One of my more serious holiday reads was Linda Polman's War Games, a serious critique by an experienced journalist of the role played by NGOs in situations of civil conflict. This is a very sobering book.

Interestingly, Polman starts and ends with a philosophical question which has hung over the aid business since its birth with the founding of the Red Cross. Its founder, Henri Dunant, debated with Florence Nightingale the concept of impartial aid. The fledgling Red Cross aided soldiers on both the Austrian and the Franco-Sardinian sides after the bloody Battle of Solferino in 1859. Dunant insisted that the assistance given to wounded soldiers had to be neutral. In correspondence with him, however, Florence Nightingale expressed disapproval. She argued that it was the responsibility of government authorities to ensure that combatants were adequately cared for, and voluntary aid simply let the proper authorities off the hook. Neutrality was a myth, she said. (An aside: here is a Guardian article on Nightingale's marvellous diagram on cause of mortality in the Crimea.)

Polman ends with the politicisation of NGOs in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan. In these conflicts, the aid agencies are inescapably seen as politically aligned with the western powers. As a result, the attempt to offer 'neutral' aid has resulted in the kidnapping and murder of aid workers. The agencies therefore huddle with the UN troops behind barbed wire and concrete, further confirming their political alignment, and making it impossible for them to work except through a chain of subcontractors, with no hope of limiting corruption or ensuring effectiveness.

In between, the book looks at a number of other examples of the perverse or even adverse impacts of NGOs in other contexts, especially Rwanda. It is a tale of almost-criminal political naivety on the part of many aid workers, self-interest on the part of the large number of people making  a well-paid career in the aid business, competition between NGOs for media attention and funds, counter-productive or simplistic journalism, distorting effects on the local economy – not to mention corrupt local governments and warlords. The bottom line is that just a small proportion of the funds raised by tapping the compassion of donors is spent on people who need relief.

One could end up concluding that it would be better to scrap the whole business of aid, but that's not Polman's conclusion. Rather, she argues that NGOs must be properly accountable, and also more tightly restricted by the co-ordinating UN agencies and forces. In most conflict and disaster zones, there are dozens or hundreds of NGOs, each competing for the media attention that will enable them to fundraise and win the next contract, so they can stay in business and grow. There are clearly too many for effective assistance to people in huge distress. Some are cowboy or maverick organisations that inflict real damage. Some readers might conclude that Polman is too generous in this conclusion, given the evidence she presents. Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid argued the case for ending 'everyday' development aid. It seems that at least some of the emergency category of aid is at least as damaging.

War Games has generated a bit of controversy, as one might expect given that it's critical of the aid business. One response, from the respected Overseas Development Institute (downloads as a pdf file), is that nobody knows how much aid is diverted by corruption or to fund arms purchases. But this seems to me simply to confirm Polman's main recommendation, namely that NGOs need to be much more transparent and accountable in tracking and reporting the uses of the funds they raise. Another criticism that's been made is that her book is just a list of anecdotes, although it's hard to see what else it could have been given the absence of transparency she highlights.

Looking at some large international NGO websites today, I was unable to find any acknowledgment of the issues raised by War Games. Nor indeed any straightforward accounting for funds in a way that would help assess either the impact of NGO spending or the proportion of money raised that goes to different uses – staff salaries, admin, campaigns, 'fees' and 'taxes' to local authorities, subcontracts, straightforward bribes – oh yes, and to ultimate recipients. I'll find it hard to take seriously any NGO campaign on, say bribes paid by multinationals, or the supply chain impacts of big business, unless I can go to their website and see a valid assessment of their own impacts.

There are other reviews of War Games on Linda Polman's home page.