Press briefing

Oana Lungescu (NATO Spokesperson): Good morning. Welcome to NATO Headquarters and welcome to Major General Phil Jones, who, as you can see, is already there in Kabul. Major General Jones will be briefing us on removing insurgents from the battlefield through reintegration.

Major General Jones has served on four deployments to Afghanistan, including as an Infantry Battalion Commander in Kabul in 2002, and Military Adviser to the United Nations Assistance Mission Afghanistan in 2006/2007. He is currently the Director of the Force Reintegration Cell at ISAF Headquarters and has been since the Cell's creation last summer.

So he's got unique wealth of experience and we're very pleased to have him brief us, especially since I know that his deployment to Afghanistan is due to come to an end very shortly.

So thank you very much for joining us from Kabul. General, the floor is yours.

Major General Phil Jones (Force Reintegration Cell at ISAF): Well, thank you very much indeed, and good morning to you all. I hope the communications link is working, you can hear me clearly. Now please stop me if you can't.

If I may I'll start by opening with a three or four minute statement and then be very happy to take questions after that.

As many of you know this Peace Programme that we're supporting was formally launched at the Kabul Conference in July of 2010. And the Afghan High Peace Council sat for the first time on the 7th of October last year. So the past 13 months or so ISAF has been supporting Afghan political leaders in the creation and the execution of this initiative.

This time last year this initiative existed only on paper, with a small group of highly committed Afghan leaders just beginning to build the political and administrative structures and processes. But more than the creation of the infrastructure, their huge challenge this time last year was to overcome some of the incredible scepticism and doubt that a social peace Programme could emerge in the middle of this conflict.

The Afghan vision of peace building and reintegration is focused on the building of trust and confidence amongst people who've been fighting the government and each other for many years. Through the outreach of political, social and religious leaders in the provinces and districts peace is built village by village if necessary. When a more stable community environment is created fighters will be brought home to reintegrate back to their communities. This means that fighters return to peace as a consequence of peace-building, not as a result of material or financial incentives.

So while we all feel a great sense of urgency to break the cycle of violence, it's incredibly important to understand and respect the necessity of the courageous, patient, confidence-building and conflict resolution work of the Afghan leaders and elders across the country.

Now let me give you a feel for what we see happening across the country. A year ago the initial level of ambition in the original strategy document in the prevailing circumstances of last summer, was to have eight provinces with active structures and up to 1,000 reintegrees enrolled into the Programme by the end of the first year. Today at the end of the first year the High Peace Council has a functioning Joint Secretariat to manage the process and has political peace committees in 34 provinces, secretariats functioning in 25 provinces, provincial budgets activated and resources flowing, and as at today, 2,436 former fighters enrolled in the Programme.

These, of course, are 2,436 men who are no longer shooting at Coalition and Afghan soldiers, and are no longer laying roadside bombs that kill innocent women and children. Reintegration today is happening in 20 provinces across the country. To my mind that's a magnificent achievement.

So over the past year of building credibility, buy-in and outreach, the Joint Secretariat has also built a range of active political and administrative structures from nothing and the Joint Secretariat never had the luxury of spending the first year building this process in isolation. Groups of insurgents were coming to join the peace process even before the president had signed the decree that brought the Peace and Reintegration Programme to life.

Of course, on the surface it's clear that the number of formal reintegrees is still relatively modest in comparison to our scale of ambition, and the overwhelming majority of groups that have joined the process so far have been low-level, village-level fighters. But today, a year into this process, we're seeing more significant groups beginning to flow in across the country. And importantly, this is beginning to take place in the provinces in the south and the east where reintegration was always going to be more of a challenge.

And in many parts of the country we're seeing low-level, day-labour-type fighters simply going home and informally and silently reintegrating back to their communities. So while those fighters are hard to track and quantify, their departure for the battlefield is an important contribution to peace and civility in Afghanistan.

