NATO Speech: SESSION III: Transatlantic Challenges: Post-Conflict Reconstruction

Residence
Palace
Brussels

11 July 2005

SESSION III: Transatlantic Challenges: Post-Conflict Reconstruction

Event
	11/07/2005 NATO: New Tasks and Responsibilities

Dr. Stefanie Babst (Head, NATO Countries, Division of Public Diplomacy, NATO): ...tackling issues on post-conflict reconstruction. I mean, we talked about this this morning already on various occasions. Iraq was mentioned, NATO's mission in Iraq. Afghanistan was mentioned. Also our operation in Kosovo was mentioned. And I thought it would make good sense to have a much more closer look at NATO's post-conflict reconstruction operations and hence I'm particularly pleased, I mean, to have together with our colleagues from WIIS, being able, I mean, to talk to five very senior and highly professional panel members into accepting that opportunity to talk about this issue.

Margriet Prins, I mean, from the Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina will be chairing that panel and obviously she will be also introducing our distinguished panelists.

So without further ado, I would like to give Margriet the floor, and please go ahead.

MARGRIET PRINS (Deputy Head of Department, Return and Reconstruction Task Force, Office of the High Representative in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina): Well, thank you very much. First of all, I'd like to thank the organizers of this event for allowing me to... (coughs)... excuse me... for the invitation and it's with great pleasure that I will try to assist the discussion on the post-conflict reconstruction.

Let me first introduce the panel members. On my far right is Mrs. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, John Hopkins University, and also the Vice President of WIIS, who is the main organizer of this event.

And then Mr. William Durch on my far left, Senior Associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center.

Then Ms. Clare Short, on my left, member of the U.K. Parliament, and former Minister for International Development Affairs.

And then on my right, Ms. Barbara Stapleton, who is policy director of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief.

So I do think we have the knowledge and the practical experience to make it a worthwhile discussion.

My name is Margriet Prins, as mentioned. I work with the Office of the High Representative now in Sarajevo. I've been on the Western Balkans for a long time. During the war I worked with the UNHCR and then more recently with the OHR.

And today it has been mentioned here already, today it's ten years ago, exactly, that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the genocide of 8000 men and boys was set in motion after the Serb forces took control of the UN safe area of Srebrenica.

This brings me to one of the main elements, I would think, any post-conflict reconstruction effort must have, which is an early establishment or a re-establishment of the rule of law. That, I mean, to make a general statement on post-conflict reconstruction efforts, we all have to look very much at the local context of the operation, but this is one of the things that all operations need to have in common.

As I said, as we speak, a large gathering now in Srebrenica is commemorating this momentous and very painful anniversary. Actually the funeral of hundreds of its victims is now underway.

Bosnia has another anniversary coming up this year, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed and initialled in Dayton, U.S.A. and in Paris, France, ten years ago. The war in BIH killed an estimated 200,000 people and it's forced two million people from their homes.

The Dayton Peace Accords, it stopped the war, it ended the war, it did not really stop or solve the conflict. One could argue that the root causes of the conflict in BIH still largely persists. The events, you may not have followed it in detail, but events leading towards the commemoration of today and make it all the more clear that the people in the country have not really yet started to acknowledge what happened in their country.

And for lasting peace people do need to acknowledge their past. And only the truth can lead to this acknowledgement.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina one of the main instruments uncovering the truth is the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This is one of the reasons that actually today's commemoration is all the more painful. The men responsible for the genocide are still walking free. An international determination right after the war...

UNIDENTIFIED: (inaudible)...

PRINS: No, that's true. To bring them to justice was insufficient. And it brings me back when you do have to wonder how stable the peace will be if people who have this on their conscience are still walking around.

Let me give the floor first to Chantal, who will give a framework.

DR. CHANTAL DE JONGE OUDRAAT (Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, John Hopkins University, Washington, DC and Vice President, WIIS): Margriet, you're making it very difficult for me and very ambitious. I'm not sure that I'm really providing the framework. I do want to offer some remarks.

I think this panel deals with what I would argue should be the core task of NATO today. And I would argue, in a way, it already is.

Post-conflict reconstruction, what do we mean with that? Sometimes it's also referred to as peace-building, nation-building. Sometimes it's called peace-operations or stabilization missions.

I think it refers in general to a process whereby international actors are trying to help a country move from war to lasting peace and to prevent violent conflict from breaking out again.

