Examination of Witnesses (Questions 103-119)
DR SHIRIN
AKINER, DR
GILBERT GREENALL
AND MS
NORINE MACDONALD
QC
27 MARCH 2007
Q103 Chairman: Good morning to you all.
This is the second evidence session of our second inquiry into
Afghanistan and we are looking at the work of the United Kingdom
in Afghanistan. Last week we had the Secretary of State and this
week we have two groups of independent and extremely well-informed
commentators. Good morning to all three of you as witnesses. I
wonder if you would like to introduce yourselves, and if I may
start with you, Shirin Akiner, I gather you have lost your voice,
which is always a handicap when you are appearing in front of
a select committee, but thank you very much for coming back to
talk to us.
Dr Akiner: Thank
you. My name is Shirin Akiner, I am from the School of Oriental
& African Studies and I lecture on Central Asian affairs.
I am also an associate fellow at Chatham House, and I have been
working on the region for a very, very long time indeed and seen
many ups and downs and changes.
Q104 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Norine MacDonald, would you like to tell us about yourself and
about your experience.
Ms MacDonald: My name is Norine
MacDonald, I am the President and Lead Field Researcher for The
Senlis Council and Senlis Afghanistan. The Senlis Council is a
policy group looking at counter-narcotics, security and development.
I am based between Kandahar and Lashkar Gah doing field research
on the issues affecting the insurgency, including counter-narcotics.
Q105 Chairman: Thank you. Gilbert
Greenall.
Dr Greenall: I have been involved
in humanitarian emergencies since 1979; ex-military, I had a four
years short service commission in the Household Cavalry, I am
a medical doctor and since the first Gulf War I was deployed with
3 Commando Brigade in Northern Iraq and have worked on a number
of military operations as an adviser to brigade and divisional
commanders over the last 15 years.
Q106 Chairman: What is your experience
of working within the Government of the United Kingdom?
Mr Greenall: I worked as consultant
adviser to the Overseas Development Agency (ODA) and then since
DFID was formed since 1997 I have worked as a consultant adviser
to DFID and, more recently, at the Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Unit.
Q107 Robert Key: Could I ask you
each, in your view is the United Kingdom making a positive contribution
to Afghanistan?
Ms MacDonald: The UK military
is fighting in the most difficult circumstances with remarkable
success. Our research has shown, however, that the development
and aid efforts of the UK and the counter-narcotics policy supported
by the UK are in fact not only failing but contributing to the
rise in the Taliban insurgency in the South. We have just finished
a survey of 17,000 Afghan men in Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar
provinces and we have asked them whether they support the Taliban.
In Helmand and Kandahar provinces 26% of the men were willing
to openly state that they support the Taliban and when we asked
them whether they believed that the Karzai Government and NATO
will win the war or the Taliban will win the war, 50% of them
stated that they believe the Taliban will now win the war. Or
research results have shown that clearly we are in a crisis situation
and emergency measures must be taken to ensure the success of
the UK and NATO effort in Afghanistan.
Q108 Robert Key: What measures might
those be?
Ms MacDonald: I have brought a
list of them, if I am permitted to make a handout?
Q109 Chairman: Yes, that is helpful;
by all means.
Ms MacDonald: I apologise but
we are a research and policy group so we tend to do this type
of thing. I will pass it around. What we are recommending is an
emergency action plan that looks at five separate areas: the first
is the area of research. I spend a great deal of time talking
to villagers in Helmand province. There are people displaced by
the fighting and poppy eradication that are literally starving.
The men are willing to sit in the food-aid line-ups for hours
at a time; thus becoming easy recruits for Taliban. Both from
a humanitarian and a counter-insurgency point of view there must
be immediate aid. There has been no food aid in Helmand Province
since March 2006. On counter-narcotics policy we are recommending
an immediate end to the eradication campaigns which turn the locals
against us, fuel the insurgency and are ineffective, and the implementation
of pilot projects for poppy for medicine, which I can speak about
more if the Committee is interested. We are calling for Jirgas
with the local population and a joint committee between Afghanistan
and Pakistan chaired by General David Richards, address those
urgent issues and the broader NATO commitments. The entire NATO
structure and response in Afghanistan must be rebalanced. The
UK is doing its part and the other countries are not. If I can
have the Chairman's permission I would also like to hand out those
survey results that I referred to, it is just a two-page document.
