UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 523 iiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREDEFENCE COMMITTEE
COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH
|
|
1. |
This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
|
|
2. |
Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
|
|
3. |
Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
|
|
4. |
Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. |
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Defence Committee
on
Members present
Mr James Arbuthnot
Mr David Crausby
Linda Gilroy
Mr Mike Hancock
Mr Dai Havard
Mr Bernard Jenkin
Robert Key
________________
Q96 Chairman: Good morning. This is our Comprehensive Approach inquiry and our second evidence session. I think it may be a unique evidence session - I cannot remember a time when three Permanent Under Secretaries have appeared before this Committee, or indeed any other; it may have happened, but I do not know. It is a very important issue and we are delighted to have all three of you here to give evidence to us. I am going to ask, with a question, which in a sense will be addressed to all there of you - but I hope, given this is a Comprehensive Approach inquiry that you will all give the same answer - what is the Comprehensive Approach and what are its crucial elements? Sir Bill, would you like to begin?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: First of all, having read the evidence that your academic witnesses gave a couple of weeks ago, I would broadly share the view that they gave you of what the Comprehensive Approach is. It stems from the fact, I would say, that complex conflicts in unstable parts of the world sometimes require military but cannot be resolved by military intervention alone. My experience in the MoD certainly is that the military themselves are the first people to recognise that, so the Comprehensive Approach is one in which military and civilian actors work together to stabilise the situation and help to establish or re-establish local governance, including security. I think it has to be flexible because, as we have seen in Afghanistan particularly, over a period of time it could be on a wide spectrum and be very insecure with the military clearly in the lead and having to be so, at one extreme; to the other extreme of something closer to civil governance with the military very much in support. Its common characteristics, I would say, is that it requires extremely close collaboration; common language, which, as I know better than most as a military one needs to strive for sometimes; a common approach on the ground and a common approach in capital cities like London. It is characterised by outcome-based thinking, a judgment of what is actually likely to work on the ground and what will have a lasting effect. I think a very powerful point that one of your academic witnesses made, with which I certainly agree, is that no two situations are the same and that this is not a blueprint, this is a pragmatic way of thinking about these conflict situations, which you need to adapt to the situation. I would say that these basic principles are ones that we are trying - and it is difficult - to apply across government and internationally.
Dr Shafik: I would be happy to agree with everything that Bill has said, particularly the point about it not being a blueprint but a way of working. Sometimes I think of conflict countries as a bit like unhappy families in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - each one is unhappy in its own particular way and one has to approach every situation in its own particular way and understand the specificities of the conflict and what one can do about it. The only thing I would add is that what we have learned from the need for early engagement, shared analysis, joint planning and collaborative ways of working is that we have learned that we also have to underpin that with pooling of our human resources, pooling of our money and pooling of our decision-making processes to Whitehall processes and processes in the field that ensure that decision-making is joined and over the last few years we have put those things into place - pooled resources through the conflict pools, pooling our people through the PRTs in countries and through the Stabilisation Unit, and pooling our decision-making through joint decision making in-country as well as in Whitehall.
Sir Peter Ricketts: Chairman, I see it in exactly
the same way. Put in a slightly
different way I think it means for me that each of our three departments have
value to add along the spectrum between security to development, and in any
post-conflict stabilisation situation we are all three going to need to be working
together. I cannot think of a scenario
in which there would be a post conflict position where the three of us did not
need to work together. If that is true
then it needs to be embedded in the way we plan, in our doctrine, in our
preparation - and as Minouche Shafik says, in the preparation of our people -
and then it needs to be implemented together and we need to learn the lessons
from each occasion where we work together so that we do it better next
time. One other element from me is that
this is not purely something happening in the
Chairman: I suspect a theme that will come out of our questions will be "these words are very good" and to what extent and how do the words translate into reality and practice? Vice Chairman, David Crausby.
Q97 Mr Crausby: I take the point that the Comprehensive Approach is different in all operations and has to be seen from a different point of view, but is it a valid concept in all operations, in current and future operations; or are there any particular circumstances where the Comprehensive Approach is not appropriate at all?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: In the kinds of things we have been doing recently - and I am looking back to the Balkans as well as Iraq and Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, etc. - it is entirely applicable, and if you get into what in MoD parlance - and this Committee knows as well as I do that it is referred to as state on state conflict, which is more purely military in character - I think it is less applicable, although as one saw even at the end of the Second World War there was a point at which civil reality has to intrude and military people have to work closely with civil authorities. So even there I think you get to that point if you are going to be successful at all.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I agree. I think in any circumstances where you are using military force or you might have to use military force there is a period of tension and crisis and breakdown beforehand where perhaps the civilian instruments would be more important than the military although there would be planning going on. There will be a period of military conflict and then there will be a period after the military conflict at which, whatever the circumstances, the civilian powers will have to reengage with governance, capacity building and development work, which is exactly what the Comprehensive Approach is all about. I cannot think of a scenario where we would be employing the military instrument without also needing the development and governance capacity building instruments that we bring to that.
Q98 Mr Crausby: How would it work in an operation in defence against piracy, for instance?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: That is an inventive counter example, I agree, because if you look at what we are doing off the Horn of African just now it does not have the civilian components in quite the same way, although oddly enough it does raise some issues where we need to draw our Foreign Office colleagues in, for example to consider jurisdictional issues where we have detained people and need to find countries and a locality willing to tie them. So even there it spills over into civil life to some extent.
Sir Peter Ricketts: As soon as the Royal Navy detained pirates off the coast of Somalia we were engaged because we needed to negotiate with the Government of Kenya and other countries for a place to which to deliver these people for justice and so again the military were not operating alone, they had to operate in close coordination with the diplomats.
Dr Shafik: Clearly we are also
contributing on the development side both on the humanitarian side in
Sir Bill Jeffrey: Arguably if you go to the
root cause of the piracy it lies not on the high seas but in
Q99 Mr Crausby: What are the difficulties then? What are the fault lines within the Comprehensive Approach? I accept that every Comprehensive Approach is almost a different Comprehensive Approach but where does it start to go wrong?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: You said at the beginning of the session, Chairman, that the real question is that these are find sounding words but have we done it. I think I know this Committee well enough to give the answer, to be very clear that we are not going to sit here this morning and say that we have cracked this - it is much, much more complicated and challenging than that. My sense from repeated visits over the last few years to both of the principal theatres - quite a number of them with my colleagues from the two other departments - is that we have got much better at it and certainly on our most recent visits to both Iraq and Afghanistan we had a sense that we were beginning to make this approach work more successfully than we had done in the past. But I would not want to over claim for it. There is still a challenge in terms of getting civilians in the right numbers into the right places, although I think we have made progress on that. There is a challenge around the international dimension, as Peter mentioned, because it is harder to deliver this sort of effect when you are working within the lines with other countries. Whether it is a fault line or not I am not sure, although the point that one of your witnesses made in the earlier session about us learning our lessons and not just going back to square one next time is vitally important and I think we have to do that otherwise we will be at least slow off the mark next time if not worse.
Q100 Chairman:
You
will have seen from our earlier session that I raised a hobby horse of mine
with Brigadier Butler. He was talking
about the number of senior visitors he had and you have talked about your visits. The three of you have visited
Sir Bill Jeffrey: Twice and
Q101 Chairman: Have you ever visited with the Permanent Under Secretary of the Treasury?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: We have not but Treasury officials at a more junior level than the Permanent Secretaries have visited both theatres.
Dr Shafik: We have taken the Cabinet Secretary.
Sir Peter Ricketts: We have visited with the Cabinet Secretary who is an even more eminent public servant.
Dr Shafik: And a former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury.
Mr Havard: Have you got any money?
Chairman: Nevertheless, I think you have a role here to play to tie in the Treasury to the things that you three are trying to achieve, and I think if you were able to persuade Treasury ministers and Treasury senior officials to go with you it will be to the benefit of this country. That is just a point I make now.
