Guess who is coming for dinner

Reuters: Red Cross delivers food in Kabul - http://reut.rs/dIv3M4

Weary about bringing the Taliban to the table? If you were a humanitarian worker in Afghanistan, perhaps you would be more worried about not bringing the Taliban to the table. While many discuss what a reduced American presence will mean for Afghanistan’s security from 2014 on, it seems aid workers are already finding it increasingly hard to move around the country and provide their services.

Humanitarian personnel have been talking to the Taliban and other parties in conflict in order to gain access to certain regions of Afghanistan for quite a while. It is interesting -in a bad way- to notice that humanitarian negotiations with armed groups are getting more difficult lately, to the point of making the job impossible.

Elizabeth Ferris, co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, has been warning that in the past year UN workers are facing growing limitations on the areas they can deliver assistance. Certain parts of the country that were previously accessible are now off limits. Two years ago they could travel around provinces; six months ago it was only possible to move around a city; now they are lucky to reach some neighborhoods.

This affects not only service delivery but also data collection in Afghanistan.

For Reto Stocker, ICRC head of delegation in Afghanistan, one of the problems is that “armed groups and other parties to conflict seem to be proliferating”. “In our experience, it is easier to reach people in a given place when you have only two or three distinct parties to negotiate access with than when you have a different armed group for each region, district or even village”, said Stocker in an interview a little over a year ago. At the time, however, he believed that a great part of the problem of access for humanitarian agencies was tied to impartiality. When they adopted an approach that integrated humanitarian activities into the overall military and political strategy of stabilization and reconstruction, they were no longer viewed as neutral and lost the trust of the population. The roads closed down.

Whatever the reason for lack of access, humanitarian assistance is ever more needed. Ferris points out to increasing civilian casualties (the UN and NATO disagree on the data collection here) and displacement since last year. The number of refugees returning is declining; from the 6 million who did come back from exile since 2002, the vast majority never went back to their communities and became internally displaced people, adding to problems in larger cities.

“If the signs aren’t good with all this international assistance, what does the future look like when the troops are withdrawn and the Afghan government is faced with its fundamentally responsibility of protecting and assisting its own people? [It is] actually quite troubling when you look at the humanitarian dimension of what’s happening in Afghanistan”, Ferris said in a Brookings panel last week.

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) does not hide their fears for the country either, saying loud and clear that “the planned withdrawal of ISAF from Afghanistan over the next three years risks disrupting local economies and adversely affecting humanitarian and development action”.

Afghans do not have many alternatives. Unlike insurgent groups in other countries, the Taliban was never in the business of providing basic services –on the contrary, they let public services deteriorate. Maybe from the outside Afghanistan looks like a black hole for foreign resources, and it probably is. But for now help has to come from the government or from international assistance, and this topic has not been given the attention it deserves so far.

It is a sad day when we hope the Taliban will come for dinner.