Examination of Witnesses(Questions 220-239)
RT HON
CLARE SHORT
MP AND MR
CHRIS AUSTIN
TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2002
220. It would make sense to identify people
who have good leadership skills, who are trustworthy, reliable
and honest?
(Clare Short) It is not just people; this is institutions.
It is beyond people. You can get really good people in lousy institutions
and they cannot make things work.
221. You need both?
(Clare Short) Absolutely. The Germans are supposed
to be leading on the police and the Italians on the justice sector.
(Mr Austin) We have provided a very modest level of
support for the Ministry of Public Health which has been well
received, helping them revise their strategy plans. There are
capacity building groups that the UN and ATA have set up across
all of the ministries. They are being taken forward in blocks
and the ministry of rural reconstruction has a capacity building
group of people identified for fast-track training capacity building,
to manage the new system.
(Clare Short) The UN really tries. It is funny they
are getting so much flak because I think they are trying in Afghanistan
better than they have ever tried before to have a "light
footprint". You go to any country that is being wrecked and
all you see is the UN vehicles and the UN institutions everywhere
overwhelming the locals. They are really trying not to do that.
Brahimi has led demands for that kind of reform in the UN system
and they have in every ministry a grouping that is trying to build
up the capacity of the ministry, so that it would have the capacity
to take over some of the services that the UN has been running.
The health people are in the health ministry, people working in
education and so on. You will never get perfection in this life
but that is a pretty good effort and they are trying.
222. I do not want to take you back to what
you have already said about your concern about the government
complaining that it is not getting enough money. That point is
very clearly made to us. I would take you back to your comment
about the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. As you know,
the Afghan Government is asking for more money to be directly
channelled through it, and you have explained some of the reasons
why we have to move slowly and carefully on that. It has been
suggested to us that more money could be channelled through the
Reconstruction Trust Fund in Afghanistan; that they should be
the principal holder of monies; and that the Transitional Administration
could bid from the Trust Fund for projects, and the Trust Fund
should be responsible for making sure that the money was properly
disbursed and properly used. Is that a model?
(Clare Short) No. The Trust Fund is the instrument
we are using to fund the spending of the Afghan Government. Right
from Tokyo you had a government with no systems; where do you
put any money that is meant to help them build up their system?
So we constructed the Trust Fund. We appealed to other donors
to put money in. A lot just will not; they only do projects, and
they have got rules so they are unable (unlike us) to put money
in. We did , and encouraged others to do so. Everything I have
said about the funding of civil service salaries, it was all drawn
out of the Trust Fund. The governments claim they want more of
the money that has been going to fund all the activities of the
UN system, or going through the Trust Fund which they will control
and manage; then we need civil service reform so that the money
is spent on services for people and not hopeless salaries for
people who do not do anything. I just read this morning that even
on the Trust Fund they have got they are underspent. You often
get that problem too. Governments have more aspirations to do
things than the capacity to do them. Even with the Trust Fund
they have got, they are not spending all the money they have got.
223. Finally a question about the Trust Fund.
What influence does the Transitional Administration have over
the policies and priorities that the Trust Fund follows?
(Mr Austin) It is one of the managers. The Trust Fund
is administered by the World Bank, and the management board is
the World Bank, the Asian Bank, the Islamic Development Bank,
UNDP and the Afghan Ministry of Finance.
224. In practice, is it a leading player, or
is it just present at meetings—
(Clare Short) I think Ashraf Ghani, whom I am sure
you have met, is interested in taking control of financial affairs,
if I could put it like that. They are a very powerful voice. Everyone
is trying to work to build up Afghan institutions and treating
that task with respect and a desire to cooperate; but we all have
to be responsible about public finances. We all work in very poor
countries with weak institutions where money goes missing and
there is misuse of money. Afghanistan has got lots of corruption
and lots of corrupt people. We cannot have institutions that do
not have some checks on them. All those institutions Chris has
just listed, that are members of the Trust Fund, are looking to
respect the transitional authority's lead, to strengthen their
capacity to make decisions. That is the mood of it. We have to
make sure the money is properly spent.
Tony Colman
225. My question is also about ensuring the
money is properly spent. The Afghan Government has been critical
of high overheads incurred by the UN, by donors and by NGOs. What
do you believe is an acceptable level of transaction costs for
donors and UN agencies; and how can transaction costs be reduced
without reducing transparency and accountability of donors and
aid agencies?
