Earlier this week, Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, won attention -- and praise -- for a plan to open an intelligence-training center that will allow military officers, intelligence analysts and covert agents to focus long-term on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the plan has raised eyebrows in the humanitarian community, in part because of an apparent push to gather intelligence from aid workers.
Writing at Change.org's humanitarian relief blog, Danger Room pal Michael Kleinman flags the *Washington Times *profile of Derek Harvey, the retired colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency who has been tapped to head the center. Paraphrasing Harvey, reporter Eli Lake writes that "the intelligence community tends to rely too much on information from human sources such as spies and from signal intercepts such as wiretaps, to the exclusion of reports from people on the ground such as military officers and aid workers."
I'm not sure if Lake was using "aid workers" as a shorthand for describing military-led reconstruction efforts -- the direct quote from Harvey says, "We have tended to rely too much on intelligence sources and not integrating fully what is coming from provincial reconstruction teams, civil-affairs officers, commanders and operators on the ground that are interacting with the population" -- but Kleinman may onto something. As he notes, Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has also suggested that the government needs to tap the knowledge of relief workers on the ground.
That kind of sentiment alarms aid workers and non-governmental organizations, who see neutrality as their best protection in war zones. But as Kleinman would also acknowledge, the idea of NGO neutrality is a fiction, at least in places like Afghanistan: The Taliban view foreign non-governmental organizations and aid workers as legitimate targets. Lots of aid organizations work as implementation partners for U.S.-funded schemes. And aid workers have had to think a lot differently about how they can preserve their security.
Lest there be any doubt on that point, I'd refer to the Taliban's 2006 code of conduct, which makes clear that foreign aid projects can be targeted. Kleinman refers to the murder last year of four aid workers in Logar province, but I'd go back earlier to the 2003 killing of Ricardo Munguia, a water supply worker who was working for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The death of Munguia sent a tremor through the expatriate aid community in Afghanistan, but it didn't make too many headlines: the war in Iraq was kicking off at the same time.
But the interest of the government and military types in "ground truth" from aid workers and others working in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan gets to the heart of the matter: Unarmed aid workers or civilian researchers often do have better information on what is going on in local communities. It can be a lot harder to get an accurate read on things when you show up with a rifle company.
Photo: Flickr/Todd Huffman
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