The War In Afghanistan: How A Political Surge Can Work
NATO Parliamentary Assembly,
Edinburgh
November 17th, 2009
Last week in Berlin, I watched the moving commemoration of the event that defined the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Wall twenty years ago closed a dark chapter in Europe’s history. It also presaged a broader role for NATO.
There are many big, long term issues for NATO to address - notably cooperation with the EU, where the passage of the Lisbon Treaty creates a major opportunity for more proactive and efficient European Defence and Foreign Policy cooperation; relations with Russia, where NATO and OSCE in their own ways need to respond in a positive and principled fashion to the idea of a debate about European security architecture; and the modernisation of NATO’s internal structures, where we need to streamline decision-making, improve defence planning, slim down the headquarters structures and beef up capability development.
Today, however, I make no apology for focusing my remarks on the war in Afghanistan. In each of the countries of NATO, people are wondering whether the military commitment of combat troops will be endless. My belief is that it does not need to be – if we ally to the impending decisions for force uplift, Afghan and international, a commitment to political uplift, in the key relationships between the peoples of Afghanistan, the government and the insurgency, and Afghanistan and its neighbours. Today I want to discuss how the idea of a political surge can be turned from a cliché into a reality.
The Scale of the Sacrifice
I don’t need to remind this audience that total ISAF casualties this year alone stand at 472. Many more have been injured, in many cases very seriously. Many thousands of members of the Afghan National Security Forces, the Pakistani military and civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed. We pay tribute today to each and every sacrifice made.
For the UK, we have suffered the bloodiest year since the Falklands war. Since Armistice Day 2008 we have lost over 100 members of our armed forces. The Prime Minister spoke ten days ago, and last night, about the aims of the mission – to prevent Afghanistan being used again, by Al Qaida under the umbrella of Taliban rule, as a launching pad for international terrorism; about the strategic plan – to support the development of Afghan institutions to deliver this goal; about the priorities – for a clean and competent Cabinet and provincial appointments, for enhancements to ANSF capacity, for action against corruption that saps the loyalty of the Afghan people; and about the next steps, starting with the inauguration of President Karzai in Kabul, where I will travel later this week.
The military effort is brave and impressive. Since this is a war, and since soldiers are being killed, it is inevitable that much of the debate about strategy concerns military posture and above all troop numbers. That is important. Secretary General Rasmussen has addressed the issue this morning. In every capital, every government and every Parliament, we will have to address the issue of what burden we should bear.
President Obama is now in the final stages of his deliberations. In the UK we support the prosecution of a serious counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan. We do not see that as an alternative to counter-terrorism but as the best means to achieve it. And we are ready in the right conditions to raise our already high contributions on the basis of an agreed strategy.
I fully endorse the arguments for burden sharing today. But I don’t want to repeat them. Instead I want to return to a theme that I outlined in a speech at NATO headquarters in July, and set out what the UK government believes to be the essential counterpart of a coherent military strategy – namely a political strategy of strength because it is comprehensive and depth because it is rooted in the life and history of the Afghan people.
We all repeat that “there can be no purely military solution”; so let’s take that mantra seriously; recognise that we will succeed in Afghanistan only when our military resources and development assistance are aligned behind a clear political strategy. Unless we get this right our military will be able to suppress the cancers of insurgency and instability, but not tackle their causes.
The goals of a political strategy are clear. It is to unite a critical mass of the key players behind shared goals – Al Qaida kept out, the different tribal groups kept onside, and the neighbours prepared to play a constructive role in Afghanistan’s future. I stress that a political strategy is not separate from a military strategy, or vice versa. Each must be part of a single whole, working to our overriding shared objective.
To be successful the political strategy must address three audiences. This is a war in the mind as well on the ground. First, the Afghan people and their loyalty: to reassure and mobilise citizens to resist the Taliban, military effort to improve security must be allied to civilian effort to improve governance especially at the local level. Second, the insurgents and their determination to fight: military pressure to beat back the insurgency must be combined with support to flip sides rather than fight or run away. Third, Afghanistan’s neighbours: a new relationship must be forged between Afghanistan and its neighbours, based on the understanding that Afghanistan’s future is not as a client of any, but as a secure country in its own right.