Now post-conflict reconstruction, so defined, has been a growing concern since the end of the Cold War, and remains of great concern today. Even if it's true that global warfare is in decline since 2001, serious problems remain and we only have to think about Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, the DRC, Côte d'Ivoire, and others.

There's a highly authoritative source here, that is the 2005 Peace and Conflict Survey that is established by Ted Gurr and Monty Marshall. They argue that the risks of future genocide and political mass murder remain high in half a dozen countries, and a significant possibility in a dozen others. They also identify 31 countries of serious risk to mismanage societal crisis and succumbing to civil war or governmental collapse. They also believe that some other 51 countries are slightly less, but still at great risk for governmental collapse.

So if you look at these figures you have sort of half the world who has serious trouble and serious governmental weaknesses. So to say that these internal communal strife, these conflicts, are among one of our top security challenges is, I would argue, not an exaggeration.

Particularly if you know that a lot of these internal conflicts often have very serious regional security consequences, and I would argue very often also global security consequences and repercussions. These conflicts also have repercussions on our own security.

Now I think there are three things that we have learned since the end of the Cold War, about how to deal with these type of conflicts.

First is that, international intervention can help stop and prevent a violent conflict, and is often essential to create the conditions for a lasting peace.

Secondly, for post-conflict reconstruction to succeed you need a robust military component to ensure a secure and stable environment. You need boots on the ground who are not afraid to shoot, if necessary, and not just in self-defence.

And thirdly, that post-conflict reconstruction is not a linear process. That is to say that the social and economic dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction go hand-in-hand with the military dimension of post-conflict reconstruction. I think these are not sequential phases. On the contrary I would say they go hand-in-hand.

Now NATO has increasingly taken on these post-conflict reconstruction tasks and has become actually quite good at it. And I would argue that the other top security challenges that we face, preventing and stopping the proliferation of WMD, halting terrorism, are actually more of a stretch for NATO. I have difficulty envisaging NATO mobilization for a military action to counter or to prevent the proliferation of WMD. Such an operation would be extremely divisive within the Alliance.

And similarly, I think in the fight against terrorism, our main immediate policy instrument is not military action, but it's cooperation between intelligence services and enforcement officials. In this sense, I think September 11 really was a sort of an exception, and there are no more Afghanistans, as we have actually seen with the attacks in Madrid and in London, the enemy resides within our own societies and we're not going to attack, you know, London or Madrid.

So I would argue that NATO member states should allow NATO to focus on what it does best, and that is post-conflict reconstruction.

Now if post-conflict reconstruction is going to be the future of NATO, if this is going to be the core job of NATO, this has, I think, three main consequences for the organization in terms of both first, military capabilities; second, institutional structure and decision-making processes; and third, alliances and partnerships with other international organizations.

Now as far as military capabilities are concerned, I think this means continuing the process of transformation, building up lean, rapidly deployable forces. I think NATO members should be pushed, and particularly smaller NATO members, should be pushed towards specialization. They should be encouraged to develop these kind of niche capabilities. And I think NATO... the NATO military authority should probably want to guide this process, and give very specific advice to some of the smaller NATO members, for a very specialized type of force planning.

I think it also means the further development of the NRF, and I would also argue for the establishment of a new... a stabilization reconstruction force, as was proposed by our colleagues from the National Defence University in Washington, D.C., Hans Binnendijk and Dick Kugler.

Now as far as institutional structure and decision-making procedures are concerned, you need an institutional framework and a structure to be able to make quick decisions and to allow for troop deployment. Now there have been and there are several proposals on the table to speed up NATO decision-making procedures, and to help how NATO operations are financed, and including there are some proposals by the Secretary General.

I think in this regard probably the most important proposals are the proposals that deal with the common funding operations. Of course, organizational structures matter in the sense that they facilitate action when political will is there to proceed. The problem here is, and we have touched upon this a little bit in the morning, is that there is no real consensus on the future role of NATO.

We're maybe nudging closer to a consensus, but amongst those who think that NATO is toast, those who want NATO to stick to its core, I would say maybe Cold War missions--and it's maybe the Helga Haftendorn school--and then the ones who want NATO to do it all--and that is maybe the Gale Mattox school--the organization is being pulled in very different and sometimes contradictory directions.

So I think with that political commitment by NATO member states to a focused role for the organization, I think NATO will fail and NATO will become toast.

