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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 772-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT committee
Tuesday 13 December 2005 MR NICK GRONO and MS ELIZABETH WINTER MR JOHN GORDON, MR RICHARD CODRINGTON and MR PETER HOLLAND Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 67
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 13 December 2005 Members present John Barrett John Battle Joan Ruddock Mr Marsha Singh
In the absence of the Chairman, John Battle was called to the Chair ________________ Witnesses: Mr Nick Grono, Vice President (Advocacy and Operations), International Crisis Group, and Ms Elizabeth Winter, British Agencies Afghanistan Group, gave evidence. Q1 John Battle: Can I thank our witnesses for coming and taking part in this session. As Elizabeth knows well, we have had periodic reports on the situation in Afghanistan and occasionally our Committee returns to try and do an update of where we are now as best we can. I think the last report that our Committee did was back in January 2003, but since that time both Joan Ruddock and I have visited Afghanistan as well, so we have got some experience on the Committee of visiting on the ground. We appreciate that as we move towards January and the donors' conference you will be preparing and putting work in for that. I am grateful that you can give us a snapshot today of where you think we are up to. What we would like to try and get a clearer view of this morning in our session is what the situation is like in Afghanistan now, whether there have been improvements in security and whether things are progressing well even though it has dropped out of the public eye. I want to ask you about the context of the security challenges facing Afghanistan. When I was there in 2004 any London-based staff were based in the compound and could not travel out. Kandahar was out of bounds entirely, although I went to Herat and I visited communities there and I had quite a sense that things were easing up at that time. I came away knowing that the challenges were there, but I was rather more positive about the future. Since that time the press reports of 2005 have suggested things have been a bit more difficult. I just wonder what your assessment would be now at the end of 2005. What are the challenges? Is the drugs trade as strong as it was before when the Taliban were there? Is your view that the general security situation is deteriorating or is there a grip gradually being achieved? Ms Winter: I think you are right, that you would have been more optimistic when you last went than one could be now. Most of us feel that security has deteriorated and continues to do so. The problem has changed. The problem now is unpredictability. You are never quite sure what is going to happen where. I was there last month and there were several occasions where it was 'white cell', which means that everybody was locked down in their UN compounds. NGO staff are having to be very careful when they go out to vary their routines and to take all kinds of avoiding actions. Nobody is quite sure what is going to happen. Suicide bombers are around now with improvised explosive devices, sometimes vehicle borne, et cetera. In terms of the figures, they have increased as well. In 2003, for example, 13 staff of aid agencies were killed and 36 injured. In 2004 it had gone up to 34 and that includes a variety of staff involved in aid agencies, three of those were internationals and 44 people were injured. In 2005, so far - we are trying to get final figures on this - it seems to be keeping pace at least with 2004 and possibly increasing. Certainly the perception people have is that it has got worse, it is not so safe and programmes are being reduced. We are currently looking at the effect of security on our programmes and the ability to get out into the areas where people need us most and we will be sending you the results of that when it is completed. Q2 John Battle: Do you want to add to that? Mr Grono: I would agree that security has deteriorated, particularly in the south. As always in Afghanistan it depends where you are. I was there in July and travelled to Mazar and Herat and found them to be fairly stable, we were able to walk around fairly freely, there were not the same restrictions, but Kabul has got worse this year. We have seen suicide attacks in the last couple of months, lots of restrictions particularly on UN staff throughout the year and then growing insurgency in the south, the interrelationship with the cross-border insurgency and what appears to be a growing drug problem tying into the insurgency in the south. Helmand produced twice as much poppy this year than their next biggest province. There have been reports in the last week of night letters being distributed in Helmand encouraging farmers to grow poppy. To the extent that that is true, it is a very stark demonstration of the linkages that we feel are growing between the drug industry and the insurgency. The statistics this year have been of concern. I think it is over 1,000 people have been killed in the insurgency in the south, there have been heavy casualties for US forces and it is of particular concern as NATO now starts its move down south. The overall assessment would be it has gotten worse. Q3 John Battle: Did the elections go any way towards sorting out the warlords and their power? Mr Grono: It depends on your view. Our analyst based in Kabul has said that she has felt that there is a degree of pessimism in Kabul following the elections that she has not seen before. The Human Rights Commission there has said that some 80 per cent of the figures elected have some connection with armed groups. Certainly in Kabul the figure that has been tossed around is 60 per cent of the parliamentarians are associated with warlords or former Mujahideen. It is a positive development to have an election that went relatively well, with a fair turnout and apparently a large participation of women. We have the assembly meeting next week and that is an important occasion as we begin this transition. Elections are never the end of a transition process; they are very much the beginning of the transition process. Our hope is that this is the beginning of a transition into a system of more representative participation among the people, but it certainly remains to be seen whether that will be the case. Q4 Mr Singh: Nick, you mentioned the growing insurgency in the south. I understand that the UK will take charge of ISAF in May 2006. What is the implication for British troops there, and what challenges will the UK face in taking over that role in May next year? Mr Grono: They will be facing very big challenges. The situation in Helmand is very different from that in Mazar and the provinces in which the British PRT is operating there. Our assessment is that the British have done an excellent job in the north. Their model of running a PRT is the one that we endorse with the focus on security, stabilisation, to the most part keeping out of the development sphere and the humanitarian sphere. We particularly support the fact that they have operated mobile observation teams and have spread the security blanket throughout the area in which they are operating because this is a very important way of showing support for the Afghan government institutions. All of that is going to be much more difficult in Helmand. It is very unclear exactly what kind of force structure is being proposed. I saw a news report this morning about discussions going on within the British government about the size of the forces that are going to be committed down south. There had been reports that you are talking of about 2,000 troops in Helmand plus perhaps another 2,000 in Kandahar and Kabul and now there is speculation that there may be no more than 1,000 going to Helmand, which has big implications on what can be done down there and how effective you can be. Helmand is the biggest drug producing province. PRTs have traditionally stayed relatively clear of the whole counter-narcotics issue. If you identify counter-narcotics as one of the main threats to the stability of Afghanistan as you go forward, that is something that the security forces will have to start coming to grips with. The challenges will be to have a presence that supports the institutions there and to be as effective as you can and, in the view of the International Crisis Group, to have more active support for counter-narcotics programmes. Q5 Mr Singh: Given that around 90 US soldiers were killed last year, are we expecting the same number of British casualties? Mr Grono: There must be an expectation that there is a risk of British casualties. Over the last two weeks we have seen reports of suicide attacks against the Canadians in Kandahar, against the Americans and against the Afghan National Police. Clearly those that wish to destabilise Afghanistan and those behind the insurgency will be targeting international groups, as they have been doing, as NATO expands its presence in the south. There will certainly be that risk. Q6 Mr Singh: Is there any sign of any members of the international community pulling out of Afghanistan because some of the areas are too dangerous? Mr Grono: We are seeing a lot of discussion with the Dutch, for instance, who had been supportive in sending up to 1,000 troops down south, I think they were going to Oruzgan, but their parliament has not yet approved that deployment and certainly they have been concerned about the deployment. The issue comes back to the nature of the international community's involvement with Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a dangerous place. If your intention is to stabilise Afghanistan and particularly the south then there is this risk, but your overall objective over time is to strengthen the functioning of the government so that it can deal with the security threats and support stability. Q7 Mr Singh: You mentioned the role of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. I understand there are 19 operating now, but they are all operating to different guidelines and criteria. What do you think is the long-term impact of PRTs in terms of development in relation to Afghanistan and its reconstruction? Are they working? Are they having an impact? They are new things in terms of the civilian/military overlap between them. How is that working? Mr Grono: I will give you the Crisis Group view and I am sure Elizabeth has a view on behalf of the NGOs. At the moment I understand there are 22 PRTs, nine of which are operating under NATO and the rest under the US-led coalition, and they are quite different in the way they operate. The US coalition, who came up with the model, partly building on their Vietnam experience, the hearts and minds attempt, viewed them very much as sending a small team into Afghanistan bringing security but also demonstrating concrete development progress, which meant that they were very heavily involved in quick impact projects, building schools, digging wells, et cetera. The Germans, the Spanish, the Italians and the British all lead their own PRTs. Q8 Mr Singh: Is that a European approach they have got? Mr Grono: No, it is not. We put out a paper a couple of weeks ago arguing that there should perhaps be a European approach building on their very heavy role in these PRTs. The Germans have very restrictive rules of engagement. Potentially they do not go out of their base overnight. The British take a much more robust view of extending security throughout the province. In terms of the development focus, we support the British view, which is that ideally you establish security which allows room for others or a better place to do development. The problem you see with some of the US PRTs, for instance, is that you build a school but there are no teachers there because you have not integrated your development efforts with the rest of the development work that is going on, or you build a well, but who is there to maintain a well if it is not part of a cohesive approach? So the approach adopted in Mazar, which is the