Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 179)
TUESDAY 16 JUNE 2009
SIR BILL
JEFFREY KCB, SIR
PETER RICKETTS
KCMG AND DR
NEMAT "MINOUCHE"
SHAFIK
Q160 Linda Gilroy:
When will the report be ready to which you have referred on the
wheat example because that presumably will give some more detail
about which bits have contributed towards the success of that?
Dr Shafik: I do not know that
but I can find out for you.
Q161 Linda Gilroy:
Thank you. Again, you have already discussed very much the strategic
development and planning in the Comprehensive Approach and you
have given us a pretty positive picture, but if it is now established
in the right direction of travel what things are standing in the
way of it becoming even stronger? What are the barriers to the
Comprehensive Approach being better routed, more successful in
the future? Perhaps each one of you could say one thing you would
change about how your work and the work of ministers is done on
the Comprehensive Approach that would deliver results that will
be sustainable over time.
Sir Peter Ricketts: To be honest
with the Committee budgets are something that we have to work
to overcome. My own observation is that Comprehensive Approach
works best of all in the field. If you want to see it really working
well then Lashkar Gah or Basra is the place to go, or Kabul. We
are learning to make it work in Whitehall and I think it is a
lot better than it was, as colleagues have said. The fact that
we do still all have accounting officer responsibilities to this
Parliament and we are all responsible for our own departmental
votes means that we have to pay attention to how each department's
money is spent, and that means that pooling money, working across
departmental boundaries is an excellent thing to do but is not
always an easy thing to do. Certainly in the case of the FCO we
have struggled to find the budget to do the sorts of deployments
in Afghanistan that we have wanted to make, and we are now making
the pools work better jointly but the accounting officer structure
of government accounting does not make that easy.
Q162 Linda Gilroy:
Are there ways in which that can be changed or is it just a feature
of it?
Sir Peter Ricketts: Unless we
ever got to a point of having a single budget for the Afghanistan
operation, which is somehow jointly owned by the three departments,
we will have to make the current system work where we are each
individually responsible for our own budgets, and yet we want
to work collaboratively together. We are making it work but the
system is not ideal.
Q163 Chairman:
You were arguing against that earlier, were you not?
Sir Peter Ricketts: In what respect,
Mr Chairman?
Q164 Chairman:
In respect of a single budget with perhaps a single minister in
charge of it.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I was not
talking so much about a single minister; I was talking about a
single pot of money, which would make life easier in terms of
across departmental working.
Q165 Linda Gilroy:
Sir Bill?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think I would
say that although we have made progress we are still not where
we need to be in terms of being able to deploy the right numbers
of the right kinds of civilians, appropriately trained, as rapidly
may be needed for the purpose. We are a lot closer to it than
we were but that is one of the remaining tasks.
Dr Shafik: It is much easier when
you do not have to coordinate with dozens of other allies. So
Sierra Leone was the situation where the UK military intervened
in 2002; we had an integrated HMG effort; we had to sort out the
Comprehensive Approach among us but it was not among 32 allies,
each of whom had their own Ministry of Defence and Development
Ministry and Foreign Ministry. The variable geometry gets very
complicated in Afghanistan, if I may say. Ultimately the Comprehensive
Approach can be made to work in a Sierra Leone case where it is
one country doing the Comprehensive Approach, or maybe a small
group of partners, but I suspect if you were dealing with very
complex situations with large numbers of participants you need
to multilateralise the problem and that is where I think that
the work we are doing collectively to get the UN to be a much
more effective deliverer of the Comprehensive Approach itself
is probably a very important piece of work.
Q166 Linda Gilroy:
I think we will probably be coming on to the international links
in a moment, so thank you for that. Can I move on to PRTs and
how well they do their work? Does their success depend too much
on the personalities of those involved? What can each of your
contributions do to mitigate against that, starting with Dr Shafik?
Dr Shafik: In terms of the effectiveness?
Q167 Linda Gilroy:
Yes and how dependent are they on the leader person and the personality,
the leadership of the group? And what are you doing in one way
both to encourage that but also to mitigate it?
Dr Shafik: There is no doubt that
leadership matters and I think we have seen when we have had good
leaders of PRTs that they are more effective. Having a cadre of
people who are experienced in these situations is quite important.
The future head of the PRT in Helmand, for example, is somebody
who used to be head of DFID's office in Iraq, was head of DFID's
programme in Afghanistan and is now going back to run the PRT
in Helmand and has a strong track record of working in conflict
environments. That is good to build up a cadre of leaders who
can do that. I think that the FCO also now has a cadre of people
who have that experience. But leaders cannot be the whole story
and so the work that we are doing through the Stabilisation Unit
and building up the civilian cadre and having other people in
the PRT who have experience working in this comprehensive inter-departmental
way will reinforce the fact when you do not have the strongest
leadership. So I think you have to work on both fronts—the
leaders as well as the worker bees that are also need to be embedded
with a comprehensive spirit.
