Afghanistan

Richard Burden Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Walker. It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce). As he said, I was not able to go on the last Committee visit to Afghanistan. Injury, sadly, prevented me from doing so. However, I was on the visit that we paid to the country in 2007. It is the only time I have been there, and is an experience that will stay with me for ever. Afghanistan is one of those places that gets to you.

That leads me to a point about the overall tenor of our report, and what we were trying to say. What we said about the need to be clear as to what we are doing post-2014—particularly in relation to DFID’s work in Afghanistan—and about concentrating on such things as poverty alleviation, and focusing less on state building, attracted comment. It is important to point out that we are not saying that the things DFID and the UK Government have been doing until now were unimportant. We certainly do not say that state building in Afghanistan is unimportant. However, we are cognisant of the kind of message that has been impressed on hon. Members across the House for some time by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who is not a member of the Committee but who has a wealth of experience from Afghanistan and beyond. We need to be clear about what we are doing. I said that Afghanistan is the sort of place that gets to you; but those who want to contribute as positively and constructively as possible need to get Afghanistan. Part of that means not trying to do everything and being aware, to some extent, of what we can do and what we can do best. That is not to say that we should be unambitious and go only for the easy stuff—it is not that we should climb mountains that are flat. We need to concentrate and focus on the kinds of things we say in our report, which are hugely challenging issues. Gender and the position of women are not unchallenging areas in which to be involved in Afghanistan, nor is the accountability of the security forces or what we have said about human rights. It is important to set that in context.

DFID and the UK have done tremendous work there, but as we move to a new situation post-2014, which is uncharted in so many ways, it is important to bear in mind the wise words we have heard from people such as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border and others.

I would like to touch briefly on one area on which I would appreciate the Minister’s comments. To some extent it flows from our report and is certainly topical at the moment: emergency relief and humanitarian assistance as we move into winter. I shall refer to a striking article in The Guardian on new year’s eve by Emma Graham-Harrison, who was in Kabul. She quoted the UN deputy envoy and humanitarian co-ordinator in Afghanistan, Mark Bowden, who clearly said that more aid money needs to be dedicated to emergency relief at the moment in particular. The article came out with a striking quote from 77-year-old Shah Ghasi:

“Each family already has two or three people who are sick”.

He has squatted in a camp on the outskirts of Kabul for nearly a decade. He says:

“We only have hot water to try and keep warm—no stoves, no fuel.”

If we look at the forecast, we see that nobody knows how severe the winter will be. It is forecast to be a bit milder than 2011, so the impact of cold on the camps may not be as bad as it was last year, but we are talking about a country with one of the world’s worst child mortality rates, rampant malnutrition and other health problems that can make the challenges presented by winter particularly difficult.

The Minister and I have discussed, across the Floor of the main Chamber, other emergency situations on which winter is having a big impact—Syria being an obvious one. The UK is stepping up to the plate there better than a number of other countries are. The scale of the problem in Afghanistan as we go into winter should not be ignored; it could become greater, as violence is still bad and in many ways getting worse. Slightly echoing some of the problems in Syria, Mark Bowden said that only a tiny percentage of aid money coming into Afghanistan, perhaps just single figures, goes to supporting urgent humanitarian needs and that donors stumped up less than half the cash the UN sought for Afghanistan’s emergency response fund this year; at one point the fund was completely empty. Those comments were reported in the article to which I referred.

The situation is serious. A week before the article was written, 10 people apparently froze to death waiting to cross into Pakistan from Afghanistan. When the problems are that severe, in a country as poor as Afghanistan, with its problems of health and conflict, we need to address them, particularly at the moment. If the Minister says one or two things about that, I will be particularly grateful. If he wants to reflect on it and write to us, I would also, obviously, be grateful for that.