(Clare Short) The UN system has very old fashioned,
slow and expensive bureaucratic systems, so it tends to have high
overheads. Kofi Annan has been trying to reform this. It needs
to go faster. It is very ponderous, very slow, and different costs
are paid for different bits of the system before the money gets
through. Bilaterals—it depends on how they behave; this
is where the argument on untying comes in. Some countries only
procure expertise and supplies from their own country. It is not
just high overheads; this is spending where, instead of building
up local capacity, you get arguments about road building, with
expensive equipment brought from country X to do very labour-intensive
ways of doing it in a country that needs employment. You get that
kind of problem and that is in the system. That is where more
effective use of aid and untying and all that stuff which the
UK is arguing so strongly in the international system comes in.
NGOs with high overheads they vary. Normally those who put funding
through them check out their effectiveness and tend not to use
the ones that have got high overheads.
(Mr Austin) There is a distinction to be made between
transaction costs, which the Secretary of State was saying are
things like having tied aid and procedures that require the Afghan
Government to negotiate separate projects and contracts for each
activity, and what we call the operating costs or overhead costs.
How you define those is very hard. In our office we have at the
moment an essential overhead cost of the close protection team—and
those of you who visited were looked after by it—because
that is part of what we have needed to have to be able to operate
effectively in Afghanistan. Other international agencies have
similar arrangements which are quite costly. It rather distorts
the overhead costs and it is hard then to say that the figure
is 10 per cent of what you are spending or 15 per cent of what
you are spending. Within DFID on overhead costs, some of the things
that we do are all about our policy dialogue in Afghanistan. We
are trying with a relatively light admin touch to channel funds
through the ARTF to support the government system direct to implementing
agencies for activities but not manage projects ourselves. Nevertheless
we have quite a large team of people who engage with the Afghans
and with the other agencies on policy dialogue, not managing money
but they are a cost to us. Is that an overhead, or is that a benefit?
226. Secretary of State, in your DFID Action
Plan that you submitted to us on economic management, you said
that civil service reform is the key output including agreement
on pay levels, staff numbers and a functioning cabinet office
system. Do you think this sort of problem, in terms of having
very highly paid UN officials currently administering the system
outside Kabul, is helping in terms of getting this reform through
in terms, as you say, of agreement on pay levels and staff numbers?
(Clare Short) Again, I think these attacks on the
UN system—which is doing a better job in Afghanistan probably
than I have seen it do anywhere else; it is under constant improvement
and needs it—are wholly improper. People coming from other
countries, who have family responsibilities at home, housing,
children and children in universities and all these kinds of things
and they have to live in another country, they need an international
salary. It is different from being employed in your own country.
In terms of ministers in Afghanistan, there is an issue about
ministerial salaries that we are trying to help on. Some of the
ministers are extremely wealthy independently and some are not.
We need to sort out ministerial salaries. Currently I think they
are paying their own housing and security costs. This is all institutional
building. They need to have salaries, have proper housing for
ministers, and their security costs ought to be taken care of.
We are working on that and we will try to get to a system where
the ministers are properly paid and looked after. In the civil
service the EC is also working on civil service reform. They have
appointed some leaders of clusters of reform that are paid $400
a month. It is the beginning of finding out who there is in a
ministry. Lots of these people are flitting in and out and nobody
knows who they are; how many people there are; and what their
tasks are; and to begin to cluster how many people you would need
to do it and look at what kind of salaries you would need to pay.
There will need to be some redundancy programmes and some help
for people to go off and re-train and set up a little enterprise
or whatever, to release this big salary spend on lots of very
small salaries for people who are not really doing anything. Again,
it is a familiar thing in developing countries. Attacking the
salaries of UN officials who have kept nine million people fed
in Afghanistan—and I think the World Food Programme did
a stunning job in keeping food in Afghanistan all through that
time—I think is out of order and really, in this case, is
not justified. Creating that kind of division is really foolish,
when the Afghan system does not have the capacity to deliver to
its people. If the UN system went away people would starve outside
Kabul, children would not be in school, and the health care that
has taken place would collapse; polio would not be eliminated
and children would not be immunised.
