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Ambassador, since you were appointed in February last year, what’s gone well in Afghanistan
and what’s not gone so well? I think that over the last year and a half,
I see three things which I think have gone really well.
The first of those is that we have really gone quite a long way towards handing over
responsibility for the security of Afghanistan to the Afghan Security Forces – the so called
Transition process. Now we are in a position where three quarters of Afghans are living
in areas where it’s actually the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police who have the lead
for security, not ISAF. Secondly, the training of the ANSF – the
Afghan Security Forces – has gone really well. The army and the police are now increasingly
capable units that are leading the fight now against the insurgency. And this summer in
particular, we have seen the Afghan Army really getting into the fight, really managing to
get a grip of the insurgency in the areas where they are leading security. That is a
big improvement. The capability and confidence of the Afghan Army and Police, and their equipment,
has improved immeasurably over the last 18 months.
What do you think has been a disappointment – areas that could have improved a lot more?
I think what I would have liked to have seen, is that I would have liked to have seen more
progress against corruption and I would have liked to have seen more progress on good governance.
Those are areas where President Karzai has recently issued a decree, charging his ministers
with a whole range of different tasks which they need to fulfill to make an improvement
in both of those very important areas. But of course, the support which the International
Community has promised to Afghanistan is support which is explicitly dependent on the Afghan
Government’s progress in these critical areas. So, there’s still room for improvement.
One trend that we have seen this year is the increase obviously in insider attacks. I don’t
think anymore that you can call these attacks isolated. How do you think they’ve impacting
on the mission here? Well, they are of grave concern of course.
Every soldier that we lose as a result of one of these attacks by Afghan Security Forces
is a tragedy in itself. And also, of course, it does make it more difficult for those of
our forces who are engaged with our Afghan partners day by day.
I think though that the effect on our troops has been pretty contained. They do continue,
of course, to work along side their Afghan colleagues as they have to do day by day.
In most cases that process is still going on as it had before. What we have got though,
is a partnership with the Afghan forces to introduce a whole range of measures designed
to reduce these incidents to the absolute minimum. I don’t think that we will ever
be in a position where we can say with certainty that we can prevent every one, but we will
reduce them to the absolute minimum. Don’t you think that that has been a product
of the fact that we have had to reach a certain amount of ANSF by certain targets and the
very size that we’ve tried to build up the ANSF has made it more susceptible to infiltration?
I don’t think that in most cases there is infiltration. We do have some evidence in
some cases that there is and insurgency connection with these attacks, but in most of them, it
isn’t. The fact is that this is a young army; it’s a young police force. We have
built them up quite quickly. I think that as they mature and as their officers and non-commissioned
officers become more experienced then these threats are likely to reduce over a period
of time. But we need this force. We need it to be a big force because that is who we hand
over the security in this country to and that means that we will save the lives of far more
of our service men and women because they will no longer be in the lead in fighting
the insurgency. And don’t let’s forget that by about the middle of 2013, we expect
ISAF to be only operating in support of the Afghan Security Forces – no longer in the
lead in combat operations. So that will be a very important step.
A key Haqqani leader has been killed in the last couple of days. Isn’t there a risk
that the more you kill the more you breed? I don’t think that’s true. I think that
what we have seen is that the insurgency has been degraded pretty substantially by being
able to take out many of its senior leaders. Every time that we take out somebody who is
involved in facilitating suicide vests and roadside bombs, not only are we taking them
off the battlefield, but we’re also saving the lives of the many innocent Afghan citizens
who would otherwise be killed by them. The latest example of Badruddin Haqqani, is a
very good example. This is a man who has been absolutely ruthless in his targeting of Afghan
citizens, not just our forces, and therefore it is a good thing when we take these people
off the battlefield. It’s been reported that many Afghans who
can afford to are trying to make as much money as they can now so that they leave the country
post 2014. It could imply then that they have no faith in the mission here. Why should they?
Well I think the thing is that this is a country which has gone through 30 years of warfare
and therefore it is almost inevitable that when Afghans see a big change coming, they
ask themselves ‘is this going to be a change for the better, or is this going to be a change
for the worse?’ The fact is that at the height of the ISAF mission, we had 140,000
foreign troops in this country which were providing a level of security, and therefore,
it’s not entirely unexpected that Afghans say to themselves ‘well that was very good,
but how are we going to maintain security after that force is gone?’
What we have to do is we have to build up the confidence of our Afghan partners. The
way we’re doing that, as I have said, is we are training the Afghan Security Forces,
who are an increasingly capable outfit. So you have no fears that the country will
return to civil war? Look, I don’t think that the country will
return to civil war, but I do hear some commentators speculating that that could be the outcome.
But when I talk to senior Afghan politicians, I see very clearly that they all understand
that we need to prevent the return to those awful days of 1992-1993 when shells were raining
down upon Afghan citizens living in Kabul. Nobody wants to go back to those days. They
all want stability in this country and I think they can achieve it.