security blanket but enabling NGOs and/or the Afghan government to carry out development, is a better approach. Ms Winter: Our view certainly is that PRTs should be PSTs, provincial stabilisation rather than reconstruction, because all evidence now points to the fact that their activities, quick impact projects, et cetera, are not really sustainable. They do not take into account the community's views and so on. If you look at the multi-donor evaluation, which I will be providing references for, they came to the same conclusion, ie that the PRTs should be concentrating on stabilisation. I think that the British PRT did that. They have just had a PRT best practice conference at which they were trying to work out ways forward and whether they could come to agreed terms of reference for PRTs in future. It looks at the moment as if national caveats may remain and a lack of clarity of mandate and so on, all of which would be unfortunate. Q9 Mr Singh: You are saying that if you move into an area and you build a school the local people are not necessarily going to jump up in joy because of the school, are you not? Ms Winter: No, I do not think they would. I think they would probably see it for what it was. One can understand that if you are looking after a group of soldiers with not much to do in a particular place you want to find something that seems to be worthwhile. I think if you ask most Afghans and certainly people involved in trying to reconstruct Afghanistan, they would say give us security and then we will be able to do the rest. Q10 Mr Singh: What impact is the move south now of British troops and ISAF going to have on the British view of PRTs? Are they going to be able to maintain that civilian/military balance or is it going to be completely security led? Ms Winter: Again they are looking at this at the moment from all sorts of angles. They are looking at it from what is NATO's policy, if it has a joined-up one, what resources will they be allowed to do their work and what is it going to mean if the Americans withdraw their firepower and their financial resources, et cetera. All of these things remain fairly unclear, although the Americans are talking about withdrawing 4,000 troops next year and maybe more later on. They talk about it in terms of troop adjustment and possibly leaving their financial resources intact. These things remain unclear. I suppose what we would say is that if anybody can do it the British can, but they have a formidable task ahead of them and there is currently no overarching strategy for Afghanistan, either a military one or in terms of the reconstruction of the country. Q11 Mr Singh: I am very concerned about that. If the US withdraws 4,000 troops what are the implications for the UK in terms of troop resources? Ms Winter: And what are the implications for them as to whether they have to deal with a counter-insurgency? How will they engage in that? What is their role going to be in counter-narcotics? Neither the US nor the European soldiers have wanted a role in that. Q12 Mr Singh: It sounds like a very gloomy scenario, does it not? Ms Winter: I think if the result of the current discussions is a much more robust view, that they want to bring stability and that they are going to work out how to do it, then it is a less gloomy scenario. If it remains a scenario of different people doing different things in different ways without much coordination and without that overall vision then we are in trouble. Q13 Joan Ruddock: It sounds as though you are suggesting there needs to be a total review of policy towards Afghanistan. Ms Winter: I think that would be very welcome from all sorts of angles. I think the report that was done by this Committee before was very timely and helpful. I would say it is now time to look at things in more detail again. We would be very happy to assist with that. Q14 Joan Ruddock: John Battle asked earlier on in passing about parliamentary elections and I would just like to pursue that a bit further. Nick, you said that there were rumours about there being 60 per cent or so of people connected to armed gangs or standing armies effectively. What I have heard is that it is actually a combination of those who are essentially warlords, former Mujahideen and the very conservative Right, the Islamicists basically. Within that group, clearly in Afghan terms, many of those people will now be considered to be legit in terms of having given up the use of arms to achieve their ends. Can one separate out those groups? Is it quite as gloomy as 60 per cent of parliamentarians? We may not approve of their backgrounds or think they are helpful to democracy, but they may not be people who still hold standing armies. Mr Grono: The challenge whenever you try and form a judgment on this is that you are looking at a country that has been through 25 years of warfare and most of those who stayed were impacted in one way or another. One of the things that is happening now is the fight over who becomes speaker and the leading candidates are Qanooni, former President Rabbani and the Hazara party leader Mohammed Mohaqiq, all of whom have fairly strong ties with the past. You can break the parliament up in a number of ways. One way of looking at it is that there are essentially four overlapping groups, the Mujahideen, the second group being independents, technocrats and tribal leaders who are not associated with a particular party, the Leftist former Communists and then former members of the Taliban, and there is a lot of overlap between those groups. One of the challenges we have highlighted is how well does parliament operate. The electoral system was designed to favour individuals over parties and to that extent it has worked. Part of the reason why you have a fairly high representation of former Mujahideen is that they were better able to mobilise their supporters, particularly the Hazara vote in Kabul. Mohaqiq was first and I think Sunny Hazara was third on the list, and it was a very strong turnout, which is part of the reason why we were opposed to that particular system, because it does not encourage political party participation. If you are looking at issues such as women's involvement in elections, you have a high number of women in the sense that you have 68 women, I think it is 25 per cent, and that is because you have the set asides; it is about 13 women in one seat in their own right if you did not count that quota. One of the things we have argued for is support for the development of the women that are in parliament and we hope perhaps that you might get a women's caucus. Part of the attraction of women candidates in the election was that they would be able to say they did not have blood on their hands. A woman led the vote in Herat. One hopes that you will have an effective operating parliament but we are not sure. The issue of former warlords and former Mujahideen is something where we will see how it plays out. If it becomes a squabble over the spoils of office then you are going to see a great deal of disillusionment among the people of Afghanistan. If you see a reasonably coherent structure then maybe the people of Afghanistan will be more supportive, but there is a long way to go. Q15 Joan Ruddock: Presumably the international community could be quite helpful in terms of trying to increase the capacity amongst parliamentarians because that seems to me to be the critical thing, ie how they become an effective parliament without all these pressures anyway. They need the support and resources that are just not there at the moment. Mr Grono: There are a couple of programmes underway. When we were out there in November last year after the presidential election we were flagging up that nothing was being done in preparation for the election of parliamentarians. When I was out there in June/July very little had changed. There is very little support for staff and people have not participated in a parliamentary democracy. The last parliament in Afghanistan was in the late Sixties. The parliament building is being rebuilt and they are being housed in one of the old buildings until then. The parliament is quite powerful in a number of respects. It has within its power to call ministers before it and to question them and to have a vote of no confidence in them. It has to approve all passed legislation. It is quite critical to the effective functioning of the government of Afghanistan. It is very disappointing that more work has not gone in to preparing parliamentarians for that role. Q16 Joan Ruddock: In terms of the government's policy overall, one of the things many of us regard as one of the great failures has been the inability to provide for the rights of women, particularly with the judicial system being so ineffective in terms of protecting women against violence. What help do you think the international community should be giving to the Afghan government to try and improve the situation for women in Afghanistan? Mr Grono: This is an area I have not done a lot of work on. We put out a report recently on EU engagement with Afghanistan and we suggested that the EU might want to set aside five per cent of its development assistance specifically focused on women - at the moment two per cent is being set aside - with a view to developing more effective programmes, starting with things like supporting a women's caucus, supporting women in particular. A lot of these women will never have spoken in public. A lot of these women are being put in a situation that is very alien to them. More broadly, I just do not have the expertise to comment on what programmes the international community should be supporting. Ms Winter: I think it is part and parcel of assisting capacity overall, so it is not just the capacity of parliamentarians, although that is very significant. They take their seats on 19 December and then it is estimated it might be six months until the procedures are worked out and all the other things. I think there is a need for DFID, for example, to continue their work on governance, public administration reform and building state institutions, et cetera. I know that several of the ministries would welcome that. On the question of women, I think it is the same in a way for men, ie you have to build up access to justice, reduce impunity and so on and then look at gender mainstreaming. We have recommended in the past that DFID has some expertise in this field and they should look at that in terms of the overall review of what is happening in Afghanistan. There are various ways in which help can be given. It is unclear yet what funding will be available for Afghanistan next year. The other aspect of it is - and this is something we have brought up in previous evidence - the role that civil society will have in holding parliament and the government to account. There is a useful report that has just come out from the EU observer mission which went to look at the elections on democratization in which they also talk about the role of civil society. That is something that DFID has said in the past they wanted to support but it is a little unclear still how that will happen. They are supporting the input of civil society to the London conference. There is a plan for a consultation process which will go ahead from now until January and then there will be a meeting in Kabul before the London conference. So there are some moves afoot, but I think it would be very good to have a look at what happens after that. It is within the context of a more assertive Afghan civil society that they are beginning to understand a bit more about what their role might be and to wish to flex their very small muscles at the moment. They have had some encouraging meetings with President Karzai and others in the government about this kind of thing. I think there is also a feeling, in preparation for the NDS or the Interim National Development Strategy which is taking place now, that it is a more Afghan-led process than it might have been in the past and there is a real sense of wanting to have ownership and wanting to be part of the decision-making process on that. All of these