UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 408-iv

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

 

 

UK OPERATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN

 

 

Tuesday 8 May 2007

RT HON DES BROWNE MP, LT GEN NICK HOUGHTON CBE

MR DESMOND BOWEN CMG, MR PETER HOLLAND and MS LINDY CAMERON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 295 - 394

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 8 May 2007

Members present

Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair

Mr David S Borrow

Mr David Crausby

Linda Gilroy

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Adam Holloway

Mr Bernard Jenkin

Mr Brian Jenkins

Mr Kevan Jones

Robert Key

Willie Rennie

John Smith

 

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Ministry of Defence

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rt Hon Des Browne MP, Secretary of State for Defence, Lieutenant General Nick Houghton CBE, Chief of Joint Operations, and Mr Desmond Bowen CMG, Policy Director, Ministry of Defence; Mr Peter Holland, Head of Afghan Drugs Inter-Departmental Unit (ADIDU), Foreign and Commonwealth Office; and Ms Lindy Cameron OBE, Head of Department for International Development, Afghanistan, gave evidence.

Q295 Chairman: Good afternoon, Secretary of State, and welcome. As you know, this is a part of our second inquiry into Afghanistan and we are taking evidence from you, Secretary of State, for the second time in this second inquiry, so you have been back and back, and we are most grateful to you for doing this. We went to Afghanistan two or three weeks ago and many of our questions will be informed by that visit, but I wonder if I could ask you to begin, Secretary of State, by introducing your team please.

Des Browne: Certainly, Chairman. I am not that long back from Afghanistan myself, so perhaps we can compare notes. On my far right is Desmond Bowen, who is the Policy Director from the Ministry. Immediately to my right is Lindy Cameron who is the Head of DFID Afghanistan and is part of the team at the special request of the Committee. On my immediate left is Lieutenant General Nick Houghton, who is here for the second time in this inquiry as the Chief of Joint Operations and for a second appearance also is Peter Holland, who is the -----

Q296 Chairman: I think it is about his third or fourth time.

Des Browne: In this current investigation?

Q297 Chairman: Not in this current investigation, no.

Des Browne: Here in this current investigation for the second time, and Peter Holland is also here at the specific request of the Committee.

Q298 Chairman: We met Lindy Cameron in Kabul. This is a personal comment of mine. I went to Afghanistan this most recent time feeling really very pessimistic about it and came back feeling less pessimistic, but thinking that the work that is being done in Afghanistan is going to take a very long time indeed. When we were there, we heard about progress that had been made there and there was no doubt there was a lot still to be done, but, Secretary of State, I wonder if you agree that it should be suggested to the British people that this is going to take a very long time indeed and certainly will take the deployment of equipment and people way beyond 2009?

Des Browne: Well, can I just say first of all, Chair, that I am pleased that your visit to Afghanistan dispelled at least some of the pessimism, if not all of it, and no doubt the rest of the questions that we face during this session will be an indication as to what extent that was in dispelling pessimism. It is of course a very significant challenge, what we and others have taken on in Afghanistan, and I have never made light of that at any time. Can I just say that I think people ought to be reminded, and maybe the public should be reminded, that in January of 2006, which would then be five years after we had embarked on this challenge, at the London Conference the international community in the Afghan Compact agreed with the Government of Afghanistan that they would commit to five years at that time, so that of itself takes the international community's commitment, expressed in the Compact, to 2011. We ourselves as a government made a bilateral commitment to Afghanistan for ten years to support and be with them. I realise that that does not mean that at that stage either the international community or we ourselves committed to a military presence in Afghanistan for either of those two periods and I think it is more the military side of this that the Committee is interested in, although I believe that this country, having been 30 years in conflict or more, will take efforts to get to the stage where they will be able to stand on their own two feet, and I think that the international community will have to support them for a considerable period of time. Perhaps some of the confusion in relation to time arises from the fact that when we announced the deployment of troops into the southern part of Afghanistan, we announced at the same time that, for planning purposes, we would be planning to 2009, and that has been interpreted as a commitment to 2009 with nothing beyond. My own view is that, given the nature of the challenges there, particularly the security challenge, we will have to stay with the Afghans beyond 2009, but exactly how long and in what way I think it is too early to tell. We have only been about one year deployed, I think it is about a year almost exactly since we first deployed troops into Helmand Province and I think it is just too early to say at this stage exactly what the nature and shape of our commitment will be beyond 2009, but I agree that we will have to have a commitment. Exactly how many troops we will have to have there and what they will be doing will be more a function of our ability to be able to grow and develop the Afghan National Army and a police force to provide security there than anything else.

Q299 Chairman: But about one month ago you said that we were one of the few countries that could actually do this really difficult work, so a lot of the burden will fall to us in military terms. Do you think that, without an increase in funding and in manning in Afghanistan, we will be able to sustain the commitment that you are talking about now?

Des Browne: Well, I do not retract any of the words that I used before, but I would need to look at exactly the context of them to see what exactly I was talking about as far as difficult work is concerned.

Q300 Chairman: It was in the statement you made to the House of Commons when you were announcing the extra 1,400 or 1,600 troops.

Des Browne: The point I am making, Chair, is that we are in an evolving set of circumstances. As we will no doubt come to during the course of this session, we will be looking at what is going on in Afghanistan, particularly in the south and in the east of Afghanistan at the moment, compared to what was happening, for example, about a year ago when we deployed our troops there and we were engaged in some quite heavy war-fighting sustained in a very particular way. We will, in my view, over the course of the next year see a situation which will evolve further and our ability to be able to improve the security situation and also to improve the ability of the Afghan National Army and its own police force to be able to take over from us and to take the lead in security, I think, will be this principal determining factor as to what scale and nature of military commitment we will need to make.

Q301 Chairman: But do you accept that there needs to be a large-scale exercise to persuade the British public that we are going to be deploying resources there for a long time?

Des Browne: Well, I have never made any bones about the nature of the challenge that we face and the level of the commitment, but I have never been in a position to answer precisely the questions that people always want me to answer precisely. I can give prescriptive answers and say that this is a difficult and challenging environment, and I have been straightforward and honest about it, but we will need to see over the course of the next year to what extent the work that we have already done, which has shown some progress and progress is being made, the extent to which we can build upon that and how the other parts of what has become known as the 'comprehensive approach' create a secure environment, but also create capacity with the Afghans to be able to do what we are doing. From where I am at the moment, I am not able to put specific measures on that, but I do not avoid the question that this will be a long-term commitment. I think we will be involved, we the international community and the British in particular, and the Americans will be involved with the Government of Afghanistan, militarily we will be involved with them and financially in terms of financial support, so we will be involved with them in all the ways that we presently are for some period of time. The scale and nature of that will depend on the progress that we make. I am concerned, Chair, that if I say things very specifically, they will be misinterpreted. This is an evolving set of circumstances and, as I have been absolutely straightforward with the Committee on a number of occasions, we have learnt a lot from the last year, but things are different this year than they were last year.

Q302 Mr Jones: Secretary of State, can I talk about current operations. On April 20 the media reported that Operation Silicon was taking place in the Sangin Valley. Can you just give us an update on what is happening, what the aims were of that operation and whether they have been achieved?

Des Browne: I think, first of all, in order to understand Operation Silicon, you have to understand the kind of operational intent of the ISAF Commander for that part of Helmand. The overall operational objective comes under the title 'Operation Achilles'. The intention of the operational Commander, as I understand it and indeed it is, is to do two things in that area. One is to engage the Taliban in that area and specifically by engaging the Taliban and keeping them on the back foot, as we have been doing over all of the winter across southern and indeed eastern Afghanistan and in other parts of Afghanistan, to protect Kandahar in particular because Kandahar is an iconic place for the Taliban, as the Committee will know. Secondly, it is to create an environment in the upper part of Helmand that allows a very specific project to take place and that is the development of the Kajaki Dam which is very important to reconstruction and development in southern Afghanistan. At the tactical level, there have been two operations, one being Operation Silver which was designed to effectively clear the Taliban out of the village of Sangin in the northern part of the Sangin Valley and to establish or re-establish the writ of the Afghan Government. That has been done. The supplementary tactical operation goes under the name of 'Operation Silicon' and it is designed to do two things, one of which is to do the same for the southern part of the Sangin Valley down to Gereshk and, by doing that, to spread the opportunity for reconstruction and development north of the Afghan Development Zone which presently ends at about Gereshk. What has happened since it started at about the end of April is that the battlefield-shaping exercises have been concluded successfully, what is known as the 'kinetic' part of it has been successful and we are now into the consolidation part in anticipation of the construction and other work that needs to be done, so it is ongoing at the moment, but it has broadly been successful in its earliest phases.

Q303 Mr Jones: So it is a phased approach and, once we have secured an area, what is the process then in terms of ensuring that you keep that area clear of Taliban? How does it actually work? Are there specific timelines for those or is it just as and when?

Des Browne: Well, this operation does not only involve us, it involves other coalition forces specifically, including the Reserve which has been deployed into these operations, but it also includes Afghan National Army forces. The intention, once an area is secured, is to have Afghan National Army forces deployed into government centres or into the area to hone and consolidate the security and to support them by immediate QIPs projects which are designed at improving the security infrastructure, putting in vehicle checkpoints, improving the security of the police station, improving the security of the government centres, allowing the Afghan forces to operate in an infrastructure which they can protect and then to follow that up with a carefully planned and agreed reconstruction efforts which sometimes concentrate on improving schools, improving perhaps the mosque in the area which sends a very strong message to the people of that area in terms of information operations in relation to the propaganda that the Taliban use, and there are multifarious wells, clearing up of ditches, all sorts of small quick-impact projects that have an effect on the community, and then to allow an environment that NGOs and others can deploy into in order to do the longer-term development work.

Q304 Mr Jones: That is clearly a thought-out strategy, but when we met General McNeill in Kabul, he said that the coming priority over the next few months was to continue taking the fight to the Taliban, a pre-emptive attack, and keep at them. How does that fit in with this? Is that separate from this planned control of areas or how does it actually work? Are they running side by side?

Des Browne: I can see from the CJO's body language that he is anxious to answer this part of the question, so perhaps he could.

Lieutenant General Houghton: It is very hard to improve on what the Secretary of State has said for a start. He has got absolutely the right balance between what are tactical sets and operationally desired outcomes. As he said, just to refresh, in respect of the operationally desired outcomes of Achilles, that is taking the pressure off Kandahar and creating the circumstances under which security is right in the Sangin Valley to enable the Kajaki Dam project and that is the desired outcome of the tactical sets and Op Silver and Op Silicon. However, at the same time Commander ISAF has a series of desired operational outcomes throughout Afghanistan, many of them actually concentrating in RC South and RC East, some of them down in the border areas, and again through Commander RC South, he lays down what his desired operational outcomes are and then the tactical sets match that, so this is happening as concurrent activity all the time. I think the Secretary of State mentioned that the Commander ISAF's tactical reserve has been put at the disposal of RC South and down into Helmand for the two tactical sets of Silver and Silicon and I think they are going to be with Commander RC South for a little while longer and then will be lifted to be put in support of one of the other tactical sets, but you will understand that, because these are operations into the future, I could not now specify where in time and place those tactical sets are or necessarily the operational outcome design.

