Examination of Witnesses (Questions 113-119)
JAMES FERGUSSON,
CHRISTINA LAMB
AND DAVID
LOYN
21 APRIL 2009
Q113 Chairman: This afternoon we are
continuing our inquiry into Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are pleased
to have two public evidence sessions today and a panel of three
participants for each. Perhaps the witnesses could begin by introducing
themselves before we start the questions.
James Fergusson:
I am a journalist and author. I have written two books on Afghan
affairs, most recently "A Million Bullets", which is
all about the British Army's experience in Helmand in 2006, so
that is where I am coming from.
David Loyn: I am a BBC correspondent
specialising in international development. I have travelled in
Afghanistan a lot and am the author of a recent book on the history
of Afghanistan. Forgive me, Chairman, but I think you know that
I will have to leave a little early for another engagement.
Chairman: We are very glad that you have
been able to come at all, so thank you.
Christina Lamb: I am a foreign
correspondent for The Sunday Times and have been covering
Afghanistan and Pakistan since 1987. I have also written books
on Pakistan and Afghanistanwe are all plugging our books.
Q114 Chairman: Thank you very
much. I will begin by asking each of you for your assessment of
the impact of ISAF and the events of the last seven years on Afghanistan.
Christina Lamb: I was in Afghanistan
in 2001 when the first ISAF troops arrived, which were the British
Marines. In stark contrast to what happened in Iraq two years
later, the foreign troops who entered Afghanistan then were really
welcomed. People were fed up with war. They had had almost 30
years of war and saw foreign ISAF troops as the only answer to
ending fighting between Afghans, so there was a lot of welcoming
and people came out on to the streets and were very happy to see
them. I think that in the last seven years we have totally lost
that consent that we had at the beginning, and I think that a
lot of that is due to the behaviour of the ISAF troops and to
having parallel operations going on at the same time. Quite a
lot of it is to do with the behaviour of the Afghan Government
themselves. We could go into those issues in detail, but I think
that it has been shocking to see the change in attitude. Right
at the beginning we only had 4,000 troops in Afghanistan from
ISAF. It is a country with 25 million people. Those troops were
not allowed outside Kabul. People used to refer to them as the
international shopping assistance force because all they did was
hang about Chicken Street, where the shops are. I think that we
wasted a huge opportunity at the beginning when there was support
and when people wanted troops throughout the country. We just
sent them in much too late and too little.
David Loyn: It was an opportunity
squandered. There was enormous confusion on what the mission was
right at the beginning. It was understandable as war in revenge
for 9/11, but I do not think that the US, in particular, really
had a coherent view of what Afghanistan was or what they had let
themselves in for. In particular, they did not really apply any
analysis to what the Taliban was and where they had come from.
Huge mistakes were made at the beginning in not being generous
enough with the Taliban's enemies, nor sceptical enough of their
allies. The Northern Alliance were given a far too easy ride,
and warlordism returned very easily into this security vacuum,
which Christina has described. There was a very small number of
foreign forces, and it was seen as a casualty-free war from the
United States' point of view. Right from the very beginning there
was a confusion on what the mission was. President Obama now says
that it is very clear that it is about defeating al-Qaeda in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. He has laid down very clearly that that is now the
US military strategy. Behind that, there is still not the really
clear analysis required to establish exactly what the Taliban
are, how they can be dealt with and how they could be divided
from al-Qaeda, in particular. Speaking as a journalist who deals
with ISAF and the international forces in Afghanistan, I do not
quite know who to call if something happens. There are national
forces, Operation Enduring Freedom, which is the US mission to
take out al-Qaeda, and there is the ISAF mission itself. If a
western journalist does not quite know how to navigate his way
around that maze, you can imagine what it is like for Afghan villagers,
particularly as they now face 3,000 bombs a year dropped from
the air across Afghanistan, and President Karzai has protested
about that. The military strategy and the way it has been run
on the ground now confuses Afghanistan on the reason why foreign
forces remain there.
James Fergusson: Just briefly,
I have to agree with that. When, in 2001, we began all this and
Karzai was appointed and so on, there was literally dancing in
the streets, even in Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taliban
opposition. The public came out and were overjoyed about the possibility
of a better future for the country. Now, the latest polls show
minority support for ISAF, which is very sad, so I completely
echo the line about an opportunity squandered. It is very tragic.
Q115 Chairman: How much of it
is dueyou have alluded to thisto the tension between
the ISAF operation and the US Operation Enduring Freedom, and
to the fact that the Americans had a different agenda and a different
role to some of their NATO partners?