fledgling things should be supported by donor governments. Q17 Joan Ruddock: In respect of 1325, the UN Security Council Resolution on women in post conflict, do you think that DFID has sufficient regard to that responsibility in terms of its Afghan programmes? Ms Winter: I do not know if I know the answer to that. My gut instinct is probably not, but I have not sat down and looked at what they have actually been doing. I think for many donors, whether they are supporting civil society or whether they are supporting issues to do with violence towards women, it is often a sentence in a report. I think what we advised last time was that there should be an evaluation of what they have done in terms of gender mainstreaming and civil society development, et cetera. I am not aware that they have done anything, but that does not mean that I know everything they have been up to. Q18 John Barrett: I want to move on to counter-narcotics operations and the various strategies that have been employed and other alternatives, like aerial spraying compensation and possibly the conflict between the donors and what is the best way forward. Is it better to take a slightly harder approach as sometimes the Americans have in saying there has been a lack of leadership by President Karzai and that also the UK approach is maybe just a bit too soft an approach? The Americans often base their experience on what has happened in Colombia and say that they do not want a repeat of Colombia in Afghanistan. I wonder if you could reflect on a few of these subjects and then we can probe some of them further. Ms Winter: I think our view would be that the UK approach is to be long term, to look at alternative livelihoods, or ways in which people can earn a living is perhaps a better phrase for it. Alternative livelihoods have become synonymous with counter-narcotics work and it is not the same thing. I think their approach is that it is going to take a long time and they have to go gradually and sensitively. Aerial eradication, as certainly the Afghan government has agreed, is not the way forward and eradication itself is not the way forward at the moment. I think people need to look at long-term strategies, to work together on what might work, to look at what has happened in other countries and just go forward gradually. Q19 John Barrett: Is there a problem on the ground because UK/US governments and others are not pulling in the same direction? Ms Winter: I think it has been a problem on the ground. There have been times when it has been advisable not to do eradication according to some people and it has gone ahead with very limited results in fact, except to annoy the local population, to upset the farmers who have lost their livelihoods or it has been used to settle old scores and so on. It has not done much to reduce production in the long term. Q20 John Barrett: Has compensation proved not to be such a great idea on the grounds that you can compensate people for one year's crops and then they will rush off the following year and start again knowing more compensation will follow? Ms Winter: That was tried in the beginning and it was realised it is not the way to go. You have to look at much more sustainable long-term efforts to providing alternatives, but the reality is there is not any very good alternative to opium in some areas. It grows very well on poor ground and so on. There have been various discussions about how it might be tackled ranging from the production of licit opium to allowing it to go ahead so that poor people have some way to continue living until alternative livelihoods appear on the scene, whether that is going back to the previous production of dried fruit and nuts, et cetera for which Afghanistan was famous or whether it is trying to foster local small scale industries. I think what needs to be done is much more understanding of local rural economies, what might work and just being a bit more patient than people otherwise might be. There are no quick fixes. There is not anything fast that can be done to resolve it. Q21 John Barrett: Do you have any information you can share with the Committee about the links between the revenues from the drugs on the ground to those who have been elected? Now that we have had elections out there clearly in an ideal world the bad guys would be on one side and the elected representatives would be on the other side, but it is not such a clear distinction. Do you have anything to share with the Committee on that? Ms Winter: Not on actual figures. Certainly I think it is well accepted that there are people within the government who are involved heavily in the trade and making substantial money from it. It is linked to corruption and all sorts of things. It is undesirable. It may well be possible for us to get you more detailed information on that if you would like it such as there is. Q22 John Barrett: More information is always appreciated. There was also a report on the findings of the Senlis Council that opium licensing for the production of opium-based medicines would be a viable alternative as the way forward. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that. Ms Winter: I think it is very valuable to look at this as a proposal. I think it is very good that they have done a feasibility study and suggested that perhaps it is a way forward. I think at the moment it would be true to say that there are varying views on whether it is going to be practical at the current time. I know the Afghan government has said maybe in the future but not now. There are other specialists who have said it is fraught with all sorts of difficulties. I certainly think it is worth examining as an option. Given that the West has criminalised the whole thing and maybe we should not have done that in the first place, yes it is worth looking at. Q23 John Battle: Could I ask a little bit more about understanding local rural economies because I do not know of anywhere else in the world, apart from Colombia, where this issue has been got right. In Colombia people are taught to grow palm oil, but then the value in the palm oil crop is half the value of the value of the coconut crop. Crop switching has not worked. I wonder whether there was not any attempt at a more integrated local economy approach like whole packages for agriculture, healthcare and education put together in a local community as part of a group of resources to displace the drugs trade. Has anybody ever worked at a more holistic and integrated approach to rural economies? Are any NGOs trying it anywhere in the world that you know of? Ms Winter: I do not know about NGOs in the rest of the world. I do know that people have talked about the possibility of this in Afghanistan. UNDP runs something called the National Area Based Development Programme which up until last year had not really looked at the narcotics issue in relation to that but I think they probably are doing so now. I think the Afghan government is interested to see whether in fact there could be a more holistic approach to tackling these things because it will only work in the long term if there is going to be a better rural economy coupled with civil society saying we do not want to continue producing, which most of them do. Certainly in the areas where it is new to them they would rather stop. I think those two things together could help. Q24 John Battle: Is the military being used to tear up the crops? Is the conflict being militarised in that way still? Ms Winter: I think the military have resisted being used in that way. I think they have destroyed labs if they have come across them and so on. They have not wanted to get involved in the counter-narcotics issue and that is one of the things I understand they are debating at the moment, ie what their role is going to be in Helmand. Q25 John Battle: So it has not been turned into a Colombia situation where it has been massively militarised with crop spraying? Ms Winter: No. The Afghan government has resisted that strongly and said it would be too damaging for the local economy and for farmers and it does not want the resentment it would raise against whoever was doing it and so on, so no, not at the moment. Q26 Mr Singh: Elizabeth, you mentioned NGOs in Afghanistan just a moment ago. I am astonished to learn that they grew from 50 in 2001 to over 2,000 registered with the Afghan government by 2004. I am alarmed by the allegation that 50 per cent of the budgets of some of these NGOs is spent on overheads. Are all these NGOs genuine? What is the truth behind those allegations that they are spending half their money on their overheads? Who is daft enough to be funding them to spend that kind of money? Ms Winter: The allegations by and large are untrue, that is one thing to say. The other is that organisations that were registered as NGOs did so at the encouragement originally of the UN, this is in the past and very often they were organisations that were actually profit making. Because they were providing small scale reconstruction efforts they got benefits if they registered as NGOs. What is being argued for now is that there should be clarity about what is a real NGO and what their overheads should be, so a Code of Conduct has been drawn up by ACBAR in association with the ANCB, the other coordinating bodies for Afghan NGOs, and gradually what you could call real NGOs are signing up to this, operating on principle, et cetera. There have been many unfounded allegations about organisations. At the same time there is the registration of private sector organisations separately, so you can distinguish what is profit making - and Afghanistan needs private sector profit making organisations - and this is a gradual process that will take a bit of time. NGOs themselves need to be more proactive about saying what they have achieved and what their overheads are. Very often they get the blame either because people want to use them as scapegoats for things that have not been achieved or they get the blame because they are assumed to be the same as the UN, with expensive white vehicles, high rents, et cetera, et cetera. When we looked at the amount of money that was going into NGOs it was by far the smallest proportion of any, and again I can send you detailed figures on that. You do not need to be alarmed about the real NGOs, they have stuck it out through thick and thin and achieved a great deal in Afghanistan and we are going through a transitional time now just sorting out who is who and what is what. I think the last registration figures that I remember seeing showed it was something under 100 had been registered. Q27 Mr Singh: I would welcome the details you offered to send. When I hear the term NGO I do have some respect for it. You are now saying to me that there is no definition of what an NGO is. Is that true across the world where DFID is operating and other agencies are operating, that there are organisations there called NGOs which might not be NGOs? Ms Winter: In Afghanistan that is the case because there were financial benefits. This is going way back to the days when they operated out of Peshawar and the UN set up the system of registering Afghan NGOs. There is a definition largely held throughout the world of what an NGO is but it is not understood in Afghanistan in the same way and that is what we are trying to clarify at the moment. Q28 Mr Singh: Is the regulatory framework which was drawn up in 2005 having the impact that it should have on trying to sort all this out? Ms Winter: We have broadly welcomed it. It is still unclear whether or not organisations that should not be called NGOs have registered under it and there is a view that maybe some of them are still profit making organisations instead. It is going to take a bit of time to sort out. The other development is that there are civil society organisations coming along as well, which are also non-profit making and trying to look at peace building and the development of civil society. I think in the next year these things will become a lot clearer. Certainly the Code of Conduct which was launched in Kabul was very much welcomed by the Afghan government