Q168 Chairman:
How many people in your department speak Pashtu, Dr Shafik?
Dr Shafik: None; in terms of the
employees in DFID. But to be honest—
Q169 Chairman:
Not one?
Dr Shafik: Not fluently. I think
a lot of the people who have served have studied the language
and can manage, but to say I have a fluent Pashtu speaker, no.
Q170 Chairman:
Is that something that you should perhaps be addressing?
Dr Shafik: We have tended, I have
to say, to rely on the FCO for being the linguists and we have
tended to recruit people on the basis of their development expertise
because they deploy all around the world.
Q171 Chairman:
And lots of times to Afghanistan. Should you not be addressing
it?
Dr Shafik: Clearly it would be
a good thing and we encourage our staff if they are interested,
but it is a weakness—it is a weakness.
Mr Jenkin: Chairman, it is only fair
to ask the Armed Forces the same question.
Chairman: Do not worry, we will!
Q172 Linda Gilroy:
If you would like to cover that?
Dr Shafik: The only other thing
I would say is that we rely very heavily on local staff; we have
more Afghan staff working for us in Afghanistan than we have UK
staff, so a lot of the language issues are addressed by the fact
that much of our work is actually being done by Afghans.
Q173 Chairman:
How long do you assess the military will be in Afghanistan?
Dr Shafik: I hope the military
will not be in there as long as we are, but I think for at least
20 years.
Q174 Robert Key:
Chairman, might I ask Dr Shafik how many of your locally employed
staff, your Afghan staff speak English?
Dr Shafik: Virtually all of them
speak some English. Some of the more lower level administrative
staff—not the administrative staff but drivers and so on
will not speak very good English, but everyone will speak some;
and our professional staff are excellent.
Q175 Linda Gilroy:
So the same question about PRTs and how they look and whether
they are over-dependent on the leadership on the one hand but
what you could do to make sure that every PRT has good leadership.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I agree with
what Minouche said. I think the nature of this beast is such that
the person you put in charge of it is going to have a profound
impact on how successful this is. I think that the PRTs as entities,
the kind of model that we saw when we were last in Lashkar Gah
is what we ought to be aiming for with a good mix of military
and civilian people with the right skills. The way to make it
stronger and more consistently effective is by, as Minouche has
described, growing a group of staff who have done quite a bit
of this sort of thing. The woman who is about to take over in
Lashkar Gah is I think known to the Committee and, as Minouche
says, is on her third post of this kind; and that must help if
we can get that degree of consistency into it.
Q176 Linda Gilroy:
And as far as Pashtu?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I would need
notice about how many of our military colleagues speak Pashtu.
I do not think the answer is zero.
Chairman: I think it may be.
Q177 Linda Gilroy:
Except that presumably in terms of training the Afghan Army, whether
it is zero or not it is an important aspect of what should be
done. When I was over there with the Armed Forces Parliamentary
Scheme I saw even quite junior marines sitting down with their
colleagues from the Afghan Army and conducting almost mini jirgas
with elders—it was put on, a presentation for our purposes.
So there seems to be a great thirst at the lower levels but whether
at the level of fluency where it could matter quite a bit there
is sufficient paid to that, and presumably again does it rely
on what the Foreign Office have in the way of Pashtu speakers.
Perhaps Peter could deal with that?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: If I could just
finish off the point? I think in the military context it would
certainly help—no doubt about it. What we tend to do is
to rely greatly on local interpreters who certainly from my observation
are usually very good.
Q178 Dai Havard:
The Gurkhas.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The other limiting
fact inevitably with the military is that we are deploying on
a six-monthly cycle quite a significant proportion of the British
Army and the Marines. Having said all that, though, it would help
if we had more fluent Pashtu speakers.
Q179 Linda Gilroy:
Of course some people are now serving second, third, fourth and
even more terms of deployment there. Sir Peter.
Sir Peter Ricketts: Ms Gilroy,
on your point about leadership I agree with what my colleagues
have said—leadership is always important in these operations
and a good leader will always make a difference and make an operation
better. So, yes, we need to make sure that the leader of our PRT
is an effective leader and also can work well in this joint structure
that we have with the brigadier who is there. But we also need
to have systems in place so that it is not totally reliant on
any one individual and there is a strong enough system so that
cooperation will work in addition to there being a good leader
at the top. I think it is very important and a very powerful signal
that the next civilian leader of our operation in Helmand will
be a DFID member of staff—I welcome that very much. We do
have some Pashtu speakers—I would need to find out how many
exactly—but I am sure we could always do with more. We certainly
expect to be in Afghanistan and the Pashtu region for the long
term. So we need to build up a larger cadre of Pashtu speakers.
We are trying to keep some of our key staff rather longer in Afghanistan;
for example, our Ambassador who recently came back did almost
two years and our current Ambassador will aim to do that sort
of length of time as well, to give even more continuity in experience
of the country.
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