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EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Selkirk of Douglas and Lord Teverson, on their very able speeches. We are debating a good, although by any standards extremely depressing, report. It is probably one of the most depressing reports with which I have been associated in a long career as a Select Committee member in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. That is a tribute to the chairman, and it is a tribute to the staff for their back-up. It is a tribute to my colleagues for their extremely sharp questioning and the fact that they have always been well briefed, and it is a tribute to the people who gave evidence before us. I particularly remember Chief Superintendent Nigel Thomas, who was the former interim head of the EU’s Afghan police mission. I do not want to go into the detail of the report. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has given us a very good summary of it. However, we are really talking about a mission that was, "““too late, too slow to get off the ground once the decision was made, and too small to achieve its aim; or perhaps, worst, too small to receive respect from other actors””." Therefore, it had a very bad start and those involved are having to work under very difficult conditions. The conflicting timescales clearly make the background almost impossible. By any standards, it is going to take at least five to 10 years to create a decent police force; yet, as we know and as has been confirmed today, the deadlines for military withdrawal are growing ever closer. Therefore, those two things are in direct conflict. You have only to look at the map at the back of our report to see the weakness of the police force. In large parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan the police force has no presence at all. Even in the areas where there is a relatively strong police effort, we hear that there are considerable problems with security issues and so on. The fact is that the impact of the insurgency and the civil war between the north and south in Afghanistan is making the job extremely difficult. We completed our report in February and I think that it is legitimate to add to it. Last night, I read the book written by Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former ambassador and special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He recently retired and produced the most devastating account of the background effort. It is not that he did not support the mission strongly or that he does not pay tremendous tribute to all those who have taken part—particularly our Armed Forces—but there is one question and it underlines our report: how long will any policing effort last once western forces have left, and what will happen in the many areas where there is no western presence at all and will not be one? He quotes, rather devastatingly, David Miliband, one of whose visits to Afghanistan occurred in 2009. He reports two Afghan Ministers coming to the residence for dinner: "““David Miliband asked our guests, innocently enough, how long they expected the Afghan central government authorities, civilian and military, to stay on in Lashkar Gah””—" which of course is in Helmand—““after Western forces left””. Cowper-Coles continues: "““I don’t know precisely what response David was expecting, but I imagine it was somewhere between decades and infinity. So the answer we did get, delivered with an insouciant grin, was all the more shocking. ‘Twenty-four hours’, came the reply. In three words, the whole object and purpose of our presence in Helmand were being called into question””." We can say that about our whole effort in Afghanistan. It was a devastating book. In a review of the book in last Sunday’s Observer, William Dalrymple points out that, "““the Taliban controls more than 75% of the country and Karzai’s government holds just 29 out of 121 key strategic districts””." That is a fairly depressing background against which the effort to set up an effective police force has to operate. If there is a withdrawal, what is likely to happen? I have given the Committee the quote from Cowper-Coles’s book. Dalrymple says that it is, "““anyone’s guess. Karzai could hold on after western withdrawal, like Najibullah after the Russian retreat. The Taliban could roll over the country as the Vietcong did in Vietnam. There may be a return to the civil war that destroyed Afghanistan prior to the rise of the Taliban””." The only chance of creating an effective police force is some kind of political settlement, but how does one get that if one is at the same time withdrawing one’s forces? That is a question for Britain and, particularly, the United States, which is running the operation. I asked Nigel Thomas: "““Is it possible to carry out significant improvements in building up the police force without some kind of peace settlement in Afghanistan?””." He said: "““Of course, the overriding security situation is going to be instrumental in whether a civilian policing system could operate out there. If everything fell apart in terms of the security, then you are not going to be able to have that traditional police force, so the development of a civilian policing structure out there is absolutely reliant on a certain level of permissiveness to operate within the country””." That is absolutely basic. If there was a negotiated settlement, there might be a chance of creating an effective police force on the lines of the EU’s Afghan mission. However, we need to realise that we would have to go on paying for it pretty well ad infinitum. Afghanistan has basically been a kept state for nearly 100 years. Money has come in from Britain, Russia and the United States, but we need to realise that we would have to go on doing it. My own conclusion is that the prospects for the EU’s Afghan police mission, and indeed for our whole effort in Afghanistan, at the moment look extremely problematic.