Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 31 JANUARY 2007
MR MICHAEL
GRIFFIN, DR
MATTHEW NELSON
AND DR
GARETH PRICE
Q180 Ms Stuart: So they are not clear
what they actually want?
Matthew Nelson: There is a variety
of different views, even within Azad Kashmir.
Gareth Price: That is right. People
sometimes talk about the plebiscite, which raises the question
of who votes. Lots of Pandits—the Hindus from Kashmir—have
left; do they vote? It all becomes very complicated, and it is
so far down the line.
Last time I was in Srinagar, what came across
was the phrase, "We want them to leave us alone." That
referred to the militants as much as anyone else. There is tiredness
of the conflict, which might not always be reflected by people
abiding in the UK or the militants themselves. Among the general
public in Kashmir, however, there is a hope that it goes away.
The way in which that is expressed will vary. Does "leave
us alone" mean "independence", or does it mean
"stop the fighting"? It might mean a wide range of things,
but it is hard to find a support base for the militants.
Q181 Ms Stuart: To what extent are
those who want separatism involved in the peace process? Are they
sidelined?
Matthew Nelson: My sense is that
they are largely sidelined.
Q182 Sandra Osborne: Are you aware
of the jihadist Islamist terrorists in Kashmir having any links
with UK-based extremists?
Matthew Nelson: This lies well
beyond my area of expertise. I think that it is possible to imagine
that among those in Britain who have concerns about politics in
Kashmir and hold a range of different views about it, there may
be some who feel that militant forms of jihad are the only way
to go in Kashmir. In that sense, the range of opinion among Muslims
in Britain could include some who find that approach attractive
for whatever reason. At that point, linkages through families,
visits and all kinds of other exchanges could emerge to create
militant links. I do not think, however, that there is a systematic
pattern of politics in Britain that ties in with a pattern of
politics in Kashmir to exacerbate the link to militancy.
Michael Griffin: May I add something
to that? I do not have anything more expert to say, except that
the kind of terrorist training camps that existed in the mid-1990s,
which might have trained British Kashmiris who were then inflamed
to go either to Kashmir or, two or three years earlier, to Chechnya
or Bosnia, were all located on the Afghan border. In the same
way that younger Pakistanis ended up in eastern Afghanistan training
for the jihad, the previous generation might have ended up in
Kashmir.
Q183 Sandra Osborne: In response
to some of the terrorist attacks, the two Prime Ministers have
issued statements and set up a joint control commission to tackle
terrorism. Some of the statements have been quite controversial.
Can you comment on that situation?
Gareth Price: At first, the proposal
was opposed by some members of the BJP, who were asking why we
were sharing intelligence with the Pakistanis when we were accusing
them of complicity. It is worth asking about the extent to which
that was political point scoring.
The joint co-operation is one of many confidence-building
measures. It makes sense if India and Pakistan are to move forward.
After the Mumbai bombs, India accused Pakistan of involvement
and complicity, to which Pakistan said, "Let's see the evidence".
That is the sort of process that is happening. I do not think
that it was part of a wider, deeply thought-through confidence-building
measure; it was a reactive attempt to make something good come
out of the bomb blast, to build on it and move forward. It was
controversial, but I think that it was a positive step.
Q184 Sandra Osborne: In his evidence
to us, Professor Bose told the Committee that the high calibre
of training and logistics support that had been available at certain
times to their terrorists in Kashmir would point to the fact that
they had had at certain stages support from the intelligence service
in Pakistan. Do you think that that is the case? That would be
one of the impediments to the Prime Ministers taking the initiative
on a joint basis. Is that a fair comment?
Gareth Price: That was the allegation
last week or the week before when the firing started over the
border. India's claim was that there was firing to distract the
army and to allow militants to pass through. It is very hard to
say whether that is still going on. A recent Human Rights Watch
report claimed that militants were still receiving arms from some
elements within Pakistan, but it is very hard to assess how deep-seated
that is. There has certainly been a big change from five or 10
years ago, when links were much stronger.
