UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 523-iiiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREDEFENCE COMMITTEE
COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Defence Committee
on
Members present
Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair
Mr David Crausby
Linda Gilroy
Mr David Hamilton
Mr Mike Hancock
Mr Dai Havard
Mr Adam Holloway
Mr Bernard Jenkin
Mr Brian Jenkins
Mrs Madeleine Moon
Richard Younger-Ross
________________
Witnesses: General John McColl, Deputy Supreme Allied Command Europe, Mr Martin Howard, Assistant Secretary General for Operations, NATO, Mr Nick Williams, Deputy to the NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Kabul, and Mr Robert Cooper, Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs, General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, gave evidence.
Q213 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to a further evidence session on the Comprehensive Approach. We are very grateful to our extremely distinguished panel of witnesses this morning. We have, I am afraid, a limited amount of time, so we will try to rush through many of the questions, and I hope you will do your utmost to give concise answers, but I wonder whether you could perhaps begin by introducing yourselves. May we start with you, General McColl? You are the Deputy SACEUR.
General McColl: I am the Deputy SACEUR.
Q214 Chairman: Tell us a bit more. You have also been a special adviser to President Karzai?
General McColl: As DSACEUR I am also, in my
EU hat, the Operational Commander for the EU operations in
Mr Howard: I am the Assistant Secretary
General for Operations. Before that I was
Director of Operational Policy in the Ministry of Defence dealing with
Mr Williams: My name is Nick
Williams. I am currently Deputy to the
NATO Senior Civilian Representative in
Mr Cooper: I am Robert Cooper. I am Director General for External Affairs at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union. More easily explained, I work for Javier Solana. Mine is the level within the Council Secretariat that brings together the political and the operational. Perhaps I should also say, I also have a little bit of Afghanistan in my history, as I was for a while the British Government's envoy on Afghanistan, and I have a little bit of British Balkans background as well, because I used to chair the committees on the Balkans.
Q215 Chairman: Thank you. Some
of you have given evidence to us before, and we are grateful for you coming to
see us again, so it cannot have been too awful!
During the course of our inquiry we have put a question to some of our
witnesses about how well we are doing on the Comprehensive Approach. On a scale of one to ten, are we doing well,
are we just at the beginning stages of the Comprehensive Approach or are we
nearly there? Professor Farrell said,
for example, that "you need to distinguish between where we are in Whitehall
and the Departments versus the field", and he said, "I think we are making
reasonable progress in the field, so maybe a six in the field and a four here",
i.e. in Whitehall, but then he said, "Where we are with NATO, NATO is back at
one or two." Brigadier
General McColl: Thank you, Chairman. I have read the testimony of others that have
appeared before you, so I understand the opinions of Brigadier Butler. The first thing I would say is that the
Comprehensive Approach is undoubtedly viewed as being important by NATO. There have been a series of agreements. In April 2008 there was an action plan
produced by NATO and there was a Comprehensive Strategic Political Merger Plan,
which Martin is better able to talk about than I, produced by NATO. In September 2008 there was a meeting between
the UN and NATO, an agreement rather, and in April 2009 there was a
declaration by heads of state of government which included a confirmation of
the priority afforded to the Comprehensive Approach. I was at a meeting of all the military
commanders in allied command operations and allied command transformation (which
makes up NATO) last week, and we were asked what we wanted to see in the new
strategic concept, and number one on that list was clarity of the Comprehensive
Approach, what NATO meant by it and how we might deliver it. So, in terms of the importance of it, I think
there is no doubt that within the military aspects of NATO, on which I am best
able to comment, there is huge importance attached to it. In terms of where we stand, I think there is
also no doubt that NATO is considerably further back than the UK, if you were
to mark them, and that is because it is significantly more difficult for NATO
to reach agreement on these matters, and perhaps we can go into that later
on. I can go into that, but I do not
think you will want me to do it right now.
It is far more difficult for NATO to do that than the
Q216 Chairman: Is it more difficult because it is a military alliance?
General McColl: It is more difficult because
it is primarily a political alliance and, in order to move forward on something
as complex as the Comprehensive Approach, you need consensus from all nations
and there are a number of obstacles to that.
The first - and I would describe it as the primary obstacle - is our
relationship with the EU. As you go
round capitals, you will find capitals outdoing each other in explaining how
important they view the relationship between NATO and the EU, and yet the
reality on the ground is somewhat different, and the reason for that is because
there are some nations who deem it unacceptable for us to sign a security
agreement with the EU. What that means,
therefore, for example, when the PSC and the NAQ meet - I take it we know what
the PSC is: it is the European equivalent of the NAQ - they only have one
item on the agenda, they can only have one item on the agenda, and that is
Q217 Chairman: Okay. Mr Howard, can you expand on that or add whatever you would like to the question I asked?
Mr Howard: Let me start with the
evidence you had before from Brigadier Butler and others. I thought, like General McColl, that was
a rather harsh marking, and I think it does not reflect what has happened since
April 2008. General McColl mentioned the
Comprehensive Political Military Plan that we drew up and endorsed at
Q218 Chairman: You say that one and a half is a harsh mark, but everything you have said suggests that it is not.
Mr Howard: I think it is always difficult to put figures on this. I would have perhaps given us three, or three and a half. I read Brigadier Butler's evidence very carefully, and there are a lot of things that have happened in the last two years which were not mentioned by him, or, indeed, by anyone else in the evidence session, and I feel that in terms of what has happened since then, just to take a more practical example on the ground which Mr Williams could elaborate on, we, last year, generated a NATO-wide policy for PRTs and PRT management, a very practical piece of work, and for the first time the work of PRTs is now being co-ordinated through a committee called the Executive Steering Committee, which is chaired by an Afghan, Dr Popal, and has the NATO SCR on it, has the UN Special Representative and, indeed, also has the EU's Special Representative on it as well as from ISAF. That is working on the ground.
Chairman: We will come on to Mr Williams and what is happening on the ground in just a moment.
Q219 Mr Jenkin: This institutional paralysis between you and NATO has
become part of the landscape of European security policy. Should we not just learn how to work within
that framework, and is not, in fact, the NATO nation relationship the way
forward? Should not the EU simply act as
a co-ordinator and enable and encourage individual nations to have these
bilateral relationships with NATO on the ground? Actually it has the advantage that in counter-insurgency
warfare you do want a single command and it puts NATO in command of the
civilian effort, which sounds to me more comprehensive than having a double-headed
monster which the EU and NATO threaten to become when they are operating side
by side. I wonder if John McColl would
comment on that. Actually the model we
have got in
General McColl: I do not disagree that
pragmatism is important, and I do not disagree that we need to make this work
on the ground for the benefit of those who are in harms way, and, indeed, that
is exactly what is happening. People are
doing what they must in order to make sure that co-operation works, and in many
ways, to pick up the point that was make by Martin Howard, co-operation on the
ground is, particularly in
Chairman: Yes, but you have got to sort
out
Q220 Mr Jenkin: Supposing we did have this ideal relationship, is it
not rather frustrating in NATO that you are essentially a military alliance but
the EU has a far wider range of policy instruments at its disposal, and so the
EU constantly steals roles from NATO which really should be NATO roles because
you are in charge of military operation?
You are in charge of driving forward the security. You should be in charge of the post-conflict
reconstruction and it is where the post-conflict reconstruction gets divorced
from the security tasks that we make such slow progress in
Mr Howard: Can I pick that up? This whole inquiry is about the Comprehensive
Approach, and the Comprehensive Approach means that you need to bring together
military activity, non-military activity, development and reconstruction, and I
would say, actually, a crucial part of that is governance as well: we need to
develop governance. With the best will
in the world, NATO can only physically do part of that. That is not to say we cannot act in a more co-ordinating
role, but the fact is that, if we are going to make a success of the campaign
in
Q221 Mr Jenkin: So NATO cannot do the Comprehensive Approach.
Mr Howard: NATO, I think, can be part of the Comprehensive Approach but a comprehensive approach would involve, for example, building up courts, building up law and order systems, a proper development programme. NATO is not in that business. We do not have those ultimate facilities.
