Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR RAJA
JARRAH, MR
ROBIN GREENWOOD,
MR DAVID
WALKER, MS
ELIZABETH WINTER
AND MR
SIDDHARTH DEVA
18 SEPTEMBER 2003
Q1 Chairman: Perhaps we could we
move on to Afghanistan. Elizabeth, as you are our special adviser
on the reports we do, would you like to start off by setting the
scene? Would you like to start off with any good news? Is there
any good news today?
Ms Winter: I think the good news
is your continued interest. We are delighted with that and hope
you maintain it. We are very pleased to come and talk to you again
because it is timely. The situation in Afghanistan is critical
now. The drought, of course, has broken in some areas but nonetheless
the effects of that are still felt. The harvests have been correspondingly
better because of the break in the drought but there is a chronic
depletion of resources of all kinds, so it is grim for many people.
The peace dividend also remains largely insignificant for the
majority of people I would say, particularly in the south and
east where for some people life has even worsened. In terms of
security, of course we are all going to be talking about that
this afternoon because the deterioration has continued and in
fact accelerated in the last few months. When we last gave evidence,
the aid community and others were identifying this as a major
problem and indeed you reported on this as well. It is the biggest
obstacle to reconstruction, to the provision of aid, to investment
in the country, and these things remain true. We all—the
ATA, the UN, the experts, you yourselves—called then for
the international community to take measures to deal with it.
That has not happened and we have to report that the ability of
aid workers to reach certain parts of the country has actually
been further reduced. There have been many well-documented cases
of injury and death amongst international aid workers but a much
more worrying development is that local national staff, of both
their own NGOs and international NGOs, are now targets, and we
feel this is likely to continue. It is very demoralising and it
is quite deplorable and depressing for all of us involved. There
is still of course the factional fighting and the insecurity associated
with the actions of coalition forces in pursuit of their aims.
We still have a rudimentary army and police force unable to bring
law and order and in any case not supported by a functioning judicial
system. Overall, personal security for Afghans has diminished
in many areas and aid delivery is increasingly constrained, so
the results are that people are without their basic needs, whether
it is water, food, health care, let alone human rights, education
and so on, and you will be hearing details of this. If we force
NGOs to withdraw even further then obviously the situation of
the people, particularly in the south and east, can only get worse
and that will have political repercussions, and indeed national
development under the Bonn process is also under threat. You will
have heard about the constitutional Loya Jirga having been
postponed and insecurity threatens the election date as well.
One other matter before I finish is the return of refugees, which
we feel should be voluntary. We have argued that there should
be informed choice and conditions that allow for the dignity and
safety of the individual, so they should be phased and co-ordinated
and match the local capacity to absorb them. Really, just to say
these conditions are not currently being met in Afghanistan and
we would therefore ask that non-voluntary returns conducted by
the UK Government (which is the only European country to do so)
should be halted now.
Chairman: Thank you for that. Let us
take some of those issues. Tony, would you like to start off asking
on security.
Q2 Mr Colman: Clearly, Elizabeth,
you have covered this in many areas but if I could just explore
a little bit further on this. Do you believe there is any political
will to expand ISAF's remit beyond Kabul?
Ms Winter: Yes I do. Everybody
is talking about it. There are many people investigating how this
could be done and who might be interested in doing so. Even if
there were the political will and even if the agreement were made
now to do so, it would take some time and I think the matter is
so urgent that anything you can do to bring it forward would be
valuable. My colleague from CARE will bring you up-to-date on
security matters with some recent reports they have done and figures
they can give you as well.
Q3 Mr Colman: If we stay with ISAF
for the moment, if it were extended beyond Kabul how would the
team feel its tasks should be defined? I am assuming you are still
feeling that it is getting worse outside the capital. What should
ISAF's tasks be defined as beyond Kabul?
Mr Jarrah: If we look at the trends
over the recent year, from September to December last year there
were an average of four attacks on the aid community per month.
