Picking up the themes outlined by Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Lord Malloch Brown, Gareth Thomas, minister of state at the Department for International Development, delves into the nitty-gritty of UK government policy on trying to prevent violent conflict in Afghanistan...

 

 

As all of you I’m sure will accept, conflict and poverty are inextricably linked, and unless we continue to seek to put in place effective conflict prevention strategies we’re not going to make the type of progress that we want towards achieving our goals on poverty.

You’ll also accept, I hope, that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and probably what an ordinary person there wants more than anything else is security.  Not just in its most narrow physical sense - although of course freedom from violence and the threat of violence is particularly important to people in that country; but security in its broadest sense.  Which means being able to feed and house your family, having access to the affordable medical treatment that we would take for granted; access to the basic services and commodities that make life worth living and give you a sense of a better future.

And we know, of course, that there are many in Afghanistan who are opposed to our efforts and to build up on that agenda, who are oppose to the work of the coalition forces in the past to try to bring that physical security.  And sometimes the efforts by those coalition forces to bring improvements in security have not always been matched quickly enough by real answers for the broader, human security of the local population.

 

I think it’s true to say that often we haven’t been able to get a quick enough peace dividend.  The police have perhaps often appeared predatory to local people in Afghanistan.  There is still for many of the local population a lack of jobs, a lack of markets for their produce.  They want quicker access to water, to schools, to health clinics and also to electricity.  Without all these things we are not going to see the continued year-on-year improvements in the quality of people’s lives, despite the progress that has been made.

 

Now, achieving all of these individual challenges requires us to make progress in other areas.  It requires us to look at the totality of the political, the security and the wider developmental challenges. And that means trying to bring together the defence effort, the diplomatic effort and the development effort - both the UK’s and the international community's - in a more coherent and a more coordinated way; making sure that we are doing so in a way that aligns our approach and the international community’s approach with that of the government of Afghanistan.

 

I think it’s also clear from our experience in Afghanistan that we need to be quicker at getting in and responding, when violent conflict stops, with opportunities of re-construction and longer-term development work. 

 

To try to underpin that accelerated improvement in our response - not just in Afghanistan but more generally - we have for the first time (in the current comprehensive spending review settlement) a new public service agreement on conflict prevention and resolution. 

 

We’re in the process of developing a national security strategy.  We’re considering a cross-government conflict strategy, whose aim is to try to give us an overarching government conflict policy, with much greater ministerial oversight of conflict issues in the round. 

 

To help us with that objective, we have increased the overall level of resources that we’re making available for conflict prevention and stabilisation, to some two hundred and twenty-nine million pounds by the end of this CRS period 2010/2011.  We have also sought to reform the conflict prevention pools, getting decision-making about how the resources in those conflict  prevention pools is made much closer to the country level, so that we are taking faster, more appropriate decisions, which are much better tailored to the needs of the local community.

 

Some of you too will see that we have established the stabilisation aid fund for which both the Ministry of Defence, colleagues in the Foreign Commonwealth Office and in the Department for International Development will jointly be responsible for, and which will support work where the security situation doesn’t allow more traditional post-conflict peace building work to commence. 

 

We’re trying too to deepen the co-ordination that there already is across Whitehall.  So for example developing cross government training programmes.  We’re undertaking more joint exercises together, we’re trying to strengthen the overall joined up working that we have traditionally done.

 

The Stabilisation Unit, previously The Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit, has also been trying to work to improve understanding between the military and Whitehall departments, to try to increase our ability to get civilian experts onto the ground quickly to work in conflict situations alongside the military as effectively as possible. 

 

To give you a sense of the difference that these changes will make, in Helmand province there is a team of development stabilisation governance, rule-of-law and military colleagues helping to deliver immediate post-conflict assistance to the subordinate local population. And that team is guided by comprehensive, UK government-wide strategy for our work in Helmand. This means that the individual decisions being taken in different Whitehall departments are now armed with our broader cross-government objectives for what we are trying to do to support the Afghan government in Helmand. 

 

I think we have moved from a situation where civilian reconstruction efforts were perhaps too slow to follow up the military operation, to one where now  we’re helping to shape military plans and to insure a much more timely response, once that immediate military action has ceased. 

 

We need to be  better, of course, in our efforts to try to prevent conflict in the first place.  And some of the changes that I described earlier will help us to increase our work on long-term conflict and prevention. 

 

For example, we’re trying to step up our work on understanding some of the underlying causes of conflict, such as poor government, social exclusion, how natural resources are managed or, indeed, aren’t managed. 

 

We’re seeking, of course, to step up our work with the international community; with our friends and colleagues in the UN, in the African Union and in a range of civil society organisations, too. 

 

We also want to work to prevent the re-emergence of conflict, so in the DRC, for example, we are supporting the demobilisation of tens of thousands of former rebels. 

 

We can’t do all of this work on our own, of course, and we are again stepping up our work across the international community; not just in the multilateral organisations that I’ve described, but also in seeking to make sure that our efforts are aligned much more closely with the efforts of other colleagues in Europe, in NATO and more broadly across the international community.

 

We need a multilateral system that can effectively respond to prevent violent conflict and there are many parts of the international system that are very effective.  But as the Prime Minister has made clear, there are some parts of the system that don’t work as well as they can do.  And it is in those parts of the system that we are going to seek again, with colleagues from across the international community, to try to promote reform in the coming weeks and months.

 

This is a slightly edited transcript of a talk given to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues in January 2008.