Q102 Mike Hancock: If I can just go back to the answer you gave when you were talking briefly about piracy, was there a Comprehensive Approach put together before we engaged in that activity? Was there a system for referral for dealing with it if you had pirates under your control, or was this something that emerged because the circumstances were that a British ship had taken possession of these people and then we started to wonder what we did with them? Was the Comprehensive Approach considered before we sent that ship to do that job?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The decision to deploy - and in
fact it is unusually a European Union mission, it is an ESDP mission that we are
leading off the Horn of Africa now - was a decision taken collectively by
ministers and before they did so there was consideration given to some of these
jurisdictional and other issues. My recollection
is the incident that Peter referred to arose quite early on and while we had
custody of the bodies there were then quite urgent discussions with the Kenyan authorities.
But the original decision to increase
our involvement off the Gulf of Aden by deploying a
Q103 Mike
Hancock: There is one thing taking a decision; there is
another thing to have a Comprehensive Approach to how to deal with the emerging
situation that comes out of that decision.
I want to know whether or not after all your experience in
Sir Peter Ricketts: I do not think the answer is no; I think the answer is yes, we had thought about what jurisdiction Royal Navy warships would have and what issues would arise if they found themselves detaining a pirate. You cannot, I think, make a precise plan until circumstances arise because any number of different scenarios might have arisen. As soon as a particular circumstance arose we were all in action together to solve it but we had thought before the operation began about the various contingencies that would arise and what legal rights and responsibilities British warships had.
Q104 Mike Hancock: If that is a Comprehensive Approach, Sir Peter, I do not seem to think it was fairly effective in that case and I would be interested to know what approach would be now made in the same situation. Do we now have countries that are prepared to take pirates and to deal with them under a judicial system?
Sir Peter Ricketts: I do not believe that we will ever have countries agreeing in the abstract to take pirates; I think it will only be in particular cases that we will be able to approach countries. I do not think that we will ever get a blanket agreement in advance from a country that they would take any pirate that was detained on the high seas.
Q105 Mike Hancock: In the absence of that we would just release them, would we?
Sir Peter Ricketts: We would do what we did last time, which is when we have a particular case we would then make arrangements with neighbouring countries.
Mr Jenkin: But last time we just let them go.
Q106 Mike Hancock: We just let them go. If I could ask each of you individually how well do your departments work together, given the different roles and the cultures and the objectives that you have set your own departments? Shall we start on the left?
Dr Shafik: Echoing what Bill said, we
have learned to work together much better over time. Clearly in the early days there was not a
long tradition of DFID working with the MoD - there was a longer tradition of DFID
working with the FCO - and we had obstacles to overcome. But I think it is fair to say that over the
last few years there has been a huge uptick in the quality of the
engagement. I think that can be
evidenced by the fact that we now have 311 staff in DFID working in 13 conflict
countries and a further 83 staff working through the Stabilisation Unit. I think that can be evidenced by the huge
increase in resources that we have put into conflict and fragile states; by the
decision that we have taken to put half of our aid budget into what we call
fragile and conflict states, going forward; and there has been a steady
improvement in terms of the level of interaction with DFID staff actively
engaging with the military in terms of pre-deployment and in terms of training
programmes. We now have a whole cadre of
people in DFID who speak military, which is quite an achievement actually
because it takes a while to learn the language and the ways of working with a
different organisation. So I think we
have a pretty good story to tell and I think that if you see the operations in
action in Helmand, for example, or in
Q107 Mike
Hancock: You were suggesting there that there are still
issues to overcome. It has been a long
time now, has it not, in both
Dr Shafik: If you look at the current situation
I think they have been overcome, but one has to remember that this is new
territory and one is working in very, very difficult and unpredictable
situations. So I think that there is
actually quite a good story to tell in terms of the lesson learning and the
adaptation that has occurred in terms of the number of people and types of
people we have been able to deploy. If
you look at the early days there was serious difficulty, for example, in
recruiting civilians to go to
Q108 Mike Hancock: If I could persist with your agreement with DFID. Can DFID really adopt a fully Comprehensive Approach given the priority of your other work, particularly poverty reduction, and in respect of the 2002 International Development Act which actually set you some very high goals to achieve and at times must put you in conflict with your two departmental colleagues?
Dr Shafik: I do not think there is a contradiction; I do not think there is a contradiction for several reasons. First of all, it is important to remember that poverty reduction is a significant government objective and I would argue actually probably one of the best investments we have made in security ever. I think that if we had gotten two million Afghan girls into school 20 years ago we would not be in this mess, frankly. So it is a very low cost and quite cost effective investment in longer term security. In terms of there being a conflict between the poverty objective and the work in conflict countries, if you actually look where the poverty is today the most intractable poverty in the world is in 50 countries which are either in conflict or have been in conflict; so our relentless focus on reducing poverty is actually increasing the force of stability in conflict countries because in countries that are stable we have actually been able to reduce poverty and so as we continue to push the frontier and focus more on poverty we are actually being taken more and more into countries at risk of conflict. Lastly, on the International Development Act, the Act gives us a fair amount of room to manoeuvre as long as we stay ultimately focused on reducing poverty and much of the work that we have been able to do in Afghanistan - most of the work that we have been able to do in Afghanistan, for example - has been completely legislate under the Act. There are some things that we cannot do where there is no poverty objective and we have been able to fund these things under the conflict pool outside of the Act.
Q109 Mr Jenkin: Can you give an example?
Dr Shafik: Half the funding in the conflict pool is not funded the Act.
Q110 Mr Jenkin: Sorry, can you repeat that?
Dr Shafik: About half the activities under the conflict pools do not qualify as official development assistance. I should say that the definition of what official development assistance is is an internationally agreed definition set by the OECD - it is not in our gift to determine what that is.
Q111 Mr Jenkin: Could you tell us what that is?
Dr Shafik: The definition basically is that it has to be an activity whose primary purpose is to reduce poverty. It can have secondary purposes which are achieving security, achieving other objectives - environmental objectives, other things - but the primary purpose has to be poverty.
Q112 Mr
Jenkin: Dr Shafik,
Dr Shafik: Yes. I think we have always known that
Q113 Chairman: But was there not a sense of resentment amongst DFID employees that they were spending all this time and resource on a country that was extremely rich?
Dr Shafik: I do not think I would quite
use the word "resentment". I think there
was an issue of defining a meaningful role in a country of where the issue of
resource transfer was not the priority and I think we have successfully defined
what that role is. Just to give you an
example, we quickly realised that the issue for
Q114 Chairman:
But at
the end of the day do you not think that in your department many people feel
that dealing with
Dr Shafik: No, I would not agree with that.
Q115 Mr Jenkin: Can I just be very clear what you are saying about your definition of poverty reduction? That if military commanders need more resource to stabilise post conflict areas where they may be taking casualties, civilians may be being killed, may be huge economic dislocation as a result of the conflict, that because of the Act that is actually not your department's concern and you cannot spend your money on those circumstances?
Dr Shafik: That is not correct. We actually funded a lot of the quick impact projects in the early days and so we did provide resources, as did the MoD.
Mr Jenkin: This is what we do not
understand because when we talk to military commanders they are desperate for
much more resource. We will come to the
Chairman: Let us pick this up later.
Q116 Mr Hancock: Can I go back to Sir Bill and Sir Peter for their comments about their departments?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: Your original question, Mr Hancock, was the issues raised by the three departments working together and the most obvious, if you like, is a cultural one. I live with this all the time - and I admire my military colleagues greatly but they have a very special way of doing things and they have a language of their own in the international development world and indeed in the international world. People come at things from different angles and I think that the most challenging thing we have had to do is to build understanding among well motivated people who just approach things in different ways. My sense is that that is where we have made some progress. I do not know what the experience is of individual Committee members but certainly when I go into theatre more and more I meet people who, although they come from different backgrounds, whether it be military, aid or diplomatic, are, broadly speaking, speaking the same language. Just to follow up on the point you elicited in the conversation with Minouche, my observation over the three and a half years I have been doing this job is that DFID's approach to this has changed quite substantially.
Q117 Chairman: It needed to, did it not?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: It is not that they were not contributing three and a half years ago; it is more that in the intervening period they have an even clearer recognition of the inter-relationship between conflict reduction and poverty reduction. And throughout that period the law has been the same, so I think it is more about policy and the attitudes of people and addressing these cultural issues.