Q305 Mr Hancock: Are you satisfied, Secretary of State, once an area has been relatively secured and it is then safe for others to come in behind you, that there are both the financial resources available and the manpower resources then to carry out the hearts and minds operation that needs to happen?

Des Browne: If you take, for example, the lower Sangin Valley or the Sangin Valley itself, the United States have committed $3.7 million for follow-up projects, what we would call 'QIPs' projects, in that area over and above the plans that we have for the Sangin Valley. I do not have the list in front of me, but I know that we can give the Committee a list of the projects, the QIPs projects which cover a wide range of different areas for the Sangin Valley, so I am satisfied that we are doing what it is necessary to do, but at the end of the day what will hold security in these areas is a combination of governance and local security. It is proper policing, a presence of the Afghan National Army and that the Governor's writ runs. Now, in preparation and anticipation of these tactical operations, a significant amount of work was done by the Governor and indeed, in the case of Operation Silver, the President himself came down into Helmand Province and had a shura with their tribal leaders to explain what this was about and to get the support of the tribal leaders for sustaining the situation. Also in anticipation of both of these operations, there has been a quite significant information operation to send a very strong message into these communities about what these operations were about. Now, on the measures of success that are applied by assessing the level of resistance which these operations have faced, those information operations were successful because they persuaded the local people not to fight with the troops as they were deployed into the area, but at the end of the day this is not an exact science. We have to understand the very low base from which we are starting and that is what instructs of course the Chairman's first questions to me. It is a very low base from which we are starting and of course we will have some success and there will be regression from that point of success, but it is inevitable that that will be the case and, until we test the ability of the Afghan forces to be able to hold in this environment the areas that we have cleared, we will not know whether they are able to do it. We have got to be very careful that we do not over-extend them, so it is not an exact answer, Mr Hancock, to your question, but this is not an exact science.

Q306 Mr Holloway: Mr Bowen, we have a great plan, there is no doubt about that, the comprehensive approach is marvellous, but do you think we are delivering it?

Mr Bowen: From the perspective of the ordinary Afghan, which we do not talk about very often, I think we are increasingly delivering it. The efforts of the military followed by the efforts of the International Development Agency and the money of the International Development Department, some of which is spent by Royal Engineers deployed for that purpose, are, I think, delivering exactly the kind of comprehensive action that we seek. Has it been a slowish start? I would say yes, it probably has, but on the ground I think now we see the activity brought together of the military and civilian heads in Lashkar Gah as being something that is actively being pursued and actively being delivered.

Q307 Mr Holloway: So do you think your ordinary Afghan would think things were better this year than they were last?

Mr Bowen: I would say that there are some ordinary Afghans that would say that and there are an awful lot of ordinary Afghans in quite remote places that probably do not see that, and there will be some ordinary Afghans who see the rough end of some military activity, but the intention is there and indeed I think the message is beginning to get out, but maybe I should turn to my colleague, Lindy Cameron, who is actually delivering some of these projects.

Q308 Chairman: I am wondering whether we are getting slightly away from the subject and whether we will come back to this.

Des Browne: Might I just state one or two things. I do not have the qualification of being an ordinary Afghan, nor to my knowledge does Mr Bowen, but what we do is we measure, and consistently measure, the view of the people of Helmand Province through polling and that polling comes across my desk and overwhelmingly the majority of the people of southern Afghanistan welcome our presence and talk optimistically. You have to understand that these people have been through a number of changes in their lives; they have seen people come and go and they have lived in a number of brutal sets of circumstances. Until they see that we are there and can sustain the security, then they will not believe that they should be optimistic for themselves or for their children. I read, and I will not repeat it, General Richards' evidence to this Committee, but he went on, I thought, quite eloquently and at some length about how important it was for us to be able to show the people of southern Afghanistan that not only could we match the Taliban, but that we could sustain that position of security, and it does not take a genius to work out why that is the case because, if we cannot sustain that position, then when the Taliban come back they will punish them for the fact that we were there for a period of time. We know that, so I think it is early days to be saying whether Afghan people have made the decision about this. The polling suggests that they are still optimistic, that they support our presence, that they see improvements, but at the end of the day we will need to sustain this position for a period of time before they will come to the state of mind that we want them to.

Q309 Chairman: Secretary of State, do you make that polling public?

Des Browne: We do not, no.

Q310 Chairman: Why not?

Des Browne: I do not know the answer to that, Chairman. I will need to enquire about it. There may well be reasons to do with the security of the people that we poll.

Q311 Chairman: The attitudes of Afghan people?

Des Browne: Well, I think the reason that we do not make it public is that we have concerns about the security of the people who engage with us and the people that we ask to carry out this work for us. I will look at it.

Q312 Chairman: Could you, please.

Des Browne: I will do.

Q313 Chairman: Could we have copies of the polling, if you could consider that as well, please.

Des Browne: I will of course.

Q314 Robert Key: Chairman, I am very anxious that we should not be deluding ourselves on this question of polling because this Committee has been told in an earlier session that the polling that has been done is only amongst women and only in the safest and friendliest parts of the country. Therefore, I am pretty doubtful that we should take it too seriously. Can you comment on that? Am I right?

Des Browne: Certainly that is not right about the polling that I see. It could not possibly be in the safest parts of the country if it has been conducted in Helmand Province; that is axiomatic, it seems to me. I do not agree with that interpretation of the polling, but I do not hold the polling up as being the total answer. This is not an exact science and, as Mr Bowen has said and I agree with, of course there are violent acts taking place in some of these communities, but we should not kid ourselves that there were not violent acts taking place in some of these communities before we deployed into them. The Taliban's behaviour in some of these communities was absolutely brutal.

Q315 Mr Jenkins: Secretary of State, on 2 May the BBC reported maintenance problems with the Army's WIMIK, the armoured Land Rover used in Afghanistan. They reported that, due to maintenance problems and a shortage of spares, nearly a quarter of the fleet was not in working order. How would you respond to press reports about the availability of this vehicle?

Des Browne: The WIMIK Land Rover is a very important vehicle for us in Afghanistan and indeed those of you who have spoken to the people who use them will have been told that they value them very highly and that they think they are a very helpful piece of equipment. At any given time on operations, particularly operations in the sort of arduous environment that is southern Afghanistan, a proportion of our vehicles will be in need of maintenance, there is no question about that, and indeed that is why we deploy into theatre people to maintain vehicles because they need to be maintained and things break. It is not a failure of planning that things break, it is a function of operations and the very difficult environment if things break, so at any given time there will be a proportion of them that are in need of repair or are being repaired and in fact we deploy additional vehicles in order to mitigate that very set of circumstances. My understanding is that we expect for any given time about 20 per cent of our vehicles to be under repair. Currently, the figure is significantly lower than that and I do not recognise any time when a quarter of our vehicles were in need of repair. It was reported that that was the case, but I do not recognise that as being an accurate figure, that there were a quarter, but it may well have been that at one particular point there were 25 per cent not being serviced, and I cannot say, but I do not recognise that figure. Currently and throughout the time of deployment of these WIMIK vehicles to Afghanistan, my understanding is that the figure has been less than the 20 per cent that we plan for and repair at any time and I think it is a credit to our mechanics and the people that do the work there in very difficult circumstances who work very hard to keep these vehicles that they were able to achieve that. Can I also say that every other country that has equipment in this environment has the same problems. It is as if the fact that things break when you use them in very difficult terrain is a function of some decision of the MoD; it is not. It is a function of the fact that we are using the vehicles in very difficult terrain.

Q316 Mr Jenkins: I like your answer, Secretary of State, so far, but honestly when you have got vehicles operating in this type of environment, which is hot, dusty, awful, things break, things go wrong and what I want to know is whether our supply chain is adequate to make sure we have got the spares there to keep these things up and running so that it does not interfere with the operational capability of the force, and are you going to say, "Of course they are"?

Des Browne: If the information I have been given, and again the CJO looks at me as if he wants to supplement what I have to say and I am content that he should do so, but, if the information I am given is that we expect about 20 per cent of our vehicles to be under repair at any one time and that consistently the figure has been less than that, then that suggests that we are doing well in relation to getting the spares that are needed to repair them and the mechanics are doing an extraordinary job in very difficult circumstances to keep these vehicles going at a level that we had not planned we would be able to achieve.

Lieutenant General Houghton: That is just the point I was going to make. This particular BBC reporter, I have to say, caused the severe irritation of the Commander of the whole of the Task Force because he had not checked his facts, he had picked up some apocryphal stuff from some of the soldiers. The number of deployed we mix in theatre is 140 and we would go to the envelope of perhaps a 20 per cent margin for first-line repair, but as of today 120 are available and that is 86 per cent availability and we have been nowhere close to that 25 per cent mark, again supporting the fact that there are sufficient both first-line vehicle mechanics and spares in the system to keep us well up to our desired operational availability level.

Q317 Mr Jenkin: There is no doubt that these vehicles are getting an absolute pasting in that environment and of course, as our military operations become more manoeuvrable in character, that mobility becomes more important and, therefore, they are getting even more of a pasting. While we were out there, the guys were certainly looking forward to having the next generation of vehicles. Can you confirm that that is actually going to happen and it is going to happen in good time and can you give us any other information about what we might be deploying in order to make sure that that mobility component is maintained?

Lieutenant General Houghton: I think currently the maintenance thing, as I say, is not a concern against availability of the in-theatre equipment. There is a plan to roll out, as it were, the next generation of WIMIK and, without going into the detail, we have changed the roll-out profile, but actually the full roll-out of the additional vehicles, the changing profile, gets us to the fully deployed state quicker than we had previously thought. The enhancements in respect of the Warriors, they will be out in their anticipated time-line of September, the Mastiff, that is there again in its anticipated roll-out, the figures there being 166 deployed, 132 available, again just within the tolerances. Therefore, there is nothing on the protected vehicle mobility side at the moment that gives us any cause for concern, but of course it is always a dynamic battle between technical developments on the enemy side and our own to make certain that we maintain the technological edge, which is why we have specific teams deployed that look at the specific capabilities requirements against the emerging threat because there might be a requirement through the UOR system to rush further elements of protected mobility into theatre.

Q318 Mr Jenkin: I am thinking in particular about enhanced WIMIK. It has a new name, I wrote it down and I cannot find it.

Lieutenant General Houghton: E-WIMIK?

Q319 Mr Jenkin: Menacity?

Lieutenant General Houghton: Yes, there is a WIMIK and an E-WIMIK and the E-WIMIK relates to the quality of armour on the floor and the radio fitting. Then Menacity, if you like, is a WIMIK and, remember, 'WIMIK' is no more than an abbreviation for "weaponry mounted installation kit", but mounted on a Pinzgauer rather than a Land Rover. Indeed, it is the deployment of the Menacity rather than further enhanced WIMIKs which alters the profile of the deployment, but gets the full requirement of vehicles there more quickly than was going to be the case with the enhanced WIMIK.

Q320 Mr Jenkin: And that is happening?

Lieutenant General Houghton: That is happening.

Q321 Chairman: When will the Mastiff deployment be complete?

Lieutenant General Houghton: I have not got a firm date, but there has been no change. It is the late autumn, which is, I think, what I gave last time and, as far as we are aware, there is no change to that.

