Special report on the humanitarian challenge ahead

In response to the UN Secretary-General’s appeal, some US $737 million has been committed by donor nations, the bulk from the US and Japan, for emergency aid to Afghanistan. The speed and scale of the response prompted a UN official in Islamabad to call it "nothing short of amazing".

Equally remarkable will be the effective distribution of this aid to those Afghan civilians who are in dire need of it. The scale of the crisis - with 5.5 million dependent on food aid inside Afghanistan and a further 2 million likely to be so soon - is virtually unprecedented. Aid agencies are now faced with the daunting task of providing life-saving assistance to a stranded and inaccessible population twice the size of New Zealand's.

Responding to a potential refugee influx into Pakistan and Iran will also be fraught with problems. Anti-US protests and obstruction of relief preparations in the northwestern Tribal Areas of Pakistan has prompted UNHCR to call for safer refugee sites. In Iran, the authorities report difficulties with the Taliban movement in establishing camps along the border.

Afghanistan

According to UN sources, US $301 million has been raised in response to the donor alert appeal, US $28 million has been committed separately, mainly to NGOs, and a further US $406 million has been verbally pledged.

Despite this significant sum, relief officials told IRIN they remained "daunted" by the scale of the challenge. Aid workers familiar with Afghanistan warn that food and other relief assistance must reach parts of the country, such as the central highlands, in the coming weeks before winter sets in. This must be done against a backdrop of ongoing attacks by the US-led coalition and an imminent offensive by the opposition Northern Alliance, with international staff relocated outside of the country, and a communications blackout with national staff inside.

In this context, Chris Kaye, head of the programme section for the UN Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan, found it hard to be positive. "There are so many variables at this stage that setting out answers may be futile at the moment. I think that the next few days may prove to be a watershed as to what extent we will be able to operate - at least in Pakistan," he said.

Andrew Wilder, field office director for Save the Children-US (SC-US), told IRIN on Thursday that the operating environment was difficult, but not impossible. "Instead of focusing on the difficulties, we need to concentrate on creative ways on how we can do more," he said. Wilder said food had been getting into the country, even at times when deliveries had been officially suspended.

"Our main concern is what happens if there is a collapse of law and order in the country," he said. Although it had not happened yet, the situation is tense in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, Balkh Province.

Meanwhile, Wilder said that SC-US was expanding its activities in the drought-affected northern province of Faryab to assist 400,000 people in the most vulnerable districts. Edible oil and beans from Turkmenistan for 180,000 people were being transported this week to complement WFP wheat, he added.

After a suspension of its operations, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced on Wednesday that an accelerated campaign of overland food deliveries into Afghanistan from neighbouring countries was planned. A WFP spokesman, Francesco Luna, said there was 9,022 mt of food inside Afghanistan and 45,535 mt in the neighbouring countries, transported with the help of commercial trucks. However, aid workers point out that the onward distribution from the warehouses to the beneficiaries, usually done through partner NGOs, needs to be rapidly re-established.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) spokesman in Islamabad, Diderik Van Halsema, told IRIN on Monday he was not surprised that activities had been suspended. "This is a difficult period because of insecurity. Future aid [into the country] depends on how the conflict will develop," he said, adding that the situation was looking grim.

Despite this, MSF has been able to pre-position enough supplies for its medical and nutritional centres, which continue to function with national staff.

Aid activities have been seriously compromised by the Taliban commandeering UN and NGO offices. In the latest incident, UN spokeswoman in Islamabad, Stephanie Bunker, told reporters on Wednesday, the Taliban had taken over and looted the UNOCHA office in Mazar-e Sharif. The impounding of high-frequency radios by the authorities had also deprived aid agencies of vital communications with national staff.

One aid official in Islamabad told IRIN on Thursday that the ability to deliver sufficient assistance to Afghans in the coming weeks before winter depended largely on the outcome of the hostilities. "In areas where the Taliban are in control, we are going to have limited access - especially as they may be siphoning off aid destined for civilians to feed their soldiers," he said.

Another aid worker based in Islamabad argued that little significant aid could be delivered at present. "It's totally impossible to work in Afghanistan now. Anybody who claims that they can run a credible aid operation in Taliban areas is deluding themselves. The capacity of this approach is not 20 percent of what we were previously doing, and we need to double our efforts," he said. He told IRIN that the international community needed to take the initiative and establish "safe havens" before a collapse of the Taliban led to chaos and anarchy.

"Afghans do not want a vacuum again," he said. Rather than wait for this to happen, the official recommended coordinating with local authorities and communities inside the country in order to create security zones in which humanitarian relief could be delivered safely.

"Afghans are sticking to the Taliban until there is a viable alternative. Many Afghans do not want to be left with the Taliban or jihad-style commanders that are now presenting themselves in Peshawar," he said.

This view was recently echoed in an article published in the 'Washington Post' by Patricia Grossman, a professor at Georgetown University. The article advocated the establishment of an interim authority alongside local authorities before a possible collapse of the Taliban movement led to a power vacuum in the country.

