Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
RT HON
LORD MALLOCH-BROWN
AND ADAM
THOMSON
14 MAY 2009
Q180 Mr. Pope: I wanted to ask
about our strategic objectives in Afghanistan, because when the
Prime Minister made a statement to the House of Commons a couple
of weeks ago, I thought that the objectives were all very worth
while—we are talking about security, good governance and
human rights. Is there a danger that those objectives will become
ill-focused? Which, out of security, good governance and human
rights, is the top priority?
Lord Malloch-Brown: I am genuinely
not trying to avoid the question, but it is extremely hard to
get one without all three. Security might seem separable, in that
you might be able to have it without governance and human rights,
but the lesson from recent years in Afghanistan is that that is
not the case; in some cases, the absence of good governance has
fuelled the insurgency. Similarly on human rights, we need to
draw the human rights line at a reasonable level and not expect
to get everything conforming to tip-top, impeccable, best western
standards and practice. Again, this comes back to Afghans feeling
that it has all been worth it, and that they have a Government
who respect them and care for their rights.
I think you have to progress on all three objectives
without taking your feet off the ground, which is, I think, what
you mean, and aiming for the moon—trying to create a model
state that is beyond reach and that would lead to an over-extension
of our mission in impossible ways.
Q181 Mr. Pope: That leads me to
my next point, which is that I fear that that is exactly what
we are doing. Some of our objectives mention strengthening democracy,
which we are obviously in favour of, and the Prime Minister has
used the phrase, "helping the Afghan people achieve prosperity".
Those seem to me to be open-ended objectives that almost invite
mission creep. That is not to say that they are not good objectives,
because they are, but if we are really going to strengthen democracy
and help the Afghan people achieve prosperity, are we really saying
that that is an open-ended commitment?
Lord Malloch-Brown: If I take
the two points you have raised, strengthening democracy breaks
down to some pretty practical things, such as national elections
later this year. When we talk about strengthening democracy, what
we practically mean is an election that is accepted by the great
majority of Afghans as a credible test of their leadership, and
that whoever wins it has a mandate that people accept as genuine
and real. It is not a 10-year Westminster Foundation programme
to fine-tune democratic procedure, but although what I have just
described is a practical project-like task, it is not straightforward
or easy, and it poses a challenge.
Similarly, on improving life and the anti-poverty
objective that you mentioned, you have heard the oft-cited figures
of the extraordinary improvements in basic development outcomes:
there are now 6 million kids in school as opposed to 2 million
in 2002; a third of the students now are girls; and 83% of Afghans
live in areas that now have basic health care assistance. Again,
I think that on some of the very basic development goals, we have
made some significant progress, because Afghanistan was literally
at the very bottom of the global human development index, and
now we are starting to nudge it up a bit. But nobody is being
unrealistic; we do not expect to create an economic miracle there.
Q182 Mr. Pope: This is my last
point for the moment. On the issue of being realistic, it is extraordinarily
difficult for us as elected politicians—I am not making
a cheap point because you are in the House of Lords—because
we end up having constituents who fight and die in Afghanistan.
Constituents of mine and of Andrew Mackinlay have died there recently,
and it is very difficult to explain to our constituents what our
aims are. The things that you mention—Afghanistan going
up the education league table, education for girls and primary
health care—are great and we can be rightly proud of them.
But we need to be very realistic and honest with both the British
and the Afghan people about what can be achieved in a realistic
time frame, do we not? Otherwise, it just becomes an open-ended
commitment.
Lord Malloch-Brown: I absolutely
share your concern, and that is why I felt that some of the apparent
objectives we were laying out in the early years were much too
open-ended and seemed to imply a 20 or 30-year military commitment
in Afghanistan by British troops. There has not been a war of
that length since Britain became a democracy, and certainly not
one prosecuted on the other side of the world. There was a detachment
between objectives and what it is reasonable to ask people to
put their lives in danger for. The reason we have asked for that
commitment from our soldiers is not to bring about girls' education
or development. To be honest, there are plenty of countries in
the world that welcome our development pound but where we do not
have to put in our army to ensure that it is used properly. If
it were just about anti-poverty, we should take our money and
spend it in Africa or poor parts of India, but we are not doing
that.