Q222 Mr Holloway: I am quite surprised you are bringing up the Comprehensive Approach here. If we think Ed Butler is being generous by giving them one and a half, what score, General McColl, do you think he would give an Afghan farmer living near to the Helmand river (after all he is our target audience, is he not) in terms of increased security, development and political progress since, say, 2006?
General McColl: Are you asking me the question?
Q223 Mr Holloway: Either of you.
Mr Howard: We have actually done some
opinion-polling - I do not have them in front of me - in
Q224 Mr Holloway: I am talking about the south and the east.
Mr Howard: Yes, that is true, but you would have to look at the country as a whole.
Q225 Mr Holloway: Of course. I am starting with the south and the east. What score would they give?
Mr Howard: I think there is a real issue there and there is certainly a view that security has got worse. I do not know what score they would give to the Comprehensive Approach. I am not sure that is a question you could put to an Afghan farmer.
Q226 Mr Holloway: What do they feel about it in terms of security, development, political progress? Would they be negative?
Mr Howard: I think they would be
negative on two counts: first, on security - because the security situation has
got worse - and the second crucial point where it has got worse is on
governance. I think that this is a very
important point, that the average Afghan does not feel that his government from
Chairman: We are just about to come on to that.
Q227 Mr Crausby: Can I aim my question directly at Nick Williams. Drawing on your current experience in
Mr Williams: I wanted to pick up on the scoring point because of a rather difficult and in a way misplaced question. The point about the Comprehensive Approach is that no organisation does it on its own. Essentially the Comprehensive Approach means that on the ground all elements recognise that they are working towards a common purpose; in effect, are ready to be co-ordinated and are ready to adjust their institutional positions, not their mandates but their positions, in order to achieve a co-ordinated effect. Certainly in the past year I have seen some progress in the Comprehensive Approach, particularly in the strengthening of the UN's co-ordinating role, and also in response to preparation for the elections, for example. Once you get an issue which is almost transcendent in its importance, then you find that the institutions, working to their particular specificities, find their roles in terms of the common endeavour. So I personally would not be negative in terms of the Comprehensive Approach overall, but, as to marking institutions or countries, I think that is a very difficult issue. Could I very briefly say that in my personal experience(and a lot of people have had the same sort of experience as I have had) the Comprehensive Approach is more advanced in terms of its understanding by the actors involved in terms of the intent to apply a comprehensive approach than I saw in Iraq or in the Balkans the first time I was there in the 1990s, and in a way it is a debate about an issue over which there is no debate: everyone agrees there is no alternative to the Comprehensive Approach. The issues, I think, tend to be on the margins of the mandates of the institutions themselves and whether you can achieve better co-ordination and co-operation between them. I think that is happening, there is more to do, but it is not a 1.5 out of ten type issue.
Q228 Mr Hancock: If we all agree that it is working on the ground because, out of necessity, it needs to but the failure is at the top with regards to the co-operation between the EU and the understanding of their responsibilities and NATO, where is the political lead going to come from? We are a bit late in the day trying to catch up with what is happening in reality. Where is the political lack of will to make the Comprehensive Approach work? I understand that the EU can only talk about the one operation that they are involved in where they are actually sharing responsibility with others. Why on earth is that the state of play?
Mr Howard: Let me say, I am not sure it is complete failure at headquarters level.
Q229 Mr Hancock: It must be, must it not, because otherwise we would have been there by now?
Mr Howard: I think that there are relationships, which, for example, are working much better - the relationship between NATO and the UN is now working much better. We have now a joint agreement with the UN, which would have seemed impossible three or four years ago. There is a particular problem with the European Union, which I think we have all now referred to. How you solve it, Mr Hancock, as I said earlier, I think it is very difficult for me on the NATO side and for Robert on the EU side to solve it together. We could agree what we would need to do, but the EU has its 27 Member States, NATO has its 28 allies and they are the ones who have to decide.
Q230 Mr Hancock: Who is driving it then, Mr Howard? Who politically is not willing to take on that task? Is it the NATO members, or is it the EU members, or is it a total lack of leadership politically?
Mr Howard: There are 21 common members, of course, so there is straightaway a problem. I think it is a very reasonable question. The Secretary General of NATO is very, very firm about the need to improve NATO/EU relations, and I have no doubt Mr Solana sees it the same way, but it needs the Member States themselves, the allies, to make change now. If you are asking me to pick out particular allies, I would find it very hard.
Q231 Mr Hancock: I am not asking you to pick out particular allies; I am asking you to tell us where the problem is in those two organisations. I listened to the Secretary General's farewell speech at the WU a month ago and it was obvious he had no answer to the issue of how he co-operated with the EU. Javier Solana is coming soon to make possibly another farewell speech, and it will be interesting to see what his comment is as to why he cannot make the relationship with NATO work. Why is it that no-one can get to grips with it?
Mr Cooper: Would it help if I were to say something? This is not an institutional problem; this is apolitical problem. As far as the institutions go, we have as close a co-operation as you could wish between NATO and the European Union. We have worked out at a bureaucratic level the detail of the agreements that we need to function together, but they have not received political endorsement, and, as Martin and General McColl have said, that is because of political problems between one of the members of the European Union and one of the members of NATO, and that is a problem which the institutions are not able to solve. Within those constraints we work together. I would say, I think that we work together much better now than we did three or four years ago. On the staff level the co-operation is extremely close, on the ground everybody does their best, though we suffer from the lack of a formal agreement, but that is a political problem which none those here is able to solve.
Chairman: Mr Cooper, I do not think you can leave this hanging in the air. When you say "one of the members of the European Union and one of the members of NATO", I do think you have to say which they are.
Q232 Mr Hancock: It must be
Mr Cooper: This is not a secret. This is a question about
Chairman: We will not expand on that.
Q233 Mr Hancock: But that is where the problem is.
Mr Cooper: Yes.
Q234 Mr Hancock: Can I ask possibly Mr Cooper and Mr Howard and then the General, is the Comprehensive Approach a valid concept for all current, and what you would foresee as future, operations? Is the Comprehensive Approach applicable in all future operations and are there particular circumstances where that approach is less appropriate?
Mr Howard: Personally (and this is speaking from my experience of NATO and from before), I do not think there is any purely military operational military campaign. Everything, even going back decades, I think, has a military/civilian aspect to it. It seems to me that some version of a comprehensive approach is going to be needed almost whatever operation that I can foresee is carried out. I suppose you could argue that a single nation very specific special forces operation might not, but anything that has got politics involved with it I think will need it. Having said that, I think a comprehensive approach that you apply in Afghanistan could look very different to the comprehensive approach that you apply in Kosovo, which would look, in turn, different to the comprehensive approach that we would apply to the very narrow problem of counter-piracy, but the basic concept that you need to bring both civil, military and other actors together, I think, you are right, would be valid for current operations and future operations.
Mr Cooper: A comprehensive approach is
perhaps an ideal, and one tries to approach it as far as possible. My own suspicion is that the only place at
which a fully comprehensive approach will be available is perhaps as it was
applied by
Q235 Mr Hancock: Can we ask the General for his point of view?
General McColl: Yes, first of all, I think
the idea of a comprehensive approach is absolutely essential. If you analyse the future threats that we
might face, they are largely bracketed around the concept of instability, and
the lines of operation that deliver you strategic success in respect of
instability problems are economics and governance; the security operation
simply holds the ring. It is, therefore,
essential that we have a comprehensive approach to these types of
problems. Talking to the issue of
Q236 Mrs Moon: General McColl, you have painted a fantastic picture of the complexities of the pulling together of the comprehensive approach and the difficulties that we actually have in achieving successful communication and collaboration. Can I get a picture for myself as to how well this is actually playing on the ground with local nationals producing successful outcomes? It is a little bit like Adam Holloway's question about the farmer at the side of the river. Can you give us some examples of how it has actually worked well?
General McColl: I can try. First of all, to go back to the specific
example of a farmer on the river, I think that is the wrong the snapshot to
take. If I might be so bold, I would go
back to 2001/ 2002 when we arrived in
Q237 Mrs Moon: Mr Williams, what is your view on that?
