Deep Field (13 page)
In an African context, this portrayal—while true—had troubling repercussions. In the West, Africa was increasingly seen as an ongoing humanitarian crisis in itself, only newsworthy when there was ‘another’ major humanitarian catastrophe affecting hundreds of thousands of people. People noticeably talked about events ‘in Africa’ rather than naming the countries or contexts in which they occurred, overlooking regional differences, languages, cultures or other specificities. More frightening still was the language of barbarism that continued to underpin liberal concern about conflicts on the continent. ‘Why are African conflicts so brutal?’ asked a well-meaning friend, suggesting that there was a unique level of violence not experienced elsewhere—a kind of amnesia about the brutality of European history hidden behind the apparent order of wealthy societies.
This kind of thinking informed equally simplistic views about African conflicts: that they could be easily resolved through the intervention of ‘capable’ Western forces (Romeo Dallaire, commander of UN forces in Rwanda, propagated the myth that 5000 trained and equipped Western troops could have stopped the genocide); that conflicts are based on supposedly ancient ethnic and tribal tensions; and that development could be guided by the supposedly benign tutelage of Western aid agencies. ‘Buy a goat,’ runs the fundraising message associated with so many aid agencies, and you can ‘solve world poverty’. There was more than a grain of truth in the observation of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, about ‘those professional friends of the African who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of the ignorant savage so that they can monopolize the office of interpreting his mind and speaking for him’.
A problem for humanitarian agencies working in conflict arises because they are often seen—and encourage people to see them—as bearers of a moral or ethical flame. They carry the weight of moral expectation from their donors and the engaged citizens of wealthier countries who genuinely want to see an end to conflict or a focus on long-term investment to reduce poverty. Yet in conflicts these agencies have limited, if any, scope or authority to do more than provide basic humanitarian services that will not ultimately affect the political or economic causes of war.
Some agencies, like Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), use public denunciation to influence policies that their operational activities cannot. Others, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with its hallowed tradition of Swiss neutrality, place priority on access to vulnerable people and so will only rarely comment publicly on the political motives that cause war and destruction. Along with private advocacy, the Red Cross pursues a narrower humanitarian agenda to try, against the odds, to ensure that civilians receive emergency life-saving assistance and are not targeted by any of the armed forces in a conflict. In a legal nicety, the ICRC therefore supports the Rome Statute (the basis in international law for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes genocide and crimes against humanity). The ICRC has a special exemption from appearing before the court itself or providing trial evidence based on the conduct of the conflicts in which it works. Unlike more advocacy-based assistance organisations, it supports the law but not the lawyers and judges who administer it or the invariable political consequences of the court’s decisions.
It is in conflict situations that the humanitarian ideal runs into the most difficulty. Some have argued that humanitarianism is beginning to take the place of ideology in a post–Cold War world infatuated with international law and other technocratic solutions to complex political, ethical and historical problems. In the past, activists have sought to change society radically for the better: to gain independence; to afford rights, protection and representation; to ensure justice and equality before the crushing wheels of the market or the majority. Humanitarianism, in its proper form, does none of these things—it only attempts to make things less worse. It is an extension of, and an improvement upon, the condescending but still prevalent concept of charity. For many NGOs and in university courses, the term ‘humanitarianism’ is magically imbued with the rump of liberal causes and ideas. In this view, humanitarian action can somehow promote human rights, stop wars, and further social justice. Although it touches on all of these things, humanitarianism is a practice—often a technical and technocratic response to people with immediate life-preserving needs. It cannot change the political, social, and cultural landscape in which humanitarian action takes place, no matter how appalling the situation. It is the provision of band-aids magnified to the thousandth degree. In some cases this is sufficient. But in many, if not most, situations humanitarian action falls woefully short of the moral, political and financial commitments needed to preserve life, dignity and the environment in the longer term. Humanitarian work is a limited mechanism that is often overburdened with expectations of a solution that it simply cannot provide. Something that becomes even more problematic when, as in Afghanistan, almost all of the relief agencies (with the exceptions of MSF and the ICRC) were entirely funded by the governments of the belligerent powers.
On Pakistan Day, August 2007, I escaped from the confinement of our ring-fenced office where the pressures of work and the cautions of overzealous security officers had us imprisoned in ‘lockdown’. Public holidays, religious festivals, meetings and gatherings of any sort—even Friday afternoon prayers—sent the ex-marine security officers from the UN Department of Safety and Security into paroxisms of fear. We were told to ‘reduce our profile’, take down flags and markings, park cars in the ‘go’ position, and for days and weeks on end we could not leave the secure compound with its high concrete walls and sleeping guards. Often alone in the office and annoyed by these restrictions, which I felt were completely unjustified, I made it my daily task to breach protocol in some way. At first this was a short lunchtime walk around the neighbourhood, which soon developed into chats with the local shop owners and an occasional game of street cricket. During lockdown, colleagues would sometimes come—strictly against orders—to keep me company and to continue to work in the best way we could, until finally Pakistan Day drew near and I was presented with an offer I could not refuse.
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.’