one group of similar organisations that can be handled in a similar way.

  “In your role, you need to understand the fourth thing: if you want to get things done you need to be more diplomat than soldier.”

  Nadeem became a very good diplomat. We went back into the main meeting. Nadeem instructed the chief of the army air wing to co-operate with Philippe in seeing what air assets could be brought into the country. He also asked me to attend the Federal Relief Commission (FRC) meeting the next day to get a preview of the Public Needs Assessment that the government of Pakistan was going to make known to the international community.

  The FRC was set up by the government of Pakistan after the earthquake to make up for the fact that there was no pre-existing National Disaster Management Authority. The FRC, headed by Major-General Farooq Ahmed Khan, had two wings, a civilian wing to deal with the civilian bureaucracy and the military wing to task the military assets in the relief operation. General Nadeem, as Vice Chief of General Staff, was in charge of the military wing. The next day, in a heavily guarded Prime Minister’s Secretariat in Islamabad, I attended the first of my many FRC meetings.

  The Prime Minister’s Secretariat is a tremendously handsome building and looked somewhat like a hotel in its architecture. It was constructed when Islamabad was created. Islamabad, like Canberra, Washington, DC and Brasilia, is a purpose-built capital city created after the Partition. The Greek architect of Islamabad, Konstantinos Doxiadis, is said to have taken part of his inspiration from Canberra.

  I used to joke with the Pakistanis that Doxiadis had designed a capital with self-contained suburbs with their own shopping centres, just like Canberra. He had designed wide streets in a city seen as “bat-shit boring”, also just like Canberra. This usually brought a chuckle to Pakistanis who had an expression that Islamabad was 16 km from Pakistan as that is how far it takes to drive to Rawalpindi. Islamabad is not a Pakistan city in the cultural sense. It is not chaotic. It is organised and clean. Living in Islamabad, one does not experience the ‘real’ Pakistan. In terms of lifestyle, Islamabad is a very easy city to get around and there is a great mix of architecture.

  At the meeting of the FRC General Farooq outlined the structure of both the civilian and military wings of the organisation he was to command. As we were walking from the FRC meeting room back to Nadeem’s temporary
office in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat he asked me for my view of the structure.

  “I don’t know, sir, it seems a bit complicated.”

  “What would you do?”

  I explained that we were implementing the experimental cluster approach and drew a diagram of it on a piece of paper. Nadeem asked if it were possible to implement something similar in the FRC. Together we thought they could. “If you did that, we would be running the experiment together. It certainly wouldn’t be imposed from outside.” Nadeem liked the concept of the clusters and the concept that it would be a joint experiment conducted by both Pakistan and the international community together. The next day at the public announcement of the FRC structure and Pakistan National Action Plan, we saw that Nadeem and Farooq had indeed implemented a synergistic structure.

  A Humanitarian/Military Alliance Relations between humanitarian workers and the military now had a clear, identifiable, and agreed structure. The military’s medical corps could liaise with the health cluster, the logistics corps with the logistics cluster and so on. As time went on the critical personal relationships between the cluster coordinator and the Pakistani civil or military counterpart became key. Also, Jan had by then been appointed Humanitarian Coordinator and with me as Chief of Operations/Cluster Coordinator, we were able to strengthen personal relations with the Federal Relief Commissioner through General Farooq and the FRC’s Head of Military Wing, General Nadeem.

  The cluster approach, implemented by both the FRC and the UN, was the one critical element that made all the countless government bodies, including the armed forces, work together with agencies and NGOs. Before then, partitions between ministries, military, civilians and internationals were seemingly impenetrable. Although it should not be the case, often the effectiveness of collaboration will depend on how strong the personal relations are between the key players. The strong interpersonal relations allowed for the creation of another key group – the Strategic Oversight Group. It also allowed us to set up similar coordinating structures in each of the field operations that we had called ‘humanitarian hubs’. In any emergency, the first two weeks are haphazard at best – and Pakistan was no exception. By the end of the second week, multiple international search and rescue teams were on the ground, augmented by the Pakistan military, with good direction by local military commanders and the UNDAC OSOCC in Muzaffarabad.