Mr Williams: I would like to go back to the example I already gave, which is the elections, which is not the only example, but it is an indication of how each of the institutions are helping the Afghan Government deliver elections by mentoring, training, providing funds and expertise according to their own specificities. For example, ISAF is providing support alongside EUPOL to the planning for the security of the elections. That involves training and preparing both the Army and the Police. ISAF does not have, nor does See Sticker, which is the American-led mentoring training organisation, in-depth civil police expertise. EUPOL does, and so by working together and dividing up the task into specific functions, we are approaching an election on August 20 which, for the first time, will be largely delivered by the Afghan authorities themselves. I have just cited ISAF and EUPOL, but the European Commission, working with UNDP and other organisations as well as NGOs, are also playing their part in preparing either observers, monitors, and so on. So I take that as a supreme example of the Comprehensive Approach. In terms of going back to the emblematic Afghan by the side of the river, I think one has to distinguish between the mechanics of the Comprehensive Approach, and the international community does spend a lot of time on the mechanics co-ordinating and working together in order to create policies and strategies, and the effects of the Comprehensive Approach, and certainly the what man by the side of the river will notice is probably the UK, or the Canadians, or the Americans delivering either security or some sort of aid project but which, by now, should be coherent and consistent with the Afghan national development strategy or the Afghan national counter-narcotics strategy, and so on. Again, I go back to my point. Comprehensive means that all the organisations and players, including to some extent NGOs, are working towards a common idea of what has to be achieved according to strategies which, after a number of years, are now in place across a range of development goals. So the man by the side of the river may not notice whether NATO, or the EU, or the UN is delivering something, but the overall effect should be that what is delivered should increasingly be part of a consistent, coherent strategy which has been developed by the Afghan Government with the support of the various international actors.
Q238 Mrs Moon: Mr Cooper, you were nodding. Would you agree with that?
Mr Cooper: Yes, indeed. Nick, being on the ground, in a way sees a bigger picture, because he sees all of the different organisations involved. I am aware of only one part of the picture, but I know that the European Union aid programmes over the years have actually been building up an Afghan NGO to do election monitoring. There will be European monitors out there as well, but the bulk of the monitoring will actually be done by Afghans, which is the best way to do it.
Q239 Mrs Moon: We have got a picture that there is change in the
development, and we have to look at it over a period of time, that there is
mentoring, training and expertise being developed through the Army, the Police
and the political system, the development of common ideas of what can be
achieved and what has been achieved, but no-one has mentioned women. It has all been about the man at the side of
the road. If you talk to the majority of
women in this country part of their buy-in to
Mr Howard: It is actually. I talked to you earlier about the POL/MIL
plan that we developed. We did a
revision of that in April of this year and we have a number of items within
that which are specifically about UNSCR 1325.
In addition to that, going beyond Afghan, the NATO military chain of
command have also tried to embed the concepts of UNSCR 1325 into their
planning. I know that my military
counterpart, the Director of the International Military Staff, has been working
very hard on that. That is, again,
rather bureaucratic, but it is visible at the NATO headquarters level very
clearly. On the ground there are various
statistics which are brought out about the number of girls that are going to
school in
Q240 Chairman: Mr Cooper, could you give a brief answer?
Mr Cooper: Yes. I just wanted to say that we have specific
directives on 1325 in the European Union.
I think there may be a couple of exceptions, but each of our missions has
a gender adviser. In some cases I find
that I get continual pleas from the heads of the mission: can they have more
women in the mission. For example, we
were running the border crossing; we were monitoring the border crossing at
Rafah, between
Q241 Mrs Moon: Can I very quickly ask General McColl in terms of this political role with President Karzai, how conscious was President Karzai of the importance of the political dimension of the UN resolution?
General McColl: I am not sure I am able to give you a particularly clear answer to that. He is very aware of the political sensitivities of his international coalition partners, and I think it is fair to say does his best, in my experience. I am well out of date now, but my experience is he does his best to accommodate that. I think that is the best answer I can give.
Q242 Mrs Moon: In terms of the international organisations and government working with NGOs, is that working? Is that a successful partnership? Is there a common language and a common understanding when you add in the NGOs?
Mr Howard: I will start from NATO
headquarters point of view. I think it
is getting better, I would say.
Certainly in my time in NATO we have had a number of engagements with
NGOs on very specific issues, for example to do with civilian casualties in
Mr Cooper: Chairman, if I might add just one word, I think for us the place where we do this best at the moment is in Kosovo, where we have had quite a long preparation time. We have created a kind of forum of NGOs and consulted them, and we have a partnership agreement with the main NGOs on the ground in Kosovo, and that works very well. It is more difficult when something happens rather quickly and you find you move in quickly and a whole lot of other people move in quickly. It takes time to sort it out.
Richard Younger-Ross: How difficult do you find working with the NGOs? Some of the NGOs say they do not wish to engage, they wish to keep you very clear and very separate, and some others like ActionAid are very critical of the lack of engagement.
Q243 Chairman: Mr Williams, you are willing to answer this?
Mr Williams: I think it is precisely as you say: some will want a closer relationship than others. It is not a natural or easy relationship in general, but certainly, as part of the Comprehensive Approach, the UN hosts a forum of NGOs at which ISAF is present and in which some form of co-operation is developed. One issue that has irritated NGOs has been the fact that some ISAF nations have driven around in white vehicles, for example, therefore confusing the status of ISAF with the status of NGOs, but we came to a very amicable solution to that where ISAF has issued instructions for the repainting of its vehicles. So there are mechanisms and fora for working things out. Just by chance, before this session started I met in the foyer Eric Igastum(?), who works for one NGO who did a very good study on civilian casualties which I recommend that you read. We had very a close relationship. He had criticisms of ISAF and has lobbied very effectively in terms of ideas on how to reduce civilian casualties. So I would not say there was a huge gap between NGOs, but their purposes and modus operandi are slightly different. They need a certain space and distance from ISAF in order to function, in order to be recognised for their specificity. Sometimes on the ISAF side there is sense of obligation towards the NGOs. If they get in trouble it will be ISAF, often, that may be required to help them out. I think the relationship is balanced, as long as everyone understands what the relationship is. I think the biggest problem the NGOs have is that the military turn-over in ISAF is so huge that, as they develop relationships with particular points of contact, then that point of contact goes and the continuity goes and the ability to build up a fruitful, stable, more co-operative relationship is hampered, not by ideological reasons often, but just by practical reasons of change-over in ISAF staff. NGOs tend to be much more present for a greater period and often have more experience than some of the ISAF officers that they are dealing with.
Q244 Richard Younger-Ross: ActionAid have said in theirs that they do not believe the UK Government is benefiting from the NGOs knowledge and understanding of the Afghan people. Is that a fair criticism?
Mr Williams: I do not know what they think about how the UK Government benefits, but certainly, again, I find on the ground the relationships are reasonable. All NGOs tend to be open, certainly the office for which I work has a good relationship with all NGOs. We are in constant dialogue. If there is any issue that they want to raise, we will raise it with ISAF or with the respective organisation. The particular position from which either NGOs, or nations start, or institutions start from their capitals tends to get modified once you in theatre.
Q245 Richard Younger-Ross: Are they an equal partner?
Mr Williams: In some places they are not partners at all because of the security situation, and certainly in the south the Canadians and the Dutch, as well as the British, have made significant efforts to get more NGOs deployed in order to be partners. There is no institutional resistance to getting them as partners, but I think they themselves would recognise, as would other institutions faced with an organisation the size and the weight of ISAF, you cannot be an equal partner, but what they need is a listening partner, and, as I say, the problem about being a listening partner, a responsive partner, is more about the turnover of personnel rather than the resistance to listening to what NGOs have to say. That is my experience.
Q246 Mr Holloway: What difference, if any, do you think there will be with the new American strategy in terms of the Comprehensive Approach?
Mr Howard: The American strategy
actually is very much based on the principle of the comprehensive
approach. Its component parts, insofar
as it relates to
Q247 Mr Jenkin: Is it not legitimate that the military, particularly in places like Helmand, should express frustration that they have, albeit limited, access to very large amounts of military capability, but they have very limited access to civilian capability which they desperately need for the follow-on after they have taken somewhere like Musa Qala? If we are going to deliver the comprehensive approach, is not the traditional NGO approach, where there is a strict demarcation between what is a military operation and what are civilian operations, really completely unsuited to what we are doing in Afghanistan?
