Introductory remarks

I thought I would start by explaining a bit about myself, my former team, what we’ve achieved in the last year and then take your questions.

I also want to start by saying what a privilege it is to be here. One of the first places I came to de-brief was NATO after I finished, partly because one of the privileges of working in the PRT in Helmand is working with some of our fantastic UK, US, Danish and Estonian military and indeed civilian colleagues and so I think it’s an appropriate recognition of the sacrifices they all make in that joint effort.

The Helmand PRT is quite unusual in the sense that we are one of the largest, and I would say most effective, PRTs in Afghanistan. It’s got a staff of about 100 in Lashkar Gah, the majority of whom are civilians. More than 60 of our staff are civilians who are based in Lashkar Gah. We regard ourselves as a team of about 300 in total, basically the majority of whom are out in the districts. The District Stabilisation Teams are actually military but there’s a significant civilian presence there as well. We’ve got a hundred civilians there in total across the whole area. We have broad capacity across the full range of central areas that we deliver in on the civilian side. That’s health, engineering, education, infrastructure, politics, counter-narcotics, rule of law and, indeed very critically, governance, as well as things like policing as part of that rule of law effort as well. We have teams based in 9 of Helmand’s 14 districts. District Stabilisation Teams are like the PRT itself, civilian-military teams and those District Stabilisation Teams report up to me in the PRT. It’s a multinational team, it a UK/US/Danish/Estonian team. It’s UK-led at the moment and the majority of resources on civilian side are still UK but it’s got significant efforts from all those countries. We’ve also got an Australian and a Swede masquerading as Danes as well, so it’s even more diverse. And of course there’s funding from nations like the UAE for Helmand, for some of the road projects

I’ve actually been to Helmand before this job. My first visit was in 2006, in fact. So I thought I’d take you back to what it was like when I first visited and give you a sense of how much has changed. When I first visited in 2006, Lashkah Gah was a fairly sleepy provincial but very badly broken rural town, where you had Taliban control for some time in 2001 but you then had a situation from 2001 to 2006 where the then Governor of Helmand had been somebody who had not impressed people with what they thought the government could do for them. It was a pretty difficult situation which made people pretty sceptical and it was a time that felt quite a long way away from the centre power in Kabul and obviously had, frankly, very little development going on and a very, very limited government in terms of capacity. The narco-mafia was really significant… people were very frustrated with both the predatory influence of that narco-mafia but also with the security problem that they had as well.

I then came back in a year ago in July for my recce visit before I started this job. Governor Mangal had been in power for just over a year at that stage, and basically building on the kind of success that would see some of the key clearance operations - both UK led and increasingly with the surge of US Marine forces into Helmand - during his first year as Governor you’d seen some significant improvement in the government’s ability to get out and project itself. But still I went and saw Nad Ali last July where the battle group was pretty much holding the ring around the district centre to allow that shura to take place. If I compare that then to what I see now, when I went back to Nad Ali a couple of weeks ago, where Nad Ali is unrecognisable in terms of the progress that’s been made, the bazaar is thriving. The forward operation base that the troops were based in last July is now a school. The police station has now been finished, the Governor’s compound is rapidly rising besides this building and you walk down the corridor of the building and there are little offices everywhere that have the different names of departments that show what the line ministers were doing there in Nad Ali. We actually had a researcher come in from Kabul from an independent analytical unit who said, in fact , it’s the most effective district government he’s seen in 50 visits to district governments anywhere in the country. So part of what we’ve used, the sort of surge for support of Operation MOSHTARAK to deliver, is to get the national government really throwing resources behind not just provincial but also district level government for somewhere like Nad Ali. And to my mind the difference between Nad Ali a year ago, last July and now is the kind of thing that shows what’s possible in Helmand and has shown most importantly to Helmandis what’s possible in Helmand. They’ve got a pretty good local government delivering for them, offering jobs in a thriving market… and the market matters because fundamentally the key thing for people is that find ways to make money apart from growing poppy, and the government is helping them with that. 4,800 farmers will get some form of alternative seeds or fertiliser this year through the Governor’s food zone programme… and that’s the third year of the programme he’s run, with our support, to help people chose not to grow poppy. It was the first instalment of the very few provincial counter narcotic strategies in Afghanistan and it's been an effective programme which has caused a third reduction in poppy production two years ago and 7% reduction this year. Two successive year on year drops, and really unprecedented as people shift away from poppy to other livelihoods.

Governor Mangal has been a key factor in the success of Helmand. Two and half years of stable and very effective provincial government. We’ve seen a much more robust provincial government now than we had before. We’ve seen him build the kind of district level capacity, that I think again is much more resilient to whatever happens when he goes. And I think that you have a situation where most district Governors now saw the job ad, applied for their jobs and went through the civil service selection process. They are effectively selected on the basis of their ability and qualifications not on the basis of patronage. And again that means that people have more confidence that the people they have in charge of them are competent people who are trying to do a good job.

