EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

Lord Selkirk of Douglas Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Selkirk of Douglas]

My Lords, I support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has said, and a great deal of evidence was presented to us to support his conclusions. The EU’s Afghan police mission report highlights a number of pressing problems which I hope Ministers and their European allies are now urgently addressing. Otherwise, as has been said and the report makes clear, the mission runs a real risk of failure. Everyone knows that military withdrawals can lead to heavy casualties being inflicted. We are in the business of effecting an orderly transition, but it is quite clear from the extensive evidence given to the committee that the job of training the Afghan police will stretch well beyond the deadline set for our troops to leave the country in 2014-15. If we want our troops to leave with a job really well done, we have to have a clear appreciation of the transitional arrangements required. I need hardly remind the Grand Committee that, when the British withdrew from India at the time of independence, more than 1 million casualties as individuals tried to move from one country to another.

Obviously we want to make certain that we ensure a successful handover. We therefore need to have a very clear appreciation of the challenges confronting the EUPOL mission which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has so ably presented. The first of these is that members of the Afghan police are a top target for the Taliban. In answer to my question in committee, chief superintendent Nigel Thomas, former interim head of the EU’s Afghan police mission, referred to casualties. He said that there might, in extreme cases, be 15 a day. He asserted that seven a day might be killed and numerous police personnel injured to quite a significant extent—and, importantly, at a much higher rate than the Afghan army casualty rate.

The second challenge is that at the same time as being very much in the front line the situation is exacerbated by a lack of close co-operation between the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police. We heard from Fatima Ayub of the Open Society Foundation that the rationale behind building up the police was not to improve the rule of law but was—

“as the US forces put it, about putting boots on the ground, such that you have someone in the line of fire against the insurgents”.

Chief Superintendent Thomas stated bluntly:

“The ANA need to take on a more proactive role and relieve the ANP from some of the more militaristic duties that they are performing”.

At the same time there is a need for much more emphasis to be put on the quality of training, and the mere six weeks given at present is insufficient for a police service that ultimately should have a civilian role. I note that last month NATO agreed to extend the length of its training course by two extra weeks, and perhaps when he replies the Minister can tell us whether EUPOL is doing the same.

The third challenge which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has touched upon is the fact that so many police are illiterate. At least half are, according to Fatima Ayub, and our sub-committee concluded that there was currently no coherent strategy for dealing with this problem. She said in response to a question from me:

“You can train policemen in Afghanistan … but the question is whether you are first going to invest time in teaching them to read and then actually to do the work of policing rather than acting as cannon fodder for the insurgency”.

Fourthly, there is, as has been mentioned, the widespread issue of corruption, bribery and drug dealing within police ranks. Chief Superintendent Thomas gave me examples, which I could cite, of police chiefs who have links to local criminality because that is the way they are able to keep the peace in that particular location. That will undoubtedly have to change over time, but for the communities there that sort of relationship works for them and the police chief would not intervene against certain individuals because they know what the consequences are going to be. Those things will simply have to change, he stressed—and undoubtedly they will—but, again, it is going to be a slow and in certain cases painful process.

All this has a knock-on effect on the Afghan judicial system, and the corruption within it must be attacked. If this is not done, Chief Superintendent Thomas said, EUPOL cannot effectively train Afghan police officers to carry out relevant and important investigations that will lead to successful prosecution, as they could be blocked as the result of corrupt practices.

There are other challenges, including infiltration and desertion, but I will restrict myself to mentioning only one more: whether there have been cases involving the use of torture. Chief Superintendent Thomas was clear in his response. There are pockets of things that happen around the country, and interrogation techniques are used that would be abhorrent anywhere else. These sorts of things are part of the ongoing cultural and organisational change that is required, but it takes time.

Despite the challenges facing the EUPOL training mission, which are formidable to the Afghan police, they are not insurmountable. In his evidence, the Chief Superintendent told my noble friend Lord Jopling that it was not mission impossible. In his view, what was required was a defined role for the military and the police, with an understanding of those timescales and agreement at the top strategic level. He believed that the people on the ground had a real desire to deliver and, given support, they would do so.

Anyone who has read the history of Afghanistan knows that the British have not always found campaigns there to be straightforward. Rudyard Kipling wrote in Barrack-Room Ballads, published in 1892, in the last verse of his poem entitled “The Young British Soldier”, these words:

“When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier”.

I am glad to say that we have come a very long way since then, and at least we have the presence of mind to know when a great deal more has to be done. The EUPOL mission is currently extended to May 2013, but the evidence submitted to us indicates that, to achieve the required success, the task will take at least five or 10 years longer. The mission, with an allocation of only 400 staff, is clearly too small for such a formidable task, and the fact that it has never come close to the numbers specified for it has weakened its stature. This issue now needs to be addressed with urgency and given a much higher priority by Governments of the European Union, including our own.