As the process continues to push ahead we see confidence begin to grow, enabling provincial peace councils across the country to build provincial and district peace strategies and work on grievance resolution.

But I'll close by asking you to remember that building peace out of war is a tough human process. After 30 years of conflict people will be cautious and wary - scepticism and doubt remains widespread. This is a human process that depends on increasing confidence day in, day out. It absolutely requires courageous Afghan leaders to make bold decisions, to reject the cycle of violence and work to build local and national peace processes. It requires huge energy to overcome the inertia of war and great persistence to build confidence and trust at a necessary level to achieve some form of momentum.

ISAF's part in all of this is to work with our Afghan military and civil partners to bring increasing synergies between security, political outreach, governance, the rule of law and development. This is absolutely an Afghan Programme, designed by Afghans and led by Afghans. But we're keen supporters, able and willing to do whatever we can to support the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Programme.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much, I'll take questions.

Oana Lungescu: Thank you very much. We'll go to questions in Brussels. NPR.

Q: Thank you. Teri Schultz with National Public Radio and Global Post. This is an obvious question, but with so much turmoil going on right now, the events we've seen in Kabul and also the increasing number of infiltrators who have attacked ISAF and their own Afghan counterparts in the armed forces, whether they are wearing a uniform they bought on the market or whether they truly are turncoats inside the military, how can you be certain that these people with a know track record of having been sympathetic to the Taliban or other insurgent forces, are safe for reintegration? I understand that General Caldwell has put in place much more stringent measures, together with the Afghans, biometrically registering everybody, following up, interviewing people in home towns, but it's not working even for the initial recruits in all cases, so how can you be sure with these guys?

Thanks.

Major General Phil Jones: Thank you. I think the first point that I would make is let's not overstate the scale of the problem here in terms of the infiltrators and that sort of stuff.

Yes, there have been incidents and we've all learned from that and people have put a lot of measures in place, a lot of measures were in place, and vetting processes are in place for a number of different processes out here, whether it's recruiting to the Afghan armed forces, and indeed for entering this Programme. Vetting, as you know, irrespective of how many processes you put in place, can often be an imprecise art. But day by day it's getting better.

Certainty. Well, of course, if you're dealing with insurgents who've been fighting in this conflict - some for months, some for years - you can only judge them by their deeds. For sure as people come to enter the Programme they're vetted, they're biometrically registered, iris scans, fingerprints, photographs, that sort of thing, the normal vetting process. Vetting means that the local Afghan Security Force has joined together to come up with a collaborative understanding of who they are, whether they are insurgents or criminals or people on the make. And then they join the Programme. But joining the Programme is just the first step. 

Of course, you don't measure people's intentions day by day, week by week as to whether they stay at peace. You can only judge this, really, over time. And building trust is not the start ... is not completed with two or three simple acts, such as biometric registration. Trust has to be built up over time.

And again, it comes back to this thing, you know, human process where subjective judgments are made in all of this. And what has been remarkable, I think, so far, is that we expected much more recidivism of people coming to join the Programme and going back. There have been instances of recidivism that have been catalogued, but they're markably small.

Thank you. Next question.

Oana Lungescu: Geo TV Pakistan.

Q: Khalid Farooqi, from Geo News Television, Pakistan. Major General, I would be very much interested that you have covered eight provinces in this reintegration Programme. I will be very much interested to know how many of them are in the south and east, and particularly Kunar, Nangarhar and Logar, Kandahar areas and how many of them are Pashtun in this Reintegration Programme? How many Pashtun you convince to reintegrate in this structure? Thank you very much.

Major General Phil Jones: Okay, let me just clarify that point. In the original strategy document that was signed off by the President and the International Community last July, the level of ambition was to create active structures in eight provinces in Afghanistan. The High Peace Council and Joint Secretariat have massively over-achieved on that with political structures in all of the provinces and functioning secretariats in 25 of the provinces and reintegration happening today in 20 provinces.