Michael Griffin: If you look at
reporting from the war in Afghanistan and the role of Pakistan
or the ISI in supporting the Taliban, al-Qaeda or other insurgent
forces in their actions against either allied NATO or Afghan troops,
you will see that there seems always—and this is done through
the rather obscure intelligence provided by US military advisers,
witnesses and generals on the ground—to be a situation where,
on the one hand, Pakistan is rooting out and shooting at incursionists
and terrorists in Afghanistan, while another element of the Pakistani
military-industrial base is encouraging, financing and training
them. These two policies, rather than cancelling each other out,
appear to run hand in hand, so to a certain extent, you have a
dual foreign policy. Possibly one is above ground and the other
one is underground, but they then change from being underground
and overground, and they get rather confused at the same time.
So you have the new Defence Secretary of the United States accusing
Pakistan of being helpful in trebling the number of cross-border
attacks by Taliban against NATO and US forces since signing a
treaty with Waziri Taliban back in September, but Pakistan is
helping. Once you have found a very useful trick in dealing with
your adventurous foreign policies, I assume that the same thing
will probably happen in terms of the on-off active war in Kashmir.
Chairman: Now that we are on to Afghanistan,
that is rather convenient. I bring in John Stanley.
Q185 Sir John Stanley: Mr Griffin,
with all your expertise on the Taliban, do you think that the
Taliban that is confronting us in Helmand province and the Kandahar
area now is basically the same Taliban, with the same motivation
and determination as the Taliban that took over the country before
we threw them out of government? Or do you think that they have
changed?
Michael Griffin: I think that
they have radically changed since they were defeated in 2001,
not just because they have had to learn a lot of very valuable
lessons about how to survive against the world's largest military
power, but because a large number of Soviet jihad-era fighters
either have been killed or have been replaced or retired, and
new generations are coming in with new experiences, and definitely
better sources of training. They have turned into a much more
professional fighting force than they were at the time that they
came to power in 1996, or at any time since then until their fall
from power in 2001. If you read between the lines of British military
reports from Helmand province, or any American reports from Kunar
province on the east, you will find time and time again that non-commissioned
officers upward will talk about the courage, the accuracy and
the good training of the Taliban that they encounter, as well
as their ability to move very nimbly over the ground, and to have
timed, careful attacks from three or four different directions
with good covering fire. The only thing that seems to throw them
is air support and all that that entails, particularly fixed-wing
bombing.
It strikes me that one of the things that came
out of Helmand province was the notion that if the Taliban had
enough wit to figure out how many British and allied forces aircraft
could be in the air at any one time—say, five to 10—and
if they were to set off 20 attacks at the same time, they would
totally overtax that. That was already happening in Operation
Medusa: they were taxing British helicopter support to the limit.
This requires a much greater sophistication of military planning
than the Taliban had before.
Everybody assumed that the original Taliban
were a mixture of mullahs and a few fanatics—although the
Afghans were never that fanatical—and out-of-work members
of the former Soviet-trained army; people with experience in how
to use rockets and various other pieces of modern technology grafted
on to this Lashkar type of formation. They have changed a lot
since then and, as you will have heard, have imported a lot of
techniques and technology from the Iraqi experience.
Q186 Sir John Stanley: So you are
saying that in military terms they are considerably more sophisticated
than they were and therefore present a more severe threat?
Michael Griffin: I think that
they are. One of the things that we have not seen during the baptism
of fire and the baptism of NATO abroad, both of which have happened
in Afghanistan—it is the one thing that is stimulating the
United States not to circulate out 3,500 troops as intended, but
to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan—is the idea among
Taliban that they were so successful in both Helmand and Kandahar
in the second half of last year, before the snow cut them off,
that they should think next about co-ordinating with attacks from
eastern mountain ranges against the United States. Once that starts
happening, and there are two fronts fighting hand in hand, Afghanistan
will begin to look like a totally different war game.
Q187 Sir John Stanley: Turning to
co-operation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, there seems to
have been material progress since our Committee's last visit.
The trilateral commission has been in operation and there have
been further developments beyond that. There is no doubt that
there is an incredibly difficult physical problem in terms of
the length and topography of the border and the number of people
who cross it. We are told that some 200,000 people cross the border
every day, 30,000 of them at one crossing point alone. It is an
almost impossible situation. The border does not admit of a physical
barrier. It might be possible to do something with sensors, but
that would require vast investment. Mining is unthinkable and
would anyway be contrary to the anti-personnel land mines treaty
and so on. There is an enormous problem there.
