Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-203)
MR ROBERT
FOX, MR
RORY STEWART
AND DR
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
27 MARCH 2007
Q200 Mr Havard: But if we did it
your way do you provide a platform for the Taliban who do not
have any strategic capacity to gain strategic capacity and undo
the good work that has been done elsewhere?
Mr Stewart: My guess is that the
real resource here in terms of the sustainable campaign against
the Taliban is the Afghan people themselves. There is no serious
counter-insurgency campaign in this country without Afghans buying
into it.
Q201 Linda Gilroy: I think we covered
earlier on the questions we were going to ask about Provincial
Reconstruction Teams and particularly Mr Williams' views on those
and also the role of the military in delivering development. Perhaps
one last catch-all question: where would development funding and
effort be best directed?
Dr Williams: One of the points
I wanted to make about the rather critical PRTs is that they are
useful in many regards and whether you maintain the current strategy
or you change to Mr Stewart's strategy of the Waziristan approach
of giving up in the south for the time being, I think we need
to split security, reconstruction and development into three different
spectrums. You should have a frontline where the military is working
to provide security and doing very quick relief for aid projects,
then you have PRTs which are concentrated in areas of conflict
but where it is too dangerous for NGOs and you could start serious
construction perhaps and development activities which would then
be followed by a third band where NGOs are the principal actor.
This frees up military resources to be used in areas where security
is the paramount concern and allows you to access the experience
of NGOs and development organisations in more peaceful areas where
they can operate. It is a bit silly to have troops in an area
where you do not need them aside from regular security patrols.
That is something to take into account in terms of how funding
is divided between military relief, as Mr Jenkin has pointed out,
in long-term development aid and, of course, this all has to be
wrapped in a framework from the beginning so that NGOs have input
so that the military are not going to say, "What is your
opinion" and then ignore NGO responses systematically, that
advice is taken into account.
Q202 Linda Gilroy: So there is nothing
wrong with having different types of PRT as long as they are focused
in the right way to do the right job?
Dr Williams: I think that some
standardisation would be good but, as Rory has pointed out, it
depends on local circumstances. A more devolved authority tends
to be the most successful. We do not want to have a difference
between, let us say, the Germans and the Americans where one PRT
is doing mainly shooting and killing and the other is doing only
reconstruction. That is why I am saying you put them into a certain
band of conflict where the definition of the ratio of military
actors to civilian actors is about the same but then what is the
best approach for this area. That is what you need to address.
Q203 Linda Gilroy: Does anybody else
want to comment on the best use of development funding or, indeed,
PRTs?
Mr Stewart: I would say we want
to distinguish very clearly between three quite different kinds
of economic investment. There is the sort of money that you might
want for military units, which is really money and projects used
for counter-insurgency warfare. The second might be the kinds
of projects which DFID would pursue and DFID, of course, is a
very theological organisation, they are dedicated to an extremely
sophisticated idea of sustainable development over the long-term.
The third kind of projects, which we are not doing, are those
which somebody like the Foreign Office should be controlling if
DFID refuses to touch it, and those are symbolic political projects
which have the name of the international community on them. I
talked about garbage being seven feet deep in the centre of Kabul,
we are currently trying to restore the historic commercial centre
of the city and, done correctly, this could be a place that hundreds
of thousands of Afghans would visit and in 50 years' time they
could point to and say, "This is a gift from the international
community to the Afghan nation". There are very few permanent
symbols of our commitment. There is very little that Afghans can
point to when they are asked what we have done for them. We do
need to start directing money towards this third category. I am
not saying give up on counter-insurgency, I am not saying give
up on all the very worthy sustainable development projects which
DFID is pursuing, but we must think more like politicians and
less like bureaucrats if we are going to catch the imagination
of the Afghan people.
Chairman: It being 12.59, I would like
to say to you three and to all of our witnesses this morning that
this morning's evidence from the point of view of the Committee
has been a real privilege to take. Thank you very much indeed
for your well-informed and very careful evidence.
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