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2001
AMERICA'S ASSISTANCE TO THE AFGHAN PEOPLE
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
NOVEMBER 1, 2001
Serial No. 107–62
Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/international—relations
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa
DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey
DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California
PETER T. KING, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
AMO HOUGHTON, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
RICHARD BURR, North Carolina
JOHN COOKSEY, Louisiana
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
RON PAUL, Texas
NICK SMITH, Michigan
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania
DARRELL E. ISSA, California
ERIC CANTOR, Virginia
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JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
BRIAN D. KERNS, Indiana
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
TOM LANTOS, California
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
BRAD SHERMAN, California
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
JIM DAVIS, Florida
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
BARBARA LEE, California
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
GRACE NAPOLITANO, California
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ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., Staff Director/General Counsel
ROBERT R. KING, Democratic Staff Director
ADOLFO FRANCO, Counsel
LIBERTY DUNN, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
WITNESSES
The Honorable Andrew Natsios, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Andrew Wilder, Field Office Director for Afghanistan/Pakistan, Save the Children
The Honorable Alan Kreczko, Acting Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, U.S. Department of State
Kenneth Bacon, President, Refugees International
Charles MacCormack, President, Save the Children
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LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
The Honorable Henry J. Hyde, a Representative in Congress from the State of Illinois, and Chairman, Committee on International Relations: Prepared statement
Map of Afghanistan entitled ''Per Capita Energy Available from Various Sources of Income Compared to the Annual Energy Requirement'' supplied by the Honorable Andrew Natsios
Chart entitled ''Afghanistan Cross Border Food Delivery'' supplied by the Honorable Andrew Natsios
Chart entitled ''Afghanistan Internal Food Distribution'' supplied by the Honorable Andrew Natsios
The Honorable Andrew Natsios: Prepared statement
Chart entitled ''Estimated Number of Afghan Refugees in Neighboring Countries'' submitted by the Honorable Alan Kreczko
Chart entitled ''Afghanistan Refugee Movement'' submitted by the Honorable Alan Kreczko
The Honorable Alan Kreczko: Prepared statement
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Kenneth Bacon: Prepared statement
Charles MacCormack and Andrew Wilder: Prepared statements
AMERICA'S ASSISTANCE TO THE AFGHAN PEOPLE
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2001
House of Representatives,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 11 a.m. in Room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry J. Hyde, (Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order.
Seven weeks ago, the United States was attacked by cowardly terrorists who were trained and given safe haven by the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan. On October 7, the armed forces of the United States began military operations against Afghanistan following the failure of its dictatorship to cooperate with the United States to bring to justice Osama bin Laden and others responsible for the atrocities of September 11.
Despite the brutal crimes committed by these terrorists and the protection offered to them by the Afghan regime, the American people remain committed to help the people of Afghanistan. Let me be clear: our opponents are the terrorists and the Taliban regime that protects them; we are not at war with the Afghan people.
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To that end, on October 4, the President pledged $320 million in additional assistance to help Afghans who face critical food shortages and who are partially or fully dependent on outside assistance for survival. Although Afghanistan is in crisis today, it is a country whose food emergency predates September 11 as a consequence of 3 years of drought, 22 years of internal conflict, and 5 years of brutal Taliban rule.
These conditions have brought misery, hunger, and suffering to millions within Afghanistan as well as to seven million Afghans who have fled to crowded refugee camps in neighboring countries. Yet even prior to the events of September 11th, the United States provided more humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan than it does to any other country. In addition, the United States provides 80 percent of all the food that the World Food Program channels to Afghanistan.
This humanitarian effort, despite the atrocities of September 11, has only been increased dramatically by the United States. Nevertheless, because of the chaos brought about by the brutal Taliban dictators, Afghanistan is on the verge of widespread and precipitous famine.
Our hearing today will focus on America's renewed efforts to help the Afghan people, efforts which began long before September 11. Our goal has been and continues to be the delivery of food and other relief supplies to the helpless victims of the Taliban regime. As the President has said of the American people: we are a compassionate Nation and will make certain that those who need help get help. This is indeed what distinguishes our generous people and great country.
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We look forward to taking testimony from our distinguished witnesses on the humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan, our country's humanitarian response strategy, and on the work of international relief agencies that work in close coordination with our Government to better deliver food and other relief supplies.
I am pleased to once again welcome our Administration witnesses, Andrew Natsios, the Administrator of the Agency for International Development, and Alan Kreczko, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
We are also joined by Mr. Charles MacCormack, President of Save the Children, Mr. Andrew Wilder, Field Director for Afghanistan/Pakistan, Save the Children—who will be testifying via digital video conference from Islamabad—and Mr. Kenneth Bacon, President of Refugees International.
I now turn with pleasure to Mr. Lantos, the distinguished Ranking Member of the Committee, for an opening statement.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hyde follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE HENRY J. HYDE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, AND CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Seven weeks ago, the United States was attacked by cowardly terrorists who were trained and given safe haven by the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan. On October 7, the armed forces of the United States began military operations against Afghanistan following the failure of its dictatorship to cooperate with the United States to bring to justice Osama bin Laden and others responsible for the atrocities of September 11.
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Despite the brutal crimes committed by these terrorists and the protection offered to them by the Afghan regime, the American people remain committed to help the people of Afghanistan. Let me be clear: our opponents are the terrorists and the Taliban regime that protects them; we are not at war with the Afghan people.
To that end, on October 4, the President pledged $320 million in additional assistance to help Afghans who face critical food shortages and who are partially or fully dependent on outside assistance for survival.
Although Afghanistan is in crisis today, it is a country whose food emergency predates September 11 as a consequence of three years of drought, 22 years of internal conflict, and five years of brutal Taliban rule. These conditions have brought misery, hunger, and suffering to millions within Afghanistan as well as to 7 million Afghans who have fled to crowded refugee camps in neighboring countries. Yet even prior to the events of September 11th, the United States provided more humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan than it does to any other country. In addition, the United States produces 80% of all the food that the World Food Program channels to Afghanistan.
This effort, despite the atrocities of September 11thm has only been enhanced by the United States. Nevertheless, because of the chaos brought about by the brutal Taliban dictators, Afghanistan is on the verge of widespread and precipitous famine.
Our hearing today will focus on America's renewed efforts to help the Afghan people, efforts which began long before September 11. Our goal has been and continues to be the delivery of food and other relief supplies to the helpless victims of the Taliban regime. As the President has said of the American people: we are a compassionate nation and will make certain that those who need help get help. This is indeed what distinguishes our generous people and great country.
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We look forward to taking testimony from our distinguished witnesses on the humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan, our country's humanitarian response strategy, and on the work of international relief agencies that work in close coordination with our government to better deliver food and other relief supplies.
I am pleased to once again welcome our Administration witnesses, Andrew Natsios, the Administrator of the Agency for International Development and Alan Kreczko, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
We are also joined by Mr. Charles MacCormack, President of Save the Children, Mr. Andrew Wilder, Field Director for Afghanistan/Pakistan, Save the Children—who will be testifying via digital video conference from Islamabad—and Mr. Kenneth Bacon, President of Refugees International.
Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to commend you for rescheduling this important hearing that we had to cancel a couple of weeks ago because of the anthrax incidents.
In those 2 weeks, the humanitarian situation has continued to deteriorate, and the Afghan people have continued to suffer. Clearly, providing relief in the midst of war is fraught with many difficulties. The current conflict, with its many fronts and multiple factions, presents challenges of unprecedented complexity and of a nature that we have never faced before. The ongoing hostilities, the onset of winter, the lack of adequate infrastructure and the total lack of security are all factors which are impeding severely the delivery of relief inside Afghanistan, not to mention the looting of foodstocks, relief offices and vehicles by the Taliban.
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Today's hearing seeks to shed light on this extremely complex and dangerous situation facing the international relief community as we race against the clock to save the lives of millions of utterly innocent Afghans. Before we turn to our witnesses, Mr. Chairman, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the heroic work done by the relief community in Afghanistan and indeed around the globe.
Thousands of men and women leave their families and forego the comfort of their homes to risk life and limb so they can help provide food, shelter and other critical relief to people in faraway places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Angola, Congo and countless other places. There are no medals nor heroes' welcome for these men and women when they return home, yet they walk into the most dangerous of places carrying no weapons, armed only with their good intentions and their belief in humanity.
The relief workers in Afghanistan and around the globe are the international equivalent of our firefighters and police and rescue workers at the World Trade Center. Like those courageous men and women in New York, the relief community has lost too many of their own to the violence of war. I wanted to take this opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to express my personal gratitude, and I am sure the gratitude of the entire Congress and of our Nation, to all the men and women who work in this very noble profession.
Before concluding my statement, Mr. Chairman, I want to comment on the fact, which is not often enough observed, that the United States, which is probably the most compassionate nation on the face of this planet, is currently engaged in waging a very difficult war against a singularly unconscionable and conscienceless adversary while simultaneously carrying on a major relief effort.
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Many years ago, there was a story going around of an unnamed, tiny, destitute country which faced impossible obstacles in its attempt to survive, and one of its political leaders recommended that they declare war on the United States, which, of course, they would lose, and when they lost American generosity would open up the tap, and we would flood them with foreign aid.
Well, we have done this one better. We are now providing relief while waging war. The critics of the United States both in this country and abroad better take notice of the extraordinary compassion and commitment of the American people to relieve suffering in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, while simultaneously fighting a war against international terrorism.
I do not think any of us has ever been more proud of being an American citizen than we are at this moment. We are proud to wage the war, and we are proud to provide relief at the same time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, Mr. Lantos.
Without objection, any other Members who have an opening statement will be made a part of the record at this point.
Because one of our witnesses in the second panel, Mr. Wilder, Andrew Wilder, Field Office Director for Afghanistan/Pakistan, Save the Children, will be testifying from Islamabad via video conference, I am going to ask that we hear from Administrator Natsios first and then Mr. Wilder from the satellite. Following Mr. Wilder's statement, we will proceed with questions for Mr. Wilder and then resume regular order with Secretary Kreczko. I really appreciate your courtesy in helping us do this soft shoe dance to get everybody in on the satellite from Islamabad. I thank you for your indulgence and cooperation.
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I would like to welcome Andrew Natsios, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. His distinguished career includes service as the first Director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance from 1989 to 1991, and as Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Humanitarian Response at AID.
Before assuming his current position, Mr. Natsios was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and Secretary for Administration and Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He also served as Vice President of World Vision.
I will give some introduction to Mr. Kreczko now. Alan Kreczko was appointed Acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in January of 2001. Prior to assuming his current position, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau. He also served as the Assistant Legal Advisor for the Bureau for Near East and South Asian Affairs from 1983 to 1987. In April 1993, Mr. Kreczko was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Legal Advisor for the National Security Council. Mr. Kreczko's notable career includes service as the Legal Advisor to Sol Linowitz in the Camp David autonomy talks from 1979 until 1981 and Legal Advisor to Donald Rumsfeld in the Israel/Lebanon negotiations from 1981 until 1983.
We are honored to have you gentlemen appear before our Committee. I would respectfully request that you confine your statement to 5 minutes, give or take a few minutes. The entire statement that you have will be made a part of the record.
Very well. Mr. Natsios?
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STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ANDREW NATSIOS, ADMINISTRATOR, U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like my full testimony to be made part of the record if I could.
Chairman HYDE. Without objection. So ordered.
Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you. Tomorrow, Mr. Chairman, is the 40th anniversary of the creation of the United States Agency for International Development by the Executive Order of President Kennedy, so we have a birthday tomorrow. It is unfortunate that we are going to be celebrating it under these circumstances, but AID has been doing humanitarian work and long-term development work for 4 decades now. We have learned a lot in those 4 decades about what to do and what not to do.
Yesterday I briefed President Bush on the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and our response to it—the strategy that we are pursuing to drive death rates down and to facilitate the reconstruction of the country even though a war is on. Let me describe briefly the current situation and what led to the current situation and then what our strategy for dealing with it is.
The crisis did not start on September 11. While the world paid more attention after September 11, Afghanistan has in fact been experiencing its third year of drought. We know poor countries that have successive years of natural disasters reduce their capacity to cope each year. People who can deal with 1 year of a crop loss by using their family assets or using their animals, after 3 years they have nothing left. That is exactly where Afghanistan is right now.
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Families that had 300 to 400 cows or sheep or goats 5 years ago have 3 or 4 left, and they are in an emaciated condition. Farmers in 18 of the 29 provinces who planted crops for 3 years now have complete crop failure. If you are poor to begin with and you have that happen to you, the consequence is that people have no more coping mechanisms.
Save the Children U.S.—and Charlie MacCormack will be speaking, who is the President and my good friend from Save the Children—is doing some heroic work in the northern part of Afghanistan and has been there for I think a couple of decades, a very long time. He will talk about that, but he allowed one of his senior nutritionists to brief me on an assessment they did before September 11, in March and April of this year in the area just below the Turkmenistan border.
If you look at the map, and the map is not up here yet, but it will be. You should have a map like this, Mr. Chairman, in front of you. This red area on the map is the most severely famine affected area in the country. The tan area is moderately affected, and the green area is actually okay. The green area with lines is actually getting more than the minimum requirement to survive, so the green area with lines is doing the best. The red area is doing the worst.
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Mr. NATSIOS. You cannot see it very clearly on the map up on the screen, but perhaps if you have good eyesight you can see a distinction between the orange and red. There are four or five counties up here that are a different color red, and those are the most severely affected.
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The Save the Children nutritionists who went over to conduct a nutritional survey concluded that in the villages they surveyed they found mortality rates of children under the age of 5 per 10,000 people and determined what the death rate is for children under 5. Normally it would be a half a child, a quarter of a child. In other words, a child would die every 3 or 4 days in a poor country per 10,000 people in a situation. In an emergency it goes up to 2 or 3. It is 6 in Afghanistan. Six kids were dying in April per 10,000 people each day. Six children under 5 were dying each day. That is a famine, Mr. Chairman.
What that means is that last spring we were facing famine conditions, long before the terrorist attacks on the United States. What we did in May, when I became Administrator, is we sent an assessment team in to work with the NGOs and the U.N. agencies. We ordered another 100,000 tons of food. We rediverted cash assistance to the NGOs to rachet up their efforts particularly in the northern part of the country.
Understand that this is 3 years of drought, 22 years of civil war. It precedes what we were doing. Our largest humanitarian aid effort in the world—humanitarian, not development—was in Afghanistan. We spent $174 million in the last fiscal year in Afghanistan to save people's lives long before the terrorist attacks in the United States. We were by far the largest donor.
If you take this map once again and you draw a line east to west through the middle of the country, the exact middle, you will find that 80 percent of the people who are at risk of dying are north of that line. The Hindu Kush is up there, among the highest mountains in the world. There is snow in many of those mountains all year long. People live in those mountains and they are at risk because the drought affected some of that area up in there.
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This is important to understand because we are trying to move as much of the relief effort to the north as possible because the three countries there are not at war, and the center of Taliban control is in the green areas, interestingly enough. This is just a historical presence. This map, by the way, was done before September 11th by the World Food Program. This is the map that is driving the food distributions in the country. We use this to plot where the areas of most severe nutritional distress are.
We are facing a situation of enormous crisis. It was prior to September 11 that the worst humanitarian crisis in the world occurred because of what I just described. Complicating that is that we had one of the worst groups to deal with in the world, the Taliban. We started, the NGO started and the U.N., withdrawing expatriate staff prior to September 11 because of the arrest and prosecution of eight faith-based humanitarian relief workers last summer. You may remember the series of incidents. They were put on trial. They realized this was a political event because one of those groups had been there for 30 years doing the same thing. No one ever bothered them. They were targeting relief workers last summer—expatriate relief workers.
Since then, since September 11, the harassment of the international relief community has become exceptionally aggressive. Afghan relief workers, who are the ones running the program now, many of whom have worked for the NGOs and the U.N. for 20 years, are very dedicated Afghan relief workers and very capable people. They are being beaten. Some of them have been arrested. They are being harassed.
Sixteen hundred tons of food disappeared from the Kandahar WFP warehouse in the last few days. Trucks and radios have been looted from NGOs and from aid agencies and from U.N. agencies as well. There is also growing lawlessness across the country, not just from Taliban, but from people taking advantage of the collapse of order in certain regions of the country.
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The President announced a $320 million program 3 or 4 weeks ago that combines the budgets of Alan Kreczko's office and AID's program, and that, by the way, is the resource we need. We have all the resources we need because the President chose in the options paper that he was sent the most aggressive of all the budgets. Actually, we never believed we were going to get that much money, and everything we asked for was approved.
The problem is not resources. It is not political will on the part of the United States. It is a very, very difficult situation in terms of security on the ground, in terms of weather, terrain, in terms of conflict, in terms of the collapse of the transportation infrastructure over 20 years and a demoralized and debilitated population. We are facing a very, very bad situation.
What is the strategy that we are pursuing? Well, the first is obviously to drive death rates down. We are doing that by maximizing the amount of food going into the country. The first 2 weeks following the bombing there were no deliveries into the country, and the reason for that is we were simply not sure of what was going to happen. I have passed out bar charts that should indicate to you that just in the last week the World Food Program (WFP) has turned up the spigot to maximum degree.
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Mr. NATSIOS. They sent in their best logistician in the world, Ramira Lopez DaSilva, who I worked with in the Angolan civil war 10 years ago. He is one of the most gifted administrators and I must say obsessed humanitarian figures in the U.N. system. If DeSilva is there and it is possible to do it, it will get done. I have great confidence in him personally. The fact that he has just joined them there will indicate why there has been a huge jump in the deliveries across the border.
