Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR JIM
DRUMMOND, HON
DOMINIC ASQUITH
AND DR
ROGER HUTTON
16 NOVEMBER 2004
Q1 Chairman: Thank you all very much
for coming to give evidence. As a committee our concerns over
Iraq have been largely when do we—and I suspect as a consequence,
when do DFID—engage? Our experience in Afghanistan—and
many of us have visited Afghanistan—was that it is very
difficult to do any development work without security and without
stability on the ground. You can do a certain amount such as trying
to get the electricity working again and get the sewage working
again—they are all important things—but in terms of
real development work which actually requires a civil society,
NGOs, moving around, some interaction between representatives
of state and a civil society actually does require a degree of
security and a degree of stability. I think we would welcome your
views as to whether or not that point has now arrived? Is there
sufficient security on the ground for there to be meaningful development
work or are we simply in a kind of sticking plaster mode still
and trying to keep society moving as best we can? So it is some
kind of huge humanitarian operation, not in refugee camps but
a whole society in some sort of humanitarian situation just trying
to keep water and food and everything flowing. Could you paint
a picture of how you see the development space in Iraq at the
moment?
Mr Drummond: I think usually in
these post-conflict situations one can move from the immediate
relief to the reconstruction to the development with some overlap.
I think in Iraq what we have at the moment is much more overlap
than we would normally expect so that there are some immediate
relief questions such as: How do you follow up in Najaf or Fallujah
after a military action? There are some immediate reconstruction
questions still there. We are dealing with a situation where there
has been very little investment in infrastructure for 15 to 20
years so there are very frequent breakdowns of almost everything.
I think what has happened in the last year is that the situation
has stabilised due to the efforts of donors and partners here
and the military. At the same time there is an opportunity to
do development work. The Iraqi Government has recently produced
a National Development Strategy which is very forward looking.
We can make it available to you if you have not seen it[1],
but it seems to me a pretty good document for a government that
has been there for two or three months in terms of setting forward
priorities, the political process and security, taking more responsibility
for their own security and establishing a liberal market economy.
There are also targets for reconstruction which have been set.
I think you have these three phases overlaid in a way that perhaps
you do not have in quite the same way in Sierra Leone or even
in Afghanistan.
Q2 Chairman: Is it post-conflict or post-war?
Mr Drummond: Clearly in parts
of Iraq there is still conflict going on. In other parts of Iraq—in
the north of Iraq—it is pretty peaceful. In the south in
the last couple of months since Najaf it has been pretty stable.
People have been able to get out and around and do things again.
Q3 Mr Battle: You mentioned the overlap
and I was recently visiting Afghanistan and the case there was:
Can we get onto development? It seems we are going to elections
but when will development actually start? By that I mean on the
ground, in villages, health clinics, education, projects for the
agricultural economy. Some of the resources—including DFID
resources—were going into basic security, not necessarily
military to chase the Al-Qaeda network up and down the Tora Bora,
but at least to employ people to have local presences of quasi
military police presence. I wondered if, for all the talk of resources—and
it is public resource, probably inaccurate—that money in
DFID is being taken away from other areas and parts of the world
and other programmes to go into the reconstruction and redevelopment
of Iraq. I do not get the impression that much re-development
is actually going on. Could you disillusion me and others of that
and tell me that water, electricity, roads and agricultural development
and, indeed, industrial and service development is being sponsored
and supported?
Mr Drummond: A lot of work on
immediate reconstruction is being done. For example, DFID funded
jointly with the Development Fund for Iraq—Iraq's own oil
money—an emergency infrastructure programme in the south
which has helped to restore power supplies, extend water supplies
in Basra; there have been programmes to rehabilitate schools;
the UN and World Bank trust funds are starting to operate in these
areas. However, I think we are at an early stage of this. There
is work going on that we are sponsoring at the centre to provide
economic policy.
Q4 Mr Battle: Is the electricity supply,
for example, more secure now than it was under Saddam Hussein?
Mr Drummond: The output is a bit
higher than it was before the war.