Mr Howard: I would agree with that, but
I would say that in
Q248 Mr Jenkin: I am sorry; may I pick you up on that? The amount of resource available to the
military commander and the PRT in
General McColl: I think there is a difference in the approach to the question of redevelopment, particularly in terms of timeframe in the immediate aftermath of a particularly difficult military action such as Musa Qala. I think the balanced approach the UK has, where there is emphasis on the civil need in delivery of development, is probably right, except where the security circumstances are so difficult that the civilian element have difficulty because of the differences in duty of care and those aspects which govern their use when they have the difficulty of getting people onto the ground, and in those circumstances - and this is the primary difference between ourselves and the American approach, as you are well aware - I think there is an argument to say that we should review our delivery mechanisms, give the designated commander more access to what I would describe as immediate influence aid, which is not to be confused with the long-term development requirement, which is rather separate.
Q249 Mr Jenkin: I understand that point, but I am saying two things. One is that it is unbalanced how much we are devoting to the long-term when we cannot get the short-term right; the long-term is going to be otiose if we cannot get the short-term reconstruction right. Perhaps a question for Mr Cooper. Given that NATO just does not have this intermediate immediate post-conflict capability at scale in the same way as the Americans do, is that not what the EU should be facilitating Member States to provide to NATO rather than retreating into the longer-term governance issues, which, as I say, are really surplus to requirements at the immediate point at which we are trying to provide security?
Mr Cooper: I think that you are right, Mr Jenkin, that there is really a gap in our capabilities. There is a very well-organised defence sector, there is a very large and experienced development sector and there is a gap in between those two.
Q250 Mr Jenkin: So how do we fill it?
Mr Cooper: Part of the gap, which we attempt to fill but not with enormous success, really consists of police and justice. That is in a way the transition from a situation where you have the military in control to the establishment of civil government. The first things that you have to do to make civil government work are to make justice work and to have police. The resource that it is hardest to obtain for deployment overseas, apart from helicopters, is almost certainly police. It is very difficult on a large scale to run a comprehensive approach when you do not have comprehensive resources, and that means that a number of governments in the European Union, the USA as well, the British Government included, are thinking about how they can make available more readily deployable police and judges, and then you sometimes need other kinds of officials, because it is no good training an army unless you have a defence ministry as well, but actually police and judicial officials are the key people you need.
Q251 Mr Jenkin: So where should the political need come from? Should it come from the NAC or should it come from PSC, or does it need to come from Member States? Where is this lead going to come from?
Mr Howard: I think at the moment it is
more likely to come from allies than the states. In the
Q252 Mr Jenkin: If I may just interrupt you. You made quite a big admission there. Here we have an extraordinary collection of
political institutional structures that span Europe and the
Mr Williams: The resources belong to the Member States.
Q253 Mr Jenkin: Then why do we pretend this institutional structure can deliver something when, in fact, really your best role is as facilitators and encouragers of individual Member States to step up to the piece? Is that not what we should be concentrating on instead of this institution building, where so many Member States, effectively, contract out responsibility for what happens to the international institutions and then wash their hands of the consequences?
Mr Howard: Speaking for the
Mr Jenkin: But this is internationalism not working, is it not?
Q254 Chairman: Would you allow Mr Howard to answer.
Mr Howard: I think it is working, but
it is far from perfect. The fact is that
NATO headquarters, NATO command structure provides the framework to actually
carry out the mission in
Mr Cooper: The European Union position is almost exactly the same. It is certainly the same as far as military and civilian resources in terms of police are concerned. There is no European army. The armies are all national. The European Union provides a method by which they can work together. There are European resources when it comes to development through the Commission, but otherwise the human resources are all nationally owned and they are lent to the Alliance and the European Union for particular operations, but I believe most Member States are conscious of the gap in civilian resources.
Chairman: I am afraid we are falling way behind because you are being all too interesting. We will move on to PRTs.
Q255 Mr Crausby: Can I ask Nick Williams how well the different PRTs
work? With 42 nations contributing
troops and 26 different PRTS, to what extent do they all operate in the pursuit
of international objectives and what is the overall contribution to stability
in
Mr Williams: Again, this is a work in
progress that has seen some progress in the past year in particular. The PRTs, when they originally deployed,
basically deployed with the idea that they were there to fill a gap in terms of
governance, support and development in the provinces, given that the Afghan
Government at that time was rather weak and its reach to provinces was rather
limited. Therefore, you had a process of
province ownership by the nations that actually were present and a sense of PRT's
responding, as they would, to the resources and guidance being provided by
their capitals rather than responding to a comprehensive coherent agenda set by
the Afghan government with the assistance of the international community. I think what has happened in the past year
that has been significant is the final putting to bed of the Afghan national
development strategy, which, although still rather broad, is nevertheless a
strategy which has been agreed by the Afghan Government and which is the
framework and the objectives within which they want to see development taking
place in their country; and that has allowed us, on the NATO side, to revive
something called the Executive Steering Committee, which until January had not
met for about 18 months previously, which essentially brings together
representatives of the PRT nations, usually the embassies, and attempts to give
them guidance as to how to create coherence between them and share best
practice. The innovation that we made
was that, instead of being chaired by ISAF and the NATO office, it would be chaired
by, and is now chaired by, a member of the Afghan Government, in this case
Mr Popal, who is the Head of the Independent Department of Local
Governance. PRTs have become politically
sensitive over the past two years, essentially because Mr Karzai, and not
just Mr Karzai, certain elements within the Afghan establishment felt that PRTs
were not responsive to Afghan development needs. By putting an Afghan political lead to this
process of guiding and giving some sort of policy framework, we have actually
made the PRTs more transparent and what they are doing more transparent to the
Afghan Government. We have also provided
a framework for the Afghan Government to provide guidance and feel that they
have some sort of control and influence over what the PRTs are doing. So the PRTs are in some sort of evolution,
just as
Q256 Mr Crausby: Just a quick question on funding. I think all of our witnesses on 9 June pretty well said that some PRTs were starved of funding, particularly in comparison to the Americans. Is that true and what effect does that have on delivery.
Mr Williams: Starved of funding suggests a rather cruel deliberate policy by Member States. Different PRTs have different functions. Some PRTs do not actually do development, they just oversee development initiated by their capitals, so they may not have any money because that is not their purpose, and certain PRTs which are not as well funded as the British, or the American PRTs, or the Canadian PRTs certainly do have access to Japanese funds. The Japanese Government has also, very generously, said they are willing to spend their money through PRTs on certain priority projects. From where I sit, the issue, again, is not funding, it is really about, at this stage, now bringing the PRTs into a relationship with the Afghan Government which the Afghan Government feels comfortable with in terms of providing guidance and visibility.
Q257 Mr Holloway: I appreciate that a lot of the questions have been about institutions, and so on, but we have spoken largely about the framework strategy, Steering Committee, institutional relationships and it sounded to me often in the session you were describing a self-licking lollipop that exists and feeds for itself. Can you tell us what is actually being done to improve the score that the ordinary Afghan might give us?
Mr Howard: First of all, you have to have a plan.
Q258 Mr Holloway: But what is actually being done to improve the score, because it is pretty poor?
Mr Howard: Let me speak primarily from a NATO perspective, because that is who I represent. I think that our main centre of gravity (and this is reflected in the plan) is to build up Afghan capacity, particularly in the Afghan National Security Forces and, if I might, I would like to pick up the example that Nick quoted about the election, which has a direct impact on ordinary Afghans. The fact is that security for these elections coming up now primarily will be led by the Afghan Police, supported by the Afghan Army, with ISAF as the third responder. That is something which two or three years ago would have been unthinkable. In that sense that improvement has been made. There is still a long way to go, particularly on the police front, but that progress is being made, so in that sense there are, increasingly, competent Afghan security forces that are able to provide an increasing proportion of the security the Afghans create. In the south and east is where it is most problematic, and you have pointed out, Mr Holloway, where that was most difficult, but even there you will see more and more Afghans being upfront. I think the area that is weakest, in terms of building the confidence of ordinary Afghans, is in the area of law and order, justice, those systems which lie behind the Police and the Army. I think there is a real problem there, and there needs to be a lot more done. So it is a very mixed picture. I believe that the polling that we have done indicates Afghans across the country, including in the south and east, have quite a lot of confidence in both the Army and even the Police but have much less confidence in the political machinery which lies behind it.