Thirdly, what does this mean in terms of alliances and partnerships with other organization? We talk a lot about the NATO and the EU. But I think actually the more interesting story and the more interesting relation for NATO is not with the EU, but with the UN. I think NATO and the UN are natural allies, and there's a natural division of labour between these two organizations. One provides political legitimacy, the other military effectiveness.

There is no inter-institutional security dilemma between these two organizations, unlike the EU-UN relationship, which as Tomas Vlasak said this morning, is very much a zero sum type of game, as is the NATO-EU relationship.

So for these post-conflict reconstruction stabilization missions, NATO will always need a partner, and I think the UN is actually the best partner for NATO.

Whenever we talk about the NATO-UN relationship people always come with this question yeah, but what about primacy? Meaning, can NATO intervene somewhere without authorization by the UN Security Council, and my argument, and my answer would be, of course NATO can. The question is not whether it can, but whether it will, and there I don't see NATO embarking on a lot of missions without UN Security Council authorization. In that sense, Kosovo was really an exception, as was, for that matter, Afghanistan.

I think one of the problems NATO faces is a problem that actually the UN faces as well, is that member states have actually very little "animo" to intervene in far away places.

Now I hope... Jaap de Hoop Schaffer this morning told us that he is going to the UN in September 2004(sic) and I hope this will indeed lead to a more robust institutional relationship between these two organizations.

And to conclude, I would have four recommendations for the NATO Secretary General and maybe for the NATO member states.

I think one, NATO and the UN should indeed establish a full-fledged institutional relationship. They should build up their liaison offices, both in New York and in Brussels in a serious way. They should establish working groups, I think, on specific issues, such as command and control, planning, some information sharing. I mean, it is ridiculous, if you think about it, that at present you only have, I think, just one NATO officer sitting in New York, and a lot of the UN Information Centre here in Brussels is actually more focused on the EU than on NATO, although I do sense there is quite some interest within the UN to engage with NATO.

Secondly, and one of the people this morning talked about it, I think it was Catherine Gegout who asked the Secretary General about the relationships with the African Union and other African security institutions. And I was a bit disappointed, I must say, with the answer by the Secretary General, because I think this is the way for NATO to go. And I would argue that actually NATO and the UN should take over the coordination of the G8 initiative, the Sea Island G8 initiative, the African peacekeeping initiative. They should become the coordinator of peacekeeping training around the world, because at present this effort is being done by all sorts of countries individually and is also often being done at cross-purposes.

Thirdly, when the UN and NATO strengthen their institutional ties, I think they have to be... it's very important that they do this in a very transparent manner. So that they can't be accused of some double standard, neo-colonialism, or sort of neo-imperialist type of efforts. Or for that matter, submissiveness to the U.S.

So openness and transparency of this relationship is, I think, extremely important from a political point of view, and I would urge them also to be very inclusive and not limit this just to NATO members.

And last, but not least, I would actually want to make a plea for the call by the International Crisis Group, which called for the deployment of NATO's NRF in Darfur, as a sort of a bridging operation until the time that the African Union can get its act together.

The European Union ESDP, is not capable of intervening thus far, and I think it is really shameful, I would say, some of the European members of NATO not realizing that what we should really care about is the plight of the victims, not so much maybe about our institutional prestige.

So with that...

PRINS: Thank you very much. I'd like to go to Mr. Durch.

DR. WILLIAM J. DURCH (Senior Associate, Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington, DC): Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to have been invited to participate on this panel.

(Taps microphone)... Come on! How are we doing? There we go.

It's a great honour to be invited to participate on this panel. I'm going to be following up some of what Chantal has said, and focus on some of the same issues from maybe a little bit different perspective. I'll try not to run overtime doing it.

Let's look at some of the dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction that Chantal was talking about.

There's security, or the end of warfare and the control of societal violence. There's political and governance issues, provision of legitimate and socially-accepted rule of law, with supporting institutions and principles and respect for human rights, at least as we would envision that goal. There's economics, namely jobs and investment. There's social structures and relations, including the support for civil society and transitional justice after a war. So there's several dimensions to this issue process.

What outside providers are there that provide such services? Well, they range from the global to the singular.

