EUC Report: EU Afghan Police Mission

Lord Sewel Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Sewel]

My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, for his contribution, not only in terms of the content but for the fact that he acquits us of the charge of incest by his very presence, otherwise it would have been a matter of the committee talking to itself.

It is refreshing to agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has said, because I have spent the past two days sitting in the Chamber disagreeing with everything that his Front Bench has said on House of Lords reform. There is also the fact that we have reached the stage in the debate when everything that I had wanted to say has been said and I should therefore sit down. However, that is not in the tradition of our great House, so I shall continue.

The task of the EU Afghan police training mission is, I believe, absolutely vital for the future of Afghanistan. The existence of a fully trained and effective civilian police force, capable of enjoying the confidence of the Afghan people, is a fundamental requirement in underpinning the rule of law and stabilising Afghan society. We should recognise that. We should explain that that is why the mission is there and why it is a high priority. In terms of the type of society that Afghanistan is likely to become, the work of the EU police training mission is absolutely fundamental and of the highest priority.

On the other hand, the challenges that the mission faces are formidable. As other members of the committee have mentioned, we were told that up to 70 per cent of the recruits to the Afghan police force were illiterate. An inability to read and write at a very basic level severely limits the operational effectiveness of the police force. Reports cannot be written; number plates cannot be read. That is almost the level of the operation.

In addition, we were told that at times there is an attrition rate of up to 75 per cent, which means having to run desperately fast to keep still. With an attrition rate at that level, progress will inevitably be very slow. Let us have a look at that attrition rate. It is undoubtedly accounted for to some extent by the enormous pressure that recruits are suffering from members of the insurgency.

There are also things that are within the control of either the Afghan Government or the EU. One is the lack of welfare support to those recruits, and the policy of sometimes moving recruits to serve in distant areas, outwith their home environment. I do not think that we understand the importance of that factor, because Afghanistan is an enormously localised country and society. Perhaps most important is the fact that money allocated for police pay has a habit of getting “lost” on its way from disbursement to supposedly arriving into the pockets and wallets of the police. The build-up of those various pressures must undermine the commitments of police recruits to the task that they are asked to perform.

Good policing is a vital part of the rule of law but little can be achieved if corruption exists in the judiciary, and I am afraid that there is significant evidence of that. The reform of the two—the Afghan police force and the Afghan judiciary—must go hand in hand, because otherwise there will ultimately be failure.

As has been mentioned, an underlying challenge to the success of the mission is the apparent mismatch between the length of time that it is anticipated will be needed to complete the mission and the timetable for military withdrawal. Our witnesses told us that the task would not be completed until somewhere between 2018 and 2023, yet the deadline for military withdrawal is 2015. That raises a problem. Of course, policy falls back on the hope—it must be only a hope—that by then the Afghan army will be capable of providing a stable security environment in which the training mission can continue to operate. Quite honestly, that must be something of a tall order.

A further challenge lies in the continuing lack of a proper relationship between NATO and the EU; that has already been mentioned. We were told that the lack of a formal agreement between NATO and the EU was putting lives at risk. It is totally unacceptable that a European political dispute has such potentially dangerous implications for those serving on the front line. That needs to be sorted out, and quickly.

How can we judge the EU’s response? Frankly, all the evidence that we received pointed to the conclusion that the planned size of the mission, at 400 people, was always inadequate to the task. Worse, although signing up to 400, member states have failed to deliver, with actual numbers tending to run in the high 200s. How can you really expect to train the civilian police force of an entire country on the basis of 200 or so trainers? We had a sad and worrying example of the EU signing up for an objective and the member states failing to deliver the necessary resource. That is the underlying cause for concern of the whole mission. If you are sitting in Brussels, it is relatively easy to say, “Oh yes, this is a good thing. Let’s get on with it”, and sign up for it but, at the end of the day, all member states have some reason or excuse why they cannot provide the specific numbers required. That is a total failure of planning and approach. In itself, it runs the risk of calling into question the effectiveness of the mission and its ultimate success. It undermines confidence, which is a great mistake.

I go back to the specifics of the evidence to deal with the relationship between Brussels and the people who are doing the job on the ground. I asked Chief Superintendent Nigel Thomas—he was, quite honestly, an outstanding witness, and I think that other people have borne testimony to that today—if he had the opportunity to make three recommendations to the EU to improve the effectiveness of EUPOL, what they would be. He said: allow the head of mission the freedom and the autonomy to deliver on the ground. It is vital that the head of mission is not stifled by the bureaucracy of the system. That has been problematic and I believe that it still is. Those of us who know anything about the way that Brussels operates know that that has the ring of authenticity. It is barely tolerable in the normal decision-making and management responsibilities that the EU gets involved in; it is totally unacceptable when that sort of bureaucracy and reluctance to trust the people on the ground exposes our people to greater unnecessary risk.

The EU mission is not alone; there are a number of bilateral European missions in Afghanistan. It would be better to have a single, integrated, well resourced and managed mission rather than the lack of co-ordination and coherence that you get with a range of bilateral and multilateral missions.

Let us face it, the view of the report and the contributions has been more than somewhat critical of the mission. However, I am sure that all members of the committee would want to say that that does not reflect at all upon the commitment, skills and courage of those who are doing the work on the ground. Indeed, what shone through in the evidence that we took was the highest level of commitment of those involved in doing the job itself. Lurking in the back of my mind, though, although I try to suppress it, is a question: are we kidding ourselves?

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, this wonderful report shows once again the extremely valuable work of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the European Union. To be quite honest, I found it gripping bedtime reading.