Chairman: That too would be very helpful;
thank you.
Q110 Robert Key: Could I then ask
you, Shirin, if you would give us your view about whether the
United Kingdom is making a positive contribution?
Dr Akiner: The United Kingdom
is treading water; they can cope just about with the security
tasks they have been set, but if you are talking about any further
vision as to how the country should be developed, that is entirely
lacking. One of the major problems is that we have indulged in
obfuscation. We have used a term "reconstruction": we
are not talking about reconstruction. If you look at all the data
on Afghanistan going back over the years, we are talking about
construction from a very low base. Looking at the United Nations
Human Development Index, Afghanistan is today, as it was 10 years,
20 years, 30 years ago, on a level with countries such as Burkina
Faso, so when we talk about development if you want to raise the
level of development in Afghanistan it has to be clearly understood
that this is a vast undertaking. Think of a country like Burkina
Faso; what level are you hoping to raise Afghanistan to? That
is the first question. The second question, which I do not think
has been taken into consideration enough, is how is Afghanistan
ever to become self-sustaining? It has very few natural resources,
the few minerals it has are difficult to exploit and transport
costs of course are extremely high. Leaving aside the opium, it
seems to me that Afghanistan has only one advantage, and that
advantage is deliberately being ignored and, I would even say,
undermined. The advantage is that it could be a transit country
for the region, for roads, railways and pipelines, but because
the Western-led coalition quite firmly and explicitly has stated
it does not want the involvement of the neighbours, what we have
in Afghanistan is in effect an enclave completely cut off from
the neighbouring countries. The level of trade between, Afghanistan
and Uzbekistan is absolutely minute; between Afghanistan and the
other neighbouring countries, likewise absolutely minute, so apart
from Pakistan there is virtually no regional involvement. This
may be sustainable in the short term if you are prepared to pour
in aid to Afghanistan, but in the longer term, with the growth
of China and China's relationship with the other major powers
in the region, that is to say Russia, Iran and eventually India,
either Afghanistan has to be keyed into the structural developments
that are taking place or it is doomed to be excluded. What we
see now, if we look at all the road and rail networks that are
being planned for Afghanistan, they are not linked in to the other
states. In the long term this policy of isolation is entirely
unsustainable. In the short term of course individual units, individual
people from the UK are doing a great job, but this is not looking
ahead to the future.
Q111 Robert Key: Thank you, Dr Akiner.
Gilbert Greenall, is the UK making a positive contribution?
Dr Greenall: The original plan
back in 2001 when the Taliban were harbouring al-Qaeda, it was
a direct threat to the United Kingdom and it was completely correct
to deal with that direct threat. Since that time there have been
a number of secondary objectives and those secondary objectives
now are undermining the operation in Helmand province. With counter-narcotics,
for example, I cannot think of anything more designed to actually
create conflict and get us embroiled in great complexities of
central Asian politics than trying to deal with counter-narcotics.
The nation building, pushing a stronger central government—initially
the idea came across the Atlantic that failed states were a danger
to a harbouring of international terrorists, therefore a strong
central state was a barrier to them—I cannot think of anything
in Afghanistan which is more likely, than a strong central state,
to actually create conflict and not actually reduce it. The actual
resourcing of this, if you look at the billion or so that the
press report for the war, versus £180 million for the civil
effort in Afghanistan, there is complete disparity of effort and
also the effort now is being spread in so many different areas
and not in just this one defeat of the Taliban.
Q112 Robert Key: Is this because
of a lack of strategic focus or could you identify one or two
serious obstacles that are preventing progress?