The way this system works is the WFP moves the food across the border. It is given to the NGOs, among them Save the Children and other NGOs, that work to distribute the food in the villages and in the neighborhoods at the neighborhood level.
The second strategy we are pursuing is the stabilization of food markets. People die in famines either because prices of food go up dramatically or people's incomes collapse, or both. It is either a supply driven famine or a demand driven famine. We believe it appears in this famine that it is more driven on the demand side, which is to say people have no money left to buy food no matter what the price is, even if the prices were low, because people have been under so much stress for so long.
We are monitoring this issue. We would like to feed people through the markets with their own resources, so that we do not have to feed them through food aid. We want to pursue both the food aid for the most destitute and an approach that uses the profit motive in the commercial markets to get food in so that people can buy on their own.
The third strategy we are pursuing is to avoid population movements that are famine driven if at all possible. The reason I say that is our experience with other famines. When people move as a result of a famine, a huge percentage of them will die along the way or die in the refugee camps they enter. Almost all the scenes you have seen over the last 20 years in famines are from a famine driven population movement. Those are a disaster, so we are trying to bring the food to people in their villages so they do not move. When they are extremely debilitated from hunger, moving is a death sentence—especially for women, children, elderly people, lactating mothers, pregnant women.
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We want to avoid the manipulation of food aid by the Taliban or anyone else, for that matter. Aid is there to save people's lives. Finally, we want to engage in spot reconstruction. In those areas that are stable, the NGOs in some areas are beginning the process of reconstruction. Some of them started this before, but we have now provided assistance to some NGOs to rebuild the well system, the irrigation system. Fifty percent of it was never rebuilt after the Soviet civil war, and as a result of that food production has been dramatically lower.
Food production last year was 2.3 million tons. They need 4 million to feed themselves. We need to get production back up, and you have to rebuild the irrigation system to do that. We want the NGOs to help us do that, and many of them are stepping up to the task. Finally, we want to look at the question of rebuilding roads, which are essential to markets and commerce.
We have an enormous task in front of us, but we have partners who are dedicated. I believe we can make the difference. The President's leadership and the instruction he gave to Alan and me is respond aggressively to the crisis, drive the death rates down and show the American people and the world that we are up to the task. We are trying to do that.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Natsios follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ANDREW NATSIOS, ADMINISTRATOR, U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here for this extremely important and timely hearing on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
INTRODUCTION
Afghanistan today is a country in crisis, a crisis that predates the events of September 11th by many years. Three years of drought, 22 years of conflict, and five years of brutal Taliban misrule, have brought untold suffering to millions of people.
The long drought has caused the near-total failure of rain-fed crops in 18 of 29 provinces. Only ten to twelve percent of the country is arable, and much of that land cannot be used due to mines and the fighting that has raged about the country since the Soviet invasion of 1979. Thirty percent of Afghanistan's irrigation infrastructure has been damaged or fallen into disrepair, rendering about a half of the irrigated lands unusable.
In 1979, Afghanistan was able to feed itself. Currently, there is a food deficit of nearly two million metric tons (MT) of food. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that the country will only produce 10,000 of the 240,000 MT of seed that it will need for next year's planting. We know the reason: most of the seed has already been eaten by farmers who fear they may not survive until the next crop.
Approximately 12 million people, more than half of the country's inhabitants, have been affected by the drought. About 1.5 million people are internally displaced as a result of the fighting and the drought, 80 percent of which were displaced prior to September 11. Many, many thousands more are unable to move, due to illness, hunger, injury, or disability.
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The World Food Program (WFP), which distributes most of the food to Afghanistan through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), estimates that food stocks in the country are critically short and they are aggressively seeking to move food into the country. NGOs and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have been able to maintain their programs in many parts of the country through the efforts of thousands of dedicated local Afghan staff, many of whom have worked for these organizations for decades.
Still, we believe that 1.5 million Afghans risk starvation by winter's end and that between five and seven million Afghans face critical food shortages and are partially or fully dependent on outside assistance for survival.
ACTIONS PRIOR TO SEPTEMBER 11
One of the first actions I took as the Administrator of USAID was to order an assessment conducted by a team from our Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, working with the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The team's conclusion was inescapable: Afghanistan was ''on the verge of widespread and precipitous famine.''
Based on this and other information, and with the support of Secretary Powell, I ordered a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to the region. They arrived in June and have been operating in the region ever since. Since then, we have focused on Afghanistan's humanitarian needs as never before. Through closer cooperation with the United Nations (UN) specialized agencies and the NGOs with whom we work, we have been able to target our efforts more precisely toward those who need it most.
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The United States, of course, has been monitoring and helping the people in Afghanistan for many years. In the fiscal year that just ended and in the few days since, the U.S. Government donated $184 million in humanitarian assistance for the Afghan people. This includes a variety of programs run by the Department of Agriculture, the Department of State and USAID.
Our country has long been the largest donor to the World Food Program's Afghan humanitarian assistance program. Approximately, 85 percent of the WFP food aid in the pipeline now—45,000 MT stored in Pakistan and another 165,000 MT on the way—comes directly from the United States.
The President has now added another $320 million of new money to this humanitarian effort.
HUMANITARIAN SITUATION INSIDE AFGHANISTAN
According to our DART, the conditions in many areas of Afghanistan are well beyond the ''pre-famine'' stage. As best we can judge, the situation will only get worse with the coming winter. Nearly three-quarters of the at-risk population live in the northern half of Afghanistan.
While most people comprehend famine as a dramatic increase in death rates due to starvation and hunger-related illnesses, there are a number of famine indicators that relief experts look for when reliable information on death rates or malnutrition levels is not readily available. These indicators include the following:
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Seed shortages due to increased cost of seed and/or consumption of seed stocks;
Widespread sale of family assets, including land, homes, domesticated animals, and family possessions, to raise money to buy food;
Rising prices of food staples and hoarding of grain stocks by dealers;
Consumption of wild foods, domesticated animals, and inedible materials;
Increased rates of wasting due to malnutrition and other nutritional disorders;
Declining birth rates;
Mass migration in search of food and employment; and
Increased deaths from starvation and related diseases.
In Afghanistan, NGOs, UN agencies, and the media are reporting evidence of nearly every one of these indicators. The Afghan people are tough, seasoned by many years of war and conflict. But many have exhausted their ability to cope. Their resources are exhausted, and their animals are dead, sold or eaten. They enter this crisis in an extraordinarily weakened state. Apart from the many sick, weak and disabled people, the most vulnerable population lives in remote regions, often at very high altitude, cut off from most efforts to provide food or seed.
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Based on WFP's vulnerability assessment map (VAM), the nutritional crisis appears to be most severe in the northern half of the country where the drought has hit hardest—three years of drought versus one year in other areas of the country—and where most of the internally displaced population is located. We are now seeing whole communities on the move in the north, and many villages abandoned altogether. Although precise statistics are hard to come by, many families have resorted to desperate measures, selling their draft animals, mixing their food with inedible substances, selling off their last possessions, selling their children, or marrying off their daughters to strangers at an abnormally young age.
While we have not been able to collect data on food prices fully, there is some anecdotal evidence that prices have risen rapidly in rural areas, as much as 200 percent higher than prices in urban markets, even as family income has plummeted. Most alarmingly, there is evidence of abnormally high death rates in some parts of the north.
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE STRATEGY
President Bush's strategy to deal with this vast and complicated humanitarian crisis is designed to accomplish five critical objectives:
reduce death rates;
minimize population movements;
lower and then stabilize food prices so that food in markets is more accessible and increase family income to afford market food;
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ensure that aid reaches those it is intended for; and
begin developmental relief programs, in which we can move beyond emergency relief, where possible, to begin long-overdue reconstruction projects.
Reduce Death Rates
Our primary goal, of course, is to prevent as many people from dying as possible. Winter is fast approaching, so time is clearly of the essence. We must get as much food as possible into the country as soon as possible, particularly in the northern half of the country. This means doubling the amount of tonnage going in, at the very least, from approximately 25,000 MT per month to 52,000 MT. We are opening all possible pipelines to move food, seed, and other emergency commodities and health kits into the country to increase the volume of aid. Health care, nutritional surveillance, and water and sanitation programs will help us to stop epidemics of communicable disease which can wipe out whole populations whose immune systems have been weakened by hunger and malnutrition. Blankets and shelter material are vital to prevent hypothermia in the highlands where temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.
Minimize Famine-driven Population Movements
There are three common causes of widespread population movements: economic collapse which causes people to move in search of jobs and economic opportunities; famine which causes people to move in search of food; and insecurity which causes people to move in search of safety. In famines, when people have sold all their assets for food and have run out of options, many leave their villages to find food or work. From the experience of other famines, we know that as many as 50 percent will die along the way or in famine-induced refugee or internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. So we must do everything we can to encourage people who are likely to move because of food insecurity to stay in their villages by moving as much food as possible into the villages and rural areas. The million or more refugees and IDPs that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has predicted has not materialized thus far. One of our objectives is to see that it never does.
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Lower and Stabilize Food Prices
We also need to do what we can to drive down the cost of food, so that ordinary Afghan citizens can buy what they and their families need. People die of hunger in famines because of the skyrocketing price of food and sometimes a collapse of family income and the depletion of family assets. Food is nearly always available in famines, families simply cannot afford to buy it. The best way to counter this is to address both the supply and demand sides of the equation. On the supply side, we can sell significant amounts of food to local merchants in order to bring down prices and discourage hoarding. These merchants have their own means of protecting their goods even in the midst of general insecurity, and the incentive of profits to be made ensures that the food will reach the markets. Experience from other famine situations has shown this to be a particularly effective strategy, especially in smaller markets where even limited amounts can have a significant effect on prices. On the demand side, we can undertake cash for work and other programs to raise family incomes so that people can purchase the food that is available on the markets.
Ensure Aid Reaches the Intended Beneficiaries
It will be necessary to do our utmost to keep U.S. Government humanitarian assistance out of the hands of the Taliban or other armed groups. Part of our strategy to do so is linked to our second goal, limiting population movements. By moving as much food as possible to remote villages and towns where most Afghans live, we can help discourage people from concentrating in refugee or IDP camps, where the risk of manipulation by the Taliban and their supporters is comparatively high.
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Where the security of the food is an issue in IDP camps, we should avoid distributing dry rations. Wet feeding programs in which prepared food is distributed directly to beneficiaries, rather than uncooked or dry rations, should be the norm wherever possible, even for adults. Cooked food spoils quickly, is heavier to move and harder to store, making it more difficult to steal and more likely that the intended beneficiaries will receive their rations. An expatriate presence is essential to running a cooked food program in IDP camps, a presence which is not possible under current circumstances.
Right now the collapsing discipline of the Taliban as an organization makes the return of expatriate relief workers problematic, many of whom left the country due to Taliban harassment of relief agencies last spring and summer.
By opening as many food pipelines into the country as possible, not only will we be able to move more food quickly to where it is needed, we will also minimize the distance any given aid convoy must travel to reach its destination, thereby reducing the opportunity for diversion. We will also make it our policy that only limited amounts of food will be warehoused in areas the Taliban controls so as not to create attractive targets for looting. Wherever possible, warehouses will be by-passed and food will be delivered directly to beneficiaries. In October, the Taliban took over two WFP warehouses, one of which still remains under Taliban control. In addition, numerous security incidents are being reported to us by humanitarian agencies of harassment and looting by Taliban forces, although many will not speak out publicly against these abuses for fear of putting their local staff on the ground in jeopardy.
Finally, we will also implement a humanitarian public information campaign so the Afghan people know aid is on the way. This will have the dual effect of helping to discourage further population movements, and will provide a check against diversion or manipulation of aid since people will know what they are supposed to receive through this information effort.
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Developmental Relief/Spot Reconstruction
The constant conflict that has plagued Afghanistan has kept people from rebuilding damaged infrastructure. We intend to structure our relief programs so that they can begin this long-overdue process of small-scale reconstruction at the community level where security conditions are relatively stable. We call this spot reconstruction. Our food-for-work programs, for example, will focus on practical sectors. Distribution of seed for the winter wheat crop or even small-scale repairs of irrigation systems and wells can make a profound difference in the country's recovery from this crisis. If enough crops can be planted and livestock rebuilt, next year will not have to resemble this one.
Commitment to the People of Afghanistan
The President and the Secretary have made very clear that the Afghan people are not our enemies. The President said on October 4 when he announced his new $320 million initiative for the Afghan people: ''We are a compassionate nation . . . We will work with the U.N. agencies, such as the World Food Program, and work with private volunteer organizations to make sure this assistance gets to the people. We will make sure that not only the folks in Afghanistan who need help get help, but we will help those who have fled to neighboring countries to get help as well.''
With the new funds the President has announced, we are redoubling our efforts to get relief to those who need it most. Despite the events of September 11, and the fact that we have no diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and despite their refusal to hand over bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda, our humanitarian assistance policies will not change. Food aid distribution will be based on need. The President has made this very clear.
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Accomplishing our humanitarian objectives under the current circumstances is a huge task, but I am confident that, if we follow the President's strategy, we can save many, many lives and help Afghanistan begin to rebuild itself. Let me assure you that we at the Agency for International Development are fully committed to doing everything we can to work with you in Congress, the other Executive Branch agencies, and the international community to accomplish these objectives.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, Mr. Natsios.
We welcome via video conference from Islamabad Dr. Andrew Wilder from Save the Children Federation. Dr. Wilder is the field office director for Pakistan and Afghanistan programs. He manages women and children-focused relief and development programs inside Afghanistan and in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.
He has also been a coordinator for the International Rescue Committee and administrative coordinator for Mercy Corps International.
Mr. Wilder, welcome. Please proceed.
STATEMENT OF ANDREW WILDER, FIELD OFFICE DIRECTOR FOR AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN, SAVE THE CHILDREN
Mr. WILDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I should probably start off by saying I think the drought has ended. It is starting to rain here on the roof of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad where I am testifying from.
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Mr. Chairman, I think it is safe to say that Afghanistan is certainly one of the worst countries in the world today to be born a child, especially if you are a girl. By now, the grim statistics about life inside Afghanistan are all too familiar. One out of every four children dies before reaching age 5. School enrollment is among the lowest in the world, and girls' education has been particularly neglected. In addition to being at war for the past 2 decades, the country, as we just heard, is suffering through one of the worst droughts in living memory.
Save the Children has been working with communities in Afghanistan for more than 15 years to improve the condition for children. Our work is primarily concentrated in northern Afghanistan in the areas of the country most affected by the drought. Working in Afghanistan is challenging under the best of circumstances. Since mid September, however, the crisis in Afghanistan and the operating environment for humanitarian aid agencies like Save the Children has become even more complex.
Before I describe some of the new challenges that we are confronting, I do want to focus for a moment on the positive and outline some of what we have been able to accomplish despite the tough conditions. In shaping a response to the current situation, Save the Children is focusing on two priority areas; first, to meet the food and health needs of the children and their families in Afghanistan and, second, to prepare for the potential that large numbers of Afghan children and families might become refugees.
We have prioritized providing assistance inside Afghanistan because the more we can address the needs of Afghans living inside Afghanistan, it is less likely that they will join the ranks of the millions of Afghan refugees living in neighboring countries. All of Save the Children's offices in Afghanistan remain open, and our major lifesaving activities remain operational. In the last several weeks, Save the Children has increased the scale of its food distribution program and completed a polio immunization campaign in which we vaccinated 20,000 children under the age of 5. We anticipate completing a similar immunization campaign for measles during the coming weeks.
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Food shipments consist of wheat provided through the World Food Program and other complementary food items, including beans, lentils, vegetable oil, sugar and salt, which have primarily been funded by the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. We are transporting this food by trucks from Turkmenistan.
In October, we delivered a new shipment of essential pharmaceuticals to four hospitals in the capital city of Kabul. This shipment will supply the pediatric ward with sufficient medical supplies for 2 months. In addition, we are supplying fuel for heating hospitals in the capital city of Kabul and in northern Afghanistan.
Mr. Chairman, I would now like to offer a perspective of what we see as some of the main challenges as we continue our work on behalf of Afghan children. First, as needs have increased, the operating environment for aid agencies has become more difficult. More than 3.8 million Afghans currently rely on food from the international community, and 3 to 4 million more are expected to need food during the winter months. The latest World Food Program information indicates that much of northwestern Afghanistan where Save the Children works has only 25 to 50 percent of the food required for a year. Serious food shortages exist elsewhere in the country.
Aid agencies have geared up to meet the challenge. However, humanitarian organizations face huge organizational and logistical challenges. Some of those have already been mentioned earlier by Mr. Lantos. Some of these include reduced staffing due to the evacuation of expatriate staff, new security needs of our national staff who remain in Afghanistan, looting and/or confiscation of our equipment, sporadic and monitored communications, closed borders and the near arrival of winter conditions that will make some parts of the country inaccessible for up to 5 months.
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A second concern, Mr. Chairman, is the plight of refugees and the need for Afghanistan's neighbors to open their borders to Afghans seeking protection. If the situation continues to deteriorate inside Afghanistan and Afghans have no exit, the consequences could be dire.
Save the Children has been working for the past 15 years in refugee camps in Pakistan. While the reported number of new refugees arriving at new or existing camps has been relatively small to date, there are still concerns that this number may increase. In cooperation with our Save the Children alliance partners, as well as other NGOs, we are preparing to respond to a potential influx of refugees into Pakistan. Building on our existing strengths, we will support health facilities, informal education for women and children and insure that camps are protected environments for children.