Do you see in your contacts with the Governments
of Pakistan and Afghanistan more realism on the part of both Governments
and a greater readiness to recognise that, instead of sitting
back and blaming each other for the security difficulties that
both countries face, they would do much better to start seriously
co-operating at intelligence, military and political levels?
Matthew Nelson: Yes, the landscape
is changing quite a lot. Pakistan and Afghanistan could find a
great deal to co-operate about, but it is also important to understand
the domestic politics within each country with respect to the
Taliban. Both Governments have found that Pashtuns are an important
constituency, and among the Pashtuns one aspect of Pashtun politics
involves the Taliban. Both in Pakistan and in Afghanistan there
has been pressure to engage at some political level even moderate
Taliban. That type of thinking is evident in the agreements that
have come forward in Waziristan on the border between the two
countries and in Musa Kala in Afghanistan and so on.
Interestingly, some of the disagreements between
Musharraf and Karzai, with each accusing the other of failing
to tackle the Taliban, grow out of the pressure that each faces
from outside—say from the UK and the US—to tackle
the Taliban, when the fact of the matter is that both feel political
pressures to find some way to work with aspects of the Taliban,
and when they are accused for doing so, they then blame the other
leader for keeping the Taliban alive. Some realism here would
be helpful. The Taliban is not representative of Pashtuns, but
it is one part of the Pashtun political landscape. I think that
recognising the politics of the Taliban as opposed to simply its
militancy, and separating the politics of the Taliban from the
politics of al-Qaeda, can be fruitful in our thinking about the
different configurations.
When, for example, Karzai says, "When I
am in Kandahar I find that I have to talk about and occasionally
with members of the Taliban," that should not necessarily
be read immediately as supporting insurgency. That should be read
as politics within Afghanistan. It is helpful to differentiate
the military and the political when it comes to the Taliban.
Q188 Sir John Stanley: Thank you.
While we were in Afghanistan and in Pakistan we had a number of
discussions about the possibility of building on the tripartite
commission, which is military to military, and whether some form
of reasonably structured dialogue might be created at the political
or civil level. There is a great deal of mutual suspicion in both
countries but it appeared that at the highest level there was
a degree of sympathy and support for that to happen. I wonder
whether you are getting any feedback in that area from where you
sit. We had a considerable debate as to whether it should be called
a jirga, but we will leave the terminology aside—a meeting.
Michael Griffin: I have not heard
about the idea of a joint jirga. I realise that it was proposed
in Washington DC and initially came from the two presidents' visit
over there. It was considered to be the next step forward, following
the de facto decision by Musharraf to have his own private jirga/peace
agreement/standing down of his own army in Waziristan to which
my colleague referred a little earlier. I have suggested that,
militarily, that did not have the same impact in Afghanistan as
Musharraf was promising in Washington that it would, although
it has probably reduced the stress on the Pakistani military,
which I believe had as many as 70,000 forces in north and south
Waziristan at one point, so there have not been quite as many
attacks on Pakistan.
Moving on to your more immediate question
of a bilateral jirga with bilateral Pashtun, I had not heard that
that idea had been moved forward at all. This is again one of
those coded words: can we truly have one without resolving the
Durand line issue and could we possibly have a jirga around that
first, since that tends to underpin?
Matthew Nelson: On the final
point of whether a joint jirga could resolve the Durand line question,
my sense is that a joint jirga would not be the place to look
for a fixed boundary. There are many ways in which a joint jirga
could have interesting things to say, but that issue might not
be the first one on the agenda.
Michael Griffin: I only mentioned
that point because you started a line of questioning in terms
of whether building a more stable border fence between Pakistan
and Afghanistan was on the agenda, and I suspected that it could
be on the agenda only in a joint jirga, in which case neither
of the Pashtun delegations will agree either way, so it is off
the agenda. But whether the jirga concept is off the agenda as
a result, I could not possibly say.
