Select Committee on International Development Minutes of Evidence


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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