Q118 Mr Hancock: But the Chairman's interjection there was that they needed to change, did they not? There was a real problem, was there not?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think we have got better at
this over the last few years. One cannot
underestimate how challenging it is to start with, not least because although,
as Minouche says, that there was a substantial and has particularly recently
been a very substantial contribution in
Q119 Chairman: Absolutely.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: So generally speaking I think we have come on a long way in the last few years.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I agree that we have. For me in the last 12 years I have been very
closely involved with the FCO work in Bosnia, in Kosovo and then in the early
days in Afghanistan and Iraq, so I have seen over 12 years a considerable
improvement in our capacity to establish ourselves and operate in these
difficult and dangerous circumstances.
We did not have in 2003 an embassy in Baghdad; we did not have an
embassy in Kabul; we did not have anything in Lashkar Gah or anything in Basra,
and over the last five or six years we have built up to having one of our
largest concentrations of diplomat anywhere in the world actually in Kabul; and
very substantial operations in Lashkar Gah and in Baghdad and now a small but
remaining mission in Basra. We have
learnt how to operate right alongside the military and we have had to learn
about duty of care to our staff so that our staff can be out there right behind
the front line and working very closely with DFID in doing that. Yes, I am sure that we did not do it well in
the early days and I think we did not do as well as we should in learning the
lessons of
Chairman: Can I interject with a point that in case I am seen to be bashing DFID, I must say that we as a Committee have noticed the way that DFID has changed and the Comprehensive Approach in Afghanistan seems to have been working much more effectively now than it was at the beginning. I just want to make that point.
Q120 Mr
Hancock: I would hope that nobody would give that
impression or for you to take it; we all have lots of admiration for the work
of all three departments. This next
question is the one where you should have the earphones on so that you cannot
hear each other's answer! I am quite
interested to ask which minister do you think has overall responsibility for
the Comprehensive Approach in
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The Prime Minister.
Dr Shafik: That is a very good answer!
Q121 Mr
Hancock: But he is not dealing day to day, is he? Who is responsible for making sure that the
Comprehensive Approach that we have put in place, that you have worked on for a
number of years - three and a half years - is actually working in
Sir Peter Ricketts: I do not think that it would be a good thing to have a single day to day minister. It would be for the Prime Minister to judge, but it is actually a Cabinet Committee of the three Secretaries of State here represented with the Prime Minister in the chair. If you want to have all three departments fully committed, seeing this as a core part of their business I think you need all three Secretaries of State as part of a collective ministerial group that is directing it.
Q122 Mr Hancock: Can the three of them give what is needed? Do they have the opportunity to be together that often that they can keep on top of this?
Dr Shafik: They meet quite regularly, as do we.
Q123 Mr
Hancock: How often would you say in the course of a
month that the three Secretaries of State meet to discuss the Comprehensive
Approach in
Sir Peter Ricketts: I should think they meet at least once a month - the three of them.
Q124 Mr Hancock: On this specific subject?
Dr Shafik: As do we.
Q125 Mr Hancock: Do you not think it is worthy of more time?
Sir Peter Ricketts: No, because I think that the ministers are giving strategic guidance to people who are then dealing with it every day and we have senior officials who are dealing with it all the time every day. I do not think we need senior Cabinet ministers to be dealing with it all the time every day.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: It is certainly the case, as Peter says, that our three ministers meet very regularly; I would say at the moment every few weeks and certainly once a month and there is a meeting taking place soon. We meet on the same sort of regularity across our three departments. The formal answer to the question in a sense is the one that we have given, which is that the Cabinet Committee responsible for all these matters meets under the Prime Minister's chairmanship and takes the decisions that need to be taken.
Dr Shafik: The only thing I would add is that one of the key lessons of the Comprehensive Approach is the importance of delegating responsibility to the field. So the leadership in-country is a key point where the day to day decision-making about how to implement the Comprehensive Approach is being taken; and, as Peter said, we need strategic guidance on the big decisions in a much sort of slower time
Q126 Mr Hancock: But the Comprehensive Approach also has to work in this country, does it not, to the people whose sons and daughters are going out to do the work for us and for the general taxpayers who are paying for it, so surely that does warrant somebody having overall control and day to day political control of what is going on?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I go back to the point that Peter made a few minutes ago, that if you had a minister who was not the Prime Minister but was in some sense in political command of the whole operation you would then, as a consequence, have a set of separate relationships with three very senior Cabinet ministers. Since the essence of this is to get the three departments to work more closely together I think that the judgment ministers have made so far is that the PM must be ultimately in the lead and he must operate through his three principal colleagues.
Q127 Mr Hancock: Sir Bill, you told us that you had read the evidence we have had from our academic colleagues and they were of the mind that this was what was needed not just for Afghanistan but there needed to be a specific minister to oversee the whole operation of a Comprehensive Approach, not only being put together but actually being delivered. So I take it that having read that and from what you have all three said today that none of you share that view?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: In the end these are matters for the Prime Minister. I do not want to sound too Sir Humphrey-ish about this but in a sense we mainly help the Committee by describing the situation that exists at the moment. I would simply make the observation that it is an issue in many other areas than this in our system of government where ultimately one has departments of state led by members of the Cabinet - does it help or hinder to have a minister who is not in any one of the relevant departments leading the activity? Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. But the judgment as to whether it will help or not is very much one for the Prime Minister to make.
Q128 Mr
Jenkin: In
Sir Bill Jeffrey: My personal view is that we could do with being more on a war footing. It depends what you mean by the term. This is clearly not like the Second World War when this country was under direct threat. The threat is real but indirect and inevitably there is less of an atmosphere of war around. I personally would like to see us more in that frame of mind.
Q129 Mr
Jenkin: Sir Peter, would you say that the
Sir Peter Ricketts: No, I do not think I
would. I do not see what machinery they
have in the
Q130 Mr Hancock: The public perception is different there.
Sir Peter Ricketts: They have exactly the same
arrangements that we have; the President is in charge and the Secretary of
State and the Secretary of Defence meet him in the National Security Council
and they pursue a collective strategy towards
Q131 Mr
Jenkin: Do you think that the President spends more
time on
Sir Peter Ricketts: I do not know.
Q132 Mr
Jenkin: I would hazard that he does. Would our effort be better coordinated if the
Prime Minister appointed someone, a single person, a person who reported to
him, to make sure that this was pulled together? Sir Bill, you said earlier that this is all
new territory, but actually Oman, Malaya, they are all previous campaigns that
adopted a form of the Comprehensive Approach but they were all under a single
command, albeit a military command; and where we see the Comprehensive Approach
working best in microcosm is virtually under a single military commander as it
is in Helmand. Do we not need to
replicate that kind of command at
Sir Peter Ricketts: Remember that in
Q133 Mr Jenkin: You may kid yourself that that is the case but the brigadier in charge of the brigade effectively commands the entire effort.
Sir Peter Ricketts: The brigadier commands the
brigade; the brigadier does not command the civilian activity. It is a joint command at one star level
between the brigadier and a civilian and they work together - that is what the
Comprehensive Approach is. The brigadier
does not command ISAF; they are under the control of the civilian head of the
civil-military mission in
Q134 Mr
Jenkin: That seems to be a management problem in
Sir Peter Ricketts: I offer you my opinion on the subject.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: You are right, Mr Jenkin, in
the sense that there is an alternative model for doing this, which is much more
military-led. The
Q135 Mr Jenkin: So we do it better than the Americans?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I am not arguing that; I am saying that it is different and that there are pros and cons in both approaches.
Q136 Mr Jenkin: Are the Stabilisation Unit and reconstruction teams sufficient to ensure that we can adopt a coherent approach across individual conflicts and different situations?
Dr Shafik: The Stabilisation Unit was
established precisely to create standing capacity and the capacity to learn
lessons across conflict, so that we would not have to do what we did in Iraq,
frankly, which was to put together an integrated team over time, and we had to
scramble a bit, to be honest; whereas the Stabilisation Unit provides us with
the capacity to have that standing. Do I
think it is sufficient? We are still
building up our capacity in the Stabilisation Unit. We have 34 staff there now, 16 of whom are
DFID. They have developed an extensive
call down capacity of staff who can serve in conflict zones around the world
and they have provided lesson learning, they have done analytical studies, they
provide pre-deployment training and I think the last time we were in
Q137 Mr Jenkin: What is the budget of the Stabilisation Unit?
Dr Shafik: The Stabilisation Unit budget is £7 million and 94 per cent of that is provided by DFID.