Matthew Nelson: I do not think
that the jirga concept is off the agenda yet. A number of groups
are suggesting this type of forum, both within local party politics
in Pakistan—say the Awami National party looking to traditional
forms of negotiation in a jirga—and in Afghanistan resurrecting
the idea of the jirga. The concept is alive.
Q189 Mr Horam: Let us return to the
Taliban and their strength. Mr Griffin, you were talking about
military strength and you, Dr Nelson, were talking about the political
aspects of it. Dr Nelson, you were almost saying that, if the
Taliban cannot be defeated militarily, they would have to be accommodated
in some way on both sides of the border. How do you see that unfolding,
if it does unfold?
Matthew Nelson: Instead of focusing
on the Taliban as a religious movement, I focus on Pashtuns as
a political factor. The initial dispensation of the Government
in Kabul after 2001 and so on was not necessarily regarded as
favourable for Pashtuns. Some of the concern about that Government
fuelled initial concern among the Pashtun majority in southern
Afghanistan and some political resentments grew from that. My
focus is not so much on the Taliban as on Pashtuns and their quite
different objectives in Afghanistan compared with some of the
other groups.
Q190 Mr Horam: How can you deal with
the concerns of the Pashtuns in a way that contributes towards
a more stable situation in Afghanistan?
Matthew Nelson: Rather than put
forward a solution about exactly how the Pashtun voice will be
heard, some of the concerns that Gareth raised earlier about the
importance of process are important. The tripartite agenda or
suggestion that has come up at the meeting might be one way, making
sure that Pashtuns are acknowledged in that process. Making sure
that there are regular meetings between different types of Pashtun
leaders—Taliban and otherwise—in Kabul, Islamabad
and Peshawar could be very useful.
Q191 Mr Horam: Mr Griffin, you were
talking about the military strength of the Taliban. What you said
was rather frightening in a way because you put forward the idea
that two fronts might develop from the east and so on. What are
the implications of that for the British and American effort there?
Will the situation get worse?
Michael Griffin: It all tends
towards the notion that it is going to get worse before it gets
better. Not a single cited senior officer in either NATO or the
United States forces has suggested any other difference. The incoming
Defence Secretary in the United States has said the same thing,
hence the boosting of forces. In January or February, Britain
will take possession of some up-armoured personnel carriers, which
should improve the security of British forces on the ground in
Helmand province, and it will take over joint command of all NATO
forces in January, which gives it an opportunity to co-ordinate
its operations in the east and south in a better way. The United
States has also given it control over a 3,500 rapid deployment
force to be used wherever it wants, whether in Helmand, Kunar
or Khost, which could change the shape of the conflict.
One of the areas that is always interesting
in Afghanistan and other countries—in the terror network,
if you like—is where the money comes from. An awful lot
of money is going into the Taliban campaign, whether in the form
of new training or new recruitment. You might have read The
New York Times journalist in Kabul who gets to interview Taliban
from time to time, because they have become quite outspoken and
good manipulators of the media and video. That is unusual for
the Taliban because they have always eschewed all of that. They
are on very good salaries compared with the Afghan soldier who
is scratching $80 a month and anything else that he can steal
compared with the Taliban who is on $160 and, for example, a motorbike
and fuel per month for 10 days' work. Those are the figures that
I have seen, so there is a good and solid flow of funding coming.
To a large extent, armies march on their bellies; they do not
march and fight on belief alone, if at all.
Matthew Nelson: I want to add
some specificity, so it will be a bit easier to understand what
I was trying to suggest when I said to bring in the Pashtuns.
It is important to recognise why that is a difficult idea, as
well as an interesting idea. In Pakistan, Musharraf has some domestic
political concerns when it comes to regional governments. For
instance, Musharraf is sitting in Islamabad and wondering what
will happen in Sindh or in North West Frontier. When it comes
to bringing Pashtun voices into the conversation, that creates
some anxieties about regional politics within Pakistan. In Afghanistan,
bringing in Pashtun voices and perhaps the religious voice of
the Taliban among Pashtun voices creates anxieties about the future
of the Afghan Government from the perspective of coalition forces,
and the religious dispensation of that Government. In both senses,
there will be concerns about what bringing Pashtuns into the conversation
might mean.