Third, as an organization with a mandate to protect and provide assistance to children, we are concerned about the impact that the bombing campaign is having on Afghan children and their families. While we are not here to offer the military advice, we do believe it is important to share with the Committee some of what we are hearing regarding the bombing's implications for children and other civilians. Of greatest concern, of course, is the need to continue making every effort to minimize civilian casualties.
Another concern is that the destruction of power generation plants has led to major health and sanitation concerns in cities like Kandahar, which require electricity to pump water. Our staff in Quetta in Baluchistan Province reports that many of their relatives who are leaving Kandahar are doing so because they no longer have water. Save the Children recently had to purchase storm lanterns for hospitals in Kabul also due to the intermittent electricity supply.
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There is also concern about the dangers of unexploded ordnance UXO for children. Data collected several years ago from our land mine and UXO education program in Kabul indicated that nearly 80 percent of the unexploded ordnance victims in Kabul City were children. In the current context, there is the potential for children to mistake the colorful yellow bomblettes released by cluster bombs for either air drop food packets, which are also yellow, or for toys.
A fourth concern, Mr. Chairman, is to maintain as clear a distinction as possible between the military and humanitarian missions. We acknowledge that there are circumstances that may call for cooperation between military and humanitarian agencies in delivering assistance. However, during the period of military action we believe that it is important to keep a civilian face on the humanitarian works. Blurring the distinction between the two could endanger the lives of our staff on the ground.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to offer some recommendations about how to address at least some of these challenges and how to maximize our impact, which in this case means saving children's lives. First, in formulating the U.S. response continue to take into account the humanitarian element of the crisis. This includes providing funding, as well as insuring the infrastructure and capacity remain in place for assistance delivery.
The U.S. Government's pledge of an additional $320 million in humanitarian assistance is a solid down payment on meeting the needs, and other governments and international organizations have risen to the challenge with their pledges as well. We also welcome President Bush's call for American children to reach out to Afghan children with their donations.
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Second, we need to prioritize. While we cannot meet all of Afghanistan's many needs, food and health should be the top priorities in the short term. There is a danger that donations of non-essential items could clog up an already stretched distribution capacity.
Third, we need to get as much food assistance into Afghanistan as possible before the onset of winter. We have a window of approximately 3 to 6 weeks before winter snows make some areas impossible, including 2 districts in which Save the Children works. I want to stress, however, that even during the winter many areas of Afghanistan will remain accessible, so our work will not stop during the changing of the seasons.
Mr. Chairman, while I have addressed what can be done in the near term to ameliorate a major humanitarian crisis among the children and families of Afghanistan, we cannot ignore that the real hope for Afghan lies with investment in long-term development to help them rebuild their country and their society.
President Bush recognized the need for long-term commitment when he urged Congress in his October 6 radio address to make funds available so that one day the United States can contribute, along with our other friends of Afghanistan, to the reconstruction and development of that troubled nation. We endorse that call, as well as the call being made by Senator Biden for a large reconstruction package for Afghanistan.
Longer term engagement serves our country's policy interests and is an investment in our own security and well being. It also provides hope for Afghanistan's children. Nowhere is this long-term investment more critical than in education and in particular the education of Afghan girls and women. Only 11 percent of girls in Afghanistan are able to read and write. A mere 3 percent of girls are currently enrolled in school, yet the desire for education among Afghan children and their families is extremely high. The long-term efforts and effects produce dramatic, positive results for the girls, their own children and the entire community.
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For many years, Save the Children has been running formal and informal education programs for internally displaced people in Afghanistan, as well as in refugee camps in Baluchistan and in WFP in Pakistan. Over the years our programs have grown as more and more families have enrolled their boys and girls in the schools. In the refugee camps in Baluchistan, for example, enrollment rates have tripled from 6,000 to 18,000 during the past 6 years, and the number of girls enrolled has gone up tenfold from 600 to 6,000.
I will close by reminding us all that only 8 weeks ago one of Save the Children's major advocacy messages was that Afghanistan was a forgotten crisis that needed to be remembered. The fact that I am giving testimony is only one indication of how dramatically this situation has changed.
Let us not forget the children who are in crisis in many other parts of the world. Now, more than ever, is the time for all of us to increase investments in long-term development to help build stable societies throughout the development world, including in Afghanistan.
Thank you.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you very much, Mr. Wilder.
We will now entertain questions for Mr. Wilder while we still have you on the satellite. Mr. Lantos?
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Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Wilder, first of all I want to thank you for a very informative and incredibly moving presentation. You did not just evoke sympathy on the part of all of us, but enormous anguish as you have portrayed the crisis. I want to commend you and your colleagues in doing an extremely difficult job.
Before I come to my questions, let me state for the record in view of your very accurate depiction of the tragedy that is unfolding in Afghanistan that we place full responsibility on the terrorists for this most recent addition to the crisis of the Afghan people. Afghanistan would not be under bombardment, there would not be a war going on involving the United States and our allies, had it not been for the horrendous terrorist act against the American people. I think the record must show this.
I would like to ask one general question. If you could have your wishes answered, what is it specifically you would ask of Afghanistan's northern neighbors, what would you ask of Pakistan, and what would you ask of Iran? How could these neighbors be effective in making your job and the job of other agencies more productive?
Mr. WILDER. I think I would start off by requesting that they open borders so the Afghans who do need to flee their country are able to do so, but also that the international community must then take on the responsibility to support neighboring countries, to support the refugee population.
I think the other thing I would call for is the support of all neighboring countries to help Afghanistan achieve a lasting and durable political settlement. I think that the real crisis now is how do we get a political settlement that leads to peace and stability in Afghanistan so that we can all reengage in the reconstruction and development efforts that Afghanistan really needs and which we would all like to be doing.
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Mr. LANTOS. If I may pursue this a bit, our understanding is that the enormous flood of refugees that was expected did not in fact materialize. There are large numbers on the border not allowed into Pakistan, but much smaller than had been anticipated.
Can you give us your judgement as to why this vast influx of people has not taken place?
Mr. WILDER. I think there has been a vast population movement, but it has not all been to neighboring countries as was I think originally predicted. What we are seeing are that large numbers of the population of the major urban centers, particularly Kandahar and Kabul, have left the cities for the rural areas. I think most are generally trying to go to the areas where they feel they will be the most safe. For the majority of those people, that will be to their home villages in rural areas around Kabul and Kandahar.
Those who have support networks in Pakistan in particular have come here, and those are people who often had family members here living in some of the urban areas of Pakistan or in some of the old camps. The majority of those people who have crossed the border specifically into Pakistan are going to join other family members and relatives. Others, though, who do not have support networks I think are going into the rural areas of Afghanistan.
I think a major reason why also we are not seeing such a large influx is that the borders are formally sealed. If those borders were opened, we might see more people come.
Mr. LANTOS. To whatever extent you can, could you give us an indication of the extent to which the Taliban have infiltrated the camps within Afghanistan and what problems does this create in terms of the work of relief organizations such as yours?
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Mr. WILDER. I assume you are referring to the camps for the internally displaced——
Mr. LANTOS. Yes.
Mr. WILDER [continuing]. Inside Afghanistan?
Mr. LANTOS. Yes.
Mr. WILDER. Currently Save the Children is not working so much in those as in the rural areas because our main objective is to try to provide assistance to those areas where we might see displaced people leaving. We are trying to do everything we can to provide assistance to prevent displacement.
It is hard to get accurate information from inside Afghanistan these days because our communications are very limited. On sensitive issues, it is hard to communicate with our staff because they are being monitored. At present I do not have up-to-date or accurate information as to the extent to which the IDP camps in Afghanistan have been infiltrated, but there does seem to be evidence that suggests that the Taliban are using civilian areas and some IDP camps as shelters.
Mr. LANTOS. Thank you very much.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Smith?
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Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Thank you very much.
Mr. Wilder, I want to thank you. I know all of us in this room and in this country are very grateful to you and to all of the front line relief workers, who are doing an outstanding job often at great risk to your own lives. It is very much appreciated. It cannot be overstated, or stated with enough frequency, how much respect we have for the courageous work you are doing on behalf of the children and all of the suffering people of Afghanistan.
I would just note you mentioned President Bush's appeal to American children. In my own household, my youngest daughter, who is the Student Council President in her school, after watching that press conference immediately sat down and organized an effort. They raised in excess of $600. Her name is Elyse. Her sense of compassion for the children of Afghanistan has been replicated countless times throughout schools: the elementary, the secondary schools in America. There is a sense of solidarity and empathy for the suffering. The fact that so many children have responded, child-to-child hopefully gives you some encouragement that it is heartfelt here.
You mentioned the $320 million in down payment. Mr. Natsios has clearly indicated, as has President Bush, if there is more needed I am sure there will be no doubt that money will be provided to make sure that some of the suffering is mitigated.
I do have one question. You mentioned the disease, the polio campaign that is underway or that has been completed, the measles campaign that is anticipated. What are the other challenges? We know there is an enormous food challenge, but in the area of other diseases, the land mines. Is there a need for prosthetic devices, or is that going to come later down the line? And then the mental health question. The impact, as you know better than anyone else, of post traumatic stress disorder on children and women and non-combatants, as well as combatants, can be absolutely devastating.
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If you could go through the diseases, land mines, and the impact and mental health, Mr. Wilder.
Mr. WILDER. Yes. Thank you. I think in terms of the health, what we have prioritized at Save the Children has been addressing acute respiratory infections during the winter months and diarrheal diseases during the summer months. Those are by far and large the two largest killers of children in Afghanistan. Next would be measles.
In the study that Mr. Natsios referred to earlier, in the southern district of Juzjan Province in northern Afghanistan where we were, one of the things that we found when we did the study was not so much the acute malnutrition, but alarmingly high rates of child mortality primarily from vaccine preventable diseases and other preventable illnesses. I think it is important to stress that while there is a lot of focus on the food, it is critical that we also prioritize the health sector and do whatever we can to continue to support the minimal health infrastructure that remains in Afghanistan.
In terms of land mines, Save the Children has been for the last 5 years focusing on a land mine education program especially targeting children. Some of the previous land mine education work was more focused on adults, but our data in Kabul showed that both for land mines and unexploded ordnance children comprised the largest number of victims in Kabul City. Landmine education is something that we are still hoping to prioritize.
Unfortunately, in Kabul we have had to suspend some of our activities. We are still maintaining our health work, but our land mine education work there has been temporarily suspended, but that is going to be a critical need both as front lines are changing. Heavily mined areas are going to need to be demined, and contributions to the U.N. led demining effort will be critical, as well as widespread land mine education work.
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In terms of mental health, it is an incredibly big issue, and we are only scratching the surface. One of the real priorities of Save the Children is to try to provide safe spaces for children where we can structure activities, recreation, because we feel those are some of the best ways to deal with some of the mental health needs of children living in a very stressful and traumatic environment.
For example, in Kabul City we work in these IDP camps at the former Soviet Embassy compound where there are about 20,000 internally displaced from the fighting north of Kabul. This is 2 years ago. There we thought it was important in those horrific circumstances that they were living to provide safe spaces for children. Quite remarkably, we were able to get permission from the Taliban to open up a school, which included for both boys and girls. We are still to this day not quite sure how we got permission for the girls, but we had about two and a half thousand children in those schools.
We saw that not just as an educational program, but as a program to address mental health needs, to provide a safe and stable and secure environment for environment for at least a few hours every day. That is something we hope to do in the refugee camps in Pakistan as well if we do have an influx of new refugees.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Hoeffel?
Mr. HOEFFEL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. Wilder, congratulations on the wonderful job that you are doing. Could you address some comments regarding the refugees and their condition that are arriving in Pakistan and what kind of assistance, if any, you are getting from the Pakistani Government to help with those refugees?
Mr. WILDER. Currently, Save the Children's major work has been in the old refugee camps in Baluchistan where we provide all the education in those camps. In the northwest frontier province we have health programs.
We have not been so much involved with the influx of new refugees primarily because there have not been that many, and those that are coming are in a way joining, as I mentioned earlier, family members living in the urban areas of Pakistan, as well as in some of the old camps. They are not very visible. As a result, it is not very easy to provide assistance to the new refugees.
That is why we are concerned that camps be set up that could provide places for these new refugees where they are given proper refugee status and protection. That is currently not being done. The camps that are being set up are right on the border areas and relatively insecure areas, which would be difficult for international aid agencies like Save the Children to access. Mr. Lubbers of UNHCR was just here and did raise this issue at the highest levels of the government.
I would also point out that this policy of closed borders and not welcoming refugees is certainly not unique to Pakistan, but all the neighboring countries. While I think pressure needs to continue to be put on to open borders, again the international community needs to assure the neighboring countries that they will help foot the bill to support those refugees.
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Chairman HYDE. The gentleman will yield for my statement that we are running out of time on the satellite, so I am going to ask for as much time as we have left that those of you who have not had a chance to question Dr. Wilder ask one brief question if you would, and that way we will try to get around to everybody.
Mr. Rohrabacher?
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes. Mr. Wilder, and then if I could ask Mr. Natsios to follow up on this. First of all, how long have you been in Islamabad doing your job in that part of the world?
Mr. WILDER. I started working here in 1986 with Mercy Corps International and then worked for 3 years with International Rescue Committee in the 1980s and early 1990s. I have been working with Save the Children since 1996.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. So you have been there during the whole period of the Taliban reign?
Mr. WILDER. Correct.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. What I would like to know is all of my sources of information indicate that over the last 4 years, the United States foreign aid and assistance has been almost totally channeled through Taliban areas. Places like the Panjshir Valley and other places that have been controlled by the opposition not only got very little support, but got virtually nothing. Are these reports accurate?
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Mr. WILDER. Well, the Taliban controls about 90 percent of the country, so in that country the bulk of the humanitarian work was done in Taliban controlled areas, but certainly lots of work was also done in the 10 percent of the areas controlled by the Northern Alliance as well. For example, we had the terrible, devastating earthquakes a few years back in Badakhshan Province, and large amounts of humanitarian aid went in to address that situation.
Also, the Taliban has not controlled this much territory for the last 5 years. For example, Save the Children has been working in northern Afghanistan primarily. That was controlled by General Dostum up until 2 or 3 years ago.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right.
Mr. WILDER. We received assistance prior to the Taliban when Dostum was in control.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. The major question——
Mr. WILDER. Aid continued after the Taliban took over.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes. The major question I am asking is just——
Mr. WILDER. I guess that is how I would respond.
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Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes. The major question I am asking is, was the vast majority, and, by the way, there were several years where a third of the country was controlled by anti-Taliban forces. The Panjshir Valley was never controlled by the Taliban. Did a lion's share of our aid go to the Taliban?
Mr. WILDER. I do not think it went to the Taliban. I think it did go to aid agencies working throughout Afghanistan. Again, for example, with Save the Children we had our programs in northern Afghanistan where we do now which were fully funded when the area was controlled by General Dostum, and they continued to be funded after the Taliban took control of that area in 1998.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Davis?
Mr. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Wilder, do you have any suggestions for us about what we can do to improve the impact of the air drops of food into Afghanistan?
Mr. WILDER. Well, I think the real priority is to try to do whatever we can to get more food in, and I think still that is best done by truck. I mean, for Save the Children we are procuring most of our food in northern Afghanistan through traders who bring it in by Turkmenistan. We currently have about 65 truckloads of edible oil, wheat and beans traveling down through Faryab Province to the worst affected district in southern Faryab.
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The World Food Program has also been very successful in recent weeks in greatly scaling up their efforts in trucking food into Afghanistan, so I think as long as we can truck food in I think that is by far the preferred option to get large scale assistance into Afghanistan. I think if we no longer have that option then we do need to look at the issue of air drops and air lifts, but I do not think we have reached that point quite yet.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Chabot?
Mr. CHABOT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My principal concern is along the lines of what Mr. Rohrabacher has raised, and that is that the food actually go to the children and those in need and not to the Taliban, so whatever effort can be made to make sure that is happening, we would certainly appreciate that.
It has also been said that the first victim of war is the truth. There have been a number of reports in the media here in the United States such as—and we assume a lot of these are being spread by the Taliban—that the food is being dropped around mine fields, and that children are wandering out to get them and being injured or killed. Another absurd allegation is that the United States is poisoning the food, these types of things.
What is being done to temper down or to get the truth out on these issues? Would you comment on those, please?
Mr. WILDER. Yes. I would agree that those allegations are absurd, and I do not think they are being taken terribly seriously here.
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In terms of the food, we do have strong systems in place to monitor food distribution. At the end of the day, we can never offer a 100 percent guarantee as to what is going to happen if there are, you know, armed attacks on convoys. We have not actually seen that yet. Up until now we have been able to distribute food. We have our very strong team of national staff in place who are excellent at monitoring this. Up until now, we have not received any reports that the food we are distributing has been looted by the Taliban.
Chairman HYDE. We have three votes on the Floor at their usual inopportune time, so we will recess until 1:30. I regret very much this, but we will have the three votes, and it will take about that time to get back, so we shall reconvene at 1:30.
[Recess.]
Chairman HYDE. The Committee will come to order.
The Chair would like to announce that in order to hear from all our witnesses today, we are going to postpone today's markup until 4 p.m. It was scheduled for 2 p.m., but we are not going to get to it and also be able to hear the witnesses, so it will be postponed until 4 p.m.
