ISLAMABAD: Former diplomats and policy experts on Sunday said the United Nations’ (UN) principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) did not cover humanitarian assistance and was wrongly used by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in his appeal to the world for desperate Afghans. 
The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated drastically since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. International aid came to a sudden halt and the United States has frozen $9.5 billion (8.4 billion euros) in Afghan central bank assets held overseas. 
Hunger now threatens 23 million Afghans, or 55 percent of the population, according to the United Nations, which says it needs $5 billion from donor countries this year to address the humanitarian crisis in the country. 
PM Khan on Saturday said there was an urgency for the international community, as well as their obligation under the unanimously adopted UN principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), to provide immediate humanitarian relief to millions of Afghans on the brink of starvation. 
He said one pillar of R2P was to help protect people from mass-scale humanitarian crisis left in the wake of a prolonged conflict. 
Experts, however, differed with the Pakistani prime minister and said R2P had nothing to do with humanitarian crisis. 
“Basically R2P is a totally different instrument within the UN system which has little to do with humanitarian assistance and therefore it cannot be implemented in Afghanistan,” Pakistan’s former foreign secretary Tehmina Janjua, who also served as Pakistan’s representative to the UN in Geneva, told Arab News. 
The objective of the prime minister was obviously to draw the attention of the international community to the suffering of people in Afghanistan and the urgent need for assistance for their very existence, she said. 
“While the idea was correct, but I don’t think that R2P applies to Afghanistan for this,” Janjua said. 
Uzair Younus, the director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Washington-based Atlantic Council advocacy group, said R2P was a doctrine endorsed by all member states of the UN in 2005 and dealt with the international community’s duty to protect human beings in a country where they were faced with atrocities in the form of mass violence, genocide and others. 
“If this is the case, R2P opens the door for international intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state, including through the use of military force, to stop the atrocities even if that included toppling a government,” Younus told Arab News. 
He said R2P was used as a justification for the Libyan intervention. “It is not about humanitarian assistance at all. Invoking R2P in the manner in the which the PM did is both irresponsible and dangerous.” 
Pakistan’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, said Khan’s tweet was very strange and the world would take it as “ignorance.” 
“If he had really known the exact scope of R2P, then he would not have used this reference,” Mohmand told Arab News. 
“It is giving a wrong impression that you are presenting a picture of genocide in Afghanistan to justify your comment.” 
He said there was no such situation in Afghanistan and even the security had improved there, adding such appeals had no value when a country had not even recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. 
Another former ambassador Asif Durrani said whoever advised the prime minister about R2P did not know about the concept. 
“Now the best response to this mistake is that the prime minister’s office should itself clarify it,” Durrani told Arab News. 
Syed Muhammad Ali, an international policy analyst who is the director of the Center for Aerospace and Security Studies in Islamabad, said R2P was an international legal principle that primarily represented the responsibility of the international community to protect the people of a nation state facing either persecution, genocide or war crimes. 
“It indicates that the situation has deteriorated to such an extent within any nation state that international community has a responsibility to protect the lives and honor of the people in violation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Ali told Arab News. 
“The R2P reference is applicable to the situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir not Afghanistan,” he said, adding that R2P did not cover humanitarian assistance caused by economic issues. 
The government spokespersons, PM Khan’s media team and the Pakistani foreign office did not respond to requests by Arab News for a comment.