Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges: How Foreign Aid Became a Casualty of War

321 Pages·2016·4.471 MB·English

by  Peter Gill

TODAY WE
DROP BOMBS,
TOMORROW WE
BUILD BRIDGES
Peter Gill is a journalist specialising in developing world affairs. He
has been South Asia and Middle East correspondent for the Daily
Telegraph and has travelled widely in Africa and Asia as a current
affairs reporter for ITV and the BBC. He covered the fall of Saigon
for the Daily Telegraph and made documentary films on Afghanistan
during the Soviet occupation. He led major media campaigns to
combat AIDS and leprosy in India for the BBC, and has written
four books on development themes, including a study of Oxfam’s
early work and two books on the politics of hunger in Ethiopia.
TO DAY W E
D RO P B O M B S ,
TO M O R RO W W E
B U I L D B R I D G E S
HOW FOREIGN AID
BECAME A CASUALTY
OF WAR
PETER GILL
Zed Books
LONDON
Today We Drop Bombs, Tomorrow We Build Bridges: How Foreign Aid
Became a Casualty of War was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd,
The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Peter Gill 2016
The right of Peter Gill to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by seagulls.net
Cover designed by Jonathan Pelham
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78360-123-3 hb
ISBN 978-1-78360-122-6 pb
ISBN 978-1-78360-124-0 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78360-125-7 epub
ISBN 978-1-78360-126-4 mobi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Introduction: Humanitarian Armada...................... 1
PART I: FRONT LINES
1. End of the White Saviour.......................... 11
2. Development at Gunpoint..........................30
3. Meetings with Remarkable Men..................... 51
4. Taking a Bullet for Polio ...........................70
5. Frontier Manoeuvres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90
6. Blue UN, Black UN.............................. 105
7. Delay Costs Lives ................................123
8. Acts of Faith ................................... 142
PART II: HOME FRONTS
9. With All Those Who Suffer ........................161
10. When Aid Becomes a Crime....................... 178
11. Doing Well by Doing Good ....................... 196
12. The Police, Not the Stasi ...........................213
13. Making Poverty History?.......................... 229
14. French Lessons ................................. 252
15. Running Out of Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
Conclusion: How Many Cheers for Neutrality?.............281
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .300
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My biggest debt is to the people and organisations that got me to
the places I needed to reach to be able to tell this story. At my very
first meeting in Kabul in October 2013, Benoit De Gryse, country
representative of Médecins Sans Frontières in Afghanistan, started
making the arrangements to fly me to Lashkar Gah and put me
up with the MSF team running Helmand’s provincial hospital. In
Pakistan, Dr Fayaz Ahmad, country director for Islamic Relief, was
equally helpful in acquiring the government permit I needed – and
may not otherwise have got – to travel towards the Afghan border
and see something of his agency’s work on the ground. Without
the help of Dawn Blalock Goodwin at the UN’s Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Nairobi, it is likely I
would not even have made it to Mogadishu. Her colleague Abdi
Yussuf Noor organised my stay in the city superbly. To reach the
world’s biggest refugee camp at Dadaab on the Kenya–Somalia
border, I relied on the help of Bogdan Dumitru, CARE Kenya’s
country director, and Rod Volway, CARE Canada’s director of
refugee operations.
I am grateful for many valuable introductions along the way.
Khalil Rehman, chief executive of Doctors Worldwide in Britain,
put me in touch with Syria Relief and Hand in Hand for Syria, two
brilliant British Syrian organisations whose work I witnessed on the
Turkey–Syria border. Lamees Hafeez, operations manager for Syria
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TODAY WE DROP BOMBS, TOMORROW WE BUILD BRIDGES
Relief, linked me in turn to Syrian diaspora organisations in the US.
John Penn, a former colleague with the BBC World Service Trust
(now BBC Media Action), made many useful connections for me in
Turkey. Sandrine Tiller, humanitarian adviser at MSF in London,
fixed important contacts for me and has encouraged me in this
project from the beginning. Two distinguished British aid experts
– Myles Wickstead, formerly of the Department for International
Development, and Mark Bowden, with the United Nations in
Kabul – were generous with their introductions and insights. My
thanks are also due to Ashley Jackson and Eva Svoboda at the
Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) of the Overseas Development
Institute (ODI) in London. Ashley provided me with an impressive
list of significant people to see in key countries, and both of them
tutored me through their writings in this area. In its meetings,
events and studies, the HPG leads the world in the quality of its
analysis and discussion of the contemporary humanitarian scene. A
good deal of its work is acknowledged in the book, and I want to
thank David White from its communications team for his patience
and his willingness to send me papers that I should have seen and
read in the first place.
Press offices in the aid world are as varied in their responsiveness
as they are anywhere else. Among non-government agencies, two
individuals were consistently open-minded and generous with
their help – Polly Markandya, head of communications at MSF
in London, and Martin Cottingham, media and advocacy manager
at Islamic Relief UK. Several government press officers went out
of their way to make sure I got to see the right people and got
my facts (I hope) right. I would like to thank Rebecca Gustafson,
at the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID in
Washington; Chris Kiggell, at the Department for International
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Development in London; Kevin O’Loughlin, at USAID in Kabul;
and Lloyd Jackson, at USAID in Islamabad. No one apart from me,
of course, has any responsibility for errors of fact or judgement.
Good friends were kind enough to put me up on my travels
around the aid capitals of the West. In Washington I stayed with
George and Chrissie Griffin and with Rumu Sen-Gupta and Patrick
Watkinson and family. In Geneva my hosts were Lori McDougall
and René Véron and family. Their daughter Lili generously gave up
her bedroom to me for a week. In Paris I stayed with Robin and
Merrill Christopher. I loved being with them all.
When the manuscript was finished, I shared sections of it with
aid people who had helped me along the way. It is better they remain
anonymous lest they are thought to be responsible for anything that
follows. I am nevertheless grateful to them for their inputs, including
the spotting of factual errors. It was my additional good fortune
that several leading authorities in this field were willing to read
the manuscript as a whole. My thanks are due to Sara Pantuliano,
who was already busy enough leading the ODI’s Humanitarian
Policy Group with such energy and skill; Fiona Terry, whose work
is quoted in the book and whose stance is an eloquent reminder of
the role principle should play in humanitarian affairs; and Myles
Wickstead, whose knowledge and experience of the aid world
overall is profound. Alex de Waal, at Tufts University, who has been
generous to me on past projects, was helpful in getting this one
off the ground and made a number of positive interventions along
the way. Alex is closely associated with Zed Books, whose editorial
director Ken Barlow picked up this project in 2013. I am grateful to
him for that as well as for his detailed and incisive comments on the
draft. Two very good friends, Sue Kyle and Ned Campbell, ran their
literary slide rules over the manuscript and saved me from a number
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