Comparison with the Kashmir situation could
be helpful. There is a group—the Kashmiris—that crosses
the border between India and Pakistan. In the west, of course,
the Pashtuns cross the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Bringing the group that crosses the border into the conversation
has been difficult in both cases, but many observers feel that
bringing these cross-border groups into a conversation about future
political solutions is really important.
Q192 Mr Horam: Given the strength
and sophistication of the Taliban that Mr Griffin described and
the difficulty of dealing with them militarily, do you think that
that political solution is ultimately going to happen?
Michael Griffin: In the few months
before Christmas, I became very interested in the Senlis council—have
you come across the Senlis council? Its proposal, which is several
years old now but has gained greater attraction, is to try and
separate the issues of security and the elimination of the opium
poppy on the ground, in the southern provinces chiefly. Also realise
that the NHS is crying out for some relief of the pain deficit
through the provision of licit and controlled supplies of painkillers
from Afghanistan, composed of heroin and opium subsidiaries.
That would be an interesting idea to explore
in the south: imposing a 10-year hiatus on destroying the opium
crop, which sustains the Pashtun population there and—if
you believe the World Bank—keeps the entire Afghan economy
bubbling over healthily. If you could create a 10-year gap before
eradicating opium and, at the same time, insert British and NATO
forces whose job was to create security but not to destroy the
economy, you would do a great deal for Afghanistan. However, judging
by the conversations I have had with people about this, the time
for this idea has never come and will never come, because Britain,
which is leading the fight against opium in the south, and the
United States, which does not believe in any other relationship
with drugs apart from war, will not accept that solution in Afghanistan.
However, I would argue that that would be one way of separating
the Taliban from the very large population—perhaps 1 million
families strong in the south—who depend upon the illegal
drug.
Q193 Mr Horam: May I finally ask
you about links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda now? What is
the state of affairs between them?
Michael Griffin: It is difficult
to say. Five years of fighting, propaganda and media coverage
have tended to cover over the tracks that might now link the fates
of these two different movements. I think that there are still
links of some kind in the two Waziristans—not necessarily
cross-fertilisation, but the drinking of tea between like-minded
veterans. They might be from Uzbekistan, Chechnya or Iran or they
might be volunteers from Arab countries who have got stranded
or married there. They could be recruited to some kind of a rent-a-jihad
situation, whether with the Taliban, or for a war in Tajikistan
or even an operation in Kashmir.
I think that there is some overlap between these
organisations. There seems to be strong evidence that the al-Qaeda
of the Two Rivers—that is, in Iraq—transported Taliban
commanders to Iraq, in late 2005, for training in how to produce
more efficient road-side bombs—improvised explosive devices—such
as shaped IEDs, which create a bigger blast. Certainly, there
has been training, possibly from Iraq again, but certainly being
sponsored from the Gulf, in how to convince Afghanis of the value
of being a suicide bomber. There have been an awful lot of suicide
bombs in the south and the capital of Afghanistan in the past
two years. However, the extent to which al-Qaeda gives the Taliban
instructions, rather than renegade elements—as they call
them—of the Pakistani security forces, is anybody's guess
at this point.
There is no evidence of anything systematic,
but there might be a kind of old boy's network. For example, Jallaluddin
Haqqani was considered to be commander-in-chief in the eastern
frontier area—so it is an American area—of Khost,
on the Pakistani border with North Waziristan. Back in the mid-1990s,
he was the grand old man in the training of Harakat fighters in
Kashmir and an old friend of Osama bin Laden. He controlled the
camps and gave bin Laden access to them.
That gentleman continues to fight and has connections
with al-Qaeda. The Americans keep trying to assassinate him using
Predators, but they keep failing. He has those connections, but
they are no different from those that he has with Inter-Services
Intelligence, generals, former colleagues in the various Taliban
Governments or those before the Taliban, or with old colleagues—he
is in his 50s or 60s—who fought against the Soviets. They
are all one great generation of astonishingly interrelated people
with businesses from Korea to the UAE, and in America as well.
But I do not think that there is anything systematic.