Mr Cooper: I just wanted to recall what
General McColl was saying much earlier on.
If you had looked at
Q259 Mr Holloway: I am sorry, the Pashtun Belt where the insurgency is?
Mr Cooper: In the insurgency, of course, there are major difficulties, but what has been delivered for the Afghans is actually enormous improvements in some areas.
Q260 Mr Holloway: I am sorry, in areas where there is peace, that is just development; you do not really need a comprehensive approach. The Comprehensive Approach is about winning the military struggle and the battle for the people. What are the benefits that you are in the process of describing within the Pashtun Belt since 2002?
Mr Cooper: I think I would rather pass the question to Nick Williams, who has lived there.
Q261 Mr Holloway: But you were describing how things had got better, so tell us how they have got better in the Pashtun Belt?
Mr Cooper: As I say, a specific question about the Pashtun Belt I have difficulty in answering, because I know the global statistics but what is clear is there are more schools, more hospitals, more roads, so to say that nothing has been done---
Mr Holloway: It is about the Comprehensive Approach where there is conflict.
Q262 Chairman: Mr Williams, do you want to answer that question on the Pashtun Belt?
Mr Williams: It depends where in the Pashtun Belt, because not all parts of the Pashtun Belt are equally insecure, but it is true that the sense of insecurity felt by the population in the Pashtun Belt has increased. Nevertheless, you can point, in the major conurbations, to the same sorts of improvement in mind, health and education that you see elsewhere, but they are in a very restricted protected space. One of the existential effects of our presence is actually to give reassurance, and it is not what you can call welfare benefit or social benefit, that the Afghans will not be abandoned and the Pashtuns will not be abandoned, and, despite all the losses we have taken and the increase in the insurgency and the fact that we are sticking it out, that is an element of stability, even within the insurgency.
Chairman: I understand that you have to go in five minutes, so we have got to wrap up with Madeleine Moon.
Mrs Moon: Very briefly from each of you, if you would, you have outlined the difficulties and some of the successes that the Comprehensive Approach has brought. Where do we go? What do we need to do to make it more effective? What is the next step on this road?
Chairman: Who would like to start? General McColl, you have been too quiet for too long.
Q263 Mr Jenkin: Can General McColl draw on his experience in
General McColl: I will try and keep it simple. Firstly, in the new strategic concept we need clarity on an agreement from all allies of what they mean by the Comprehensive Approach. At the moment people are consenting and then evading. For example, there are allies who will be quite happy to agree to the Comprehensive Approach and then become obscurant as we move down the road, mainly because of the competition with the EU, I have to say. The second issue: we need to resolve this block in our ability to communicate with what is, I think, our principal partner in terms of delivering, and that is the EU, and that is to supply some of the intellectual ability and energy that is devoted to building castles in the air about NATO and EU co-operation to solving the problem which is stopping it happening. That is it in two bullets. I could give you a lot more, but I leave it there.
Q264 Chairman: That is extremely helpful and very also very nicely brief. Mr Howard.
Mr Howard: I will it keep it brief as
well. You were talking, I think, about
Mr Cooper: Might I go a little bit
wider? I said earlier, and I think I
want to repeat it, that the Comprehensive Approach needs comprehensive
resources, and we are not organised for that at this moment. The second thing I would like to say is that,
at the heart of whatever you do, there has to be a political strategy, that is
to say a strategy, in this case, with the Afghan Government, or with whoever,
but because General McColl has underlined the problems between the EU and NATO
I wanted to mention one forgotten EU/NATO operation which has been so
successful that everyone has forgotten it, which is what was done in Scopje in
the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia jointly by Javier Solana and George
Robinson. NATO resources were deployed,
rather small resources because we were preventing a conflict. The EU has been involved since then in aid
programmes and all kinds of things. You
do not hear about it because it was a success, and that was comprehensive but,
at the heart of it, it had a political deal between the two communities in
Q265 Chairman: Thank you. Mr Williams finally.
Mr Williams: Very briefly, I think it should be understood that, insofar there are obstacles within existing resources to applying the Comprehensive Approach, it is really still due to the weakness of UNAMA and its inability still, despite the quality and the increase in its staff, to play a leading co-ordinating role, which means that you spend a lot of time on the bureaucratics of the Comprehensive Approach rather than the effect. My main point would be strengthening the UN even further so that it has an ability to help governance and help develop governance in a more effective way than is happening. ISAF cannot do that. We can do our bit, but the UN has to be strengthened in order that it can do its bit better.
Chairman: Thank you. I know you have to be away at 11.50; it is now 11.49. I should be wrong to say anything other than this has been a fascinating first part of this morning. We are most grateful to all of you for having given so freely of your evidence. Thank you very much indeed.
Memoranda submitted by Care International
and European Council on Foreign Relations
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Daniel Korski, Senior Police Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations, Mr Howard Mollett, Conflict Policy Adviser, Care International, and Mr Stephen Grey, journalist, Sunday Times, gave evidence.
Q266 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to help further with our evidence session. Would you like to tell us a bit about yourselves, please, and what relationship you have had with the Comprehensive Approach? Daniel Korski, do you want to start?
Mr Korski: I am Daniel Korski; I am a Senior Policy Fellow at a think-tank called the European Council on Foreign Relations. Before that I worked for the British Government as the Deputy Head of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit (now called the Stabilisation Unit), I ran the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Basra, spent some time advising one of President Karzai's ministers, and worked for four years for Lord Paddy Ashdown in the Balkans on what we then did not call the Comprehensive Approach but it probably was that very thing.
Mr Mollett: Good morning, my name is Howard Mollett and I work for Care International, which is a multi-mandate non-governmental organisation. We work across development, recovery and humanitarian work in about 70 countries worldwide. I work in the conflict and humanitarian team at the international level, providing technical support to our country officers on both the programme quality side and also research to inform our engagement with different policy issues, such as the Comprehensive Approach. Civil military relations is a really important issue for us, obviously, on the ground, particularly in countries affected by conflict, but we are also seeing some of the implications of the Comprehensive Approach playing out at the international level in terms of donor policy and how funding is managed, and so on. So that is where our interest stems from.
Mr Grey: Thank you for having
me. I am a journalist working as a
freelancer primarily for The Sunday Times. I have covered operations in
Q267 Chairman: Could we begin with that then, please. Could you give us a summary of how you think
it is working, in your experience, on the ground in
Mr Grey: I have to say, I think we
owe it to all those that are sacrificing themselves in Helmand, to be brutally
frank about what is going on there and what is going wrong, because it is only
with that frankness that I think certain things can be put right. From the perspective of those on the ground,
I think the Comprehensive Approach has largely been a parody of reality. In some ways the failure to get that right
has done as much to stir up conflict and cause what is happening as it has to
bring peace to
Q268 Chairman: Please do.
Mr Grey: He referred to the
governance strand, and I will just summarise that, a sense of total lack of delivery
of promises. A governor there in Musa Qala
who was frequently absent for months on end and absent without anyone knowing
where he was. Intelligence (and I will
not go much into that), but the sense of a severe lack of any continuity and
situational awareness, even at a very local level, about the opinions and the
make-up of the people with whom they were working. I will read you exactly what he said about
the Comprehensive Approach. "The Comprehensive
Approach was the biggest set back. Once
the security bubble was established, there was little to back it up to trade
the ink-spot theory. Yes, there was a
rebuilt school, a few ditches dug and a medical centre which will be the best
for miles around if it is ever finished, but that is it. The FCO lead in Musa Qala did not leave the
base in the entire six months I was there, as it was decreed too dangerous by
their standards. This meant it was left
to an underfunded CIMIC team of five people.
In conclusion, it felt as if we were doing things half-heartedly. Intelligence and CIMIC are a most important
aspect, but underfunded. All we really
did was to fight and kill the Taliban.
The numbers are staggering, and why is that? Because we are good at it, structured for it
and resourced for it, but that should not be the centre of gravity of our
efforts." I suppose I would argue
that there are three ways in which you can see fault, and I only look for fault
because we need to get it right, not because there are not people who are
trying to resolve these things and making some progress. First of all, strategic synchronisation is a
phrase I have heard at the top of
Q269 Chairman: Did you get involved in
Mr Grey: Absolutely. I spent months in
Chairman: Do you think the same thing happened there, or do you think that lessons of things that happened there were not applied, or were applied but in an inefficient way, or what?