In the last four months there have been over 60 attacks. The figures
are in front of you in the policy brief that CARE has produced[1]1.
That for us is an indication that soft targets are being selected
now more and more as being legitimate targets of violence. So
to answer your question about what should the remit of an expanded
ISAF be, it must be principally to protect those soft targets
that are going to be so essential for the conclusion of the Bonn
process. There is a Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration
(DDR) process, which will require country-wide outreach, there
is the constitutional Loya Jirga process, which has been
mentioned, and there is the preparation for the elections. All
of those will require country-wide teams that will be perceived
by people trying to derail the process as legitimate targets because
they are furthering the agenda of the government and of the coalition.
So the primary mandate for an expanded ISAF must be to give protection
to those soft targets.
Q4 Mr Colman: Robin Greenwood, in
the Christian Aid evidence, said particularly that the Provincial
Regional Teams should not be involved in reconstruction work.
Do you want to expand further on that?
Mr Greenwood: That is a view which
is not universally shared by this panel, but it is a view that
Christian Aid holds and it a view that many other NGOs working
in the west of Afghanistan hold, and it is certainly a view that
our Afghan partner organisations hold. We believe that the reconstruction
and humanitarian sectors should be left to civilians. We think
that in deploying military forces in those sectors you are risking
a confusion between the aims of the military and the aims of NGOs
and of the civilians. We feel that that in itself is jeopardising
the programmes of NGOs like our partner organisations and organisations
like ourselves that work with them.
Q5 Mr Colman: So how would you get
increased security in the absence of ISAF expansion and not working
with these PRTs?
Mr Greenwood: We do not object
to the PRTs having a security mandate. It is the reconstruction
role of PRTs that we have a problem with and I think an issue
that everybody around the table would agree on is the importance
of actually clarifying the mandate of PRTs, which has shifted
to and fro a number of times over the past few months.
Q6 Mr Colman: Oxfam wanted to come
in.
Mr Deva: I think it is important
now to accelerate security sector performance and put more effort
into building the Afghan army and police. Not enough has been
done so far by donors, especially by the Americans and the Germans.
Although ISAF is necessary it is not sufficient nor are the PRTs
and I do hope that over the next few months more effort will be
put into developing the Afghan army so the Afghan army can provide
security for Afghan citizens. At this point the PRTs do not have
a security mandate. I do know that the British-led PRT in Mazar
is providing security to villages in some parts of the province
but that is not the case in many other areas. We need to encourage
PRTs, especially the American ones and also ones led by Germany
and New Zealand, to provide security for Afghans.
Q7 Chairman: As you have raised the
issue of the army and the police force, those of us who have visited
Afghanistan (now some months ago) saw the preliminary training
of the police and army. Indeed, Mike O'Brien of the Foreign Office
has written to this Committee telling us that the UK was involved
in the training of the first battalion of the new Afghan army.
Presumably basic training has been given to an emerging Afghan
army and police force. To what extent are these forces operational?
To what extent are the Afghan police and Afghan army able now
to make a contribution themselves to security?
Ms Winter: I think the numbers
are relatively small. The numbers quoted are something like 5,000
when they are aiming at 70,000, and I think they are talking about
at least four years to get them operational at that kind of level,
and that is assuming that there is pay for them and assuming that
people stay in the army after they have been trained. The police
themselves are under attack now. In isolated posts they are being
picked off one by one. I think what the authorities, the ATA would
argue for now is yes, an accelerated training programme but nonetheless
still some international assistance with peace-keeping while they
get on with that, because they will not be ready for some time
yet.
