Sorry about the typo - I meant "He said no" not "know."

The title of your post seems to suggest that you think someone in the humanitarian community has decided that the lives international staff more valuable than the lives of national staff yet nowhere in the article do you provide any evidence to support the hypothesis. I would certainly challenge you to provide an example of a humanitarian organization that has made that determination.

I acknowledge that the HPG report indicates that the risk for national staff increased between 1997 and 2005 but the reasons for the increase are not as simplistic as mere institutional bias. As I am sure you are aware the risks for international staff vs. national staff vary from context to context.  Other factors such as ethnicity, sex, religious affiliation, etc., also affect the risk faced by staff and need to be accounted for in any security plan.
I would also challenge the assumption that  "The underlying assumption behind "remote management" ... is that national staff face less risk than international staff." There are many other issues involved. For example if an organization decides that a situation is too dangerous even given the humanitarian need what happens to the national staff? Do you just let them go and add to the humanitarian burden? Do you pay them not to work? And what about their feelings regarding the risk? An Afghan colleague of mine put it this way, "I have to take the risk. This is my country. You can leave if it becomes too dangerous but I live here. If I don't help my country when it is most at need who will?" How does one argue with that?

I do acknowledge that security training for national staff has been sadly neglected. Then again, as a security advisor, I feel that security training is generally under appreciated by senior management. Having said that I do realize that humanitarian organizations are in the humanitarian business not the security business. There are always trade offs.

It has been my experience that most larger organizations have realized that greater emphasis needs to be placed on providing security training to national staff and are working hard to change the status quo.

It is also important not to let biased media reporting speak for the values of humanitarian organizations. Media reports can lead one to believe that internationals are more importants than national staff. Its true that national staff fatalities seldom get the coverage that international staff fatalities do but it is important to remember that the media is in the business of selling advertisements. They produce stories based on what they think will bring more viewers for their advertisers. In short, more media coverage of international staff deaths does not mean humanitarian organizations place greater importance on international staff lives.
 
I find your two concluding points a little disingenuous. The question of, as you put it, “at what point do we decide that a situation is simply too dangerous, that it poses too much of a threat to national or international staff, regardless of humanitarian need?” is a valid one and one with which most organizations continually struggle. Indeed I suspect that there will never be a conclusive answer to the question. What I fail to see is how this question relates to your final question. The two are not synonymous.

And no, I don’t think that anyone is asking national staff to be humanitarian cannon-fodder.

Kevin, you make great points, and everything you say is true of NGOs with coherent security policies. The problem is that many, even the big ones, are still doing security ad-hoc and that does often include the assumption that national staff can safely go where expats can't.

Alanna, I agree with you there. Its just that there is a big difference between assuming that national staff are safer in risky areas and making a calculated decision that national staff lives are less valuable. The latter is morally reprehensible while the former is just ignorance.

The dilemma's as posed are hard and I do not have an answer to cover them all. I just wanted to add that within the programs organisations work with, safety & security policies in high risks area's should be built in. Like any other instrument we have Safety & Security policies can than become a management tool (are the risks known, are measurements and operational procedures in place, can we work in this area?). This implicates that organisations need to built their capacity in this particular field and it should be budgeted. Donor organisation should be more aware about the costs that are involved to get to a certain level of capacity in order to operate in a adequate and acceptable way on risk analysis and safety & security management. It seems that this is a problem many local organisations are facing, beside the lack of committment from the management level to this part of programming as mentioned by Allana. In Afghanistan, Kabul, just recently some Afghan NGO's who work with international donor organisations (who often do not implement by themselves) have offered the opportunity to enhance their capacity on Safety & Security Management. I hope that other (donor) organisations will enable local NGO's to have these trainings. It will help them to perceive safety & security not only from a reactive point of view but to incorporate these in their organisational vision, mission and program management. It will not change the volatile environment but at least it will make the work more responsible and less risky for the people in the field.