Q138 Mr Jenkin: £7 million?
Dr Shafik: That is just for the staffing and the capacity; that is not the entire programme.
Q139 Mr Jenkin: What resources do they have at their disposal?
Dr Shafik: The specific programme budget that they deploy is £4 million, but then they also manage parts of the conflict pool. If I may just make a clarification on something I said earlier? Of the conflict pools, which are currently £171 million only about a quarter of that is not eligible for official development assistance; three-quarters of it counts as aid in the international definition.
Q140 Mr
Jenkin: But it seems awfully small compared to how
much we are spending on military capability in
Dr Shafik: If I could give you a sense
of proportion? If DFID was treating
Afghanistan like a normal country and we try to allocate aid on an objective
criteria based on how much poverty there is in that country and how good its
policies are and how effectively we think the money could be used we would
probably allocate it one-tenth of what we give it now. So that gives you a sense of proportion; we
are giving it ten times more than we normally would if we were treating it as
an ordinary country. If you look at
Helmand, Helmand actually only constitutes about five per cent of the
population of
Q141 Mr
Jenkin: But very little of that half billion is
available at the front end of stabilisation post-conflict. The conflict prevention fund in
Dr Shafik: Yes, that is about right.
Q142 Mr Jenkin: You must have heard the argument that if military commanders could carry suitcases of dollars they might actually be able to avoid having to fight because they could go straight into a village and bargain with the local leaders about how to resolve some of their problems.
Dr Shafik: I think that approach is misguided, if I may say. I think the idea of military commanders handing out cash to buy support is both transient and it is ---
Q143 Mr Jenkin: It worked in Anbar, did it not?
Dr Shafik: I do not think it works; I do not think it is sustainable, I do not think it was sustainable in Anbar. There is no dispute that short-term stabilisation measures, well-targeted, well designed can provide some consent for a short period but if you do not follow it by a longer term development it is unsustainable and you do not get anywhere.
Q144 Mr
Jenkin: Last year was the stabilisation fund in
Dr Shafik: Yes, I believe so. I would have to check on that.
Q145 Mr Jenkin: If you could send us a note on that I would be grateful.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: If I might just avert to your point, Mr Jenkin, about the Stabilisation Unit? I think the thing to bear in mind about it is that it is essentially the central enabler. It is always going to be quite a small team. Following an announcement the Prime Minister made last year about building up to 1000-strong civilian standby capacity, the three departments, principally DFID, are going and enhancing the capability of the Stabilisation Unit so that it can delivery more easily more significant numbers of well trained civilians for these purposes. But the central enabler is always going to be much cheaper in the end than either the military spend in theatre or the budget in theatre.
Mr Hancock: When you talked about the way in which DFID spends its money and the disproportionate amount you are spending in, say, Helmand, how does that compare with other countries who are committed to giving aid where they are specifically only targeting their aid where their people are on the ground and they are not giving a Comprehensive Approach to sharing their aid across the country as a whole? Does that not create problems?
Chairman: That is a very large question to which we will come later and I do not want to get into that just yet.
Q146 Dai Havard: Can I have some clarification here because I am getting confused now? The Stabilisation Unit is one thing but stabilisation funds are other things. There is an MoD stabilisation fund, as I understand it, of £269 million; is that right? I am getting confused with you saying from the DFID point of view that 90-odd per cent of the money comes from DFID and yet, as I understand it, the fund is on the MoD budget line, is that correct? So can you clarify the difference between the Unit and the Unit's costs and the funds that it spends and how the MoD is involved in that?
Dr Shafik: The Stabilisation Unit's budget is £7 million, most of which is provided by DFID, but it is a jointly managed unit and the governance is joined and the FCO and the MoD both have directors who sit on the board and oversee the work of that unit. That is a jointly owned unit. The Stabilisation Aid Fund does sit on the MoD budget and that sits alongside the conflict pools and that was agreed in the last CSR. The total of the Stabilisation Aid Fund over the course of the CSR is the 200 plus million number that you mentioned.
Q147 Dai Havard: 269.
Dr Shafik: That is right. Having said that I think that we have also increasingly come to the view that having different pots of money is rather complicated and while we have money in pots we have agreed actually just this week to have a shared management, for which DFID will take responsibility, of the Stabilisation Fund and the conflict pools and the peacekeeping budget; so our three main pots of money for this type of civilian work will be jointly managed by DFID on behalf of the three departments.
Q148 Dai Havard: Could you tell us what those three numbers are at some point? Could somebody write to us and explain how that is managed?
Sir Peter Ricketts: Is it worth just going
through what the numbers are for this year because there are a lot of numbers
flying about? These are set out
essentially in David Miliband's statement to the House of Commons a few weeks
ago. The three pools of money that we were given in the spending
round were for assessed contributions to UN and other peacekeeping missions -
that is 374; the conflict prevention pool, which was supposed to be for longer
term conflict prevention work, which was 109; and the Stabilisation Aid Fund which
was specifically for Afghanistan and Iraq immediate purposes, 73 million. Total 556.
Our major problem in this area is the growth in our assessed
contributions to the UN and others, partly because sterling is weak and partly
because there is more UN peacekeeping going on; so of that total of 556 for everything
we estimate that about 456 is going to be needed for our assessed contributions
to the UN, leaving only £100 million for everything else. That is why we delved into our departmental
pockets this year and we have found another £71 million to make up the budget
that we feel is necessary; that ministers feel is necessary for the
discretionary conflict prevention work in addition to our assessed
contributions to the UN. So having made
a departmental contribution we now have this fund of £171 million, which is to
cover all the costs for our stabilisation work in Afghanistan and Iraq, but
also in the Balkans and also in Africa and the Middle East. Those are the choices that we have had to
make. So the original money that you
refer to which was in the spending round we have had to pool to make maximum
use of it and we are now managing that jointly.
So just to reinforce the point made earlier, the Stabilisation Unit is
supposed to be a place where we centralise human capacity, a database of
people, a library of expertise - it does not manage the programmes in
Q149 Chairman: From which department did the bulk of that increase come?
Sir Peter Ricketts: There was an equal amount from DFID and the MoD and a rather smaller amount from the FCO - not quite pro rata to our departmental budgets but three of us made very generous contributions.
Dr Shafik: There was a healthy exchange!
Q150 Mr Jenkin: I believe the Stabilisation Unit could, if scaled up with sufficient capability, become a very, very important component in security and poverty reduction around the world. What are we doing to ensure that the different personnel from the different departments, particularly military personnel alongside civilian personnel, are trained together so that they better understand each other's perspectives?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The Stabilisation Unit itself
provides quite a bit of training for all purpose. The thing that I am most conscious of,
because we tend to provide it but it is proving valuable, is that we now have
routinely not many people but a significant number of people from FCO and DFID on
the
Q151 Mr Jenkin: We did hear from Shrivenham that the training provided to DFID staff at Shrivenham was not very popular with DFID staff and I think that the Shrivenham personnel expressed - how shall I put it? - some surprise at the attitudes that DFID staff had on some issues. But this kind of cultural hostility is inevitably something that exists and what are we doing to break that down? I can throw that particularly at your own departments. How are you training your own personnel to incorporate the cultures of different departments?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: My other two colleagues may want to comment but I would not overstate it. You might say that we would say that, would we not, but I am not hearing from Shrivenham exactly what you report. As I said earlier, there are, however, differences in approach that you could politely describe as cultural differences and I certainly accept that one of those possibilities we have is to provide the sort of leadership that will enable these to be overcome and to lead to the kind of greater understanding that I think is happening. One of the reasons, apart from the fact that we quite enjoy each other's company and can talk as we go, why we have chosen in the last couple of years to visit theatre quite regularly together is to give a signal to our people that this is the way we want things to be.
Dr Shafik: If I may add something to Bill, in terms of DFID management we have sent a very clear signal that attending these kinds of courses like the higher command staff course and like some of the ones that Bill mentioned is a priority. I think it is no accident that the Private Secretaries of most of the ministers and my own have all served in Afghanistan and Iraq; so the people who we signal are on the fast track in the organisation, many of them are ones who have served in these posts and we have sent a very clear signal that these are our best and our brightest and that they will be rewarded for reaching out across Whitehall and learning about cultures in other departments and working in these very tough places.
