Transcript from special interactive
video forum series with Jamie Shea
DR. JAMIE SHEA (Director of Policy
Planning): Well, ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome to Stopwatch,
your monthly program on current NATO topics. I'm Jamie Shea and once again
it's my pleasure to be able to moderate today's discussion here from NATO
Headquarters in Brussels.
Today we're going to look at NATO's role in humanitarian relief operations, and based very much on a recent and concrete example, which is the three months before Christmas, over Christmas and the beginning of this year when NATO sent forces and military assets to Pakistan to help that country cope with the devastating consequences of the earthquake that took place there last autumn.
This was NATO's first major humanitarian relief operation. And to those of you who follow Stopwatch on a regular basis, you will know that NATO's been doing some surprising things since the end of the Cold War, particularly with operating in parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, or Iraq, that you don't normally associate NATO with.
But Pakistan and a humanitarian relief operation, with the United Nations, that is something that is quite new.
So therefore what we'd like to do in Stopwatch today is to describe what happened and what NATO was able to contribute, look at the reaction from the Pakistani population, and also the consequences in terms of NATO's relationship with the United Nations.
And above all, to answer the question: Will NATO be doing this type of thing in the future?
Once again, it's my pleasure to be able to introduce three guests. First of all, Ambassador Maurits Jochems. Maurits was NATO's senior civilian representative in Pakistan during this operation. In his normal job at NATO Headquarters he is the Deputy Assistant Secretary General responsible for Civil Emergency Planning.
I also welcome, right next to me here, Jan Vandemoortele who is the UN Resident Coordinator in Pakistan. He's come from Pakistan to be with us today, so a special word of thanks goes to you, Jan, for being with us.
And then finally, last, but by no means least, of course, my former colleague in the NATO Press Service, Simone de Manso. Simone was out in Pakistan with Maurits during the NATO relief operation, very much dealing on the ground with the press and with public opinion, explaining what NATO was doing to the local population. It was a demanding job and I'm very glad to welcome Simone here today.
So Maurits, first of all, I turn to you. As I said, this was something new for NATO. So what exactly did we do and what do you think we achieved in those 90 days?
MAURITS JOCHEMS (Deputy Assistant Secretary General responsible for Civil Emergency Planning, NATO): Yes, well, the earthquake hits Pakistan, and by the way, part of India, the 8th of October. The 10th of October the Pakistani government asked NATO and other organizations for assistance. The very next day, I think the 11th of October, NATO took the decision to establish an air bridge from Europe essentially to Pakistan to transport much needed relief material.
That was one part, and at the same time, NATO decided to look into other options, and sometime later that month they decided to make available an extra hospital for the stricken area, to make available a unit of engineers, to do some reconstruction, or rather relief repairs, and to make available water purification units.
That was essentially what NATO made available. That was for a period of about three months, 90 days, because we have the... I think instinctively we had the idea that a relief operation should be limited in time, because after that the reconstruction activities will start and that's more something to be led by the UN.
What we achieved is we, as far as the air bridge is concerned, in the initial sensitive area, the period of the relief operation, we provided the biggest sort of contribution to the airlift; NATO did. We transported 3,400 tonnes of relief goods, mostly, by the way, tents made available, shelter material, made available by the United Nations. Much needed, of course, in the high mountains there. And the engineers repaired about 60 kilometres of badly damaged roads, and made available a lot of shelter material. And the hospital treated, I believe, something like 5,000 people directly and 3,500 people with mobile teams.
So the contribution was considerable.
SHEA: That nonetheless raises the question, Maurits, just to stay with you for a second, why the Pakistani earthquake, and not, for example, the tsunami which generated as much media coverage when it happened over a year ago? There have been lots of disasters, unfortunately, in the last few years, so why would NATO suddenly emerge in Pakistan rather than in some of the previous disasters?
For instance, some people who are looking at the politics may think that maybe NATO was taking advantage of this, not just to play a humanitarian role, but also to have a role in Pakistan given that that's a neighbour of Afghanistan, where NATO, of course, is building up its peacekeeping force. Was there some sort of reason, therefore, why it would be Pakistan and not something else?
JOCHEMS: Well, I think the reason is perhaps a bit disappointing after your sort of introduction in the sense that in the case of the tsunami which was, of course, a major catastrophe there was no request to NATO. It's as simple as that. We don't volunteer for these kind of things.
But in the case of Pakistan, as I said, the Pakistani government requested NATO to assist.