Mr Walker: Going back to the PRT
issue, to add something to what you were saying, Siddharth, one
of the issues I suspect we are all agreed on is that there is
real confusion about the mandate of PRTs at the moment. There
is certainly concern that as it is they do not have the mandate
or resources to really deal with the significant security issues
there. From Save the Children's perspective we would also like
to see that while reconstruction activities may be under the remit
of the PRTs, that it is limited very specifically to a fundamental
role, and an extension of the authority of the Afghan administration
in the provinces and reconstruction should relate to that. Colleagues
have mentioned overall security sector reform, and there is lots
of reconstruction to be done around that in supporting the rebuilding
of police stations or other public administrative offices and
moving away from this confusing area of humanitarian or development-type
assistance projects, because clearly that is confusing many people.
Secondly, we need to be clear about the distinction between ISAF
and the PRTs. As I understand it the PRTs are significantly different
to ISAF as it currently constituted because it is actually under
the command of coalition forces. I suspect there may be some useful
consideration to be given, if you are extending ISAF, to seeing
it as something entirely different and therefore not compromised
by being seen clearly linked to coalition command. Nevertheless,
I would just like to state this: as you are probably aware, there
have been a lot of calls from all sorts of areas for an expanded
ISAF mandate, not just from the NGO community but also from Ambassador
Brahimi himself. It is absolutely clear that this is probably
the number one concern of all assistance and aid actors working
in Afghanistan at the moment.
Mr Jarrah: On the subject of the
PRTs I think we have been lulled into thinking of them as a very
big, important subject that we have to take a stand on. In the
big scheme of things PRTs are almost irrelevant to the security
situation in Afghanistan. As we speak, there are only four of
them. Even if they reach the target of eight by the end of the
year that is still only one PRT soldier for every 50,000 Afghans.
Their mandate, as has already been said from this panel, is not
a security mandate. They do not have either the resources or the
backup to fulfil a security role. Talking to PRT members directly,
many of them perceive their role as being there to bolster the
feel-good factor of the coalition so that they can feel they are
doing something that is for the good of the Afghan people on top
of running after terrorists in the southern hills. My worry is
that every time we as an NGO community raise the issue of insecurity
in Afghanistan and expansion of ISAF, the answer given back is
the PRT and the experience to date is the PRT is not an answer.
None of us is experts in security but we have to work under the
security framework that is provided for us, and the present one
is simply not good enough.
Q8 Chairman: You mentioned DDR briefly
before. Obviously this is an area that you very much want to get
involved in. How do you see NGOs getting involved in DDR? That
is really a question for all of you.
Mr Jarrah: I think the lead on
DDR has to be taken by the military and it has to be taken under
the wing of the Afghan Government. It is putting NGOs into a very
invidious position for us to be responsible for any process of
disarming a militarised country.
Mr Greenwood: I think an important
role that NGOs can play in the DDR process is in working with
communities in order to enhance livelihood opportunities so that
the demobilised soldiers can actually have some licit livelihood
to go back to. It is similar to the poppy issue in some ways in
that there are many people who are used to making a living out
of an occupation which is harmful and the role that NGOs can play
is not in the demobilisation but giving people an alternative
way of making a living to soldiering.
Q9 Chairman: Can I ask Elizabeth,
who has lead responsibility in this area, is it UNOPS or still
with the UNDP or what is happening?
Ms Winter: It is with UNOPS but
they have divided up the "D" and the "R" and
the Japanese have the reintegration bit and they have said they
are not going to produce money for that until there has been reform
of the Ministry of Defence, which is what everybody is waiting
for before the DDR process can actually start. Nobody has any
incentive to give up any arms, particularly as security deteriorates.
One is told frequently that reform is about to happen, there has
been a decree, and we are awaiting the announcement of appointments
to the Ministry of Defence to show it is going to be much more
representative of the make-up of the country. Once that happens
that is the precursor to DDR. All they have managed to do so far
is to set up the administration for it and the plans for it and
to have one pilot project but otherwise it has not actually started.
