Global Security: Afghanistan and Pakistan - Foreign Affairs Committee Contents


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 Afghanistan—we 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 due—you have alluded to this—to 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 forces—the Americans—have 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 used—when 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 States—a 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 17,000—most of them not actually combat troops—who 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 development—including schools, water and other infrastructure—and, 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 ground—particularly now—who 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 a—on 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 with—he 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 today—seven and a half years after the Taliban fell—and 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 there—I do not cite them as a great example—did 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 country—there 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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