LONDON: Western military interests driven by the “war on terror” are endangering aid workers, distorting budgets and depriving the most needy of help, says Oxfam. In a report reflecting increasing concern among humanitarian agencies, the charity warned on Thursday that Britain is under pressure to repeat mistakes committed by other international donors, notably the US.

Aid workers' neutrality is compromised if local people see aid as a tool of the military, Oxfam warns. It says 225 aid workers were killed, kidnapped or injured in attacks worldwide during 2010, compared with 85 in 2002.

More than 40 per cent of the total $17.8 billion increase in development aid from major industrialised countries since 2001 has gone to two countries — Afghanistan and Iraq — with the rest shared between about 150 others, says the report, titled Whose Aid is it Anyway?

Billions of dollars of international aid that could have transformed the lives of people in the poorest countries in the world has been spent on unsustainable, expensive and sometimes dangerous aid projects, as donor governments including the US, Canada and France have used aid to support short-term foreign policy and security objectives, it says.

Humanitarian aid per head given annually to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been a 12th of that spent in Iraq, though per capita income in the DRC is more than 10 times lower than in Iraq.

Aid money used for short-term projects by US military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan — amounting to more than $1.5 billion in 2010 — is now almost the equivalent to America's worldwide poverty-focused development assistance budget, Oxfam says.

In Yemen, it notes, US attempts to combat Al Qaeda's influence has resulted in its $121 million aid package ignoring the country's poorest districts in favour of sparsely populated and less poor areas associated with Islamist groups.

Though the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan increased the amount of aid the UK devoted to the two countries, overall Britain has followed better practice than other major donors, the report says.

However, the UK's coalition government has brought aid for priority countries under the scrutiny of the new National Security Council, and the Department for International Development is now required to show that UK aid overall is making the “maximum possible contribution to national security”, the report notes.

Kirsty Hughes, Oxfam's head of policy, said: “British aid to fragile states is at a crossroads. Ministers have a choice between making every penny of British aid count for poor people or prioritising short-term security goals that risk leading to over-expensive, ineffective and often dangerous aid, while making little impact on security and stability.”

The recently retired surgeon-general of the British armed forces, Lt-Gen Louis Lillywhite, has also warned of the dangers of what he calls the blurring between “neutral humanitarian aid” directed solely at the relief of suffering and “development aid” intended to give legitimacy to a government.

“The increasing use of military resources in providing development ... has further contributed to the perception that humanitarian activity is partisan,” he says in an article in the latest issue of The World Today, the magazine of the Chatham House think-tank in London.

Matt Waldman, former head of Oxfam's office in Kabul and now an Afghanistan analyst, said: “Foreign aid can contribute to stability over the long term, but its effectiveness can easily be undermined by military involvement or political manipulation. The evidence from Afghanistan suggests that assistance intended to promote development, but distorted for a military purpose, rarely achieves either.”

The Department for International Development said Oxfam's concerns were misplaced. “Britain's aid is targeted at the poorest people, a vast number of whom are trapped in conflict-ridden countries, and we make no apology for helping them,” a spokesman said.

He added: “The coalition government is looking at diplomacy, defence and development in a more integrated way. It is right that we recognise that instability locks people into poverty and is also a driver to problems that affect our national security, whether that is terrorism, migration or narcotics.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service