Q152 Mr Jenkin: On the cost of deploying personnel it is far cheaper to put an Army major into the field than a member of civilian staff and which each may be contributing different things where it is so difficult to deploy civilian staff and therefore so expensive should there not be an element of cooperation between DFID and the Ministry of Defence that certain roles might actually be taken by somebody in uniform? Or should we be creating a new cadre of people who might have a military background but nevertheless be operating in civilian clothing?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: On the last point, one of the things that is being done in terms of building up the 1000 deployable civilians that I mentioned earlier, is to plan on a register basis to have 800 or so of the 1000 from outside government altogether - 200 will be civil servants forming a kind of stabilisation cadre of people who will do other jobs but will be pretty readily deployable. Among the 800 though I would be very surprised if there were not quite a lot of ex-service people because they do acquire exactly this sort of resilience and skills you would expect to be able to survive in these sorts of environments.
Sir Peter Ricketts: Mr Jenkin, might I just add one point? I wonder whether your two points are slightly in tension with each other because if we transfer more of these roles to military personnel we will deny the opportunity to get more civilians the experience of working out in the field alongside the military and developing this expertise on stabilisation. I think the most powerful thing that has been driving the culture change in the last few years is a number of members of our staff out there doing it. Over the last five years we have cycled through an awful lot of FCO/DFID people in these places working right alongside the military, learning the culture and coming back into Whitehall and then doing relevant jobs, and that is quite valuable. On the cost point I think there is a debate to be had about that because the cost of deploying a civilian to the field includes a lot of cost of security provided to that individual. I am not sure whether the cost of the major to which you refer is factored in the cost of the infantry company that is there providing the security for that officer as well. So I think we need to be careful that we are comparing like with like.
Q153 Mr Jenkin: That is a brilliant riposte and I am now completely confused.
Dr Shafik:
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The other people I would not omit from this are MoD civil servants. There are 150 or so deployed every year and we have put several thousand through in the last ten years. They work very closely with the military and with representatives of other departments as well; so it is a mixed picture. Like Peter I would not assume that it necessarily in the end costs more to deploy a civilian than a military officer - it depends what you are accounting for.
Dr Shafik: If I could add one
thing? We are in practice doing
this. We have 165 people in
Q154 Mr Jenkin: Absolutely right.
Dr Shafik: It is not an accident that
more of our military staff who are working in
Q155 Linda Gilroy: In your memorandum but also in the evidence you have given us thus far this morning you are reporting that good progress has been made in making the Comprehensive Approach work, but I think what it would be helpful for the Committee to have is a sense of what different outcomes are happening, perhaps drawn from experience in Afghanistan or Iraq. What is it that is now happening on the ground that, had there been, for instance, a much more military directed approach, would not be happening? Perhaps I could ask Dr Shafik first and then come to Sir Bill afterwards. What one or two things would you point to that you feel would not be happening were the Comprehensive Approach either not to be in place or not to be working as well as you have given us to believe?
Dr Shafik: Let me try and give a couple
of examples of that. In
Q156 Linda Gilroy: Sir Bill, why should what Dr Shafik has just told us not have happened anyway? What is it about the Comprehensive Approach and working with your colleagues that has delivered that that could not have been directly delivered through a much more military led approach?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: It is partly about skills and
it is partly, I would say, about flexibility given that, as I said at the
beginning, we are talking here about a spectrum.
Q157 Linda Gilroy: That has been over a period of about a decade, as Dr Shafik said.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: Yes.
Q158 Linda Gilroy: But of course in Afghanistan we have been there for coming on for a decade now and I am just interested in particular in the wheat example that Dr Shafik gave, as to what is it about the Comprehensive Approach that has delivered that either at all or better than a simply military-led approach perhaps with the resources being deployed through military command and control?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: As I said to Mr Jenkin earlier, it is perfectly possible to conceive of this being done entirely by the military, but think it would be a poorer effort if it were, with great respect to the military. To take the wheat example, I think first of all that such progress as has been made in recent times - and as Dr Shafik says there is quite a bit of analysis going on to work out how much it is about the market, how much it is about the distribution of wheat - has also been attributable to the efforts of the Governor, who is a very capable man as anyone who has met him could testify. What I would say is that the fact we have improved our capability over the last few years collectively means that when someone with Governor Mangal's ability and drive is appointed to a position like that we are better able to provide the kind of support that might, if we were successful, deliver a reduction in poppy and an increase in alternatives. Of course, it is not straightforward - if it was it would have been done before. It is all about marginal advantage and whether we are better placed to achieve results than we would otherwise have been.
Q159 Linda Gilroy: I suppose what Dr Shafik was describing is a sort of spectrum in which at one point the military is very much in the lead because of the need to create that security envelope and that the transition you described in Sierra Leone has yet really to happen, and when the tipping point comes perhaps we will not even necessarily recognise it.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I agree with that. The other thing I would argue is that in that early stage, if it is going to be successful, where the position is very insecure and dangerous one has to be realistic about what deployed civilians can achieve. In the very early days - and I read Brigadier Butler's evidence very carefully on this - when Brigadier Butler was distinguishing himself in Northern Helmand the situation was dangerous and realistically the scope for the effective deployment of civilians was much more limited in some parts of Helmand than it is now. So it is about taking advantage where it arises and having the capability there to fill the gap.
Q160 Linda Gilroy: When will the report be ready to which you have referred on the wheat example because that presumably will give some more detail about which bits have contributed towards the success of that?
Dr Shafik: I do not know that but I can find out for you.
Q161 Linda Gilroy: Thank you. Again, you have already discussed very much the strategic development and planning in the Comprehensive Approach and you have given us a pretty positive picture, but if it is now established in the right direction of travel what things are standing in the way of it becoming even stronger? What are the barriers to the Comprehensive Approach being better routed, more successful in the future? Perhaps each one of you could say one thing you would change about how your work and the work of ministers is done on the Comprehensive Approach that would deliver results that will be sustainable over time.
Sir Peter Ricketts: To be honest with the
Committee budgets are something that we have to work to overcome. My own observation is that Comprehensive
Approach works best of all in the field.
If you want to see it really working well then Lashkar Gah or
Q162 Linda Gilroy: Are there ways in which that can be changed or is it just a feature of it?
Sir Peter Ricketts: Unless we ever got to a point of having a single budget for the Afghanistan operation, which is somehow jointly owned by the three departments, we will have to make the current system work where we are each individually responsible for our own budgets, and yet we want to work collaboratively together. We are making it work but the system is not ideal.
Q163 Chairman: You were arguing against that earlier, were you not?
Sir Peter Ricketts: In what respect, Mr Chairman?
Q164 Chairman: In respect of a single budget with perhaps a single minister in charge of it.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I was not talking so much about a single minister; I was talking about a single pot of money, which would make life easier in terms of across departmental working.
Q165 Linda Gilroy: Sir Bill?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think I would say that although we have made progress we are still not where we need to be in terms of being able to deploy the right numbers of the right kinds of civilians, appropriately trained, as rapidly may be needed for the purpose. We are a lot closer to it than we were but that is one of the remaining tasks.
Dr Shafik: It is much easier when you do
not have to coordinate with dozens of other allies. So
Q166 Linda Gilroy: I think we will probably be coming on to the international links in a moment, so thank you for that. Can I move on to PRTs and how well they do their work? Does their success depend too much on the personalities of those involved? What can each of your contributions do to mitigate against that, staring with Dr Shafik?
Dr Shafik: In terms of the effectiveness?
Q167 Linda Gilroy: Yes and how dependent are they on the leader person and the personality, the leadership of the group? And what are you doing in one way both to encourage that but also to mitigate it?
Dr Shafik: There is no doubt that leadership matters and I think we have seen when we have had good leaders of PRTs that they are more effective. Having a cadre of people who are experienced in these situations is quite important. The future head of the PRT in Helmand, for example, is somebody who used to be head of DFID's office in Iraq, was head of DFID's programme in Afghanistan and is now going back to run the PRT in Helmand and has a strong track record of working in conflict environments. That is good to build up a cadre of leaders who can do that. I think that the FCO also now has a cadre of people who have that experience. But leaders cannot be the whole story and so the work that we are doing through the Stabilisation Unit and building up the civilian cadre and having other people in the PRT who have experienced working in this comprehensive inter-departmental way will reinforce the fact when you do not have the strongest leadership. So I think you have to work on both fronts - the leaders as well as the worker bees that are also need to be embedded with a comprehensive spirit.
