EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury]

My Lords, I am afraid that there will inevitably be a certain amount of repetition in this debate, which demonstrates how ably the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has chaired our committee. I, too, extend my thanks to the staff.

A few years ago, I went on a trip to Afghanistan—not with any member of the Committee here—and was generally impressed by what our Army was attempting to do. It was at the time of that incredible, hugely successful derring-do involving the transport of the second turbine to the Kajaki dam in Helmand through Taliban controlled-country.

What was less impressive was our introduction to a ragtag group of very sad-looking men who were the local Afghan police force. Three years later, taking evidence for this report, their sorry state has kept flashing in front of me, and nothing that I have heard has made me feel that they would be looking any the less sorry.

Afghanistan, as we know, is a conservative country and a complex one. Despite being the centre of an imperialist tussle during the 19th century between Tsarist Russia and Victorian Britain, famously called the Great Game, Afghanistan and its people beat them both at that game. As someone else mentioned earlier on, the Soviet Union had another try between 1979 and 1989, propping up a puppet Government with the help of an estimated 100,000 troops, and now we are back there, discovering yet again how difficult it is to control, to help and to help govern.

The country is hugely lacking in infrastructure. It is unused to centralised government. These difficulties are compounded by the topography of the country, with corruption, illiteracy and drug abuse, the tradition of tribal hostilities and self-governance and, of course, the Taliban. All these problems have had a direct impact on successfully achieving a civilian police force, which did not exist when the West invaded the country in 2001—indeed, it is one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of the Taliban and for its ascendancy after the departure of the Soviets. While the Taliban’s form of justice is harsh, it did not involve bribery and corruption. My noble friend Lord Lamont had a conversation only recently with an Afghan taxi driver who was saying the same thing about today.

As we say in our report, it is not the fault of the EU that its police training mission was so late in being set up, but it seems from the evidence we have taken that the mission itself has not been well planned or thought through. The things that have struck me during this inquiry are the ignoring of the blindingly obvious—the size of the EU mission for one, as noble Lords have mentioned. Why, when it was meant to consist of 400 people, has this target never been met? It was an unambitious level of staffing in the first place. Not to have achieved it has had a negative effect on the mission itself—meaning among other things that it has had to reduce its presence from 17 to 13 locations—and on the perception of the mission as a whole. In particular, it appears to have harmed the relationship between EUPOL and the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, only adding to the problems caused by the lack of formal agreement between NATO and the EU, as mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord Teverson. Indeed, the head of the EU civil missions, Mr Klompenhouwer, told us that the lack of a security agreement with NATO creates some risks for the people on the ground, yet the work being undertaken by these people on the ground for EUPOL is so important for the future of a viable Afghanistan.

Then there is the length of the police training course, which was, in the words of Chief Superintendent Nigel Thomas,

“shrunk from eight weeks to six weeks, and basically the eight weeks was deemed to be too long because it was taking too long to get people out on the ground. There is this big drive to get numbers and feet out on the ground”.

In other words, it was quantity over quality.

I am normally a glass-half-full person, but the chances of a functioning Afghan police force surviving a departure of troops in 2014-15 seem to be as likely as rats dancing on the moon. As the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, has already mentioned, some recent stories include 450 prisoners tunnelling out of the main jail in Kandahar city on 24 April, in something reminiscent of the Great Escape. On 12 May, the New York Times reported that Taliban commander turned police officer, Ghulam Hazrat, was raising funds by imposing an Islamic tax on the people in his district, typically demanding around 10 per cent of their income. On 20 May, inquests into the killing of five British soldiers by a rogue Afghan police officer showed that the officer had been a habitual drug user. Although drug users are not allowed to join the police, random drug tests have shown that around 10 per cent of Afghan police officers use cannabis or opium. On 13 June, the NATO International Security Assistance Force reported that not a single police unit is able to maintain order without the assistance of coalition forces. Moreover, there is a shortfall of around 740 police trainers, posing a significant barrier to growth of the police force. Only last week, a new police training centre in Wardak was mortared during its opening ceremony. The new police training centre has the capacity to train 3,000 new recruits at a time, but currently it has only 720 recruits.

Against this, our most recent briefing, a week ago, was full of optimism about how various fundamental problems like attrition rates, training, forms of payment, the recruitment process and so on had seen,

“a rate of change that is phenomenal”,

in the past six months. However, when I suggested that this was perhaps a bit late in the day, the response was yes, of course it was. So I ask the Minister: why, when the mission is so important both to Afghanistan and, I suggest, to the standing and the reputation of the EU, was best practice not introduced at the beginning rather than bringing it in at the tail-end?