Q10 Mr Walter: Could I move on to
the whole question of resources and funds for the reconstruction
of Afghanistan. In the evidence that Christian Aid gave us they
said that basically it is under-financed and all the funds are
being delivered late. Part of that seems to be problems with the
Afghan Transition Authority and their ability to absorb those
funds and to allocate those funds, but I think there is also a
perception that you have got things like the UN programme itself
needing something like $728 million. The US has pledged £600
million and Mike O'Brien, the Foreign Office Minister, told us
in July that the UK pledged a total of £286 million. This
is very much a similar situation to what we were looking at a
year ago and there does not seem to have been any improvement.
Why do you think we are in this situation? Why is there still
not enough money? Why is the capacity of the ATA such that even
if it had more money it would not be able to allocate it? Where
do you see us? To use the jargon, what should be the "roadmap"
here to take this forward?
Ms Winter: I think there should
be more money, quite clearly. There is an issue about how it is
going to be spent, of course, and whether it is spent wisely.
There is an issue about monitoring and evaluating the way it is
spent, and DFID could certainly play a role in looking at that.
There is an issue about the ATA raising revenue itself and it
has made some movements in that, it has appointed a new head of
customs, they are talking about bringing in an ID system so traders
have to register and can then be taxed. They have attempted to
get money out of local authority holders, warlords, whatever you
like to call them, and some revenue has come. DFID has had conditionality
on some of its grants. Civil Service reform was one condition
and they said once that comes in they would be prepared to release
more money to them. A Civil Service reform was passed and those
ministries with capacity have been reforming themselves, others
with less capacity have not. There is a whole series of complicated
questions in there. When it comes to actual figures I will defer
to my colleagues from CARE and Christian Aid because they have
been working there most recently and can say where the money is
coming from and what happens to it.
Mr Jarrah: I think one of the
big issues is absorptive capacity, as you hinted, and we have
compiled figures which show only 1 per cent of estimated need
has actually gone through the system and ended up being spent
on completed projects. A large amount of that is to do with the
fact there has not been enough investment in the absorptive capacity
of Afghan ministries and Afghan institutions. I think another
part of it is the re-allocation of pledged funds from reconstruction
work into disaster relief to the tune of about 25%. In terms of
long-term pledges and commitment, yes, further resources are needed
but our suspicion is at the moment if more money was made available
tomorrow it could not be used effectively.
Mr Greenwood: That is not to say
that absorptive capacity is the whole story. In fact, one of the
areas of shortfall is in disbursements to meet pledges to cover
the running costs of the ATA. I think only 10% of the pledged
funding for ATA's running costs this year has so far been delivered.
Even the pump is not being sufficiently primed.
Q11 Mr Walter: Is there a regional
disparity here? Is it easy to get the funds into Kabul and the
immediate area and to spend them and find the projects and bring
them to fruition, whereas it is more difficult to get it out to
the other areas of the country?
Mr Deva: Yes, there is indeed,
and there is a problem in many remote areas where money is not
coming in and you do not have agencies working there. We have
that problem in Badakshan for example where Oxfam is the only
organisation working, in an area where you do not have any government
structures and other NGOs. This regional disparity is an enormous
problem, not just among the provinces but within provinces, between
districts in provinces. The other issue which is still there is
the divide between humanitarian development funds, and there is
a criticism on the part of the Afghan Government that NGOs, including
international NGOs like Oxfam and others, are spending money on
food assistance, that a lot of money is in kind rather than in
proper assistance, not investment, that we still are not addressing
the causes of the problems, only the symptoms, and I think there
is some truth in that criticism. Also, clearly, a lot of the money
that is coming into Afghanistan is being spent mainly in Kabul.
The overhead costs of NGOs is something which has been raised
by a number of government authorities and by the United Nations,
the number of consultants and advisers, the huge ex-patriate staff
the United Nations has for example, a lot of INGOs have, and a
lot of money goes into them. I think we may need to be addressing
a lot of these issues which are of concern to the government.
Moving on, I think certain sectors are also under funded. What
worries me is that, for example, the Counter-Narcotics Directorate,
the CND, which is the Afghan authority on law enforcement and
drugs prevention, has no money. It has on paper a budget of 3
million dollars but it has not received anything as yet, so how
do you expect that sort of entity to do any sort of drugs enforcement
work.