Q168 Chairman: How many people in your department speak Pashtu, Dr Shafik?
Dr Shafik: None; in terms of the employees in DFID. But to be honest ---
Q169 Chairman: Not one?
Dr Shafik: Not fluently. I think a lot of the people who have served have studied the language and can manage, but to say I have a fluent Pashtu speaker, no.
Q170 Chairman: Is that something that you should perhaps be addressing?
Dr Shafik: We have tended, I have to say, to rely on the FCO for being the linguists and we have tended to recruit people on the basis of their development expertise because they deploy all around the world.
Q171 Chairman:
And
lots of times to
Dr Shafik: Clearly it would be a good thing and we encourage our staff if they are interested, but it is a weakness - it is a weakness.
Mr Jenkin: Chairman, it is only fair to ask the Armed Forces the same question.
Chairman: Do not worry, we will!
Q172 Linda Gilroy: If you would like to cover that?
Dr Shafik: The only other thing I would say is that we rely very heavily on local staff; we have more Afghan staff working for us in Afghanistan than we have UK staff, so a lot of the language issues are addressed by the fact that much of our work is actually being done by Afghans.
Q173 Chairman:
How
long do you assess the military will be in
Dr Shafik: I hope the military will be in there as long as we are, but I think for at least 20 years.
Q174 Robert Key: Chairman, might I ask Dr Shafik how many of your locally employed staff, your Afghan staff speak English?
Dr Shafik: Virtually all of them speak some English. Some of the more lower level administrative staff - not the administrative staff but drivers and so on will not speak very good English, but everyone will speak some; and our professional staff are excellent.
Q175 Linda Gilroy: So the same question about PRTs and how they look and whether they are over-dependent on the leadership on the one hand but what you could do to make sure that every PRT has good leadership.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I agree with what Minouche said. I think the nature of this beast is such that the person you put in charge of it is going to have a profound impact on how successful this is. I think that the PRTs as entities, the kind of model that we saw when we were last in Lashkar Gah is what we ought to be aiming for with a good mix of military of civilian people with the right skills. The way to make it stronger and more consistently effective is by, as Minouche has described, growing a group of staff who have done quite a bit of this sort of thing. The woman who is about to take over in Lashkar Gah is I think known to the Committee and, as Minouche says, is on her third post of this kind; and that must help if we can get that degree of consistency into it.
Q176 Linda Gilroy: And as far as Pashtu?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I would need notice about how many of our military colleagues speak Pashtu. I do not think the answer is zero.
Chairman: I think it may be.
Q177 Linda Gilroy: Except that presumably in terms of training the Afghan Army, whether it is zero or not it is an important aspect of what should be done. When I was over there with the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme I saw even quite junior marines sitting down with their colleagues from the Afghan Army and conducting almost mini jirgas with elders - it was put on, a presentation for our purposes. So there seems to be a great thirst at the lower levels but whether at the level of fluency where it could matter quite a bit there is sufficient paid to that, and presumably again does it rely on what the Foreign Office have in the way of Pashtu speakers. Perhaps Peter could deal with that?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: If I could just finish off the point? I think in the military context it would certainly help - no doubt about it. What we tend to do is to rely greatly on local interpreters who certainly from my observation are usually very good.
Q178 Dai Havard: The Gurkhas.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The other limiting fact inevitably with the military is that we are deploying on a six-monthly cycle quite a significant proportion of the British Army and the Marines. Having said all that, though, it would help if we had more fluent Pashtu speakers.
Q179 Linda Gilroy: Of course some people are now serving second, third, fourth and even more terms of deployment there. Sir Peter.
Sir Peter Ricketts: Ms Gilroy, on your point
about leadership I agree with what my colleagues have said - leadership is
always important in these operations and a good leader will always make a
difference and make an operation better.
So, yes, we need to make sure that the leader of our PRT is an effective
leader and also can work well in this joint structure that we have with the
brigadier who is there. But we also need
to have systems in place so that it is not totally reliant on any one
individual and there is a strong enough system so that cooperation will work in
addition to there being a good leader at the top. I think it is very important and a very
powerful signal that the next civilian leader of our operation in
Q180 Chairman: What on earth has happened to the language training that the Foreign Office used to give?
Sir Peter Ricketts: Until 2002 we did not have an
embassy in
Q181 Chairman: Are you going to concentrate on that?
Sir Peter Ricketts: We have many other calls - we need also to be generating speakers of the languages where we have to operate around the world - but, among other things, yes, we intend to build up more of a cadre of Pashtu speakers.
Q182 Linda Gilroy: But given the priority that Afghanistan has and the length of time that we appear to be committed to their, surely it should be featuring as a priority for everyone to one degree or another, but particularly for the Foreign Office contribution to making this work. Can I just move to one last question in this series on the length of postings on both PRTs and also military postings? Dr Shafik, you have just mentioned that there is to be a new head of PRT; can you just remind the Committee what the length of postings is as head of PRT and what your view on the length of posting is. Is it something that is registered as an issue with you? Is thought given to it? Is there debate about it?
Dr Shafik: Most civilians serving in
Q183 Linda Gilroy: Sir Bill, Dr Shafik suggested that six-month deployments are necessary as far as military is concerned but we have had debates with people who have given us evidence on our Afghanistan inquiry particularly previously at which it appears that some of the more senior levels people are thinking that there should be consideration given to longer deployments and that there would be advantages to the success of the deployments from that. What is your current view on that?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: In terms of the generality of ground troops there is no current intention to move away from six-month deployments. What has been recognised by senior military commanders is that there are other key posts at officer level where consistently with the shorter deployments of the ground troops we can arrange for longer postings. The current deputy commander of ISAF is there on a 12-month posting. We will do the same when we take over the command of RC South in a few months' time, and some of the key posts in Task Force Helmand at officer level will be held for longer than six months. The particularly difficult issue is actually the commander of the Task Force because as this Committee knows very well there is definitely a benefit in deploying a brigadier with his brigade, as it were. On the other hand, what we have been trying to do is to find other senior posts where continuity does make a difference and to have extended tours for the holders of these posts.
Dai Havard: Can I go back to the question
of resources on the ground? The PRT: the
question I have written down here is do they have access to sufficient funding
and authority to make a difference? That
is the question. What I would like to
understand is, there is going to be a big change in Helmand and we have seen in
Chairman: Except that I want to limit the approach to the British area.
Dai Havard: Can we limit it to how the money will work because part of it is how we put money is through supporting government organisations and the Americans do not do that either; they have a different way of supporting the local people. So how do you see the money is going to flow?
Q184 Chairman: We are just about to come on to the difference between the British approach and American approaches in other questions.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: If I could say something
about
Q185 Dai Havard: The PRT currently there is led by the Brits, is it not?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: Yes.
Q186 Dai
Havard: There are Danes, Estonians and there is some
Sir Bill Jeffrey: My current expectation is that it will carry on broadly as it is now, but I would like to just check my facts on that and if I am misleading the Committee in any way I will arrange for a note to be provided.
Q187 Dai
Havard: So we could have the Brits continuing to use
the money in the way we will use the money and alongside it there could be a
parallel operation by the
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think there is an appreciation that in the areas in which we have been operating - and there may be some adjustments in these areas as a consequence of the arrival of US troops - we have begun to get interaction and have some impact, and that I think will lead to, broadly speaking, the continuation of the status quo.
Q188 Robert Key: Could I just return for one moment to what Sir Peter Ricketts was saying about language? No one expects all our embassy staff in every country of the world to be fluent in the language of the country in which they are working; however, I seem to recall that in years gone by the Foreign Office did have a language school of its own; does that still exist?
Sir Peter Ricketts: No. We closed down our own
in-house school and we now train our people using professional language
training facilities in universities and specialist organisations around
Q189 Robert Key: You said that you intend to increase the number of Pashtu speakers, which implies that you are not at the moment, and that this is an aspiration; is that right?
Sir Peter Ricketts: We have some and I want to have more.
Q190
Robert Key: Is that constrained by your budget?
Sir Peter Ricketts: No. We have the funds we need to train people.
