Tonight at a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference, Paddy Ashdown gave a talk about Afghanistan. In the speech he quoted from a confidential memo he provided Gordon Brown in March when it looked like he would become the UN chief in Kabul.
We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1000 years – a society in which the gun drugs and tribalism have always played a part.
In a sobering statement, the soldier-politician says:
On the military side we also need to understand that we probably cannot defeat the Taliban – only the Afghan people can do this. And at present, especially in the South, they do not seem ready to do so. Nor can we force them. They change their mind on this in their own time, not ours. The best we can do is give them the space, help where we can and hope for the best.
Read the whole speech below.
In December last year, when I thought it was likely that I would be going to Afghanistan, I wrote a minute to Gordon Brown and David Miliband.“Afghanistan – can it still be won?”
I wanted them to know what the bottom line in Afghanistan could be.
Here is what I said;
• “We do not have enough troops, aid or international will to make Afghanistan much different from what it has been for the last 1000 years – a society in which the gun drugs and tribalism have always played a part. And even if we had all of these in sufficient quantities, we would not have them for sufficient time – around 25 years or so – to make the aim of fundamentally altering the nature of Afghanistan, achievable.
• In 5 – 10 years time, it seems very probable that troop numbers and aid in Afghanistan will, at best, be half what they are now. The international community will have other priorities and Afghanistan will no longer be at the top of its agenda.
• So our task now is to shape our actions towards the kind of Afghanistan which can be managed on these diminished resources.
• This will be an Afghanistan in which:
(1) Guns will, especially in the South, probably still be a greater factor in the exercise of power than the ballot box.
(2) There will still be tension, especially in the South, between governance through tribal democracy and government through formal Western style democratic structures, with the former being more influential than the latter, unless we can find a way to synergise the two
(3) War lords, especially in the South, will still be a feature of Afghan governance and government.
(4) Drugs, especially in the South, will still be a feature of Afghan life and the Afghan economy.
(5) Corruption will still be deeply embedded in Government.
(6) The Taliban will still exist as an armed force, especially in the South. Because here the insurgency is actually NOT, about Al Qaeda, but about deeply conservative Islamic Pashtun nationalism, with many locals preferring the Taliban, even if they do nasty things to them, to foreign troops, even if they do nice things for them.
• We may, if we are really successful, be able to diminish the effects of the above, but we will not be able to eradicate them.
• Progress in diminishing the insurgency will require a two pronged strategy. On the military side we will need to be ruthless about attacking their structures, even at the risk of collateral. They need to know that we will do whatever is necessary and for however long, to defeat them. On the political side we will need to be equally focussed on providing a better alternative that can deliver improvements in Afghan lives. Very bad cop to all insurgents; very good cop to all those who aren’t, is our motto.
• So, politically, governance is the key. But it has to be governance with the grain of Afghan traditions and in tune with what is achievable. Under promising and over delivering is a shining virtue; vice versa, a mortal sin. So we have to abandon the notion that we can make Afghanistan into a well governed state, with gender aware citizens and European standard human rights. It raises expectations we cannot fulfil and wastes resources better deployed elsewhere. A better governed state is the limit of the achievable.
• On the military side we also need to understand that we probably cannot defeat the Taliban – only the Afghan people can do this. And at present, especially in the South, they do not seem ready to do so. Nor can we force them. They change their mind on this in their own time, not ours. The best we can do is give them the space, help where we can and hope for the best.
• To expect to do more than the above, is to set ourselves up for failure.
• These truths will be deeply shocking to the politicians and their publics who initiated and still, mostly, support this operation. But that does not make them less true.
• So one of our tasks is, gently, to lower expectations in the Western world and bring our ambitions back into the range of the achievable. This will certainly be difficult and may well make those who attempt it, unpopular.
