A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  Despite the growing structures, logistical problems were a mounting nightmare. Many mountainsides had collapsed, meaning that roads had slid away and simply ceased to exist. Helicopters were vital. The Pakistan military stock of helicopters was insufficient to deal with the massive needs, even augmented by US military support. The UN had been able to initiate a handful of helicopters, but even as funds began to trickle in, poor and slow donor response meant that few could be leased. Early estimates assumed a need for more than 100 helicopters – which would make this the largest helicopter aid airlift in history.

  While local military, international and spontaneous national groups were doing all they could for emergency medical evacuation, aid deliveries and rescue, what was still missing in those early days was a strong central direction. Given that no functioning National Disaster Management Authority existed, and given that the military was set up to deal with conflict not aid, the urgent need for the newly created Federal Relief Commission grew. In the meantime the army continued its role.

  Two organisations not used to co-operating are an active military and a sceptical humanitarian world – especially in sensitive zones. Prior to the earthquake in Pakistan only a handful of foreigners were allowed by Pakistani authorities to access Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The Line of Control was sensitive, with major exchanges of artillery between India and Pakistan a fairly frequent occurrence. Most major governments, including Britain, USA and Australia – the national homes to many aid workers – had travel advisories recommending against travel to Kashmir. The North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which shared the force of the earthquake with Kashmir in almost equal measure, was known as conservative, and was thought by some to be a potential hiding place for Osama bin Laden.

  It was only in 2011 that we realised how accurate that suspicion was. The compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed is 500 metres from the accommodation tents used at the UN helicopter hub in Abbottabad. Travel advisories also recommended against foreign travel in this zone. In such difficult areas the military can be understandably hesitant to open up controlled areas to a host of poorly regulated and loosely aligned foreigners as part of a large and disparate group known as ‘aid workers’.

  Aid workers, for their part, often have deep institutional mistrust of the military. In many countries ‘army’ does not mean ‘professional organised force’; rather it might describe a 12-year-old boy, drugged and carrying a Kalashnikov. Although this is clearly not the case in Pakistan, institutionally many organisations find it impossible to work closer than at arm’s length with the military. Added to this, the requirements of earmarked funding, mandates, and principles of neutrality and independence, mean that many institutions, and many individual aid workers, have never worked, or ever want to work, with the military. What had become clear was that the huge area of the earthquake required the establishment of several field coordination hubs. We ended up creating four of these in Manshera, Battagram, Bagh and Muzaffarabad. In each we would need to replicate the cluster system and in each we would need to foster the creation of the interpersonal relations between the international community and the military. While in Islamabad we concentrated on the coordination at the high level with the government, the really hard and dirty work was being done by our colleagues in the forward field hubs.

  Early on, Nadeem and I took a Pakistan army helicopter and flew to each of the field coordinating hubs and held meetings jointly with the NGOs, UN agencies and local military commanders. Nadeem was a pilot and I was to spend many flights on-board helicopters with him during the two and a half years I was in the country. This relationship was unusual. Some look back today and are tempted to think that the strong relationships and inter-operability between international NGOs and the Pakistan military was ‘normal’. In those early field meetings, military commanders were suspicious of the foreign aid workers, and likewise the foreign aid workers of the military. Many aid workers had deployed from emergency settings in Darfur or other conflict environments where close collaboration with the military can be dangerous. It was initially a very difficult task to convince the humanitarians and the military that these two worlds could make good collaborating partners. Nadeem and I set about creating a framework for a collaboration. He had the authority simply to instruct the army officers that they had to attend the humanitarian hub cluster meetings and had to participate in full honesty and transparency. In the first meeting in Muzaffarabad he said, “If I get a piece of information from an NGO and conflicting information from the military, I will believe the NGO, so you’d better collaborate with them.” When a statement like that comes from the Vice Chief of General Staff in an army like Pakistan’s, it’s not a suggestion, it’s a command.

  I couldn’t match the strength of Nadeem for many reasons. As Chief of Operations for OCHA I had, at best, persuasive authority and no command authority. I said that the United Nations endorsed the program and requested the NGOs to do the same. It was weak and limp in comparison to Nadeem, but it was all I had. What began to develop throughout each of the field operating hubs was a series of partnerships between the health cluster coordinator locally and the local military commander in charge of health. Same for the logistics, food, water and all of the other clusters. By the end of the operation many people would look back upon friendships made between foreign NGOs and Pakistan military officers that would last for life, but the relationships were built over time and based on trust that had to be earned.

  After about two weeks we had some structures in place that could do some real work. It had been more than a week since the flash appeal had been launched and not enough funds were coming in. UNHCR had expended almost all its emergency reserves, as had WHO, UNICEF, IFRC and other major organisations. Crunch time was coming so a small group of selected people in addition to cluster coordinators met in the basement of the World Food Programme (WFP) office in Islamabad to discuss a couple of ideas.

