Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
JAMES FERGUSSON,
CHRISTINA LAMB
AND DAVID
LOYN
21 APRIL 2009
Q120 Sir Menzies Campbell: One last
question, if I may. What if the Obama plan does not work?
James Fergusson: We then proceed
to our exit strategy, which is surely going to be a negotiated
settlement with the Taliban.
Q121 Sir Menzies Campbell: That is
something you have written about?
James Fergusson: Indeed, I have
written about it, and I have met the Taliban myself. I think it
is going to be the last option. There is nothing else we can do.
We are already talking to the Taliban, I notice, and Obama has
also been talking about talking to the "reconcilable elements"that
is the phrase that is used. I think that is certainly the way
we are heading. We should do a deal with them. That is what it
is going to come down to: we will say to the Taliban, "You
can come back to some form of political power in the country on
condition that you split with al-Qaeda," because all of this
is aboutit is the reason we went there in the first placekeeping
al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan. The Foreign Office is still saying
thatthe Foreign Office line now is that the reason why
we are in Afghanistan is to prevent terror attacks on Britain.
That is our direct reason for it. I take issue with that because,
in fact, there has never been a Taliban bomb in any western city.
The Taliban have no foreign policy. When I say Taliban, I mean
the Quetta Shurathe "pure" Taliban. There is
this rather lazy conflation of language. The Foreign Office now
talks about the threats coming "from this area", but,
no, they do notthey come from Pakistan. The 10 named people
we know about in the Manchester plot were all Pakistanis; there
were no Afghans involved.
Sir Menzies Campbell: Alleged plot.
James Fergusson: Alleged plot,
of courseexcuse me. But it is every timeyou never
hear of Afghan bombers.
Christina Lamb: I think they see
the same lack of co-ordination, though, on the whole talking to
Taliban, as we saw at the beginning with the military operations.
Almost everybody you meet now is talking to the Taliban, but there
is no co-ordinated approach, and it is not clear to whom they
are talking. Obama talks about moderate Taliban, but who are the
moderate Taliban? What are the names of these people?
Q122 Sir John Stanley: As of today,
two major justifications are given by the Government for being
in Afghanistan. One is about security and preventing the re-emergence
of a safe haven for al-Qaeda or the Taliban; but the second, which
is reasonable in theory, is that we are seeking to prevent a reversion
to the gross denial of human rights to women and girls that occurred
under the Taliban regime. On the latter area, in the last few
weeks and days, we have seen legislation passed through the Kabul
Parliament that has been described, quite reasonably, as legalising
rape. It has been reported that in the Upper House, the Bill concerned
was not even read, let alone debated, before it went to the Supreme
Court. Also, in the last few days, we have heard reports of the
cold-blooded murder of Mrs. Sitara Achakzai, who was shot by the
Taliban outside her home in Kandahar from a motorbike in a ride-and-shoot
operation. She was one of the leading campaigners for women's
and girls' rights in Afghanistan. Clearly, the defence of human
rights of women and girls in Afghanistan is going seriously backwards.
My question is whether you think that that is an irreversible
trend, and, if so, how can we in the west face our electorates
when we support a Government that are steadily eroding the fundamental
rights of women and girls?
David Loyn: May I quote Malalai
Joya, who is a prominent Afghan female MP and an outspoken activist?
Christina Lamb: Suspended.
David Loyn: Now suspended. She
won the Anna Politkovskaya human rights award in London last October.
In her acceptance speech, she said that rights for women in Afghanistan
are now worse than they were under the Taliban. That is nothing
for the international community to be proud of. Our expectations
were far too high in that direction. A lot of very good UN officials
on large salaries went in with gender awareness programmes to
a country where these kinds of things will take a long time to
develop. Yes, there was a huge appetite for girls' education among
the middle class, but in most Afghan society, we are a long way
from the kind of equality between men and women that is commonplace
in the west. It is far too high an expectation for us to demand
it of Afghanistan.
Christina Lamb: You will not be
surprised to hear me say that I feel passionately about this.