I now ask Secretary Kreczko to proceed with his statement. Following the Secretary's statement, Members will ask questions of the first panel, long suffering and patient. We are grateful.
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Secretary Kreczko?
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ALAN KRECZKO, ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY, BUREAU OF POPULATION, REFUGEES AND MIGRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Secretary KRECZKO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will submit my statement for the record with your permission and try to be very brief on the refugee side of the situation.
The United States believes that all of Afghanistan's neighbors should be open to new refugee flows across its border. In working with the neighboring countries, however, we have to bear in mind the preexisting refugee situation, which had over three and a half million Afghan refugees in neighboring countries, two million in Pakistan, over a million and a half in Iran. We need to be cognizant of the generosity of these countries in hosting so many refugees for 2 decades.
[Charts depicting the information referred to follow:]
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Secretary KRECZKO. Initially the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there could be as many as a million and a half new refugees following September 11th's events. That has turned out not to be the case. To date, we have seen much, much fewer, in the vicinity of 80,000 to 100,000 new refugees, almost all of them moving toward the Pakistani border and into Pakistan. There have been virtually no population flows to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, and all of those countries do take the position that their border is closed.
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There have been some population flows toward Iran with reports of a few thousand having entered Iran, and Iran, through its Red Crescent Society, having established a couple of camps inside Afghanistan for Afghans that currently house about 8,000 Afghan refugees.
With respect to Pakistan, Pakistan officially maintains a closed border with Afghanistan, fearing that an open border and the prospect of relief inside Pakistan could attract hundreds of thousands of new refugees with security and economic implications for Pakistan. Pakistan has allowed some vulnerable groups to cross the border and acknowledges that tens of thousands have crossed unofficially.
With Pakistan's authorization, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has established a transit center near the Quetta border crossing where assistance can be provided to new arrivals. Pakistan has also identified sites where the U.N. can establish new refugee camps, although the sites are in areas that are very difficult to access and secure.
UNHCR has prepositioned substantial relief materials in Pakistan, but given the large numbers of refugees that they already host the international community needs to continue to assure Pakistan, Iran and other neighboring countries that the international community will help shoulder any economic costs associated with new refugee flows.
Fortunately, the President's commitment of $320 million of new humanitarian assistance puts the United States in a strong position to provide this reassurance, and we will continue to work with all of the neighboring countries, and in particular Pakistan, to see that the needs of the refugees can be met.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Kreczko follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ALAN KRECZKO, ACTING ASSISTANT SECRETARY, BUREAU OF POPULATION, REFUGEES AND MIGRATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
President Bush is providing firm leadership in the international campaign to eradicate terrorism worldwide. A key part of his efforts is directed at both the immediate and the longer-term problems plaguing the people of Afghanistan, and on this front, too, the United States is providing leadership.
Compassion is an integral component of the President's foreign policy, and it motivates America, even in these trying times, to lead the international humanitarian relief effort for those most vulnerable in Afghanistan. As the President asserted, ''We have no compassion for terrorists, or for any state that sponsors them. But we do have great compassion for the millions around the world who are victims of hate and oppression—including those in Afghanistan. We are friends of the Afghan people. We have an opportunity to make sure the world is a better place for generations to come.''
The President, on October 4 th, announced a $320 million initiative to provide additional humanitarian assistance for Afghans—for both those inside Afghanistan and for those who flee Taliban opresion to neighboring countries. The United States has consistently been the largest donor to international humanitarian efforts. With vital help from a number of countries around the world, our goal is to alleviate the suffering that Afghans have endured for more than two decades, as a result of war, severe drought, and the brutal, repressive rule of the Taliban regime.
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The United States believes that all of Afghanistan's neighbors should be prepared to accept new Afghan refugees as needed, and that the international community must be prepared to shoulder the economic costs incurred by the flight of desperate Afghan people. In working with neighboring countries on potential new refugee flows, we need to take into account the existing refugee situation. Over 3.5 million Afghan refugees already reside in neighboring countries. The bulk of those are in Pakistan which generously has taken in some 2 million refugees, and Iran, where some 1.5 million Afghan refugees reside. As with its contributions to relief efforts overall, the United States has consistently been the largest financial donor to support those refugees. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the remarkable generosity of the neighboring countries in providing relief and refuge to so many Afghans for nearly two decades.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees originally prepared contingency plans for the arrival of as many as 1.5 million additional Afghans in the countries neighboring Afghanistan. Based on information available at the time of their original plan, UNHCR plans were based on an additional 1 million Afghans arriving in Pakistan; 400,000 in Iran; and 50,000 each in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Those were planning figures, and the actual flow of new refugees has been much smaller. Although population flows to Iran and Pakistan have increased recently, the overall number of new refugees to date, some 80,000 to 100,000, is significantly lower than originally anticipated. Possible reasons include: the international community's aility to deliver continued assistance inside Afghanistan; Taliban restrictions on male departures; the focused nature of the U.S. military campaign; and the fact that the borders of all neighboring countries are officially closed. There has been no significant population movement to the North, toward the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Each of these countries has closed its border to refugee flows, although Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have engaged in some contingency planning with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and have agreed to facilitate cross-border assistance to Afghanistan. Uzbekistan has agreed to the prepositioning of relief material at Termez, but is conditioning the opening of the border to relief activities on resolution of the security situation on the Afghan side of the border, which is currently occupied by the Taliban.
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Iran also maintains a closed border, although reportedly a few thousand Afghans have entered Iran in the past several weeks. The Iranian Red Crescent Society has established two refugee camps inside Afghanistan, with about 8,000 Afghans there. Iran has done contingency planning with UNHCR for larger flows of refugees, and has identified some sites for refugee camps along its border with Afghanistan. Iran also is facilitating cross-border assistance into Afghanistan.
Pakistan officially maintains a closed border with Afghanistan, fearing that an open border and the prospect of relief inside Pakistan could attract hundreds of thousands of new refugees, with attendant security and economic implications. Pakistan has allowed some vulnerable groups to cross the border, and acknowledges that tens of thousands more have crossed unofficially. With Pakistan's authorization, UNHCR has established a transit center near the Quetta border crossing, where assistance can be provided to new arrivals. Pakistan has also identified sites where UNHCR can establish new refugee camps, although the site locations are in remote areas and security of humanitarian staff there will be a great concern. UNHCR has prepositioned substantial relief materials in Pakistan. Given the large numbers of refugees they already host, the international community needs to continue to assure Pakistan, Iran, and other neighboring countries that the international community will help shoulder the economic costs incurred in providing assistance and protection to Afghans who cross their borders. The extent of future refugee flows will be affected by the same factors that currently appear to be limiting outflows and, of course, how the military campaign unfolds—not just ours against the terrorist networks but that by the Northern Alliance forces against the Taliban. We will continue to work with UNHCR and other relief organizations, and Pakistan and other neighboring countries, to prepare for possible increased refugee flows.
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On October 5th , the UN convened in Geneva a meeting of major donors, as well as Iran and Pakistan, to discuss the Afghan humanitarian situation. Attendees of this meeting praised President Bush's initiative and strongly endorsed the view that the international community should make maximum efforts to provide assistance inside Afghanistan, so that people are not forced to leave in search of assistance. The meeting also endorsed contingency planning for refugee flows, and provided assurances to Pakistan and Iran of burden sharing to care for all new arrivals. Total offers of humanitarian assistance from over 40 countries—including President Bush's pledge of $320 million—now total some $800 million.
The unambiguous message of the meeting was support for the Afghan people. That certainly represents the attitude and endeavors of the United States as well. We are not at war with the innocent people of Afghanistan, and we are doing all we can to ameliorate the conditions under which they have long been suffering.
Chairman HYDE. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
We will now go to questions, and I am going to ask one question. I usually do not ask questions, saving the time for the Members, but I am most interested in an issue that arose today. This is directed to both Mr. Natsios and Mr. Kreczko, Secretary Kreczko and Administrator Natsios.
A front page story in today's edition of The Washington Times states that some elements of the Pakistani army and intelligence service may be providing military and other supplies to the Taliban. Do either of you have any information regarding this matter? Is there any evidence that relief, food or other supplies that we are supplying to Afghan refugees in Pakistan is actually being channeled to Taliban forces in Afghanistan?
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Secretary KRECZKO. Sir, I do not know of any such evidence. Being from the humanitarian side of the house I may not be authoritative on that, but I am not aware of any such evidence.
Mr. NATSIOS. Mr. Chairman, this is the first time I have heard about it this morning in The Washington Times article. We do have a team that has been in Pakistan working on Afghanistan since May. They report to us every day. They are experienced field people. They would hear these sort of things. On the humanitarian side, we are not aware of anything.
I was intrigued to read this this morning, but that is the first time I have heard of it.
Chairman HYDE. Very well. Very well. Ms. Watson?
Ms. WATSON. I will pass.
Chairman HYDE. You want to pass? Very well.
Mr. Bereuter?
Mr. BEREUTER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I am sorry I have been in and out during the course of your presentations. I have been trying to keep up with them.
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Mr. Administrator, I want to submit a question to you related to a nutrition issue that comes from agriculture groups, and I would appreciate it if you could have you or your staff give it some attention.
[The question referred to follows:]
POST-HEARING WRITTEN QUESTION SUBMITTED TO THE HONORABLE ANDREW NATSIOS FROM THE HONORABLE DOUG BEREUTER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEBRASKA
President Bush and the United Nations have said that malnutrition is a serious problem among Afghan children. While it is laudable to send grain and vegetable oil products to help keep people alive for a long cold winter (and spring and summer, even if rains come next year), more protein is needed to support proper growth and development. What is being done to address protein deficiencies and improving people's, especially children's, diets?
[NOTE: At the time of the printing of this hearing, no response from Mr. Natsios was received by the Committee.]
Mr. BEREUTER. A few minutes ago when you came up to introduce yourself, which I very much appreciated, I mentioned to you that the Aspen Institute has recently been holding hearings on Islam and Afghanistan and terror related to al-Qaeda. For 14 or 16 years, they have been doing these congressional breakfasts for the House and the Senate. I have never seen as large an attendance as during these last 3 weeks when they focused on Afghanistan and Islam.
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Yesterday, Ambassador Fred Starr, the former President of Oberlin College with a very distinguished career, made a presentation. He spoke of the Central Asian Republics and Afghanistan and his concern that we need to focus our attention on helping people feed themselves.
Much of the irrigation infrastructure, which is very crude, in the mountainous regions of that region has been destroyed by warfare. He feels that focusing on providing seed and breeding livestock and helping these people build irrigation systems would be among the most important things that we can do in that region, and it would bring some stability. It would also help in a strategic sense to cut the ties that some of them feel and often times are forced to feel they have with the Taliban.
He points out some dramatic examples of success in Tajikistan, and he thinks that this could be used as a leverage point to insist that, in order to provide this kind of assistance that comes flowing into Afghanistan, Afghanistan meet four specific criteria. A good government could be put back in place for the governance of Afghanistan after the Taliban are removed from power.
I thought of the micro-enterprise program. I thought of the Farmer-to-Farmer program, which eventually would be complementary to such an effort. I wonder if you could give me your own impressions about how we might help address the problem with not just emergency assistance, which is obviously needed now, but how to get these farm families, basically conducting subsistence farming, back on their feet in this mountainous region of Afghanistan and stretching to the north into the Central Asian Republics.
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Mr. NATSIOS. First let me say that agriculture is one of my deepest interests in the development field not just in Afghanistan, but in every area of the world, because three-quarters of the poor people in the world live in rural areas. My argument is if you do not deal with agriculture, you can't deal with rural poverty. Three-quarters of the people are going to be left out of the development process.
We withdrew aid from the development of the agriculture field in a precipitous way beginning in the mid 1980s. In 1985, we were spending $1.2 billion in agriculture. Last year we spent $250 million. When I started 15 years ago we had 250 agricultural scientists on our staff. We have 42 left. We have hired 8 more. We are going to hire more to get back in. We started a new agricultural initiative in Africa, and we are looking at it now in Afghanistan in the reconstruction process.
There are areas now, many areas, of Afghanistan that are quite stable. The impression you get from the media reports—because the nature of media is that they focus on the more exciting, interesting things that are going on anywhere—is that the whole country is in the middle of war. That is not the case. There are many rural areas that are stable. They do not have any food left because of the droughts year after year.
One of the things we always do even at this stage of a famine is to look at seed production, seed needs, because you know what farmers do in a famine. If they do not think they are going to survive to the next crop, they will eat their seed. The FAO has done a study, and I have to say it appears so ominous that I do not believe it. I have asked our staff to look into it to see if these figures are accurate.
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The FAO, Food and Agricultural Organization, of the United Nations says there is only 10,000 tons of seed in the country right now. They need, according to FAO, 400,000 tons of seed. I have never seen a gap that large anywhere in any famine in the world. That is a very disturbing sign because they have a winter wheat crop that they should have planted last month, the month of October. They did not do it because there was no seed left.
We did a study a month ago of the seed requirements. We looked to see if there was seed in Pakistan or any of the Central Asian Republics that would be compatible, because you do not want to introduce a seed variety that causes problems without studying this carefully. We brought in a British seed scientist who was an expert in Afghanistan seed varieties. I have yet to read the study that he has given us, but we are looking into that in great detail because the only way to reestablish stability in food security and move people back to the rural areas where they normally live is if we get seed back.
Secondly, we need to focus on the animal herds. They have been absolutely devastated by the lack of forage and the lack of water. It is both problems, which means it is very important to reconstruct the wells, because many of the wells were not reconstructed from the time of the Soviet civil war. Fifty percent of the irrigation system was destroyed during the Soviet civil war and has not been rebuilt. It is absolutely essential that we do that.
I know Charlie MacCormack is sitting here. He is sick of me telling this story, but Save the Children, with an AID grant, went in at the height of the Somali civil war and chaos in 1992, and we did a cash for work project in the middle of the famine. Save the Children helped design a program and implement it to rebuild the entire irrigation system in the lower Shabeellaha Valley. They actually extended it beyond what it had ever been. This was in the middle of the civil war.
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We are looking to the NGOs to make some suggestions in stable areas where we could do some food for work or cash for work projects to help rebuild the well system and particularly the irrigation system, so I fully agree with what you are saying.
The farmer to farmer program I had not thought of in the context of Afghanistan. I think we would have to progress a little further on the peace side of it before we are going to start——
Mr. BEREUTER. No doubt we would.
Mr. NATSIOS [continuing]. Sending farmers in, but it is a very good idea.
Mr. BEREUTER. Could you address briefly the micro-enterprise possibilities?
Mr. NATSIOS. Yes.
Mr. BEREUTER. I have heard where an extremist leader, a very violent leader, given $400, began an operation which has moved him into productive pursuits in Tajikistan. Can this be used more frequently?
Mr. NATSIOS. We actually had started a design of a conflict prevention program in the Central Asian Republics. We have not announced it yet, but we did because I was concerned, and this was 3 or 4 months ago, that there was an instability in that area as a result of what was happening in Afghanistan. Part of that was a small scale public works project that would create employment opportunities and small businesses, so we very much support that. Some of the internally displaced person projects now in those three countries are focused on that.
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Sixty percent of all the micro enterprise lending we do is for agricultural purposes. Most people do not know that, but there is a heavy focus in all of our programs in the rural areas on what is the biggest business and industry in those areas, which is agriculture. It is particularly appropriate in terms of the reconstruction phase of Afghanistan, although I believe some NGOs are actually doing some micro lending even now under these circumstances.
Mr. BEREUTER. Mr. Chairman, thank you for lenience to follow up on that. I appreciate it.
I would like to work with you and your staff to see if we can use this as a leverage for a good governance eventually in Afghanistan.
Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you, Congressman.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY [presiding]. Thank you, Chairman Bereuter.
Administrator Natsios and Secretary Kreczko, thank you very much for your testimony and, more importantly, for the good work that the Bush Administration is doing in this terrible crisis. The $320 million which was announced certainly is very much welcomed as the ongoing effort to mitigate this pain continues.
I do have a couple of very specific questions. Earlier Dr. Wilder from Save the Children, when he testified, spoke of the diseases that they are trying to address, the polio, the problem with measles that they are going to be vaccinating against. At least that is my understanding based on what he said.
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You might recall I asked him what other diseases are out there that need to be addressed. He mentioned acute respiratory diseases and diarrheal disease, and we all know that, after abortion, diarrheal disease is the second leading killer of children in the world. It seems to me that, you know, the shots can obviously save a child's life. If they are properly deployed and the mothers and health dispensaries can get to the children, lives can be saved.
My question is, do we have an early warning capability in place? Is somebody in charge to ensure that these diseases that are on the horizon, and many of which will be directly related to the coming winter, and diseases that exposure to the elements help to bring about—is there sufficient stockpiles of medicine to address what the potential threats may actually be?
I just would parenthetically add, you know, the issue of anthrax has hit America like a ton of bricks. My own district, Trenton and Hamilton Township, are in the news virtually every day. I have spent most of my waking hours in Trenton or Hamilton, mostly Hamilton, because of that problem. I have been amazed, despite the best efforts and the best minds in health care at the postal authorities, how often we are not on the same page. Is Cipro going to be available? Is it not? Who is stockpiling it?
I went through one day where we were trying to find 50,000 tablets of Cipro to help the postal workers. I finally got to the VA. They were on hold to bring in those 50,000 tablets from Chicago. Finally CDC made it available. It underscored to me the chaos that often ensues. We could get hit with Ebola and a myriad of other diseases. If you could answer that, if you would?