Dr Greenall: It is a loss of strategic
focus.
Dr Akiner: I would agree entirely
with that, but I think that comes from the refusal to face reality
and to pretend that the task is something that it is not, that
it is a short term task that can be accomplished and that therefore
there will be an exit point in the foreseeable future. That is
not the case and therefore there is a failure of analysis here.
Q113 Robert Key: Norine, do you have
a view on that?
Ms MacDonald: Part of it actually
is a lack of internal capacity. As I mentioned, the military is
really doing their very best in difficult circumstances, but there
is a failure on the aid and development side. The Department for
International Development has turned out to be the Department
for International Development except in war zones. This means
it is failing the military and showing a lack of commitment to
the military success there. There has been a lack of willingness
to discuss that capacity issue: whether or not this Government
wants DFID to be DFID only in places that are not war zones, or
whether it wants it to be also present in war zones as part of
a counter-insurgency effort. This is an internal strategic and
capacity issue that has not been brought into the debate. I understand
their response to why they are not present there, but it is not
acceptable when you are asking your military to go in. That has
to be clearly addressed and I would agree with the comments previously
made about the counter-narcotic strategy, which is at cross purposes
with the military aims.
Dr Greenall: This business of
the funding too, there is a complete disparity between the enormous
effort on the military side and part of the campaign plan being
dependent upon DFID to deliver and that capacity not actually
being there.
Chairman: We will come on to the relationship
between the military and DFID in a few minutes time. Bernard Jenkin.
Q114 Mr Jenkin: Very briefly, Dr
Greenall, you say in paragraph 2.3 of your paper "There was
no post conflict recovery plan in December 2001." That was
not what we were told in Parliament.
Dr Greenall: I was in Kabul at
that time and it was very difficult to implement any projects
because they all had to be multilateral, and the problem was that
the UN were only just bringing in a skeleton staff themselves—this
was right at the end of the war—and they did not have the
capacity to actually implement their own programmes, and with
us trying to say can we create programmes which they are going
to be involved in, there just was not the capacity at the time
to do it. It was a very complicated process of trying to get projects
up and running and there was definitely a pause of quite a few
weeks before those actions started to happen.
Q115 Mr Crausby: Can I ask Dr Akiner
about Afghanistan's immediate neighbours because I know she has
a view on that. Should Afghanistan's immediate neighbours be more
involved in shaping its future?
Dr Akiner: The immediate neighbours,
immediately after Operation Enduring Freedom was launched and
then even more so after NATO-ISAF began operations in Afghanistan,
had tremendous optimism and they wanted to be engaged in all these
developments, all the more so as many of them had actually worked
on construction projects in Afghanistan during the 1980s. I remember
one journalist, Anthony Lloyd, commenting on the Soviet presence
in Afghanistan as being barbaric; absolutely not at all. The Central
Asians were involved in very serious, major construction projects
during this period, so they had assumed that when there was peace,
when NATO and ISAF were established in Afghanistan, they would
be able to contribute to the recovery of Afghanistan. Also, they
believed that trade and cross-border links of all sorts would
pick up. That is not happening; quite the contrary, they have
been specifically excluded, and I have been present on many occasions
when that point has been made. The result is that the benefits
that Afghanistan could have had through integrating into the region
it is not having, and the longer this situation continues, patterns
are formed and the more difficult it is to change the situation.
Metaphorically speaking, I talked about the policy dilemma in
Afghanistan being to remain in the zoo or return to the natural
habitat, because what we have in Afghanistan today is like a zoo
where Afghanistan is entirely nurtured and protected by outside
forces. Eventually there must come a time when it is reintegrated
and I see no move to even realising that that will have to happen
or should happen if Afghanistan is going to have any kind of peaceful
prospects for the future.
Q116 Mr Crausby: What about India
and Pakistan and what is the relevance of the tension between
India and Pakistan and the impact that that has on Afghanistan?