and by the Afghan media as an example of something really good that the NGOs had done; it was now much clearer what they were. I think what we now have to do is to have a better communications campaign of who is doing what, where and why. It has been used, unfortunately, as I said before, to make NGOs a scapegoat sometimes. We have had one particular person, the Minister of Planning, who has gone out of his way to say how NGOs are not doing what they should and spending a lot of money and so on and so forth and he has succeeded in tarnishing the reputation of NGOs so that it is now almost a dirty phrase, but we are trying our best to address that. Q29 Mr Singh: You are defending their reputation very well so far. There is also another accusation on NGOs which is that in terms of the salaries they offer to Afghan experienced professional staff, they are not only competing against each other to get the staff but they are competing completely with the Afghan government, the local government structures, which has had a negative impact on governments in Afghanistan. Ms Winter: That is a perception which again is not correct. There are several ministries which have offered large salaries to NGO staff and they have gone and NGOs have been depleted. It is particularly true of engineers, for example, but it is true of other people who have been recruited into the UN and have found that they are not doing the jobs for which they are qualified, so that skill is lost in Afghanistan. For example, if they have good English they might be there as translators or they might be drivers and earning considerable amounts of money, more than they would have earned in the NGO. It is really not the case that NGOs have kept people who should be working in the government. In fact, the NGO semi-training resulted in several senior cabinet members of the last cabinet, some of whom remain in this one, being lost to the NGOs but the Afghan government gained. Q30 Mr Singh: I think you are doing a wonderful job defending them. There is still a question mark hanging over my head about those NGOs because they cannot be purer than pure and the Afghan government and the people in it cannot all be wrong. I would like to be convinced further at some stage. Ms Winter: That is not to say there have not been NGOs calling themselves that who have been profit making and doing it in a way that is detrimental to themselves and those whom they are supposed to be helping. That is what we are trying to clarify now. I think it is a transition phase. I do not think, for example, the British government has funded any organisation that was not a real NGO and that was not doing good work. Yes, I will talk to you about it at greater length and provide you with more information. John Battle: I think it is worth recalling that the day I visited Kabul an NGO worker was murdered and it was a local Afghan who had worked for an NGO. The risks that NGOs are taking in Afghanistan are much higher than elsewhere in the rest of the world where NGOs, including the Red Cross and other people, are not touched by violence, but they run a very high risk as well. Q31 John Barrett: I wanted to ask about the scale of the impact such a large foreign assistance spend in Afghanistan will have on the local economy. Clearly there are a lot of NGOs doing a lot of good work. I heard years ago that the per square foot rental space price for an office in Kabul was greater than it was in Manhattan. I am not sure if that is the case. There must be a human impact. The figure I had was that the revenue raising power of the Afghan government was one-tenth of the foreign assistance budget over there. Is there any work being done on the long-term impact when the external economy is out of all kilter to the local economy, possibly with the exception of the narcotics angle of that? Is somebody looking at the big picture of the impact on the economy of the NGOs, the impact on jobs, products and so on? Ms Winter: The NGO impact is minuscule. If you look at the numbers of staff of the UN and the different amounts of money going through those two channels, the NGO channel is minute in comparison, so I would not accept the premise. As to whether there is somebody looking at it, I think the World Bank have examined it, but my guess is that the majority of people accept that if you have a country like Afghanistan and there are some sorts of political settlements then people will come in and rents will go up, and they went sky high, they were nearly up to Manhattan rates. That meant that you had people who could not afford to return to Kabul and live in any kind of comfort. Afghans who were trying to return have had great difficulty. Those already living there have found it extremely difficult. That is not down to NGOs. We have taken people to car parks and said "These are our vehicles," little white scrubby pickups with dents in them, and "This is where we live". Yes, we have a certain standard but it is not mansions. You need a vehicle that is reliable to take you to the field. You need somewhere relatively comfortable to live. If you look at the comparison perhaps with people living in mansions bought with drug money, there is no comparison. If you look in Kabul now, there is even a plaza with an escalator, et cetera. That economy entirely dwarfs any kind of aid budget even if you take it all together. So I think probably what we have to do is to say okay, what is going to have some impact, what have we already done that has worked, what can we repeat and what do we need money for? I think those questions are probably going to get us further forward. Q32 Joan Ruddock: One of the things that struck me when I have been there is the fact that the international community is funding a very significant part of the government budget and the government is paying all of its workers what, by an international definition, are poverty wages. I do not know how you see that situation being resolved because there is reluctance amongst donors to increase substantially the budget going to the government and there have been questions about too many government workers and things like that. It is quite fundamental that if the government does not pay its workers a decent wage then corruption is a possibility and real poverty. That is one question that you might give a thought to. I wanted to take that then into whether you think the UK government has got sufficient policy coordination across government because you see one part of the government being focused on counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, but DFID has a very clear mandate for wherever it works, which is poverty reduction. Is there a conflict between those two? Do you see tensions there? I think perhaps you are going to end up by saying you do think there has to be a review of the whole lot which perhaps is the answer to the question, but I leave that to you. Mr Grono: On the point about the government paying workers, it is a problem if the salary is $40 or $50 a week and these are people that you are asking to deal with, among other things, the narcotics issue. There is also a capacity issue. The domestic government revenue I think was about $330 million this year, less than half of what its recurrent expenses are, so an increase in wages has not flowed through to these issues. As always when we talk about Afghanistan we come back to saying everything is linked. It is an issue of building government capacity, it is an issue of supporting the government in the long term to enable that capacity to be built, to develop the expertise, to enable strengthening of the institutions in the provinces and so on and all of those issues. Because everything is interlinked obviously from a policy point of view your approach has to be coordinated because you cannot just focus on poverty reduction or insurgency because, of course, they are intimately linked. When you are dealing with counter-narcotics you are dealing with insurgency and you are dealing with reconstruction development because your long-term solution is going to be to build the economic future of farmers and those who are relying on the income, but you also need to develop the capabilities of the Afghan National Police and the counter-narcotics police. I am not familiar with the extent to which the coordination processes within the British government are interlinked. We support issues such as conflict prevention which is a clear attempt to interlink these and that is the approach you have to take. One of our criticisms of the international engagement with Afghanistan over the last few years is this structure which has said that the Germans are responsible for police training and the Italians are responsible for judicial reform and so on without effective coordination mechanisms between them, and I hope that is something that we will revisit next month with the Afghan Compact to ensure a greater degree of coordination. So to the extent that there is not that coordination within the British government, it is absolutely essential when you are going into Helmand - and DFID is looking at alternate livelihoods - that there is a link with whatever activities the British forces are taking on, eradication or support of the Afghan government on interdiction and so on because if there is interdiction, if there is eradication going on and there is no linked up alternate livelihood and development process then you are exacerbating the problem, you are not solving it. So I would certainly agree that it is highly desirable. Ms Winter: I think there are attempts to have cross-Whitehall coordination and far be it for me to say whether they are successful or not. On the question of the poverty strategy that DFID has, they should continue with that in Afghanistan. Obviously being one of the poorest countries in the world it would be very important for DFID to continue with that strategy. There may well be difficulties in pursuing that in a highly politically charged situation where you have three ministries, all of which have their own mandates and do need to try and work together. It is not going to be easy to bring foreign affairs, defence and DFID under one hat when they have different mandates and different views about how to pursue them, but obviously if they can then that would be an improvement. The question of Civil Service reform comes up when you talked about low wages. I think it is very important to reduce the numbers on the payroll so that those who remain on it can be effective and properly paid, but I think that movement on that is still extremely slow and I think DFID's programme to assist with public administration reform and the PPR and so on should be supported. The UK has signed an enduring relationship with Afghanistan, and that is for ten years, which is the very minimum Afghanistan now needs to be assisted, and I think we should provide enduring programmes for that, things that are sustainable and that will be there for years to come, and that will make a difference. Q33 John Battle: Can I thank you both. Our intention as a committee, the International Development Committee, is to keep Afghanistan in the forefront of the minds of not only DFID but the whole of government and, indeed, the wider public, and let us not pretend it has gone away and the whole caravan has moved on somewhere else, but to keep returning, checking. It was before the conflict the poorest country in the world and poverty is the key focus. Can I thank you for your help this morning in helping us keep Afghanistan on the agenda. I ought at the beginning to have offered apologies for our Chairman, Malcolm Bruce, who is away, with other members of the Committee, at the meetings in Hong Kong of the World Trade Organisation. They clashed with our session - so while they are there we are here - but we do appreciate you coming this morning, and thank you very much for the information you have shared with us. Ms Winter: Thank you for inviting us. We are very pleased to come again. Witnesses: Mr John Gordon, Deputy Head, DFID Afghanistan and Senior Programme Manager for Rural Livelihoods, Mr Richard