To: Kosovo Talk
From: George Kenney
Subject: Question 2 Ask anybody who has worked in traditional development assistance about how difficult it is to implement programs. By many estimates, most development aid is wasted, largely because of unintended consequences. Humanitarian relief for natural disasters is more straightforward as a set of temporary problems to solve, but relief to complex emergencies (e.g. conflict situations) rapidly becomes much more complicated.
Bosnia was a good example of how aid during the war became part of the war, because aid allowed the Sarajevo regime to allocate resources both to its military forces and to its civilian populations (without aid it could not have done both), and because aid deliveries accompanied by outside forces could be manipulated by the combatants into a sort of shield. Aid prolonged the war, and, though it may not be possible to measure, this weighs heavily against the good it produced. Similarly, aid to Somalia, once delivered into Mogadishu, became a kind of currency that funded further clan warfare.
Some, perhaps most, implementation problems for complex emergencies can be ironed out with thoughtful management. But this gets us back to the question of who is doing the intervention. And here a strange hybrid has emerged. Humanitarian-relief organizations have learned that they cannot cope with severe security problems, while the U.S. military has learned that politicians will often throw it into the breach. The result is that the humanitarian-relief industry works increasingly closely with the military to plan for and implement relief in complex emergencies. But all too often, both sides view relief as the thin end of the wedge for military intervention with political purposes. Again, Bosnia was a prime example, with Kosovo the sequel.
Whatever the motivations, this multi-billion-dollar business is politically very powerful, especially when allied with news organizations. It is essentially unsupervised, with no independent evaluation whatsoever. Its success, where that happens, is not the result of institutionalized procedures so much as the perseverance of one or a handful of brilliant individuals.
Looked at through this lens, I do think humanitarian interventions can work in certain situations. Probably an intervention in Rwanda would have worked, at least in the short run, to avert disaster. Somalia done differently, with aid off-loaded away from Mogadishu (we have instant-port capabilities), might have worked. Bosnia, I think, could not have worked in this sense unless a military intervention had disarmed the combatants and brought a cease-fire. But intervention on that scale would have created its own problems. Kosovar refugees can be ministered to on an emergency basis, but if a longer-term solution involves a ground war, their welfare again becomes problematic.
To generalize from recent history, it seems that relief to complex emergencies has occurred in failed states or portions of states where state structures broke down. Kosovo is a significant departure -- the first instance of forced humanitarian relief in a complex emergency to an intact, sovereign state that does not want to receive it. In this case the difficulties multiply geometrically, not least because relief is inseparable from political goals (however vague). If, after the fact, Kosovo is branded a "success," it will spawn repeat performances. If it turns into a huge catastrophe, it will become merely the exception to the rule of remaining in gray areas where sovereignty does not matter.