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Then the ancillary question of shelter. Is there sufficient shelter, warm clothing for these people this winter? Our country certainly has a great record of in a pinch, dropping such equipment in even when it means putting in military supplies. The Kurds, as part of Operation Provide Comfort, were saved not only because of the MRE's (meals ready to eat), but everything else from socks and heavy jackets that were made available.
Third, if you could, and I have some other questions, but I will just put it out there given the time limit. Air drops. We have heard the criticism, and we heard it again from Dr. Wilder. We heard it yesterday, and I have read about it a number times that the color of the meals that are being dropped are nearly identical, if not identical, to the bomblettes from cluster bombs. Is that going to be changed? Should it be changed in your view?
Finally, corridors of tranquility. You know, Mr. Natsios, you have indicated that it is not a money problem, and we are ready and willing, as are the others in the international community, to step up to the plate, but what about getting it from A to B to C? Are there corridors of tranquility available to us?
Mr. NATSIOS. That's a number of questions, Congressman. The first is there is a disease that Dr. Wilder did not mention Save the Children discovered an epidemic level of this disease last spring that I have never seen in a famine, though it could be common in cold areas, and that is scurvy from a Vitamin C deficiency. Sixteen percent of the kids had scurvy in the area that Save the Children is working in.
I think they have dealt with it since then. It just requires a supply of Vitamin C, but it is a problem because the only thing people are eating in these villages is tea and the flat pita bread that they make. That is it. They do not even have vegetables to go along with it, and some places do not have lentils or even beans for the protein requirement, so it is a serious problem.
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We ordered 17,000 tons of lentils, beans, fortified foods and complementary commodities, and we need also vegetable oil because of the amino acids which are essential in health. They have just been ordered and will be shipped shortly from the United States for distribution because you have to have a balanced diet. We hope the establishment of that balance will help.
We have given $5 million to NGOs, 4 or 5 NGOs, particularly those working in the north, to do local purchase of commodities on the local markets. Particularly those commodities that cannot get there from the United States during the next couple of months before the winter starts, so there is an effort to redress the nutritional imbalance in the food basket that we provide each family.
Secondly, in terms of the upper respiratory disease, the most frequent problem and most severe problem is tuberculosis. If it were just bronchitis or something like that it would be easier to treat. TB takes about 6 months of very intense treatment. If a child or an adult is acutely malnourished and they have TB, they will not get better no matter how much you feed them unless you deal with the TB, so we have to do both. That is a very difficult, very expensive and very time consuming treatment, but it is necessary for people to get better if they are acutely malnourished, so it is a serious problem.
A number of our grants to the NGOs are medical grants. Three things that kill people in famines, particularly this kind of a famine, are, one, malnutrition obviously, but 90 percent of the people in famines do not die from actually starving to death, which usually in the last stage is kidney failure. If a person actually dies from starvation, it is from usually kidney or liver failure. Most people die of diseases because their entire immune system collapses because of the acute malnutrition, so one of the things we want to do is provide immunization.
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There is an immunization campaign going on among many of the NGOs and UNICEF right now because we can save a lot of kids. Fifteen percent of the kids in the Save the Children survey last spring had died of measles, so we are going to immunize against measles and against the other communicable diseases. We are going to balance the food basket.
The third thing you mentioned was shelter. The second reason people die or third reason—medical problems, disease epidemics, malnutrition—is hypothermia. It is 40 degrees below zero on average in the Hindu Kush in the wintertime, 18 to 30 feet of snow in an average year, drought years 12 to 18 feet of snow. Forty degrees below zero is almost unimaginable.
We take this very seriously. We have just sent in the first of seven plane loads of commodities, including winter socks to prevent frostbite and winter coats. We have just sent in 30,000 wool blankets to Turkmenistan that will be distributed in the northern area. Those went in 2 weeks ago. There are 6 more flights coming. We have a warehouse in Pisa, Italy, and 1 in Maryland that have shelter commodities, clothing and winter blankets that are moving in now because that is a very serious risk, and the NGOs are doing the distribution in the mountain areas in particular.
Finally, you asked the question of air drops. By the way, the air drops that are being done since Wednesday following the bombing have been in two areas. I am not going to put them out on the map because it causes security problems for our forces. They are not in areas that we are doing any bombing of any kind. We chose those areas. We chose the areas in AID. I want to take responsibility for it. General Franks asked me. We do not know where to send this stuff. I said there are two conditions. Severe nutritional distress. We know where those areas are. Two, extreme inaccessibility on the ground. We cannot get there physically, but we know people are in deep trouble.
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They have chosen two areas, and I can guarantee you there is no bombing of any kind going on in those areas because I know where both those areas are, and I do not want to go into the details. We did have, however, 3 or 4 days, which is what caused the bad publicity. I have to tell you. The areas that we are in there are no NGO workers even in these areas because they are so remote.
The first 4 days of the bombing we could not get logistically to the areas that General Franks and I had agreed we should focus the air drops on, so they dropped south in populated areas, and that is where we had the problem. That stopped 3 weeks, a month ago, more than a month ago. That has been dealt with because we moved the air drops to the areas they were supposed to be. The military has been very consistent. They have dropped over a million of these packets so far.
I think the problem in terms of they may be the same color, but since there is no bombing going on in these areas where we are dropping the packages I do not really see that as an issue.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Thank you. If I could, the mental health issue. I did raise it earlier with Dr. Wilder. If you could briefly address post traumatic stress or any other mental health concerns, as well as the prosthetic device issue? What is AID doing to help people, particularly children who may be suffering and in need of an artificial limb?
Mr. NATSIOS. Right now, our primary focus is keeping them alive.
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Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Right. Okay.
Mr. NATSIOS. When we get through the winter and through this phase of the famine and we get food security restored, I hope in the next 6 months we will move back to a more stable system. We will see.
One of my friends who was a clinical psychologist said a large portion of Rwanda is now suffering from acute depression because of what happened, so the notion that this is not affecting people just because you cannot see it does not mean it is not there. It is a very serious problem.
The NGOs that have worked in conflicts, the AID staff that have worked in conflicts, U.N. agencies all know this, but right now our first job is to keep them alive because if we do not keep them alive we are not going to be doing any counseling later on. There are a number of things that can be done later on.
We did some projects that AID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) funded in Mozambique that became quite famous because of the trauma of that war 12 years ago. Neal Bufbe at Duke was the one that began that pioneering work in this whole issue of it was not post traumatic stress. It was acute severe depression over what had happened. We will work on that, and we are looking at that.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Secretary Kreczko, I think you wanted to respond?
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Secretary KRECZKO. Thank you. I would just add two quick points. With respect to the colors, the Defense Department is reviewing the color, and I understand that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is making a statement about that today.
With respect to prosthetics, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been doing prosthetics work because of the large number of land mines in Afghanistan, and the United States has been the largest funder of that.
Thanks.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Thank you very much.
Mr. Issa?
Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
There are a lot of hard questions when it comes to Afghanistan. This may be one of them that is going to take time to work out, but given the difficulties of delivering humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without ultimately it falling into the hands of Taliban, has USAID and the State Department considered establishing humanitarian corridors or safe zones? If so, you know, is there a role for the U.S. military to play in that? Have you begun that process?
Mr. NATSIOS. I worked with an NGO for 5 years, as you may have heard earlier, and I know I advocated those corridors in several civil wars. We have tried them. We tried them in Sierra Leone. They were not successful.
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The requirement for any of these safe haven ideas or corridors to be successful is that all the combatants have to exist within an ethical framework that suggests restraint will be mutually accepted by everyone. Now, it is possible that the U.N. will succeed in convincing the Taliban it is in their interests to do this.
I have to tell you. I am very skeptical. We have seen what the Taliban did before September 11, before we had any terrorist issues. There was no thought of the United States intervening with the military. We had serious trouble with Taliban intervening in a very unhelpful way in the relief effort. They are really not interested in this, I have to tell you.
If you read Rashid's book, Ahmed Rashid wrote the preeminent work on the Taliban, a Pakistani reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He says in that that Taliban really has never had an interest in humanitarian relief because they believe that Allah will provide, which is a very anti-Islamic idea, I might add, almost giving us part of the Koran. For them to say something like that indicates that they do not even know their own Koranic teachings.
That is their view, and so the notion that they are concerned about this. There is no evidence that that is a concern that they have. They have done looting, they have harassed and beaten Afghan workers, they have prohibited us from using radios—which is essential to running a complex logistical operation like this—the fact that we had one of the WFP warehouses taken over, which is now empty. You just go through the list. It does not appear to me that they are going to be interested in agreeing to a restraint for these corridors.
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Without that, all we are doing is inviting attacks. If we create the corridors, what may end up happening is that people who are naive may use those corridors and find out, whether they are civilians or aid agencies, that they are going to be attacked when they get there.
Mr. ISSA. Given a combination of a lack of the normal ethics of war that you would often find, their link to Osama bin Laden, and terrorism as a practical reality that we are dealing with, then I guess my question is when we give fuel oil to keep a hospital going would they not logically reappropriate that, put it into their multi fuel vehicles and use it to wage war?
Is there some concern that, you know, for every dollar we give them we have to spend $10, $15, $20 more trying to overcome it? America is a very wealthy country. We can use dollars to win wars, but at the same time it appears as though the product is also not getting to the needy, and thus there is no reason to spend the extra dollars.
Is there not a sort of pattern whenever you are not behind real lines, such as the Northern Alliance, where people to the north of that or in Pakistan or Iran, where people in those areas really can be reasonably assured to get the aid?
Mr. NATSIOS. Let me just point out this map once again.
Mr. ISSA. I have looked at it all day.
Mr. NATSIOS. Okay.
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Mr. ISSA. It is the best we have had here, by the way.
Mr. NATSIOS. It is. It is a very interesting map. I might add, it was an AID grant, my last act from the first Bush Administration, that funded this project, which is why I keep showing the map.
Mr. ISSA. You have to make your dollars last.
Mr. NATSIOS. Yes. Right. This is very interesting from the ethnic politics of Afghanistan. The Taliban are based in one of the three subclans of the Pashtun Tribe, not all three. In fact, the other two tribes do not like the Taliban. Their polls were done by an Afghan information group along the border in June, long before September 11, and they found that the Taliban only have about a 10-percent support base in the country. It is a very small support base.
The three or four ethnic groups in the north half of the country, the Uzbeks, the Turkmen, the Tajiks,——
Mr. ISSA. Right.
Mr. NATSIOS [continuing]. The Hazaras; the Hazaras are in the center of the country. They are the lowest social class. They are Shiites, so they are regarded as heretics by the Taliban. The Taliban has been massacring them and committing horrendous human rights abuses over a period of 5 or 6 years now. These people all live in the most heavily famine affected areas. That is number one.
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The Taliban, and they do exist, are regarded as an occupation force. In the Pashtun area down here it is less so, but that is not a famine area down here, so it is important to understand that the ethnic politics of the country affect the relief effort.
When you have the population with you, it is much easier to run an accountable relief system because they are not interested in diversion. The Taliban are constantly looking over their shoulder because they are in hostile territory when they are up in the north. They all know that.
This area is less likely, the northern area, the northern half of the country, to have severe problems with accountability. The problem we did have was in Kandahar, which is the——
Mr. ISSA. Right.
Mr. NATSIOS [continuing]. Capital and the center of Taliban control.
One of the things that has been happening is the NGOs have been opening logistics offices along these borders because there are needs that we can get to this way, but on the Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Iranian border logistical operations have been set up to move food into areas of very weak or non-existent Taliban control, which means our accountability problems will be less severe.
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We have used basically a logistical strategy to improve the accountability and reduce our risk. We are also reducing the length of time that our trucks from the aid operation are in the country. When you move from Pakistan all the way across the country, you increase—triple—the risk of looting or of diversion or of taxes being imposed on your vehicles, which happened a few weeks ago. If you are moving in right from every border, the length of distance that you travel to where you are going is much shorter. That is another strategy that the NGOs, the U.N. agencies and we are pursuing.
Mr. ISSA. Thank you very much. If I may just for a moment, Mr. Chairman, I would like to close off my questioning not only by thanking you for helping to educate me, but for making it clear to this Committee and to America that although we have an oversight responsibility and we take it very seriously, when we micro manage your dollars, when we pick a particular country or particular region and say do not spend the money there because from our vantage point it looks like there might be a conflict, I suspect that we miss the kind of insight that you have on the ground, and how even conflicted dollars ultimately lead to the kind of positive result that you are achieving.
I know you are in the hardest location in the world to do it, and I commend you for doing it. I thank you for being here today.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Thank you, Mr. Issa.
The Chair recognizes the gentlelady, Ms. Watson, for any questions she might have? No?
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Ms. Davis, Jo Ann Davis, the gentlelady from Virginia, is recognized.
Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I regret I was not able to be here for the testimony. I had two other hearings going on at the same time. I would like to ask unanimous consent to be able to request questions in writing.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Without objection. Any request for questions in writing will be made a part of the record, and we hope that our witnesses would respond very promptly.
Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. The Chair recognizes Ms. Napolitano for any questions she might have.
Mrs. NAPOLITANO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I listened with great interest, and I am sorry I arrived a little late, but I am very interested in all of the different aspects of the country that we are at war with, so to speak.
What I am interested in is if there are any specific plans by our Administration to address the needs of women in Afghanistan, both in the current crisis and in the reconstruction process? Are there special programs in place that are going to meet the needs of the women refugees and the internally displaced, understanding women are the family members? Most men are not around, whether they are involved in the conflict or not. Also, what is the vision for these women in this reconstruction process?
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Mr. NATSIOS. Mr. Chairman, let me answer the question. First, one of what we call pre-famine indicators that tells us that a food emergency is beginning is the migration of men to cities. Typically what will happen is because a grown man will eat a large amount of food to stay alive, more than a child would, in order to relieve the stress on the family and to also try to bring wages back to the village, the men will go off to the cities and other countries to try to find day labor and then send the money back to the villages.
There are whole areas of northern Afghanistan where there are no men in the villages. There are children, women and elderly people. Our aid program through the NGOs, through the U.N. agencies, tends in many villages to be almost exclusively through the heads of households who are women, so in one sense the aid program is a woman centered program.
Secondly, the people who are most vulnerable in any famine are children under 5, pregnant women, lactating mothers. Those are the three most vulnerable groups. Why? Because the woman is feeding two people essentially whether they are pregnant or whether they are nursing. We focus on those populations as a function of nutritional stress. I mean, they are the ones that are most at risk, so we have to focus and target our assistance on those populations. That is standard operating procedure in all NGOs that work in these emergencies, so that is the focus now.
The third thing is there has been a conflict with Taliban—I do not have to tell you that—over women's issues. It is a problem in Pakistan as well. The literacy rate among women in both countries is extremely low, among the lowest in the world. We do know that by raising women's literacy rates, girl children or adult women, that child mortality increases. Agricultural production increases.
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Studies from East Africa show us that if we educate women who are farmers, and not in agriculture, but just in reading and writing and computation, that it increases agricultural production because they take those skills, and it is easier for them to do their farming.
We know we can affect agricultural production with education programs. One of the things we are looking at now, and we are not designing anything yet because the war is not over, is an education program in Afghanistan that will be geared within the cultural traditions of the country. We want to be sensitive not to the Taliban, but to the general historic traditions of the country.
In the northern areas, these are more Turkic culture in the north, the northern half of the country, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, Hazaras. They had universities with women in them who would wear high heels and dresses. I mean, if you went there you would not even imagine this was the Taliban era even as late as the mid 1990s. So they are particularly outraged by the Taliban imposition because women were—and I do not want to use the word liberated to describe something—but is a much more moderate and modern view of women's role in society in that context.
Also, in the rural areas under Taliban control, a lot of the complaints about the Taliban's behavior toward women is in the cities. Eighty percent of the people in Afghanistan live in rural areas, and the Taliban just does not have the structure to be able to intervene in those areas.
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The answer to your question is it is essential that we work through women. In the camps, the tendency is for food distributions to go through women even when there are men because women feed their kids first. If we want to keep the nutritional level of the children up, we give the woman the food to feed the kids with because we know they will feed them first. This is very important for child nutrition. It has to be an integral part of our response to these emergencies because culturally it is the way in which we provide the assistance.
Mrs. NAPOLITANO. I would like to follow that up with would there be any plan to further the women representation in government in the political dialogue?
Mr. NATSIOS. That is a question I will leave to my friend from the State Department in terms of the diplomatic area of this. We are a little bit of a ways from any political representation, but at some point I suppose if you want to come and——
Mrs. NAPOLITANO. Understood. May I just make a point that in meeting many heads of state in my years in different levels of government, I have long stated to those leaders that if women were the leaders there would be no wars because women do not want to place their children at risk.
I think women have the ability to mediate and to be able to work with others; at least that is what I have gathered, and that is what I feel. Then again, I may be challenged on that piece.
Secretary KRECZKO. Well, Congresswoman, I am really not in a position to address the political issues because we work in the humanitarian area.
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I can tell you that in the refugee camps we are funding and we have been for the last several years special programs to promote girls' education and to make available basic health care to girls and women. That is in large part because it was a place in which we could access the women and the girls because we were not able to do it as well in some of the Taliban controlled areas in Afghanistan, so we have had special programs dedicated to that in the refugee camps.
Chairman HYDE [presiding]. The gentlelady's time has expired.
Mrs. NAPOLITANO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Rohrabacher?