Christina Lamb: I think that a
lot of it is down to that. It creates confusion. I have been with
British forces when they have gone into villages in Helmand on
a sort of peacekeeping mission only to find that the night before
Operation Enduring Freedom forcesthe Americanshave
been in smashing people's doors down and running over people's
goats. There has been no co-ordination between them, and that
continues despite the fact that there has been a lot of discussion
about this. In my view, one of the most damaging things that the
Operation Enduring Freedom forces did was to bring back warlords,
as David mentioned. In 2001, when the Taliban fell, most Afghans,
if you spoke to them, would say that they felt that the main reason
for the problems in their country was the warlords, that they
were the ones who had caused all the damage and had led to the
Taliban coming in. The warlords themselves were running scared.
There was a big meeting in the Intercontinental hotel in Kabul
in December 2001 and all the main warlords were there. They thought
that their days were finished. They had never seen anything like
the American B52s and all the forces that had been there, and
they thought that their days were over. They could not believe
it when, shortly after that, American special forces were coming
to them giving them briefcases full of dollars. I witnessed in
Jalalabad a warlord being given a briefcase full of hundreds of
dollars by somebody from Delta force. In return he gave a list
of names that were supposed to be al-Qaeda people that the force
was looking for. It was actually a list of names of his enemies,
whom it would be very convenient for him to be rid of. The Americans
had no idea. I said to these special forces guys, "How do
you know that these are al-Qaeda people?" They did not really
care. They said, "Well, we are going to enter the names in
the computer and we have our list." So, they were quite happy.
Seeing these warlords who had caused all this damage suddenly
being paid huge amounts of money and being allowed to then become
powerful again gave such a bad signal to ordinary Afghan people.
Now a third of the Parliament in Afghanistan, which we cite as
a great victory for democracy, is formed of people who have committed
serial human rights abuses.
Chairman: Do either of you wish to add
anything on that?
James Fergusson: Very briefly,
yes. You asked about the conflict of agendas. They are totally
conflicting. The British, with ISAF, started out trying to "win
hearts and minds"that was the phrase that was usedwhen
the Americans were trying to hunt terrorists. You cannot possibly
do the two things at the same time; it never is going to work.
I will give a very brief illustration. There was a small garrison
of British troops in Now Zad, back in 2006, that was sent there
originally to win over the locals and get them to support the
Government. While that was going on, an American plane came into
their area of operations and made an attack as part of their own
operation, and a few hours later a truckload of body parts arrived
at the British camp with Afghans saying, "You people are
responsible for this." Of course, the Afghans do not make
any distinction between the British and the Americans. Why would
they? The Brits were trying to win hearts and minds but how could
they possibly do that when they were not even told about this
attack?
Q116 Chairman: So overall, what
will the legacy of the NATO operation in Afghanistan be?
David Loyn: The operation has
a long way to run yet. Talking about legacy, I think that NATO
forces will be in Afghanistan for several decades to come, certainly
the way they are deployed at the moment. You have to remember
that it is the first deployment abroad, outside of the NATO area,
that NATO has been engaged in, and so there has been a huge amount
of learning in the NATO machine since 2006. Christina has talked
about empowering the warlords back in 2001; we are seeing the
same problems in Helmand today. If you talk to British officers
fighting in Helmand now, their biggest concern is that they may
be on one side of what is, effectively, a drug war. If 60% of
the police in Helmand are heroin addicts and you have drug barons
with a considerable connection to the police, then this same list
of names against your enemy, which Christina described was going
on in 2001, is still going on in Helmand in what is a really difficult
war for British forces to fight. So I think it is a bit early
to talk about legacy.
Q117 Sir Menzies Campbell: I am
rather taken aback by your prediction of several decades. I wondered
whether you thought that that was consistent with the actions
of the new Administration in the United Statesa kind of
a surge equivalent to Iraq; Richard Holbrooke appointed to a particular
position with more extensive responsibilities than any other American
diplomat has had; and the fact that, I think I am right, Barack
Obama has actually used the word "exit" in relation
to Afghanistan. Is what you say a gloomy analysis of the extent
to which the new American strategy is likely to succeed?
David Loyn: British Forces were
in Northern Ireland for more than 35 years, as we know. It takes
a long time to deal with these difficult, intractable insurgencies.