Q322 Chairman: So there has been no delay?

Lieutenant General Houghton: No delay that I am aware of.

Q323 Mr Borrow: There have been a number of suggestions made to the Committee, including by General Richards and President Karzai, that the effectiveness of military operations would be improved if the length of the tours were increased or at least as far as the senior officers were concerned, if they were there for a longer period of time. I wonder how you respond to the suggestion that senior officers should be there for periods in excess of six months?

Des Browne: Well, I agree with them, that there is advantage in relation to certain posts to have people there for longer than six months. Of course, again as General Richards told you, that has consequences for the families of those who may be asked to stay in post for longer. General Richards himself did nine months in post precisely for the reasons that he and President Karzai believe would come as a benefit to operations from extended periods like that about continuity, building relationships and all the things that are important for the people at that senior level. Major-General Page, who will take over as the Commander for Regional Command South, will serve nine months. Whether we take this further and apply it to other posts of course will depend on the job involved, but I have no objection in principle, but the only other point I make is of course that we are operating in a multi-national environment and the length of tours of commanding officers, particularly where they are commanding troops from another country, is a matter for negotiation and discussion with our NATO partners and others who are deployed in the area, and we have to take into account the views of other countries as well as the views, with all due respect, of General Richards and President Karzai and the other people who get a vote in this particular discussion. I agree with them and I think there is something to be said for extending the tours of important people at a particular stage at this stage in the command.

Q324 Mr Borrow: Do you consider it was worth exploring the possibility of extending ISAF XI and XII to periods of in excess of one year?

Des Browne: I am not sure what would be gained by extending the periods of ISAF. There are ongoing discussions all the time about the terms of service of senior officers and, as I say, they are discussed at a fairly senior level between the Chiefs of the Defence Staff all the time. What has emerged from that which has affected our officers is that both General Richards and General Page will be extended to nine months, or they have been and will be extended to nine months.

Q325 Mr Hancock: In the summer of last year, ISAF's assessment of the Taliban's capability and tactics seems to have been somewhat unreliable and we were getting conflicting information about the reliability of our intelligence. How can we be sure that the current assessments we are getting are more accurate?

Des Browne: Intelligence is just what it says it is; it is information which is gathered. I think we are in danger of getting into the situation where we put more of a burden on the people who collect this information and on the information than they are entitled to bear. Intelligence can only guide us and we have to make our best assessment on the basis of the information that we glean from a number of sources. Why do we think we are better in a position to come to more accurate conclusions? Well, we have a year of experience in the environment, we have a year of experience of observing the enemy, of collecting information from engagement with them, observing their tactics, learning from logistic lines their lines of communication and also from building up the sorts of sources that we would normally use for intelligence purposes in that environment, so we are better placed from that year's experience to come to conclusions than we were when we had not been in that environment before and were relying solely on intelligence that had been gleaned from a comparatively small number of sources.

Q326 Mr Hancock: When the Committee were in Afghanistan, they heard conflicting interpretations of the purpose of the agreement in Musa Qalah, and General Richards acknowledged that there were shortcomings in the way that the agreement was explained to the Afghans. What steps have been taken to improve the way ISAF gets its message and its role, its specific role, across to the Afghans at all levels?

Des Browne: As far as the Musa Qalah agreement is concerned, it is not just the Afghan people who, in my view, misunderstand the Musa Qalah agreement. I read over the weekend a very interesting report by Amnesty International on the violence of the Taliban and breaches of human rights by the Taliban, and no doubt members of the Committee have read that report. At the heart of that report there is an assertion that we, the UK Government or our Commanding Officer, negotiated the Musa Qalah agreement with the tribal elders of Musa Qalah. The fact of the matter is that that is not true. It was gleaned from media reports of that agreement back here in the United Kingdom where the footnotes indicate where that came from, as indeed almost every assertion that is made in the report has a footnote that depends on the media somewhere or another, but that is not the case. The fact of the matter is that the Musa Qalah agreement was an Afghan agreement. It was an agreement by the Governor of Helmand with the tribal elders which was endorsed by the President himself and, in those circumstances, it was an Afghan agreement that we respected and which we thought had potential for a template for moving forward if the tribal elders were able to exclude the Taliban from their area and allow the Governor's writ to run in the area. We thought that was far better than having to fight in these communities and we were supportive of it, but it was an Afghan agreement.

Q327 Mr Hancock: But the President himself ----

Des Browne: Let me just answer the second part of your question, Mr Hancock, which is that the only way in which we can ensure that the people of these communities know and understand what is going on is by encouraging and improving communication between their Government both at central and at provincial level and the people who represent them, the tribal elders, and, as I have already explained, we were very successful, it would appear, in doing that in relation to Op Silver and Op Silicon by using in one case the President and a shura and then the other the Governor himself sitting down with the tribal elders and explaining to them what is going on, and that is what we continually try to do. Over and above that, of course we have, as ISAF, the opportunity to put out messages on the radio or to put out messages through local media, and we do that, but the fundamental is if their own people who lead the communities know and understand what is going on and explain it to them, then that is the most successful. This is substantially an environment where word of mouth dominates this area.

Q328 Mr Hancock: But do you feel that there is a problem yourself and is the advice that you are giving that there is a failure to explain properly? The Committee were told by the President himself and indeed by General McNeill that they had real reservations about the way this agreement had been put together. Now, it is an Afghan agreement, but the President raised with this Committee very strongly held reservations and said that he doubted whether he would sanction such an agreement again. Are you personally concerned on the advice you are getting that the real message of what we are actually doing there is not getting across at all levels? I do not want to talk about ordinary Afghans. If you have the situation where the President and the Afghan farmer have doubts about why we are there, then are we sure that we are actually telling people why we are there?

Des Browne: Well, just like in this community or this society, mostly when people are commenting on things that have happened, then they are not motiveless. Helmand Province is a very challenging environment, not just physically in terms of its terrain, its weather patterns and its poverty, but the Taliban operate in there and these people are capable of propaganda in a way that would be unthinkable to us. They can do things which we would never contemplate doing. First of all, they lie comprehensively, they lie with violence and they intimidate and they use night letters and other ways of getting their messages into the community, and it is very difficult for us with the constraints that we have and the way in which we can approach these issues, quite proper constraints, to be able to face that sort of intimidation and propaganda down. It is not surprising in these communities that people who are having a message delivered to them quite often with an overt or implied threat are more impressed by that message than they are by the carefully delivered message which is designed to try and encourage them to stand up against that. It is also not surprising to me that sometimes people are selective in their recollection of exactly how certain circumstances come about if they are not as successful as they think they may be. What I am satisfied of is that we are doing the very best in very difficult circumstances, but our whole objective is to build up the ability of the Afghan Government to be able to engage with its people and give them the reassurance that they need because that is what we are about because building governance is a key element of this and our ability to be able to do that depends on how good the messages are that we are given by the Afghan Government as well, but I am satisfied that we are doing as well as we can, but that does not mean that we will not improve in doing it. The longer we are in there, the better we will get at doing it.

Q329 Robert Key: Chairman, some people have suggested to us Secretary of State that there is a real need to improve the number and performance of political advisers to the military. How many political advisers are there in Helmand, should or could there be more and what is the role of the political adviser to the military?

Des Browne: I do not know the answer to the specific question about numbers, I am sorry, though maybe somebody at this table knows the specific answer, but we can get that for you. To be honest, Mr Key, in four visits this year to Afghanistan, nobody has ever raised this issue with me about the number of political advisers, so that is the reason why I have had no reason to ask anybody how many there actually are. I meet people who do that job and I know they are valued very highly by the people they work with. Their role is to do exactly, with respect, what it says on the tin and that is to advise the military about the political environment that they are operating in, to be au fait with it, its complications, and to make sure that they know and understand those complications, but, I have to say, my sense of the military officers that I have met at that level who have political advisers is that they are very alert and very aware of the political circumstances that they operate in in any event and that they tend to complement each other and advise each other, and I have seen a lot of relationships between political advisers and senior military officers which were very supportive of each other.

Q330 Robert Key: Which I think, Secretary of State, underlines my point that they are clearly very useful.

Des Browne: They are.

Q331 Robert Key: They clearly have great potential and what I am saying is that, if people are saying to people like me, "We need more of them", perhaps that is something that might be considered to help the environment.

Des Browne: It is certainly something that we will now go and look at. I have to say, nobody has ever said to me that they need more advice at this level, but, if they do need more of them, there is no reason why we should not look to see if we cannot provide more of them to them to support them. There are over and above of course political advisers that are FCO civil servants in Helmand who also have the ability and capability to be able to analyse the politics and there are people who work for DFID as well who have these skills. I was not aware that there was a shortage of these skills, but I am certainly prepared to go and look at it.

Q332 Chairman: Secretary of State, may I move on to the fulfilling of ISAF's requirements? We have heard about the CJSOR, the Combined Joint Statement of Requirements, and we have heard that last year it was not satisfied in that there was no strategic reserve and that the summit in Riga moved towards fulfilling some of it but still some of it remains unfulfilled. Are you disappointed by NATO's apparent inability to meet the requirements of the CJSOR?

Des Browne: Can I just say, Chairman, that it would be better in my view if the requirements of the CJSOR had been met but, as you point out, this is fundamentally a question for NATO. Consistently we have, as the United Kingdom, put our money where our mouth is and we have supported this mission well, as have a number of other nations, and I continue to press others to identify and deploy resources that will move towards the fulfilment of the CJSOR. I learned today, and I did not know this but I share this with the Committee, that nobody in our department has any knowledge of any NATO CJSOR for any operation ever being fully fulfilled. I am going to have it checked to make sure that it is exactly right, but I am told that it is quite common for NATO CJSORs not to be fully fulfilled.

Q333 Chairman: What does that say about NATO?

Des Browne: The only thing I can say it says about NATO is that the NATO countries have never been able to fulfil the statement of requirements. I am not in a position to go into the motivation of the individual countries in relation to all of the operations but as far as this CJSOR is concerned this ISAF Commander has significantly more resource available to him than General Richards had, but essentially he asked for seven additional battle groups and ----

Q334 Chairman: I thought it was eight.

Des Browne: I think it was seven.

Q335 Chairman: And he has got six.

Des Browne: He has been given five. I think the two that are missing are the border one and the Nimruz (?) battle group.

Q336 Chairman: But that is quite an important battalion, is it not, to go onto the border of Pakistan?

Des Browne: Well, yes, although we did discuss this the last time I gave evidence to this Committee and it does not necessarily mean that the Commander of ISAF will not be able to deploy resources into that area. If that is a priority for him then he could, of course, deploy resources into that area.

Q337 Chairman: At the expense of something else?

Des Browne: I make two points. One, the theatre reserve has been deployed as instructed to northern Helmand, as we have already discussed in this evidence session, and, secondly, the Afghan Special Narcotics Force, the ASNF, has been deployed into the border area and was there for a period up until about the end of March shortly before I went to Afghanistan myself, and was very effective in working in a manoeuvre fashion in that area and detecting the communication and supply chains of the Taliban, so it does not mean that the work is not getting done and I believe there are plans at some time in the future to deploy them there again in a tactical way. It just means that the Commander does not have a force that specifically fulfils that requirement of the CJSOR.

