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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness to the Front Bench and her renewed commitment in the Queen’s Speech on her Government’s behalf to Afghanistan. Our foreign policy in Afghanistan cannot succeed if it clings to its post-2001 objectives. The mightiest military alliance will never remove the Taliban, and the largest aid programme ever will never make Afghan poverty history. That is not a pessimistic assessment. The author Khaled Hosseini wrote last week that Afghanistan was failing because we were not doing enough. Five million refugees had returned to abject poverty and we were neglecting them and 2 million more are due from Iran and Pakistan. He said that, "““a failed Afghan state is a catastrophe for both Afghanistan and the West””." He is right—it would be. But it is a dire prediction, and novelists are rarely useful policy makers. I do not think that Afghanistan is a failed state and during a recent visit I witnessed many positive changes that had taken place in Kabul and elsewhere since I was previously there. However, I believe that, as the UK, we have to revise radically our optimism after 2001 and reassess our performance, both as a military force and as an aid donor. I shall focus on our development policy but should like to say a word first about Helmand, where the strategy must surely be one of simple containment, since we do not want the Taliban to spoil any efforts to rebuild the country. The question has to be asked, five years on: why are we in Afghanistan? Why are our soldiers in Afghanistan? Is it a NATO co-ordination exercise? Is it to defend our country against terrorism or to help the Afghans? Surely it is quite unreasonable to expect British troops to risk their lives in Beau Geste-type operations unless the people can see not only military success but other diplomatic, aid and development activities working effectively. The Afghan population does not need our NATO battalions to behave like giant vacuum cleaners hoovering the Helmand valleys and suffering appalling casualties unless they themselves are actually benefiting from our presence. And was it wise to move our provincial reconstruction team and much of our development effort to Helmand? The different issue of blurring the lines between aid and soldiering came up in the defence debate in another place on 16 October. During that debate, the Defence Secretary said that he wanted to give NGOs the confidence to work in an environment where they do not become targets. That surely means that the MoD cannot mix war and peace; it cannot dress up what the Minister calls a dirty, difficult and dangerous war in Helmand as an environment of peace and development. My contention today is that we are not protecting the Afghan people so much as protecting ourselves and the rest of the world against terrorism. We are driving rapidly about in armoured vehicles and not doing enough to demonstrate our friendship with those we have come to help. We are in danger of losing the battle for hearts and minds. Can the Minister confirm from his own experience that we may seriously be missing the UN millennium development goals, as well? We shall have to move quickly as there will not always be the same appetite among aid donors for helping Afghanistan. Much has been achieved, but we tend to hear the same figures from Ministers—about the 5 million children—and read too little about genuine poverty eradication, as I shall mention later. After spending a week in Kabul and Balkh province, I am concerned, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, about the proportion of aid coming in that goes to ministries in central government and is never seen by the people. The in-phrase is ““capacity building””; this can often be a disguise, not only for the usual excessive administration and corruption that we find in a poor country but on buying in too much external technical assistance, which last year absorbed an estimated 25 per cent of the total aid. The NGOs have been concerned about this for some time and have lobbied hard for more investment in projects which directly involve local people. It is true that internal revenue also has to make up for any future slack in aid, when the world’s attention inevitably moves on. Three-quarters of our DfID funding comes through central government. In this context, I have already asked the Government in a Written Question what independent auditing of DfID funds is taking place. Much is expected of the new independent directorate of local governance under Jelani Popal, which is designed to decentralise national and provincial governance. The aid community must support every effort to devolve government down to the elected local councils and shuras. As my noble friend Lord Crisp has just said, much more must be invested in the training of health workers in the provinces where health centres are virtually run by the NGOs—it is very like the situation in Mozambique from that point of view—and they should come into the public sector. Infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world and the trained village-level nurses and midwives whom they need can come only from their own communities. International and Afghan NGOs are active in many other parts of the country and DfID and the embassy should give them and other development projects more support in their own right. Dr Liam Fox made the important point in the defence debate that Afghans, not administrators but local people, must become more involved in their own reconstruction or the Taliban will inevitably come and fill the vacuum. The FCO and DfID also need to work harder on their image with the Afghan and other media. They need to emphasise success, perhaps through the national solidarity programme which is a fruitful partnership between government and NGO projects. The expanded UK embassy is, I know, addressing the problem of hearts and minds and as part of that it must identify itself more closely with the reduction of acute poverty in Afghanistan. That is the primary objective. The more that acute needs are recognised and addressed by local people, the faster the country will move towards the millennium development goals. This will take what the Minister described in the debate on 23 October—which I missed—as ““an enhanced political effort””, which uses all the levers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said. It is a wonderful country with an exciting history—most of it about the greed and pillage of foreign invaders. In Bactria, close to Mazar-e-Sharif, my wife and I met French and Afghan archaeologists and saw relics of Archaemenid and Greek empires and of ancient walls of cities destroyed by Gengis Khan and Timur. We saw some of the oldest Islamic mosques in the world, the Timurid madrassas of Balkh and Mazar, the haunting valley of Bamyan—still largely intact—and the garden shrine of the Emperor Babur in Kabul, which is testimony enough of the survival of a world-class culture in Afghanistan. The Afghan people are proud of their country. They would like outsiders not to invade or occupy it but to come and support them in rebuilding it. Whatever the inadequacies of their Government now and in the past, the vast majority are now committed to development and reconstruction and to a future in which their country may again hold up its head in the family of nations.