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I began this line of questioning, and you probably were able to go into this once I had left because I had to run across for a delegation meeting, and I am sorry. But having been very involved with Afghanistan now for a number of years and faced a number of challenges, and I remember when Al Santoli, my partner here, and I tried to get some supplies in to Bamian, was it? We were blocked by the State Department.
In fact, the State Department, and this was what year, Al? In 1998, when I guess it was the Hazaras in that area were facing a very, very hard situation. We actually had humanitarian supplies that had been donated, and people were ready to go in. Our own State Department blocked that.
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It seems very difficult for me to hear now indications of all this supposed help that we were giving up in the north and non-Taliban areas. You seem to have stressed that several times since I have been sitting here. We did not see that. I did not see that.
For example, today in that same area there is a threat of a major outbreak of starvation and such. The people we are in contact with almost on a daily basis have not seen this aid that you are talking about.
Mr. NATSIOS. Congressman or Mr. Chairman, if I could? The first thing I would say is I would never choose to speak for the last Administration on any matter. I was not here then. I can only tell you what we have done in AID this year.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, I do not have any trouble——
Mr. NATSIOS. I can tell you that I know I asked for a map, and I asked for the staff to tell me where the grants were being made geographically. The grants are primarily being made in the red areas on this map because that is the area of most severe nutritional distress.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Do you mean for this year?
Mr. NATSIOS. Well, I cannot tell you what happened before because I was not around then. I have been Administrator since May.
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Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let me recommend that you read about what your agency has been doing for the last 5 years. I just would like to suggest that it has been my experience, and I have been deeply involved in this country for the last 5 years, that the United States has been channeling the lion's share, if not all of our aid, and, as you mentioned, the United States has been the largest contributor of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but it has been channeled into the Taliban controlled areas. Even at times when private organizations were trying to help the non-Taliban controlled areas, the last Administration not only did they not facilitate it, but thwarted those efforts.
I find that to be a heinous condemnation of the last Administration, of which you are not responsible, but let me note that right now there is a humanitarian crisis not on the verge of happening, but happening in the Bamian Province.
Mr. NATSIOS. There is assistance going in. Your friends may have not seen it. I can tell you there is assistance in the Bamian Province right now.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. We do know that there was a humanitarian air drop, and it missed the target, but that is nobody's fault. I mean, people are just getting used to having——
Mr. NATSIOS. Yes. Right.
Mr. ROHRABACHER [continuing]. To drop things in.
Quite frankly, Mr. Chairman, this government that we have today, this Administration, has been responsive, and they have tried to help. We have had 6 weeks of war now, and you cannot expect them to be perfect, but that air drop actually went off target, and they have not found the food yet.
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Mr. NATSIOS. Actually, that is a large area. Even though it looks small on a map, it is actually large because Afghanistan——
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right.
Mr. NATSIOS [continuing]. Is a very big country. There has been more than one drop in that area.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes, sir.
Mr. NATSIOS. There have been a number of drops. Two, we contacted well before September 11 a number of NGOs to work in this red area up in here in the northeast up here.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes.
Mr. NATSIOS. The Agah Kahn Foundation has a grant in to us, which I believe we have approved now or almost approved, to move I think it is about 10,000 tons of food into the northeast region.
You can look also at how Save the Children works, and Charlie MacCormack is going to talk about it, their programs for 15 years have been located up here, which is an Uzbek/Turkmen area, I believe.
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Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right.
Mr. NATSIOS. They have been there, and I have to say I think some of the money even under the last Administration they got to work up there was from——
Mr. ROHRABACHER. He did suggest that it was while General Dostum was there. He did not say, however, that it was necessarily in those areas controlled by Dostum's military.
Mr. NATSIOS. I might, though, add something. If we say that we are only going to provide aid in the areas not controlled by Taliban, the population, which is 90 percent of the population, that do not like Taliban will suffer. That does not make any sense.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. I think that that is a very humanitarian approach, and I am not second guessing. Since the war began, I am not second guessing the President's decision to do that. I am sure that came directly from him. Our President has a wonderful heart, and that is probably one of his best attributes.
He is also someone who thinks very clearly, but I personally would prefer having the aid provided outside the Taliban areas so that it would give people an incentive. Also, we know, as you mentioned in your own testimony at times, the Taliban have actually manipulated some of that aid and gotten a hold of it, stolen it.
For the record, Mr. Chairman, the district that I mentioned where the humanitarian crisis is in full force now, and there have been some food drops, which I commend you for, is the Y-A-K-A-W-L-A-N-G, Yakawlang District.
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Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much.
Chairman HYDE. Mr. Nick Smith?
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Mr. Chairman, thanks.
Where does the food come from? Who decides on the efficiency of providing the most food for the available funds both to this panel, and I will ask a similar question to the next panel?
Mr. NATSIOS. The food comes from the United States. We did have a controversy over a local purchase, which I will go into in a minute.
Last year there were no local purchases from U.S. funds. It was all U.S. Title II food or 416(b) food from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA food, so it is either AID or USDA. The logistics are all done by USDA.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. And how much more does that cost than local purchases?
Mr. NATSIOS. We do not have to pay the freight charges, which are about 30 to 40 percent of the cost of moving food.
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Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Who does pay the freight charges?
Mr. NATSIOS. We do. The United States Government does. When we ship food, we pay for the cost of moving the food as well. Once it arrives in port, then we pay for it to move on trains or on trucks into the country to be distributed.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. But why do you do that when it would be half the price buying locally——
Mr. NATSIOS. Well, there is a——
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN [continuing]. If you include the cost of transportation?
Mr. NATSIOS. Because there is a large amount of support in the United States, in this Congress and among the American people for food grown in the United States to be used.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Who knows how much more it costs and how much less effective our food aid is by——
Mr. NATSIOS. I can tell you.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN [continuing]. Shipping it 5,000 miles across the sea?
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Mr. NATSIOS. Well, I can tell you depending upon the area of the world. If it is to Latin America, it would be——
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. No. I am talking about Afghanistan, sir.
Mr. NATSIOS. Afghanistan would be about 40 percent more. There is a 40 percent premium in paying for food which is shipped from the United States because of shipping costs and because of the long distance.
I have to tell you, the quality of the food is much higher. The best, and I am not making an advertisement here. If you ask local people which do they prefer, they always prefer the American food because the quality of the grain is almost always much higher.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Again, if you asked them if they would be willing to pay twice as much——
Mr. NATSIOS. Yes. Yes.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN [continuing]. I suspect the answer might be different.
Mr. NATSIOS. In this particular emergency, what I asked for was the authority, and we received it, to purchase a third of the food that we are going to be distributing in Afghanistan in the next 6 months locally.
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The reason I did that is because it takes 3 to 4 months to move food from the United States, purchase it in the United States, put it on ships, move it to country and then take it from port and then move it into the country. That is a long time.
Afghanistan does not have any ports. You have to go through either Iran or Pakistan, or we were shipping food, believe it or not, to the Baltic Sea to Estonia and then shipping it all the way across Europe and Russia by freight, by train, into the Central Asian Republics. It took a very long time.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Expanding on the efficiency——
Mr. NATSIOS. Yes.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN [continuing]. Of the way we do business, Mr. Rohrabacher and I and several others met with the Turkish people that had been involved in food aid into Afghanistan. They suggested that they were providing food relief for just a bit more than 25 percent than our costs. That means their food assistance was almost quadruple the efficiency of our's at getting the food to the places that needed it, so that is why I ask the question.
Mr. NATSIOS. I would challenge that, Congressman. I think you can argue for the 40 percent difference, but no one is providing food at that level. I think people may have been able to do it once in one area.
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Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Do you know what the Turkish effort is?
Mr. NATSIOS. I know what the other donors are paying. The world price of wheat, which is the same in Pakistan as it is in Iran, is $110 or $120, which is the same price in the United States. There is an equilibrium in the market.
The big price or the big cost of moving stuff, of food, in Afghanistan is not the cost of the wheat. It is the cost of transportation, depending on where it is shipped from.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Well, certainly if you are shipping it from the United States certainly the cost——
Mr. NATSIOS. Obviously it is much more expensive. Anyway, we have the approval now to spend $50 million on local purchase.
WFP purchased with U.S. Government money 15,000 tons of food in Kazakhstan yesterday. The Europeans paid for another 15,000 tons. They are now moving 30,000 tons of locally purchased food down. WFP also is purchasing without U.S. money some food on the Iranian markets, so local purchase is being used now.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. With limited time, I appreciate politically we have got surplus food in this country and we would like to get rid of it, but because of the cost of transportation and because there is a limit on the contributions that we are putting toward this food aid, it seems to me that we should consider how we can most efficiently and effectively provide that.
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Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you for saying that, Congressman. I have a lot of scars from the fight, I have to tell you.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Let me add to the question of teaching the people how to fish versus giving them a fish. How much of your effort is dedicated to looking to the kind of research that allows food protein to be grown in more arid climates?
Mr. NATSIOS. The United States, as I was saying to Congressman Bereuter earlier, the aid agency, USAID, got out of the agriculture business beginning in the mid 1980s or the late 1980s. There has been a steady decline of agricultural research.
We still do provide $27 million a year to the World Bank, the Consulative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) network, which is 18 research stations around the world, very famous, that do extraordinarily good work in rice and sorghum and potatoes and wheat and corn, et cetera. They have these centers, and they do research in improved varieties, in biotechnology, in herding. We use that technology in our programs all over the world.
I am trying to rebuild the agricultural component because, in my view, three-quarters of the poor people in the world live in rural areas. If you want to deal with that——
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Mr. Chairman, you are about ready to gavel me down, but something I really did not understand is the out migration. Was that out migration taking place before September 11, or has it substantially expanded as I suspect in the hopes of having better food, better conditions or more safety?
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Secretary KRECZKO. Congressman, there was significant outflow of population last spring as a result of drought and fighting. It then subsided some, and we have over the last several weeks seen about 80,000 to 100,000 people move, much, much fewer than had originally been projected.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has long since expired.
Mr. SMITH OF MICHIGAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. I want to thank this panel for your very illuminating contribution. We will be seeing lots of each other I am sure, but you are doing most important work, and it is most appreciated. Thank you so much.
Our second panel consists of Dr. Charles MacCormack. Dr. MacCormack is currently President, CEO and a member of the Board of Directors of Save the Children Federation, a non-profit, private voluntary organization which implements programs focusing primarily on health care, micro-enterprise and basic education.
From 1977 to 1992, Dr. MacCormack was President of World Learning, an organization working to foster world peace through international education. He currently serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Executive Committee of InterAction, the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid and the Food Security Advisory Committee.
Mr. Delahunt has asked me to personally greet you. He unfortunately has another schedule he cannot avoid, but he wants to apologize to you, and I am happy to convey that message.
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The other gentleman, the final member, is Mr. Kenneth Bacon. He is President and CEO of Refugees International, which monitors conditions of refugees and displaced people around the world. Prior to his current position, he spent over 7 years in the Department of Defense as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. He was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal for 25 years, concentrating on defense, economics and international finance.
It is an honor to welcome you gentlemen today. We do look forward to your insights, and we ask that you proceed with a 5-minute summary of your written statements. Your complete statement will be made a part of the record.
Mr. MacCormack, I understand you have submitted a statement for the record, and you consider Dr. Wilder's comments and statement on Save the Children to be sufficient.
We thank you for your statement, Mr. MacCormack, and for making Dr. Wilder available to us as a witness via the video conference from Islamabad.
Mr. Bacon?
STATEMENT OF KENNETH BACON, PRESIDENT, REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL
Mr. BACON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. First I want to thank you and the House International Relations Committee for holding this hearing on Afghanistan and its humanitarian crisis. It comes at a very crucial moment.
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Chairman HYDE. Is your mike on?
Mr. BACON. I think so. Can you hear that?
Chairman HYDE. Now we hear you.
Mr. BACON. All right. I want to thank you and the Committee for holding this hearing, which comes at a very crucial moment. The U.S. is correctly attacking terrorists and their protectors in Afghanistan, while moving to feed the Afghan people. Taliban obstruction and the military campaign have slowed food deliveries, and the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan will worsen without urgent and imaginative efforts to get more food to the Afghan people.
As you, Chairman Hyde, pointed out earlier, Afghanistan was one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, a crisis of refugees and displacement, well before the events of September 11, 2001. Even before the current military campaign, conditions in Afghanistan were so bad that 25 percent of Afghan children died before reaching the age of 5, according to some estimates, and a woman dies in childbirth every 30 minutes.
Prior to September 11, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) was providing daily rations to 3.8 million people and was preparing to increase the number fed to a total of 5.5 million through the long winter season. Now the WFP estimates that it may have to supply food to as many as 7.5 million Afghans, including 1.5 million who could flee to neighboring countries in response to attacks against Afghanistan.
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In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, it became clear that the initial focus of U.S. military retaliation would be on Afghanistan. Refugees International, joined by many other humanitarian organizations, immediately began to press the Administration to recognize two imperatives.
First, the humanitarian imperative to continue to respond to the needs of millions of vulnerable Afghans, and, second, the political imperative to insure that the U.S. military response did not harm innocent civilians and thereby jeopardize the moral high ground that the United States has been able to maintain as the victim of terrorism.
RI applauds the Administration's allocation of $320 million to respond to the humanitarian needs in Afghanistan. We consider this, however, just a down payment for what could be a larger relief obligation over time, followed by a rather ambitious program to help Afghanistan get back on its feet through economic reconstruction. We are especially glad that the $320 million pledge comes from the extraordinary $40 billion emergency fund approved by Congress and does not, therefore, reduce U.S. funding for other humanitarian crises around the world.
The problem now is that the increased aid is not getting into Afghanistan fast enough. As a result, hunger and the diseases that go with it could increase dramatically this winter. In Islamabad last month, a UNICEF official estimated that 400,000 Afghan children could die this winter from preventable causes, up from an estimated 300,000 last year.
The WFP says it must deliver at least 196,000 metric tons of food to Afghanistan by the end of the year or almost 3,500 metric tons a day. Currently, it is delivering 2,000 metric tons a day. Although this is up sharply from several weeks ago, it still is not enough.
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To boost food deliveries, Refugees International recommends the immediate establishment of humanitarian response zones inside Afghanistan. The proposed zones would be located initially in relatively secure areas in northern Afghanistan that have not been targets of U.S.-led bombing attacks and are close to large concentrations of vulnerable people. As Administrator Natsios said, 75 to 80 percent of the vulnerable people are in the northern part of the country.
International staff of U.N. agencies and NGOs would work in the zones overseeing the distribution of increased quantities of emergency relief. The proposed zones would consist both of safe corridors to transport relief goods from the borders of Afghanistan and internal logistical hubs where large quantities of relief supplies would be located for onward distribution either through commercial networks or networks established by international and local NGOs.
The opening of delivery routes from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is going to boost food deliveries in the famine-stricken northern half of the country. For example, the WFP estimates that it will eventually be able to deliver up to 16,000 metric tons of food a month through Uzbekistan.
We also recommend the aggressive use of air transport, both air lift to functioning airports and air drops of food by parachute when necessary to get food to people otherwise in inaccessible areas. WFP and other aid agencies, if they are not able to conduct air delivery, recommend that military planes be used to head off starvation in remote areas. I realize that this recommendation differs from that of other humanitarian organizations perhaps, but we think the needs are urgent enough to require unusual actions.
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Food deliveries inside Afghanistan will save lives and could also help prevent a refugee crisis on the borders of Pakistan, Iran and other neighboring states. So far the refugee flow toward Pakistan and Iran has been lighter than expected, although the numbers are rising. It is important that neighboring countries provide refuge to those fleeing Afghanistan.
Several thousand refugees on the Iranian border are being sheltered in encampments near the border, but just inside Afghanistan. Iran is permitting food and other relief shipments to the refugees, but it is not allowing the refugees to enter. It is imperative that these and other refugees from Afghanistan be permitted temporary asylum in Iran, Pakistan and other countries of the region in accordance with international humanitarian law. The U.S. and other governments have been leaning on both Pakistan and Iran, and they should continue to do that to get them to open their borders.
The U.S. must do its part in another very important way as well. Following September 11, the Administration understandably instituted a review of the program to admit refugees into the U.S., and at the same time placed a hold on all refugee admissions. This has not applied to at least some categories of immigrants. Refugees International urges that effective immediately refugees already approved for admission to the U.S. and in life-threatening situations be admitted without delay.
Further, as soon as the current security review is completed, general refugee admission should recommence. U.S. approval of a refugee for admission to the U.S. is a lengthy and intensive process. Perhaps the least effective method for a terrorist to try to enter the U.S. would be to go through this lengthy refugee admission process.
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The crisis in Afghanistan is complex. The U.S. response involves military, economic, diplomatic and humanitarian elements. A clear lesson from similar crises over the past decade is the importance of designating a Cabinet-level official to take charge of humanitarian issues.
While all senior members of the U.S. team from the President on down are sensitive to humanitarian concerns, it is important to have one individual at the table who is responsible for the complex interplay among military, political and humanitarian aspects of the operation, someone who, incidentally, could report to Congress on how these humanitarian issues are being handled across the government. Recently, President Bush appointed coordinators for homeland defense and counter-terrorism programs. He should do the same for humanitarian programs.