Q338 Chairman: But in the end it costs NATO, does it not, not to fulfil the CJSOR because they are under-equipped and under-manned to do the job that NATO themselves have assessed needs to be done?

Des Browne: They certainly are the latter, under-manned against what NATO assessed needed to be done. The question as to whether or not there is a cost depends on what actually happens. That is the discussion we had the last time. I am not in a position to anticipate exactly what the challenges will be and what General McNeill will require. I know that retrospectively General Richards was able to go into some detail as to what he would have been able to do additionally had he had that reserve, how he would have been able to deploy that reserve in the aftermath of Medusa, for example, but I do not think I can anticipate what General McNeill may or may not do. I just make the point to the Committee, as I did before, that it does not mean there is no manoeuvre capability for that important area. If the General decides that needs to be done then it can be done, and indeed it has been done by the deployment of the Afghan Special Narcotics Force.

Q339 Willie Rennie: I am quite surprised at the relaxed approach that we seem to be taking to the constant under-manning or under-committing of the NATO countries. Is there a kind of overbidding by commanders in the knowledge that these requirements will never be met, so that at the end of the day they always get what they want? Is there a little game being played here?

Des Browne: No, it is not my sense of the way the process goes forward. The process is an iterative process and there are discussions that take place about it before the CJSOR is finally settled. I do not have any sense that there is overbidding. I just share that fact with the Committee today because in preparation for this meeting I was advised quite casually by somebody who had more extensive knowledge in terms of time in the department than I have. I am going to go back and check that it is accurate. I am not suggesting it is not true. The source that told me suggested it was true but I have not had a chance to verify it. I am not casual at all about this. I spend a lot of my time engaged with defence ministers from other governments encouraging them to provide additional resources to the collective NATO commitment, and indeed we ourselves have taken some steps to fulfil the demands of the CJSOR. We have also, recognising the challenge that lies there in the border area where we supported the deployment of the Special Narcotics Force into that area for that very purpose, taken some operational steps to tackle the problems posed by the border areas, such as the provision of additional ISTAR as part of our next roulement in order to get some visibility of what is going on in that area.

Q340 Mr Hancock: Are you surprised on this occasion that we have to pick up the slack which NATO countries who are not picking it up committed to when they agreed to the way in which this deployment was going to operate? There has to be a time when the likes of the UK Government have to make this point, does there not?

Des Browne: I just say to Mr Hancock that surprise and disappointment would be luxuries in my job. I get on with the job.

Q341 Mr Hancock: Well, angry then.

Des Browne: Even anger. The fact of the matter is that we have made a commitment.

Q342 Mr Hancock: And we are keeping to it.

Des Browne: It is of the nature of our commitment and our expectation in that context that we will live up to that commitment. We do live up to that commitment and I spend, as I say, a lot of my time encouraging others to live up to the collective commitment.

Q343 Chairman: Secretary of State, would a bit of anger not be a good thing here? You implied a few moments ago that General Richards was looking back at things retrospectively, I think you said, as though he regretted in hindsight the absence of a strategic reserve, but it was not in hindsight. It was in foresight that the ISAF requirement included a strategic reserve and it was not fulfilled. Is it not time for you to begin to get extremely angry rather than for you to accept this as part of the things that go with the job?

Des Browne: Can I just say to you, Chairman, that first of all the example of General Richards' evidence and the retrospectivity of that was designed to support my explanation to you that I was not in a position to anticipate exactly what General McNeill would want to do that he could not do and I am not aware today of General McNeill wanting to do anything that he could not do. I point out quite specifically to the Committee that he has deployed the theatre reserve but to northern Helmand and not to the border area. I am not aware that General McNeill is unable to do anything that he would want to do tactically in relation to the delivery of the operational plan in the absence of the CJSOR having been fulfilled.

Q344 Chairman: I thought they were two entirely separate roles. There is the theatre reserve and there is the battalion to be deployed along the border.

Des Browne: Absolutely, but the point I was making and made before was that the fact that a battalion was to be deployed along the border as part of the CJSOR does not necessarily mean that once it is deployed that is what the General will do with it.

Chairman: I accept that.

Q345 Mr Hancock: Yes, but he wanted it there for counter-narcotics and to stop arms and infiltration coming across the border, so if they are not there nobody is stopping it.

Des Browne: I have given evidence to this effect, that we have been able to deploy forces to do that by use of the Afghan Special Narcotics Force and we will be able to do that again. I do make that point forcefully in NATO meetings and to our NATO colleagues. I do not want to get into a debate about anger, disappointment and whatever these mean to people.

Q346 Mr Jenkins: Secretary of State, you have my sympathy on this issue. The problem is, of course, that within NATO if you do not make a commitment no cost falls on your Treasury so you are in effect a freeloader on the organisation and we all know it is very difficult to change the rationale of freeloaders, but surely the time has come for us to say, "If you are not prepared to make a military commitment we are asking you to make a financial commitment so that some of the facilities we need can be put in place", like a good, reliable airbridge. That is what we need to do: put moral pressure on these countries, so that if they have not got the will to fight at least they can have the will to pay so that the facilities are there to enable other states to fight on behalf of NATO.

Des Browne: We certainly have been encouraging countries which might not be able to make the contribution that fulfils a part of the CJSOR to make other additional contributions to the effort. A number of countries are making substantial contributions to the effort across Afghanistan. We should not forget that there are contributions being made and it is as important to sustain the progress that has been made in the north and west of the country as it is to try and bring that progress to the south and the east, and I think we need to be careful sometimes not to devalue the efforts people make and that there are risks associated with the deployments to some of these other parts of Afghanistan as well.

Q347 Mr Havard: Moving on to counter-narcotics, we have had some figures given to us that in 2006 165,000 hectares were used for opium cultivation, that the resulting harvest of 6,100 tonnes represented 92 per cent of the world supply and that only six of the provinces are opium-free and so on, so the numbers look extremely stark and very bad. We have also seen this report in The Independent on Sunday at the beginning of April about there therefore being some sort of revision of government policy in relation to this and that the Prime Minister might be minded to change his attitude towards the strategy and buy some of the crop or possibly legalise it and change the strategy. Could you make some comment about that?

Des Browne: I have talked about this and answered questions about it on a number of occasions, including, I think, in front of this Committee and in the House of Commons. If I thought that buying the crop would solve the problem I would be first in the queue to persuade people to do that. My view is, and I think this is a view shared by most people who know and understand the environment of Afghanistan, that proposing to buy the crop currently would double the crop. There is not the infrastructure in place to ensure that we would be buying anything other than what was grown to be bought by the Government. I do not know exactly how much of the land that can grow poppy is used in Afghanistan but it is somewhat less than ten per cent. There are plenty of other places in Afghanistan where poppy can be grown and it grows very easily. Attractive as this idea is, and there are acres of print written about this and about how much of a challenge the chemical companies are facing in trying to get opium for medicinal purposes, I know and understand all of that but if we start doing this in my view in Afghanistan at the moment it will be grown for us but it will also be grown for opium to feed into the heroin market.

Q348 Mr Havard: When we were in Afghanistan the last time a few weeks ago there did seem to be some confusion, and I have to admit there was some confusion in my mind, about exactly what was happening in terms of eradication and how that was playing out on the ground. Subsequently we have had a memo from Mr Holland which is quite useful because one of the things he talks about is the criteria he has deployed before any attempt at eradication in given circumstances is conducted. I say this because, as you will know, when we met Brigadier Lorimer his troops were putting out leaflets saying, "Look: we do not do this. We do not do eradication". However, eradication was going on in the area and we were concerned about the confusion as to why it appears as though we do not do eradication but maybe elements of the Afghan army, with whom we are also associated, are involved in eradication activities. Can you possibly make some comment about exactly what the strategic view is of the eradication policy, particularly in relation to its relationship to British forces who are possibly in a situation where Afghans themselves might be confused as to exactly what their role might be?

Des Browne: You are looking at both me and Mr Holland.

Q349 Mr Havard: I think it crosses all elements.

Des Browne: Why do I not say something first and then I will hand over to Mr Holland? I do not believe there is any confusion over the policy but there is a debate about the difficulties of implementation in the difficult southern and eastern regions. I do not think that should come as any surprise because, as I repeatedly say, this is a very difficult environment. No aspect of our policy in relation to Helmand or the southern part of Afghanistan is straightforward when we try to apply it on the ground, whether it be reconstruction, counter-narcotics or even security. It is not straightforward and we have to take into account the local circumstances. Most of this debate about narcotics focuses on either counting hectares and production or counting hectares that have been eradicated. I have said before that I think that is an unhelpful concentration on a particular part of a very complex policy that involves trying to build up an environment in terms of a justice system, in terms of policing, in terms of reconstruction, development and alternative livelihoods that allows us then to move on, and it is a long term challenge, like most of the other challenges we face. Specifically on eradication, I have spoken at some length to the governors of southern provinces and they are absolutely persuaded that eradication has a place in this overall policy. The place they believe it has in the overall policy is that we should use the threat of it to prevent people from planting in the first place and in order to ensure that that threat is deemed to be real at the time of planting there has to be some eradication takes place. Doing that through the Afghans is difficult in this environment. There are effectively two methods of eradication. There is a national force known as the Afghan Eradication Force, which comes into a province and carries out eradication, and then there is governor-led eradication. The ability to do the latter is a function of the extent to which the writ of the governor runs in the areas where the poppy is being grown and that has proved to be a challenge in Helmand province. As far as ISAF is concerned our policy is clear. ISAF do not conduct eradication but that does not mean we do not make a contribution to the security environment in which eradication can take place. That is generally, as I understand it, the policy. The application of it, however, is challenging. It has proved to be challenging this year and no doubt at the end of the day when it comes to these simple counts people will come to conclusions but we have to look at the effect our policy has had across the whole of Afghanistan, and increasingly there are parts of Afghanistan where there is no poppy being grown at all. There are provinces that are poppy-free and that is because we have been able to generate the greater environment that allows that to take place.

Mr Holland: Eradication is, of course, only one element of the strategy as a whole and its is exactly as the Secretary of State has described. It is there to put risk in to farmers where they already have alternative choices and they have a diversified economy so they can grow something else. We do have some evidence that it is a pretty crucial factor in persuading farmers in that sort of circumstance to change and move away from growing opium poppy. That is very much the purpose of these criteria, particularly where we assist in terms of the eradication effort. We support the Afghan Government in terms of identifying those areas which are more likely to have choices in terms of livelihood. Specifically in Helmand we did some work with the Afghan Government in terms of identifying specifically which were going to be the wealthiest areas in the province. Lindy Cameron might be able to expand on that.

Ms Cameron: Helmand is one of the areas that we are least worried about having effective target areas where people do have alternative livelihoods because, as those of you who have been to Helmand will know, when you fly over Nadali, for example, which is the irrigated area to the north of Lashkar Gar, you will see that it is an incredibly fertile area. The Helmand river valley means that people can grow almost anything they want to there, so in Helmand in particular we are quite confident that extensive parts of the river valley are within what we think is an area where people have choices about what they can grow. It is less the case in some of the more difficult rural areas in the north.