Reassurance
Less than five percent of Afghans want the Taliban back. This is our greatest strength. But they fear that the international community will tire of the war and the Taliban will return, inflicting brutal retribution on those who “collaborated” with the government.
This is the security challenge at the heart of the McChrystal report. It requires training and mentoring of the Afghan army and police. And it requires us to support local, informal security initiatives, empowering communities that decide that they want to stop the insurgents from terrorising their villages.
But security, formal and informal, is inseparable from governance. This is the first plank of an effective political strategy.
The Taliban know this. This is why they appoint shadow governors. It is why they have systems to take up complaints against their own so called "officials". Why they install “shari'a” courts to deliver swift and enforced justice in contested and controlled areas.
The Government of Afghanistan, supported by the international community, must offer a better alternative.
Many of the candidates in the Presidential election, including President Karzai himself and Dr Abdullah, argued for a wider process than the constitutionally mandated Parliamentary and District Elections next year, to take stock of the national political structures created in the heat of events after 2001. But for most Afghans, particularly in the areas most badly infected by the insurgency, sub-national governance is the only form of governance that matters. The 34 Provincial Governors, the 364 District Governors of Afghanistan, and the shuras – bodies of local elders – should all represent their people’s views, and help deliver to the people the governance, the security, and the elementary justice, they crave.
There are a number of good ways sub-national governance is being supported: through the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, for example, or the Afghan Social Outreach Programme, or the 22, 000 Community Development Councils. But their coverage is patchy, the link to the reintegration of insurgents weak, and their funding far too small. In 2008, the total national budget of the Afghan Government Department responsible for local governance, the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, was $33m. That is less than $1m a province to run local administration.
A winning political strategy would select and train, empower and equip, mentor and monitor those responsible for governing the provinces and districts of Afghanistan. It would help those Governors and District Governors create, through elections or other appropriate methods of consultation, truly representative local shuras that have the backing of the Afghan Constitution. In turn, those shuras can guide the distribution of development funds that create jobs and build schools and clinics. They can deliver some aspects of civil and criminal collective dispute resolution which is what Afghans mean by the rule of law. They can provide a forum for a political debate, and, under carefully controlled conditions, provide the re-entry mechanisms for insurgents seeking reintegration.
In this, there may need to be, as General McChrystal has said, a different approach to the insurgency in rural areas – where sympathy for the Taliban is much stronger, and where security and governance have never been delivered by conventional military or police forces – to that in urban areas, where resentment of the Taliban and all they represent is more acute, and where the conventional tactics of “Clear, Hold and Build”, delivered by conventional Afghan and international forces, may have a much greater chance of gaining purchase.
The offer to the Afghan people has to be, at national and subnational level, governance they can believe in. Believe in because it is there to stay. And there to stay because it goes with the grain of the ancient but continually evolving traditions on which the Afghan polity has existed as a stable but loose confederation for some two and a half centuries.
Our role should not be to prescribe exactly how those traditions evolve, or how the systems which reflect them are implemented, but to provide the resources without which none of this would be possible, and which will be far far less expensive than trying to suppress the insurgency by conventional military means.
Reintegration
This brings me to the second part of the political strategy: dividing the insurgency.
The Afghan insurgency is not a monolith. There is no single authoritative leadership. Different insurgent groups operate in different localities. Sometimes they take orders from a Taliban central command in Peshawar or Quetta. Other times cooperation is purely tactical and opportunistic.
By combining targeted military pressure with concrete political incentives we can change the calculations of these people and force them to reassess. This time last year the Taliban commander Ghulam Yahya claimed to control 600 fighters in Herat, western Afghanistan. But in October he was killed in an ISAF strike. Shortly afterwards his deputy was arrested by the ANP, and the insurgent structures underneath him quickly collapsed, with former fighters returning to their villages and accepting the authority of the government.
This is just one example. But with intelligence led, targeted operations against not just individuals but key positions within the insurgent hierarchy, we can weaken the insurgency. Because the impact is not just on the individual who is removed, but on those around him who fear for their lives.