Reintegration emerged first in the provinces of the north and the west where the insurgency is less entrenched, and a combination of security gains and political outreach was able to precipitate early reintegration. In fact, in many respects the early reintegration took us by surprise. There was a lot of it over last winter. The Programme wasn't in place fully. The structures weren't in place. People ad hoc can respond and it was a challenging time.

Now the structures exist throughout the south and the east, and indeed, this week we had a major two-day conference in Kandahar focusing very much on the provinces in the south, the five provinces of Logar, Kandahar and Nimruz,  Helmund, Zabul and Oruzgan, with the High Peace Council, Minister Stanekzai, the governors all present, discussing this.

The percentage... the ethnicity, given that reintegration started first in the north and the west, was dominated originally by a mix of Tajik, Pashtun pockets, a few small groups of Uzbeks who had become engaged in the insurgency in the north and as it's grown in the south and the east we're starting to see the ethnicity rebalance off, as you'd expect. Such that today we've probably got just over... just about 50 or 60 percent of the people in the Programme are Pashtuns.

The numbers in the south, of course, are smaller at the moment in some places. For example, in Kandahar there's probably no more than about a 100 to 120 people who have joined the Programme. But what I would say is that whereas in the north and the west a lot of the groups have been low-level village groups, in the south and the east you're seeing much more sophisticated, what we would call full-time professional Talibs join the Programme and fewer of the village-level groups.

Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: Let me ask you a few questions that we've had coming in from those watching live on the NATO website. You've been talking of numbers. One question is, with regard to numbers you've mentioned, how are they relative to the total size of the insurgency?

Major General Phil Jones: Yes, okay, well, the total size of the insurgency is one of those unknowables that we've all struggled with over the years. And certainly over the past 18 months ISAF has used a rough figure of somewhere in the region of 25,000 people in the insurgencies, but that covers a broad range of what we would call the itinerant day labourer fighters who through a function of poverty are paid a small amount of money to lay an IED, right the way through to sophisticated ideological fighters operating from the border areas.

So as a rule of thumb, which varies greatly depending on the season, we have been using 25,000. So you can imagine that at the moment we're talking about ten percent of that number.

Oana Lungescu: One other question I have here. There have been reports, and I think we've all seen those in the media, that insurgents have entered the Reintegration Programme only to turn back to the Taliban after not receiving enough support from the Afghan Government in terms of security and payment. How much of a challenge do you think that is?

Major General Phil Jones: Well, in many respects of course it's a challenge because if you have insurgent leaders sitting talk to the press saying that they're dissatisfied with what they perceive to be broken promises and everything else, then it sends out exactly this wrong message.

The issue here, as I said in my opening statement, was that this time last year this strategy was 30 pages of paper and a very small group of applicants. But Minister Stanekzai was very clear that despite the fact we all had to struggle to build the Programme as fast as we can so that the structures and processes and resource flows to support the process had to come into place quickly, that we could not turn back groups. Even in provinces where structures were absent.

People started coming quite quickly. More quickly than people anticipated in the circumstances of the day. So there were multiple challenges in dealing with the groups in terms of just building people's understanding, training them on the emerging systems, having committees in place to deal with these things, having the resources to flow down. So over the past year, as the government has been building this Programme, they've also been operating at the same time but that has set up a number of challenges.

But week by week, month by month the process becomes more solid. As I mentioned in my opening statement, you now have 25 technical secretariats in provinces across the country. And many of these provinces are now dealing with these small groups coming as a completely routine activity.

The other point about this is that there were many perceived promises that flowed out of some of the early rhetoric, of jobs for all, this is all about money, and again, as I made... the point I made in my opening statements, the Afghans were very clear, no perverse incentives. This has to be an earnest and sincere peace process. It's not about the exchange of money or material gain.

And so some of these leaders and their groups who came perceived that they were going to get a lot of money, and then announced that promises were broken as they came into the Programme. And that wasn't the case. Promises weren't made, and actually coming to peace out of a life of fighting is actually quite a tough process and we have to recognize that.

