Global Security: Afghanistan and Pakistan - Foreign Affairs Committee Contents


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 about—it is the reason we went there in the first place—keeping al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan. The Foreign Office is still saying that—the 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 Shura—the "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 not—they 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 course—excuse me. But it is every time—you 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 families—it 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 justice—they come and sort things out that the police have failed to deal with. So it is a key area to be sorted out—much more important, in my view, than the Afghan army.

  David Loyn: May I reinforce that? When you go into Afghan villages under Taliban control—as most of the countryside is—and 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 1980s—it 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, not—with respect to Afghans—women'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 now—Canada and the Netherlands—there 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 answer—he just did not bother asking, really. He was asking for police training and other things—he 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 women—we all feel strongly about that—it 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 women—that is not far from the characterisation of what the Americans believed they might be able to do in Afghanistan—is 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 2006—the last time all the donor countries came together to say what they would do—there 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 different—to 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 show—as 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 looks—we are not exactly in a position to preach.

  Q133  Mr. Moss: Can I return to something that Mr. Fergusson raised earlier—that 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 country—they 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 game—that we hand over to the Taliban—do 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 is—whether it is beating the Taliban or whatever—there 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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