Having said that, as you recall in the tsunami, some military capabilities were definitely used, but those were made available on a bilateral basis by the United States, for example.
SHEA: Jan, Maurits, of course, mentioned the fact that we had a request in the case of Pakistan. It came from the UN, so that of course begs the obvious question, why did the UN turn to NATO in the case of Pakistan? I mean, clearly the UN has a very major disaster relief capacity of its own, specialized agencies, lots of capabilities, but why this time did you feel that you needed a NATO military contribution?
JAN VANDEMOORTELE (UN Resident Coordinator in Pakistan): Mostly because of the air bridge. This was... the scale of it was unprecedented, and we had very little time because of the winter. We had tents sitting out there in Turkey and we had no way of getting them to Islamabad and up in the mountains. And it was a gift of heaven, so to speak, that all of a sudden NATO volunteers for the air bridge, and as we just heard, this was a major air bridge. This was not a couple of flights. These were major cargo flights.
And the tents got there and the results are visible today. We didn't have any extra mortality that we feared. We feared a second wave of deaths after the earthquake. It didn't happen, and I think it's partly due to our quick response of having shelter.
SHEA: Does the UN therefore not sort of have contracting arrangements with countries to provide air support in that kind of disaster? Was it because you felt that NATO had this sort of unique capability in terms of providing the air bridge, that you couldn't get somewhere else?
VANDEMOORTELE: Yes, commercially it would have taken too long to get it there, and also the volume was too big. This was thousands and thousands of tents, heavy weights, because these were winterized tents. This was not a tent that goes to the beach in the summer for camping. These are heavy tents.
SHEA: Maurits, Jan has mentioned air bridge, but we also of course sent the NATO Response Force to do things on the ground. If the UN is emphasizing the air bridge, why did we follow up with something on the ground as well? Was there a special reason for that?
JOCHEMS: Well, yes. I mean, one of the elements that we sent afterwards, after we established the air bridge, were of course helicopters. And helicopters in these kind of disasters are very necessary. I mean, we should not forget that the tents Jan mentioned only landed in Islamabad or Lahore, but then had to be transported to the stricken area, and that was done by helicopter essentially.
So that's one element we made available later. And yes, we were in good consultations with the Pakistani government about the hospital and about the engineers, and yes, they were needed.
I think Jan mentioned the word, the scale of the disaster. If the scale of the disaster is such that every helping hand is welcome, it's clear that engineers and hospitals are very welcome. I mean, the Red Cross has hospitals, that's obvious, but not enough. Not enough. Where the area Jan can describe better, to what extent that was stricken.
SHEA: Yes, Simone, clearly we were going into somewhere where we hadn't been before, where, if we are honest, there are among the local population some hesitations about westernization and obviously sensitivities about anything that could smack of a occupation force coming in. And I remember at the beginning of this operation there were some reports in the Pakistani media that were rather worried that, you know, maybe NATO was coming to stay and this could have strate gic implications.
Can you describe a little bit your experiences and what the press environment was like and what you had to do to get the NATO message across?
SIMONE DE MANSO (NATO Press Officer): Well, when we came into Pakistan with the air bridge there was a great sense of gratitude, I think, from the media and from the population that we were carrying all those tents that were badly needed to Pakistan.
However, when the news came that NATO would launch an operation in Kashmir, with...
SHEA: It's a very sensitive region, politically left(?).
DE MANSO: Yes, and we'd send soldiers to Kashmir, and the number was a thousand soldiers to Kashmir, then some eyebrows were raised and people thought what are they going to do in Kashmir?
Well, these soldiers were engineers and doctors, only that. We were sending medical facilities and engineering facilities. Now this announcement came, and of course, it takes some time for these people to be deployed. So the announcement came and it took a couple of weeks until they could actually be seen in Kashmir.
SHEA: And they could actually see that it was doctors and engineers.
DE MANSO: That actually they are doing the job. So in this period we had to take very much care to explain what we were about to do over there. And of course, before, you know we live in the television age, and before people see something they don't believe it. So there is no perfect solution to that. There will always be a time gap between the moment you announce that you will do something and the moment you can actually be seen doing something in the case of a relief operation.
Of course the air bridge is instantaneous, but not the deployment of engineers and doctors. And this is what... and this is what we had to deal with.