227. Can I ask you about the other areas which
you have put in the Action Plan which is about increasing the
capacity of the Central Bank. I think it was good news to all
of us that you slipped into your answer to the Chairman's first
question that the UK had helped and worked on the write off of
Afghanistan's debts to the World Bank, if I heard correctly. Could
you perhaps go into more detail on that and what may be needed
in terms of reconstruction of the debts that Afghanistan does
owe the world to ensure that IFIs can come in to provide the level
of concessional finance going forward on the basis that Afghanistan's
existing debt has been cleared?
(Clare Short) This is very much the case I put to
the Afghan Government when I was there a few weeks ago, when there
was this constant refrain about demanding more money from the
international system. I was saying I really think it is time to
prioritise arrears clearance, so that you can borrow from the
Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. The World Bank is there
with grants and has very limited grant funds. The Asian Development
Bank is very anxious to engage in a big way and has already prepared
programmes. To be honest, when I was going we were thinking of
spending another $20 million, and we were thinking how to distribute
it between the humanitarian effort (which still needs more because
people are desperately poor in Afghanistan, let us be clear about
what we are talking about) and putting more into the Trust Fund.
I decided, having been there, that putting the money into arrears
clearance was the most constructive thing to do. The Asian Development
Bank and the World Bank, in this case, cannot lend to a country
when it is in arrears to them; but the arrears are only $55 million,
so we put in $20 million and a number of other countries are coming
in. We have cleared the Asian Development Bank and they have now
allocated a £150 million programme. There is us and a number
of others—the Norwegians—
(Mr Austin) Sweden, Italy, Canada and Japan.
(Clare Short) If everyone comes together, what is
left after our $20 million is not a lot—$35 million—and
then they can borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and get all
the technical expertise that goes with it. I think that is right.
I think also this goes back to the whole argument about wider
replenishment, there is something good about a country taking
responsibility for its own long term concessional borrowing; this
sense that you are taking control of your own fate, and when you
take that on it means you have to make sure it produces results.
It is a very long time before you have to pay back, but I think
it provides that sense of being responsible for their own future.
But, let us be clear, there are massive debts to the Paris Club.
This is sovereign debt. Aid debt is Paris Club debt, mostly to
Russia—probably not very keen on repaying $6.4 billion.
Now IFI lending is clear they can get on with that. To get normalisation
of their finances and higher prospects of inward investment, they
will need a Paris Club clearance and there are big problems there.
228. If you could perhaps give us a note prior
to final preparation of our report and bring us up-to-date on
the arrangements you are making on this issue, Secretary of State[2]?
(Clare Short) There is not a lot of it
to the UK.
(Mr Austin) I am not aware of any.
(Clare Short) Russia, for obvious reasons.
Mr Khabra
229. You have said you are of the view that
international comparisons are not valid and that per capita comparisons
are misleading. Many commentators have compared funding for Afghanistan
to that for many other post-conflict countries that are facing
reconstruction. How valid are such comparisons? How should the
amount of aid pledged and the speed of its disbursal be evaluated
if not by using international comparisons?
(Clare Short) This is part of the complaining that
I think is unwise; which I have already said I think is unwise.
These are wrecked countries; the international community is mobilising
to help re-build it, to help bring in the transitional authority
to build up its institutional capacity, to keep the UN system
going and to organise the handover; and there is this strident
voice saying, "Give us more money. Give is more money",
which I find very unattractive—and the claim that the Tokyo
money has not been disbursed which is misleading; and I have already
said what I think about the attacks on the UN system. I think
this is unwise, wasteful and not justified. Out of that same voice
has come these claimed comparisons with other countries. I do
not think we should proceed in that way. I think we should go
according to a country's need. If, for example, you take the Balkans—a
dollar in the Balkans is worth less than a dollar in Afghanistan
or a dollar in Rwanda. There is also a question of how many years
you put into the calculation. If you take Sierra Leone or Rwanda,
as the years go back you can claim the money is bigger and bigger.
We go with the needs assessment. Chris Austin described how the
World Bank and the UN move in, look at the country, look at what
it needs, give us all a figure around which there is some sort
of international cooperation. I think that is the right way to
go. I think the carping is unjustified and unattractive.
230. Are you succeeding in convincing the others
about according to need, or not?