I wrote the Sunday Times magazine cover story this week
on the situation of women in Afghanistan, and I spent a lot of
time earlier this year talking to a lot of women. It would not
be wrong to say that there has been a betrayal of the women, given
all the promises that were made in late 2001. Yes, the main concern
of most ordinary Afghan women is security and being able to feed
their familiesit is an incredibly poor country. The types
of programme that were introduced in 2001 were not suitable. There
were all these gender rights projects and feminists coming in
with different things that were not what most women wanted. There
has rightly been a lot of outrage over the law, but I have to
say that Afghanistan has the best laws for women in most of Asia
because of the new laws that were drawn up after the Taliban were
removed. The constitution gives women equal rights and 25% of
the seats in Parliament are reserved for women. That is a lot
higher than you have here. Yet that makes no difference because
nobody complies with those laws. The only rape case I know of
from the last few years in which the men were successfully prosecuted
involved a girl who was gang raped; unusually, her family supported
her and secured a prosecution. The President wrote a pardon for
those people. He will not pardon the journalist who downloaded
information about women's rights and got a life sentence, but
he pardoned those three men who gang raped a 13-year-old girl.
Q123 Sir John Stanley: May I ask
a specific question? President Karzai gave an undertaking following
the outcry about the passing of this new law, which has been reproduced
in detail. There are appalling provisions in the new law that
has gone through the Afghanistan Parliament. He said that he would
review it. Can you give us your view on whether that is a token
gesture or whether he actually has the political clout and will
to do what should be done, which is to annul the law in its entirety?
Christina Lamb: You should ask
him how many women he has working in his office, in the presidency.
I can tell you the answer.
Sir John Stanley: But can you answer
my question? Do you give any credence or not to President Karzai's
statement that he will review this law?
David Loyn: Certainly not four
months before an election.
James Fergusson: It was an electoral
ploy, designed to bring in the Hazara Shi'ites, was it not? It
was only 10% of the country, in fact, but it was a sop to the
Hazara vote. So I agree with David on that. I think that that
is right.
Q124 Sir John Stanley: So you hold
out no prospect of an annulment?
Christina Lamb: My point is that
there is no commitment from him to women's rights. He, in his
own office, has not a single woman working for him. His own wife,
a qualified obstetrician who used to work in a hospital in Pakistan,
has never been seen publicly since he became President. That is
his commitment to women's rights. If he was committed, he would
be making an example. She would be coming out, leading the way.
James Fergusson: The international
community does hold a big stick, on the other hand. There is the
funding issue. He will, to some point, bow to western opinion.
I think that he has got the point. There was a much bigger row
about the Hazara law than I think he expected. I do not think
that he probably even knew what was going on, frankly. I think
that it was drawn to his attention rather late in the process.
Chairman: Thank you. I think that we
need to move on to some other areas now.
Q125 Ms Stuart: It was suggested
that, just as when Gorbachev came in and allowed the Russians
to review their role in Afghanistan and essentially leave, Obama's
action will have a similar dynamic. Any immediate responses to
that?
David Loyn: I am not a prophet;
I am a reporter, and I am not sure what will happen in the years
to come as Obama's strategy unravels, but certainly the similarities
with 1985 and 1986 are quite strong now: the sense of a troop
surge and "Let's have one last go at this before pulling
out." But Russia had far more troops in Afghanistan and far
more will to fight than the Americans, and still they were beaten.
Q126 Ms Stuart: May I move on to
yet another player? The European Union has poured enormous amounts
of money into Afghanistan and intends to pour even more into it.
Has it done any good whatever?
David Loyn: If I can take the
question to begin with, the biggest failure on the European Union
side is on policing. It took until last year before EUPOL, as
it is called, was set up. At the Bonn summit, different bits of
Afghanistan were carved out between different countries. You will
remember that Germany said that it would do police training. Very
little happened between then and 2007-08. The EU has put a lot
of money into Afghanistan and a lot of that money has gone into
the Government budget. There has been some effective aid alongside
the World Bank and Britain, the two other big funders of the Afghan
Government, but in terms of the things that the EU said that it
would do on police training and standing up the police, that has
not happened. We now see President Obama effectively taking it
over.