Q5 Mr Battle: The output by the power
stations?
Mr Drummond: Yes and the reach
is better because the grid is now operating so that you can transfer
power from stations in the south or the north to the centre, or
vice versa. The coverage is better.
Q6 Mr Battle: The reason I ask these
questions is that in a sense Iraq started, in technical terms
according to the World Bank some years ago, as a middle income
country that is now desperately facing poverty; it has not got
the basic supplies of energy and water. What percentage of rural
and urban areas have clean drinking water now?
Mr Drummond: We are in a situation
where we need to gather more information about what is going on
around Iraq so that we can monitor progress more accurately in
what we are trying to achieve. There have been a number of studies
of households now which provide information. I think the best
one that we have seen is by an organisation called Fafo which
I think is Norwegian based[2].
It shows that 93% of rural households and 98% of urban households
are connected to the electricity network. Those people report
that the electricity supplies are unstable but if you look at
the latest maps for electricity supplies across Iraq what it shows
is that the different governates are getting between 10 and 16
hours of power per day which is better than it was during the
summer when the demand is much higher. There are economic policy
issues that need to be addressed in all of this because power
is virtually free in Iraq so there is not much incentive to switch
it off. There is an issue for the government for the future as
to how it unwinds some of these subsidies because about half of
its budget is spent on subsidies.
Q7 Mr Battle: We only get impressions
of the conflict and we only get impressions from films of Baghdad
with one or two other city exceptions. If I wanted to compare
(I do not have any experience of visiting Iraq but I have of Afghanistan)
western Afghanistan where there was no conflict going on you could
see the real potential for DFID (they were there with other agencies)
working on rural agricultural integrated development projects,
making sure an irrigation water supply where a river had dried
up worked. It was a brilliant example where you could say there
were security problems in places such as Kabul and Kandahar occupied
by the Americans. In western Afghanistan you could see the real
potential for good sustainable economic development. Is that true
in parts of Iraq now or is the whole place a security camp really?
Mr Drummond: I think the main
security problems are in the areas around Baghdad. If you go to
the Kurdish areas in the north then they are pretty stable and
secure and there has been a lot of development there. If you go
to southern Iraq at the moment there have been phases where it
has been very insecure but for the last couple of months it has
been better and people have been able to get out more and do development
work. As I say, we have been able to do things in the south; it
has been stable enough over the last year to get out and do things.
Q8 Mr Battle: I do not decry the use
of security officers including police officers; I actually feel
and believe they are a function of good integrated development
work, but were DFID satisfied that they engaged in the appropriate
planning with senior police officers in advance of the invasion
and that since then enough support has been provided by the Home
Office so that just as in Afghanistan there is support between
DFID and the Home Office—and indeed in East Timor—to
provide that basic level of ordinary security? Has that happened
yet in Iraq?
Mr Asquith: Let me try to answer
that question. Certainly in terms of looking at it now I would
congratulate the Home Office on the support they have given in
terms of providing police expertise on the ground in exceptionally
difficult circumstances. That is very true down in the area around
Basra—which is under British Forces control—but it
is also true in Baghdad. That includes both police officers on
the ground and retired police who are mentoring the Iraqi police
service in slightly more remote areas as well.
Q9 Mr Battle: A police officer from my
own constituency in Leeds has been in Iraq, but the question I
am asking is: has there been enough planning and are there enough?
Mr Asquith: Enough planning now,
yes. I would say there is enough planning. Are there enough? One
can always do with more.
Q10 Chairman: Could you just say a little
bit about the Global Conflict Prevention Pool? Who is in the lead
on that and when does it come into play? How does it come into
play? Is it something that sits permanently or does it become
activated if there is a particular conflict in the offing? Can
you just give us a feel about what the interplay is with the rest
of Whitehall?