There does, however, need to be an alternative to fighting – a route back into society, not just a tougher penalty. That is the significance of discussion of a National Reintegration Organisation, which can help former combatants to return to their homes, supporting them to start new lives and find new ways to make a living and support their families. The international community can provide support – including through an Afghan Resettlement fund - but reintegration needs to be led by the Afghans both at the central and at the district and community levels.
The thesis is simple. Some Afghan Taliban may be committed to global jihad. But the vast majority are not. Their primary commitment is to tribe and to locality. Our goal is not a fight to the death. It is to demonstrate clearly that they cannot win; and to provide a way back into their communities for those who are prepared to live peacefully.
Once reintegration gains momentum, and the insurgency is starting to fray or crumble, we will need to support President Karzai in reaching out to those high-level commanders that can be persuaded to renounce Al Qaida and pursue their goals peacefully within the constitutional framework. This will be far from straightforward. But the historical lessons are clear. Blood enemies from the Soviet period and the civil war now work together in government. Former Talibs already sit in the Parliament. It is essential that, when the time is right, members of the current insurgency are encouraged to follow suit.
Neighbours
The third element in weakening the insurgency is a new relationship with Afghanistan’s neighbours. The fighters within Afghanistan draw on funding, support and shelter from beyond its borders.
Afghanistan’s neighbours are motivated by a range of contradictory fears. As Hillary Clinton pointed out again on Sunday, it is not, and never has been, the coalition’s intention, to establish a permanent security force in Afghanistan, or colonise the country, or to use it as a base for regional dominance. But equally having driven Al Qaida from Afghanistan we do not want to leave only for them to return.
The choice on offer for the neighbours is not between stable clienthood and unstable independence. It is between an unstable state with terrorism, crime, drugs and migration destabilising the whole neighbourhood, and an independent, sovereign state which enjoys good relations with its neighbours, and is a responsible and respected member of the international community.
Each of the neighbours has a range of interests in Afghanistan – whether it is Iranian investments in Herat, or Pakistani interest in promoting the return of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees still in Pakistan, or Russian and Central Asian concern about drug running. Above all, they have much to gain from an Afghanistan that develops as a commercial and cultural cross-roads of South West Asia. Creating this will require the kind of long-term vision and drive that brought peace to Western Europe after centuries of conflict. It must be done, using the habits of consultation and conciliation essential to convincing the parties that each has more to lose from continuing conflict than it has to gain from tolerant co-operation.
The foundation for better relations is the resolve shown by the Pakistani government, military and people in taking on domestic insurgents, most recently in South Waziristan. For years, the West has lobbied Pakistani politicians and army generals to take action against domestic militants. Yet despite billions of dollars in US military assistance, there was little shift in behaviour. The fight against terrorism was seen as Washington’s war. That position has been transformed because Pakistani public opinion has shifted dramatically. Pakistani citizens have felt the devastating effects of terrorists turning on their own people.
The opportunity is to squeeze the life out of the terrorist threat from both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That will happen only if Pakistan and the international community develop a new relationship based on a recognition of interdependence and shared interests. The successful passage of the Kerry-Lugar Bill shows that the partnership with the US is based on development as well as security, and is between civilian institutions not just military ones. The first EU-Pakistan summit earlier this year was a step towards a longer-term strategic partnership between the two, in which the world’s largest single market and its biggest aid budget must help promote economic growth and development in a country beset by poverty and instability.
But the relationship must be two-way. The international community must address the needs of ordinary Pakistanis – in terms of jobs, education, trade and agriculture. Pakistan must address not just the terrorist threat to its own citizens, but Al Qaida and the Afghan Taliban who threaten our citizens. That means the current military operations need over time to address all militants who shelter Al Qaida, as well as those who threaten Pakistan itself. It also means ensuring that the areas that have already been subject to military operations – in Swat and the Malakand Division – are reconstructed effectively and internally displaced persons resettled, so that short-term military success does not give way to longer term civilian disaffection. Finally, it means giving the people of FATA a clear roadmap towards proper inclusion in the Pakistani state, with the same rights – and responsibilities – as other citizens.