Q127 Ms Stuart: Ms Lamb and Mr. Fergusson,
are you equally pessimistic about the police force? We were very
much told, "Afghan army good, Afghan police bad," and
that restructuring was needed. Do you hold out any hope of the
EU stepping up to the plate, or do you think that we have simply
given up on them?
James Fergusson: The EU does not
seem to have any profile in parts of Afghanistan. Traditionally,
you see nice blue signs saying "Developed by the EU",
but there is none of that, and it is not something that Afghans
really talk about. It is not on their radar: "Oh, we're okay
because Europe is helping us." You do not get any of that.
I am not even particularly sure whether they see the police and
think, "We need better police. Why isn't the EU doing a better
job?" I think that they look at Kabul and blame Kabul for
not doing it. It is all rather back-room stuff, but I do agree
with "Army good, police bad," broadly speaking.
David Loyn: The UN reports that
the locus of interactions between state institutions and criminal
interests is in the Ministry of Interior. It remains the focal
point of the worst corruption in the country
Ms Stuart: Would you like to add anything
to that, Ms Lamb?
Christina Lamb: Yes. There is
no doubt that policing is the biggest problem, because for most
Afghans, their interaction with the Government or the state is
through the police. I have an Afghan friend whose husband was
murdered: she went to the police and they asked her for a bribe
even to report the crime. That is typical. Of course, if that
is people's experience of dealing with the police, that would
give them a very bad idea of the Afghan Government, and that is
one of the reasons why the Taliban are able to come in and get
support. One thing that people say that the Taliban offer is speedy
justicethey come and sort things out that the police have
failed to deal with. So it is a key area to be sorted outmuch
more important, in my view, than the Afghan army.
David Loyn: May I reinforce that?
When you go into Afghan villages under Taliban controlas
most of the countryside isand ask, "Why do you now
support the Taliban?" they talk as if the Karzai Government
have already gone. They say, "When President Karzai's police
were here, we had to pay them off for justice and there were all
the petty officials you had to pay along the line. Now the Taliban
are back, and we have good, clean sharia law again." Remember,
that is what they had under the mujaheddin. The Taliban did not
introduce village sharia law into Afghanistan; it was what was
there during the 1980sit was the social glue that kept
the country together during the years when they were fighting
against the communists. That is why the Taliban were able to bring
law and order pretty effectively to most of the country, once
they had stopped the civil war that went on after the Russians
left. Karzai and the international community failed dismally after
2001 to have any other effect on the countryside, so the Taliban
are able to recruit much more easily again. It is the failure
of the rule of law and the corruption in the villages and the
police, which are the reasons why the Taliban are so easily able
to return. Those are the things that matter in Afghanistan, notwith
respect to Afghanswomen's rights.
Christina Lamb: I agree with that.
Almost everybody is affected. You can imagine that, with so many
people having been moved around during all the years of fighting,
there is an enormous number of land disputes. Almost everyone
you meet has to try to resolve a dispute, and they cannot get
anywhere through the official system, so they are all reverting
to the traditional justice system, which the Taliban does much
more effectively, unfortunately.
Q128 Mr. Keetch: Briefly, before
we move on, can I just roll in back to international co-operation?
Every speech that I have heard by a British or American Secretary
of Defence or Foreign Secretary in the last two or three years
has consistently said that the caveats placed on NATO forces by
other European countries have been a problem. Do you agree broadly
with that criticism of some of our European NATO partners? You
are all nodding your heads.
David Loyn: It certainly significantly
weakens the ability. NATO planners in Kabul call the Germans and
the Italians pot plants"What should we do with the
pot plants this week?" they ask, because there is so little
that those forces can do in terms of effective military action.
They will not go out at night; they will not fly helicopters in
certain conditions; and they will not go to the south of the country.
So you have a military force that was initially drawn from an
alliance, which you cannot send into battle in most of the country.