Election day was a really good day in Helmand. A day that really boosted the confidence of the senior team around Governor Mangal. There was not a shot fired within 6 kilometres of Lashkar Gah and the excellent job that the Afghan security forces did with the support of ISAF meant that actually rather than having to focus on security, in fact the government could focus on combating fraud. So what they were able to do was to put quite a significant effort into trying to tackle the kind of fraud they had seen previously: arresting people who had lists of photo IDs; arresting people, anybody with foreign multiple ID cards for example. So they were sending a really strong signal that basically that was not going to be tolerated. And I think as a result, people again are confident that the election was able to happen with a really good Afghan low level security but also focussing on the next biggest problem which was trying to combat fraud.

In broader Governance terms Helmand is also a bit of a sort of cutting edge in some ways. Tests… what it is we might be able to do in Afghanistan. There are two programmes in particular that we run in the PRT. One, the Afghan Social Outreach Programme, which helps the Government… to create district mini councils. You are probably aware that under the sub-national government law, district councils are theoretically supposed to exist but have never been elected. Partly because it is quite a challenge to define the boundaries. So [we’re] recognising the importance of these local representative bodies. What we did was actually design a programme to help the government figure out how to set up an election process in these districts. It builds on the best of the old kind of shura process, plus then a secret ballot to make sure people get a really free choice at the last minute. 1,200 elders set up in the … desert to be part of one of the nominations shuras for… councils which were re-elected earlier this year. And we find those councils to be a really effective way of getting a broader sense of the voice of the people in government at district level rather than simply having a sort of small bureaucracy round the district Governor.

I mentioned the kind of narcotics programme that I think [to] the broader economy is also really key. Ashraf Ghani visited Helmand earlier this year and said that he was really shocked at what it looked like because he said that nobody had told him it was this good. He was particularly surprised because he could drive from Lashkar Gar in the valley as indeed people do on a fairly regular basis now. And he found there to be a thriving market both in Lashkar Gar and in Nad Ali, importing stuff from all over the place - from Pakistan as well as Afghanistan and the rest of the area. But also he saw evidence of businesses being built up where actually people can again export. Helmand is not the poorest province in Afghanistan. It is actually one of least food insecure, so it keeps on feeding itself [better than] other parts of Afghanistan. So actually the security improves as movement improves as the infrastructure improves and we are building a significant number of roads to help that as well as. DfID and the US have funded an airport, which is actually the first civilian airport. And it is very important to civilians. This is a civilian only airport. The first civilian airport to open in Southern Afghanistan in 30 years. You can fly for $60 from Lashkar Gar to Kabul. And that means if you are a businessman interested in setting up a business at the business park we are setting up on the airfield, you can hop down for $60 from Kabul, recce the ground, and decide whether you are prepared to invest or not. You know, in whatever it is - your pomegranate business or whatever. And the whole point is that people can now start to make those decisions as they would in a normal developing country. Because security has become much less of a constraint.

We are also doing things like helping to work out how to build storage facilities to help Helmand to contribute to the strategic wheat reserve. Which is obviously becoming increasingly important, given global wheat prices at the moment. And we are also working on irrigation. We are supporting the Helmand master plan for the Helmand river base. Because obviously Helmand is built on, essentially, some fantastic work done in the 50’s and 60’s which created the irrigation infrastructure which is fed by the dam and… rivers, in a way that makes it such a potentially viable economic province. We also work on a security… The Helmand PRT helped to build the… Police Training Centre, which is a really key part of the police training we are doing, which is helped to shift from people of been wary of the police to seeing the police as part of the effective face of local government. Still work in progress, but I would never have expected to be as optimistic as I am about it now if you had asked me a year ago… The Afghan Civil Order Police in fact now prefer to have local Helmandi police trained in Helmand. Because they would rather have somebody who is well trained and is from the local area. I really wouldn’t have expected to have seen people asking for local police, given the reputation of the local police a year ago. Still a work in progress as with all these areas I would be cautious on. Cautiously optimistic, and this is a situation where this is not only a developing country but you know a very challenging one to work in. One of the poorest in the world and we have to be realistic about the levels we are going to reach in some of these areas. But still, it is a significant improvement. But I think that is all of what I see as a contribution. Things like, getting prosecutors out to the districts so that people see that the government is actually making an effort to try solving their disputes. And get them, actually, justice for grievances. That is all contributing to what I sense as a shift in people’s perceptions in Helmand. And a shift in confidence about the likely future of Helmand. As I say, everybody in Helmand is a realist. And it means that they are cautious in making their judgements. But I think that you see for example, in things like increased recruitment for civil service positions that are advertised in Helmand, the sense that people are willing to say “okay actually this is a job worth doing and it is a job where the risk is acceptable and it is worth taking”. Being a district governor, being a district chief of staff for example. The government has also done its bit to try and manage the expectations. They have looked at things like educational qualifications to make sure that Helmandis can actually apply for these jobs. So they are helping in their own way to try and get people matched up so that Helmand is able to build its own government and actually so that people begin to have confidence in what they are seeing. And to my mind, that is what leaves me, as I leave Helmand, reasonably optimistic. Recognising it is a developing country, it is poor, it’s a challenge. It’s one of the most challenging parts of Afghanistan. But nevertheless, confident we have made a significant difference in the last year. Very much in support of the Afghanistan Government. Very much in partnership with our military colleagues, who have hugely helped to push back the insurgency and give central Helmand a sense of security it didn’t have a year ago. And I think that I leave with a good feeling that I can hand over feeling a job well done to my successor and leaving him with some challenges to keep that going.