So structures are now in place. We still are facing capacity problems in some areas, but there's an awful lot of it that is now routine.

Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: The German Press Agency, DPA.

Q: Yes, Alvise Armellini, from DPA, German Press Agency. Apologies for the simple question, but is there a budget for this Programme? How much does it cost? Thank you.

Major General Phil Jones: Yes, there is a budget. And at the moment the International Community has donated just over $142 million into the Afghan Reintegration Trust Fund. The Afghan Reintegration Trust Fund has a number of windows, depending on how nations donate that money. Germany, for example, has donated money to the trust fund through UNDP. That money is 100 percent committed. The vast majority of it has gone to line ministries to do developmental programmes in support of the community recovery, the sort of the follow-on process of working with communities. There's a range of governmental programmes that are beginning to emerge across the country. Some of the money has gone to operating costs, salaries for these secretariats that I've discussed and that sort of thing.

So the $142 million by and large is dispersed and is in action right now. Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: A follow-up from Geo TV.

Q: Thank you. Can you tell us... you know the size of Haqqani Network, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, these people are very known to you and you know how many fighters they've got on their disposal, so beyond that you don't know, of course there are splinter groups in south and east, particularly along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but what is exactly size of the groups you know basically?

Major General Phil Jones: Well, as I said before when we were talking about numbers... you know, people have a broad notion of the size of particular groups and in some cases we have a very detailed understanding of particular networks within groups. But really defining the precise numbers is an incredibly challenging thing in this country because just as you pointed out, there are lots of different networks. Some of these networks are insurgents on one day and narco smugglers the next day. Some networks are more criminal than ideological. There's an awful lot of criminal violence and criminal activity that goes on in this country that's given a convenience label of Taliban.

So really defining numbers and then measuring this process against those numbers, you know, is a really challenging thing. And so as Minister Stanekzai says to anyone who cares to listen, at the end of the day the numbers are important, but they're not the most important thing. What's really important is the impact this Programme has on peace and civility in these local areas.

A group of 15 in one particular province can be very insignificant. A group of 15 in another district in another province can be incredibly significant depending on the level of competence, the way they fight, who they're connected to and all these sort of things.

So drawing deductions from simple data and metrics in some cases is quite challenging.

Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: NPR.

Q: Teri Schultz again, thank you. How vulnerable do you consider this mentality that's been changed among these people. For example, if the Taliban menaces their villages again do you sense that they will change out of self-preservation? And also, could you explain a little bit about how you track them after they've left the Programme, other than just being registered in a biometric database? And do you find that Taliban or other insurgents are targeting these people for retaliation if they are known to have gone through your Programme?

Thank you.

Major General Phil Jones: Yes, thank you. That's a great question, and of course one of the key blockers to reintegration, and indeed, drivers to reintegration is a sense of security.

One of the fundamental incentives here for people joining this Programme is that they can step out of the fight. This is not surrender. They can come and rejoin society of Afghanistan with their honour and dignity intact, and that where possible we'll work with the communities to enhance their security. And of course for their perspective they want to know that they can come to this Programme and first of all, live through it, and secondly, be free from harassment and retribution thereon down the line, whether it be Talibs’ intimidation or indeed us inadvertently arresting them later on.

On our side, of course, we're putting multiple processes in gear to make sure that we register these people, that we remove them from targeting lists and that sort of thing.

Local security remains one of the salient challenges of all of this. Such that people can be free of retribution because there's no doubt whatsoever that the Talibs see people joining this Programme as a significant threat. And indeed, just as you pointed to, we have lost people in this Programme over the past year. And indeed, we've lost a number of peacemakers, who are not insurgents, but are mediators and peace brokers in one or two of the provinces. The numbers are remarkably small given the level of intimidation and threat, but any people lost in this Programme is a tragedy and has a significant impact.