Support is very fragile: even in the countries that will go in
to fight the Taliban nowCanada and the Netherlandsthere
are major political discussions. In fact, the Dutch are committed
to pulling out, and the Dutch Ministry of Defence tells me that
it hopes that it will manage to change the policy to that. There
is a very significant weakening of military will because of that
and, again, the Americans are hoping to fill the gap.
Q129 Mr. Keetch: This has undoubtedly
caused enormous resentment in the British and American forces
in theatre, because they feel that they are not being backed up
by some of their major colleagues.
James Fergusson: Yes, I think
that they have given up, actually. I am not sure that the resentment
is there any more; the other day, it was hardly mentioned. At
this point, Obama, when he was over here, was not really asking
for more troops from NATO because he knew the answerhe
just did not bother asking, really. He was asking for police training
and other thingshe has moved on to civil-side development,
which may be a good thing, because at least it might save NATO.
I agree with Lord Carrington who said three years ago that if
NATO cannot do that, what is it for? That is a very good question.
Q130 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I must
return to the question of human rights and what we are supposed
to be doing in Afghanistan. In my view, President Obama has restated
our Western aims to deny al-Qaeda a base, and that can be stretched
to the need to suppress an insurrection against an elected Government,
however unsatisfactory that Government may be. Although it is
highly desirable to create a Western democracy with respect for
human rights, particularly those of womenwe all feel strongly
about thatit confuses the picture, because we are dealing
with a disjointed society, which is presumably traditional outside
the cities. I am going there next week for the first time. We
do not invade countries to influence the right of girls to go
to school, otherwise we would be at war almost continuously, so
what are we doing? Mr. Fergusson, your fall-back position is to
talk to the Taliban and somehow to get them back into government?
Where would that leave our human rights aims?
James Fergusson: In dire trouble.
Our Government must decide why we are there. Are we there for
our security and to prevent terrorist attacks and so on, or are
we there to spread democracy and to make things better for schools
and women's rights? I am not saying that we should abandon Afghan
women, but there are other ways of dealing with the problem, and
surely we do not improve the lot of women in Afghanistan by sending
in an invading army, which is what we have done. I believe that
a better way is through dialogue, engagement and, most of all,
education. Afghanistan is an extremely illiterate and uneducated
country, and much of the stuff comes from the fact that there
is no education. I advocate talking to the Taliban and engaging
with them. Whenever I have done so, I have made progress. They
are there to listen, and they like to listen. Their movement is
revolutionary and work in progress. Believe it or not, not all
Taliban are against women's education. I know a maulawi who ran
a girls' school in Kabul all through the Taliban period with their
approval. Such things happen, and the situation is not always
as black and white as it looks. Yes, it is terrible, and I do
not condone the Taliban's treatment of women, but there is scope
for improvement.
David Loyn: I think there has
been a problem of Afghanising the solution in Afghanistan. Assuming
that with freedom of democracy, a neo-con agenda and a Parliament,
everything would follow automatically with a McDonald's on every
corner and rights for womenthat is not far from the characterisation
of what the Americans believed they might be able to do in Afghanistanis
clearly a long way from what has happened. We have been rather
poor at the bits beyond just having votes and about building a
democracy. They are about accountability, empowering a civil society,
and having a free media, which is now very much on the back foot
in Afghanistan and going in the wrong direction. We have been
rather poor at defending those areas and building Afghan institutions
that can stand up for themselves in an Afghan way. We have not
even done the things that we said we would do. For example, at
the Afghan compact in 2006the last time all the donor countries
came together to say what they would dothere was agreement
that senior appointees in the Afghan community would be properly
vetted for corruption and crime, but that has not happened. The
idea was that Afghans would do that, but it has not happened,
and no money has been put into that. The Counter Narcotics Trust
Fund has not worked, and whole areas of public policy have been
attempted in Afghanistan by Britain and others, but have not been
followed up to provide the livelihoods and to create the Afghanistan
that we wanted. Instead, there is a Western-style Parliament,
which is beginning to operate as a bulwark against Karzai, but
not much else at this stage.