Q191 Robert Key: I would anticipate that your staff would be in the lead very often in contact with the local community and therefore it is absolutely key that you should have enough people speaking the language in the country in which you are operating.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I absolutely accept that.
Q192 Robert Key: Could I turn to Dr Shafik and ask how difficult it is for DFID staff to work with local nationals in delivering successful outcomes?
Dr Shafik: I would not say it is
difficult at all. It is our
priority. Our whole approach is about
building Afghan capacity and the fewer
Q193 Robert Key: But you have to operate within a dominant military environment, do you not? Is that a problem in itself? Does it constrain how easily you can move around and so on?
Dr Shafik: On balance the military is incredibly useful to us in terms of getting us to places where we otherwise would not be able to go. It is an issue for the NGO community who we sometimes work with and I know that the Red Cross submission to this Committee emphasised the difficulties for the NGOs of working in a military environment. It is less of an issue for DFID officials.
Sir Peter Ricketts: Could I interject with one
point just to broaden the focus because a lot of our discussion has been about
Helmand but the British presence in
Q194 Robert Key: No; that was very helpful. Last week Professor Chalmers of King's College London and Bradford told us that we had to distinguish between two sorts of NGOs, those who are sub-contracted to provide particular services and those who are operating completely independently and who might be willing to co-ordinate their activity but are independent actors on the ground. How difficult is it to work with those two different kinds of NGOs?
Dr Shafik: Many NGOs, particularly the humanitarian ones, place a very high premium on their independence and neutrality, and it is the key to their own security. We consult with them regularly. They have said quite clearly that it is very important for them not to be seen as agents of the military because their security is then jeopardised. They provide a vital service and the more NGOs we have operating in places like Afghanistan the better off we are, and in order to work with them we have worked with the Scandinavians and developed guidelines for engagement with NGOs in armed conflict or Afghanistan and the ISAF troops have signed up to those guidelines. For example, we do things like we do not meet with them in the PRT; we meet with them outside in neutral territory so they are not seen to be implicated as agents of the military presence. I would not say it is difficult but we do have to be sensitive to their concerns, particularly because it jeopardises their effectiveness if we are not sensitive.
Q195 Robert Key: In terms of our relations with, for example, the Americans, who operate their Commanders Emergency Response Programme; they regard money as an alternative weapon, does this lead to a sort of bidding war between the Americans and the British and other players? Is there a real conflict between the two approaches?
Dr Shafik: At some level, yes. Just to give an illustration, the Afghan
government's budget this year is about $4 billion. The CERP programme, the
Chairman: We are just about to come on to the international tensions.
Q196 Robert
Key: Could I finish my questions by asking
particularly about the role of women in all of this? Security Council Resolution 1325,
particularly at Article 8(c), calls on all actors negotiating and implementing
peace agreements to adopt a gender perspective ensuring the respect for the
human rights of women and girls, particularly as they relate to the
constitution, the electoral system, the police and the judiciary. How does this work in a country like
Dr Shafik: Yes.
Q197 Robert Key: You mean, yes, I am wrong?
Dr Shafik: No, it was more "yes" as I
gather my thoughts. As you know, the
Q198 Linda Gilroy: I wonder if there is an element of conflict between what you were describing just now as the very understandable wish to build capacity amongst Afghanis by putting the aid money through the national government but on the other hand narrowly avoiding setback to women under the legal system, largely through the intervention of the UK Government. Is there a tension there in trying to secure women, not just in parliament, where, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan have got a good record thanks to the work of the NGOs in making sure that happened, and how can you move in the right direction of travel rather than, as was narrowly avoided recently, in the wrong direction of travel in these things?
Dr Shafik: We do not put all of our money through the Afghan government. We also support NGOs and women's groups alongside that to empower women to claim more rights in the country. That is one mechanism and I will let Peter say a bit more.
Sir Peter Ricketts: You are right: there could be a tension because we are putting our money through the Afghan government and the Afghan government will in the end take its own decisions on the policies it wants to adopt, but the fact that we have maintained such a close relationship with the Afghan government in many of these areas means that if there is a problem, like there was over this issue recently, we can raise it with them and press President Karzai very hard to change his mind, which in the end he did. I think that is the way we have to resolve the tension. I do think you are right to point to the role of women in the Afghan parliament, which certainly has been significant, and I would hope to see in the forthcoming elections plenty of women returned to the Afghan parliament so that they can continue to exercise influence there.
Q199 Linda Gilroy: The action plan which Dr Shafik mentioned, which I believe is in the ownership of the FCO to lead, was published I think in 2006. However, because it is of such significance, a Comprehensive Approach cannot be a Comprehensive Approach unless it embraces, in both the civilian population but also in the people who are trying to help them, a good contribution from women. Has there been an update on the implementation of the 2006 action plan and, if so, can we see it?
Sir Peter Ricketts: I do not know the answer but
I would be happy to provide a note on the implementation of the 1325 action
plan, particularly in relation to
Q200 Linda Gilroy: I think a note would be very helpful on that, Chairman.
Sir Peter Ricketts: We will provide one for you.
Q201 Linda Gilroy: May I finally return to Dr Shafik? I think I am right in saying that as of the end of last year, of the then 30 current peace operations going on, which I know you range across, the ones under the UN, there was only female chief of mission to the UN Secretary-General Special Representative to Liberia, Helen Margareta Aloj(?) from Denmark. Has there been any progress since then? Are you, as a leading person in the international field of reconstruction and peace building, aware of whether the momentum to try and achieve more in that respect is going in the right direction, or is it stalled?
Dr Shafik: We have pressed very hard and we think this is quite a high priority. I cannot say there has been much progress since the one case that you identify, but it is something on which we have pushed the UN system very hard. More broadly, we have pushed the UN system to create a body for gender in the UN system, because at the moment gender issues are spread out and fragmented across a variety of agencies and there is no strong voice for women in the UN system, which is mad given that it is the majority of the world's population.
Q202 Linda
Gilroy: And how can a Comprehensive Approach be
comprehensive unless there is a very great deal more attention paid to
this? Can any of you tell me, for
instance, what proportion of the population in
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am sure that is true.
Linda Gilroy: Does anybody know?
Q203 Chairman: I think the answer is you cannot because there has not been a census for a long time.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I think your assumption is absolutely right.
Linda Gilroy: I have heard people say that
60 or 70 per cent of the population in
Q204 Mr Crausby: It is highly unlikely, is it not, that we will be involved in any major conflict without at least one coalition partner, so how well does the Government work with international bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union and in particular NATO?
Sir Peter Ricketts: I had better declare an
interest to the Committee in that I was Ambassador for NATO so I have a
particular interest in and affection for the
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I agree with all of
that. The thing I would say is that the
thinking we have been discussing throughout this session is increasingly
embedded in these big international organisations. I was at an event yesterday evening in
Dr Shafik: We speak the same language more or less. I think the only thing I would add would be on the UN. The UN is clearly moving in the direction of taking a more Comprehensive Approach to the creation of what they call integrated missions, which include peacekeeping and diplomats as well as development efforts. However, it is not there yet, and I think the Foreign Secretary helpfully chaired a session of the Security Council last year which looked at the deficiencies in the UN's approach and focused particularly on the UN's lack of a coherent strategy, lack of capacity and lack of pooled funding for it to support integrated missions. They need to do a lot of the same things that we have tried to learn to do better - better capacity on the ground, better common action against a single strategy, more deployable civilian capacity, faster and more flexible funding. It is a very similar agenda. Having said that, even though we are not there yet it is worth making the investment because the evidence is clear. Academic research shows that peacekeeping missions reduce the probability of conflict by 85 per cent, and if we can avoid a recurrence of war it is worth struggling through the managerial and administrative constraints that we are struggling with.