• There is one thing we have achieved, however, and, with skill and a ruthless prioritisation of resources, ought to be able to continue to achieve, even with diminished resources. That is denying the Islamic jihadists the use of Afghanistan for the kind of activities they conducted there prior to 9/11. Islamic jihadist fighters may be taking part in the insurgency in Afghanistan, but they are no longer using the country for bases, recruitment and training. These activities are now taking place over the border in Pakistan.
So the realistic aim in Afghanistan, with current resources, is not victory, but containment. Our success will be measured, not in making things different, but making them better; not in final defeat of the jihadists, but in preventing them from using Afghanistan as a space for their activity. These two aims will be difficult enough to achieve; but they are at least achievable.
Ends.
I fear, there is nothing that has happened over the past year or so in Afghanistan which has caused me to alter this analysis. Indeed almost everything that has happened there makes me more gloomy today than I was when I wrote this minute.
This is not to ignore the successes we have achieved in Afghanistan. For they are worthy of note – even if they fall, far short of the Panglossian rhetoric about the situation which we hear whenever one of our Ministers visits Afghanistan.
• British troops have made progress against the Taliban in Helmand province, forcing them to lose ground and change tactics to suicide bombing and Improvised Explosive Devices.
• While every casualty is an individual tragedy, overall the casualties of the 40-odd-nation international coalition remain relatively low for an operation of this sort.
• The Taliban has failed to broaden into a mass movement and few Afghans want to be ruled by it again.
• There is much greater access to education and health services today than previously.
• The currency is stable.
• The network of paved roads is growing.
• IT infrastructure is expanding.
• A new small business sector is emerging.
• There is greater freedom of expression and a relatively free media.
These are all positive gains. The problem is that they are, now considerably outweighed by the negative ones.
• Although the Taliban’s physical hold on Helmand may have been weakened, they still hold in all seven provinces, which we have little prospect of taking back in the foreseeable future. And that is not the whole story. There are further nine provinces in which the Taliban, or groups in association with them, are substantially or intermittently in control. As a recent report from NGOs working in the country, has confirmed, Taliban inspired insurgency spread in 2007 and is spreading still.
• Indeed security is now assessed as worse than at any time since 2001. Suicide bombings were up by 27% in 2007 and by 600% over 2005. In 2007 alone, there were 8000 conflict-related deaths – 1500 of them civilian, 40 of these were relief workers, with another 89 abducted. In the first six months of this year alone, seven hundred and ten members of the Afghan National Police force have been killed. Things are now even deteriorating in the capital itself and in a number of provinces around Kabul.
• Travel by road is becoming increasingly dangerous.
• There is little prospect now that the international community will achieve what was envisaged by the Afghan Compact or Afghan National Development Strategy, the basic road maps for international delivery in Afghanistan; indeed, the priority now is protecting gains, rather than making new ones.
• Government corruption is growing and its writ outside Kabul is decreasing.
• While Afghan public opinion, overall still favours the international presence, this support is increasingly fragile. We know from elsewhere, once this starts to slide, it is very difficult to turn around. And events such as the US air raid on 22 August in which, according to Afghan Government claims, up to ninety civilians died, does absolutely nothing to help this trend and everything to ensure that it is the Taliban, not the international coalition, who will win the vital battle for hearts and minds.
• One Taliban leader said, the West may have the watches, but the Taliban have the time. An increasing number of ordinary Afghans think that’s probably true. They suspect that the black turbaned insurgents have greater sticking power than we have
• And to add to all this, some humanitarian experts now fear that harsh cold weather this year, combined with drought and high food prices could lead to a humanitarian crisis in the country in the winter months ahead.
The situation in Afghanistan has, in short become very dangerous. And we have very little time to turn it round.
In this speech I want to concentrate on how we might still be able to do that.
But first, a brief word on how we got here, if only because understanding this, may help us to understand what has to happen next and prevent us from repeating the mistakes in the future.
Our approach to the Afghan enterprise has been characterized by the following factors:
• A complete failure to understand the importance of having a plan, not just for the war, but also for building the peace which followed.