The rationale for this war is that in this new
global era a distant country such as Afghanistan, or indeed its
neighbour, Pakistan, can pose huge security threats to people
on the streets of our cities, as we have seen in terrorist incidents
since 2001. So this, in its motivation and rationale, is a classic
national security challenge, to which the solution is some measure
of development, good governance and security that defuses Afghanistan
as a threat to us. We must remember that the reason we are there,
and particularly why our soldiers are there, is to defuse that
threat from terrorism in our market squares, nightclubs and train
stations.
Q183 Andrew Mackinlay: Lord Malloch-Brown,
I jotted down some of the things you said. You mentioned that
the task had proved a lot harder than we had anticipated and that
some objectives were far too open-ended—you referred to
the prospect of a 20 or 30-year commitment. When the Chairman
asked whether there was mission creep, you replied that it was
more of a deepening of the mission, and you also said that some
Ministers, your predecessors and others, thought this might be
a walk in the park.
I think your evidence has been very frank, candid
and truthful. You were not a Minister when we went in, but you
are the representative of the Government of the day, so I must
put it to you that I am really horrified and frightened, because
this has never been put to the House of Commons. If you remember,
following Iraq there were protestations by Prime Ministers that
there would always be a vote to deploy. We are deep in this, and
there is no mandate from the British Parliament for it, and that
is why I think "mission creep" is the appropriate term,
but we can say "deepening the mission"—it doesn't
matter. It raises big, fundamental, constitutional, and indeed
moral, issues. I welcome the British Government's response to
this.
In your reply to my colleague a few moments
ago you referred to this, as I would expect you to do, as a classic
case of combating terrorism and the threat in our nightclubs and
so on, but at the end of the day, I am thinking, did we actually
dig a deeper hole for ourselves? Has the threat been heightened
by our deployment without a mandate or a proper discussion in
the House of Commons, based on what Dr. John Reid, the then Minister,
said: that he thought we might not even fire a shot? That was
the inference, and I think that this is such a terrible, terrible
moment we are at. I would like to hear your comments and observations
on behalf of the British Government.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Well look,
it was obviously that comment from Dr. Reid, which I think has
been used in this Committee before, which made me say that there
had been things in the past. I think that Dr. Reid, were he here,
would say that that comment was taken rather out of context. I
was not around at the time, but that is my understanding. In that
sense, I do not want you to misunderstand me as being critical,
but a view has grown up that somehow Ministers presented it as
too light at that time. Having not been there, I do not want to
go through the rights and wrongs of that.
My point, the more fundamental one, is to acknowledge
that the strength of the insurgent opposition we have faced in
Helmand has surprised us; there is no way around that. In saying
that, I hope that I am not being seen somehow as out of line or
more honest than other Government Ministers, because I think that
we have actually tried to do as good a job as possible of raising
Afghanistan as an issue of concern in the Commons. The Prime Minister
has been there several times. He came to the Commons, as promised,
to update the House on the strategy for Afghanistan that he had
presented more than a year earlier. So I very much hope that it
is not true to say that somehow we are pursuing this without a
full debate. Precisely because it is so difficult, and because
young men and women have lost their lives, we are terribly aware
of the need to keep the House informed and seek its support for
the way forward. We have certainly made an effort not just to
respond, as we always would to a Foreign Affairs Committee request,
but to have three-monthly meetings—briefings—for MPs
and Lords who are interested in Afghanistan so that we can be
as forthcoming as possible. We realise the sacrifice that we are
asking of people and we think it enormously important that we
carry political and public opinion with us.
Q184 Mr. Horam: Just now you based
your fundamental rationale for this operation in Afghanistan and
Pakistan on the threat to British troops and security in this
country. We have heard about that threat before, of course, on
WMD relating to Iraq, and it proved to be a tissue of lies, as
you are aware. So, why should we believe it any more now?