There have been mass jail breakouts on many occasions. In 2003, in southern Afghanistan, 45 Taliban escaped from a tunnel. In 2008, suicide bombers attacked the prison gates in Kandahar and 900 prisoners escaped. On 23 April this year, 541 prisoners escaped down an ingenious tunnel. With such a resourceful enemy, it is essential that the police are given the best training possible.

Having been to Helmand province in Afghanistan, with among others the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, I believe we have a strong obligation to support our service men and women to the hilt and to see this matter through to a successful conclusion. Our report is frank, direct and relevant, and I hope and believe that the British and European Union Governments will give it the support that it so justly deserves. Most importantly of all, I trust that the Minister will be able to reassure us today that the British and EU Governments are already acting swiftly on its conclusions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Like me, the noble Lord goes on holiday there. My wife and I spent a week in the heel of southern Italy some time ago, and it was quite interesting to read about some of the local ways in which policing is provided and order is maintained. We all understand that there is a continuum between our idea of perfect civilian policing and perfect law and order, which we have not quite achieved in this country but have gone a long way towards. The Afghan situation is starting very much at the other end; indeed, noble Lords remarked that the situation there has gone backwards over the past 30 or 40 years. With our different contributions—our bilateral mission in Helmand and our contribution to EUPOL—we are helping to rebuild the beginnings of a civilian police and judicial structure, recognising that what we are putting in is only beginning to build and cannot reach what we would regard as modern standards in a short period.

[Lord Selkirk of Douglas]

Is the Minister aware that NATO has lengthened its training period for the police from six weeks to eight? Will that happen with EUPOL, has it happened or is it currently under consideration? It would be a great help if he could give some indication.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not have the information on that; I will write to the noble Lord.

I turn to the problem of decisions in Brussels. The report was rightly critical of the Brussels bureaucracy. I happen to have former students working in this area in what was the Council Secretariat and is now becoming the EU External Action Service, and I am struck by how much they have all had to learn in creating a new structure and in developing this new concept of civilian operations jointly. I think we all recognise that doing anything like this in the context of an international organisation is not entirely easy; the levels of trust are not too high so the levels of accountability, as with the initial problems over procurement, are low. I have the impression—this is certainly what I have been briefed—that lessons have been learnt, and questions of how future and continuing missions and relations between the Brussels institutions and mission leaders in the field will be managed in future are now improving.

I do not have the figures to show where secondees are coming from, how easily different groups work together or whether one should point a particular finger at some member states for not pulling their weight as much as others. That is an area that the committee or others might like to look at in future. I was impressed by the written memorandum from the researcher from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik who is clearly doing some very valuable work on this. We all know that we have a great deal to learn, but we also know that the Americans are envious of the EU’s ability to apply this mix of civilian and military resources and feel that that is not something that the US is yet able to do—it tends to put the military first and not provide the full mix that we would like to have.

Many other points were raised in this debate, and I shall deal with one or two. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, remarked on regional co-operation. We all understand that we cannot resolve the problem of Afghanistan on its own. I remind him, though, that although India is very active there and in many ways is a natural partner, the reaction in Pakistan to India playing a larger and more visible role, particularly with Afghanistan’s security forces of all sorts, would be such as to make that an extremely delicate area. It is almost like saying, “We recognise that Iran has legitimate interests in Afghanistan”—which of course it does. These are very difficult areas. Pulling in Afghanistan’s neighbours to help them is not entirely easy, given the delicacy and difficulty of the region as a whole.

The EU mission is on an upswing at present. It has a first-class Finnish leader and it has more people on the ground than previously. The figure is not yet up to 400, but it is well into the 300s. The sense in Brussels and London is that the situation has improved and is continuing to improve. That is not to say that things are going very well. As those who have read Sherard Cowper-Coles’ book are extremely well aware, Afghanistan presents a very difficult situation. Giving ordinary people in the provinces outside Kabul confidence in the state and in its governance is extraordinarily difficult. EUPOL has therefore begun with city policing and is working in particular in Kabul and a number of other areas to try to build civilian city policing as a constructive way forward.

We recognise that what we are doing in training leaders of the police force is a long-term investment, but we hope that it is improving and providing the leadership for the much larger number of police recruits who are being trained through the NATO mission. We also feel that EU/NATO co-operation has improved and is continuing to improve on an informal basis without us stubbing our toes on the underlying problems of formal EU/NATO relations. However, that is something of which the Government are acutely aware.

To come back to where I started, it is an active concern of the British Government, as it was of our predecessors, to continue to improve our capabilities in this very large area, in which weak and failed states need to make the transition to stronger governance, a more effective rule of law and, as far as possible, the building of civil society and democratic institutions. That is what the conflict pool has been about. It is the area on which we continue to work, and it is something that the Government are talking about with civilian police providers and others, as well as with our partners in Brussels.

I thank the committee very much for this report. I look forward to continuing reports on this area, and I hope that other Governments, as well as many people in Brussels, have read it as well.