Q131 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Clearly,
we want to build Government institutions to obtain a legitimate
Government that does not terrorise the rest of the world.
David Loyn: With respect, Mr.
Heathcoat-Amory, Afghanistan never terrorised the rest of the
world. It was host to people who did. It is important to distinguish
between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Q132 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: I was actually
thinking of al-Qaeda. I want to deny them the use of another country,
and to do that I accept that we have an interest in good government
in Afghanistan. My question was more about this ideal of human
rights. Are we not in danger of taking on the Afghan Government
as well as the Taliban? From what has been said already, Sir John
Stanley is right. We have grave doubts about the present Afghan
Government. But we are just taking up another front there. He
is facing an election, and it may be that, in the society out
there, this is unobtainable. In pursuit of human rights, we are
arguably using up a lot of political capital, whereas our primary
aim and, I thought, our sole aim was rather differentto
make us and our allies more secure.
David Loyn: I think you are right,
but tactically we have to swallow some distaste about some of
the things that happen in order strategically to get a more stable
Afghanistan in the long term. If you will forgive me, I have to
leave, unless there is anything else I can help you with. Thank
you.
Christina Lamb: Can I make a point
on that? I take your point entirely but I think it looks to Afghans
that we are not very committed to human rights because of what
we have done. We wanted a Parliament, so they had elections, but
it is all for showas if we had elections where we did not
care who contested them. As I said earlier, a third of the people
sitting in Parliament have committed serial human rights abuses
and are regarded by most ordinary Afghans as the problem. It looks
to them as though we are not genuinely committed to human rights.
What is the point of having a Parliament full of those people?
Many of the governors who have been appointed are the same.
James Fergusson: I agree with
that. Look at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Add them into the mix
and imagine how that lookswe are not exactly in a position
to preach.
Q133 Mr. Moss: Can I return to something
that Mr. Fergusson raised earlierthat the British strategy
seems to be built on the assumption that if ISAF and US forces
withdraw from Afghanistan, it is inevitable that al-Qaeda will
return and use it as a base? What is your view?
James Fergusson: I saw the transcripts
of one of your sessions and a witness said categorically that
if we moved out, al-Qaeda would come straight back in again. My
view is that there is no evidence that that is the case. Why would
they? Why would the Taliban let al-Qaeda back in? After all, by
hosting al-Qaeda in the first place the Taliban lost control of
their countrythey lost their Government. They said to me,
"You have destroyed our country for just one man." They
were furious about it. The idea that they might let bin Laden
back in again and go back to scratch, I find very implausible.
Another point is, would al-Qaeda want to come back in? Originally,
in the 1990s they were there with training camps and setting up
their movement. At this point, I do not think they need training
camps. I think their armies are trained and they are probably
over here in Britain. We have moved on from there. You keep hearing
this line that we have got to stay there because if we go al-Qaeda
will come straight back into the vacuum, and we will be back where
we started. I do not accept that at all.
Q134 Mr. Moss: To go back to your
postulation of a potential end gamethat we hand over to
the Talibando you feel a guarantee to keep out al-Qaeda
could be built into that agreement?
James Fergusson: I think that
is a discussion that needs to be had with the Taliban, with the
Quetta Shura. I think we would be very pleasantly surprised at
the outcome of that. I think they would agree to it.
Christina Lamb: But I think you
have to be careful not to look at the Taliban as a monolithic
organisation. There are a lot of different groups, which is one
of the problems with the whole "let's talk to the Taliban"
scenario. I do not have the same confidence that James does that
the Taliban could stop or would necessarily want to stop al-Qaeda
coming back. What I do think is, what interest does al-Qaeda have
in going back to Afghanistan? It is in Pakistan, which is a much
more useful place to be. You have got nuclear arms and an intelligence
service that is largely sympathetic to what you are doing. It
has everything you need. It has electricity everywhere. It is
a highly technological country. Why would you go to Afghanistan,
one of the poorest countries in the world, and run about in caves?