If you talk to the most pragmatic people in the Ministry of Defence,
those are the sort of time scales that they are thinking about
in relation to Afghanistan. The troop surge is tiny compared to
what would be required. Any reading of counter-insurgency doctrine
would require 300,000 or 400,000 troops to manage properly in
Afghanistan. The extra 17,000most of them not actually
combat troopswho are coming in at the moment will not make
the significant difference on the ground without the changing
politics of a far more effective development strategy, which is
the bit of President Obama's policy that I am most sceptical about.
Q118 Sir Menzies Campbell: The
implication behind that answer then is of a lack of overall co-ordination.
If you think about it you have got the military, the political,
the economic developmentincluding schools, water and other
infrastructureand, of course, counter-narcotics. The received
wisdom is that there has been no overall strategic approach to
all four of these. Is this something, do you think, on which the
UN could and should have been more effective?
David Loyn: I think the UN has
made a number of really significant errors in Afghanistan. Most
significantly, there are so many foreign people on the groundparticularly
nowwho cannot actually operate outside Kabul. The World
Bank, in a very vivid report, stated that an "Aid Juggernaut"
had descended on Afghanistan. This built up parallel institutions
outside the state and did not effectively build up the Afghan
state. Remember, we have been there nearly eight years and still,
despite significant development improvement in some areas, the
Afghan state remains extremely frail. We have not grown Afghan
civil servants; not enough efforts have been made to Afghanise
things that could have been done on the ground. So, the UN has
remained mostly a pretty weak organisation, and when the British
Government and others said let us have aon the ground they
call them a "super gorilla"; that was the nickname for
the "Paddy Ashdown" role when he was supposed to go
last year
Sir Menzies Campbell: I am familiar with
that.
David Loyn: Of course, he was
vetoed by Karzai, partly because he is a Brit and partly because
Karzai did not want this overall co-ordinating role between the
EU, the UN and the different individual Governments.
James Fergusson: I think the US
approach is the right one. What Obama has come back withhe
is calling it the "comprehensive approach"is
exactly the plan that the Brits went in with in 2006. It did not
work for the Brits specifically because it was under-resourced
in Helmand. I think that the Americans doing this is good news,
because they are the only ones, really, who now have the resources
and the will to do it. As it is the only plan in town, we really
need to get behind it. I think it is right. I am sceptical as
to whether it will work now, because I think we are out of time.
We have lost the consent of the Afghan people because we have
been going for eight years, but nevertheless the approach is right.
Whether it can be made to work is another matter. I hope we can.
Q119 Sir Menzies Campbell: Ms
Lamb, do you share the same sceptical view about what the UN has
done and what it might be capable of doing in the future?
Christina Lamb: I do. The United
Nations is just one of many players there who should take responsibility
for a number of things. It is shocking that you go to Afghanistan
todayseven and a half years after the Taliban felland
only 15% of people have access to electricity. You go there and
the airport is still in the same disastrous state that it was
before. Actually, they have built a new one but they do not use
it because they have not got any trained staff who can work in
it. The roads in the capital city are all mud tracks with ruts
and holes everywhere, and this is after all these years and all
the millions or billions that have been spent on the country.
We can talk about the Obama plan and the need for more development
but, frankly, you are never going to resolve the situation in
Afghanistan unless you do something about Pakistan. That is where
the training is coming from, and the recruitment and funding.
You can kill as many Taliban as you like, and you can build as
many schools as you want to in Afghanistan, but you will not end
the problem until you do something about Pakistan.
David Loyn: Can I add something
about the UN? There are individuals at the top of the UN who are
really excellent, and Kai Eide has done a first-class job since
he came in as the head of UNAMA. There are people who have been
there for three or four years, who really understand the country
and are able to analyse it well, but beneath that there are rafts
of foreign consultants coming in for three and six-month contracts,
being paid grotesquely large amounts of money. Those people are
really the problem. They do not provide very much to Afghanistan
and, to quote from the World Bank report again, that "foreign
presence undermines the very objective of building a credible
and legitimate" Afghanistan.
Christina Lamb: I totally agree.
The Russians, when they were thereI do not cite them as
a great exampledid at least send many people to go and
be trained in Russia. Most of the trained engineers and, indeed,
the Governor of Helmand, whom we cite as someone who we think
is very good, was trained by the Russians. We are not doing that
same thing of sending people.
James Fergusson: The Americans
are now talking about that at least.
Christina Lamb: This is a country
where, for 30 years, practically nobody went to school or was
trained. To expect them suddenly to be able to run a countrythere
were not the people there to do it. I totally agree with David
about these people who came on big salaries for six months at
a time. This is a very complicated country. I have been going
there for 22 years, and I do not pretend to understand all the
interactions between tribes and things. People coming for six
months is almost a waste of time.
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