HUMANITARIAN CRISIS: Aid agencies adapt to new reality By RICHARD MCGREGOR
Kept awake by a dose of snuff, and the odd pipe of hashish, Rahat Ullah drove for almost 24 hours straight from Kabul back to Pakistan on Friday after unloading his latest truckload of emergency food aid in the Afghan capital.
The US bombing campaign was no impediment for this swarthy, three-decade veteran of the rough, Pakistan-Afghanistan trucking route.
"We're used to such problems - we are not afraid of thieves and snakes, and other such things," he said, resting at the end of his trip at a United Nations food depot outside Peshawar.
The nonchalance of Rahat Allah, and scores of other truckers ferrying food across the border, is a reminder that the much touted humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is not turning out as aid agencies and non- government organisations (NGOs) had expected.
They predicted that as many as 1.5m refugees would flee from Afghanistan into Pakistan and Iran because of the war, and that transport of emergency food provisions would be blocked.
Instead, the crisis has unfolded in reverse, with food for the most part getting in, while few refugees have been coming out.
Using four transport corridors, though Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, the UN World Food Program (WFP) sent 20,000 tonnes of provisions into Afghanistan in the first 10 days of November. A fifth corridor, through Uzbekistan, is about to be opened.
Despite an intensification of the bombing, the food sent in the first week of November matches the amount trucked in by the WFP during the whole of last month. "We have met our target so far in November of sending in 2,000 tonnes of food a day," a WFP spokeswoman said yesterday.
The masses of refugees, too, have failed to materialise, with only an estimated 130,000 Afghans crossing into Pakistan and Iran since September 11
In part, this is because both countries have refused to open their borders, despite pressure from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and aid agencies.
Instead of refugees, Afghanistan now has hundreds of thousands of "displaced people", who have fled their homes, but remain inside the country. There is no accurate estimate of exactly how many.
The aid agencies are struggling to adjust their plans to this new situation before the arrival of winter later this month, by sending into Afghanistan the supplies they had stockpiled on the borders for the expected wave of refugees. But that has created a dilemma for many aid workers, who worry that the makeshift camps inside Afghanistan are being run by the Taliban and sometimes used by them to hide, or rest, combatants, and store weapons.
The British agency, Islamic Relief, was one of the first to break ranks, with Skandar Ali, its country director, leaving at the weekend for a tour of Afghanistan to assess how many displaced people there were, and what they needed.
"He was the first guy who said: 'Why are we wasting our time waiting for refugees? We need to do our work inside Afghanistan'," Faisal Gilani, a spokesman for Islamic Relief, said last night. Mr Gilani said it was impossible to know what role the Taliban was playing in the new communities of displaced people "until we do a survey of what's happening in the country".
Mr Ali will be visiting one camp, at Spin Boldak, which the Pakistani press has reported will be used by the Taliban as its new information centre, following the restrictions placed last week on the press briefings in Pakistan.
However, other aid workers say they fear their impartiality in the conflict could be damaged if they supported camps controlled by the Taliban.
"It's a moral dilemma providing assistance in camps where the Taliban is recruiting people to fight," said the head of one international "All of a sudden, you could become involved in assisting combatants in a military conflict."
With the intense global focus on Afghanistan, the UN in particular is under great pressure to head off any humanitarian disaster.
Such ethical dilemmas do not enter the equation for the truck drivers taking convoys of food into Afghanistan, although they admit to being ready for the time when their safety could be threatened.
"We don't carry guns in our trucks," said one driver who called himself "Commander Thunder". "But we can easily get a free gun in Afghanistan if we want one."