Q350 Mr Havard: But with regard to an eradication policy in that particular area there is obviously a tension between the governor-led policies and the ones that have come out from national governments and the co-ordination of all of these different things. As I understand it, the American firm Dyncorp are the people who are paid effectively by the national Afghan Government from the US subvention in order to employ people to carry out the activity; is that right? Do they do both the governor-led strategy as well as the national-led one?

Mr Holland: No. Dyncorp are the contractors who provide support to the Afghan Eradication Force, which is the central force, so they are doing the central force, not the governors.

Q351 Mr Havard: And they would be, if you like, given some sort of protection in an overall sense by the general security by ISAF forces and the national police and anyone else in the area?

Mr Holland: They firstly provide their own protection within the force. The Afghan Eradication Force is part of the Afghan National Police. It is one of the police forces, so it comes with its own protection but it will use local Afghan national police forces as well.

Q352 Mr Havard: So how does the governor-promoted strategy work that is different from that?

Mr Holland: In Helmand specifically the vast majority of eradication was central force eradication because that is where it was. In other provinces the governors will use their own police forces to do local eradication.

Q353 Mr Havard: Given that we are the G8 lead for the issue of narcotics and drugs, full stop, across the whole of the country, what are your projections for making progress given that Helmand ought to be somewhere where alternative livelihoods ought to be possible? What is the prognosis?

Mr Holland: This year overall you are unlikely to see much change in terms of overall cultivation across the country.

Q354 Mr Havard: It is a bumper crop because the weather helped.

Mr Holland: Yes, that is likely to be the case, absolutely. I think there are going to be differences though across the country. It does appear that essentially the trends from last year are continuing, that in the north and the central provinces you will see increasingly cultivation coming down, so there may be an increased number of poppy-free provinces in those areas. There was a reconnaissance, for example, yesterday up to Badakhshan, which was the third biggest cultivator last year, to assess what could be eradicated and they could find very little poppy at all up there, but in the south you are likely to see again pretty high levels of cultivation.

Q355 Robert Key: Why has there been so much disagreement between the United States and the United Kingdom on narcotics policy?

Mr Holland: I do not think there has been disagreement between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Q356 Robert Key: Oh, please, Chairman.

Mr Holland: We work very closely with the United States on counter-narcotics. I have been doing a series of presentations with my counterpart from the State Department to NATO recently on this. We are agreed absolutely on the need for a national drug control strategy, the need for the range of pillars that the drug control strategy has. It has to cut across all elements of that. We do work very closely together.

Q357 Robert Key: But there have been well reported occurrences of briefing against the United Kingdom by the United States in Afghanistan. You must have heard of that.

Des Browne: Can I just say, Mr Key, that I meet regularly with the Secretary for Defense, Mr Gates, and we discuss this, among other things, and we do not disagree with each other. The heart of this issue in relation to eradication is that we both recognise that this is an Afghan-led process and at the end of the day President Karzai takes responsibility for it. I cannot be responsible for what other people may brief or report as having been briefed. I can just tell you that at the highest level in terms of my discussions with the Secretary for Defense of the United States there is no difference between us in relation to the appropriate policy for narcotics.

Q358 Mr Holloway: General, some of your officers say that our policy on narcotics is conflicting. Some say it is insane because it fuels insurgency. We are currently the G8 lead on drugs. Would this great lead that we are giving be different if the Americans were not determined to see eradication, if we had a free rein?

Lieutenant General Houghton: I do not know about the business of a free rein but as for the business about certain British officers saying that the drug policy is insane, again, I think that probably relates to a tactical view on the degree to which in a localised sense poorly targeted eradication is anathema to consensus within the local population. From a localised tactical view that may very well be the case, but, as I argued last time I gave evidence, that is not to say that properly applied eradication, properly targeted does not need to be done, and indeed is an essential part of an overall counter-narcotic strategy. What can appear like local lunacy from a tactical point of view in respect of local consent does not necessarily mean that it would be at odds if the targeting was correct. That is what I think Peter Holland said. It is the implementation of the policy which is difficult. One of the things that I think this year went wrong with the eradication and the Afghan Eradication Force was that at the local level some of that targeting was subject to localised abuse and corruption which made it anathema to consent locally. There is this dichotomy. Eradication is absolutely properly a part of a properly worked out strategy but in the implementation of it within a society in which there is localised corruption, where the business of local land ownership is quite complex, there will be occasions at a tactical level where eradication is done against the wrong people with an unfortunate security result.

Q359 Linda Gilroy: The answer that you have just given may be part of the answer to my question, which is this. Am I right in thinking that in some of the provinces where there have been governor-led programmes it has been done in such a way as to target, say, 50 per cent of the crop so that it introduces the element of risk that you talked about, it reduces the income that the farmer can get from it and therefore introduces the level at which they will make other choices about what other alternative livelihoods they will get? Is that true and is there any way in which that approach is capable of being introduced into Helmand at this stage, where you very selectively target a farm and part of a crop?

Mr Holland: The implementation of eradication varies across the country. In some provinces some governors have done it significantly better than others, and you are right, there are certainly lessons in terms of the ways that those governors have done that. This is absolutely a question that we are looking hard at. Is it possible to target very specific landowners, the biggest landowners, for example, who are exactly the people that you would want to target? It is difficult because the information that is available, the availability of land records, is again pretty patchy but that is exactly the kind of thing we are trying to look at, obviously not for this season but for next year.

Q360 Mr Havard: I just want to make the point that what you say in your memo is that there is no evidence to suggest that the resistance met by the centrally directed Afghan Eradication Force came as a result of them being mistaken for ISAF forces. This question about confusion between the eradicators and the ISAF forces which might have this tactical consequence locally in relation to consent you say is not present in Helmand.

Mr Holland: From the Eradication Force perspective the resistance that they came across was because they were coming to eradicate. There was not confusion that they were ISAF. It was that these were the eradication forces that had come out. The issue that is more difficult to know is how does that then affect the whole security environment, and obviously the question of consent, but they were not directly attacked because they were ISAF.

Q361 Robert Key: Secretary of State, we have been told that since the 2005 counter-narcotics law was introduced there has grown up a parallel judicial system in the country with parallel judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police, investigators, even prisons in this parallel judicial system which has led to it being extremely ineffective. It has even been suggested that a mark of bravado is that you have been for a fortnight in one of these special prisons and it marks you out as someone who has done something special. Would it not be better if we did not have a parallel judicial system dealing with narcotics but that it was all dealt with under a single system?

Des Browne: I do not think it is true that there is this parallel system, although I do observe that there are drugs courts in Glasgow. The point I make is that all over the world where there are specific challenges generated by organised crime or by specific problems such as drug abuse or use it is not uncommon for the judicial system to recognise that the particular specialities of these challenges require people to be put together into task forces or special courts to be identified for them. Indeed, we had for many years a special jurisdiction in Northern Ireland to accommodate a type of criminality there which generated in that community a degree of intimidation that meant that the normal processes of the law could not be applied. It is not uncommon for sophisticated and developed countries to recognise that the criminal justice system creates special circumstances for dealing with particular types of activity, particularly when it is organised and done by people who are particularly affected. I just make that point as an opening remark. There is a counter-narcotics tribunal which is the judicial element of the criminal justice task force which deals with counter-narcotics cases. It is particularly constituted as part of the Kabul court and it is part of the Afghan criminal justice system. I think this is nothing other than a recognition of the uniquely serious challenge that narcotics pose for society in Afghanistan, but more importantly for the ability of the system of justice to be able to deal with immensely wealthy and powerful people who, if we do not make special provision to develop the skills and secure the safety of the people who are involved in that, will use their wealth and their power in a fashion which will be designed to undermine the administration of justice. Why is that important? Because at the end of the day much more important than anything we do militarily, or indeed anything we do economically, is our ability to make the rule of law run in this country where for decades, because of the violence in it, people behaved with an impunity that allowed them to intimidate and murder at will the ordinary people of Afghanistan. It is important for us, through the Afghan Government, to be able to say that the rule of law runs and that even the most powerful people can be taken on. Have we been able to do that? They have been able to convict 350 drug dealers. Have they been the top people? Disproportionately not. They have taken a number of the top people but this is a balance and for the people in the ordinary communities it is much more important that the people who immediately prey on them are being convicted and going to jail than the people at the very top. Getting the people at the very top is an objective but we need to be realistic about what we can achieve. Contrary to the gloss that people put on this and have done to date, I would say that this is a sign of progress. We have not got enough of the significant people but as we build the capability and the confidence of this system to take them on we will get more of them.

Q362 Mr Jenkin: Secretary of State, can I just tell you that we encountered, I would say, widespread despair about the Italian lead on justice reform. Do you have confidence in the progress of justice reform in Afghanistan?

Des Browne: I sometimes think people think this is because I am a lawyer but I think the most important thing that we can do in any environment like this where we are trying to build a nation or help people come out of conflict is to establish their justice system. I think it sets the framework for the police force. You can build an army because the army serves the state but if you want police officers to serve the community they need to do it within the structure of the rule of law. I think we have not done enough in terms of building that element of our reconstruction of the state and need to do more. I am hopeful that we will see progress coming over the summer and part of the engagement of the ESDP, of the EU, in this in my view generates a hope and a possibility that we will be able to build on that. This is a country which has had decades of people behaving with impunity and brutalising the people of the country. It is a very difficult challenge.

Q363 Chairman: More like millennia, I suspect.

Des Browne: It may well be. Making use of the challenge is very difficult. These people who are bad people in Afghanistan are used to exercising their power with a degree of violence that would make most people shudder.

Q364 Mr Jenkin: I would say that overall the Committee was impressed by the huge international effort across all lines of operation to try and bring the country round but there was a general concern that the different lines of operation were not sufficiently co-ordinated. We were very impressed with the PRT in the way that DFID, USAID, FCO and the military operations were being effectively co-ordinated on the ground, but I have to say it was more by the determination of those individuals than because of the strategic framework within which they are operating. I wonder if I could draw your attention, Secretary of State, to a chart which is about to be placed in front of you which was presented to me at a briefing in Shrivenham last month by a lecturer who had better remain nameless, which underlines the complexity of multinational, multi-agency, multi-departmental operations of this nature. I wonder what we are learning from this as we try and apply the comprehensive approach. Do you feel that DFID and the Ministry of Defence and the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, incidentally a box that is not on this chart and perhaps should be, are having a strategic effect or are we simply dependent upon the brilliance of the people we met on the ground to make it work on the ground, because that is far too complicated, is it not?

Des Browne: Of course it is far too complicated. I have to be careful that I do not add to it because I do not think it is comprehensive. We have made lot of progress in the last year since we deployed into Afghanistan. We have learned a lot. I do not think it is accidental that when you visited you saw progress or were impressed by what people were doing. What these people are doing on the ground is a consequence of their own skills and abilities and I never underplay that, but also of strategic decisions that have been made, recognising some of the difficulties. Strategic decisions have been made back here in London but there is still a challenge. The fundamental challenge lies in the ability to get at the proper strategic level, that is, at the national level in Afghanistan, a strategic overall campaign plan which is not an aggregate of every single country which has an interest in this, in other words bilateral interests. There is, of course, the United Nations Special Representative there and I look to that part of the infrastructure to provide the leadership for that campaign plan on the ground. It is in the context of that campaign plan that we should be doing what we are doing in Helmand province. Our ability to reduce this spaghetti to something more manageable is a challenge for us in Whitehall and that is a challenge which I believe we are accepting and seeking to deal with and operating better at a strategic level, although not perfectly. Your own visit and my visit were followed by a visit to the theatre by the three Permanent Under-Secretaries of the three departments involved, the FCO, DFID and my own department, and seeing for themselves on the ground in the way in which it operates what needs to be done and have come back energised, I can tell you, to reduce some of this unnecessary complexity. There are challenges and I do not move away from them, but at the strategic level we are addressing them and addressing them successfully, which is now reflected in the improvement that there has been on the ground. At the end of the day, however, the real strategic challenge is to find a campaign plan and a leadership for that campaign plan in Afghanistan that works closely with the Afghan Government in an appropriate way to set the framework for what we are doing in Helmand province because quite a lot of our decisions, as this points out, are centralised and decisions are made in Kabul.