• An equally complete failure, on the part of the international community, to understand the importance of co-ordination, speaking with a single voice and having a single person with the authority to lead.
• A high degree of collective historical amnesia: Afghanistan is a graveyard of imperial hubris. This should at least have warned us against complacency.
• A woeful under-resourcing both of troops and foreign assistance. Afghanistan is far more difficult than ex- Yugoslavia – yet we have deployed there, one twenty fifth the number of troops and one fiftieth the amount of aid per head of population than we put into Bosnia. You cannot re-build a state like Afghanistan on the cheap and if that is all you can afford, it is probably better not to try.
• A set of preposterously ambitious aims, which included setting up a unitary Western style state in a handful of years, in a country which had just emerged from an ongoing civil war of 30 years and has been steeped in a deeply tribal culture, based on revenge and division for probably thirty centuries.
• An early neglect by the US and its allies of state-building and sustainable security, in favour of hunting down Al Qaeda.
• A failure to understand early enough that the best people to defeat the Talban were not Western forces, but Afghan ones.
• A preference for co-opting the corrupt and the powerful, often by stuffing their mouths with gold, over making a serious effort to establish the rule of law.
• A concentration on reforming government in Kabul, while ignoring the need to strengthen government where it matters – in the provinces and the districts.
• Aid programmes which have been fractured, uncoordinated, untargeted and wasteful.
OK. Enough of the past. Enough of how we got here.
The big question is: what do we do now ?
Can we indeed get ourselves out of the mess into which our own folly has dumped us? And if so how?
I still believe it is possible – just – to turn things round. But only if we have a clear plan, a unified approach and start now.
And the right place to start is with some basic understandings, upon which any plan to turn things round, must depend.
• We must tackle, at last, the disastrous lack of co-ordination amongst the international community in Afghanistan, which, above all else, is responsible for our failures there. The appointment of Ambassador Kai Eide as the new UN envoy has seen some steps in the right direction. But the international community remains dangerously fractured. Each organization maintains a separate civilian representative and there no meaningful overall co-ordination between them which is worthy of the name.
• The same has, until recently applied to the military side. In an almost precise replica of the military command structures which led to the Somalia fiasco immortalised in the film “Black Hawk Down”, the military command structures in Afghanistan have been a veritable spaghetti-bowl of tangled command lines and muddled authority between the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, NATO’s ISAF operation, U.S. Special Forces – reporting to Special Forces Command in Tampa, Florida – and the many black-ops undertaken by the West’s security services.
• At present every troop contributing NATO country sees Afghanistan exclusively through the narrow lens of their own troop deployments – the UK thinks Helmand is Afghanistan; the Dutch thinks it is Uruzgan; and Germany thinks it is Kunduz.
• There is, in consequence, no comprehensive internationally accepted, country wide, political-military strategy and almost no means of creating one.
• Not surprisingly, therefore, there is no co-ordinated approach to international aid either. The aid programme in Afghanistan resembles one of those a pot-luck dinners which friends arrange, with each nation contributing what they think best to the party, regardless of whether it is needed or fits into the bigger whole.
• There is also a depressing and continuing misunderstanding that killing insurgents will kill the insurgency. It won’t. Tactical successes must be followed the promotion of better governance and better living standards. Instead of expanding international instruments for development, we should be expanding Afghan ones if we are to avoid leaving a dangerous vacuum when we leave.
• And finally we have to rid ourselves of our caricatured view of the Taliban. They are not the Al Qaeda. They are predominantly nationalist, conservative and Islamist. Given the past history of foreign intervention and the grassroots strength of Islam, the insurgency can only really be defeated by forces which are themselves also national and Islamic.
The next thing is to make a proper assessment of what our assets are and what are those of the Taliban, so that we can build on the first and diminish the second.
