Crying wolf, or doing their job?

Humanitarian aid groups warned that the bombing would create an aid catastrophe -- but they've brought in far more relief since the war than before it began

By Laura Rozen

Nov. 16, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- While the citizens of Kabul cheered as the Taliban retreated from the Afghan capital this week, some humanitarian aid organizations warned that instability on the ground was hampering their efforts to reach Afghanistan's population of 5 million seriously hungry people.

"In Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people will be helplessly exposed to the elements this winter, no matter which authority sits in Kabul," said Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's fund, UNICEF, on Wednesday. "We are moving supplies every day, but we still face a very tough road ahead."

The statement echoed earlier warnings by humanitarian groups that the U.S. bombing was disrupting their efforts to truck in and distribute aid in the few short weeks before winter arrived.

"We just don't know how many people may die if the bombing is not suspended and the aid effort assured," said Oxfam's Barbara Stocking in an Oct. 17 press release calling for a U.S. bombing pause, signed by Oxfam, Islamic Relief, Christian Aid, Tearfund and ActionAid.

But aid experts say that the agencies' repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban on relief efforts have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before -- a lot more.

"More aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year," says John Fawcett, a longtime humanitarian relief worker who studies the politics of aid. "The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees -- one-tenth of what they expected, and there's been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in, because everybody's focused on the problem now."

The lead U.N. food agency, the World Food Program (WFP), has been getting 2,000 tons of food a day into Afghanistan -- up from 200 tons a day before Sept. 11, Fawcett notes. The WFP confirms that.

"The month of October was an all-time high for WFP," said Bear McConnell, the Central Asia Task Force director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at a press conference Wednesday. "They moved 29,000 metric tons of food. That is the highest month that they have ever had, whether it's before or after September. But what is even more significant, it seems to me, is this month, not yet half done, they have moved over 27,000 tons already."

Fawcett says aid groups shouldn't be criticized for sounding the alarm about Afghanistan's horrific humanitarian plight. "It's aid groups' job to cry wolf. We know that. And the WFP is doing a good job. They have been very flexible" in a situation of constant flux on the ground in Afghanistan.

"The reason we've been able to do it is, we have the food, the staff and the commercial trucks," says Abigail Spring of the World Food Program.

And they have the money. The WFP has gotten about half of $320 million President Bush pledged to support humanitarian relief efforts in Afghanistan and the surrounding region in the wake of the 11 September attacks, which the U.S. traced to Osama bin Ladin and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. The money was also disbursed to two other leading U.N. emergency organizations working on Afghanistan, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and UNICEF.

Aid groups say they aren't broadcasting their relative success, many say, because the situation remains so dire for Afghanistan's population. USAID estimates that some 5 million Afghans face serious hunger from drought, conflict and displacement, and some 1.5 million face starvation.

"The big problem we are still facing is internal distribution," says the WFP's Abby Spring. "We have been able to feed 2 million people since the crisis began. We need to feed 6 million. And we can't get to all of them because of insecurity on the ground. And thousands of people have fled to rural areas and it's hard to find them. And it's hard to get trucks of food to them."

Next page: Was the aid groups' opposition to bombing ideological?