Lord Malloch-Brown: I am sorry,
what was a tissue of lies?
Mr. Horam: Iraq.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Yes.
Mr. Horam: You made the point—
Lord Malloch-Brown: No, no, I
agree, but just a minute. In the case of Iraq, the issue was that
the original casus belli was the expectation of finding the weapons
of mass destruction—we didn't find them.
Mr. Horam: They didn't exist.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Okay. In the
case of Afghanistan there is no such doubt or debate about the
presence in Afghanistan of the terrorists who—
Q185 Mr. Horam: Yes there is.
Of course there is a big debate, isn't there?
Lord Malloch-Brown: About their
location there now?
Mr. Horam: Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden are
not in Afghanistan.
Lord Malloch-Brown: They are in
the border area of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but my point is that
there is no doubt about their presence and the role they played
at the time of 9/11, at the beginning of this.
Q186 Mr. Horam: Yes, but are they
a threat now? That is the point. Let us suppose that we were to
withdraw from Afghanistan, and secondly let us suppose that the
Taliban were going to come back as the Government of Afghanistan.
What evidence do you have that they would welcome back al-Qaeda
and Mr. Bin Laden? That is the fundamental assumption you are
making; what evidence do you have to assume that?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me just
say that al-Qaeda remains, it seems, and continues to operate
principally—you are right—across the border in Pakistan
at this stage. However, the presence of a strong Taliban-based
insurgency in southern Afghanistan allows us reasonably to assume
that absent control from Kabul, whether or not they were formally
allowed back, would mean that there would be nothing stopping
al-Qaeda operating again in Afghanistan. Perhaps the better answer
to your question is the recognition that we cannot solve the terrorist
issue in Afghanistan alone. That is why our own strategy has broadened
to deal with both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Q187 Mr. Horam: We have got soldiers
in Afghanistan who are risking their lives. We have got a huge
effort that is costing this country nearly £3 billion a year
now, as well as lost lives. There is a lot of evidence, from experts
who have studied it closely, that the last time al-Qaeda people
were in Afghanistan under the Taliban, they were not welcome at
all. They broke the agreement with the Taliban. In particular,
the Taliban are interested in their country; they are not particularly
interested in our country. Therefore I come back to the question:
what evidence do you have to make the assumption that if we pulled
out of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Bin Laden would come back and
operate from Afghanistan?
Lord Malloch-Brown: My answer
to that is that if we pull out under the right circumstances we
will have a very good shot at ensuring that they don't come back.
That is why, rather than relying solely on a military strategy
to eliminate the Taliban, we are using military means, and the
Americans are in line with our thinking—
Q188 Mr. Horam: With respect,
it means that we are spending nearly £3 billion of taxpayers'
money and losing 160 soldiers' lives, to try to do something based
on an assumption for which there is no real evidence. You have
produced no real evidence that al-Qaeda would come back, and we
could spend that money and save those lives by improving intelligence
in the UK.
Adam Thomson: I want to supplement
the Minister's point about the question of how we do it. At the
moment, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are collaborating on the Pakistani
side of the border in operations into Afghanistan. So there is
some evidence to suggest that they have a continuing working relationship.
It is not necessarily cordial. It may be simply a matter of practical
mutual interest.
Q189 Mr. Horam: Let us look at
it another way. Given what you have just said, why would al-Qaeda
and Bin Laden want to come back to Afghanistan? They are in Pakistan
now. They are working apparently with some freedom in the North
West Frontier and the administered territories. Why would they
want to come back? They do not need to, do they?
Adam Thomson: I am not an al-Qaeda
expert, but I would suggest that that sort of terrorist group
will generally go where governance is weakest. It is part of our
objective in Afghanistan to equip the Afghan Government to be
sufficiently strong to resist that.
Q190 Mr. Horam: I am just trying
to get the basis of this assumption. It is easy to make an assumption,
but you do not seem to be giving me any facts or evidence that
this is likely to happen. Do you have any intelligence?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Our objective
in going in was to make Afghanistan a legitimate functioning state
which could protect itself against re-colonisation by al-Qaeda
elements.