(Clare Short) It is how the international system works,
and we are working on trying to improve it; but we have to proceed
by need. We have so many crises in the world right now. Afghanistan
goes on with the drought, Angola, Southern Africa, Ethiopia; the
situation with the Palestinians and so on. We could not have some
notional equal spending. You have to look at that country, what
its need is, how you can keep people fed and so on. Often in a
country it is whether you can disburse the money. There is terrible
need in the Democratic of Congo where not all the people in need
can be reached. Need has to be the basis; there is no other way
of doing it in reality.
231. Do you think that the per capita approach
can be refined to a numbers affected per capita approach? Does
not the fact that most aid costs are not incurred locally mean
that per capita comparisons cannot be ignored?
(Clare Short) No, I have said I think we have to proceed
by need. I do not think the sub-clause there, because they are
not incurred locally, is helpful in this context. That just takes
us back into the untying argument and so on, which I am very keen
on but does not help us sort out in Afghanistan in the short-term.
(Mr Austin) You have made the point, Secretary of
State, it is need, absorptive capacity and what could be delivered.
I think it bears repeating that we are still in the first year
of Afghanistan's reconstruction effort. Everyone at Tokyo acknowledged
that it was going to require a long-term effort from the Afghan
transitional government and from donors. In the development forum
that is planned for next March we will be taking another medium-term
look on a more informed basis of what is needed where, across
the country, how best can that be delivered, and what is the cost.
(Clare Short) On the question of absorptive capacity,
there are many countries with desperate need who have not got
the capacity to spend money well in a post-crisis situation when
you have no institutions that work; so that is another factor
that comes into this.
Chairman
232. Let us go back to this question of timescale.
What I think we have described today is, here we have got Afghanistan,
admittedly it is only a year on but outside of Kabul it is little
more than a UN mandate. You are saying, and confirming what a
lot of people have said to us, more by way of concern that President
Karzai is really no more than the mayor of Kabul. The UN mandate
outside of Kabul, obvious issues of security which we will come
on to in a second, and even within Kabul issues of capacity, corruption
and so on and so forth. Ultimately the objective must be to have
a sovereign government, accountable to the people, elected by
the people throughout the whole of Afghanistan, because we do
not want a UN mandate forever. What is the timescale on this,
and what are the milestones? How does one set milestones for transitional
authority? It has to be a two-way process, has it not? If they
manage to achieve various things—and I have to say it is
quite impressive that they have managed to achieve a line to take,
even if it is a line to take simply complaining about what they
want to take a line to complain about, but over 33 ministries
it is always a consistent line—but if there should be objectives,
if they need certain targets then the international community
will respond. It is slightly difficult getting a sense of scale.
Of course, it is difficult in different situations, but are we
looking at 5/10/15 years? What, in your mind, do you see as being
a time when you would hope that the transitional government of
Afghanistan would become a real government?
(Clare Short) May I just say one thing about the way
you are conceptualising that, which is fine but it assumes that
the international community is a more rational and coordinated
beast than it is. It is all these institutions that you will hear
about and that we endlessly try to work with and so on. It was
built for previous times. Its capacity to respond rationally to
a country that needs to be reconstructed from scratch is weak
but improving. If only it were as you describe that would be delightful,
but it is harder than that. As you all know, with the commitment
on the transitional government to a constitution and then elections
in two years, which is a heck of a task—they are talking
about going back to the 64 constitution and therefore building
on that—to fulfil that there is meant to be a special Loya
Jirga again to agree the new constitution, then to prepare
the way for full elections, and of course they have not had full
elections. Out of such a process will come a fully legitimate
government. We have got pretty strong legitimacy in this government
but it has come through a guided democracy and not a fully representative
democracy. That timescale is clearly important; but, at the same
time as that is going, building up the capacity of the institutions
of the government has to go on. Then security outside Kabul, which
is the next task and we are coming on to, is absolutely key to
success or failure. I think there has been enormous gain. I think
what has been achieved in Afghanistan is very impressive, personally,
but it is still fragile, and it could still all implode and collapse.
The next task of getting an army for the country and demobilising
the militias and the warlords, and getting security of justice
so that services can reach people and the economy can grow, is
an enormous next stage of the task. How long will that take? Years.