Gareth Price: On defeating the
Taliban, there is an issue of Afghan disillusionment with the
Government, largely because expectations were so high a couple
of years ago. A lot of international aid and assistance has been
given to Afghanistan, but the benefits have been rarely seen by
the average Afghan. We hear that some $4 billion is coming into
Afghanistan but quite evidently much of that will go out in profits
to contractors and be spent on security. Corruption is an issue
as well. And the actual thing that happens clearly does not cost
$4 billion. So there is the assumption of widespread corruption
within the Afghan Government, which is creating disillusionment,
and a much more profitable arena for the opposition—primarily
the Taliban—to operate in. That, as well as a military solution,
is an essential part of the problem.
Q194 Ms Stuart: I want to come back
to something that Mr Griffin said about opium and how it could
be used by the NHS. You seemed to imply that the UK is taking
a lead and that the US does not want it to happen. However, our
impression was that the Afghans also do not want that. At the
moment they cannot even lock up any of their drug barons let alone
have controlled growing. They do not support that idea. Or are
you saying that the UK and US have told them not to?
Michael Griffin: I agree with
everything that Gareth said about the corruption. If it is not
aid-related, it will be drugs-related—and it goes to the
very top. Anybody who objects, as I believe Ali Jalali, a former
Interior Minister, did, is forced to resign and go away. Everybody
knows that this is a corrupt society. This is harvest time for
them, and I guess that a lot of people fear that it will dry up
pretty soon and that they had better get their piece while they
can.
In the same way that the United States is in
charge in Iraq and, to some extent, of a Government whose interior
ministry is involved in death squads, in Afghanistan, the US or
the coalition, which is in charge of money for the redevelopment
and reconstruction of Afghanistan, feels that it owes it to the
sovereignty of its new creation not to get involved in prosecuting
the most blatantly corrupt people involved in the illicit trade,
which we are also interested in eradicating. I am not quite sure
how that operates at all.
Having said that, I think that if Karzai was
looking to create a highway of conversation between his Government—which
is not at all popular, despite the fact that it does have quite
strong roots in the clans and tribes of the Pashtun people—and
others, and if he were able to offer in the south some kind of
initiative that was carefully coded and embedded within traditional
structures of self-control, which are strong in Afghanistan, whereby
village A, which produces 250 kg of pure opium paste per year
against the law, was able to produce 250 kg legally and have it
purchased at a basic minimum price for 10 years—and they
were able to regulate themselves and make sure that their neighbours
were not growing more than that 250 kg—I think that local
people would find this a very creative way of ending that practice
and introducing opium substitution crops over a longer period,
while at the same time allowing them to carry on doing a bad thing
for a little bit longer while they got transferred into different
ways of making a living.
Q195 Chairman: No doubt we can come
back to that issue another time. That is something we have raised
with Ministers, who have given us a rather different view. Can
I ask you about India's view of the situation in Afghanistan?
How important is what is going on there for India?
Michael Griffin: India has always
had quite a good relationship with Afghan Governments, both before
and after the Taliban, but never during the Taliban's five-year
rule, when Afghanistan became associated very much with the 1999
hijacking of Indian Airlines jets flying into Kandahar and its
association and support from the ISI made it look like simply
another manifestation of Pakistan's unofficial policy of running
proxy terrorist operational wars against India, whether in Kashmir
or in the south, or against urban targets. From 1993 onwards,
India has been the target of terrorism, much of which could be
said to have originated in Afghan training camps with the assistance
of Pakistan and the ISI.
To a large extent, I guess that India sees in
Afghanistan a resolution to part of its security problem with
Pakistan. I get the impression that India is quite eager to make
itself a generous big brother to a new kind of democracy in southern
Asia, and to that extent, it has become the largest regional donor
to Afghanistan. At the same time, it has steered fairly clear
of any involvement in the development of the Afghans' military
capability for fear of creating any further rift with Pakistan,
which views Afghanistan very much as its own backyard in the continuing
rivalry with India.
Q196 Chairman: Afghanistan has just
joined the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation.