The Agenda for the next Afghan Government
This political strategy depends on an Afghan Government able to act decisively in the interests of the whole country. There can be no Afghanisation without an Afghan lead.
President Karzai intends to use his inaugural speech on Thursday to set out a positive agenda for the Afghan people. We shall be there to act as witnesses to what should be a new contract between President Karzai and people. A people whose hopes were so lifted by the achievements of the years after the fall of the Taliban; and whose fears of a return to earlier, never forgotten, miseries have been awoken by the endurance of the insurgency of a more recent past. Our role is to support their aspirations because the Afghan people are key to the future stability of the country. We need to do so in a coordinated and effective way, and that is what the Prime Minister set out yesterday.
In the eyes of the Afghan people and the wider world, this means addressing the corrosive fear of corruption. None of us is so naïve as to think that in Afghanistan, or any other country, corruption can be eliminated overnight or completely. Nor do we deny that the vast flow of foreign funds into a country whose government’s self-generated income is less than $1bn a year doesn’t play a part.
Yesterday Interior Minister Atmar announced the creation of a new unit to tackle high-level corruption. This will need real powers both to investigate and to prosecute. And the Afghan people also need to see, from the appointments of Cabinet Ministers and Provincial Governors, that there is a fresh attempt to govern in their interests. By governing in their interests, the new Afghan government will be governing in ours. Because the point about counter-insurgency is that it depends on the will of the people.
I - as much as anyone else - want to bring our troops back home to safety. But we cannot leave a vacuum which the Taliban will quickly fill. Counter-terrorism deals with the symptoms. It brings short term success. But only a comprehensive strategy can deal with the causes and ensure that when we leave, we do so knowing that we will not have to return.
This is not a war without end. But success must be based on aligning our military and civilian resources behind a clear political strategy. A strategy that reassures and mobilises ordinary Afghans to resist the Taliban; that divides the insurgency by reintegrating and reconciling those in search of money, status or power; and that builds a new relationship between Afghanistan and its neighbours. That is what the British Government is determined to promote.
NATO Parliamentary Assembly,
Edinburgh
November 17th, 2009
Last week in Berlin, I watched the moving commemoration of the event that defined the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Wall twenty years ago closed a dark chapter in Europe’s history. It also presaged a broader role for NATO.
There are many big, long term issues for NATO to address - notably cooperation with the EU, where the passage of the Lisbon Treaty creates a major opportunity for more proactive and efficient European Defence and Foreign Policy cooperation; relations with Russia, where NATO and OSCE in their own ways need to respond in a positive and principled fashion to the idea of a debate about European security architecture; and the modernisation of NATO’s internal structures, where we need to streamline decision-making, improve defence planning, slim down the headquarters structures and beef up capability development.
Today, however, I make no apology for focusing my remarks on the war in Afghanistan. In each of the countries of NATO, people are wondering whether the military commitment of combat troops will be endless. My belief is that it does not need to be – if we ally to the impending decisions for force uplift, Afghan and international, a commitment to political uplift, in the key relationships between the peoples of Afghanistan, the government and the insurgency, and Afghanistan and its neighbours. Today I want to discuss how the idea of a political surge can be turned from a cliché into a reality.
The Scale of the Sacrifice
I don’t need to remind this audience that total ISAF casualties this year alone stand at 472. Many more have been injured, in many cases very seriously. Many thousands of members of the Afghan National Security Forces, the Pakistani military and civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed. We pay tribute today to each and every sacrifice made.
For the UK, we have suffered the bloodiest year since the Falklands war. Since Armistice Day 2008 we have lost over 100 members of our armed forces. The Prime Minister spoke ten days ago, and last night, about the aims of the mission – to prevent Afghanistan being used again, by Al Qaida under the umbrella of Taliban rule, as a launching pad for international terrorism; about the strategic plan – to support the development of Afghan institutions to deliver this goal; about the priorities – for a clean and competent Cabinet and provincial appointments, for enhancements to ANSF capacity, for action against corruption that saps the loyalty of the Afghan people; and about the next steps, starting with the inauguration of President Karzai in Kabul, where I will travel later this week.