Mr. Horam: That is a different objective.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Well it is
the one I described at the beginning.
Q191 Mr. Horam: It is one thing
to make Afghanistan a functioning democracy. We would all agree
with that. But that is a very different objective. Are you really
saying that you expect British soldiers to risk their lives for
the sake of making Afghanistan a functioning democracy and making
Afghan girls go to school?
Lord Malloch-Brown: No. As I said,
we are not going to war for education. We are going to war for
our own national security purposes. We have argued that an element
of basic development success in areas like education or health,
and the presence of good governance are the conditions that will
make the country safe so that it does not get re-colonised by
al-Qaeda. That is our basic argument. I would argue that it holds.
You said, alternatively, pull back and use those same resources
to improve our own intelligence-gathering or security around our
national borders. Well I would point you to the example of Pakistan,
where we are not and have no intention of engaging in such military
activities, but where intensive intelligence and police work have
not been able to protect us from a series of extremely serious
terrorist threats and near misses. We argue that something like
three quarters of the terrorist cases that are in our court system
have a Pakistan root. This is a very dangerous part of the world
for us.
Q192 Mr. Horam: Yes, but is it
not true that most of the people who have been a threat to this
country have been domiciled here? They may have originated some
time ago from Pakistan, but they are domiciled in this country
and have gone over there to be brainwashed or whatever in the
madrassahs and so forth. In other words, they are people who are
fundamentally British citizens.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Quite a few
of them are British citizens. In this recent bomb incident, some
were not British citizens.
Q193 Mr. Horam: Let us go on to
another aspect of the security situation in Afghanistan. I went
down to Helmand province and one of the things that concerned
me was the lack of resources and back-up for British troops to
contain the situation. I am not an expert on terrorism or al-Qaeda,
but I understand that a successful counter-insurgency strategy
usually involves 20 troops for every 1,000 of the population,
which would mean, incredibly, 280,000 military personnel in Helmand—in
the southern provinces, rather—alone, which is way below
what we have actually got there. We have nearly 8,000 I think—more
than 7,000 troops there. It seemed from my observations that they
were barely able to contain the situation. Even the Governor of
the province, Gulab Mangal, who is a good man backed by us, has
to travel around in a British military helicopter, because it
is so unsafe. We were not allowed out beyond Gulab Mangal's heavily
protected fortress or our own military bases. Are you being serious,
giving British troops so little support?
Lord Malloch-Brown: We have concluded—and
it is very much reflected in our strategy documents and submissions
to you and others—that we cannot solve this through that
classic counter-insurgency ratio of troops to population. That
is another reason why we need a political-military strategy. We
have to use our military presence to put pressure on the insurgent
elements to the point where we create conditions for successful
reconciliation by the Government, with elements of society who
currently appear to support the insurgents.
Q194 Mr. Horam: The problem is
that the situation is so insecure that they cannot do the development.
Lord Malloch-Brown: That is why
there are two things under way: a US-led surge to improve security
in the short term, and a big focus on training the Afghan national
army, with much bigger numbers to be put through than before,
precisely to provide the only long-term credible security solution—which
is better Afghan security forces.
Q195 Mr. Horam: How do you expect
the American troops to operate when they get to Helmand province?
You have 3,000 already there and another 10,000 or so expected.
How do you expect the American troops to operate with the British
troops there?
Lord Malloch-Brown: There has
been a lot of discussion about the right kind of command arrangements
and, if necessary, Adam can elaborate on that. I think the American
troops will operate very well with British forces. I have to say
that the American troops have been having a very good war lately.
They know the area quite well. They have not operated in Helmand,
but they have operated in nearby places and the combination of
knowledge, language skills and military tactics has proved highly
effective. It will be a welcome addition to what we are doing
in Helmand.