Q205 Mr Crausby: Thinking particularly about NATO and working on the NATO command, does NATO have any concept of a Comprehensive Approach on the same basis that we would think about it? I know what you say about the new strategic concept, but how could we incorporate a Comprehensive Approach into the new strategic concept? Is that too big a task?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: On the contrary, it is very likely to happen. It is notable how many of recent communiqués after NATO meetings, for example, have included language that very much reflects the Comprehensive Approach thinking. It may not always be described as that but it is embedded to my knowledge in the thinking of many of our partners, including the Danes and the Dutch, to take the most obvious examples. I think it is there and I do not think it will be difficult to reflect it in the new strategic concept that NATO will be working towards now. The issue is more about operationalising it in practice because that is where it is gets challenging.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am absolutely sure that this is going to be a key issue for the new strategic concept and, as Bill says, the new Secretary-General as well as the outgoing Secretary-General are very committed to this. I know at SHAPE it is now the normal practice in planning for operations to plan in the civilian component, so that there is a cell at SHAPE for NGOs, there are civilian cells at SHAPE which are there to ensure that the military planning includes planning for how the NATO military operation will fit with civilian actors. What NATO will not be able to do is, as it were, take under a NATO command the civilian part of the overall Comprehensive Approach. They will not, I think, do police training. They will not do building governance or development work as NATO but in developing their NATO plan they will make sure that they plan in how they will fit with civilian actors and that is important.
Q206 Mr Crausby: What about working with the Americans? In normal circumstances they have much greater resources, much greater numbers. Are we not in danger of being completely swamped by their Comprehensive Approach rather than our concept of it? Is it possible to work together with the Americans in relation to the size of our contribution?
Sir Peter Ricketts: First of all, I think it is
possible, yes. We have been working hard
with the Americans since the arrival of the new administration on their new
strategy, and their new Afghanistan strategy,
which the President announced some weeks ago, I think reflects a lot of
discussion and consultation with us and it is a strategy that, as our ministers
have said, we are very comfortable with, so the overall framework inside which
the Americans are working is one that we are very comfortable with. Their style of operation, as my colleagues
have said, can be different. Of course,
their scale is much bigger than ours, but they are planning that their own
surge will take place across the whole of the south and east of
Sir Bill Jeffrey: It is possible, I think, to over-caricature the American approach as an entirely military-heavy one. They too have learned a great deal over the last few years and I sense that the thinking is in fact quite close, as Peter has implied, to ours. They tend to quote the old government approach but in essence they are talking about the same thing.
Sir Peter Ricketts: For example, they are
generating several hundred more state department civilian advisers to deploy
across
Q207 Linda Gilroy: Dr Shafik rightly pointed to the fact that conflict costs an awful lot of money and it was interesting to hear you say that there could well be a place for a Comprehensive Approach within the new security approach. Has anybody done any work on how investing money in conflict, peace-building and reconstruction and those aspects of future conflict prevention is actually a worthwhile investment in terms of avoiding going back to future conflict? I think I am right in saying that about 50 per cent of conflicts become conflicts again within ten years and therefore presumably the whole approach to improving that, perhaps reducing it to ten per cent of conflicts recurring within a ten-year period, would be something which would be helpful to governments, not just nationally but in international discussions on trying to put money into this.
Dr Shafik: You are quite right - there has been some work on this. Paul Collier's work shows that the average economic cost of a conflict is equivalent to all global aid in a particular year, and so every conflict you avoid is saving tens of billions of dollars in terms of losses that could be avoided. That is partly why we have created the conflict pools, because, like in the health sector, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. An ounce of conflict prevention is worth many pounds of conflict engagement and the conflict pools were really an attempt to set aside resources for conflict prevention because when you are in a conflict those resources are the first to be raided. Much of the work that we do on conflict prevention under the pools is that kind of slow, painstaking investment in political reconciliation and compromise which is essential for avoiding the very high cost of conflicts which would otherwise result.
Q208 Mr
Havard: On the question of where the Comprehensive
Approach is going, it builds on some of the things we have just been talking
about in a sense. Our definition, as I
understand it from your memorandum, is that it is a philosophy, a framework,
that has to be adapted and adopted in different operational circumstances, not
a prescribed way of doing things, a description of how you do joined-up working
and so on, so in a sense pretty obvious - it is a matter of how you do it
operationally. However, the first test
for how it is going to work is currently in
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think that if you ask what
the future of the Comprehensive Approach is, in
Sir Peter Ricketts: For me it is, as you say, essentially a frame of mind. It is an assumption that you will do the job better if you work together, and we do now have ten years' worth of officials who have had to work together through these difficult international crises. I think the key thing is that we do not have to learn that again. If we do we move on now from a phase where we have had two or three major military operations going on at the same time and all the civilian work alongside them to a period where perhaps we have fewer major military operations. We have got to preserve the spirit of joint working and the knowledge of each other and each other's cultures that we have developed over the last decade. That for me is what the future of the Comprehensive Approach should be about.
Dr Shafik: One of the decisions that we took recently was to find a way to upgrade the role of the Stabilisation Unit. We have got a joint team working at the moment discussing what the future of the Stabilisation Unit should be, what capacities it needs to house, and I think that will be one mechanism for us in ensuring that the lessons are embodied in the bit of Whitehall that we jointly own. There is just one other thing I would say in terms of the future of the Comprehensive Approach. One of the lessons we have learned is that the whole security and justice and police set of issues was something that we probably underestimated in the earlier days, and I think we realise that we need to strengthen our capacity in that area. I do think we have to keep pushing on multilateralising some of this capacity, given the complexity of future operations and the need to be able to have multilateral instruments to use in the future. That is why we are investing a lot in the UN Secretary-General's peace building report which will be coming out shortly, which we are hoping will position the UN to be a much more effective deliverer of the Comprehensive Approach in many parts of the world.
Q209 Mr Havard: There seems to be almost a Comprehensive Approach emerging on the security side and a Comprehensive Approach emerging amongst development. Pulling them together is a real Comprehensive Approach. That is the trick; that seems to be the tension. Within doing that, in terms of who can deliver and how they can deliver, have you got anything to say about the development of forms of reconstruction forces, because the military clearly are doing tasks that they should not really be doing and there are others who are not doing tasks that they should be doing? What is the way forward? Are there military standing forces that need to be established or is there some in-between model of the sort that Ed Butler was starting to outline for us in our last evidence session? There is a mixture of standing forces, statutory bodies, contracting organisations, that are partly reservist and so on. Is there an appetite for that sort of discussion or is that something that is being dismissed and we are going to continue to work with the current agencies that we have?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think there is an appetite for that sort of discussion. We need to be clear about the military doing what the military can do. It is quite striking that we have not spent much time this morning talking about the role of contractors in the private sector. They undoubtedly have such a role and a number of people are thinking perhaps a little more imaginatively about how that can be developed.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am sure that we need to
have that discussion, and certainly we would not dismiss any of those
ideas. The idea that we are developing
through our Stabilisation Unit is of a deployable cadre of people with
experience of these conflict areas, contractors but also civil servants who
will be a bigger pool we can draw on when we need to mobilise people, but we
are bound to need help from contractors in the private sector and from the
military. I think the dosage of those
various elements is something that we need to go on working on. Partly it depends on available funding,
partly on decisions of principle about how far the military want to be used for
these sorts of reconstruction tasks, but I think there is a very open mind in
Dr Shafik: I should also say that we benefit greatly from the military support. There were several projects that we had to deliver in Iraq that we could not have done if the military had not provided us with a security envelope to move vast water pumps across southern Iraq, and we also work very closely with them in a wide variety of humanitarian situations around the world where we do not have, for whatever reason, commercial options to deliver humanitarian aid. The military on a number of occasions has helped us by providing air lift, ships, whatever we need to get emergency supplies into humanitarian crises, and that is something we are also very grateful for.
Q210 Mr Havard: Do you think that attitude is shared by the NGO community with which you work?
Dr Shafik: I think the NGO community is completely fine about DFID using the military to provide support to humanitarian operations. I think it is more problematic for them in-country for the NGOs themselves to be seen as instruments of or being serviced by the military, although there have been some occasions when they have certainly been very grateful for help on transport, for example.
Q211 Mr Havard: And their relationship with the quasi-commercial organisations being involved in that, would that change the view, as opposed to governmental organisations?
Dr Shafik: How do the NGOs feel about working with commercial contractors? Contractors who are delivering development or military?
Q212 Mr Havard: Possibly both.
Dr Shafik: I do not think they have much engagement, to be honest, on the military side, but they certainly have no issues about dealing with the ones who are delivering development services and work quite closely with them.
Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed for that evidence session. It was extremely interesting, most helpful, and I think we got to the bottom of a number of important questions. For this unique session we are most grateful.