NGO Naiveté: The Need To Be Necessary

This week, am asking people I respect a tremendous amount to weigh in on some of the more contentious humanitarian issues, everything from the costs and benefits of advocacy to the question of neutrality and legitimacy.

Today, our man in N'Djamena takes a look at humanitarian hypocrisy (or willful naivete), especially when it comes to issues of neutrality and legitimacy.

For musings from this week's other contributors, see here.

The death of Michael Bhatia [ed. - killed in Afghanistan last year] and the bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad in 2003 (as well as Algeria) are most certainly part of the same continuum, which is a direct result of NGOs and the UN being distinctly partial and with explicit political aims (whether social or governmental).

In terms of statebuilding I would call it a civil-military convergence: all actors support an agenda and order led by a government (Afghan, Iraqi) that is militarily opposed by a rebel/insurgent movement.

In this sense we all act within a political space which is violently contested. And then we are suprised when people get killed: as you said [in a previous blog post], to not factor this analysis into operational planning is in fact negligent.  The first lawsuit lodged against an NGO/UN by a bereaved relative would be a highly interesting acid test of the presumption to impartiality and neutrality.

Western educated NGO workers don't understand the basic truth that their dreams of democracy are not a universal idealism - to the Taliban an Islamic state is an equally, if not more, powerful idealism, and just as self-evident: the way of the prophet is the highest form of morality, and from that view we are not only infidels but political opposition.

Discussions of legitimacy, regarding for example democratization or the humanitarian enterprise, don't take into account realist logic. He who controls the people controls the land. And from there we go to hearts and minds, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, armed escorts, IEDs and NGO workers being executed by the side of the road.

To me it is clear, but I think too many of our number are hung up on their need to be a humanitarian, to be right and just and ultimately, to be necessary. For all our chanting about the finery of democracy we don't seem to handle either freedom of speech or pluralism very well. Most of what I came across in Afghanistan and elsewhere was nothing but shallow dogmatism, careerism and experience seeking. Hardly the stuff of which new worlds are built.

[Photo of the Taliban from Roger Lemoyne/ Liaison / dailymail.co.uk]