Mr Holloway: Mr Grey is one of the
very few Western journalists who is wandering around southern
Q270 Chairman: I am sure he is about to tell us that.
Mr Grey: In some ways the problem
about Iraq is that some of the lessons were learnt right at the end, but we
were deployed into Helmand before, if you like, the lessons learned kicked in,
and what you saw in Iraq was an enormous total lack of long-term planning where
we made short-term deals with militias essentially to hand over great
responsibility for the power structure to them.
The fundamental lesson there was: do not kiss all the bad guys in power
if you expect to win over the population, and, unfortunately, we repeated that
lesson in Helmand, where we arrived to ally ourselves with a great deal of
people who brought only disrespect to us from the population. Many of the established interests we were
working with, for example, were connected to the drugs trade, and such like
and, therefore, failed to do anything to enhance our reputational ability to
deliver effect with the population. The
only thing I would urge you to do when you look at the Comprehensive Approach -
because, after all, it is just the foundation of any counter-insurgency,
political, military unity - is to look at it in three dimensions. One is the joined up nature of UK efforts,
where the whole operation has been plagued, despite what is said publicly, by
squabbling between departments and a real sense of people not pulling together,
and that is only one aspect, but also, the second dimension is the vertical
integration: what are we doing as far as the overall plan for Afghanistan? In some ways everything we do in
Q271 Mr Hamilton: Just following up on that last part. We have had evidence before where that has
come up. Indeed, when we were in
Mr Grey: I think it was a key recommendation of the After Action Report of 52 Brigade at the beginning of last year, 2008, and it was another key recommendation, I believe, in the most recent from Brigadier Gordon Messenger, continually repeating this message. This is not about combat troops, who arguably should be going for shorter tours, but about the brigade and the commanders who run his thing. There seems to be a flat refusal at the top level of the military to accept this. The one improvement is a deployment of a headquarters to Regional Command South by General Nick Carter, who is coming in in October for a year, which is a lot better, but that has to be reflected in the overall British plan.
Q272 Chairman:
But
there is a balance, is there not, between deploying a brigadier with his
brigade and having, therefore, the entire brigade serving a period in
Mr Grey: Absolutely.
Q273 Chairman: How would you resolve that?
Mr Grey: The key people that require continuity are the intelligence officers, political officers, in other words those people that interact with Afghans. They have to develop relationships. It is impossible to develop a relationship over six months. By the time you have made the relationship you are leaving, and then the headquarters elements of the brigade. That does not mean the individual soldiers who are fighting. I would argue that they are too long, actually, many of the combat units. They are totally overstretched.
Mr Korski: I wonder if I could add a civilian element to this. There is obviously no point in longer rotations of senior military officers if their civilian counterparts either stay in the shorter rotations or have leave rotations that do not coincide with their military counterparts. Just to complement what Stephen was saying, I think it would be necessary to think much more comprehensively about deployment, including deploying military and civilians together for longer periods at the higher level.
Q274 Chairman: A totally different question. Have you had any difficulty, as a journalist
in
Mr Grey: It is extraordinarily difficult
to get access. It is just the nature of
the war rather than the Government. This
is very different from
Q275 Chairman: I am sorry, were you there for that briefing, or were you told about the briefing afterwards?
Mr Grey: I was there when I overheard discussions by staff in headquarters about how they planned to organise this Prime Minister's visit.
Q276 Chairman: What you are telling us is that when the Prime Minister goes there he gets no ground truth; he gets some pre-organised line-to-take cooked up in advance by the Ministry of Defence?
Mr Grey: That is the objective of certain officials. Of course, I just add that there are soldiers who speak their mind regardless of any briefing they receive, but there is a tendency in that system certainly and people there who do try to cook up that sort of viewpoint.
Q277 Mr Holloway: Do you think generally with both
Mr Grey: I do not know what briefings you have received, but I just know that there is almost a professional optimism that is provided to yourselves which is not borne out by the private opinions of many of the same people that make these public statements.
Q278 Chairman: You have seen the evidence that the permanent under-secretaries gave us. Do you think that was just words?
Mr Grey: I do not know their private
views; I have never met any of them. I
remember they made a similar report. In
the spring of 2007 they made a fact-finding trip to Helmand in
Q279 Chairman: From what you are saying, the truth is different from what they were telling us in terms of the effectiveness of the Comprehensive Approach.
Mr Grey: I do not wish to question those particular conclusions.
Q280 Chairman: I am not suggesting that they were in any sense lying to us. What I was suggesting was that the Comprehensive Approach is more in words than in reality. Is that right?
Mr Grey: Absolutely, and the impression you get from very senior people within the military is that they are confronted with other departments who have no genuine belief in the value of this conflict; there is a sense in which they are not sure there is a real will to win in other departments. You get a sense in the diplomatic service, for example, that the military have pushed ahead of the political will that exists in this country. So that adds up to a dysfunction between those departments which, despite great efforts by a number of people to pull together, has not been resolved.
Q281 Mrs Moon: Do you think we have learnt anything? Has anything improved? Are we making any progress at all?
Mr Grey: Yes, I believe so. You have heard people describe efforts to pull things together. I think the Stabilisation Unit and the Afghan Taskforce are examples of attempts by people to pull together what is being done, but the measure is not those organisational efforts but the actual effect I heard earlier talk about on the farmers on the ground. You cannot say that the strategy is right until you actually see those positive benefits. You can talk about this as a long-term effect, a long-term campaign, but I think as General Petraeus said in Iraq, unless you are winning in the short-term, there is no long-term, and unless at every point in every military and political operation you deliver a positive benefit to the Afghan people in that tiny hamlet, you are contributing to an overall worsening of the situation rather than an overall improvement. I do think there are places in central Helmand where things are working much, much better and certainly outside of Helmand in the wider Afghanistan, which I do not know too much about, people point to a great many successes, but the struggle is to work out how to do things where security is not present at all, and that is where I do not think anyone has found a correct solution how to deliver the Comprehensive Approach, if you like, when the mortars are still landing.
Q282 Mrs Moon: I would like the other two gentlemen to comment on the same question, and I would like to then come back to Mr Grey with another question, if I may. Mr Mollett.
Mr Mollett: We at Care International have also made a written submission. I have got it in front of me. We put in there that the comprehensive approach seems to reflect some of the lessons identified, if not perhaps yet lessons learned, emerging from Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of how operations on the ground have been ineffective, partly, in the experience of both countries, reflecting the extent to which they have been driven by short-termist strategies centered around some questionable orthodoxies and ideas around using aid in a short-term way to win hearts and minds through emphasis on the military side, and then with the lack of clarity over the relationship between the military piece and politics in the context of what aid can realistically achieve and on what basis aid can be sustainable, whether you are talking about longer-term work on livelihoods, or education on the development side, or in terms of meeting basic needs and savings lives on the humanitarian front as well. Reflecting on the experience in Afghanistan, when the British military first deployed into Helmand there was (and Stephen referred to that) this rather unseemly spectacle, that once the British military had been deployed and they had been apparently requested by the Afghan Government to go out into the more remote rural areas, there were public announcements calling, "Where are the UN? Where are the NGOs? Where is DfID?", to come in almost perhaps with a band wagon in the Wild West and do big impact projects in the areas where the troops had been deployed and not really understanding, at least from the perspective of aid agencies, or agencies like my own, that we can only work in conflict affected contexts like Afghanistan on the basis of community acceptance and being understood as distinct from, and not aligned with, one of the parties fighting in the conflict. That is no disrespect to the military in what they are doing in their operation; it is about understanding the basis on which we can operate without our staff's lives being put at risk, and, indeed, not only our staff, but the actual communities that we are trying to work with as well. What we have seen since then, but also prior to that, in some of the discourse around the Comprehensive Approach, when you hear the discussions around the mechanics if you like, and the policy at the international level, there is increasing recognition of some of those issues and the need for agencies like Care to work on the basis of independence from any of the belligerence involved in the war and on a neutral and impartial basis. For instance, someone above my pay grade was recently in a meeting in a forum at which the Deputy Secretary General of NATO was present and said something to the effect of, "NATO is now aware that we need to engage with aid agencies on a sort of co-ordination with, not co-ordination of, basis for it to work", and I think that is progress, if you compare it to, say, the earlier period in Afghanistan and the previous experience in Iraq as well, but I think it is still a little bit unclear whether the mechanics and understanding of some of the realities for aid agencies working on the ground is really translated down into the practice on the ground or is understood in a consistent way across different parts of government departments or across some of the international institutions that are involved in contexts like Afghanistan and in the Comprehensive Approach. For some it does seem a genuinely new way of working, for others it is a new label for the same old way of working and framing civil, military relations basically as a way to instrumentalise aid to deliver on a short-term tactical objective.
