The humanitarian aid industry is big business. According to the Overseas Development Institute it was worth about $18bn (£12bn) in 2008 and employed over 300,000 people – a huge increase in recent years. Aid agencies also have growing political clout, playing a leading role in shaping foreign policies of western governments towards humanitarian crises – sometimes even helping to trigger foreign military interventions.
Yet the industry is subject to very little external scrutiny, lacks accountability and is widely believed to often do more harm than good.
There is a real need for serious discussion of the politics and ethics of humanitarian aid, but unfortunately you won't find it in Linda Polman's new book, War Games. I debated with Polman at the Frontline club last week and have no doubt that she is sincere and committed. Her previous book, We Did Nothing, is a well-written critique of various UN interventions that took place in the 90s and combines a mix of good personal anecdotes and being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time luck.
War Games covers some similar ground – in fact, there is quite a bit of repetition from the previous book – but Polman's grasp of her material seems far less sure this time.
It starts in Goma, just across the border from Rwanda, in April 1995, a year after the genocide. This relief operation is one of the ones most frequently cited in the book, spanning over 20 pages and coming up 13 times in the footnotes, although according to Polman's own account, she only spent a single day there before walking back to the border the following morning.
The operation has been one of the most extensively documented and critiqued, as it was a turning point for the humanitarian movement, and Polman draws on many of these secondary sources when discussing what went wrong and why so much international aid ended up being expropriated by the genocidaires. A large number of agencies had pulled out of the camps long before Polman arrived and her failure to acknowledge this weakens what is otherwise a fairly standard treatment of the issues.
But this is a recurring weakness of the book. Polman chucks the metaphorical kitchen sink at humanitarian aid and its workers. Each chapter has a string of anecdotes illustrating their venality, incompetence, naivety or cynicism. There does not seem to have been an expat war-zone bar or luxury hotel in which Polman has not stopped to gather evidence, eavesdropped a conversation or noted a double-standard. Yet, with the exception of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where she used to live and work, she rarely seems to have ventured into the field herself, nor does she seem particularly tuned into the debates that have taken place within and about the profession in recent years. This gives what could and should have been a really interesting book a rather insubstantial feeling.
Anyone who has ever visited the site of a major, well-publicised and well-funded humanitarian operation will know that they are characterised by waste and duplication. Anyone who has spent time in a war zone knows that aid gets diverted. This is not news.
Polman says that we should demand that aid organisations explain exactly what they are going to achieve and how. Yet rather than attempt to analyse the explanations and strategies that they have put forward over the last 15 years – many of them based directly on the experiences of the Goma operation – she seems content to remain on the abstract moral high-ground. Because life-saving aid sometimes goes to the wrong people, it would be better to give it to no one in certain situations, she opines – without seeming to have followed through the obvious ethical and moral implications. Aid prolongs wars, we are continually told, yet at no point is this assertion backed by any empirical evidence.
The research is also often just bad. In her chapter on Afghanistan, for example, she refers to civilian aircraft "climbing steeply to get beyond the range of Taliban rockets". Yet, as anyone who has ever been on such a plane would surely know, they do the exact opposite, flying terrifyingly low until they have built up sufficient speed to reduce their vulnerability.
At our debate, Polman admitted that she has never even visited a restaurant in Kabul in which she claims waitresses were "dressed in miniskirts, split to the top of their thighs, with toy guns tucked into their garters" – an allegation which could easily lead to it being targeted for a terrorist attack. She concludes this chapter by saying "just as [aid workers] do little, if anything to keep their local employees safe [they] do little to reduce the risks for aid recipients" – a remark as untrue as it is insulting.
War Games has rightly been compared to Dead Aid – although Dambisa Moyo specifically exempts humanitarian aid from her "shock therapy" proposal – and it will appeal to a similar readership. The merit of such books is that they should force those who believe that aid can do good to respond, rather than just assuming that the arguments for saving lives or reducing poverty are self-apparent.
The case for international aid has been won at the macro-political level – as shown by the cross-party consensus about Britain's aid budget – but Polman's book will tap an underlying sentiment, which should not be underestimated. The road to hell, it seems, is paved with stereotypical cliches, as well as good intentions. It would be wrong to let such arguments go by default.
Conor Foley, a humanitarian aid worker.