I had the experience of standing at the Wagah crossing and seeing
the lorries of onions being unloaded and carried by bearers by
the sackful from the Indian side across, and the bearers from
the Pakistan side carrying Afghan dried fruit the other way. The
goods were then swapped over from one head to the other. That
was an absurd and interesting experience, but is there a real
potential for a trade in Afghan products between Afghanistan and
Pakistan and between Afghanistan and India other than that border
crossing, or is that the main trade route?
Michael Griffin: At the moment,
India has a preferential trade agreement for any Afghan produce
that comes into India, although not very much goes there. Obviously,
fruit, dried raisins and some spices could go there, but to a
large extent the markets of Afghan producers have pretty much
been wiped out since the Soviet invasion and replaced by much
cheaper producers such as California.
I think that Afghanistan's legitimate exports
apart from opium are in the region of $100 million a year, so
we are talking about a pittance. Plus, Afghanistan's trade is
jealously guarded by Pakistan, which manipulates the transit trade
agreement so that goods delivered in Karachi travel north into
Afghanistan via Pakistan, which then controls the access of imports
and exports across that border. India is attempting to loosen
that control by building an alternative route through an Iranian
port known as Chabahar and a new road from that port to Nimroz
in south-west Afghanistan, which will provide an alternative source
and also satisfies both of those countries' primary interest in
Afghanistan as a stepping stone towards Central Asia and its oil
and gas.
Chairman: Let us turn to Bangladesh.
Q197 Mr Horam: There has been huge
political turmoil in Bangladesh with the elections and so on.
Has this had any wider impact in the South Asian region or is
it still mainly a Bangladeshi issue?
Gareth Price: For now it is primarily
a Bangladeshi issue. India has concerns that it could spill over.
In the past, refugees from Bangladesh have been a continuous issue,
but the threat of a wider influx of refugees is the main concern
on India's side. There is also the opportunity cost. The complete
lack of empathy between the two main parties, and in particular
the leaders of the two main parties in Bangladesh, in large part
relating to the relationship with India is a big factor that holds
back Bangladesh and the export of its gas. It particularly affects
north-east India, which is cut off apart from a small chicken
neck, so it cannot trade with other parts of India so well. But
the short answer is that for now the impact is confined to Bangladesh.
India certainly has concerns about what could happen if democracy
is not able to entrench itself within Bangladesh, which to most
observers seems likely while the current two leaders, Khaleda
Zia and Sheikh Hasina, remain in power.
Q198 Mr Horam: Sorry to interrupt,
but do independent observers think that democracy is likely to
be entrenched and that it will resolve these problems?
Gareth Price: Bangladesh has democracy
in the sense that it has elections, but in terms of accepting
the results of elections, each party that has lost has taken to
protesting in the streets from the mid-1990s onwards. It has democracy
in terms of people voting, but in terms of the wider issue of
rights and so forth democracy has a long way to go to be entrenched
in Bangladesh.
Q199 Mr Horam: So you are not hopeful
that there will be an easy or quick resolution of the problems?
Gareth Price: It might be a while
before we see an election. Many issues are being discussed in
Bangladesh at the moment. One report was talking about the Pakistani
model, which would be to put the two leaders into exile. I do
not know how developed that thinking is.
The big issue is to wait for the next generation—that
is not my personal view. Bangladesh will muddle along while the
two leaders loathe each other. It is also a question of a first-past-the-post
electoral system where generally the Awami League gains a couple
of percentage points more than the Bangladeshi National party,
and the BNP in alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami gets a couple of
percentage points more. Whoever wins the most seats then obtains
an additional 30 women's seats, so we end up with a country that
is divided 47% on one side and 43% on the other side, yet the
side that has 47% has a massive majority for five years.
If the situation is to change, another point
is that Bangladesh's economy has done well lately despite the
politics, but is now coming to a position where the political
situation is starting to impact on Bangladesh. A small example
is the power projects that take more than five years. The parties
alternate each time there is an election, so as soon as the new
Government come in, they scrap previous power projects because
it is assumed that they must have been corrupt, so they start
their own ones. Now it is getting to the point where power shortages
are becoming more and more of an issue. That is a direct way in
which the political situation is starting to impact on the economy.
That is why there are calls for a third force, or some restructuring
of power—that will be the main pressure.
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