What we haven't seen, so far, is communities who have joined the process, being turned back to rejoin the insurgency through intimidation, and again, that is remarkable. And it sort of points really to the fact that for a lot of these groups these are not glib decisions. A lot of these groups, a lot of these communities have lived in a volatile and dangerous environment for all their lives. They understand the balance of risk and threats around them and they make very considered decisions and join this Programme after a period of negotiation and consolidation in amongst the community and between them and the government and security forces such that their security is fairly much a known quantity.

But you're right to point to this as an issue. It is a significant issue within the Programme. Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: Jane's. Brooks, does that answer your question?

Q: Yes, it does.

Oana Lungescu: Okay, Japanese media.

Q: Hello, this is (inaudible) from Japanese magazine Sekai and Economist. What kind of follow-up plan do you have in your mind beyond 2014 with regards to this Reintegration Programme? Allow me if I repeat the same questions.

Major General Phil Jones: The Programme is designed... it actually was designed to be a five-year Programme, launched last year. Which takes it through to 2015. But that was a base document, that was a base strategy. And if you look at other reintegration programmes in countries that have like conflicts they go on for a long time. They are part of the peacebuilding process. You look at Colombia where their programme has gone on for eight or nine years now.

And indeed, the Afghans see peacebuilding, of course, as a very, very long-term process. This is a country not just inflicted with the insurgency of the past nine or ten years, but has suffered multiple conflicts over the past 30 years where the country has divided and redivided again.

In some of the provinces the layers of conflicts going back over those decades are incredibly complex and continue to divide society. So this whole process is not just about demobilizing fighters in the present now, it's a question of starting a wider social movement for peace that increasingly binds the people of Afghanistan into an inclusive, social, political peace process.

And they see this very much as a key element of transition. But they see it enduring beyond transition because what we're talking about now are the very earliest stages of what we call reintegration, what the Afghans call village-level peace processes. Where you break the cycle of violence in the near-term and then you work over months and years where necessary to consolidate that peace through the provision of government services, through inclusive politics, through dealienation, all these sort of things. And that, I imagine, will go on for a long, long time to come.

This is an Afghan programme. It's Afghan-led. In the near-term it's supported very strongly by international funds and all of that. As part of transition the Afghans are seeing it more and more as a key to link strategy with transition. It puts them very much on the moral high ground in their minds. Peacebuilding is a moral process. So is the transition of sovereignty, with which comes responsibilities. And across the country you're seeing more and more governors, their peace councils and the like, stepping up to these responsibilities and beginning to build peace.

Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: And one last question from those watching live on the NATO website. Can you elaborate more on this link between reintegration and reconciliation?

Major General Phil Jones: Yes, absolutely. And this is... because we in the West use these terms of reintegration and reconciliation we often set ourselves up for complicated discussions that revolve around definitions. Neither term translated particularly well into either Dari or Pashto, the main languages here in Afghanistan. For the Afghans it's the peace process. Most easily translates into English as a recoming together. It's based on a sense of grievance resolution at village and national levels. It's based on a sense of 'afw – the islamic notion of forgiveness - and it's all-inclusive. Which means that at the tactical level, if you like, from a military point of view, it includes the demobilization of fighters back to their villages, but it also includes the work of the High Peace Council setting the political conditions within the country and indeed, in the regional context.

All Afghans are acutely aware of the importance of regional dynamics with their neighbours—Pakistan, Iran, the 'Stans to the north, but also the relationships of the West and other countries—as much as they're aware of the (inaudible) complexity of the internal politics of Afghanistan. This is all part of a wider process. And the Afghan vision through the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Programme will be a catalyst for a peace process that includes peace processes at the village level to consolidate stability and peace, but also the nature of wider strategic political process that would look to achieve a political settlement.

So they're interlinked. It's all part of a wider process. Thank you.

Oana Lungescu: Major General Phil Jones, thank you very much indeed for taking time to brief us this morning and thank you very much for all your hard work in Afghanistan.

Thank you.

Major General Phil Jones: My pleasure, thank you very much indeed.