Helmand Province

Indeed. To follow on from what my hon. Friend says, it was under huge pressure that DFID put people into the provincial reconstruction team in Lashkar Gah, but since they arrived there, they have found it hard to leave the compound. When they do, it is mainly to visit the provincial capital, where the PRT sit. According to another friend of mine, many projects are evaluated on the basis of digital photographs taken by the military. According to a parliamentary answer, the cost of keeping an official in Helmand is £250,000 a year. Of course, a large component of that is security. I accept that some of the work is highly impressive—it ought to be, given the money that is spent. I also accept the commitment of DFID staff, who try to do the right thing. Another very experienced person I spoke to, who is not entirely unknown to the FCO's payroll, said,"““DFID only do things in Helmand under duress.””" Someone else, who is well known to DFID staff in Afghanistan, described their working arrangements as ““ludicrous, completely ludicrous””, as they work six weeks on, two weeks off."““The cumulative impact is terrible. They come back from leave and spend the first two weeks catching up. They will also probably find themselves having to do the job of someone who is away on leave at the same time. They might then be able to spend a couple of weeks focusing on the job—then they are getting ready to go ""away again, to hand over to others without a grasp of the brief. All this in a country where trust and personal relations are incredibly important when dealing with Afghans. And then they are only generally in country for nine months all in.””" I should like to hear later whether the Minister agrees with that assessment and that the working pattern should be changed. The Minister has had a team of people working on this debate, and I am sure that when he speaks he will list all the wonderful achievements of DFID in Helmand, but unfortunately many people, certainly in the military, would not agree. Anyway, even if we have carried out a gazillion projects successfully in Helmand, what does that really matter if ordinary Afghans do not feel that we have made a difference to their lives? A friend of mine recently turned down a job working in the PRT. She said that there was no point going there because she did not feel that she would be able to achieve anything. She said,"““The bottom line is that we need to change. We need to accept more risks in terms of what we do, where we go.””" I think that DFID is sending or has sent about 40 new people to reinforce the civilian effort. It will be interesting to see whether that large influx of people makes a difference. I hope that it does, but I do not know. It may be too late. Why have we not pumped money into the Afghan and international non-governmental organisations that do exist? Why have we not stepped up the cash-for-work schemes? Why have we not made more use of the local village shuras and got stuff in at ground level? What about the national development programme or the unused capacity of the Bangladeshi charity? Perhaps that is why the Minister is going to Bangladesh later today; I do not know. The Central Asia Development Group has just finished a major project for USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—and has bags of capacity right across the province; why are we not paying it to do some of the work? Why are we not using private companies that will take the risk? I am talking not about men with gun trucks, but about people who can get out a little further. They can be directed by DFID staff inside the PRT. The Germans are doing very well in this respect. Why can we not try to persuade the Germans to get down there and do some of the work? I hope that the Minister will have some answers to these questions. The new brigade commander in Helmand, the razor-sharp and remarkable Mark Carleton-Smith, went out to Helmand a few months ago, determined to change the focus from dealing with the Taliban to dealing with the needs of the Afghan people. I have no idea whether his initiative is responsible, but I have the feeling that a shake-up is going on in Whitehall on precisely this question of what we do with the civilian effect. Unlike the Minister, I do not have chapter and verse on what DFID has been doing in those years, but I do know that a shake-up is taking place. I shall give the House a taste of it. For example, the Prime Minister's delivery unit is reviewing public service agreements on conflicts and reporting to permanent secretaries. A stabilisation and civil effect review has been set up by the Cabinet Office, and the task force will report to permanent secretaries on 1 July and to Ministers in September. A couple of things that have been a particular focus for them are specific questions on staffing in the Helmand PRT and risk management for personnel, and the feasibility of producing a framework that incorporates the FCO and the MOD. I would like to hear the Minister's view of that. The Government are also considering setting up a civilian reserve corps, and a cross-Government capacity for interpretation and translation. I do not complain that the Government seem at last to have woken up to the fact that there are problems. I do not complain that new staff are heading out there. I do not complain about DFID staff, or that the Government have belatedly sent one their most able people—Hugh Powell—to Lashkar Gah. That was long overdue. However, I complain bitterly on behalf of our troops sitting in the Helmand desert, in the green zone and in remote locations, and I complain bitterly on behalf of the Afghan civilian population, who had such high hopes of us. I wonder what on earth the Government have been doing. The Defence and International Development Committees go out there regularly. Every time we are given the same good news story, but it is not reflected on the ground. It is like smoke and mirrors, with everyone lying and deluding themselves. That is certainly how it feels from my perspective. As one Government employee put it to me yesterday:"““We realise it is now time to start taking it seriously””." It is bad enough that, on the home front, money is wasted and spin machines come into action, and that ideas are not executed properly or were half-cocked in the first place. The Government saw great opportunities and important things that needed to be done, such as spending more money on the NHS and health and the new deal, and they won that argument massively. But the problem is that the same arts used when confronting failure here are also applied to Helmand province, and I am sorry to say that the matter is too serious for that. It may be against Conservative party policy, but I believe that it is time for DFID to come back under the control of the Foreign Office, becoming once again an arm of British foreign policy. The lessons of history tell us that we need unity of command for counter-insurgency. The NATO set-up lacks coherence, and even in Britain people have often not been conducting a single policy. It is time to adopt the Templar model from Malaysia. We need an overarching boss to be in charge, and a committee system. Even in Whitehall, no one is in charge. It could be argued that we have Cabinet Government. Fine, but where is the War Cabinet? As I shall say later, this policy