  WFP is the cluster lead for logistics as they have an enormous capacity to move food around the world. The WFP head of emergency operations had come from Rome, bringing with him ideas, wine and prosciutto ham! These were a fine addition to a planning meeting. We did what most people did in a crisis. We gathered at the WFP office, drank wine, ordered pizza and then discussed each cluster area, one by one.

  Priorities were re-examined and advice generated. With no money coming in, this informal group put more detail on the contingency plan that would have seen the almost complete withdrawal of the UN from operational work, restricting itself to technical advice only. We also considered asking the Pakistan authorities to fund the vital UN helicopters out of bilateral funds provided by the government of Saudi Arabia. Without more funds or an alternative source of revenue we were only days away from grounding, let alone expanding, the helicopter fleet.

  At this meeting the OCHA 80/20 strategy was semi-formalised – agreed in Islamabad and not at headquarters in Geneva. In general terms, it was thought that the Pakistan military would probably deliver 80 per cent of relief goods, and the humanitarian world maybe 20 per cent. These figures were not scientific; they were a rough guess based on the huge resources the Pakistan army was putting into the earthquake relief. At the high point nearly 70,000 soldiers were involved. In many cases it was hard to differentiate who delivered what. If goods were carried on UN helicopter to Muzaffarabad and then carried up the hill by the Pakistan military, who delivered it? Answer – both did. That was the strength of the program.

  But if we were to and improve the knowledge and skill base of the Pakistan army to deliver the 80 per cent in the most effective way, then they had to be willing to learn a whole new lexicon of language based on humanitarian operations – not military operations. If weapons’ calibres, rates of fire and muzzle velocity are unknown concepts to the humanitarians, ‘earmarked funding’, ‘feeding supplements’ and ‘sphere standards’ are unknown to the military. As we neared the end of the substantive part of our meeting the phrase ‘humanitarian
ising the military planning process’ became part of our vocabulary.

  In the early days, without the benefit of assured, available funding, other decisions also had to be taken. In conjunction with the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, an aggressive media strategy to raise awareness of the funding situation including a countdown of days left for helicopter funding, then less than seven, was made public, as was a call for tents, tents and more tents.

  I did a live interview on BBC World Service that night, saying: “The humanitarian community here is underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars. To be frank, I just don’t think the world gets it. We have one of the best organised relief operations here and we are just not getting the funding. If the second wave of deaths hits, it is the major donors that are going to have to look at themselves in the mirrors – and ask, why?

  “There are more than 15,000 villages and towns in the affected region and many of them are going to be cut off from around about 1 December because of the decreasing snow line.”

  At this point in the interview I became quite emotional.

  “We – we have such a short time to be able to give assistance to the most vulnerable. This is not the time for people to be penny-pinching.”

  The emotion in the interview summed up the feelings of many within the operation. We had done a really good job in setting up a coordinating framework and structure, and a great collaborative partnership with the Pakistan military that would actually work. More importantly, we had set field operational hubs so that the strategic decisions made in Islamabad could be implemented through effective collaboration and co-operation mechanisms in each of the field hubs. Before long, this mechanism would enable the main focus of the operations to shift to the field operations where the needs were, from Islamabad, and allow the capital to evolve into a supporting function that would ensure the on-going strategic operational framework. It was after that interview that perhaps coincidentally money started to come

  – but only just in time. We were literally only a matter of hours from grounding the entire United Nations helicopter fleet.

  The UNDAC team expanded after the initial two weeks, establishing four ‘humanitarian hubs’ in Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Battagram and Mansehra

  – each with a civil/military liaison officer provided by OCHA in Geneva. The objective here was to increase and facilitate interaction between the military and the civilian world at the field level.

  At the Islamabad level the UN designated an experienced civil/military liaison officer to facilitate contacts with the Pakistani military, and the newly established Federal Relief Commission. In essence the ‘dirty laundry’ of the aid community was shared in order for the military to understand where the strengths, weaknesses and boundaries of the relationships would lie. Another key partnership developed. As helicopters became more important, and numbers became available, air coordination became critical. Eventually more than 100 helicopters filled tight valleys, making air-traffic control and flight tasking difficult.

  Three key actors, the Pakistan Army Air Wing, the UN Humanitarian Air Service, and the US Navy combined to formulate the air relief operation. Each of the air assets was combined into a common pool, tasked by its particular capacity, the cargo it carried and where it needed to go.

  It is only when we look back, with the current discussions of difficult inter-operability between United States and Pakistani military forces in mind, that we can fully understand the power of the collaboration that was achieved in the Air Operations Cell. Indeed, near the end of the operation, the United States for only the second time in its military history, gave up control over its assets. They did so due to the faith and confidence the US had in the operation of the AOC.