SHEA: And how did you deal with it? I mean, what was the technique of getting the message across? Was it a question of sort of daily press conferences, or taking the media out with the NATO Response Force? We talk after Iraq about embedded journalists. Did we have journalists embedded with the NATO Response Force so that they could see that they were doing nice things and didn't have any strategic sort of intentions in mind apart from the relief effort?
DE MANSO: Well we didn't have to be especially creative with that. We used the tools that we always used in order to engage with the media. We invited them to come to Kashmir and to see the hospitals, to see the work of the engineers. That was very effective, and suddenly the distrust was gone.
Now I must say that NATO does not have a track record in Pakistan. In fact, such a relief operation is by nature a surprise operation. You don't know that an earthquake will strike somewhere. You don't know what the decision of the Council will be to go there or not to go there. So we did not have time before to prepare the ground, which would have been the case in another country in which NATO would have had a relationship with.
And therefore when we arrived in Pakistan we had to identify members of the media who would be knowledgeable about NATO or interested to know what the Alliance is about. And that was part of my work. To identify the people who could pass the message of what NATO in the 21st Century is, because people didn't know that.
SHEA: Maurits, this is an interesting sort of precedent for NATO. Do you believe that this was also an opportunity to tell the Pakistanis something about NATO in general in a way that could develop a longer-term relationship with that country, beyond the earthquake, or was it really a relationship that was very much limited to a time limited, relatively short intervention, purely for disaster relief? And how do you sort of evaluate the political fallouts, as it were, from what we did?
JOCHEMS: No, it was definitely the intention to limit it to the humanitarian relief operation because, as you discussed earlier with Simone, there were some sort of questions raised, eyebrows raised, what are the deeper intentions of NATO, and it was, of course in this case, to help in response to requests by the Pakistani government.
Having said that, many Pakistanis we met got interested in NATO, what is this for sort of organization? How is it that a Dutch military hospital and British engineers all are operating under the NATO flag, but are still British and are still Dutch and how does this work? So it has raised some interest and I'm sure we will have a seminar later in March and we'll have at least the opportunity to discuss these kind of things further. But it is not he basis for a structured sort of relationship.
SHEA: You don't see at the moment that Pakistan could then become some kind of partner nation of the Alliance, like so many other countries now are partner nations based on the fact that we broke the ice, to use that expression, when we cooperated on this disaster relief operation?
JOCHEMS: I don't think so, because it takes two to tango, as we all know, and I don't think that the Pakistani government at this point is in the position that it would like to have closer ties with NATO, in that sense. No.
SHEA: Jan, coming back to what NATO did and looking from your perspective, the fact that we left after 90 days, although Maurits has given a good reason why that was necessary, because we promised that we would only be there for a short time, but the fact that we left after 90 days, very much in the middle of the winter, when clearly there is such an enormous job to do, would you have welcomed NATO to stay longer? Would you have seen that there would have been a use for the NATO forces to be there for a longer period?
Or do you think after what NATO did things were pretty well organized and the UN agencies and the NGOs could all carry on by themselves?
VANDEMOORTELE: Well you never have enough of support in those circumstances, and actually within the UN we had debates on whether the UN should make an appeal to NATO to extend this mission and that debate went up very high up informally, and then I contacted the national authorities on perhaps our move, and then we had to respect the sovereignty of Pakistan who said, no, we are happy with the support that NATO brought, but we agreed to 90 days, we'll stick to that agreement.
To come back to the support of NATO, I think NATO got quite a bit out of it. I lived there, I interact with the people and NATO definitely projected a good image. Of course, there were people in elements of society who were critical and the press, but most of the people were very grateful and the biggest image builder were the helicopters and the hospitals.
For me personally, until five months ago, helicopters made noise. Now they play music, because if you're in this operation and you hear a helicopter it's good news.
SHEA: Well, that's certainly good news to me as well, but nonetheless, nonetheless, to investigate a little more, my sense, here from NATO Headquarters, was that we obviously paid a lot of money, all of the nations concerned with the NATO response paid a lot of money to deploy there, to get, in the case of Poland, if I remember, some pretty heavy equipment moved into the area in Kashmir. That, of course, took time, and I wondered, you know, that by the time we sort of got there and we got everything set up it was almost time to start dismantling everything and turn around and come back again. And therefore in terms of value for money, would it not make sense to have stayed longer. Maurits, maybe you want to answer that one.