The military effort is brave and impressive. Since this is a war, and since soldiers are being killed, it is inevitable that much of the debate about strategy concerns military posture and above all troop numbers. That is important. Secretary General Rasmussen has addressed the issue this morning. In every capital, every government and every Parliament, we will have to address the issue of what burden we should bear.
President Obama is now in the final stages of his deliberations. In the UK we support the prosecution of a serious counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan. We do not see that as an alternative to counter-terrorism but as the best means to achieve it. And we are ready in the right conditions to raise our already high contributions on the basis of an agreed strategy.
I fully endorse the arguments for burden sharing today. But I don’t want to repeat them. Instead I want to return to a theme that I outlined in a speech at NATO headquarters in July, and set out what the UK government believes to be the essential counterpart of a coherent military strategy – namely a political strategy of strength because it is comprehensive and depth because it is rooted in the life and history of the Afghan people.
We all repeat that “there can be no purely military solution”; so let’s take that mantra seriously; recognise that we will succeed in Afghanistan only when our military resources and development assistance are aligned behind a clear political strategy. Unless we get this right our military will be able to suppress the cancers of insurgency and instability, but not tackle their causes.
The goals of a political strategy are clear. It is to unite a critical mass of the key players behind shared goals – Al Qaida kept out, the different tribal groups kept onside, and the neighbours prepared to play a constructive role in Afghanistan’s future. I stress that a political strategy is not separate from a military strategy, or vice versa. Each must be part of a single whole, working to our overriding shared objective.
To be successful the political strategy must address three audiences. This is a war in the mind as well on the ground. First, the Afghan people and their loyalty: to reassure and mobilise citizens to resist the Taliban, military effort to improve security must be allied to civilian effort to improve governance especially at the local level. Second, the insurgents and their determination to fight: military pressure to beat back the insurgency must be combined with support to flip sides rather than fight or run away. Third, Afghanistan’s neighbours: a new relationship must be forged between Afghanistan and its neighbours, based on the understanding that Afghanistan’s future is not as a client of any, but as a secure country in its own right.
Reassurance
Less than five percent of Afghans want the Taliban back. This is our greatest strength. But they fear that the international community will tire of the war and the Taliban will return, inflicting brutal retribution on those who “collaborated” with the government.
This is the security challenge at the heart of the McChrystal report. It requires training and mentoring of the Afghan army and police. And it requires us to support local, informal security initiatives, empowering communities that decide that they want to stop the insurgents from terrorising their villages.
But security, formal and informal, is inseparable from governance. This is the first plank of an effective political strategy.
The Taliban know this. This is why they appoint shadow governors. It is why they have systems to take up complaints against their own so called "officials". Why they install “shari'a” courts to deliver swift and enforced justice in contested and controlled areas.
The Government of Afghanistan, supported by the international community, must offer a better alternative.
Many of the candidates in the Presidential election, including President Karzai himself and Dr Abdullah, argued for a wider process than the constitutionally mandated Parliamentary and District Elections next year, to take stock of the national political structures created in the heat of events after 2001. But for most Afghans, particularly in the areas most badly infected by the insurgency, sub-national governance is the only form of governance that matters. The 34 Provincial Governors, the 364 District Governors of Afghanistan, and the shuras – bodies of local elders – should all represent their people’s views, and help deliver to the people the governance, the security, and the elementary justice, they crave.
There are a number of good ways sub-national governance is being supported: through the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, for example, or the Afghan Social Outreach Programme, or the 22, 000 Community Development Councils. But their coverage is patchy, the link to the reintegration of insurgents weak, and their funding far too small. In 2008, the total national budget of the Afghan Government Department responsible for local governance, the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, was $33m. That is less than $1m a province to run local administration.
A winning political strategy would select and train, empower and equip, mentor and monitor those responsible for governing the provinces and districts of Afghanistan. It would help those Governors and District Governors create, through elections or other appropriate methods of consultation, truly representative local shuras that have the backing of the Afghan Constitution. In turn, those shuras can guide the distribution of development funds that create jobs and build schools and clinics. They can deliver some aspects of civil and criminal collective dispute resolution which is what Afghans mean by the rule of law. They can provide a forum for a political debate, and, under carefully controlled conditions, provide the re-entry mechanisms for insurgents seeking reintegration.