has potentially catastrophic effects for people in Britain. Let us not kid ourselves. We have been there for three years, but an awful lot of people in Helmand are disappointed, and some of them are pretty angry with us. One of our commanders described it as a"““declining glide path of consent””." It is like an aeroplane, but we need to watch out or the plane will land. Does the Minister agree? What should we do? I have focused on Helmand province, but I fully acknowledge that the picture is not gloomy everywhere, that large areas of Afghanistan are at relative peace and that reconstruction development is taking place. However, I guess we should expect that, given the hundreds of billions dollars of taxpayers' money from across the world being spent there. I want to shoot a sacred cow. Whenever people talk about Afghanistan, they say, ““It is vital that we remain in Afghanistan; we are there to stop al-Qaeda regrouping and returning to threaten us.”” That is nonsense on several fronts. First, the effects of our over-ambitious and ill-resourced plan has been further to radicalise large numbers of people across the Muslim world. We often talk about al-Qaeda and the Taliban as if they are the same thing. There is a significant difference. The Taliban are largely Pathan tribesmen with a traditional and nationalist agenda and no foreign policy. On the other hand, al-Qaeda is a loose international nihilist movement with a highly developed foreign policy and the intent, and, regrettably, sometimes the capability, to conduct mass casualty attacks across the globe. They are two completely things. Mullah Omar himself is reported in the late '90s to have been perturbed at the internationalist agenda of the Arabs that Abdul Haq had invited into the country earlier. Indeed, in 1998 Prince Turki, the internal security Minister for Saudi Arabia and later the Saudi ambassador to London, landed his jet at Kandahar in order to take bin Laden away. Mullah Omar was going to hand him over. Only after a shura to discuss the matter was it decided that they would not hand him over. Some people who know these things better than I do swear blind, although it is surprising to me, with my western point of view, that the only reason Mullah Omar and the shura decided to let bin Laden stay was because of the pashtunwali code under which guests are protected. To assert boldly that al-Qaeda will return to Afghanistan in a meaningful way is almost ridiculous. It is not the same situation as in the 1990s, when we ignored the place. Whatever we do in future, we shall still have an interest there. Since the 1990s, we have huge signals intelligence, with huge overhead assets and loitering military assets in the sky. Almost every square centimetre of the country has been mapped. If they began to return—I cannot believe that the Afghans would wish to wreak the same disaster on themselves as happened in 2003—we would be able to deal with them. While we pour life and resources into Afghanistan, that contributes to al-Qaeda successes in the Pashtun tribal belt in Pakistan itself. Pakistan is important to the United Kingdom, as many of our citizens have one foot there and one in the UK. It is helping radicalisation in the ““-stans””, in the Maghreb, in east Africa and across the towns and cities of the Muslim world, including some of our own cities. The trouble is that by making the link between al-Qaeda and nationalist causes around the globe, we help al-Qaeda. Last week, at a Conservative middle east council event, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) made the following observation, although he was not directly referring to Afghanistan. He said that we need to understand that"““we're not engaged in a single struggle against a single protagonist. We're not engaged in a clash of civilisations, and suggestions that we are can too easily have the opposite effect to the one that you intend—it makes extremists more attractive to the uncommitted. Yes of course there are connections between terrorist activity in different parts of the world, but we have be to a little smarter in how we handle those connections. Our aim should be to dismantle ""the processes, separating each component part rather than just sort of amalgamating them into a single global jihad that just becomes a call to arms.””" I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. We need a realistic long-term policy for Afghanistan. Does anyone seriously believe that Britain and the west will be able to continue with this relatively large-scale loss of life and spending billions and billions of pounds for many years to come? I cannot see it happening. We know that some NATO countries are wobbling because of the cost and the lives lost. It is time to scale down from what we would like to do to what we are able to do. I do not pretend to be a great expert, but I have spoken to a lot of people who are—I am talking about people who have been there for longer than a six-month tour or a nine-month tour or through the changeover and reshuffles and so on. The consensus among them is something like this: we need to accept that large numbers of people in Helmand province are deeply traditional, xenophobic and resistant to change, and that most Afghans hate the Feringhi—the foreigner—especially if they pitch up in armoured vehicles and attack helicopters. We cannot impose democracy at the point of a gun, so we need to play the great game in a new century and urgently bring the Taliban into the process with a national programme of local arrangements for different areas. To the Government's credit, some of that is happening behind the scenes and through various other initiatives that I shall not raise now. However, such a strategy should be brought centre stage, regardless, frankly, of what President Karzai says. We need a sort of ““You leave us alone, we'll leave you alone”” approach and a bit of pragmatism. At the same time, we need to support intensively development zones and areas of the country that are at relative peace, reduce troop numbers to those that can be supported in the long term and focus our efforts massively on training the Afghan army and police. I am not saying that we should disengage militarily. We should have small groups of troops on the ground, working with the Afghans; but it must be their show, and we must accept that it might not be very pretty. We should also be ready, at the drop of a hat, to send in helicopter-borne men with unseasonal suntans at dead of night, and to use missiles or bombs or whatever else at the slightest whiff of resurgent al-Qaeda. It is time to stop seeing the Afghan Government as the key channel of development. We need development at local level and to let people locally decide what they want. We should let them start to feel some benefit from the presence of all those foreigners in their provinces. I am sorry to say this, and it may not be popular, but important aspirations such as women's rights and opium production will just have to wait until the reality on the ground catches up. We are there either to fight and defeat an insurgency and reduce poverty or we are not. In short, it is time to get a little bit of peace through reality—we could describe it as the great game crossed with ballistic missile, submarine and special-forces diplomacy, underwritten by massive development spending.