Ms Winter: In terms of your question
about is it difficult to get into some regions, I had a figure
from the Afghan Government yesterday saying there is a deficit
in the south and the east of something like 220 million dollars
because of the security situation, they actually have not been
able to get the assistance in. That, of course, has political
implications because that is where the Pashtuns are, who already
feel they are not represented in the government. If they are not
getting the aid either, and they are not, it exacerbates the situation
and allows people to think they are being unfairly treated, which
of course has knock-on effects on what they might actually do
about that and who they might therefore support.
Q12 Mr Walter: Can I explore this
other point briefly, which is that several of you have suggested
a lot of money is being spent on administration, on consultants
and so on and actually very little of it is actually ending up
as end-user aid, end-user support. Can you give us any ball-park
ratio of how much is being spent on overheads and how much is
actually getting through?
Mr Jarrah: Not a ball-park but
an anecdote. ISAF is 5,000 strong in Kabul and there are 900 soldiers.
Q13 Chairman: Going back to capacity,
this is not a new issue in the sense that President Karzai I know
has always been very frustrated at the amount of money which the
coalition were prepared to give to the transitional administration.
The argument was, you have not got the capacity to absorb it.
He says he was lumbered with huge numbers of civil servants, that
numbers had to be shed because they had been taken on by the previous
regime almost as a kind of employment scheme. DFID, I think, have
been helping the Ministry of Finance, they have even seen the
like of the Adam Smith Institute help the Ministry of Finance
work things out. What more needs to be done in government ministries?
What actually in practical terms needs to be done in government
ministries to enable them to better absorb donor contributions?
Because unless you get that going you are really in a chicken
and egg situation, are you not?
Ms Winter: I think the decree
will help. I think the Civil Service reform will help. We just
cannot expect everything to happen immediately. Other ministries
are taking a bit of a lead from what has already happened and
that may be the way forward. It is not going to be easy for people
to think of putting money through the ATA until they are sure
they can spend it. Having said that, I talked to Nigel Fisher,
who was in charge you will remember of the aid programmes on the
UN side, and he said, "We had all been saying, look at Kabul
and the money is being spent there" but when he travelled
outside Kabul he found there were things going on, there was a
difference being made.
Q14 Chairman: There are 32 or 33
ministries, I cannot remember?
Ms Winter: 32 ministries.
Q15 Chairman: We all know that quite
a lot of those were created to make sure there was a fair allocation,
so you do not actually need all 32 ministries functioning, so
is it not possible to reinforce a number of the ministries to
take forward capacity development? Is it not possible to get a
grip on this?
Ms Winter: I think that is happening.
They are also getting to grips with the President's Office where
policy should emanate from, so DFID, US Aid and others are putting
capacity into the President's Office and trying to beef that up.
They are using conditionality, as I have already said. Karzai
himself has now travelled a bit outside the capital and he is
coming back and saying (a) that the NGOs are doing a good job
after all and maybe the UN is too, and (b) we need to do more
of this and we need to get a move on. I think things are happening.
It is still too slow. There are absorptive problems as well but
I think things are slowly changing. Another anecdote: when I asked
Ashraf Ghani in July how he felt about Afghanistan now, he said
"30% optimistic", and when I asked "How did you
feel when you first came back?" he said, "5%."
Q16 Hugh Bayley: Can we talk about
agriculture. What impact is the World Food Programme's food aid
having on the development of viable Afghan agriculture?