JOCHEMS: Well, first of all, I think that even the engineering units, the heavy engineering units, those were Italians, by the way, who arrived a bit later because their equipment had to be sea-shipped, it couldn't be moved through the air for obvious reasons, they did a great job in the months-plus they had available, removed all the rubble in the area assigned to us. So that is one.
And the second reason is, I think, that the Pakistani government, a very proud sort of sovereign government, had the idea that after a while they should be seen to be able to cope with most of the things themselves. And I think in itself that's something to be applauded.
Of course, the same heavy engineering units of the Italians could have done perhaps a bit more, but I think you have to counterbalance there to the preference of the Pakistanis to be seen to be able to do it themselves.
SHEA: Have we sort of taken everything back from Pakistan or have we left things still there?
JOCHEMS: Everybody has returned, I think. The first of February everybody should have been... should have left the Kashmir area, the stricken area, and I take it that now... I haven't checked it, but all units have left Pakistan.
VANDEMOORTELE: From our end we requested NATO to keep two things on the ground, helicopters and fuelling equipment for helicopters. And that was left on the ground. And we are very grateful for that.
JOCHEMS: Right.
SHEA: (inaudible)...
(SPEAKERS OVERLAP)
VANDEMOORTELE: (inaudible)...to your point, and the hospital was folded up. There were enough hospitals. The coverage of medical services was okay. But to come back to your point about the opportunity costs. As an economist, as a trained economist, indeed, I also question that aspect. Not of all the interventions of NATO, but as part of the lessons learned, I think we have to go in there and see what other services that have no opportunity cost because there is nothing to replace them.
For instance, helicopters. There is no opportunity cost. But some of that heavy equipment maybe was available in the country, and could have been mobilized through other means.
SHEA: Simone, from your angle, and I'd like to just push this one question further, the NATO Response Force is NATO's premium state-of-the-art force which is trained for some very high-intensity operations. And were not the Pakistanis sort of surprised perhaps that this highly-trained force should be there doing very important, but basic things like road clearance and shifting rubble, or in the case where Pakistan , which has an extraordinarily large and well-trained army, maybe could have done that job itself? I mean, was that not something that came up in the local media? Whether we need international forces to do things that our own army should perhaps be able to do it itself?
DE MANSO: Yes, the question did come up. However, not linked to the quality of the NATO Response Force because I think the Pakistani media didn't even take into account it was a NATO Response Force. They were not aware that NATO was building up this NATO Response Force in the course of its transformation. As a matter of fact, NATO is very... scarcely known. NATO's projects and the state-of-the-art troops of NATO are very scarcely known in Pakistan.
So it was not the problem whether it was the NRF or not, but the question was asked, why the Pakistani army didn't take up these responsibilities? However, the question was asked by the opposition in Pakistan and I think it was more for internal... for reasons of internal political criticism.
Most members of the media that saw what NATO was doing, saw it was an emergency situation and it was not a question of who did the job, but it was the question, to get the job done because time was the enemy. And so there were questions asked in Pakistan, but we did not have to deal with them. And the answer we always gave was, were we asked to do something, we could do it, we could save lives by doing that, we could affect the lives positively of many people and we did it.
And as for the other questions of what the Pakistani army could have done, it's something for them to answer.
SHEA: Maurits, you were the senior civil representative of NATO there. Just give the audience a sense of what sort of practical issues you had to confront? I mean, the earthquake, nobody predicted it. You had no idea probably 24 hours before-hand that you were suddenly going to be sent to Pakistan. You arrived, you knew the NATO Response Force was coming in, the air bridge was coming in, what sort of practical problems did you have to solve to make everything go smoothly? And how smooth was it?
JOCHEMS: Well, I think all in all it was pretty smooth, but still there were problems. Maybe I can highlight two. To be brief : one is that you always have to take care of legal arrangements, and the Pakistani government in the best tradition of a country which has had a big influence in Pakistan before, has an extremely good legal apparatus, so to get all the arrangements in place for the NATO soldiers to be there, protected by law and so on, was... took some time, and took some effort. But in the end we managed.
And the other interesting element was, and we haven't mentioned that yet, but NATO doesn't have, of course, embassies all around the world. And we didn't know, as Simone said earlier, much about the country. But we leaned heavily also on the embassies of the NATO countries there. So that was of course the thing I did. I went out to meet the ambassadors of the NATO countries there, and also I visited Mr. Vandemoortele as the United Nations representative. Also, by the way, because NATO in terms of relief operations always works sort of, I would almost say, under the leadership of the UN and the national government.