I am optimistic that we can make progress. But in a country like
Afghanistan and a region like this, we have to be in for the long
haul. We have to be thinking we will be there for a ten-year timescale,
building local institutions, stability, a growing economy, more
and more justice, so we become a lighter and lighter presence,
but we need to be willing to stick with the country and its people
and its institution building and the whole security thing for
many years. There are lots of warlords in Afghanistan waiting
for the international community to go away and to go back to business
as it has been for a long time, and that could happen if we turn
our attention away, and then it is a very dangerous region. The
central Asian republics are in very bad shape, terribly poor,
very corrupt—as poor as the highly indebted countries—and
there is Pakistan in frail shape, then there is India and Pakistan
and the risks of a nuclear exchange. That is the region we are
talking about. We need to hang on in there for the long term,
build up Afghanistan, stick with building a better Pakistan, and
then we are going to start attending to the central Asian republics,
because they are all very frail as well.
Mr Khabra
233. What is your assessment of the impact of
the political changes which have taken place across the border
in Pakistan following the election? It is not a happy situation
at all, because most of the Taliban element and their supporters
moved from Afghanistan across the border into that area, which
is a no-man's land, where there is no control at all. It is not
a good situation at all. What do you think are the future hopes
of the powers there, where you are trying to maintain security?
(Clare Short) I remain of the view that General, now
President Musharraf is the best chance for the transition of Pakistan
to decent governance and decent economic management that it has
had for a long time, and I am very conscious that the Benazir
Bhutto government and the Nawaz Sharif government were deeply,
deeply corrupt, plundered the country, supported the Taliban and
behaved in ways that were completely destructive of the interests
of their people and the stability of the region. Poor old Musharraf
is pressed to hold elections, he holds them when the whole Moslem
world is feeling deeply unhappy and agitated over the situation
in Iraq, and then what has happened is that the Islamist parties
do better than they have ever done in elections in Pakistan before.
That is called democracy, I think. Then everyone says, "What
a hopeless guy! How could you let the elections have this result?"
Should he have fixed them? You know—if I may just unload
all that upon you. But we are engaged with Pakistan and I think
it is far from hopeless. They have completed an IMF programme
for the first time in their history, since Pakistan was formed
as a country. They are really trying to put more resources into
the provision of better services for the poor, and education in
particular, which is very important in its own right, and to counter
the kind of extremism that can come from Madhrassahs as being
the only source of education for boys. But we have to stick with
Pakistan. Its institutions are very frail, and it is being misgoverned
and plundered and extreme forces have been allowed to strengthen.
It is absolutely true that the Taliban dissolved and disappeared,
and I am sure lots of them went into Pakistan, into Balochistan
and into the North-West Frontier province where these Islamist
parties did so well, and that creates difficulties. I agree with
you. Of course, security must be there, but developing decent,
good governance that delivers to the people of Pakistan, including
the people of North-West Frontier province and Balochistan, is
part of those extremist elements no longer being popular or supported
by the people. Of course, both Pakistan and India have the unresolved
problem over Kashmir, both of them spending large amounts on defence.
A third of the poor of the world live in India. A third of India's
population are absolutely poor. If we reduced the tension over
Kashmir and the spending on defence and got more integration of
the economy of the region, this whole region would be safer and
life would be better for its people. All of that requires long-term,
sustained engagement with Pakistan, with India, getting into the
central Asian republics, sticking with Afghanistan, and that is
a decent future. But this region in the world could be very dangerous
for the world if we do not attend to all of this and stick with
it over a number of years.
Tony Worthington
234. It is early days for reflection about Afghanistan,
but the image I have is very much of this devastated society,
as you described earlier; then Brahimi, amazing achievements in
bringing people together, and he had this imagery of the light
footprint. We can see what he was trying to do. The Afghans do
not seem to be saying, "Yes, there is a light footprint of
UN organisations." You have got parallel administrations
and so on. On looking at it, do you think there is a case for
in some areas moving in and saying, "This has got to be done.
The quickest way to do it is by all the skills of the developed
world and capital capacity" and so on and so forth, so as
to demonstrate rapid change, or do you think it is basically being
right that we could have anticipated the problems and we have
to go through them?