Codrington, Head of Afghan Group, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Mr Peter Holland, Head of the Afghan Drugs Inter-Departmental Unit, gave evidence. Q34 John Battle: Thank you very much for coming along this morning. May I start by giving apologies for our Chairman, Malcolm Bruce, who is in Hong Kong along with other members of the Committee. We are a little bit depleted, but while they are there our intention as a committee is to keep a focus on Afghanistan. We have done previous reports. Our last report was in January 2003, and two of us, Joan Ruddock and myself, have visited Afghanistan since then, so we hope to keep our attention on Afghanistan and get regular updates, if we can, see where we are now, get a snapshot and take things forward in our recommendations as well. Thank you for coming this morning. I wonder if I could start the conversation by asking you in particular, do you see any challenges coming, particularly from the role of our involvement as DFID, because DFID has certain priorities focusing particularly on poverty, but at the same time in the context of the real issue of security that I experienced when I visited Afghanistan, which would perhaps be a Foreign Office and Commonwealth Office/MoD priority. Are we still able to keep a focus on poverty reduction within the whole issue of stability (stability, security and, indeed, reconstruction) or are reconstruction and development really falling behind the efforts to just try and maintain security? Mr Gordon: I think the two things are inextricably linked together. I think the whole debate about how development works in secure environments has shifted in the last five years. Our objective will continue to be poverty reduction, but we have to recognise the constraints that apply in situations like Afghanistan require us to look very closely at security as a constraint to achieving those objectives, which means we have to, I guess, do two things: reflect that in our own planning about how we work and what we do and then relate very closely to others. In Whitehall, some of my colleagues in the Foreign Office and the MoD, we have to be in constant dialogue with them about how we can work together to overcome the constraints that are in place to achieving DFID's objectives as well as other objectives within Whitehall. Q35 John Battle: DFID's objectives, which generally in development refer to the Millennium Development Goals, are they even on the agenda in Afghanistan? Even before the present circumstances and before the Taliban, it was the poorest country in the world; so presumably Millennium Development Goals should apply there more than anywhere else. Are we even able to think in that kind of framework? Mr Gordon: I think there is a two-phased process. One is particularly the conditions for sustainable development, which we are in now, but the long-term objective will continue to be how we help Afghanistan to achieve the MDGs. In situations like Afghanistan there is a two-step process. One is that you create the security which you need to enable development to happen and then you start working towards the MDGs more specifically; and our strategy, as defined in this document which we produced about six months ago, states that our objective now is to create those conditions, but our objective five years hence is to try and work very closely with the Afghan government to achieve those MDGs. You will have seen that the government produced its own MDG report a few months ago for the millennium summit, and that recognised that the MDGs in Afghanistan's case were further away than most other countries, so they have set a series of targets of their own for 2020 rather than 2015. Q36 John Battle: So you have put them all back five years? Mr Gordon: They have put them back and they have nuanced them and added a couple to reflect security as an example of something which other countries might not have in their particular MDG construct. Yes, we are working towards the MDGs, but we recognise that there are a couple of things we need to put in place before we can get there, and that requires issues like security to be addressed, because if in very insecure provinces development agencies cannot operate, it is very difficult to work towards those MDGs. Q37 Mr Singh: I was not on the Committee when they made their last report on Afghanistan in 2003, but in their wisdom, I assume, because I was not here, they did debate with DFID about the issue of how DFID aid should be distributed, and the Committee recommended that more of it go through the Afghan administration, temporary or transitional though that was at the time, and DFID made a robust defence against that position. Yet three years on, I think, is it, 70 per cent of the DFID budget is now being distributed through the Afghan government. What has happened to change the DFID position there? Are you accepting the wisdom that was given by the Committee then or have you had a genuine change of heart from some other direction? Mr Gordon: We would be fools not to accept advice from the Committee, and that is probably very much part of it, but what we have seen is recognition that without the Afghan government having available the resources to sustain itself, then development cannot happen. We have made the choice that investing in government systems and procedures and processes is a prerequisite for effective development to happen; so we have channelled much of our resources, as you say, through the government system, 70 per cent at the last count, but that partly reflects the fact that other donors are not particularly keen to do that, and, as one of the handful of donors who are, we are effectively sustaining the government and, without that, anything that anybody does would have less impact. I cannot speak for the people who appeared in 2002, but our position as of now reflects the position in Afghanistan as of now, which is that we believe the government needs more direct support than might have been the case then. Q38 Mr Singh: Is that because it is now an elected government? Mr Gordon: There are a number of reasons. There is greater legitimacy, for sure, in the Afghan government which we can support, there is a much stronger sense of ownership from the government. President Karzai continually offers what may be seen to be directives but are often quite helpful in how he thinks we should be doing our business, and if we genuinely believe in sovereignty and ownership and authority, then we should be responsive to that and, therefore, I guess, that is one of the main choices we have made in the last couple of years, that we should be doing more of that and less of the bilateral activity that may have been the case in 2002. It was a very different position then. As your report talked about the move from a humanitarian to a development programme, I think we have now almost lost the humanitarian tag, we are in a more stable development process, and with the government producing its own national development strategy over the next 18 months that gives us something which we can buy into and work with other donors to implement effectively. Q39 Mr Singh: DFID is also spending a considerable amount of money, £240 million, I believe, and giving that to the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund. This is a considerable amount of money to give to a multi-donor body without earmarking those funds for any specific purpose. Is there a precedent for that? If there is not, why are we doing this? Is it a good thing to do? If it is a good thing to do, have DFID any plans for doing it elsewhere? Mr Gordon: I think there are precedents in other countries. I cannot really speak for them honestly, but I know of examples in Eastern Africa, for example, where DFID does direct budget support, which is one step further than we are doing here. What we have here is a mechanism managed by the World Bank to provide fiduciary risk protection in Tanzania and Uganda and DFID is paying money direct into the budget unearmarked; so there are precedents for this, but we believe that without doing that the basic functions of the state will not be able to take place and by doing so we are actually empowering the government to become responsible and accountable for its own actions and it will, we pre-suppose, shorten the time through which development assistance is required in Afghanistan, whether that be 40 or 50 years. It will be less if we allow the government to build its own capacity by supporting its own processes and mechanisms. Q40 Mr Singh: I accept that, but what is the accountability there for the money that we are giving? Mr Gordon: The accountability is very clear. There is a managing agent who is responsible for protecting donor resources that go into the ARTF. They have just had an audit from the World Bank which was basically positive, recognising that there were at the margins some concerns about the eligibility of some of the expenditures, but we are comfortable that we have in place sufficient mechanisms to protect the resources. What we do not have yet which we are looking for now is how we identify the development impact of those investments, so we have a policy dialogue on-going with government and other donors to try and identify how we can put in place some rigorous benchmarks that will require government to make sufficient progress on certain things to enable us to continue to support them. What have been lacking up to now are those benchmarks and that monetary mechanism to enable the ARTF to be truly development effective, which we assume it has in the past but which we cannot verify. Q41 Mr Singh: That will help in terms of value as well? Mr Gordon: No, we want to have the biggest impact for the resources that we have, and we need to demonstrate to our ministers and to Parliament and to this Committee that we are using the resources in the best possible way to achieve development outcomes, and we are confident we are moving in the right direction in achieving that. Q42 Joan Ruddock: Obviously there is a continuing need to raise money. I wonder what you think are the prospects for a successful donor conference in January? Mr Gordon: Richard and I have been working very closely on this, and we are working very, very hard, both within this government and with the other governments, to try and make it as successful as possible. What we have not identified this conference as is one which will simply raise resources which Berlin did. What we are trying to do is translate pledges previously made into commitments and commitments into disbursements so we can secure the money that has already been pledged but has not yet been made available. Q43 Joan Ruddock: Can you remind us what the shortfall is? Mr Gordon: We do not really know what the shortfall is over which period of time. The current budget has a shortfall which the government have not yet divulged because they are still going through their budget planning process. Securing Afghanistan's future, which was presented to Berlin and identified - I think, $27 billion over X number of years - we are not sure what the need is yet, but what we are trying to do is (a) generate the resources and (b), perhaps more importantly, to use those resources more effectively in the future, and that means lobbying other donors to support the same mechanisms that we are supporting, because to try to bring together the donor effort is as much an objective as anything else, and to give government the authority to disburse the resources and commit the resources and plan how the resources will be used is part of the effectiveness objective of the conference - so it is about resources but it is also about using those resources more effectively - and we are in on-going dialogue with the minister of finance about how we present this. They will present their interim Afghan National Development Strategy document at that conference. We have not yet seen this paper. It is due out perhaps this week or next week, once the President has given it his authority to be released. That should have costings in it, so we should have a clearer idea then of what