In this, there may need to be, as General McChrystal has said, a different approach to the insurgency in rural areas – where sympathy for the Taliban is much stronger, and where security and governance have never been delivered by conventional military or police forces – to that in urban areas, where resentment of the Taliban and all they represent is more acute, and where the conventional tactics of “Clear, Hold and Build”, delivered by conventional Afghan and international forces, may have a much greater chance of gaining purchase.
The offer to the Afghan people has to be, at national and subnational level, governance they can believe in. Believe in because it is there to stay. And there to stay because it goes with the grain of the ancient but continually evolving traditions on which the Afghan polity has existed as a stable but loose confederation for some two and a half centuries.
Our role should not be to prescribe exactly how those traditions evolve, or how the systems which reflect them are implemented, but to provide the resources without which none of this would be possible, and which will be far far less expensive than trying to suppress the insurgency by conventional military means.
Reintegration
This brings me to the second part of the political strategy: dividing the insurgency.
The Afghan insurgency is not a monolith. There is no single authoritative leadership. Different insurgent groups operate in different localities. Sometimes they take orders from a Taliban central command in Peshawar or Quetta. Other times cooperation is purely tactical and opportunistic.
By combining targeted military pressure with concrete political incentives we can change the calculations of these people and force them to reassess. This time last year the Taliban commander Ghulam Yahya claimed to control 600 fighters in Herat, western Afghanistan. But in October he was killed in an ISAF strike. Shortly afterwards his deputy was arrested by the ANP, and the insurgent structures underneath him quickly collapsed, with former fighters returning to their villages and accepting the authority of the government.
This is just one example. But with intelligence led, targeted operations against not just individuals but key positions within the insurgent hierarchy, we can weaken the insurgency. Because the impact is not just on the individual who is removed, but on those around him who fear for their lives.
There does, however, need to be an alternative to fighting – a route back into society, not just a tougher penalty. That is the significance of discussion of a National Reintegration Organisation, which can help former combatants to return to their homes, supporting them to start new lives and find new ways to make a living and support their families. The international community can provide support – including through an Afghan Resettlement fund - but reintegration needs to be led by the Afghans both at the central and at the district and community levels.
The thesis is simple. Some Afghan Taliban may be committed to global jihad. But the vast majority are not. Their primary commitment is to tribe and to locality. Our goal is not a fight to the death. It is to demonstrate clearly that they cannot win; and to provide a way back into their communities for those who are prepared to live peacefully.
Once reintegration gains momentum, and the insurgency is starting to fray or crumble, we will need to support President Karzai in reaching out to those high-level commanders that can be persuaded to renounce Al Qaida and pursue their goals peacefully within the constitutional framework. This will be far from straightforward. But the historical lessons are clear. Blood enemies from the Soviet period and the civil war now work together in government. Former Talibs already sit in the Parliament. It is essential that, when the time is right, members of the current insurgency are encouraged to follow suit.
Neighbours
The third element in weakening the insurgency is a new relationship with Afghanistan’s neighbours. The fighters within Afghanistan draw on funding, support and shelter from beyond its borders.
Afghanistan’s neighbours are motivated by a range of contradictory fears. As Hillary Clinton pointed out again on Sunday, it is not, and never has been, the coalition’s intention, to establish a permanent security force in Afghanistan, or colonise the country, or to use it as a base for regional dominance. But equally having driven Al Qaida from Afghanistan we do not want to leave only for them to return.
The choice on offer for the neighbours is not between stable clienthood and unstable independence. It is between an unstable state with terrorism, crime, drugs and migration destabilising the whole neighbourhood, and an independent, sovereign state which enjoys good relations with its neighbours, and is a responsible and respected member of the international community.