(Clare Short) I think we could have anticipated the
problems, we did anticipate the problems, and we have to go through
them. There is no quick fix in creating the institutions of a
modern state. It is not just Afghanistan. It has had to reconstruct
Rwanda. Everything has had to be constructed from scratch in the
wake of a genocide, when you have probably even more traumatised
people. We are going to have to do it in the Democratic Republic
of Congo. That is as big as western Europe. There are no state
institutions there, and so on. So you can do quick impact projects,
but no country can run without institutions that run, and that
takes time to build. You can get clever people. There are lots
of clever Afghans outside Afghanistan, and some of them are going
back. All of us who think we are clever have all worked in institutions
that we inherit from previous generations that we can modify,
but they enable us to work and achieve results. It does not matter
how clever an individual is; if there is no institutional framework
around them, they cannot bring about the kind of public sector
that can serve its people and a growing economy and stability
and justice. So my own view is this is a fantastically large task.
I think people think, "Oh, we have finished the war. Just
sprinkle a bit of development aid around and you've done it."
This is a fantastically complicated task, and I think the fact
that we have come this far is really impressive, and I do think
the UN is really trying to have a light footprint. Without the
UN system we would be in disaster, and people outside Kabul would
have nothing. I think actually the government is doing well. There
are some very competent ministers, very intelligent and able people,
trying to build up its institutional capacity, and I think we
should all just get on with it and stop the carping. That is my
view. We should get on now with bringing security outside Kabul,
which is the big task, and if we do not do that, we will go backwards.
235. I am just trying to imagine what it is
like in Kabul, because that is what we are talking about, where
you would have big UN organisations there, needing to recruit
talented local staff and trying to build up ministries at the
same time. What is that relationship? There must be the real danger
that the plum jobs are with the international organisations rather
than in the civil service of the ministries.
(Clare Short) That is a problem throughout the developing
world. All over the developing world you have UN agencies, you
have bilateral agencies, the World Bank, the IFIs, and good staff
working for their government are often recruited and paid better
salaries in the international system. It is always a problem,
yet you cannot employ local staff on a lower rate than international
staff, but you cannot ask people to leave their home and country
and come and work in another country without paying them a decent
salary. That is a systemic problem. But let me say Kabul is completely
safe. It has thriving markets. It has women walking along the
streets in black headscarves or white headscarves, some in bhurkas,
some getting fed up with their bhurkas and folding them back,
because they do restrict your vision. There are people shopping,
traffic jams. I met the senior UK military officer in ISAF who
said, "This place is completely safe. You can go anywhere."
That is fantastic. There are loads of people coming back. There
are lots of refugees coming back to Kabul and they are building
new homes, because, of course, it is safe, unlike other parts
of the country. There are strains on it; it does not have any
sanitation systems and other things, but there are lots of children
going to school, and it is safe. Afghans feel fantastically relieved
and happy that Kabul is in the state it is. There is lots more
to do, but it is giving people hope. It is not all a disaster,
but there is masses more to do.
Ann Clwyd
236. The three of us who went to Kabul, I must
say, did not share that feeling because of the level of security
given to us while we were there, but since we left, of course,
the curfew has been lifted and clearly things are improving. We
were not able to walk freely on the streets, which I found very
limiting in terms of getting the interaction between the ordinary
people and ourselves. Of course, time after time people said to
us when we were there that what they wanted was an expansion of
ISAF. I think every agency we talked to said the same thing. I
know that you yourself have supported that idea, as has the Prime
Minister from time to time, and the Secretary of State for Defence
and so on. Why has it not been done? Why has there not been an
expansion of ISAF? Is the reality now that there is not going
to be an expansion of ISAF and that people are looking to other
methods?
(Clare Short) Yes. I personally think it would have
been highly desirable to have an ISAF that had a presence in every
major city of Afghanistan and that sense that security was spreading.
As you say, the UK were open to that view early on. Am I remembering
correctly, Chris? The US were not, and obviously they are the
major player in Afghanistan. But that was the early days. Now
we have got to the point where the will is just not there. Germany
and Netherlands are about to take over the leadership of ISAF
from the Turks and have said they will only do so on condition
that there is no expansion of the mandate. I think it would have
been highly desirable. It was political views, particularly views
in the US, that made it impossible early on, and now the momentum
has gone, so we have to find another way of getting security outside
Kabul. There is this US thinking—and the UK is very interested
in being helpful—for putting security teams in all the cities—not
masses of troops, but military teams bringing security to all
the major cities at the same time as the move forward on training
the Afghan National Army and DDR for lots of the militias and
the warlords. This is like a message to the country. "Security
is coming outside Kabul. Listen, warlords. The international community
is not going away. You might as well come inside the tent because
you are not going to be able to play around like you did before."