the needs are, but that should present to that London conference a very clear idea of what donors need to do to support government implementation of the first comprehensive development strategy we have had in Afghanistan. What do you think about the conference? Mr Codrington: The conference is going to take several aims really, one of which is to launch a post-Bonn agreement, which has been called "the Afghanistan compact", and that will be essentially a political statement of intent to continue supporting Afghanistan through the next five-year period and it will set a number of benchmarks which the Afghan government is establishing for progress in key areas over the next five years. It will then look at, as John has mentioned, the Interim Afghan National Development Strategy and talk through implementation of the different phases of that strategy. On donor pledging and new financial commitments, we are cautious about that because the Berlin conference reached some eight and a half billion, roughly, in new pledging, and we are slightly cautious that 18 months or so down the road the donor community is ready and able to come up with similar kinds of totals again. We are also cautious because the documents against which most donors will want to make their pledges are not yet available; so we are working towards maximum effect but without trying to make this too obviously a donor conference and a pledging conference, because we think that would possibly end up with the wrong kind of messaging. Q44 Joan Ruddock: So really the development strategy perhaps is a most important pivotal point for this conference to get the international community to work around it. You have not seen it, but I presume you may have had some contact with those who are drafting it. Is that not the case? Mr Gordon: We have been involved in this process for many months now, but this is very much an Afghan owned process, and we have been party to those parts that they have wanted to share. So there have been lots of discussions around the pillars of the I-ANDS and what the contents of those pillars should be and there have been working groups for each of them, and we have participated in those that are relevant to us. We have a broad idea of the subset of issues, but we have no sense yet, having not seen it, what the overall framework should be. We have expectations, and the fact that this has been very much led by the Afghan government has meant that perhaps the interests of certain donors would not be reflected adequately in there, which is why a number of our colleague organisations are reticent about committing themselves without having seen what the document says. Q45 Joan Ruddock: Are you expecting all the obvious players to be at the donor conference? Mr Gordon: Our expectation is that all organisations who work in development in Afghanistan will be represented, plus a whole raft of bilateral governments who are interested in Afghanistan's future, yes. Mr Codrington: Calling it an international conference in Afghanistan! Q46 Joan Ruddock: When you have had some sight of the development strategy, have you either seen within it or sought to influence it to reflect the needs of Afghan women particularly? Mr Gordon: There is a pillar in the I-ANDS which reflects what are called cross-cutting issues, of which gender is one. We have not participated directly in that working group, but we have monthly coordination meetings, which address gender specifically, in which DFID participates, and through that mechanism we seek to influence what the donor representatives at that part of the I-ANDS discussions will say, and clearly, as you know, gender is a critical issue for Afghanistan in the future and it needs to be reflected fully in the I-ANDS. I think we are fairly confident that the Afghan government recognise that, and we are working, through that monthly meeting mechanism, to try and influence the way in which the Afghan national development strategy reflects the interests of women. Q47 Joan Ruddock: Can you point to anything that you know of already that has changed by those monthly meetings that you have had? Mr Gordon: I guess what we have is a number of benchmarks about representation of women in politics, for example, an aspiration to put in place mechanisms to enable that to happen more so in the future. There are some very specific issues around chronically poor women and about how they might be supported directly in the developed planning process and implementation thereof. There are also issues around representations in the electoral process, about how you specifically educate women to participate fully in those processes in the future. So there are a number of things on-going, and there are a number of national programmes that the Afghan government supports or promotes or manages, one of which is the micro-finance investment support facility, which gives small loans to people to start businesses. I think 70 per cent of the recipients of that programme are women, and the group is pushing for that to be sustained, if not increased. Whether these things would happen anyway without the influence of the donor group, I do not know, but we would like to think that we are actually having an influence on the way in which the I-ANDS will reflect the interests of women. Q48 Joan Ruddock: Where the UK government is involved in a big way, if you take PRTs or if we take counter-narcotics, what attention has been given? What proportion of the poppy farmers are women? What proportion of poppy farmers are addicted? What attention has been given to the fact that women farmers give their babies a small amount of poppy to keep them quiet while they are away all day? It is the sort of mainstream, it is not just about adding on, it is not just about politics, is it, it is every aspect of the work that is being done? Mr Gordon: I think all of our programmes, when we design them we are very conscious of the need to reflect gender in them. As to the specific question about the number of women poppy farmers, I am not sure we have those figures. Mr Holland: No, I suspect it is about 11 per cent of the population are involved in the poppy trade, and it will be families as a whole, so it will be women as well as men involved. In terms of drug use, the UNODC has just published a drug use survey on Afghanistan and they have some figures which show, I think it is about 3.8 per cent of the whole population use drugs, but the majority of that is cannabis,. About eight per cent of the population are using either opium or heroine, but again, the majority of that is men. Only two per cent of the adult female population, as opposed to 12 per cent of the male population, are using drugs, but, you are absolutely right, there is a particularly concerning number of children - something like 60,000 children, I think, are estimated to be on it - and our counter-narcotics approach has supported the government in some areas of drug reduction. We have funded some drug reduction clinics and provided expertise, but I think this is an area where the international community could do a bit more. I think the scale of the problem is significantly greater than we had anticipated, and the government as well. Q49 Joan Ruddock: I think that is right, and I think often the problems that women encounter tend to be less visible to the international community because they tend not to be dealing so directly with women; so I wonder in what way DFID is monitoring and reporting on DFID's spending with respect to gender equality and women's rights? Mr Gordon: We have a PSA target which relates to gender which I think we report on annually. I am not sure; I need to check that. In reporting on our programme back to our DFID headquarters we look at the impact that we are having on women through our programmes, and, as I said on the micro-finance programme, we are seeing some very positive progress. There was some very positive progress also on the civic education investments that DFID made in the run up to the parliamentary elections; so we are monitoring at programme/project level the impact on women and we are trying to aggregate that up in terms of other reporting against the PSA target; so we are definitely, again, responding to one of the recommendations in the last report that DFID needs to look very closely at how it monitors the impact it is having on women, but there are, as you appreciate, a whole range of things we have to report against and we have to be seeking to do them. One of the challenges for us in working in Kabul on this programme is to try and make the very difficult choices we have to make, in fact where we need to focus our efforts, and I can reassure the Committee that we regard the monitoring of the impact on gender as very much a part of our responsibility in terms of the PSA. Q50 Joan Ruddock: Finally, do you think that the DFID work and, indeed, the FCO work is consistent with our being a leading light in UN Security Council Resolution 1325? Mr Holland: Remind me what that resolution is? Q51 Joan Ruddock: It is a resolution that says that the role of women is important in post conflict and in reconstruction and should be central too, and that Britain has played a leading role in getting that through the UN and supporting it in principle? Mr Gordon: No, I repeat what I said, we take this very seriously and we want to help Afghanistan in the most effective ways possible, and that requires recognising that gender and women's issues are very important in the development process, and getting the I-ANDS right and having that reflecting adequately and appropriately and fully the interests of women is very much a part of moving that process forward. Q52 Joan Ruddock: The duty is actually to equal participation and full involvement of women; so I just stress again, we are not talking about add-ons, we are not talking about special programmes, we are talking about the equality of involvement in all programmes? Mr Gordon: We are working towards that. Joan Ruddock: Thank you. Q53 John Barrett: If I could turn to the UK's counter-narcotics strategy and the fact that the focus is very much on the provision of alternative livelihoods. With 87 per cent of the world's opium supply coming from Afghanistan, it is clearly a major issue. Can you say how DFID measures its success in the area of alternative livelihoods? We realise there is a problem, you could say, between the American approach and the British approach, and HMG has very much come down on the side of providing alternative livelihoods. Can you say a bit about how you measure success? Mr Gordon: Sure. This has been an issue which has been on our minds for some time now. I think one of the difficulties we face is that in achieving reductions in cultivation, as an example of a very clear indicator, alternative livelihoods in itself will not enable that to happen. We need an effective joined up strategy which will have law enforcement components too. What we are doing at the moment is measuring the provision of opportunities rather that the uptake of those opportunities. If we support, for example, the government's Cash for Work programme, that provides X number of million labour days per year which will provide an opportunity for someone to stop growing poppy and generate an income from those programmes by building roads, or maintaining roads and getting a wage for doing that. What we are trying to do now is identify, in a much more causal way, exactly how our support for alternative livelihoods work actually changes farmers' behaviour, but that requires us to reflect the other issues within the strategy, i.e. those which Peter has talked to much more confidently than I can, the eradication and the law enforcement stuff and about how those pieces of the puzzle fit together effectively to allow you to then measure, whether that be through reduced hectorage of cultivation or reduced size of the illegal opium economy; and we are about to undertake a lot of survey work around the national vulnerability assessment process about how we can identify the investments we are making and the contribution they are having