Q365 Mr Jenkin: Can I put this to Lindy Cameron as a follow-up? The reality on the ground is that the aid is following the military plan because that is the only way you can win a counter-insurgency war, if the success of security is rapidly followed by quick impact projects. We heard the American USAID chap announce that $4 million had been added to the Make Work programmes in Lashkar Gar that day we were there, which is very important. Does DFID accept the principle of military leadership, of quick impact projects and aid programmes at the cutting edge of a counter-insurgency campaign? Is that not an absolutely essential part of winning Afghanistan for the people of Afghanistan?

Ms Cameron: I think DFID completely accepts the comprehensive approach, which means that basically we are all in this together working at the same time in a co-ordinated fashion in Helmand and in Kabul. That is why we transferred £4 million of our funding last year to the GCPF (Global Conflict Prevention Fund) so that they could manage it as a single sort of funding, not as DFID money but as cross-government QIP funding managed by the HEG, the Helmand Executive Group, and the PRT, which has one of my representatives on it but also has a representative of the Foreign Office, of the PCRU, as well. We completely accept that there has to be a comprehensive approach. I should point out that in Kabul the comprehensive approach is probably at least as important with the other international agencies as it is within the UK because, obviously, we have to look at this as a whole Afghanistan operation with all of the key partners who provide the rest of the funding and support the Government of Afghanistan.

Q366 Mr Jenkin: I congratulate you for what is going on on the ground but can I ask General Houghton, looking at it from a PGHQ point of view and a Whitehall point of view, do you feel that comprehensive approach yet fully exists? Is it institutionally embedded or, as some have suggested, does there need to be a sort of elevation of PCRU or a Cabinet office minister at Cabinet level co-ordinating the various government departments across Whitehall?

Lieutenant General Houghton: I think the cross-Whitehall co-ordination mechanism works. This is not a cheap comment but it perhaps works more or less imperfectly over time. I think the business of the comprehensive approach across government is a little bit like the journey that jointly went on between the Services. It improves over time and with lessons learned from operations. I see the functioning of the comprehensive approach within Afghanistan from a UK perspective as being reasonably effective. The first question that you asked is should the application of DFID's money be put in the hands of the military to apply its projects locally. It might surprise you to know that I do not think that that alone is at all the answer. I think that an element of government money needs to be spent locally on consent winning projects in order to help create the security and the stability locally, but if that is the only routing of international money it will ever effectively result in an Afghanistan that lives off local handouts. You do need the majority of the programmes and the money to be spent down the channels of the emerging hierarchy of Afghan governance and that at least gives you the prospect that at some time in the future, ten years or whatever, the international community will be able to take a step back from Afghanistan in the knowledge that it is leaving behind a legacy of governance which is able to administer its own money in the interests of its own people. I do think it is a balance and that recognition of the requirement to be comprehensive is perhaps something that a predecessor of mine might not have said.

Q367 Chairman: General, you just left one or two things hanging there when you suggested that putting money into the hands of the military for quick impact projects alone was not the answer but it does suggest that you think there could be an increase in the money to be given to the military for running quick impact projects.

Lieutenant General Houghton: I think Afghanistan is a case in point where increased money has been given to the military to spend on quick impact projects with local consent.

Q368 Chairman: But do you think there is scope for more?

Lieutenant General Houghton: One has to get a balance between the amount of money and the amount of military capacity to disperse it, and at the moment I think they are in relative balance.

Q369 Mr Holloway: While there is no doubt about the commitment and ability of people in DFID, off the record again people I guess working at the tactical level are contemptuous of DFID's performance. Have there been problems and is DFID as it is currently structured the right organisation to be helping you to win a war?

Lieutenant General Houghton: Again, I do not know to whom you have spoken that suggests that people would be contemptuous of DFID's performance, so I do not think that is the standard, the emerging or the enlightened view. I think there probably is an understanding that the primary purposes for which DFID as a department spends its money relate to things, I understand, enacted in Parliament about millennium goals, the relief of poverty and all that rather than spending huge amounts of the Government's money on consent-winning programmes at the tactical level in our campaigns. It is not for me to judge whether or not Government has got that balance right.

Q370 Mr Holloway: But it is if you are trying to win. You are trying to win so you can make a judgment about whether Government has got it right.

Lieutenant General Houghton: No. In terms of the relatively small number of billions that are at DFID's disposal, it is not my job to say that more of that should be given to the military for us to spend on consent winning activities but, as has happened, a small proportion to be redirected to local QIPs and Consent Winning, which has happened in the case of Afghanistan, I think is appropriate.

Q371 Mr Crausby: It is not so much the amount of money you spend, it is where you spend it really, is it not, and spend it on the right projects. That is the most important thing. Whilst it was difficult for us to get a real feel in Lashkar Gah because of the security situation, certainly the representatives of the NGOs and those from the Helmand Provincial Council felt pretty strongly that they had not been involved enough, that they had not been a real part of the planning process sometimes. What efforts are you making to involve those? I sit in my constituency and listen to people who complain about what the council spend the money on and in some sense I thought it was almost a progressive thing to hear people complaining about where the money is being spent, it was almost a step up from absolute desperation to a point where you say, "You should not be building that road, you should be doing something else". Are we at the point where we make that proper step up and involve people to have a real say in the planning process in argument really against the military spending it? Should not the local people be making these decisions?

Des Browne: Ms Cameron can come in in a moment. There are one or two issues that these questions raise. There has to be an understanding of what we are doing and the environment in which we are doing it and the legal framework within which we are doing it. Parliament passed a law which constrains the way in which we can use and spend development money. Quite rightly it did that because of immediate past history in which there was serious criticism about the way in which development money was spent and the conditionality associated with it. It is Parliament's law, which was supported, I think, by all the parties in Parliament that determines what DFID can do with its money and what its objectives have to be. There may be a debate about the interpretation of these laws but at the heart of this debate is how much of our money should we spend on what you might call construction or reconstruction and how much money should we spend on development. There is always going to be a tension. What Mr Crausby identifies from speaking to people locally is playing out of that tension. In our view, as a Government, it is appropriate that we get that balance right because it is exactly empowering local people through their structures, through their provincial councils, to make the decisions about their own communities that we are about in the long-term. That is part of what the General describes as the legacy that we are seeking to deliver. It is about directing money through the channels of central Government so that those channels operate properly and accountability measures operate properly. That is part of our development. Unattributed comments about people's views at a tactical level of other people's contributions does not help us make these balances right. In my view it does not properly recognise the nature of the challenge that we face. We have provided to the Committee a list of Quick Impact Projects which in my view devotes a significant amount of money to following up immediately security operations in communities all across Helmand Province. It is not an insignificant amount of money, it is a fairly comprehensive list and covers a wide range of activity, all of which is a function of consultation with parts of the communities. This money is being spent and at the same time there is a significant additional amount of American money being spent in Helmand Province, indeed more in Helmand Province than there is in any other province of Afghanistan. It is not my sense when I am in Helmand Province talking to people that it is a shortage of money that is the problem, it is the ability to be able to encourage and deploy the local capacity to spend that money to the best advantage that is the challenge. The final point I make before I move on is it is universally recognised that the Department for International Development is a world class organisation. It is the envy of many other countries, in Afghanistan and across the world, for the way in which it applies its funding and engages in development projects. That is not to say that everything is perfect, it is not, but there is a recognition in the Department for International Development, indeed in the Government, that conflict is the most consistent cause of poverty across the world. I do not want anybody to be coming away from this with any suggestion that my Department or, indeed, the military share the view that the Department for International Development do not know where the priorities and challenges lie. This is a very difficult environment. Part of the restriction on the people that we deploy from other departments into this environment is that they are not the military and they cannot operate without engaging a level of risk, which is unacceptable to those who employ them, including me.

Q372 Mr Holloway: What is the point of having them there?

Des Browne: That is part of the problem on occasion but they are doing very good work. Unattributed criticisms, which may be designed for reasons other than adding to our ability to understand what is going on in Helmand, do not help. Who is saying these things? What knowledge base do they have in order to say these sorts of things? What do they know of what DFID is actually doing? What do they know of what other people are doing, NGOs and others, our own engineers? In order to measure the worth of these comments we need to know where they actually came from. It is disappointing that they are being deployed against people who are doing a very good job without them being attributed to where they came from.

Q373 Mr Holloway: I was only trying to be constructive.

Ms Cameron: I think it is worth explaining that DFID is putting £107 million into Afghanistan this year. That is our sixth biggest development programme worldwide. That level of resource is much higher than it would be on our normal aid allocation framework but because of the level of conflict in Afghanistan we are explicitly targeting resources now in a period when we know they can be absorbed effectively. Research shows that it is four to seven years after the conflict that aid is most effectively absorbed in a post-conflict state. I do not say that about the south but in a sense about the rest of Afghanistan where the absorption capacity is now very good. We have also said that we will put up to £20 million of that in Helmand, and again that is a very significant part of that overall allocation. To go to Mr Crausby's specific question about the local council, you are right, it is a real sign of progress that the Provincial Development Committee now are beginning to engage with us on QIPs funding and saying, "Hang on a second, we want to determine where this money goes rather than letting you tell us what you think the right answer is". That is exactly the kind of development we want to see. What we do need to see more of, and that is part of what we are putting effort into in Kabul, is an improved linkage between the national and local government. National government has come a long way in Afghanistan in the last five years; local government is still extremely weak. Part of what we are doing at national level is trying to build the capacity of national government to reach out to local government and make sure, for example, that the Ministry of Rural Development at local level in Helmand can tell you exactly what funding is going into the Ministry in Kabul for Helmand. I think you are right, it is a real sign of progress.

Q374 Mr Crausby: I was quite encouraged particularly by the women from the Helmand Provincial Council who were talking about job opportunities.

Ms Cameron: Absolutely.

Q375 Mr Crausby: If they are talking about job opportunities then job opportunities are more important than Quick Impact Projects. I do not see any prospects for properly dealing with poppy cultivation without real alternatives. There needs to be a clear combination of a very firm hand on poppy cultivation at the same time that there are alternative opportunities to feed one's family. I do not see any future in anything other than allowing the Afghan people to regenerate their own economy. What opportunities are there to allow those local people to set up their own businesses? There was lots of talk about carpet factory-type stuff and employing local women that way, and that seems really progressive to me. If that is the sort of thing that they want to do then that is the thing that we should want to do.