Mr Korski: I think the brutal truth that the committee is gradually unearthing is the fact that our institutions nationally, our alliances internationally are ill-equipped to deal with these interconnected security challenges in a comprehensive manner, whether they be stabilising areas such as Helmand after an immediate combat operation or perhaps, more broadly, engaging with aid, the diplomatic tools and military tools in the run up to conflict. What we are gradually seeing is how things are coming apart at the seams as government departments try their best to cobble solutions together on the ground, frequently under fire, with limited resources and insufficient training. So I think in direct answer to your question, "Did we learn and what have we learned?", first we have to acknowledge that, in succession, we failed to learn from an initial operation in Afghanistan to the operation in Iraq, we then failed to learn what we learnt in Iraq back on to Afghanistan when the UK took the lead in NATO's phase three deployment into the south and perhaps at that stage we also struggled to transfer some of those lessons back on to Iraq as the situation changed there following General Petraeus' arrival. So there is a series of stages where we have failed to learn, not because people are wilful, not because senior officials want to disassemble, but, frankly, because the institutions that we created 60 years ago to undertake national security assignments are simply not structured for this task: they do not incentivise people, we do not train them the right way, we do not resource appropriately. So what we are trying to do is cover the gaps between the institutions leading to all the problems that Stephen has so eloquently described.
Q283 Mrs Moon: Can I ask a very simple question. I just want a yes or no answer from you. We were told that UNSCR 1325 was part of the Comprehensive
Approach that was being pushed forward throughout
Mr Grey: I am afraid I am ignorant of what 1325 is.
Q284 Mrs Moon: It is about the closer involvement of women in political decision-making, peace-building and capacity-building.
Mr Grey: I think, at the sharp end, in the most insecure areas it is the last thing on most decision-makers' minds.
Mr Mollett: It is something that at Care
we are working with other agencies on developing some field research in due
course, which I would be happy to share with you. Otherwise at the moment I could not really
speak from Care's experience, but I do know that, for instance, Womenkind
Worldwide, also Amnesty, are two NGOs that have done work in support of women's
rights and gender activists in
Mr Korski: I think that it is something
talked about at
Q285 Mrs Moon: Fine if you are man.
Mr Grey: Women want security too!
Mr Mollett: Just one other reflection on
that, drawing on some other work that we have been involved in in other
countries, which I have not been directly involved in, which is why I will make
it very brief, one of the issues that has come out is some of the work around
Resolution 1325 has focused on women's roles at the higher levels in peace
processes, and so on, but what we have found in some of the countries where
there is on-going violence on the ground, actually one of the real issues is
the access that women have that are caught up in violence and exposed to
violence, particularly gender-related violence, to actually safe interlocutors
where they can turn for referral just in terms of immediate medical needs, let
alone any other kinds of needs related to security, or justice, or following up
on that front. I understand that there
has been some work done on that, for example, in
Mr Korski: Very briefly, in the
previous session you talked about the extent to which these issues are taken
into consideration as the international community helps the recruitment of the
police and the military. When I was in
Q286 Mr Crausby: Not everybody is convinced that the Comprehensive Approach is the solution in all circumstances. The blurring of the lines between military and the delivery of humanitarian aid is seen, certainly by some in the eyes of the local population, as negative. Are there situations where you would say the Comprehensive Approach is inadequate, and can you tell us how you see the difficulties that are involved within the Comprehensive Approach in different circumstances?
Mr Korski: To my mind, I think we have
to make a very clear distinction between what is humanitarian assistance - aid
that we give for people in dire need and for humanitarian reasons - and what we
do for developmental reasons. One is
absolutely an area that needs to be cordoned off from political, military and
diplomatic engagement, and I think there is now a multi-year history of
developing the rules between the military and NGOs, and I am sure that Howard
can talk about more, but we should definitely respect that. At the same time, as General Rupert Smith
said in his book, development is inherently political, and I think we have to
acknowledge, in places like
Mr Grey: I would argue that where a civilian worker cannot but get somewhere with the assistance of the military, then the best person to deliver whatever effect that is, for example development, should be wearing uniform as well, should be militarised: because if not that development worker will be tainted, will be regarded as military and will hamper the work they try and do elsewhere. I think you have seen increased, for example, militarisation of DfID where it now considers investment in security as part of its poverty reduction strategy and where they are seen to be working alongside soldiers constantly. It undermines the work of people doing development when the military are not present. They are regarded as part of the military. As soon as you say that the well that you dig is part of the strategic effort, then the well becomes a target and the well digger becomes a target and it is a very dangerous course of events. It is far better in the most insecure areas, if it is too dangerous, to send a civilian forward. The military need to have the people that can do this side of the work. It is very interesting looking at what the Soviets did. We always talk about them sowing mines everywhere, but they also did experiments in the ink-spot theory and the Comprehensive Approach and all these things. They were actually far more successful at the ink-spots in that that they maintained security in the major towns and ignored the countryside in many places. There was a story from one worker in a Helmand PRT described as going to spend time with an Afghan official who said, "You know, it is great what you do", I am paraphrasing, obviously, "but why can you not be a bit more like the Russians? Because you sit here for one hour a day before you are whisked away by your security. The Russians used to stay with us day after day and mentor us in a comprehensive way." We have a different attitude to risk than the Russians did, and that is right, but we have to change our policies to reflect the reality of that. Rather than saying, "Oh, civilians, they should have the same security rules as us", we need to say the reality is that they do have different rules and what are we going to do about it?
Mr Mollett: On this issue of what is development in a situation like Afghanistan, particularly in the southern part of the country, the most violent conflict-affected part of the country, I think that throws out some really important and challenging issues that need to be rigorously looked through and then understood in terms of what is aid in the context of Helmand? I do not recall now whether it was you, Daniel, or one of your colleagues from your organisation, but there was an event at RUSI about a year ago where someone said, "We need a concept of opposed development", and the very term itself froze up the kind of paradoxical nature of what is being discussed there, because what is a school in the middle of a war zone that is immediately a target for an insurgency? What is a well? There are certain dilemmas there, or certain things, or there is an incompatibility between the context and then the aspiration of doing a developmental project in the middle of a war zone. Development is framed by governance and, in the context of completely contested governance, what kind of legitimacy or sustainability will that project have? Interestingly, at the end of 2007 into early 2008 we participated in a research project with other NGOs in Afghanistan where the research team was an Iranian woman and five Afghan researchers who had access across Helmand and Kandahar, indeed, the research team had also worked with British military and others on research for the UK Government and others but had access outside of the PRTs, met with Afghan interlocutors, community representatives. The research particularly focused in Uruzgan and Paktia, and, apart from the issues around the extent to which the military involvement in aid was blurring the lines with humanitarian work, they also threw up very challenging issues for the military zone, or the interests from the military side in terms of getting involved in development, and there are three or four sets of issues. One is around the impact of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and the heavy military footprint in these provinces, their consequences for Afghan governance at that level, and the extent to which local leaders became perceived as disempowered or puppets for the foreign integrators of a military presence. Another really worrying issue from our side was the extent of inappropriate interactions between the military forces on the ground or these integrated civil, military operations, the PRTs and some NGOs that were desperate for money and perhaps fell into the category of what some Afghans called "briefcase NGOs", or "come and goes", that have been set up post 2001 to make a lot of money, these sort of entrepreneurial things not really having links to the communities or interested in work that is about sustainable development or humanitarian relief. Military funding to those NGOs, or co-operation with those NGOs was eroding the safe space for other NGOs to operate in those same areas, and so there was a blurring, if you like, between some of the, shall we say, less professional principled NGO's work funded to deliver on short-term, quick impact project type objectives and the work of other NGOs that had been in Afghanistan for a long time and were working on a different basis. There were lots of concerns around the lack of transparency or accountability around projects that were implemented through those kinds of relations, all of which suggested that often the extent to which some of these projects were being funded or directly implemented by international forces in Uruzgan or Paktia were not actually really meeting their own hearts and minds objectives, were ineffective even in their own terms, because they were not based on a sound understanding of the context and the local political dynamics within the community where they were implementing these projects, let alone the negatives with knock-on consequences for the NGOs that have been working that area for a long time. My understanding is that the British military also conducted an evaluation of its QIPs Programme (Quick Impact Projects Programme) in Helmand just over a year ago, I think, and although that is classified, and I have not read the evaluation, but there were presentations drawing on the evaluation in various fora which suggested some remarkably similar findings around how doing development projects in an area that has not been secured in any sustainable way in Helmand or Kandahar just does not make sense because they become targets. The gap, to return to Mr Jenkin's question earlier, between the military and the development side is about the politics and the grievances or the different political factors that are driving the violence; it is not about some other form of opposed development.