Mr Greenwood: In some cases, the
World Food Programme is doing a very necessary service in providing
food for extremely vulnerable people. However, we think that the
policy of importing food is too crude, that too much food is being
imported generally for the country's needs, and certainly there
are large parts of the country where agricultural recovery is
actually being adversely impacted by current WFP policies. To
quote the example of the western provinces, like Badghis and Herat,
where I was during the start of the harvest in July, farmers were
complaining they could not get the crops out of the fields because
wheat prices had become so depressed because the World Food Programme
was either distributing free food or giving food for work and
it was actually bringing food in from other countries rather than
buying local production. The World Food Programme is not the only
villain of the piece, you have local merchants who are also buying
food from Iran, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, buying wheat to sell
on to local markets, but you have a huge recovery in the agricultural
sector thanks to good weather and that is not being capitalised
on because the prices are so depressed.
Q17 Hugh Bayley: Are there particular
agricultural sectors or regions of the country where there is
a success story with agricultural development?
Mr Jarrah: It depends what you
mean by a success story.
Q18 Hugh Bayley: We will come on
to poppies later.
Mr Jarrah: We cannot take poppy
growing out of the equation, although it might be nice to bracket
it off as an illicit thing which we discuss as a separate paragraph.
In terms of rural livelihoods, in two-thirds of the districts
in Afghanistan it is the fastest growing sector, it is very sophisticated
in terms of agricultural extension, in terms of agricultural services,
in terms of the livelihoods of the people involved, all the way
from small farmers to top government officials. It is currently
the engine of rural growth in Afghanistan. Not dodging the issue
of the World Food Programme, one of our experiences with the World
Food Programme is that while their analysis is sound, some of
their operating systems are a bit more sluggish than that, and
what ends up getting delivered at the end does not look like what
was designed at the beginning. One example would be that we negotiated
a project with the World Food Programme for the delivery of food
in January of this year, and eventually it arrived in July, slap
bang in the middle of the harvest period. That was not by design
but once it has happened, it does have a negative effect on the
rural economy.
Q19 Hugh Bayley: How could you change
policy to reduce poppy cultivation? How could you encourage people
to shift to legitimate crops? Who buys the opium and who ought
to be buying up the opium, and then how do you encourage people
to use the capital they have made from opium growing to other
things?
Mr Jarrah: There is no quick answer
to that, either to the question or to the problem. To provide
a viable alternative to poppy growing in rural Afghanistan will
take many years and it is going to be impossible to eradicate
it completely. The challenge is to create sufficient alternatives
for those farmers who wish not to grow poppy to be able to do
so. Most of the market for Afghan opium is actually in Asia and
in neighbouring countries, so any downstream controls which Western
countries can impose to try to reduce the market for Afghan opium
are quite limited.
Mr Deva: I think there has to
be a multi-pronged approach over here. A lot of organisations
have tried to do alternative livelihoods and many of them have
failed, for all sorts of reasons, poppy quotas have not worked
out, giving farmers money to leave poppy cultivation has not worked
out either. What is coming out, and I was in Afghanistan recently,
is that a lot of organisations are now saying, "We have to
build civil society organisations, for one thing, and we also
have to build government institutions and authorities at a local
and provincial level." If those do not exist, poppy cultivation
will continue, and no amount of alternative livelihood work will
stop people from growing poppy. What is noteworthy is that a lot
of people who are growing poppy are very small farmers and there
is evidence to prove they are being forced to grow poppy in some
areas. Poppy cultivation has spread from the five traditional
poppy growing provinces to a number of areas in the central highlands
and also in parts of western Afghanistan. I think we have to look
at what the motivations are for these farmers and also landless
labourers. A lot of people who are growing poppies are labourers
growing them for people who own land and they have absolutely
no livelihood whatsoever. So it is a combination of strategies,
including providing opportunities for alternative livelihoods,
including developing skills of poor people in rural areas so they
can get jobs, but also having much stronger government institutions
at the local and provincial level, and the institutions of people,
of civil society. What this requires is a multi-pronged approach.
There appears to be little co-ordination on the part of NGOs and
donors on the poppy cultivation issue.
1 1Not printed. Available at: http://www.careinternational.org.uk/news/what-do-care-think/afghanistan/afghanistan-policy-brief-sept-2003.pdf Back
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