Dr Akiner: Pakistan of course
is present and represents both a positive contribution and also
a source of threat. India is striving now to make its presence
felt in Afghanistan and it is also making its presence felt in
the bordering Central Asian states—for example, it has just
constructed an air base in Tajikistan; it is slightly uncertain
what the status of that is but India is certainly becoming very
active in the region, though it has to balance that with its very
close relationship with China, its relationship with Russia and
a relationship with Iran as well as, of course, remaining alert
to considerations about Pakistan. India can do some things, therefore,
but it is also constrained by its broader foreign policy. There
is one other point I wanted to pick up on which follows on from
something that you said. We have confused terms, and again it
is a question of analysis. We talk about "nation building"
when we do not mean nation building, we mean state building, creating
institutions. It is important to make the distinction because
nation building—as we have heard in discussions in Britain
recently, involves an effort to create a sense of national identity,
of Britishness. In Afghanistan, if there is no sense of Afghan
nationhood, the country will not hold together, and that is what
we have at present; the sense of being Afghans together is evaporating,
which brings us back to Pakistan and the ever-present threat of
Pashtunism. Because if the Pashtuns decide that actually it is
in their best interests to create their own state without all
the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan, we will see the disintegration
of Afghanistan. That is a very real possibility and one which
Pakistan may in fact be encouraging.
Q117 Mr Crausby: India has refurbished
an airbase in Tajikistan, can you tell us what is the relevance
of that and what influence will that give India?
Dr Akiner: It gives them a presence
very close to Afghanistan; it certainly makes Pakistan very nervous,
but that base is actually shared with the Russians at present.
The Chinese are also nervous as to what India is doing, so the
balance between those states is extremely complicated and changing
constantly. China is making major investments in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, throughout the region in a word; yet it is not making
such investments in Afghanistan because while the Western-led
alliance is there it regards it as a waste of money. The most
important arterial link in the region is the Karakorum Highway,
which links into the road system of Pakistan and goes down to
Gwadar on the Indian ocean. Afghanistan is cut off from that,
whereas the other states are all linking into it because that
takes them right down to a warm water port, which is important.
The same thing with pipelines, they are being constructed around,
not through Afghanistan, so the longer Afghanistan is kept out
of these developments, a lot of which are being, as I say, funded
by China and driven by China, the more difficult it will be to
actually have any place, it will be this forgotten island—somewhere
in the middle—that everyone goes around.
Q118 Chairman: Should Iran have a
role and, if so, what should it be?
Dr Akiner: I remember General
David Richards saying a few weeks ago—and I do not know
if it was on the record or off the record—that the influence
of Iran had in fact been "benign", but obviously the
Americans are very concerned about Iranian influence. For all
the Central Asians, Iran is a historic centre, a cultural centre
and at times has been the political centre, so even if they do
not like what is happening in Iran today—and they have different
views on that—they still look to Iran as playing an important
role in the development of the region. In Afghanistan, too, Iran
has always played quite a significant role, culturally especially,
and to some extent economically. Yet Iran is being largely kept
out now—it is of course working extremely energetically
on the drug eradication and has done a very constructive job there,
but overall its engagement is very patchy. The Central Asians
take note of that. If Iran were more involved, it would stimulate
greater regional cooperation, but at present that is not happening.
Q119 Mr Havard: Dr Greenall says
in his memo to us that, "There is a danger that international
military operations in Afghanistan are already destabilising Pakistan.
An unstable Pakistan is a much bigger threat than Afghanistan."
[1]The
Senlis Council says there should be a presidential committee of
the presidents of the two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
What is all that telling us then, that we should just stop military
operations in Afghanistan because it is dangerous?
Dr Greenall: It is my comment
so I must answer it. One needs to be cautious about how one does
one's military operations so that one does not end up with a bigger
problem than one has already got. That would be the extent of
my comment on that and common sense would tell us that that must
be a sensible thing to reflect on when we are engaged in Afghanistan.
1 See Ev 92 Back
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