Mr Asquith: It includes the Foreign
Office, DFID and the Ministry of Defence. We each have in our
ministries officials who follow this every single day and they
are forever looking, each day, at projects (both monitoring projects
that are existing and projects for the future). In terms of what
the objectives are, they were in the initial period (after the
end of major hostilities) focusing on security sector reform on
governance broadly and at that period on discovering more about
Iraq itself. We have now written a development of the strategy
for the Global Conflict Prevention Pool which will retain the
security sector reform element but will do more on the bridge
building between communities and the capacity building of government.
We try to work those three into each project so they are mutually
re-enforcing. In terms of actual amounts spent, we would expect
to spend by the end of this financial year roughly £20 million
and will look in the region of £50 million for next year
and about £12.5 million for the year after that. It is a
rolling programme. Some of its most effective work goes into prison
sector reform and on the policing side into supporting capability.
Q11 Mr Davies: Can I just ask if that
£12 million comes within the £70 million envelope of
aid for Iraq or is it in addition?
Mr Asquith: This is a separate
fund.
Q12 Mr Davies: What would be the total
amount in this financial year that the British tax payer is contributing
to Iraq, apart from the cost of military operations?
Mr Drummond: The Global Conflict
Prevention Pool contribution is part of the £544 million
that was pledged at Madrid for the three years from April 2003
to March 2006. We cannot tell you exactly the amount spent this
year as we are only part of the way through it, but I guess it
will be £100 million to £150 million of the pledge.
Q13 Mr Bercow: Mr Asquith, in response
to my colleague Mr Battle you asked whether he meant is sufficient
planning being done now. Obviously there is no point in living
in the past but we hope we will learn from the past. I wonder
if I could ask you, would it be fair to say that whereas there
was very substantial military planning in advance of the invasion
there was no—or next to no—civil police planning?
As part of that, wrapped into that inquiry, am I not right in
thinking—as we understand it—that the first approach
to the Home Office and to ACPO came only after the fall of Baghdad?[3]
Secondly, are there enough police now in and around Baghdad or
might it be the case that for whatever understandable reasons
a decision has been made to spread relatively thinly the police
presence across the country, partly to satisfy demand in different
parts of the country, but that the effect of that is that provision
is inadequate in Baghdad and finally, therefore, do you accept
the view that I know Christian Aid (among others) has observed
that there is still an enormous need to recruit, retain, train
and protect police because, as ordinary Iraqis are saying, security
is the biggest single thing and without it sustainable development
is obviously going to be a mere pipe dream?
Mr Asquith: Can I be honest and
plead ignorance on precisely when the first request came to the
police and try to tackle that first question in a slightly different
way? The objective soon after the end of major hostilities was
to put on the street as many police as possible to tackle the
security conditions that then existed. A large number were recruited
and a large number were put in place. The level of training and
preparation for the police was not sufficient to withstand a very
concerted attack upon them in April of this year. The lessons
drawn have been to devote even more time to the training of the
police before they are subjected to what are exceptional security
threats which I suspect our police force would have great trouble
in contending with. A lot of effort was initially put into trying
to get them spread as widely across the country as possible but
effort has been focused increasingly on increasing the training
of those police forces that are recruited. I think that is the
best answer I can give you.
Dr Hutton: There was an issue
after the conflict of the quality of the Iraqi police service.
The one thing we found in training the police and all other aspects
of the security sector is that you cannot rush these things. There
is a tendency to want to rush because of the security situation
but you only build in quality by taking time over it and training
these people properly. I can give you some statistics if you are
interested on police training. The Iraqi Police Service at the
moment is currently manned to 87,000 of whom 50% are trained and
equipped. We have increased the ceiling which we are aiming for
to 135,000, the plan being to have 40% trained and equipped by
January next year and 100% by July 2006. Slightly complicating
the picture is that because of the poor quality of some of the
people originally in the IPS there is a redundancy programme so
as the numbers go up some of the numbers also go down at the same
time.
Q14 Tony Worthington: Can I go back to
what the Chairman was raising earlier with you? I think you said
that the degree of overlay between your interests—that is
DFID's interest—and, if I understood you correctly, the
Ministry of Defence interest was much greater in Iraq than it
was elsewhere.