Each of the neighbours has a range of interests in Afghanistan – whether it is Iranian investments in Herat, or Pakistani interest in promoting the return of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees still in Pakistan, or Russian and Central Asian concern about drug running. Above all, they have much to gain from an Afghanistan that develops as a commercial and cultural cross-roads of South West Asia. Creating this will require the kind of long-term vision and drive that brought peace to Western Europe after centuries of conflict. It must be done, using the habits of consultation and conciliation essential to convincing the parties that each has more to lose from continuing conflict than it has to gain from tolerant co-operation.
The foundation for better relations is the resolve shown by the Pakistani government, military and people in taking on domestic insurgents, most recently in South Waziristan. For years, the West has lobbied Pakistani politicians and army generals to take action against domestic militants. Yet despite billions of dollars in US military assistance, there was little shift in behaviour. The fight against terrorism was seen as Washington’s war. That position has been transformed because Pakistani public opinion has shifted dramatically. Pakistani citizens have felt the devastating effects of terrorists turning on their own people.
The opportunity is to squeeze the life out of the terrorist threat from both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That will happen only if Pakistan and the international community develop a new relationship based on a recognition of interdependence and shared interests. The successful passage of the Kerry-Lugar Bill shows that the partnership with the US is based on development as well as security, and is between civilian institutions not just military ones. The first EU-Pakistan summit earlier this year was a step towards a longer-term strategic partnership between the two, in which the world’s largest single market and its biggest aid budget must help promote economic growth and development in a country beset by poverty and instability.
But the relationship must be two-way. The international community must address the needs of ordinary Pakistanis – in terms of jobs, education, trade and agriculture. Pakistan must address not just the terrorist threat to its own citizens, but Al Qaida and the Afghan Taliban who threaten our citizens. That means the current military operations need over time to address all militants who shelter Al Qaida, as well as those who threaten Pakistan itself. It also means ensuring that the areas that have already been subject to military operations – in Swat and the Malakand Division – are reconstructed effectively and internally displaced persons resettled, so that short-term military success does not give way to longer term civilian disaffection. Finally, it means giving the people of FATA a clear roadmap towards proper inclusion in the Pakistani state, with the same rights – and responsibilities – as other citizens.
The Agenda for the next Afghan Government
This political strategy depends on an Afghan Government able to act decisively in the interests of the whole country. There can be no Afghanisation without an Afghan lead.
President Karzai intends to use his inaugural speech on Thursday to set out a positive agenda for the Afghan people. We shall be there to act as witnesses to what should be a new contract between President Karzai and people. A people whose hopes were so lifted by the achievements of the years after the fall of the Taliban; and whose fears of a return to earlier, never forgotten, miseries have been awoken by the endurance of the insurgency of a more recent past. Our role is to support their aspirations because the Afghan people are key to the future stability of the country. We need to do so in a coordinated and effective way, and that is what the Prime Minister set out yesterday.
In the eyes of the Afghan people and the wider world, this means addressing the corrosive fear of corruption. None of us is so naïve as to think that in Afghanistan, or any other country, corruption can be eliminated overnight or completely. Nor do we deny that the vast flow of foreign funds into a country whose government’s self-generated income is less than $1bn a year doesn’t play a part.
Yesterday Interior Minister Atmar announced the creation of a new unit to tackle high-level corruption. This will need real powers both to investigate and to prosecute. And the Afghan people also need to see, from the appointments of Cabinet Ministers and Provincial Governors, that there is a fresh attempt to govern in their interests. By governing in their interests, the new Afghan government will be governing in ours. Because the point about counter-insurgency is that it depends on the will of the people.
I - as much as anyone else - want to bring our troops back home to safety. But we cannot leave a vacuum which the Taliban will quickly fill. Counter-terrorism deals with the symptoms. It brings short term success. But only a comprehensive strategy can deal with the causes and ensure that when we leave, we do so knowing that we will not have to return.
This is not a war without end. But success must be based on aligning our military and civilian resources behind a clear political strategy. A strategy that reassures and mobilises ordinary Afghans to resist the Taliban; that divides the insurgency by reintegrating and reconciling those in search of money, status or power; and that builds a new relationship between Afghanistan and its neighbours. That is what the British Government is determined to promote.
No comments:
Post a Comment