(UNDATED) Aid organizations, facing attacks and threats from resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida forces, are retreating from areas of Afghanistan where some have worked for 16 years.
Mercy Corps, a Portland, Ore.-based relief-and-development agency, that earlier this month disclosed that one of its Afghan staff members was shot to death in November, is pulling workers out of the Taliban's heartland in southern Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and other organizations are also pulling out of especially dangerous areas.
As an escalating guerrilla war threatens President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government, Mercy Corps managers say Taliban and al-Qaida forces are targeting Western aid workers.
"They've extended this conflict that they have with the coalition and with the Karzai government to include international organizations, which is a new and disturbing twist," said Jim White, Mercy Corps' South Asia regional director. "We're having to substantially downsize."
The retreat by aid organizations exposes Afghanistan to a vicious cycle as the Taliban, warlords and al-Qaida move into the void, turning more Afghans against the Karzai government, the United States and the United Nations. White and other relief managers say the violence and intimidation underscore the overriding importance of security in Iraq as humanitarian work begins there.
"Providing security has yet to be achieved in Afghanistan, and that's the issue we're struggling with in Iraq," said Michael Delaney, Oxfam America humanitarian-response director. In Iraq, "We're having trouble even getting in and doing assessments because of the security situation."
For Mercy Corps, which operates in 36 countries, the killing of an Afghan staff member is the fifth death of a foreign employee in its 24-year history. The organization has never lost a U.S. staff member abroad.
Dr. Mussa, a veterinarian who, like many Afghans, went by one name, was gunned down on his motorcycle Nov. 8 after leaving a village where he had treated some sheep. "It's not clear exactly why" he was killed, said White in a Portland interview, adding that the investigation had reached a dead end.
Mussa's bullet-riddled body was found in the Shah Wali Kot district north of Kandahar in a political no man's land between provinces controlled by two warlords. Soon after, seven gunmen describing themselves as Taliban held up a Mercy Corps Land Cruiser in Ghanzi, 80 miles southwest of Kabul, and kidnapped Afghan staff members for four hours before freeing them and stealing the sport utility vehicle.
On March 27, a Taliban soldier taking orders by phone shot to death another aid worker, Ricardo Munguia, an International Red Cross water engineer from El Salvador, in the same area. A witness said Taliban gunmen told the 39-year-old's Afghan co-workers they would be killed if they continued working for unbelievers as "slaves" of Karzai and the United States.
White said security began deteriorating markedly around Jan. 18, when three Afghan men working for Mercy Corps in southern Uruzgan province rounded a bend in their pickup to encounter 10 men wearing black masks.
The men opened fire with Kalashnikov rifles and a machine gun, White said. Bullets barely missed the two engineers and their driver. The men then robbed the workers and left.
"Our considered opinion is these guys were the real McCoy, they were al-Qaida," White said.
Around the same time, Mercy Corps workers in the southern city of Kandahar began seeing more fliers offering bounties on foreigners and advocating jihad, or holy war, against the West.
More recently, Afghan workers for Doctors Without Borders near Pakistan were threatened. "There have been direct threats to them, saying that by working for a Western organization you are at risk," said Brigg Reilley, a Doctors Without Borders program officer in New York.
The organization evacuated its 10 non-Afghan workers from the border area and from Kandahar. It also deactivated its Afghan workers, a step not taken during years of war.
Mercy Corps has pulled workers back to Kabul from rural areas, where they had been supporting villagers rebuilding wells, schools and houses. The organization, which had 23 non-Afghan workers in Kandahar last summer, is down to five. The organization's Afghan work force has dropped from 500 to about 150 in southern Afghanistan.
"For the first time in 16 years, we're having to pull back substantially from an area that we've worked in through five successive governments," White said, "including the Taliban, the mujahedeen and the Soviets."
Mercy Corps and other relief organizations urge the Bush administration to support expanding the international security force, a 4,500-strong unit whose patrols remain confined to Kabul.
"The very insecurity that's happening in Afghanistan," White said, "is exactly how the Taliban was born."
White sees lessons for Iraq, which he thinks may be easier to rebuild because it is a more developed country with potential oil revenues. But relief workers will need security there as well, he said, to distribute aid and to help rebuild.
"It does have to be the concern of fighting forces what comes next," White said. "You can't just fight the war."