But that was a challenge too, to get all the NATO ambassadors sort of to get to the same sort of analysis and to say the same things about a NATO operation. That was also a challenge, frankly speaking.
But a positive one in the end, because in the end the cooperation was splendid.
SHEA: I'd like now just to build(?) more horizons. Jan, one of the things that I remember when I was the NATO Spokesman many years ago and we had an operation in the Balkans which led, after the Kosovo campaign, even during it, to NATO having to build refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania, one of the things I remember at the time was within the UN community there was a lot of hesitation of this was the military taking over the humanitarian function. It was confusing the roles. We shouldn't be doing this.
Yet in Pakistan we've had, from everything that the three of you have been saying, a very harmonious relationship between the UN and NATO. And a greater degree of the UN sort of willing to use NATO. Do you see this as a precedent for the future? Is the attitude to the military now changing? Are you seeing the military more as partners? Or do you see Pakistan as sui generis again, simply a one-off that doesn't necessarily have any lessons for the future?
VANDEMOORTELE: I think that the focus is now more on results. It's pragmatism prevailing over ideology. That is what I saw. There is still reservation in the humanitarian community of getting too close to the military, definitely. But as long as we can deliver the goods, as was the case in Pakistan, with military, with NATO, with the other troops that we were on the ground we went along and I think that's going to be the formula for the future.
We had some unprecedented collaboration. For instance, the helicopters that were flying came from many sources: the UN, the military in Pakistan , the U.S. , the U.K. , Germany , NATO. There were all tasked... they were all managed from one joint unit. This is unprecedented. So the NATO helicopters and the American helicopters got their orders from the UN cell that was there, and they were told where to go, what to pick up and where to deliver it. This was... this was pretty good.
SHEA: So we were relatively disciplined then as an organization.
VANDEMOORTELE: It was disciplined and it was disciplined for one reason, and only for one reason, and that's an old story. It was because there was strong national leadership. And then everybody played that card. If there is no central strong national leadership everybody goes his or her own way, because we all know better, or we pretend to know better.
In this case we had the Pakistani army running the show, and they did it in a climate of openness. They were always ready to consult with you, with us, they didn't have decision-making going on in the back door behind closed doors. We were part of their meetings, almost on a daily basis, with the top generals, and we were taking those decisions. And NGOs were sitting at the same table as the generals, as NATO, as the UN.
SHEA: So Maurits, building on what Jan has said, lessons learned then for the future, the audience will be interested to know that we have done internally a lessons learned exercise, because obviously even if this was a great success, and I think this is what you're saying, and I certainly agree, we obviously need to learn the lessons, and so that if we have to do it again we could do it even better.
But what are the main lessons, do you feel, from your perspective, being on the spot where we could do better, you know, should we be called upon in a crisis to intervene again?
JOCHEMS: Well, first of all, I think we will only be called upon, I mean NATO, if it is a disaster of such a scale that the normal, what we call in technical terms, I believe, the first responders like on the national level, the fire brigades or the police or internationally, an organization like UN cannot manage all by themselves. Then we have to help. And I think some of the capabilities, this military organization, this partly military organization has, like strategic airlift, helicopters, we mentioned mobile hospitals and so on, are extremely well suited to help in this first relief phase.
So that is one lesson learned for me that yes, we have capabilities in NATO that could be of help.
What are, shall we say, more the negative part of the lessons learned. There are lessons learned in the sense that we have a funding problem I discovered. That both the strategic airlift, both the helicopters, to limit myself to these two examples, the operational costs are gigantic, are enormous, to run these kind of units. And ministers of defence who eventually in the NATO organization make things available, were at one point saying, but listen my defence budget is not to run humanitarian relief operations. That's more for ministers of development cooperation, perhaps, if you look at it in a national basis, or for the UN to pay for. I mean, I venture this at my own responsibility, but if the UN asks us to help why should they not pay a little bit for the running cost.
That is the most important lesson learned. That is where we got into some difficulty sometimes. Difficulty in the sense that we could have had more helicopters for the operation if we would have an assured sort of flow of money going into that.
SHEA: Is that the common funding within the Alliance, i.e. the Allies showing solidarity and reimbursing countries like Spain or Poland or Italy that actually deployed, or are you suggesting that we should go to the United Nations more brutally and say look, you know, we're operating on your behalf, actual request and you're obviously pulling in money from the voluntary contributions, you know, the... like after t
