The myth of NGO neutrality

In a counterinsurgency, there is no such thing as a neutral party. There may be unaffiliated parties, parties who refuse to endorse either the government or the rebels. But when the center of gravity are the loyalties of the population, the conditions of their lives contextualizes how they interact with either belligerent force. A poor village, desperate for a market for their milk, finds fast friends in an insurgent who needs food. A village in the midst of a water dispute with a neighboring town sides with those willing to arbitrate the case. A young man, whose family is fed by international aid, can join the local police instead of working the field. Aid isn't neutral. It makes a village strong enough to resist insurgent incursions. An insurgency isn't fought between armies, with tragic casualties of innocent bystanders, non-belligerents. It's fought by the people, for the people, and of the people. There is no neutral space, only unaffiliated, whether through choice or weariness or cagey caution. When making people's lives better, showing them their lives will be better off under the government, aid isn't neutral.

Likewise, when aid is given in areas controlled by insurgents, it aids their cause. It lets them gain medical training, like the ICRC training given to Taliban medics last year. Foodstuffs are diverted for insurgent use, while development projects are co-opted to steal credit and show that life is better under insurgent care. But ultimately, humanitarian aid, provided without consideration of political affiliation, lets the insurgent run the political show and eases the strains of the community, strengthening their political rule. Because the sustainment of the community is exogenous, the insurgents gets both credit for supervising an area with a decent quality of life and control through permitting or denying the aid. So while the aid worker may be supplying the basic humanitarian supplies to a badly impoverished, war-stricken village, they're functionally supporting a side.

Lastly, in the cases of an insurgency like the Taliban, whose first attempt to governance involved lighting people on fire in public arenas, ignoring the character of the sides involved may end producing more harm and dependency for the very people an agency is trying to help. While an insurgency is never clean on either side; there is not a moral equivalency. Differences can be discerned, even between shades of gray. International aid neutrality may have been appropriate in an era when wars were fought between states, with clearly demarcated rules and codes of conduct and ways to discriminate between the combatants and the civilian. But that era has passed, and the international aid community needs to adjust to reflect that.