on the nature of farmers' behaviour, farmers' choices, whether they chose to grow opium or to grow something else. So it is something we are constantly focused on, how we can demonstrate the impact of our work, but I think what we have concluded, and Peter can verify this, is that alternative livelihoods on their own will not lead you to the outcomes you are looking for and sustainable reductions of poppy cultivation will require not just the provision of alternative livelihoods but the increased risk of growing poppy as a consequence of law enforcement activities. Mr Holland: I would obviously agree with what John has said, and I think this has been increasingly reflected in the approach that has been taken by the government of Afghanistan. They published their own counter-narcotic implementation plan earlier this year which identified eight pillars, which covers all these areas: so it covers law enforcement, criminal justice, also the eradication campaign as well as alternative livelihoods, so the whole spectrum. I think, increasingly, we would see that you cannot really do one without the other. You certainly have to provide the alternative livelihoods and the development inputs, but on the other side you need to particularly tackle the traffickers and try to attack the top end of the trade: so you need good law enforcement forces and an effective criminal justice system which slowly will soon be put in place. We also need the institutions there, the government institutions, to take this on and, again, increasingly, this seems to be an Afghan-led effort and, particularly within Kabul, you are seeing that but you need to extend that out to the provinces. Q54 John Barrett: There has been a massive increase in expenditure. The counter-narcotics spend over the last year has been provided by DFID, and very much of this is going, as you say, into providing alternative livelihoods. Can you give us some details of the evidence which has convinced you this is the right thing to be focusing on? Presumably from the early days the evidence must have been coming through to make the decision to hike up the expenditure almost tenfold now? Mr Gordon: There are two answers to that one. We have recognised to a greater extent the impact that the illegal economy is having on the future of Afghanistan in terms of development. Three years ago our position on this was very different. We did not recognise as much as we do now that one of the six constraints to the donor is this illegal economy and how that can undermine everything you are trying to do. That is one thing, but also there is evidence from other countries - Pakistan, Thailand, Iran to an extent - which has shown very clearly that the way to achieve the sustainable reductions we are looking for in Afghanistan is very much to invest in rural development, because without alternatives farmers will have no choice but to grow poppy whether they have their crops eradicated or not. They have no other option. The evidence base really comes from experiences in other countries as much as it does in Afghanistan, that without giving farmers those choices they simply will not stop growing poppy and, if you eradicate their crops without alternative livelihoods being available, they will simply replant because they will have run into debt from the previous year which they will need to overcome in subsequent years. Also President Karzai has asked us directly and the international community on a number of occasions now, "Can you guys please focus on alternative livelihoods and leave us to sort the law enforcement out?" We are working very closely with the government on law enforcement activities, but he is very keen that the donor community can support the alternative livelihoods effort. The biggest challenge is to have a sense of realism about how quickly that can all happen: because this is not simply about driving by farmers in a truck throwing seeds off the back of it, because that is not, as we know, sustainable. You need access to markets, you need access to credit, you need a whole range of inputs which will impact upon farmers' ability to change their behaviour. The challenge for us is to try and manage expectations, all of our expectations, about how quickly we can address this issue, but we are convinced that the evidence base from other countries leads us to believe that large investments and alternative livelihoods is a significant means in trying to achieve our objectives. Q55 John Barrett: Have there had to be any compromises between that short term imperative of reducing the amount of drugs: because 95 per cent of heroin in the UK is sourced from Afghanistan, so it is a short-term imperative there and development into farmers' livelihoods is very much a long-term development. Have you had conflicts to deal with in relation to that? Mr Gordon: There are tensions for all of us, and the President is as frustrated as anybody about how this takes a while and he has asked the donors to provide quick impact support, which we have done in the last year. We have provided £30 million worth of support for quick impacts to try and provide, in the short-term, replacements for farmers who, either through the pressure of the government or through having their crops taken away forcibly, have lost their income. I think what we have concluded now is that you need to get a balance between these two things. Ideally, if the world was not so focused on Afghanistan, the longer term approach may well be the one that was pursued, but the reality is that the world is focused on Afghanistan, and the President is very keen that he demonstrates to the world that he wants to stop this problem; so we have to try and balance the short and the long-term, and whether we have got that balance right yet, I do not know, but we regard both of those things as part of the overall strategy. In time we will have a clearer idea what the balance, the proportion, between the two activities should be. Q56 Joan Ruddock: In terms of your quick wins and your alternative strategies, have you done a number of different things, and if so, do you know if anything is more successful than anything else? Mr Gordon: We have done quite a lot. There are a number of crop replacement programmes that we have been supporting. They have not been hugely successful because they have been done at a lower level than perhaps they might have been. What we have found is that with government support and using government systems there is a greater sense of impact. We have on our portfolio three or four activities in specific provinces which are quite low key and small scale. They do not have the impact that, I think, we would be looking for now. With our support to government systems what we are finding is that we are buying into something which has a critical mass which systematically is addressing these issues. The National Solidarity Programme is an example of something that has been hugely successful in terms of creating a community government structure and providing the rural infrastructure to back that up; so supporting that type of programme, allowing that programme to expand beyond that which it can currently, is, we believe, a more effective way than having what are very important small-scale bilateral activities, because you have government ownership. Q57 Joan Ruddock: I am trying to get at what are the farmers doing as an alternative? Mr Gordon: The farmers, some of them, a lot of the progress is being made in off-farm activities rather than on-farm activities, so crop replacement, for example, growing something else, is not actually proving hugely productive because the access to markets is not there. You can grow another product but you cannot get that to market and sell it, or you have not got the credit to enable you to take that step forward; so what you are seeing is that farmers are doing different things. If we can create "cash for work" schemes which provide that income to allow farmers to make the choices of what they want to do and we provide small loans to farmers to take on different sorts of business activities, then that is having the impact. Q58 Joan Ruddock: It is going to take for ever, is it not? It is a puzzle to me because you see, even the worst times, I went right after 9/11 to Afghanistan for the first time, and you see plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and even meat, you can buy loads of agricultural produce which is being brought in lorries from Pakistan, and so it seems strange it is impossible to provide any supply chains in Afghanistan itself of agricultural produce. Mr Gordon: I am far from an agricultural expert, but I understand that some of the terrain is not particularly hospitable for growing some of these things. Q59 Joan Ruddock: No, some would not be, but some would be? Mr Gordon: Yes. It is happening, a number of farmers are taking on new products, but what they have not got is the supply chain, and one of the things we have been looking at in the last year or so is how we can strengthen that, how we can identify exactly how you can grow another product and how it will get to market. There is a lot of discussion on the agriculture master plan, which is this framework for development of the rural sector, looking at how you can create supply chains to lead to export-led progress. This is not all about produce in Afghanistan, it is about how they might be able to export some of their products too, but it puzzles us a lot. This is a very complex set of issues we are trying to address, and we are in many ways recognising, as time goes by, that this is more complex than we thought it was and identifying exactly what the critical entry points are is something we are finding out as time goes by. Mr Holland: I think there is the other side of it, which is the introduction of risk as well, and we know that poppy is much more competitive than pretty much any other alternative - you are not going to compete like for like - and so, I think, particularly in those areas where you can grow alternatives already, and clearly there are a number of areas where you could grow something and there are markets, that is particularly where you want to be putting in risk, attacking the traffickers so you remove them from the system there, but that is where you would do your revocation efforts as well, so farmers know that there is a risk that they will lose their crop altogether and it would be better for them to grow alternatives. I think that is where you need both sides. You are not just going to do it by replacing alternatives; it needs that other side as well. Mr Gordon: Your point is a very good one. This will take a while, this will take a long time, and I guess we have to come to terms with that. It took many, many years in Pakistan to get to the point where we are now. In many ways it is a driving force for instability, and that can be used as a driving force for instability by those elements who do not want to see the country move forward. Q60 John Battle: It seems that it is an intractable problem and it seems to be being pushed around from one place to another, whether it is in the Afghanistan region, Pakistan or in Latin America - Colombia, Bolivia, Peru - and the issues there as well. I wondered if you had given any thought to the findings of the Senlis Council suggesting that there should be a licensing system for opium-based medicine. Are these new ideas completely off the wall? There were suggestions at one time, I seem to recall looking back into my dim and distant past, where someone suggested buying the crop on bulk, as it were, and trying to handle it that way. Are those new ideas of the Senlis Council getting any attraction? Mr Holland: We have certainly looked at these ideas and, in fact, did a study ourselves four or five years ago looking at this kind of question. I can leave that with the Committee if you would like, but I think at this stage we do not think a licensing system would actually work in Afghanistan. The key issue is one of control, how you would control an illicit crop, and that is the difficulty the government itself has at the moment