Q196 Mr. Horam: Finally, I want
to come on to the police. We found from our visit to Afghanistan
that there is a great deal of concern about the police. The training
of the Afghan army was regarded, by and large, as going quite
well, but the training of the police was disastrous, frankly,
with 40% of the police on heroin. It is a rabble, corrupt and
in a dreadful state. The problem is that we do not have any spare
police to send out there to help them. We have 120 people from
the UK in the whole country, and we are rather short of police
here. What on earth can we do about this serious situation? The
point is that it is the police with whom the normal Afghan person
comes into contact, not so much the army.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Various things
are being looked at and I will turn to Adam for elaboration. We
have been looking at supplementing the police with a so-called
Afghan Public Protection Force—APPF.[2]
We are currently running a pilot of that in Wardak province, with
support from the US. It is basically a local community police
force. There are issues of training, control, objectivity and
performance which we need to track carefully, but I think we all
agree that not nearly enough has been done on the police side.
In addition to conventional police training, we need to look at
some slightly out-of-the-box solutions to supplement the numbers
of people we have who are willing to protect communities from
Taliban activity.
Adam Thomson: I think we have
about 60 personnel, some of them military, working on training
the Afghan police. That is a very small contribution.[3]
There is a much larger US one. We have 15 people in the European
police operation as well, which makes us the third-largest contributor.
Everyone acknowledges that the effort so far in building an Afghan
police force that operates in an effective and non-predatory way
in communities has not been a great success. Frankly, we are still
experimenting to try to find what will work best. One important
thing is to recognise that you need different kinds of police
for different situations. We have been slow to recognise that,
so there is a European effort to focus more effort among those
countries within the European Union that are able to do it on
training a gendarmerie capability to operate in insecure environments.
Q197 Mr. Illsley: Following on
from what my colleague said about the Taliban in Afghanistan,
I appreciate your view. We have seen problems in the north-west
frontier of Pakistan, which we will come on to shortly. To what
extent is that because we have displaced the Taliban from Afghanistan
into north-west Pakistan and they are likely to move back in,
should the military presence be reduced? Or is it simply that
the Taliban influence in north-west Pakistan has expanded, without
reference to any exodus from Afghanistan? What are your views
on that?
Lord Malloch-Brown: I think both.
There has been a Pashtun belt with a major insurgency, which has
crossed this border and pays very little respect to the border.
On both sides its roots lie in some of the events—the Russian
occupation of Afghanistan, the displacement of refugees into Pakistan,
the Islamisation. A lot of factors hit equally on these people,
whichever side of the border they were located on. But obviously
we think the relative success of some of the military activity
by our side in Afghanistan has had a displacement effect. People
have retreated across the border into Pakistan, and would come
back again if our activities were removed.
Q198 Chairman: Can I take you
back to your answers about security generally and the reference
to the US? It was reported that President Obama wanted the NATO
summit to agree a much greater European contribution, and he was
clearly disappointed. Although the US has announced 17,000 additional
combat troops, we are making a temporary small increase only during
the election period. From the Prime Minister's statement, it is
clear that from some time after August we are going back down
from 9,000 to 7,000-something. Clearly that, therefore, is a different
approach and other European countries are not coming up with big
numbers. Does this mean that the Americans will in effect be taking
on the overwhelming majority of the burden, and that in practice
ISAF will become just a convenient fig leaf for what will be an
American-driven, American-run operation?
Lord Malloch-Brown: I hope not,
and I think there is somebody who hopes not more than me, and
that is President Obama, because I think one of his lessons, going
back to the campaign, was very clearly that America had been too
alone in the case of Iraq. It needed to be part of a multilateral
effort, and that is why I think he and his colleagues, supported
by ourselves, pushed hard for as much additional NATO contribution
as possible. But you are right, Mr. Chairman: the outcomes are
relatively modest in numbers. There are more Poles, more Spanish
and more Italian troops and carabinieri to train the Afghans.
Chairman: There are only dozens.
Lord Malloch-Brown: Hundreds.
You are completely right in your basic point that this increases
significantly the proportion of Americans versus other troops.