"Moderate Taliban and Northern Alliance commanders who have been disgusted by the abuses of their leaders have been quietly urging the UN to take a proactive role and not repeat the mistakes of the past that left Afghanistan to political chaos," the article said.

Such a process cannot not wait for a military solution. "It must be supported now before the collapse of the Taliban leaves a political vacuum that others opposed to peace will rush to fill. Only by allying with Afghans who have local legitimacy can there be a long-lasting solution to the endless cycle of war and terror," the article warned.

Leslie Omquist, UN Regional Coordinator for southern Afghanistan, remained sceptical about working directly with local shuras (consultative assemblies) instead of the de facto authorities. In areas where local authority was fluid, Omquist said trying to change interlocutors could be extremely dangerous for aid staff.

"The reality is that we need to work with whoever is in control, whether we like it or not," he said. Instead, the challenge was to concentrate on the mode of delivery. "We cannot make it risk-free, but we can try and make it as safe as possible," he added.

Pakistan and Iran

Meanwhile, aid agencies in Pakistan are also facing difficulties due to mass anti-US protests across the country. UNHCR reported that progress in preparing camp sites for a possible major influx of refugees was halted for a third day on Wednesday due to demonstrations. "There is going to be a crisis if we can't get into these areas to start work on the sites," the UNHCR spokesman in Islamabad, Yusuf Hassan, told reporters.

Initially, the refugee agency said camp preparations would take 10 days; however, there now seems to be no way of knowing when the sites will be ready. "It is too difficult to know how long it will take until the situation changes," Hassan said. He explained that the fragile security situation had "drastically limited the freedom of movement of UNHCR international staff".

The offices of several international and local relief agencies were reportedly attacked and ransacked earlier during the week in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders eastern Afghanistan. Offices of the Women's and Children's Welfare Organisation, the Saalik Welfare Organisation and a community-based hospital were set on fire in the NWFP, according to Amnesty International.

The UNICEF office in the southwestern Baluchistan Province was burned, and some of its vehicles were set alight. Two other UN offices, including UNHCR, had windows smashed by anti-West protesters, of whom between 10,000 and 15,000 were believed to be out on the streets.

The BBC reported that three people were killed in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, on Tuesday during protests, after police opened fire on a crowd of people who tired to storm a police station. One person was also killed on Monday.

On Thursday, Amnesty International called on the Pakistani security forces and the leaders of groups organising protests to exercise restraint and show respect for the human rights of civilians. "Protests planned for Friday must not result in the loss of more life - both security personnel and protest organizers must do their utmost to avoid bloodshed," a statement issued by Amnesty International said.

UN officials said they had met government officials and expressed concern over the week's events, calling for greater security for UN staff to enable them to go on working when the race against time started. Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, warned demonstrators on Wednesday. "We will not tolerate any extremists' activities aimed at damaging national assets or national interest," he said. He added that any Afghans refugees found to be involved in pro-Taliban demonstrations would be deported. He said, however, that law and order in the country were not under threat.

As a security precaution UN staff have been asked to stay away from offices which could be targeted, hampering relief efforts even further.

UNHCR has identified some 30 sites in the NWFP and four in Baluchistan Province on the border with the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, the capital of which is the spiritual headquarters of the Taliban. The UN estimates up to a million Afghans fleeing US-led strikes could end up in Pakistan, even though the border is closed, as US-led strikes on the Taliban and terrorist training camps across Afghanistan continue.

Meanwhile, Refugees International (RI) has raised concerns over security problems facing relief agencies in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, if camps are set up there. An RI statement said aid workers feared that many of the local people were Taliban supporters and hostile to relief agencies. It claims that not only are many of the proposed camps "potentially dangerous" but many are also difficult to reach and have a lack of water supply.

RI called on the Pakistani government to immediately designate potential sites further away from the border and outside the Tribal Areas. Pakistan and Iran are home to the biggest Afghan refugee communities in the world, and both have maintained that they can no longer bear the burden.

A report by the Forum for Early Warning and Early Response (FEWER), released on Tuesday, has warned that Musharraf's decision to side with the US-led coalition could so infuriate the country’s ultra-Islamic groups as to draw the country to the brink of civil war.

In Iran, aid workers said getting food into Afghanistan was daunting. "It's worse than Somalia has ever been, and more difficult than Sudan," the WFP country representative in Iran, Marius de Gaay Fortman, told IRIN in an earlier report. He said they were being confronted with almost a "quadrupling of the requirements", day by day.

The Iranian news agency, IRNA, quoted officials in the eastern Khorasan Province as saying the Taliban had stopped them from setting up camps for Afghans near the Iran-Afghan border. The director for the Iranian Red Crescent in the province said they were blocked from setting up camps in the Qaen (33.44N 59.12E) and Tayyebat (34.35N 60.47E) regions. The news agency reported that four camps were open to refugees located in Salehabad (35.42M 61.06N), Sangan (35.08M 59.27E), Gazik (33.00N 60.17N) and Nehbandan (31.33N 60.04E), all on Iran's eastern border with Afghanistan.