So I think that might be a second-best, but it is the one we have,
and therefore I strongly favour us getting on with that as rapidly
as possible.
237. Can I ask you a bit about that? Could you
tell us a bit about where you see the UK role in those regional
teams? I see from the press conference given by the US military
in Kabul, they were asked various questions: "Does international
law back the deployment of regional teams? Has the Afghan Government
requested this initiative?" and the answer was, "The
plan was discussed with the President." One of the criticisms
of the plan from other commentators seems to be that there has
been very little consultation, that suddenly the Americans have
come up with this idea and everybody is expected to run behind
it. Is that how you see it or have other countries been involved?
(Clare Short) No, it is not how I see it. I was terribly
worried by some of the commentary from the US military early on,
the voice from Washington hawks: "We don't do nation building."
Do you remember that sort of early voices? That was, "Let
us go and chase the bad guys and someone else can look after building
up the institutions of Afghanistan." That would have been
very bad news for the people of Afghanistan, and I think an error,
because you do not get security and stability in a country where
the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot hide themselves unless you build
a just, well-governed country. So I think the desire for security
for Western interests and actually progress for the people of
Afghanistan is complementary if you take things forward. General
McNeill, who is the leading general now in Afghanistan, whatever
his title is, believes that you have to have a stable, well-governed
Afghanistan in order that it not be a place where evil groups
can hide themselves in a failed state. So he has been leading
the thinking on the regional security teams. He is a very impressive,
attractive person. I very much liked his concept and his understanding
of what Afghanistan needed. I think he has a close working relationship
with the government and has frequent discussions. The big issue
has been getting agreement, which I think President Karzai announced
in the Bonn conference that has just taken place, on the size
of a new Afghan National Army, so that the training can start,
the recruitment, and then the demobilisation of lots of the militias
that are still out there. That has been the core thing that needed
agreeing by the Afghan Transitional Administration, and that now
has been agreed. This is very complementary. My understanding
is—and obviously I am not present in all the discussions—that
there has been a lot of discussion. Let us be clear: the US is
the big power in Afghanistan, and it is the US military strength,
projected out into regional cities, that is necessary to convince
the warlords that we will not be going back to warlords and militias.
So, that done in the way that General McNeill is envisaging I
think will be wholly beneficial, but we need American forces to
remain in Afghanistan and be wisely used in this kind of way in
order that all those groupings who still have masses of weapons
and still an economy based massively on illicit drug growing and
smuggling know they cannot go back to all that, and there is going
to be a united state with justice and proper tax systems and so
on.
238. We also heard criticism of the American
military outside Kabul. It was said that they were very insensitive
to local culture when they were continuing their mission of searching
for al-Qaeda, which apparently is still going on, and that women's
bhurkas were being lifted and women were being touched and so
on. There was a lot of resentment of that, although obviously
people have hidden under bhurkas; we know that. But they felt
that the people should be better trained in the local culture,
and this is what I wondered about these particular teams. Are
they going to have special training so they know how to interact
with local people, or are they just going to barge in?
(Clare Short) I heard some of that criticism too.
It is not, of course, the whole of the country where those US
operations are that are still hunting for fighters, and I understand
those complaints come from that part. There is one region where
there is still quite a lot of military activity and there are
a lot of those kinds of complaints. I agree with the point you
are making. It is really important that the spirit of the regional
security teams is like the spirit of ISAF in Kabul. I know it
is the view of the British military, who obviously were in the
lead at first, that the quick impact—we provided some financing,
and then it is just working with local schools, getting the local
children playing football, doing bits of work to help people out
in the community that helps that immediate sense that the security
is there to help people and not to oppress them. I know that the
thinking is that the regional teams will be in the same spirit,
and we will have some funding for that kind of helping out, getting
things fixed. Obviously you should not use the military for development
but if they are there, you might as well use them to fix up buildings
that are in a mess and get some decent activity going. So I know
the thinking is what I think will be the right kind of thinking:
on the ISAF model, though it will not be ISAF, but obviously it
is really important that this moves forward now and that it is
achieved in that spirit, and I think we should all pay attention
to that.
239. Can I ask one final question, and that
is this. Again, at this briefing in Kabul between the US military
and NGOs—
(Clare Short) Which I am not familiar with, let me
say.
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