Ms Cameron: That is absolutely right. One of the programmes that we are trying to bring down to Helmand at the moment is something called MISFA, the micro-credit scheme, to which DFID has given £15 million nationally and it is also part of the £30 million Helmand commitment. That is specifically designed to give people, particularly women, access to small loans so that they can set up small businesses. We have also funded a very innovative grant guarantee scheme through the World Bank which helps to guarantee a much higher level insurance for bigger businesses that want to set up in Afghanistan to make sure that investors are not put off. We have put a lot of effort into working with the Ministry of Commerce as well to try and reduce red tape so that the private sector is encouraged to flourish because that is exactly where the jobs will be created.

Chairman: We still have to deal with the Afghan National Army, the police, corruption and Pakistan. Let us move on to the Afghan National Army.

Q376 Linda Gilroy: During the Committee's visit to Afghanistan, Members were told about the progress that had been made in developing the Army and General Wardak seemed to be keen on the Army taking on more responsibility. When do you anticipate that the Afghan Army will be capable of conducting serious operations?

Des Browne: We have trained 35,000 of the Afghan Ministry of Defence forces. That is based on a target of 70,000. Presently four of the ten formed Afghan National Army brigade headquarters are judged as capable of planning, executing and sustaining counter-insurgency operations with coalition or ISAF support at company level. We have some way to go before they are capable of operating independently at brigade level. The challenge, of course, is to develop an Army that we can use to provide security, but to do that without that use damaging them because of their immaturity. This is a very young Army. It is a difficult balance. My view is that NATO has not always got that right and, in fact, we were deploying the Afghan National Army before they were ready to or leaving them in a situation of conflict for too long. Recently, having recognised that, particularly in Helmand, we have gone through a period of reconstitution to allow them to rest, train, take leave and be more effective for operations. I am not in a position at this stage to say when we will have developed an end product that will be able to take over from us in terms of security. My experience in watching the development, for example, of the Tenth Division of the Iraqi Army in MND South East is that you get to a point where that process accelerates very, very quickly. We now have an Army in Iraq which was capable of being deployed into the Baghdad security plan operations very successfully and acquitted itself very well and was admired by others, including other countries who had trained and deployed forces there. I am not in a position to answer, maybe the General has a better idea of when that is likely to happen.

Lieutenant General Houghton: I think it would be too adventurous to put a specific date on it. As the Secretary of State has said, in terms of the competence of the individual KANDAC, the battalions, they are showing the raw material is very good. The Iraqi experience is bearing this out, that the more complex thing is the higher level command and control, the planning for operations, combat service support that goes into the support of those operations, the administrative system that supports them. We recall the integration of tactical effects, that is bringing the air dimension, those sorts of more complex operations, which are the things that will make it some time before the Afghan National Army is fully capable of independent operations at the brigade level, but that is not to say that they are not contributing an awful lot at the moment.

Q377 Linda Gilroy: What about embedded trainers? When General Richards gave us evidence he told us that the UK had provided its fair share and they obviously play an important role, but NATO as a whole needs to provide more. Are there discussions about that? Could, say, Spain or Germany provide more in the way of embedded trainers?

Des Browne: As part of CJSOR there are 83 OMLTs, as they are called, which are the embedded training teams. Perhaps I should not use "embedded training teams" because that is the phrase the Americans use. They have them in place in the absence of these mentoring units. There are 83 of them required to be filled and we continue to lobby other nations to provide them because our experience has suggested that they offer quite a significant return on the investment.

Q378 Linda Gilroy: What equipment has the UK given to the Afghan National Army and what plans are there to provide more?

Des Browne: I am unable to answer specifically the question as to what equipment the UK has given.

Lieutenant General Houghton: Off the top of my head I am not certain that we have gifted any. The idea is that this is a centrally done thing by the organisation that you have probably come across called CSTC-A run by General Durbin, which is responsible for the force generation and training of the Afghan National Army. They are a train and equip organisation primarily. All the equipment is being procured and distributed to a standardised set. That is not to say that on a bilateral basis no doubt the Afghan National Ministry of Defence would not look at gifting from other nations but what we would prefer to do by dint of policy, and certainly what the CSTC-A organisation wants, is to equip to standardised sets of equipment.

Q379 Linda Gilroy: It certainly seemed to be the view of General Wardak that NATO could provide the Army with more equipment. Sorry, have you discovered something?

Des Browne: No, no, I have not discovered it. I have brought with me a note which is headed up, "ANA equipment". As the Committee can see it would take a couple of minutes to read it and rather than read it into the evidence I can hand it over.

Q380 Linda Gilroy: Thank you.

Des Browne: It shows how they are equipped presently and what the plans are. With respect to General Wardak, and I understand why he does this, everybody he speaks to he asks for---

Q381 Chairman: He would like some tanks and we do not necessarily endorse that.

Des Browne: He was a tank commander himself at one stage, I think, which may explain. I can hand over this note which I have brought with me, there are a couple of copies of it, if Members want to pass it around and it will save a few minutes.

Chairman: Can we move on to the police.

Q382 Mr Havard: You are quite right, General Wardak did ask us for tanks again. However, one thing he did, which I thought was very significant, was that not only was there great merit in the embedded trainers for the Army, he was arguing that the same sort of process might help in relation to developing the Police Force. That sounds to me to be about right. I want to ask about the Police Force, however. There has not been, if you like, as much progress as we would like to see. I shared some of your thoughts earlier on about where a criminal justice system fits with policing because even if you interdict people and arrest them and cannot process them, it does not help cement, if you like, the relevance of a Police Force even if you have policemen on the corner. One of the things that we heard was as well as the development of the Afghan National Police itself at all levels, whether at local level or support for forensic activity, etc, there was the development now of the Afghan Auxiliary National Police Force. This raised some concern. The Human Rights Commission, for example, were fearful that this might simply become a way of supporting a militia-type structure. That ranged right across to others like the President himself who billed them to us as community support officers and community policemen. There is quite clearly a tension here as to whose control they are under and whether or not they just reinforce regional strongmen, warlords, whatever, or whether they are part of a national force. I wonder whether you could comment on the relationship between those two, the national police and the auxiliary police, and the question, which is raised all the time, about whether or not the Police Force in Afghanistan ought to look more like a gendarmerie than anything else.

Des Browne: Well, where to start? First of all, the development or the reform of a Police Force in a post-conflict situation is a very difficult thing to do. It is invariably more challenging than developing the Armed Forces. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of them in Afghanistan - this is a distinction that I make - is that the Armed Forces serve the state and there is a structure for them, but for the police in any community to be successful and accepted by the community they must serve the law and the manifestation of the law must have a structure round about it and where that is missing it is very difficult to grow a Police Force in a community. The other point, of course, is, unlike the Army, the police operate in societies where there is endemic poverty, illiteracy, experience quite often of abuse by Police Forces at what I would call the point of corruption. They operate at the point of interface with the community where if they do not resist the temptation and it becomes endemic then it is really difficult to get out of any emerging structure. That is a challenge. It is a challenge that we faced in Iraq, in Sierra Leone and it is a challenge we now face in Afghanistan. The auxiliary police is an attempt to rise to that challenge in the communities. One of the things that we should remind ourselves of is that almost all of us live in communities where the Police Force has a very strong identity with our local communities and may indeed have grown up out of our communities. We only need to remind ourselves of the way in which communities across England responded to the proposal that there should be an amalgamation of Police Forces to see how strongly our communities identify their local Police Forces with their communities. With respect, it does not seem to me that it is a criticism of the Police Force that it might identify strongly with the community. The Afghan Auxiliary Police Force was an attempt to try and generate Police Forces in communities which serve those communities out of those communities. Of course, implicit in your question, Mr Havard, is would they serve warlords in those communities or individuals rather than the rule of law. In order to try and prevent that from happening the PAG, which developed this concept, which the President sits on, and it is community policing in the sense the policing comes out of communities, made a number of rules about them and the application of these rules will ensure that they do not go down the path that people fear. One is that they are within the structure of the Police Service and they are accountable to the Ministry of Interior. Secondly, you can only serve as an auxiliary police officer for a year and then if you want to continue to be a police officer you have to move into the Police Force itself. Given that the challenge was in remote communities to find police officers quickly, people who could serve that function who the communities would have confidence in, who would not be seen to have come from the north of the country or another part of the country and behave or be expected to behave in the way in which police officers have previously in these communities, they were worth a go. I have seen them operate. For example, I have seen them operate in the Kajaki area where they provide a significant amount of security for our own forces very successfully as we are doing other work to secure the Kajaki Dam for reconstruction.

Q383 Chairman: Would there be something to be said for having a Police Training College in Helmand Province?

Des Browne: I think there would be something to be said for having Police Training Colleges where there were people who were prepared to volunteer to join the police. Indeed, my understanding is that at the surer that President Karzai attended, he said to the tribal leaders of the south, "If you want police officers or members of the Army who represent your community, send your sons to volunteer". If they were prepared to volunteer then I am sure we could build the training facilities to be able to accommodate the volunteers.

Q384 Mr Jenkin: Again, can I tell you, Secretary of State, about what we actually heard on the ground which was that when the British Army went into Sangin with the Americans we had to arrest the police because they were looting, which rather reflected the lack of on the ground training of on the ground police, yet the Germans are spending large amounts of money on higher command and staff course training for senior police officers which is regarded as largely irrelevant to the ordinary platoon commander on the ground. Is there going to be a rebalancing of the police training effort towards what is actually needed now rather than, say, five years hence? I get the impression that the German effort is largely wasted at the present time.

Des Browne: There is a review taking place. The Americans are about to invest quite a significant amount, I think $5.9 billion or thereabouts, in Army and police, so there is significant resource coming in. I was making the point about the auxiliary police earlier. There is a problem with the police. The police do behave corruptly in certain parts of Helmand, there is no question about that. As you point out, the first thing you need to do in some of these communities is deal with the police. We need a structure in place that makes sure that those police officers who are deployed into these communities are paid, and paid properly. That is part of the problem, that some of the central government and provincial government structures that were supposed to pay them was not working properly and they were not being paid. In those circumstances they will use at the point of corruption, as I describe it, their power to be able to get their wages out of local people.

Q385 Mr Crausby: My understanding is that as part of this extra money from the ESDP mission and so on, there is a plan to put embedded trainers in to try and develop the Police Service at various levels. My only concern is that there quite clearly is an enthusiasm amongst some of our people, and I mean the military, the British Army people on the ground, to try and assist with that and get good people where they can get them and work with them as best they can and do it. My only concern is that they may be trying to do things and substitute for others without the resources to do it. I have a little bit of a fear that the enthusiasm and goodwill of our people might be abused a bit by trying to do things that perhaps are not their full brief and they have not got the resources to do it with.

Des Browne: We have police trainers on the ground in Helmand Province and we make a contribution to that and look forward to the deployment of the ESDP initiative which ought to increase the number of police trainers across Afghanistan and our ability to do that. Most of the training will need to be done in local police stations by mentors and people with the skills once they are deployed and we will no doubt use our resources, such as military resources that we have in these communities, to be able to keep an eye on how police officers behave.

