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EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

My Lords, I genuinely thank all those who have contributed today. The debate has been quite clear about the challenges and issues facing the mission and Afghanistan more broadly. I thank the committee members and also the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich. I want to comment on one thing that the noble Earl mentioned which touched a nerve to a degree. I refer to how much we try to impose western standards or means of working on those on other continents with different cultural backgrounds, although there are certain universal values. I know that that is not exactly what the noble Earl said but I specifically asked one of our witnesses whether Afghanistan had a tradition of policing before the civil war and the Russian invasion, and the answer was as follows: "““Yes, there were what are effectively today being called the civil order police, in the tradition of a gendarme. There was a tradition of having that. Again, mostly that began in the mid-20th century. So there was not a historical tradition of policing, but certainly people understood police; what they did and what their purpose was””." I know that this is not what the noble Earl is saying but we are also capable of thinking that traditional societies such as that in Afghanistan do not understand things such as policing. However, they understand law, justice and all those concepts just as we do and as we demand for our stable and fair society. I thank the Minister for his responses. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that the report’s lesson for the future is that if missions are going to be put into the field under the European defence and security policy—whether those missions are military or civilian—the policy needs to deliver what it says it is going to deliver. If it does not, it will lose the respect of the international community, and those missions will inevitably put people’s lives on the line without being able to be effective in what they are trying to do. That leads on to the bigger question about Afghanistan. If the outstanding improvements are not made and this mission is not made to be effective, the committee would, I think, question strongly our right to put on the line the security of European citizens who are committed and volunteer for something that we are saying cannot necessarily succeed. I thank very much the committee’s staff, Kathryn Colvin, Oliver Fox and Bina Sudra, for their work in delivering this report. I commend the report to the Committee. Motion agreed.