[Lord Sewel]

How very sad.

[Lord Liddle]

It really is. As the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, said, the report is frank, direct and relevant. It has real punch. My only regret is that it was published on 16 February and we are debating it on 22 June. If we want the hard work of the staff of our Select Committee and of its Members who have contributed to this discussion to be effective, somehow or other the usual channels in this House have to find a way of bringing these committee reports to debate in a more timely way.

Since the members of the committee drafted this report, there have been fundamental changes in the situation in Afghanistan and we have to look forward. I would like to address this question of the future and the future lessons as a whole from this Afghanistan experience.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, spoke extraordinarily well about the background to this mission and all the problems that it had encountered. My noble friend Lord Sewel talked again about the structural problems of corruption and lack of literacy and all those difficulties that lie in its way. My noble friend Lord Radice talked about the incompatibility between what is inevitably a long-term objective for this mission and others’ political timetables, which are often determined by electoral politics in the United States.

It is a very difficult situation and, since the committee published its report, we now know that the timetable for troop withdrawals has been firmed up. We also know that informal talks have started with elements of the Taliban and we have had that extraordinarily frank memoir from Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former ambassador, which I am looking forward to reading on my holidays.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank all those who have contributed to this valuable debate. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his very constructive speech.

I welcome this valuable and critical report. We all recognise that it contains a number of lessons to be taken on board by the British Government and all those other Governments within the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has rightly said, the report raises questions in case after case with which we will have to grapple in the coming years. After all, this is one of several civilian missions taking place under CSDP. It is the second largest after Kosovo but there are a number of other missions dealing with conflict prevention, state reconstruction and the promotion of law and order—and there will be more. There will have to be bilateral and multinational efforts for the foreseeable future. Her Majesty’s Government are working on a new building security overseas strategy that will expand the conflict pool funds, and will do their best to provide the resources and experience to be able to play a wider role in this effort of rebuilding good governance and the rule of law in weak and failed states. We all understand that that will constitute a lot of what British, European and other foreign policies are going to have to be about.

One of my colleagues said to me yesterday that the one thing he did not accept in Robert Gates’s speech criticising the Europeans in NATO was its assumption that in future what we need most of all is greater military capacity. Actually what we need, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, remarked, is an increased mixture of civilian and military capacities. Moving from the military to the civilian, which is what we are trying to do in Afghanistan, is part of how one begins to rebuild state capacity and, even more importantly, civilian confidence in state capacity and in the fairness and equity of the state. However, a number of contributors to this debate have recognised that this is a very long-term process and that timescales of state building and building the whole concept of civilian police—that took a long time to develop in this country—do not fit very easily with timescales of military withdrawal after an intervention. We hope that we have done enough to build the basic framework for a civilian police force and to establish links with a half-decent judicial system—that also takes a great deal of time to build—as the military withdrawal takes place. We will be able to provide continuing support for those institutions over the coming years. I am very grateful for the critical comment. I accept that the report points to a number of things that are wrong in the way in which Europeans have reacted to this set of enormous problems. However, lessons have been learnt and there are more lessons to learn.

One of the things that are not indicated in the report, which I should at least admit since I cover the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office, is that Britain has particular difficulties in seconding people to foreign countries on this sort of service because we do not have our own gendarmerie. We have a local structure of police and police expect to serve in Britain within their county, region or community. They do not move very much. Looking at the figures, the French, for example—

[Lord Sewel]

That is a very interesting point, but would that provision not be facilitated if that sort of service outwith the UK acted as a plus mark, as it were, in the promotion of police in this country?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Indeed. I should remark, incidentally, that when we first engaged in this provision in the western Balkans, a very high proportion of the UK police who were seconded were from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was a different sort of force used to serving in a slightly different capacity. Certainly it is a question that we have to continue to work with, but again I remark that it would be easier for the French or Italians to second larger numbers of personnel to the NATO police training mission, which is much more concerned with training a gendarmerie, so to speak, than it has been for all of us to find local civilian police, who come from a different culture and background. The emphasis has been much more difficult—that of building the concept of a local and civilian police force.

A number of criticisms have been made of the enterprise so far, and I shall try to answer a few of them. As the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, and others have pointed out, we know that we have real problems in striking a balance between quantity and quality. The aim is to build an Afghan national police force of 130,000. We are not there yet, and the question of how much time you spend on training and how much on providing basic literacy skills is very much part of the trade-off. As noble Lords will know from the report, the NATO mission has done much more for basic literacy and training of that sort, while EUPOL has become much more specialised in providing leadership training for senior police officers and the intermediate ranks. Part of the improving informal relationship between NATO operations in Afghanistan and EUPOL has been a recognition that there are useful differences between the functions of each mission.

That also answers some of the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked about whether the police are actually playing a paramilitary role. The answer unavoidably has to be that to some extent the gendarmerie forces are playing such a role, but EUPOL is trying to provide the local police who will work with the local judiciary, as we also helped to develop that. That will provide the community policing which it has taken us a long time to develop in this country and which, I remember from the many stories that my father told me, was not entirely free of local corruption and patronage even 50 years ago. It will of course take a long time to build up to what we here regard as modern standards, and it will take a great deal of time to build a literate police force. As I read the report, I wondered how high a proportion of the Pakistani police force was literate. There are some severe problems that are not just especial to Afghanistan.

On the question of attrition, noble Lords know that matters have improved a great deal. They were appalling but they are now better. I note this honest comment in the government response to the committee:

“The reality is that many parts of Afghanistan are not yet ready for civilian policing”.

We have to do our best to help to make it ready for civilian policing, but there is always this problem.