Afghanistan

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, who has introduced the subject with the characteristic fairness which we have come to expect of her, and with a great deal of historical learning. If I disagree with her from time to time those disagreements are largely minor and serve only to correct—as I see it—certain interpretations.

The UN-mandated military operations have been going on since 2001 and, as far as I can see, we have little to show for the past 12 years. Violence continues on all sides; rampant corruption is startling and visible. Afghanistan today is rated as 180 out of 183 countries; seven years ago, it had the honour of being 140 out of 183. There is a huge waste of resources. Money everywhere is wrongly used or used to buy people and corrupt the cultural life of the country. Violence has become a profitable industry. You only have to set up a little insurgent group and there are people who are ready to buy you or to offer you all kinds of services.

Ethnic divisions, happily, have abated a little, but they remain just as acute, and there is no stable political system. This has tended to happen despite the enormous amount of money and the enormous amount of political wisdom pouring in from all parts of the world—including from countries which cannot manage their own affairs but are very generous with advice. In spite of all that, why have we not succeeded in creating a reasonably stable political system in a small country?

I think that part of the reason is that we have been ignoring certain basic realties of Afghan life. Some 80% of it is rural, and 87% of its people earn their livelihood through agriculture-related activities. Many communities are separated by mountains and it can take days to reach them. There is an informal power structure based on ethnic, regional, tribal, clan and village loyalties. The centralised governance which the modern state presupposes and which everyone has kept recommending since the Bonn conference is simply not possible.

Afghanistan needs to evolve its own political structure and that structure cannot be imposed or propped up by outsiders. Afghanistan cannot relive somebody else’s history. We discovered that very painfully in India when the Constituent Assembly was trying to draft the constitution and realised that the modern nation state is simply not an option for India, and India did not opt for it.

One of the important things to bear in mind, therefore, is to stop outside interference except for the kind of aid and advice that it might need. We need to trust the people of Afghanistan to sort out their own differences. After all, they have lived together all these years; they want to live together; they share a future; they know—as the Minister said—that they have trillions of dollars that they can make proper use of; and they have their own children whom they would like to see educated. We need to trust the people of Afghanistan to evolve a structure which is appropriate to their own history, traditions and culture. A traditional loya jirga, for example, can be a good starting point.

In all this negative publicity we tend to forget that there are some powerful civil society movements in Afghanistan. In spite of having been a student of politics, I had not been aware of them until a few weeks ago, when I was addressing an important “Festival of Ideas” in Goa. I spoke on one day, and the person who addressed the meeting the next day was Dr Yacoobi, an Afghan professor of education in the United States who decided to return to Afghanistan and to take on the Taliban on her own. She said that girls will be educated—they will be sent to schools and the schools will not be touched. She relied on persuasion, on power and on organisation, reaching out to the daughters and wives of the Taliban leaders themselves, telling them that the future was theirs if only they would go to school. Slowly and slowly, despite threats to her life, she has been able to create a fairly powerful movement. It is not surprising that she, along with many others, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Movements of this kind exist. Society has a certain vitality, if the Taliban would only allow it to breathe—which they do not seem to be doing.

I am sorry to say that Pakistan’s role, which could have been and should be useful, has not been terribly helpful. It has provided backing, safe haven and even military training to insurgent groups, including the Taliban. It is using those groups, particularly the Haqqani network, to attack Indian interests and targets in Afghanistan; for example, the Indian embassy in 2008 and 2009 and even the United States embassy in 2011. Not surprisingly, the recently retired chief of staff of the United States called the Haqqani network the “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s ISI. Sadly, if you try to provoke violence of this kind, or support terrorism in other countries, it has a blowback effect on your own. The result is that the Pakistan Taliban uses Afghan territory as a safe haven and a springboard to launch attacks on Pakistani troops, which we all bitterly regret. In other words, Pakistan, by supporting insurgent movements in Afghanistan, is paying the price in terms of its own stability and the security of its own people.

This happens in international politics—there is no use in being sentimental or sanctimonious about it—but what are Pakistan’s reasons? It argues that Afghanistan offers strategic depth against potential conflict with India. However, you cannot think of other countries simply in terms of conflict, and you cannot think of India simply as a country with which you are eternally condemned to fight one war or another. And even if you do, Afghanistan cannot provide strategic depth.

There is also the argument that India is using Afghans, or Afghanistan, to foment trouble in Pakistan. Again, I have seen no evidence of this—and if there is, India deserves to be condemned. So far, however, I have not seen it. I do not think that it would be in India’s interests. Talking to Indian diplomats I get the feeling that it would not be in India’s interests to use Afghanistan to foment trouble in Pakistan, because one Afghanistan is enough. Half a dozen Afghanistans in the heart of Pakistan would hardly be the way for India to be stable.

I think that Pakistan needs to recognise that India has a legitimate interest in Afghanistan: first, to maintain trade with central Asia and beyond; secondly, to prevent militants from attacking Indian targets in Afghanistan; and thirdly, because it has close historical and cultural ties that need to be maintained. It is very striking that India has signed an agreement that it would not use its troops or combat personnel in Afghanistan. Its activities, as the Minister rightly said, are largely developmental. It is the fifth-largest provider of development aid, giving over $1.5 billion to various projects.

I sometimes wonder whether our own Government’s policy is as even-handed and transparent as it could be. On the one hand they seem suspicious and critical of what Pakistan is doing; but on the other hand they organise meetings such as the trilateral summit in February this year, where they seem to be supportive of what is going on and give the impression, certainly to Indians, that they want to keep the Indians out and that they think we can maintain peace in the region simply by establishing some kind of relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is not the way to go. I very much hope that the British Government will make it absolutely clear that, as the noble Baroness said, all the regional powers in the neighbourhood have a legitimate role in maintaining a stable Afghanistan —they all need to be involved. Bilateral or trilateral summits simply arouse Indian suspicion and are not the answer.