We, NATO and our Afghan partners, have three strengths to build on; Afghan public opinion; increasing resources and a new US President:
• The Taliban remain overall, unpopular, and there is still an overwhelming desire for peace;
• Key donors, especially the US are now at last providing some of the necessary resources;
• A new administration US Administration, perhaps particularly an Obama one, could enable a change of direction and strengthen US engagement.
The Taliban, meanwhile, have four key assets: terror, time, sanctuary and dissatisfaction.
• They use terror tactics with great effect.
• They believe they can outwait western forces; and many Afghans suspect they are right.
• They have a safe sanctuary in the semi-autonomous Federally Administrative Tribal Areas (the so called FATA) and Balochistan in Pakistan, where they can plan, prepare and re-supply in almost total safety.
• They benefit from increasing dissatisfaction with what is perceived to be a corrupt and ineffective government, and the slow rate of social and economic progress.
It is from these understandings and the relative balance of advantages between both sides that any new strategy must be formed.
Here is what that plan might look like.
It consists of three elements. One is regional. One concerns the international community. And one determines what, in partnership with the Afghan Government, we should actually do on the ground.
First, the regional dimension, because it is the one which is most often ignored. But it is arguably the most important.
One of the key lessons of successful post conflict reconstruction, is that it is almost always impossible to pull together a failing state if its neighbours are trying to pull it apart. The neighbours, in short are crucial; their legitimate interests have to be recognized and they have to have the opportunity to become part of the solution, instead of being part of the problem. This has been almost totally lacking in Afghanistan.
What is needed now, if we are to create a new dynamic in Afghanistan, is a regional agreement, similar to the Dayton Peace Agreement, involving all the regional players and especially Iran. This should be supported by external guarantors who are prepared, as in Dayton to underpin the agreement – the US certainly; Russia probably and I think China too. In other circumstances I would be adding India to this list, but here the particularity of their relations with Afghanistan make this impossible. We need to start getting used to the fact that international interventions in the future cannot any longer be purely Western affairs. If they are to have the international support, troops and resources necessary for success, they cannot any longer just rely on the world’s old powers, but will have to incorporate some of its new ones, too. And for those who say why should the “new powers” do this? my answer is they already are. The relative figures for China and US for troops serving in blue berets, under UN the UN flag and UN command is, China, 1700 soldiers. The United States 11.
I do not underestimate the difficulty of putting together such a regional agreement for Afghanistan, especially given the present difficulties with Russia. Though I think China would be willing, with Tibet next door. And Iran too, probably has little long term interest in instability on its border. A new President in the US might just be able to do this. Indeed, given Obama’s courageous statements in favour of multilateralism and dialogue with old enemies, he might well be the single person in the world, best placed to pull off such an enterprise.
Part of this regional approach should be an understanding that the key to security in southern Afghanistan, lies not in Kabul, but in Islamabad. A regional agreement might even open the way for Islamic nations to help Pakistan close down the insurgent sanctuaries and promote political reform in the FATA and Balochistan, supported by increased international development assistance into these areas.
The international community in Afghanistan, meanwhile has to start putting its own house in order, too.
This means four things.
First we have to agree a strategy. Even the wrong one would be better than what we have at present, which is none.
Second we have to give Kay Eide, or whoever it is we choose to head up the international effort, the necessary authority to bash heads together and co-ordinate action, especially when it comes to international aid.
Third, we have to make some sense of the mess of military command lines and integrate military action with our political aims. We need to contrast the militants’ use of terror with our standards; that means reducing even further the number of civilian casualties caused by air strikes; significantly improving mechanisms for investigation, accountability, and compensation. And it means using our influence to end abuses against civilians by some within the Afghan National Police and other elements of the Afghan security forces.
Lastly, having a clear international strategy means having priorities, and the ability to concentrate on them.
Whenever I hear our Prime Minster speaking in the House, what I hear is not clarity, but confusion.
It appears that his answer to the fact that we are close to losing one war in Afghanistan is to fight lots more:
• A war against the Taliban.