  What started off on paper as two unlikely allies, the humanitarians and the military, developed the potential to become a strong, united team – with two strong provisos: The disparity of funding and some personal mistrust between individual military and humanitarian personnel. The second of these worked out over time, with a lot of effort by the Pakistani leadership to ‘sell’ the humanitarians to the military, and by UNDAC and OCHA to likewise ‘sell’ the military to the humanitarians. While bonds were strengthening centrally, military and humanitarian actors worked increasingly well at the field operational level. The cluster coordination mechanism put in place at Islamabad was replicated in the field hubs, with all parties seeking to work through the natural distrust that military had with humanitarians, and vice versa, until strong relationships were built.

  Gerhard made the decision that he and Arjun would leave after the first three weeks (after the initial search and rescue had been completed and coordination structures established for the relief operation) but that I would remain until at least the end of the year.

  Operation Winter Race Three weeks after the earthquake the initial search and rescue phase was winding down. Hope of finding new survivors decreased. The coordination mechanisms were beginning to work. A National Action Plan was launched by the FRC but an enormous problem loomed: there were 3.5 million people without shelter and only 30–40 days before the Himalayan winter was due to strike. High-altitude villagers were beginning to migrate down the valleys and it was important to stop them or huge camps would coalesce around destroyed urban centres. With little flat land to spare, camps would have huge population densities, disease would spread and thousands could die.

  If on the other hand people stayed in their villages, they would have no home, no food and no chance of survival. Thousands could die. When the relief operation began most tents were not designed with extra protection and flaps for the cold. For most people, the words ‘winter’ and ‘camping’ don’t normally go together. Almost every available winterised tent was sent to Pakistan, but there weren’t enough. Half a million tents minimum would be needed; less than 40,000 were thought to have existed in the world. The Chinese who make the best, increased production of winterised tents and donated 50,000 to Pakistan, but that still left hundreds of thousands of families, more than 2 million people, potentially without adequate shelter. Although people could survive in the lower altitudes with a standard tent, those at high levels were in deep peril. A dozen ideas were offered as a solution to the high-altitude homeless problem. One was ‘Paniflex’, a Pakistani product used for advertising billboards. This product is a heavy-duty plastic that advertising is fused onto, and discarded once the advertisement has run. It could not be re-used as advertising, but it could be used as an emergency tent covering. In the early days of the relief effort one would fly over the earthquake-affected region and be confronted by advertising for anything from soap to motorcycles. Paniflex would put but a small dent in the problem. We had a major crisis.

  The OCHA office in Islamabad was staffed by a couple of UN employees like me, and had been augmented by a large number of volunteer interns from universities in Islamabad, as well as staff that we were hiring locally with the assistance of UNDP. A brilliant young girl named Ammarah Mubarak had been allocated to assist me from the start. She came to simply call me ‘Chief’. I smile when I hear in my own mind the cry of ‘Chiiiiieeeeffff’ echoing through the hallways. Ammarah brought one of the young male interns to me who said, “You are not using our brains.”

  I replied to him, “Of course we aren’t.”

  The reason we didn’t use interns in that way is because they had another critical, albeit menial task. When arriving in an unusual country like Pakistan interns are very useful for letting us know the basic stuff. Where do you buy paper? Where do you buy pens? Where do you get telephones connected? Where do you buy food? Which restaurants can you trust to eat at? Which ones wouldn’t you trust? There are a lot of normal day to day things that one needs to find out about a country when one first arrives. In an emergency, we simply didn’t have the time to find this information out for ourselves. Interns are good for that.

  This young man was insistent. He wanted me to put him to work on something significant.

  “Okay,
if you want to use your brain, here is a dilemma. We have 3.5 million people homeless. We are running out of money. These people are disbursed through difficult geographic terrain, have had their homes destroyed and are running out of food. We are considering a plan of forced evacuations from high altitude to low-altitude displaced persons camps, but if we run out of money and cannot run helicopters how would we do that?”

  Much to my surprise he returned the next day to say that he thought he had a solution. He told me of a former Navy Seal (US special forces) from the United States who made his own way to Kashmir and was showing villagers how to construct ‘one warm room’ from the rubble of destroyed houses. The earthquake did not vaporise building supplies, it merely collapsed them. The idea of instructing and encouraging people to build an emergency shelter to last them through the winter was an idea with some merit. If this worked we had a much cheaper option of delivering food to the people, not people to the food.

  This young intern said that he could get this Navy Seal to come in for a meeting. In the intern walked with the former professional surfer, Bgrade movie star and former trainee for the Navy Seals. Matthew George made an appearance with two small models of A-framed designs that he thought could be used to build shelters throughout the earthquake-affected region from the rubble of homes. After he had presented his models and descriptions of emergency one warm room concepts, Matt Hollingworth and Philippe oversaw a pilot trial with one helicopter sent into a village to do a rapid assessment of the housing material needs, then a second called forward with equipment and personnel. The second helicopter would offload material and demonstrate the building of one A-frame house that could house a family and be architecturally more stable in the area prone to aftershocks.