Mr Grey: I was going to say, there are ways of tailoring development projects so that they can be both doable in terms of advancing security and development, for example, road building. Roads are much more difficult to completely destroy than a new clinic, for example. They both enhance security and they boost the economy, allowing people, for example, to take legitimate crops to market as well as allowing a much more efficient security deployment.
Mr Mollett: Can I come back on the road building issue, because that is one issue that was raised by our research. I understand your point about access to markets and livelihoods, and so on, but the research did find, at least in Uruzgan and Paktia, some evidence that the local contractors and international contractors that were hired by the international military and Afghan Government to construct these roads often had rather direct linkages with militias that were involved in some of the violence in the area as well, and so the extent to which some of this road building was feeding into a war economy and security, or insecurity, along these routes being manipulated by the very organisations involved in constructing the roads, I think, is a serious issue that merits further research and careful understanding.
Mr Korski: Since I am coming in for a
lot of stick for having used the word "opposed development", I think the point
here is that we need to look at the way in which to disperse and use a series
of instruments, taking due cognisance of the complex political context that we
are operating in. That is what I
intended with the words "opposed development" - no different from what
General David Petraeus, I think, talked about when he talked about counter-insurgency. It is true, though, that we should not think
that this is the development as we have always done it, and the really
important thing to acknowledge is that a place like
Chairman: As I understood it, you were not coming under stick. What you were doing was reporting somebody else's phrase, was my understanding.
Q287 Mr Holloway: Howard, can you think of any examples where the Comprehensive Approach has had any tangible effect on local Afghans in conflict areas?
Mr Mollett: Some of my reflections are based on on-going direct working relations with colleagues in a country office but do mostly draw from research that is happening now about well over a year ago. That is a caveat. Things may have changed since then. The point I wanted to make was in that research one thing that came out was that, for all the discussion of civilianisation and stabilisation and an enhanced civilian lead at the policy level, at the time we did the research in Uruzgan and Paktia that had yet to translate into any discernible changes on the ground for Afghan interlocutors that we spoke to, and that fed into that research.
Q288 Chairman: So the answer is essentially, no.
Mr Mollett: To be fair, I think it is probably quite early to come to any kind of definitive judgment, and I think it would be very easy from an international level, reflecting now, for instance, on other reform methods within international institutions in the humanitarian sphere where if they have not solved all the issues within a year some commentators are very quick to say, "Right, rip that up. We need something completely different and radically different." I do not know whether there is perhaps a parallel here, but I think the evidence is certainly mixed and there is no clear evidence that it has resulted in changes that have addressed us. All of the issues or concerns from a humanitarian perspective from a couple of years back may.
Q289 Mr Holloway: USAID are aware that it can operate very easily itself in
Mr Mollett: I referred just now to some
of the findings around road construction in
Q290 Mr Holloway: Finally in this section, directly to you. Do you feel that the international community and the aid agencies spend a long time deciding what local people in particular areas need, and do you think there is an argument for getting local communities, in the case of Afghanistan village elders, more involved in saying what they want and, therefore, they would be a bit more likely to protect it when they got it?
Mr Mollett: I cannot speak for all NGOs or
aid agencies. Certainly within Care we
have had some really interesting experiences in working both with traditional assurors
and then establishing community development committees or councils in
Q291 Mr Hamilton: Chairman, I am a bit puzzled. Howard talks about corruption within the contractors,
but it is a choice, is it not? It is a
choice between Western corruption and what happens within
Mr Grey: I am not as depressed as you are.
Q292 Mr Hamilton: I am just depressed.
Mr Grey: I think the foundation of
this is good intelligence, and finding out who you are dealing with is all very
well, but if you have not got any intelligence, if you walk into a village with
a suitcase of cash, you probably hand the money to the drug lord. I would say the biggest source of finance for
the insurgency is actually NATO and its contacts, not any money coming from Al
Qaeda or the Gulf or something like that, because we often deal with people who
are corrupt. It does not mean there are
not good people out there. The Russians had
a very good idea. They educated
thousands of people and brought them back.
We do not seem to be doing that.
When you look at
Mr Korski: The history of what went right
and wrong in
Chairman: We are going to wrap up with the final question that we asked earlier.
Q293 Mrs Moon: The one thing we have not had from each of you gentlemen is where you see the Comprehensive Approach being now on that scale of one to ten. It would be helpful if you could give us your scale, but also where do we go from here? Can it be improved and, if so, how?
Mr Korski: I think there is a realisation that we need to be comprehensive in the way that we were not before. So points for effort and understanding the challenge. As I articulated before, the way we structure our departments, recruit our staff, plan for missions needs to fundamentally change. People have realised the extent of the problem, made some changes, but have not yet taken the full step forward, I believe.
Q294 Mrs Moon: On that scale of one to ten where are we?
Mr Korski: Six.
Q295 Chairman: You are a generous man.
Mr Mollett: Rather than answer with a score card mark, I make one brief point. Back in 2001/2002 the international community, the UN, the donors, including our Government, were very keen to push Afghanistan as this post-conflict development context, and UNAMA was established as the integrated mission with humanitarian co-ordination and leadership as a tiny subcomponent of the aid department within the mission. Last year already that was so flagrantly not the situation, the security situation was so dire, the humanitarian access situation so dire, just a complete lack of information on what the situation was for the people affected by conflict in the southern part of the country and elsewhere, that finally there was a buckling and there was an agreement to establish a new watcher office, a UN humanitarian co-ordination office, in Afghanistan, recognising that you need a strong, legitimate and credible humanitarian capacity in Afghanistan which can then engage in dialogue or co-ordination with, whether it is political or military, actors on the ground to enable an effective response to the humanitarian situation. So I think there has been some progress and, in terms of what needs to be done, I think we need to build on that recognition; that appropriate and effective co-ordination between the aid, peace and then the political and the military intervention certainly in contexts like Afghanistan does not require total integration or subordination of aid to short-term political or military agendas but requires proper resourcing and an ability to engage on an equal and a credible footing and, therefore, enable relief operations to happen in Afghanistan in an appropriate way.
Q296 Mrs Moon: Mr Grey?
Mr Grey: The score that Brigadier Butler gave was one, was it not?
Q297 Chairman: It was different. He said it was one and a half for NATO, but he was talking about NATO.
Mr Grey: If we said at the beginning it was one and a half on the Comprehensive Approach, I would say it is three now, so doubly as good but a long way off, or three as of last year, last spring, when I was probably best informed.
Q298 Mrs Moon: Are you talking about on the ground?
Mr Grey: Yes.
Q299 Mrs Moon: Others have told us six on the ground, but you put it at three.
Mr Grey: I disagree, yes. As to the solutions, obviously there are
many, but the only thing I would highlight is that at the moment the strategic
commander of all
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Mr Grey, you said you were not as depressed as we were, but the reason we are depressed is what you have told us. The most discouraging thing we heard was from you, and the most encouraging thing we heard was also from you. Thank you all very much indeed for your evidence. It has been a extremely helpful. It is a bit like a dash of cold water on some of the evidence that we have heard in previous evidence sessions, so we are most grateful.