In conclusion, let me summarize my three points. The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan predates the September 11 attack against the United States. The international community, led by the U.S., has responded well and quickly to the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people. Nevertheless, much more needs to be done—and it must be done quickly—to meet the Afghan people's needs for food, shelter and medical supplies. After the current crisis is over, the international community will face the challenge of helping to rebuild Afghanistan.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bacon follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF KENNETH BACON, PRESIDENT, REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL
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Chairman Hyde, I want to thank you and the House International Relations Committee for holding this hearing on Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis. Your examination comes at a crucial moment. The U.S. is correctly attacking terrorists and their protectors in Afghanistan, while moving to feed the Afghan people. But Taliban obstruction and the military campaign have slowed food deliveries, and the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan will worsen without urgent and imaginative efforts to get more food to the Afghan people.
Afghanistan was one of the world's largest crises of displacement well before the events of September 11, 2001. After more than 20 years of conflict, three years of drought, and the repressive policies of the Taliban regime, four million Afghans had sought refuge in neighboring countries. What's more, some 800,000 people were displaced within Afghanistan. Even before the current military campaign, conditions in Afghanistan were so bad that 25% of Afghan children died before reaching the age of five, according to some estimates, and a woman died in childbirth every 30 minutes.
Prior to September 11, The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) was providing daily rations to 3.8 million people and was preparing to increase the number fed to a total of 5.5 million through the long winter season. Now the WFP estimates that it may have to supply food to as many as 7.5 million Afghans, including 1.5 million who could flee to neighboring countries in response to attacks against Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, it became clear that the initial focus of U.S. military retaliation would be in Afghanistan. Refugees International, joined by other humanitarian non-governmental organizations, immediately began pressing the Administration to recognize two imperatives: 1) the humanitarian imperative to continue to respond to the needs of the millions of vulnerable Afghan civilians who bear no responsibility whatsoever for the attacks on U.S. soil, and 2) the political imperative to ensure that the U.S. military response did not harm innocent civilians and thereby jeopardize the moral high ground that the United States has been able to maintain as the victim of terrorism that targeted civilians in New York and Washington. We raised these points in a letter to President Bush and in subsequent meetings with administration and congressional officials. I have attached a copy of the letter to this testimony.
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RI applauds the administration's decision to allocate $320 million to respond to humanitarian needs in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in neighboring countries. We are especially glad that this pledge comes from the extraordinary $40 billion emergency fund approved by Congress and does not, therefore, reduce U.S. funding for other humanitarian crises around the world. The amount allocated by the Administration represents more than a fair share of the $584 million requested by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his appeal to the international community for Afghan relief. Partially because of the U.S. generosity, Mr. Annan's appeal has brought in almost $150 million more than requested.
However, the increased aid is not getting into Afghanistan fast enough. As a result, hunger and the diseases that go with it could increase dramatically this winter. In Islamabad last month, a UNICEF official estimated that 400,000 Afghan children could die this winter from preventable causes, up from an estimated 300,000 last year.
The WFP says that it must deliver at least 52,000 metric tons of food a month to feed millions of people in Afghanistan. The fighting has made food deliveries difficult, and deliveries are less than planned or needed, even though the WFP has been able to boost deliveries sharply in the last few weeks.
To boost food deliveries, Refugees International recommends the immediate establishment of Humanitarian Response Zones inside Afghanistan. The proposed zones would be located initially in relatively secure areas in northern Afghanistan that have not been targets of U.S.-led bombing attacks and are close to large concentrations of vulnerable people. International staff of UN agencies and NGOs would work in the Zones, overseeing the distribution of increased quantities of emergency assistance.
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The proposed Humanitarian Response Zones would consist of both safe corridors to transport relief goods from the borders of Afghanistan and internal logistical hubs where large quantities of relief supplies would be located for onward distribution either through commercial networks or networks established by international and local NGOs. In the event that certain isolated communities could not be reached by truck, vulnerable people with the strength and means to move would be able reach the zone. A copy of our proposal is attached.
The opening of new delivery routes from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan is helping to boost food deliveries to the famine-stricken northern half of the country. For example, the WFP estimates that it will eventually be able to deliver up to 16,000 metric tons of food a month through Uzbekistan. Deliveries will increase when the WFP carries out its plans to airlift food into Afghanistan. The flights are supposed to start later this month.
More food is most urgent humanitarian requirement, but Afghans also need tents, blankets and medical supplies, as well as seed to help them plant next year's crops.
Food deliveries inside Afghanistan will save lives and could also help prevent a refugee crisis on the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and other neighboring states. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that as many as 1.5 million people could seek refuge in neighboring states as a result of anti-terrorist military actions and hunger. A refugee outpouring of this magnitude would not only be a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions, it would potentially be politically destabilizing, especially in Pakistan and Iran, where resentment against Afghan refugees was already growing well before the events of September 11.
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In this context, the preference is clearly to enable Afghans to remain in their homes and on their farms rather than to have them embark on a long, difficult, and dangerous journey to neighboring countries in search of food.
So far the refugee flow toward Pakistan and Iran has been lighter than expected, although numbers are rising. This may be because both countries have closed their borers to more refugees, although and estimated 80,000 more refugees have slipped into Pakistan since Sept. 11. The office of UN High Commissioner for Refugees just announced that Pakistan has agreed to accept up to 300,000 particularly vulnerable refugees.
It is important that neighboring countries provide refuge to those fleeing Afghanistan. Several thousand refugees on the Iranian border are being sheltered in encampments near the border but just inside Afghanistan. Iran is permitting food and other relief shipments to the refugees, but it is not allowing the refugees to enter.
A new, and disturbing development of the last several days, is that the Taliban has detained several thousand Afghans on their way to Pakistan and placed them in a squalid camp near the border town of Spin Boldak. Men in this group reportedly fear being impressed into the Taliban army.
It is imperative that these and other refugees from Afghanistan be permitted temporary asylum in Iran, Pakistan and other countries of the region in accordance with international humanitarian law. Pakistan is likely to receive the lion's share of new refugees. While the international community is very mindful of the essential role Pakistan is playing in the campaign against terror, the U.S. and other governments should be pressing the government of Pakistan and the other countries of the region to admit refugees temporarily. The UNHCR and other international organizations are prepared to provide full support for the new refugees.
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The U.S. must do its part in another very important way. Following September 11, the Administration understandably instituted a review of the program to admit refugees into U.S., and at the same time placed a hold on all refugee admissions. This has not applied to at least some categories of immigrants. Refugees International urges that effective immediately, refugees already approved for admission to the U.S. and in life-threatening situations be admitted without delay.
Further, as soon as the current security review is completed, general refugee admissions should commence. U.S. approval of a refugee for admission to the U.S. is a lengthy and intensive process. Perhaps the least effective method for a terrorist to try to enter the U.S. would be to go through the refugee process.
Congress and the administration already have begun to talk of ways to rebuild Afghanistan after the current crisis ends. The magnitude of the needs in Afghanistan and the need for reconstruction assistance in the aftermath of the U.S. military campaign, suggest that it is probably best to view the $320 million as an initial investment in a lengthy and costly response to the needs of the Afghan people for peace, reconstruction, and development.
The crisis in Afghanistan is complex. The U.S. response involves military, economic, diplomatic, and humanitarian elements. A clear lesson from similar crises over the past decade is the importance of designating a Cabinet-level official to take charge of humanitarian issues. While all senior members of the U.S. team should be sensitive to humanitarian concerns, it is important to have one individual at the table who is responsible for the complex interplay among military, political, and humanitarian aspects of the operation. Recently, President Bush appointed coordinators for homeland defense and counter-terrorism programs.
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The over-riding brief for such a humanitarian affairs coordinator should be to ensure that the interests of the Afghan civilians and refugees are protected. The humanitarian affairs coordinator can be either a military or civilian officer. This person could also be the senior contact point for the UN, other international organizations, and NGOs involved on the humanitarian front. What is essential is that the coordinator be in the inner circle of those who are managing the U.S. part of the decision-making process. To do less will court humanitarian errors that will affect the lives of many and the overall credibility of the U.S. government.
In conclusion, let me summarize my three main points:
The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan predates the September 11th attack against the United States and the U.S. military response to that attack.
The international community, led by the U.S., has responded well and quickly to the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people.
Nevertheless, much more needs to be done—and it must be done quickly—to meet the Afghan people's needs for food, shelter and medical supplies, and after the current crisis is over, the international community will face the challenge of helping to rebuild Afghanistan.
Refugees are a sign of instability. Frequently, refugees flee a country where the government does not work or fails to protect its own people. The immediate challenge is to meet the humanitarian needs of millions of Afghans, both those inside the country and those in refugee camps outside Afghanistan. After the current crisis, the U.S. and its allies will face a longer term task of helping Afghanistan to become stable and prosperous.
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| Refugees International, |
| September 18, 2001. |
President GEORGE W. BUSH,
The White House,
Washington, DC.
DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: As you plan the military, diplomatic and economic responses needed to destroy the terrorist network that attacked the United States, it is important that you also plan to meet the humanitarian needs of the people of Afghanistan, a country that already is the site of the greatest crisis of hunger and displacement in the world.
Twenty-two years of war, three years of drought, and the difficulties caused by the repressive Taliban regime have caused nearly four million Afghans to flee to Iran and Pakistan. According to the United Nations, five million people still in the country are in danger of starvation due to a three-year drought. Hoping to escape a U.S. response to last week's devastation, 100,000 Afghans have fled Kabul and other cities and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar is now half-empty.
Many people in rural parts of the country are on famine rations: bitter wild roots and grass mixed with wheat flour to make bread. Tens of thousands of people in the cities, including war widows, the elderly, and orphans, are completely dependent upon international aid for their survival. Only food aid—mostly U.S.-donated wheat—stands between them and starvation.
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Yet most UN and non-governmental relief agencies have pulled out of Afghanistan following last week's attack against the U.S. The World Food Program says it has only enough food in the country for two weeks of distribution by local personnel. The borders with Pakistan and Iran are mostly closed to the flow of people and goods.
The U.S. experience in the Gulf War suggests the importance of anticipating and minimizing refugee flows and starvation. In the Gulf War, the U.S. was caught by surprise when over two million Kurds fled, some to neighboring Turkey and Iran, to escape Saddam Hussein, necessitating an urgent humanitarian response for which the international community was largely unprepared.
Refugees International recommends that the administration prepare a humanitarian impact analysis for military operations and contingency plans to deal with humanitarian challenges. Military operations should be planned to minimize the impact on people already tottering on the edge of famine and to repair humanitarian damage as soon as possible
Considering that the war is with terrorists and their supporters, not with the Afghan people, the U.S. also needs to find a way to resume relief operations and food aid to the Afghan people. The first step should be immediate consultations with the UN Secretary General to find ways to enable relief workers to return safely to the country and resume operations. The UN must anticipate huge refugee and humanitarian problems and, as it did in Macedonia this summer, get the people and the resources into the region to deal with them.
The most appalling and universally condemned aspect of last week's attack against the U.S. was the targeting of innocent civilians. The U.S. cannot afford to be accused of doing the same in its response. The U.S. requires the support of moderate Muslims around the world and this necessitates maintaining the moral high ground. A humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, if attributed to U.S. military operations, could leave the American people even more vulnerable to terrorism in the future. The United States wants to win the war against terrorism—not sow the seeds of future problems.
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Sincerely,
| Kenneth H. Bacon, President. |
November 26, 2001
Contact: Joel Charny or Larry Thompson
202.828.0110 ri@refintl.org
AFGHANISTAN: A STRATEGY FOR URGENT HUMANITARIAN ACTION
With winter approaching, the situation inside Afghanistan is stark. More than six million Afghans are facing unacceptable levels of hardship and hundreds of thousands may die of starvation and exposure in the coming months. In response to this looming disaster, REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL calls for immediate establishment of Humanitarian Response Zones inside the country. The proposed zones would be located initially in relatively secure areas in northern Afghanistan that have not been targets of U.S.-led bombing attacks and are close to large concentrations of vulnerable people. International staff of UN agencies and NGOs would work in the Zones, overseeing the distribution of increased quantities of emergency assistance.
RI makes this recommendation in response to the alarm that the Deputy Coordinator of the United Nations in Afghanistan sounded in Islamabad on October 20, 2001. The Deputy Coordinator expressed serious concern regarding the weakening of international relief efforts inside Afghanistan. The Deputy Coordinator made it clear that a humanitarian catastrophe looms inside Afghanistan this winter if there are not immediate efforts to reinvigorate the emergency response.
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Conditions in Afghanistan vary in different regions of the country. Rather than viewing Afghanistan as an single overwhelming mass of needs, introducing as many relief supplies as possible into the country, and hoping for the best, the international community, led by the United Nations, should employ a variety of strategies to address the needs of as many vulnerable Afghans as possible in the coming months. In some regions, establishing Humanitarian Response Zones of action for targeted humanitarian assistance to concentrations of vulnerable people may be feasible.
The proposed Humanitarian Response Zones would consist of both safe corridors to transport relief goods from the borders of Afghanistan and internal logistical hubs where large quantities of relief supplies would be located for onward distribution either through commercial networks or networks established by international and local NGOs. In the event that certain isolated communities could not be reached by truck, vulnerable people with the strength and means to move would be able to reach the Zones and be assisted, either on the spot or by carrying goods back to their communities.
Most of these Zones would be established initially in the ''famine belt,'' the stretch of northern Afghanistan that has been most affected by the prolonged drought in the country. International agencies are already strengthening their presence in northeast Afghanistan, centered in Faizabad. Additional Humanitarian Response Zones in the Northern Alliance-controlled northeast could be established in the Panjsheer valley and Khoja Bahauddin. The contested Hazarajat region of north central Afghanistan contains the largest number of vulnerable people in the country, approximately 1.4 million. A Zone to reach portions of this population might be feasible in Ghor province; otherwise, it may be necessary to continue to attempt to reach Hazarajat with shipments from Pakistan. In the northwest, Mazar-e-Sharif, the logical logistical hub, is the scene of intense fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance forces, but a Zone based in Andkhoy could be established to reach some 764,000 vulnerable people in Faryab province.
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The Humanitarian Response Zones should be established through joint action by the UN agencies involved in the relief response, under the auspices of the UN Coordinator for Afghanistan, with regional coordination in the country provided by OCHA. The U.N. agencies primarily involved would be the World Food Program and UNICEF. If a large-scale refugee crisis fails to materialize, then UNHCR might be in a position to allocate relief supplies to respond to the needs of internally displaced persons.
The establishment of Humanitarian Response Zones to serve some regions of Afghanistan would not diminish the responsibility of Iran and Pakistan to receive refugees fleeing hunger and conflict in Afghanistan. If the Zones were successful, however, the likelihood of a vast outflow of refugees to neighboring countries would be reduced.
Critical to the overall effectiveness and integrity of the Zones would be the reintroduction of United Nations international staff inside Afghanistan. This would have significant practical and political consequences. Practically, UN international staff would strengthen the management of the relief operation. They would give confidence and backing to local Afghan staff who have been carrying on courageously since September 11 but who feel increasingly abandoned and embattled. Politically, the reinsertion of international staff would send a message of solidarity and commitment to the Afghan people. It would also strengthen the ability of the United Nations and the international community to negotiate with local Taliban and Northern Alliance authorities to protect the integrity of the humanitarian response.
The principal prerequisite for introducing international staff would be reasonable assurances of their security from local authorities and U.S.-led forces. RI recognizes that the Taliban has caused international staff to leave Afghanistan and that the security situation is problematic in much of the country. Nonetheless, experienced international aid workers believe that it is possible to establish credible security arrangements with local authorities on a case-by-case basis, including with Taliban local leaders. To further enhance security and the overall relief effort, humanitarian air support to the Zones would be required, preferably organized by the United Nations, and consisting of both large transport and small passenger aircraft.
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The likelihood of persistent conflict in Afghanistan, in the midst of immense suffering and vulnerability, demands that the international community take risks to maintain the integrity of the humanitarian response. There will be no clear moment where the conflict gives way to a peaceful, ''post-conflict'' period. The United Nations agencies need to have personnel on stand by, ready to go into areas immediately whenever the security situation permits so that the humanitarian space may be expanded. The early establishment of Humanitarian Response Zones and the reintroduction of international staff in relatively safe areas of Afghanistan would be an important step forward in meeting the immense humanitarian needs of the Afghan people.
Refugees International therefore recommends that:
The United Nations establish Humanitarian Response Zones in relatively secure areas inside Afghanistan to increase the effectiveness of the international aid effort to the Afghan people; these Zones should be located in areas as close as possible to areas of high concentrations of vulnerable people;
When reasonable security is assured, international staff of UN agencies and NGOs be reintroduced into Afghanistan in the Zones to manage and strengthen the relief effort;
Efforts be made through all communications channels available, especially international radio broadcasts by the BBC and Voice of America, to announce the establishment of these Zones and their purpose to the Afghan people to build confidence that the United Nations and the international community are redoubling their efforts to respond to their humanitarian needs.
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Chairman HYDE. Thank you very much, Mr. Bacon.
Mr. Bereuter?
Mr. BEREUTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for your testimony. Mr. MacCormack, I am pleased to see you representing Save the Children. My family and I have been small contributors to your organization for a very long time. In fact, when my two sons were very small part of the contribution came from their own funds each year at Christmas time.
Gentlemen, as you know, we are beginning to have a public relations problem with respect to our war on terrorism, and one of the reasons perhaps is that the American public in particular has not seemed to understand the degree of assistance we have been providing to Afghanistan for some period of time, does not understand that we have intervened to save and assist Muslim populations against aggression in various parts of the world.
I am wondering what your organizations do to let people know about the assistance that comes from the American public and from the American taxpayer already? I understand that you think we ought to do more, and I agree with you, and so you might find it disadvantageous to be so forthright about what we are doing already.