Q386 John Smith: I am not sure that we are going to have enough time to do this question justice at the end of this session, but in the answers that we have received this afternoon quite clearly enormous emphasis is placed on the rule of law, the writ of the central government, presidential agreements, the role of presidential agreements, the question of the police, and up until now it has been implied that corruption does occur but it is varied and it is isolated. This Committee has received a very worrying submission from a former employee of the British Embassy in Kabul that corruption remains absolutely endemic at every level of decision-making, at every level within the legislature, public appointments, right throughout the Police Force, and consequently it is undermining the popularity and authority of the Karzai Government. Do you recognise that description, Secretary of State? Are we addressing that issue seriously and is there any more we can do?

Des Browne: Corruption is a significant issue, I do not doubt that. We have to be realistic. This is a largely subsistence economy and over the years corruption has become endemic, it has become almost cultural in certain parts, and in order to get things done people use the resource that they have. If you add to that the fact that it is largely a drugs economy and there are quite substantial amounts of money floating around in the hands of a very small number of people then it is not surprising that there was corruption. I think it will take time to develop the sort of values that we are all more familiar with and against which we judge whether or not progress is being made. Sometimes we set ourselves measures of success which are unrealistic given the nature of the challenge and then we are bound to fail against these measures that we set. Stability will ease this challenge for us. We will work towards the goal that we have set ourselves of eradicating corruption from this society, but I say again we must keep realistic expectations while we are going along. What can we expect of the Karzai Government at this stage to prevent people taking the opportunist corrupt path which will be there for them as money moves around? First of all, and I will come to Ms Cameron after, we have to ensure that the money we are investing through DFID is not being used for corrupt purposes. We have very strict rules in place and audit methods for ensuring that the money that we are investing in this country is being used for the purposes that we are investing it. I will let Ms Cameron deal with that. The second is that we can expect from the government the creation of structures that ensure that corruption is identified and eradicated. Those structures are emerging. The international community continues to keep a lot of pressure on the President and the government. For example, the President has established both an Anti-Corruption Committee and a Commission, as I understand it. The committee is chaired by the Chief of Justice, he has established an Appointments Advisory Panel to make sure that all senior appointments below ministers that are not within the mandate of the existing Civil Service Appointments Board are carried out properly so that people do not use patronage and corruption. The Afghan Prosecutor General, the Anti-Corruption Commission and the Supreme Court have proven, in our assessment, that they are determined in their fight against corruption despite the enormity of the task. A number of government officials in Kabul have been suspended, various provinces and provincial governors are under investigation and there are a number of investigations under way. I do not think that these steps will bring an immediate end to corruption but they are visible signs of intent, and that is the crucial and important part given where we are starting from in this country that they are making progress in this regard, and they are. I suspect, frankly, and it does not surprise me, that anybody looking at that against what we would expect would say, "This place is corrupt. If you want to get things done then you grease people's palms". Whether or not that is a measure of success or strategic failure, in my view, is challengeable.

Chairman: Secretary of State, can we finally discuss the regional context in which Afghanistan plays out its part.

Q387 Willie Rennie: We have discussed this issue a number of times, both in the Chamber and in this Committee. President Musharraf has been given considerable credit for the efforts that he has made on the Afghanistan front, but it seems to be a widely held view in Afghanistan that elements of the Pakistan Army and Intelligence Service are funding and training insurgents. What is your view on that?

Des Browne: I have not got any evidence that the problem that emerges from Pakistan, and there is unquestionably support from the Taliban coming from Pakistan, is state sponsored. I do not have evidence that suggests that is the case. What I do know is the Pakistan Security Forces have sustained considerable losses, disproportionately greater losses than certainly we or others have, in trying to deal with the issues that lie on their side of the border. I believe that President Musharraf is committed to taking on this problem and in recent months they have stepped up their actions against the Taliban to a level that we have not previously seen. We ought to encourage them to continue to do that. There is no doubt that historically there were relations between elements of the Pakistan structure, government structure, and the Taliban and it is highly improbable that those have gone away, those are likely still to be the case. We need to recognise what Pakistan is seeking to do. At the end of the day it is relations between the Pakistan and Afghan Governments that will resolve these problems. There is no other resolution to them than that these two governments talk to each other. Certainly I am encouraged by the fact that both presidents have spoken to each other recently. On my most recent visit to Afghanistan, which was only weeks ago, I heard President Karzai speak much more warmly and positively about what Pakistan have been doing in this regard than I have ever heard him speak before. I am encouraged by that but it is an enormous challenge.

Q388 Willie Rennie: Do you think he is doing enough to try to root out these rogue elements within the Intelligence Service? What more support could be provided to him to help him do that?

Des Browne: Across the board a number of countries provide a significant amount of support and encouragement to him, but we all recognise that he has to balance our calls for action, which are repeated, against the risk that operations of a certain nature in these very troubled areas of his border communities will inflame tribal groups and drive them into further extremism. He has to make these judgments for himself. We can encourage him, and do encourage him, and there is significant emerging evidence that he is responding in a very positive way. Will these problems be resolved by military force? They will not be. They will be resolved across that disputed border by these two countries coming to an accommodation and an agreement about how they will deal with a common problem. I am much more interested in them talking to each other and developing a common solution to the problems than I am in encouraging people to deploy military force. I will be guided by others but I think there are approximately four million refugee Afghans living in refugee camps in the territories across the border in Pakistan. The scale of these problems is phenomenal. How much military force would you need to deploy? Some of these communities you could not deploy military force into at all without the danger of carnage.

Q389 Willie Rennie: It is the rogue elements within the Intelligence Service and the Army that I am focused on here. I accept what you say, but within the Intelligence Service and the Army do you think he is doing enough to try and root out those rogue elements?

Des Browne: I am just not in a position to measure that, I am afraid. I know the effect that is having but that is not the only activity that is going on at that border that is generating problems for us or generating Taliban fighters into southern Afghanistan.

Q390 Mr Jenkin: Secretary of State, there are estimated to be 3,000 madrasas in Pakistan funded by various Gulf States very liberally churning out degrees of religious extremism, some of whom finish up over here, some of whom finish up fighting our Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

Des Browne: Absolutely.

Q391 Mr Jenkin: Is Her Majesty's Government treating this problem, albeit in as positive a way with regard to President Musharraf, as a top level strategic problem? Are we determined that this should change and should we not encourage General Musharraf to back the Commission which he himself established to bring the tribal areas, particularly in Waziristan, under the constitution of Pakistan instead of this vestige of imperial government that still remains in that part of Pakistan which basically leaves the tribal elders to govern themselves? The tribal elders have given their view that they would like to be incorporated under the constitution of Pakistan as part of regular Pakistan, should we not be encouraging and aiding Pakistan to achieve this objective? What support are we giving President Musharraf, perhaps financial or in terms of reform support, in order to be able to do this?

Des Browne: Can I just say to you, Mr Jenkin, I am not in a position to give you chapter and verse on this, but my recollection of our recent engagement with the Pakistan Government is that we have been doing all of those things that you identify, including significant aid for education purposes. As you point out, we have a common interest with the Afghan Government and, indeed, the Pakistan Government in addressing the radicalisation that these madrassers are creating in that area. It is a strategic issue for us because it is a strategic issue in relation to the security of the streets of this city, never mind Afghanistan. We are investing there and encouraging President Musharraf, who indeed has taken action, as you will have seen from your visit, in these areas in relation to some of these madrassers. You will have seen the demonstrations that are taking place in the streets of his own capital city about his challenge to the way in which his own people are educated. We are working on the other side also, on the Afghan side, with the Education Minister in Afghanistan directing and encouraging investment to ensure that Afghans are not crossing the border into these madrassers to get their education but are able to be educated in Afghanistan in a broader way. All of these things we are seeking to address. If it is necessary and helpful I would ask colleagues from the Foreign Office and perhaps also DFID to give a note to the Committee in relation to this issue.

Q392 Mr Jenkin: That would be very helpful.

Des Browne: I am not in a position to give the detail but I recognise steps being taken in all of the areas that you identify.

Q393 Mr Havard: Can I ask you about the other border on the west, which is the border with Iran. We visited India on our way to Afghanistan. Having visited Pakistan last time we thought we would get the other point of view. The Indian point of view is slightly different but interesting in terms of their own strategic development into the future. They have quite a significant aid programme, as do the Iranians in the west of Afghanistan, who have been there for some time. Therefore, military engagement on the border on the west in Herat with US forces, we discussed those issues about whether or not the confusion that could come in some minds, if you like, about the US involvement on a border with Iran might not be very helpful but, on the other hand, given that there is a positive engagement, and it seemed to be a positive engagement, by the Iranians in Afghanistan, by the US Commander, that was quite clear, that might be a very helpful thing in terms of developing a different regional relationship and the business about having a regional conference which might involve all of these different parties because there are countries such as India and Iran playing a positive role within Afghanistan at the moment which is perhaps not fully understood.

Des Browne: I agree with you and the Committee, and I am sure you came to the conclusion that Iran, India and Pakistan all have strategic interests in a strong, stable Afghanistan. Regionally an Afghanistan which is not a failed state and has a reduced drugs economy, which I suppose is the best we will get, is in the strategic interests of all of those countries. They all in their own way make a contribution to achieving that but it is much more complex than just saying that because Pakistan, for example, is very wary of India's intentions and has been for some significant period of time and is suspicious of India's engagement with Afghanistan. Iran, on the other hand, do make a very positive contribution, particularly on the border in relation to drugs. They make significant investment inside Afghanistan as well and in keeping that border sealed against drug dealers have themselves lost a significant number of their own security forces in protecting that border. They are supportive of Afghanistan. On the other hand, comparatively openly, and certainly demonstrably, they have sought confrontation by proxy with us and the United States and other NATO members elsewhere in the region and there is some indication that they are doing the same in Afghanistan. This is a complex environment. Should these countries come together in some form of co-operative regional conference, yes, they should, and that is exactly what they do. There is an organisation called the Regional Economic Co-operation Conference which last met in India in November of last year, the year before in Kabul and next year proposes to meet in Pakistan. It is co-chaired by Afghanistan. They provide a real opportunity to move the economic and trade agenda forward, which is where the common interests lie. For example, I am told that India has pledged $650 million to Afghanistan over five years and signed an MoU on rural development, but you know yourself that Iran has made investment and Pakistan has made significant investment as well as the contribution that we have already discussed at the border. These countries need to come together themselves.

Q394 Mr Crausby: Do you think that NATO involvement in Afghanistan, supported by others outside NATO, such as Canada and particularly Australia, and the view that these countries have towards the East as well as to the West, must be hugely beneficial in trying to move that political agenda on which would obviously help Afghanistan as well in terms of its structural development?

Des Browne: I do not think there is any doubt that the international community, particularly those who are involved in Afghanistan and those who have resources there, whether they be troops or other resources that they deploy, would encourage this sort of regional co-operation and, indeed, as far as I understand it, do everything to encourage this regional co-operation. I am not aware of any of those countries involved, be they NATO or other countries, who are not encouraging this. Frankly, as far as I can see there is a well-worn path to President Musharraf's office by almost all of the countries who are involved in Afghanistan encouraging this sort of co-operation.

Chairman: Secretary of State, and to all of the witnesses, I would like to say thank you very much indeed for a very constructive and helpful evidence session. A long session but it is an extremely important subject and we are most grateful to you. Thank you.