That is why humanitarian-assistance NGOs do not quietly settle down to operate in Bangladesh or India, either of which could comfortably absorb all their resources, and in each of which there is more acute human distress than in ten Kosovos. NGOs go where the TV cameras are. Natural disasters are unsatisfactory -- even if very serious, they only receive media attention in their most dramatic opening phase; after that, the cameras and the press depart. Humanitarian-assistance NGOs therefore converge on the scene of armed conflicts, or as near to them as the press itself is allowed.

By thus introducing themselves into the realm of strategy, they become subject to its paradoxical logic, which overturns commonsense linear logic. Just as victory becomes defeat once it passes a culminating point of success, each action contains the seeds of its own reversal beyond a certain point. War too destroys itself by exhausting or destroying the material and moral resources that sustain it -- unless outsiders intervene to halt the process (e.g., by imposed cease-fires that allow reconstitution) or to offset its consequences, thus prolonging war.

In Somalia, NGOs did many things to help many people, but simply by paying warlords to protect them, and feeding their warriors, they themselves sustained the fighting whose consequences they were trying to mitigate. In Somalia, NGOs were, in effect, the leading export industry for the warlords, whose hard-currency earnings from NGO protection fees directly fueled the war by paying for ammunition imports. Once the TV cameras departed, so did most NGOs. Since then the fighting in Somalia has notably waned.

In Goma, in Eastern Zaire as it then was, NGOs crowded in to help the Hutus fleeing Rwanda. Instead of dispersing in the immensity of the Congo as many previous Rwandan emigrants had done for a century, the Hutus remained where they were being fed, necessarily under the control of their defeated genocidal leaders. Very soon, NGO-fed warriors started raiding Rwanda each night to kill more Tutsis.

More generally, NGOs interrupt and freeze the dispersal of the defeated into local or remote resettlement, a key pre-condition for the transition from war to peace. If today's NGOs had existed in Europe's past, its lands would now be filled with giant refugee camps for the descendants of Sudeten Germans of 1945 vintage, stranded Gallo-Romans and Visigoths of the fifth century AD, and countless peoples in between, all still inflamed by the resentment of defeat that refugee-camp life keeps intact for generations (as in UNWRA's camps where third and fourth generation Palestinians now predominate), all still under revanchist leaders that equate resettlement with treason.

In Kosovo, where NGOs moved in with the NATO troops after the war was over, they could only inflict incidental damage, but that too was and is serious. Each of the 350-odd NGOs hired interpreters, drivers, assistants, etc., paying huge salaries by local standards. Imagine what would happen if hundreds of Martian NGOs came to Washington, D.C., and started paying million-dollar salaries to anyone who knows a foreign language, or can claim organizational skills. Hospitals, schools, utilities, etc., would promptly shut down for lack of skilled personnel. That is exactly what happened in Kosovo, blocking the recovery of its civil society.

NGOs attract praise, much devotion, and generous funding because of their good intentions. But good intentions unguided by a responsible sense of ultimate consequences merely randomize outcomes -- unless conflict is underway, when good intentions often result in perverse outcomes.

New! Round Three: Concluding Remarks -- April 14, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

Round Two -- April 11, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

Round One -- April 6, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

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