• A war against drugs.
• A war against want.
• A war against Afghanistan’s old traditional ways.
We cannot fight all these wars at the same time.
We cannot “liberate” Afghan women, until we have first created an effective rule of law.
We cannot pauperise Afghanistan’s farmers as part of a war on drugs, if we want to rely on their support to fight the Taliban.
We cannot lift Afghanistan out of poverty within the time frame we have to turn things round.
To have too many priorities, is to have none.
When I was planning what I might do in Afghanistan, I set three priorities on which we would concentrate every ounce of political will and every Pound, Euro and Dollar of aid.
The first priority was security.
I am not referring here just military security – it is human security that really matters. And that means providing for the basic needs of Afghans, such as electricity, the rule of law, effective governance and the chance of a livelihood in a growing economy whose mainstay for most, is agriculture. Unless we can fulfil these essential needs, there will always be a ready supply of recruits for the Taliban.
What this means, is a much closer co-operation between the military and the civilian side. It is no good soldiers winning a battle with the Taliban, if the civilian reconstruction takes too long to improve the lives of the people afterwards.
We British have a tendency to be rather self-congratulatory about our skill at this and a bit sniffy about our US allies’ ham fistedness and clumsy use of force. But US counter insurgency practise is now as good as the best – and better than any when it comes to getting the civilian reconstructors in straight after the military (DfID please note).
But the key thing here is not getting in international reconstruction teams, the so called PRTs, but creating Afghan ones who can do the job. Unless we can do this, we will create a vacuum when we pull back, not a sustainable future for the country.
We also have to start looking at security from a political angle. Breaking up the Taliban by winning over the moderates, is a far better route to success than bombing and body counts.
Our second priority should be governance.
Until we have strengthened the mechanisms of Afghan government, we cannot ask them to do more, they cannot deliver what their citizens need and neither of us will be able to persuade Afghans that Kabul is a better bet for their future than the Taliban.
Here however we hit a dilemma.
According to its constitution. Afghanistan is a centralised state. But on the ground it is a highly decentralised one. So, at which end of the governance pipeline should we start?
The answer is, start at the bottom and work with the grain of the Afghan tribal structure.
We should also prioritise geographically. We can, frankly expect little progress against the insurgency in the south in the near future. The urgent priority now is to stop the insurgency spreading. And that means prioritising those provinces which are insecure and run the risk of falling to the Taliban in the months ahead.
And our third priority, linking these two, should be strengthening the rule of law, from the judiciary, to the police, to the security structures, to the penal code.
Unless and until the rule of law is established and the corrupt are brought to justice, especially those at the very highest level in Afghanistan’s power structures, there can be no safe democracy, no trusted government, no successful economy and no security for ordinary citizens.
Could such a strategy, based around action on these three salients, regional, international and internal, turn things round?
Well, it is probably now the only shot left in the locker. And, backed by the authority of a newly US President in Washington, it just might.
But the US presidential election is not the only election we need to be watching.
It is very probable that 2009 will see a Presidential election in Afghanistan, too.
According to all the signs, President Karzai, whose policies some argue have been far too much influenced by short term electoral considerations, rather than the long term interest of his country, seems to be losing support. There is now a real possibility that Afghanistan’s next President would not be from the Pashtun majority. This could lead to very serious internal unrest, significantly raising the chances of a renewed civil war.
But whoever is the new President in Afghanistan, it will be better and safer if he (and of course it will be a “he”) does not come to power in a vacuum, but with new strategy for action, backed by a new US President and enjoying a wide coalition of support, including from the region.
Things are now very dangerous indeed in Afghanistan.
What we do next really matters. For NATO. For the internal security of Britain. For the stability of this volatile and dangerous region. But, above all for the long suffering ordinary people of this war torn country.
We are in the last chance saloon. If it isn’t now in Afghanistan, then it could very easily, be never.
And that will be painful – very painful- for all of us.
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