across the illicit crop. I think the government itself has said that they do not want to go down this road at the moment because they fear that it would essentially add to what already is a significant illicit crop and they would find it very difficult to control diversion away from any licensed production. Q61 John Battle: If I were to put the question again perhaps more provocatively, in a way, the twofold eye of the world is Colombia and Afghanistan for coca and for opium. The Americans take the view, crudely put, "Move in there heavy and spray the crops and that will kill it off." The problem is it might kill the people with it. Are there any connections being made with regard to alternative approaches? I think we have an alternative approach, but are notes being compared between the strategy in Colombia and the strategy in Afghanistan and are they being brought together in any way? Mr Holland: Yes, there are some notes, and, indeed, there have been some exchanges between the Colombian government and the Afghan government directly. There has been a visit by the minister of counter-narcotics to Colombia and experts from Colombia have themselves gone to Afghanistan to look at exactly those kinds of exchanges. I think within Afghanistan certainly the Americans actually now would agree that you cannot have one approach, whether an eradication approach or an alternative livelihood approach. I think they are also signed up to the kind of balanced approach that we have been talking about, and certainly in terms of aerial eradication, the government has made it very plain that it will not have aerial eradication, so that is not on the table. Q62 Joan Ruddock: I just wanted to examine your rejection of legalisation and making the crop an acceptable crop for medical purposes: because even if there were a small diversion to illegal markets, it is bound to be a better solution given the size of the crop and the colossal effects on the Afghan economy that the illegality has at the present time, and clearly, once it becomes a licit crop, you tax it and they raise revenue. I would be very interested to see your report, because on the face of it there are huge advantages: because you stabilise the habits of the farmers, you make the thing legal, you take taxes and you can, I would have thought, get a degree of control, whereas with the other programmes I suspect you are talking about 20 years to get out of it by the means that we are currently adopting? Mr Holland: As I say, I would be very happy to leave the report. The study that we did looked at Turkey and India, which are the two most likely to be comparable (and India is likely to be the closest model that you might use), and there the study found that there was as much as 40 per cent diversion of the licit crop within an environment where there was a law enforcement framework being imposed. The difficulty, particularly in Afghanistan, is one that you alluded to earlier, which is the way that the crop can move round and can be dispersed. The problem is that, even if you can create licit production of the crop in certain areas, you are still not going to be tackling the illicit production that is elsewhere, and I think a risk at the moment is that what you would be likely to do is create incentives for more farmers to move into production of opium, because if they see that there is a licit outlet for that, that gives them an opportunity to move in and so start growing, and that is a particular concern of the government at the moment. They are concerned that the discussion about this actually is encouraging more farmers to grow because they see opportunities, not just on the illicit side but on the licit side. Joan Ruddock: It would be much easier to concentrate all your efforts on those farmers who did not have jobs at the moment and divert them from going into poppy if you were to put all the resources into trying to deal with eradication, I suspect, but that is for another day. Q63 John Battle: We move over to the plans for the UK to move south into Helmand province. DFID's Interim Strategy for Afghanistan states: "We are exploring how we can support the UK's increasing focus on Helmand province in 2006." I wonder if we could ask you from DFID how you see yourselves supporting the UK's increasing focus on Helmand in 2006 and ensure once again that Millennium Development Goals tackling poverty remains the focus? How will you do it? Mr Gordon: There are a number of strands of our proposed activity which will support/complement, the UK's focus on Helmand province. The first is that we will have a development adviser based in the PRT, who, similar to situations in other provinces up to now, will have a budget available to do small-scale development activities. That will follow the model that DFID and others have followed in Mazar-i-Sharif in the PRT that we have been engaged with before. The second is we have a programme, a provincial programme, for rural development which is going to be designed, subject to ministerial agreement, over the next couple of months, which will look to identify ways in which we can use the government's national programmes to support the provision of rural development opportunities for poor people in Helmand province. This is very much at the behest of the government of Afghanistan, who have decided that they would like to address some of these issues at provincial level, because what you can do is provide development assistance but also strengthen local government structures. The Canadian government is supporting a similar programme to this in Khandahar province, other donors are looking at how they might do something similar in other provinces and DFID will therefore look to design a programme along similar lines to that which the Canadians have designed in Khandahar, in Helmand. We are still in the process of discussions internally about what will be the scale, the scope and the nature of that programme, but we expect to have a significant programme in Helmand to do that. A number of our programmes actually have two components. One is to support central government, but the other is to support roll-out of the activities which the programme supports at provincial level; so there are a number of activities around alternative livelihoods, for example, where we will be looking at Helmand as one of the couple of provinces where we try and implement the roll-out of that central support programme. We are also, as a fourth component, looking at how we can use our investments in national programmes, be they cash for work, micro-finance or rural infrastructure, how have they been focused to a greater extent on Helmand province. What we have concluded is that if the UK's deployment in Helmand is to be successful, there needs to be commensurate investments in military as well as civilian activities, and we see UK deployment in the area as an opportunity to bring greater security to enable development to happen and therefore to give greater security. So you have this sort of virtuous cycle of security linked to development, leading to greater security, leading to greater development. We do not see this as a conflict of interest in terms of our development objectives because we will remain, as I said at the start, very much focused on development outcomes, but we recognise that we need to get, as you do in Afghanistan more generally, the security right for the development to happen, and Helmand is one of the most insecure provinces. We need to be working very closely with others to try and ensure that we have collectively as much impact as possible. One of the key things in Helmand particularly is it is one of the provinces where poppy production is the highest, and if we can identify ways in which we can address some of these very difficult issues through these investments, then we may both have impact there but identify, perhaps exemplar is too strong a word, but ways of working which might have impact at a wider level than just Helmand province. Q64 John Battle: You mentioned a significant increase in programming in Helmand, and I understand that you can be channelling government programmes that you are joined to, but is there a downside of a transfer of resources from other provinces to Helmand (there is a general increase in the programme), or will it be down in one in order to now enhance in Helmand? Mr Gordon: It is an issue that is being discussed about what is the balance between central investments which have a wider impact upon one province, that being Helmand and investments in Helmand specifically. We are looking at what the appropriate balance should be. In many respects progress in Helmand will be seen as a consequence of central investments as much as they will in provincial investments, so we are trying to identify the appropriate balance between focusing on one province and focusing on others, and clearly, it would not be true if I were to say there is no opportunity cost, because there is an opportunity cost. We have budget ceilings within which we are trying to work; so the dialogue will be on-going in that, the appropriate balance between short and long-term and between one province focus and central focus, but we do not see at this point in time that they are in conflict, as it were. Q65 John Battle: A final question on the overall strategy really, the provincial reconstruction teams. What lessons can be drawn from the experience with PRTs to inform that debate that is balancing the right relationship between civilian and military action in post conflict? Mr Gordon: I think one of the things we have seen----. There was a review done by King's College of our investment in PRTs which, I think, was generally positive in that without the existence of PRTs development could have been less extensive and had less impact, and I think what we are learning, as I said at the start, is that there is an issue of security and development, and DFID has a particular policy team working on this, recognising that a lot of the places where we are trying to have impact are in insecure environments and how you bring the military and the civilian activities close together to mutually support and to achieve collective objectives. Our sense, having done this for a couple of years now, is that PRTs have been an effective mechanism to enable activity to take place in less secure environments than might be the case otherwise. If you want to extend the authority and visibility of the government of Afghanistan you need to get out into these provinces and do the work, but what you cannot do is do that without any sense of improved security, because development then becomes, as in Helmand, for example, there are very few development agencies now operating in Helmand because it is too insecure. The Americans have lost through their programmes a number of staff, a number of NGOs have had staff killed. That means that activities in these provinces become very difficult; so creating the environment through PRTs by which development can happen has been, we believe, an effective approach. Q66 John Battle: The King's report does not go quite as far as recommending that they be immediately introduced into Iraq yet, does it, but would you? Mr Gordon: I think you need to ask other colleagues, or even my ministers that question. We have had a positive experience of PRTS in Afghanistan. Whether you could apply the same approach in Iraq is something which I probably am not best able to comment upon. Q67 John Battle: If no colleagues have any further questions, could we thank you very much for the answers you have given us today? You made a remark, John, partly that you thought the eyes of the world were still on Afghanistan. I think the answer to that aspect might be yes and no and that we should keep interest up and keep pressure on in order to make sure there is real progress; and I think we can take some encouragement from the answers you have given us this morning, and we will obviously keep it on our agenda in the months and weeks, if not years, to come until we see a positive outcome. Thank you very much indeed. Mr Gordon: Thank you very much. |