Q135 Mr. Moss: The Government's strategy
in Afghanistan includes a wide range of objectives. Some people
argue that it has far too many priorities. What in your view should
they be focusing on in the near future?
James Fergusson: It comes back
to the question that we had before. Are we there to build a new
democracy or are we there for our national security interests?
The two things conflict. My own view is that we are going to have
to take a hard-nosed realpolitik line on Afghanistan, which is
about our security. We need to ensure that the West is not attacked
again by terrorists from Afghanistan. How do you do that now?
The whole thing has moved on to Pakistan. It is obviously a very
different problem. I think you start by separating what is happening
in Pakistan from what is happening in Afghanistan. There has been
in the last year an interesting development: people now talk about
"the Pakistani Taliban". That has been going on for
only a year or so. It is quite new, and it is rather lazy to say
they are all part of the same thing. The Foreign Office does it
all the time, saying, "The threat is from this area."
No it is not. It is from Pakistan and not Afghanistan. We need
to separate them and perhaps we can start tackling the problem
in a slightly different way.
Christina Lamb: We are lazy generally
in our terminology of all these things. One of the problems in
Afghanistan is that a lot of the things that are happening are
tribal conflicts. We label them as Taliban because it is easier.
When I say "we", I mean ISAF or the military. Journalists
do the same thing. The Taliban never deny responsibility for anything.
They want to look as powerful as possible. It has made them look
a much more powerful organisation than they actually are.
Q136 Mr. Horam: We have talked a
bit about the differing aims of the various organisations in Afghanistan.
Do you think that the British Government are now clear about their
mission?
James Fergusson: No, in a word,
I do not. I hear different things from different people. Stephen
Grey interviewed several senior generals the other day. They all
came up with a different answer. If the Army itself is not clear
what it iswhether it is beating the Taliban or whateverthere
is complete confusion. There are different agendas.
Q137 Mr. Horam: How far is it a desire
to protect the investment already made, the lives already lost
and so on?
James Fergusson: That must be
part of it.
Christina Lamb: You cannot just
abandon Afghanistan now. We have started something. I was there
in 1989 when the Russians left. I was shocked at the way, overnight,
everybody lost interest. I lived in Peshawar for two years covering
war and literally overnight, diplomats, aid workers and spies
all just left. No one was interested because it was just Afghans
fighting Afghans. We suffered as a result of that. We cannot let
the same thing happen again.
Q138 Mr. Horam: How far is that the
consequence of what Mr. Fergusson proposed? And the exit strategy
you have outlined very clearly, would that be perceived as just
giving up and going?
Christina Lamb: That background
is important because all Afghans know it. They never trusted when
we came in 2001. They thought that the same thing would happen
again and that these people would not be around. Because, for
domestic political imperatives, no country went there saying that
they were committed to being there for 20 years or whatever at
the beginning, Afghans just felt that we were going to go and
abandon them all over again. I remember going into a village in
eastern Afghanistan in 2002 with some American soldiers who were
setting up a clinic and helping all these people in the village.
Each night that village would then rocket the base. So I went
to the villagers and said, "You are being helped. They are
building you a school. They are treating your kids. Why are you
rocketing the base every night?" They said that it was because
those guys would be gone soon but the bad guys would still be
there.
Q139 Mr. Horam: But if we had the
sort of exit strategy
Christina Lamb: That is the danger
of saying that you have an exit strategy.
James Fergusson: We are talking
about exit, but I am not sure that we have an exit strategy. There
is a difference.
Mr. Horam: Between talking about and
having one?
James Fergusson: The comprehensive
approach has a timeline to run. It depends on the consent of the
people who live there. That is obviously time limited. They are
not going to put up with it for ever. Fighting the Taliban while
development goes into the middle is the comprehensive approach.
My own view is that we have already run out of time; it is year
eight of this war and there is intense public frustration at the
lack of progress. Apart from little spots of development in places
such as Musa Qala in Helmand, there has not really been the kind
of development promised by either the Government in Kabul or the
West.
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