Mr Drummond: I think that is probably
true. What I was trying to say was that what we are facing in
Iraq is a lot of different development challenges all at the same
time. In other countries we tended to face them more in sequence
so that there is some immediate post-conflict relief required
for places like Najaf or Fallujah. There is some next stage reconstruction
of infrastructure—quick impact projects which the military
tend to play a leading role in—required. There is also an
opportunity to do some long term development stuff, although it
is not an easy environment in which to do it.
Q15 Tony Worthington: Is it not the case
that that is the way it was planned? The Pentagon was put in charge
of the humanitarian programme; that was the American plan. It
is the American plan we are working to; the humanitarian plan
was to be set up and we were invited to come to that effort and
that that effort answered back this line of command which was
still the Pentagon and to the President. It was planned to be
overlaid.
Mr Drummond: It is certainly the
case that the US system planned to do some of the humanitarian
phase themselves but it is also the case that there was a lot
of planning done by development agencies with the UN system for
the humanitarian phase. As it turned out there was a limited requirement
for that.
Q16 Tony Worthington: The central point
I am getting at is this idea of humanitarian space, that following
the military around in any case is a very dangerous experience
and what agencies have tried to do over the years is to say that
the people providing humanitarian assistance—food, shelter
and so on—are not the same people as the people who are
shooting up Iraq. What was very alarming to the NGOs—and
I remember it well—and what they were protesting about was
that it was planned without humanitarian space; the humanitarian
bit and the defence bit were overlaid.
Mr Drummond: I think that may
be true to some extent in the way the US system approached that.
I think it is not true in the way that we approach that in the
sense that we planned with the United Nations system, with the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with the NGOs
for the humanitarian phase. The humanitarian phase was actually
very short. A lot of the humanitarian problems that were anticipated
did not actually happen and we therefore moved on into the next
immediate reconstruction phase quite quickly.
Q17 Tony Worthington: What we have witnessed
is this appalling identification of aid workers as legitimate
targets—they are not legitimate targets—where they
have been kidnapped and where they are seen as now fair game by
terrorists. We did not help that by going into a war where, in
fact, it was planned by the Americans that there would be this
overlap between the humanitarian issues. The humanitarian assistance
would follow in subject to the control of the military. That did
not help, did it?
Mr Drummond: I think what we have
tried to do is to keep that as separate as possible. I do not
entirely buy the NGO argument that because they have perceived
an association between the military and the humanitarian that
they have become targets. Elsewhere, in the Middle East for example,
they have become targets unfortunately for terrorists just because
they are associated with the West.
Q18 Tony Worthington: I do not think
that we can simply say that in the British sector we are doing
it differently because our NGOs—the international NGOs—will
be working in the rest of Iraq as well as in the British sector.
That is true, is it not?
Mr Drummond: Some of them are.
There have been relatively few British NGOs very active in Iraq
during Saddam's period and relatively few since. In a sense there
was a gap there which had to be filled.
Q19 Tony Worthington: But is this business—this
precious separation of the humanitarian from the military—going
to be more difficult in the future to recreate that space post-Iraq
than it was before Iraq?
Mr Drummond: We have seen the
same pattern in Afghanistan of NGOs being targeted; we have seen
it in a few other countries now. It is something that the UN is
very conscious of. It has just produced new guidelines for humanitarian
operations in Iraq which I think are very pragmatic. Again we
can show you them if that would be helpful[4].
1 The Iraqi Strategic Review Board: National Development
Strategy 2005-07, The Ministerial Committee on The National
Development Strategy, September 2004. Copy placed in the Library. Back
2
Iraq Multiple Indicator Rapid Assessment, Iraqi Central
Organisation for Statistics and Information Technology, FAFO and
UNDP. To be published late April/early May. See http://www.fafo.no/ Back
3
Ev 55 Back
4
Guidelines for Humanitarian Organisations on Interacting with
Military and Other Security Actors in Iraq, 20 October 2004.
Copy placed in the Library. Back
| 