Operationally, inevitably that will lead to some consolidation
of American decision making over military operations, because
it is American men and women who will in many cases be in the
front line. I think even if that happens, the US will not lose
sight of the lesson of Iraq. It needs to be there in as broad
an international coalition as possible, with the support of the
UN Security Council, and the authority and legitimacy that it
brings. So you see the US still pushing for a big UN role on the
non-military side and still consulting NATO about the military
structures and decision making. I think that it recognises the
issue that you have raised, and will do its best not to give in
to the logic of a growing American ratio versus others.
Q199 Sir John Stanley: You said
earlier that the strength of the opposition that we have encountered
in Helmand province has come as something of a surprise. I wonder
why it came as a surprise to the British Government, given the
fact that in 2001, the al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban leadership
were, unhappily, allowed to escape. The Afghan Taliban have more
or less unlimited supplies of money through narcotics, to which
we will come a little later; a 250-km, totally porous, mountainous
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan; an effectively unlimited
supply of fighters in Pakistan who can be recruited at between
$10 and $20 a day, and a geographically more expansive safe haven
for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan than there ever was in
Afghanistan. Against that background, it does not seem at all
surprising that we have encountered the degree of opposition that
we have in Helmand.
Given that those are the unhappy realities that
we have to face—and, most importantly of all, that our service
men and women have to face—do the British Government now
accept that there is no way that we will achieve success in Afghanistan
beyond a containment operation and by looking at policy simply
in Afghan terms? Do they accept that the only way that we will
achieve, effectively, the elimination of the Taliban threat in
Afghanistan is if we concert with others and have an altogether
more expansive, more positive and more direct counter-terrorist
policy in Pakistan in conjunction with the Pakistani Government?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me take
different parts of that, John. On the first part, I used "surprise"
in a clear way, which was to say that we deployed in Helmand for
the very reasons that you eloquently laid out. Clearly, there
was a resurgent insurgency in Helmand that needed to be tackled.
The porous nature of the border, the funding sources, and the
fact that the leadership had escaped largely intact—all
those reasons meant that we recognised that we faced a strategic
threat, which is why the UK deployed to Helmand. I used the word
"surprise" in a tactical sense, which is to say that
the insurgents have been fiercer and more forceful, and have done
better than we originally assumed would be the case. As with any
good military action by this country over the centuries, we have
stepped up our game and our commitment, and reinforced our effort
to deal with an enemy who has been tougher than we initially thought
would be the case. Please do not misunderstand me—it is
not a surprise that we faced an insurgency in Helmand, which is
the reason why we went there. We knew it was there, we wanted
to take it on and it has been a hard fight—that, if you
like, I clearly acknowledge.
On your second point, which is that we cannot
have a definition of success beyond a containment strategy, my
answer is that we recognise it on the military side and have been
frank about it. We will not prevail and win militarily if the
success of a military win is eliminating all Taliban from Afghan
soil and keeping it that way—that is not our definition
of success. Our definition of military success is indeed putting
sufficient pressure on the Taliban so that they recognise that
a military victory will be denied to them, that the Government
in Kabul will remain in power and draw the authority of an elected
mandate, and that the Taliban therefore needs to engage in reconciliation
with that Government on the terms that that Government set.
Your third point was about the Pakistan end
of it. We recognise that you cannot—some people have used
this term—drain the swamp of terrorism without dealing with
the Pakistan side of this as well. You can do all you want in
Afghanistan, but if Pakistan remains a continuous human re-supply
source for terrorism in Afghanistan you cannot get to a solution.
You also need a successful strategy for Pakistan; we fully acknowledge
that, and that is why all of our Prime Minister's strategy and
everything else now regularly covers Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Afghanistan alone is an artificial frame through which to seek
victory on these issues.
Chairman: Andrew Mackinlay will ask questions
on the issue of governance.
2 Note by witness: I incorrectly implied that
there was UK involvement with this project. The Government of
Afghanistan has been running the Afghan Public Protection Force
pilot in Wardak Province, with support from the US. Back
3
Note by witness: As of April 2009, 53 UK policing experts
are deployed in Afghanistan, this includes 14 deployed as part
of EUPOL. Back
| 