I hope you will also think about the responsibilities to keep the unity that we have and that Americans do understand that we are not and have not been sitting idly by. I think they would be surprised, for example, to find that the American taxpayer has been doing more than the taxpayers of other countries for some period of time with respect to assistance to Afghanistan and that we have, for example, quietly become the largest contributor of assistance to the starving people of North Korea. That has escaped public attention.
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Mr. BACON. Sir, I agree with you. We have stressed that in a number of articles we have done on our Web site, which is refugeesinternational.org. I did mention it in testimony to another body, but in an effort to try to make the testimony somewhat different I did not repeat the point this time around.
I agree with you. We should all in the humanitarian community stress this more because it is a very important point.
STATEMENT OF CHARLES MACCORMACK, PRESIDENT, SAVE THE CHILDREN
Mr. MACCORMACK. First, I would like to thank you and your children for your support. You are in fact part of 400,000 Americans who send a check to Save the Children every year to help children around the world. We receive about half of our $175 million a year budget from private citizens and about half from the U.S. Government.
The partnership is very close, and we make every effort to let the American people know that their tax dollars are saving children's lives around the world through the kind of work that you have just alluded to.
[The combined prepared statements of Mr. MacCormack and Mr. Wilder follow:]
PREPARED STATEMENTS OF CHARLES MACCORMACK, PRESIDENT, SAVE THE CHILDREN AND ANDREW WILDER, DIRECTOR FOR PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN PROGRAMS, SAVE THE CHILDREN
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CHARLES MACCORMACK:
Chairman Hyde, Mr. Lantos, thank you for inviting Save the Children to offer a perspective on the humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan, particularly with regard to children.
I hope I leave you today not only with a better understanding of what life is like for children in Afghanistan, but with some recommendations on how we might together address the continuing challenge of helping to meet Afghanistan's humanitarian and development needs.
Mr. Chairman, before we proceed, I would like to share with you a publication that the Save the Children Alliance prepared for the United Nations (U.N.) Special Session on Children that was to have been held in mid-September in New York. In the wake of September 11, that session did not take place, but this publication, Afghanistan's Children Speak to the UN Special Session, offers a glimpse—through words and pictures—of what it is like to be a child in Afghanistan. I commend it to you and your colleagues.
Save the Children-US, a member of the Save the Children Alliance, has programs in more than 40 countries and in 19 U.S. states. We have been working with Afghans since 1985. We currently implement health, nutrition, micro-credit, education, landmine awareness and drought response programs inside Afghanistan, as well as large-scale health and education programs for Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
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Following the tragic events of September 11th, Save the Children withdrew its six international staff from Afghanistan, but 160 national staff are continuing to implement programs under extremely difficult circumstances from offices in Kabul, as well as centers in northern Afghanistan where Save the Children works in the most drought-affected areas.
I am pleased that Save the Children can offer the Committee an on-the-ground perspective from our Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan programs, Andrew Wilder. Andrew holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University where he did his dissertation on Elections and Political Change in Pakistan; he was a Fulbright scholar, and he has spent more than 25 years in the region—the last five of those years with Save the Children. Thanks to MSNBC which has provided Save the Children with its satellite technology, Andrew joins us from Islamabad.
ANDREW WILDER:
Thank you, Charlie. Mr. Chairman, by now the grim statistics about life inside Afghanistan are all too familiar: one out of every four children dies before reaching age 5, and more than 40 percent of these children die of preventable causes such as measles, respiratory illnesses and diarrhea; school enrollment is among the lowest in the world and girls' education has been particularly neglected. In addition to being at war for the past two decades, the country is suffering through one of the worst droughts in memory. Children engaged in daily activities are at great risk—in part because there are an estimated 10 million land mines in Afghanistan—one for every child. Children are suffering the consequences of displacement, disablement, emotional upheaval, and the loss of family members.
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Yet, despite this bleak picture, we have seen first hand that Afghan children are remarkably resilient and optimistic in the most difficult circumstances, and they are cherished and nurtured by their families.
Save the Children has been working with communities in Afghanistan for more than 15 years to improve the conditions for children. Our work is primarily concentrated in northern Afghanistan, in the areas of the country most affected by the drought. Throughout those years, we have faced numerous challenges.
Since mid-September, however, the crisis in Afghanistan and the operating environment for humanitarian aid agencies like Save the Children has become even more complex. Before I describe some of the new challenges that we are confronting, I do want to focus for a moment on the positive—and outline some of what we have been able to accomplish despite the tough conditions.
In shaping a response to the current situation, Save the Children is focusing on two priority areas: first, to meet the food and health needs of the children and their families in Afghanistan, and second, to prepare for the potential that some Afghan children and families might become refugees. We have prioritized providing assistance inside Afghanistan because the more we can address the needs of Afghans living inside their country, the less likely that they will join the ranks of the millions of Afghan refugees living in neighboring countries
All of Save the Children's offices in Afghanistan remain open, and our major life-saving programs remain operational. In the last several weeks, Save the Children has increased the scale of its food distribution program and completed a polio immunization campaign in which we vaccinated 20,000 children under the age of five. We anticipate completing a similar immunization campaign for measles in the next few weeks. Food shipments consist of wheat, provided through the World Food Program (WFP), and other complimentary foods, including beans, lentils, vegetable oil, sugar and salt, much of which is funded by the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. We are transporting this food by trucks from Turkmenistan.
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In October, we delivered a new shipment of essential pharmaceuticals, including items such as antibiotics, aspirin, and oral rehydration solution, to four hospitals in the capital city Kabul. This shipment will supply hospitals, which log a combined total of 6,000 children's visits per month, with sufficient medical supplies for two months. We also are training 20 couples in Kohistan, an area in Faryab Province with no medical facilities and a population of 20,000 children, to serve as health care providers for the community. We are equipping them with the knowledge of how to identify and treat common ailments such as respiratory illness, diarrhea and scurvy. In addition, we are supplying fuel for heating hospitals in the capital city Kabul and in northern Afghanistan.
Mr. Chairman, I would now like to offer a perspective on what we see as some of the main challenges in as we continue our work on behalf of Afghanistan's children.
First, as needs have increased, the operating environment for aid agencies has become more difficult. More than 3.8 million Afghans currently rely on food from the international community and 3.4 million more will require food assistance during the winter months. The latest World Food Program information indicates that much of northwestern Afghanistan where Save the Children works has only 25–50% of the food required for a year, and serious food shortages exist across the rest of the country. WFP has doubled the amount of wheat it will supply, and NGO partners are planning to target a much larger percentage of the population for a longer period of time than earlier anticipated. Aid agencies have geared up to meet the challenge. However humanitarian organizations face huge organizational and logistical challenges: reduced staffing due to evacuations of expatriate staff, new security needs of our national staff who remain in Afghanistan; looting and/or confiscation of equipment, sporadic and monitored communications, closed borders; and the near arrival of winter conditions that will make some parts of the country inaccessible for up to five months.
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A second concern Mr. Chairman is the plight of refugees and the need for Afghanistan's neighbors to open their borders to Afghans seeking protection. If the situation continues to deteriorate inside Afghanistan and if Afghans have no exit, the consequences will be dire. Save the Children has been working for the past 15 years in the refugee camps in Quetta, and Haripur, Pakistan. While the reported number of new refugees arriving at new or existing refugee camps has been relatively small to date, there are still concerns that this number may increase. In cooperation with our Save the Children Alliance partners, we are preparing to respond to a potential influx of refugees into Pakistan. Building on our existing strengths, we will support health facilities, informal education for women and children and ensure that camps are protective environments for children.
Third, as an organization with a mandate to protect and provide assistance to children, we are concerned about the impact that the bombing campaign is having on Afghan children and their families. We know that the United States is making every effort to minimize civilian casualties. While we are not here to offer military advice, we do believe it important to share with the Committee some of what we are hearing and seeing regarding the bombing's implications for children and other civilians.
The destruction of power generation plants has led to major health and sanitation concerns in cities like Kandahar, which require electricity to pump water. Our staff in Quetta report that many of their relatives who are leaving Kandahar are doing so because they no longer have water. Save the Children recently had to purchase storm lanterns for hospitals in Kabul that had no electricity. There is also concern about the danger of unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children. Data collected several years ago from our landmine and UXO education program in Kabul indicated that nearly 80% of the victims of unexploded ordnance in Kabul city were children. In the current context, there is the potential for children to mistake the colorful yellow bomblets released by cluster bombs for either air dropped food packets—which are also yellow—or for toys.
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I must also report that in discussions with Afghan friends and colleagues, more and more are expressing their concern that the U.S.-led coalition is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of Afghans as a result of the ongoing bombing campaign.
This relates to a fourth concern—the blurring of the military and humanitarian missions. We acknowledge that there are circumstances that may call for cooperation between military and humanitarian agencies in delivering assistance. However, during this period of military action, we believe that it is important to keep a civilian face on the humanitarian work. Blurring the distinction between the two could endanger the lives of our staff on the ground.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to offer for your consideration some recommendations about how to address at least some of these challenges and how to maximize our impact—which in this case means save the most lives.
First, in formulating the U.S. response, continue to take into account the humanitarian element of the crisis. This includes providing funding as well as ensuring that infrastructure and capacity remain in place for assistance delivery. The U.S. Government pledge of an additional $320 million in humanitarian assistance is a solid down payment on meeting the needs, and other governments and international organizations have risen to the challenge with their pledges as well. We also welcome President Bush's call for American children to reach out to Afghan children with their donations. We need to keep up the momentum.
Second, prioritize. While we cannot meet all of Afghanistan's many needs, food and health should be top priorities in the near term. With regard to health, the focus should be on simple medical interventions that can save lives. For example, provide essential medicines and vaccinations; continue training health staff; and offer incentives to keep trained health workers on the job.
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Third, get as much food assistance into Afghanistan as possible before the onset of winter. We have a window of approximately three weeks before winter snows make some areas impassible, including two districts in which Save the Children works. I want to stress however, that even during the winter, many areas of Afghanistan will remain accessible, so our work will not stop with the changing of the seasons. But for the areas that become isolated with the winter snows, it is crucial to move food in now.
Fourth, stick with and expand what already works. There are a number of tried and true assistance providers that know the country and who have staff and distribution systems in place and whose expertise can be tapped to provide assistance expeditiously and safely and ensure that it reaches those most in need.
Mr. Chairman, while I have addressed what can be done in the near-term to ameliorate a major humanitarian crisis among the children and families of Afghanistan, we cannot ignore that the real hope for Afghans lies with investment in long-term development to help them rebuild their society.
President Bush recognized the need for a longer term commitment when he urged Congress in his October 6 radio address ''to make funds available so that one day the United States can contribute, along with other friends of Afghanistan, to the reconstruction and development of that troubled nation.'' We endorse that call, as well as the call being made by Senator Biden for a large reconstruction package for Afghanistan. Longer-term engagement serves this country's policy interests and is an investment in its own security and well-being. It also provides hope for Afghanistan's children.
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Nowhere is this long-term investment more critical than in education and, in particular, the education of Afghan girls and women.
Why is educating girls so important? Only 11 percent of girls in Afghanistan are able to read and write. A mere 3 percent of girls are currently enrolled in schools. Yet the desire for education among Afghan children and their families is high. And the long-term effects produce dramatic, positive results for the girls, their own children, and the entire community.
For many years Save the Children has been running formal and informal education programs in Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps in Kabul and in refugee camps in Balochistan and Quetta, Pakistan. Over the years, our programs have grown, as more and more families have enrolled their boys and girls in the schools. In the refugee camps in Balochistan, for example, enrollment rates have tripled from 6,000 to 18,000 during the past six years, and the numbers of girls enrolled have increased ten-fold from 600 to 6000
A few months ago, I visited one of our refugee schools in Balochistan. In one class of enthusiastic 10-year-old girls, I asked them, ''What do you want to be when you grow up?'' They eagerly replied, ''doctor,'' ''nurse,'' ''teacher.'' Even for those who are unable to achieve these aspirations, research has shown that an educated girl is more likely to postpone marriage and childbirth, which in turn leads to improved maternal and child survival and well-being. And she will encourage education for her children, even girls.
I will close by reminding us all that although the world is currently focused on the crisis in Afghanistan, we cannot forget that children are in crisis in many other parts of the globe as well. Now more than ever is the time for all of us to increase investment in long-term development to help build stable societies throughout the developing world, including in Afghanistan.
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Mr. BEREUTER. Thank you very much.
Gentlemen, I would like to know what you think we might do now to supplement the kind of food assistance that we are providing under emergency conditions to make sure that the nutritional value—the vitamins and other nutrients that people need—given what is available.
How should our programs be improved from a nutritional basis?
Mr. MACCORMACK. If I might start with two comments? A great deal of our food support is in the form of beans and lentils and oils precisely to see that there is a more balanced diet. Administrator Natsios mentioned the Vitamin C supplementation we do in order to deal with scurvy. Our entire nutrition program is designed to see that there is a well balanced package of food that is made available.
In addition to the food, I would re-emphasize the point that Andrew Natsios made that more children will die this winter from diarrhea and respiratory infections than from malnutrition. So to see that vital medicines, antibiotics, and oral rehydration salts are provided to Afghan children is on the one hand more doable, but equally urgent to the provision of food aid.
Mr. BEREUTER. Perhaps both of you heard my questions and comments to Administrator Natsios with respect to his views and reactions to what Dr. Starr had said to a Congressional breakfast under the auspices of the Aspen Institute. Dr. Starr believes that is what we need to help the Afghan people resume agricultural production, even if it is simply subsistence agriculture, as quickly as possible because the basic elements for such a type of production are destroyed. They have used the seed. The irrigation systems, crude as they were, are often cases destroyed. The livestock has been decimated.
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What are your thoughts about the kinds of assistance we need to provide after the emergency relief efforts are considered and put in place?
Mr. BACON. Well, I know that Administrator Natsios has focused a lot on seeds and making sure that we have the right seeds in our stockpile to get to the people of Afghanistan. As he pointed out, we did miss the winter planting season, the October planting season. It will be very important. We hope the political circumstances are different in the spring and that we will not face the obstructionist policies of the Taliban. It will be very important to preposition a lot of seed that can be planted as soon as possible after the winter thaws.
In addition, there was mention made earlier of micro credit programs. Particularly to help villages buy and nurture animals will be very important and to also bring in the proper agricultural equipment. There are many NGOs, non-government organizations, that specialize in water projects, irrigation, many of them European. I would anticipate that they also would be involved in efforts to rebuild agricultural capacity.
Chairman HYDE. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. BEREUTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman HYDE. The gentlelady from California with the fascinating earrings?
Ms. WATSON. My patriotism. Either one of you, what evidence do you have that the packages of food that we are dropping is getting to the target? I understand that the Taliban is moving its forces into residential areas near schools and so on, maybe prohibiting the targeted groups from receiving it. Also, we are kind of stirring up a little concern among Americans that we are harming innocent children in our bombing crusade.
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Can you comment on the political sight at the end, and I do want to know if you have guarantees that that food is actually getting to the targeted group?
Mr. MACCORMACK. At Save the Children, we have been providing food to hundreds of thousands of people in northern Afghanistan for a decade.
Ms. WATSON. But I mean since September 11. Well, since we have started.
Mr. MACCORMACK. The reason I said that is we have established relationships with reliable people at the village level. Therefore, we have been able to assure ourselves, and we can assure you, that the food is getting through to the people who most need it.
Secondly, as was mentioned, 300,000 Afghan children died last year. Large numbers are going to die this winter. Although the bombing is regrettable, the children of Afghanistan have much more serious problems than the bombing. They really need the food and the medicines that the American people are providing even more.
Mr. BACON. To the extent that you were asking about the air drops, these yellow packages——
Ms. WATSON. Yes.
Mr. BACON [continuing]. That come down, there have certainly been a number of pictures printed in the press and on TV of people collecting these yellow packages, so I would have to assume they are landing near where people can get at them. There have been reports on people's reactions to peanut butter and jelly and other things that are in there, so I gather from those that they are reaching the people.
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I think it is important to go back to what Administrator Natsios said. These are being dropped in fairly inaccessible areas. They are not being dropped in cities. They are going into areas where they may be under Taliban control, but there are not a lot of people around there. The Taliban tend to be more in cities, as I understand it.
I think they are having an impact, but they only comprise 0.5 percent of the food needs of the country. In a country of hungry people, anywhere you drop food it will land near somebody who needs it, but the real answer to the food crisis is overland transportation.
Ms. WATSON. It was said earlier that the better strategy would be to drop the food outside of the boundaries of Afghanistan. People then could go over into other areas and get it.
I am just wondering. How do you set that up? You cannot use the radios. How do you communicate with people? I know word of mouth, but you have these long expanses of land. How do they actually know if they go over across that border there might be a reward waiting for them?
Mr. BACON. Maybe Mr. MacCormack should respond to this, but there has been hunger in Afghanistan for a long while, and the Afghan people seem to know where to find food if it is around. They figure out a way to get there.
Chairman HYDE. The gentlelady's time has not expired, but in the grand scheme of things it has.
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We have a vote on the Floor. We have two votes, the previous question I think and the rule, so we will adjourn this meeting. Our profound thanks to Mr. Bacon and Mr. MacCormack for again very insightful, helpful, effective testimony on one of the burning issues of our time.
Thank you very much.
[Whereupon, at 3:05 p.m. the Committee was adjourned.]