There are global organizations, such as the UN and its agencies, and the international financial institutions, the Bank, the International Monetary Fund. Regional organizations, primarily the EU and the AU, not of equal capacity. Sub-regional organizations, such as ECOWAS in West Africa, ASEAN to some extent in Southeast Asia. Alliances, principally NATO. States and coalitions, such as the U.S., has cobbled together on several occasions, which seem to be short-term entities. Companies, which are private profit-making, and NGOs as private non-profit entities. And all of these are involved in phases of post-conflict reconstruction or stabilization.

The key questions then for us would be who can do what, on what scale? How good are they at doing it? Who is acceptable within host states as a service provider? How can international actors involved in peace-support operations in post-conflict reconstruction best be held accountable for their actions? Individually or institutionally? It does little good for the West to come into a country denouncing impunity, while insisting on impunity for itself.

If you deduct the 200,000 or so soldiers that are involved in Iraq in one way or another, and 18,000 fighting forces in Afghanistan, that leaves about 75,000 UN troops and other personnel in the field. And maybe 25,000, 26,000 NATO peacekeepers; 18,000 or so in Kosovo, about 8,000 in Afghanistan. Which is double what it was a couple of years ago, probably a quarter to a third of what it really needs to be to enforce stability in any sense of the word.

On questions of military efficacy one small quibble with what Chantal said in dividing the NATO and the UN, I think with the exception of U.S.-led NATO air campaigns, NATO has been quite leery of using force in the field and very, very cautious in how it has deployed.

It can provide troops and stabilize some political military situations where those troops are wanted. As we've seen in Iraq, even the world's greatest superpower has trouble enforcing the peace against determined local opposition that doesn't fight by the rules.

NATO members may think of themselves as a global force. That's fine, but where are NATO forces in sub-Saharan African? I know there are parts of the NATO leadership that would like to see them there. Western states in general contribute only about five percent of the peacekeepers now deployed in Africa, mostly under the UN flag. And I don't see a rush to flood Darfur with NATO troops even if France were to relent politically.

I don't see a NATO ability to field enough forces to pacify such a large region or to supply it over time with an air bridge, because NATO really has no strategic lift without the United States beyond that kind of C-130 level, and that doesn't get you equipment to the field. Unless you rely on Russia and the Ukraine, which is very efficient, and that's how the UN does it, and how NATO would have to do it, but it's very ironic for someone who remembers the Cold War.

And I really don't see much prospect for global membership in NATO, especially to the extent that NATO really runs because it responds to American will, as a differentiation from the European Union. And I think the globe's rising powers, especially India and China, would, I think have zero interest in joining a global NATO, and that leaves out 40 percent of humanity.

NATO would have to create funding mechanisms to support its less wealthy members' deployment needs. The UN already had those. It's decision-making measures are equivalent to those of the U.N. General Assembly, namly effective immunity without a veto.

So why work to create a UN when we already have it.

I think, instead look at the division of labour that would recognize the narrow political military focus and potentially greater proactive military capability of NATO, without denigrating, or ignoring the capabilities of other organizations. Especially the greater humanitarian development and peace-building resources of those organization.

I think Europe also cannot assume that even... and this also goes for my county the United States, if it wants to be the provider of the good life to the rest of the world it's not clear that it would be welcomed by the rest of the world in such a role, or that it could afford to be an active nanny to the majority of humanity.

I think it's not at all clear to me, having listened to many assessments of post-conflict reconstruction efforts in Europe, Africa and Asia, that states and society can be successfully rebuilt by outside action, or at least primarily by outside action. Certainly not within the decision... political decision span of most western Parliaments and their budgets and resources.

I really do want this to work, I just don't see a path.

To shift the focus a bit for... from NATO to the U.S., the organization that's holding the line in half a dozen situations in sub-Saharan Africa, the UN manages 18 peace operations simultaneously. The NATO manages two. The UN manages 70,000 troops, 5000 police, 10,000 international and locally-hired civilians with 800 Headquarters staff dedicated to the task. NATO manages 26,000, with maybe, I don't know, 3,000 to 5,000 Headquarters staff supporting it. The UN does have a cost-sharing mechanism based on ability to pay, and a reimbursement mechanism that's pretty much uniform based on the lowest cost members.

There is a lot of talk, I think, about UN troop contributors making money among the developing states on doing peacekeeping for the UN, but they do it in very dangerous places, and I think there should be some incentive structure to do that.

And frankly, it's not that great a payoff. If you look at it the average UN cost per troop per year is about $18,000 and that's including wear and tear on equipment, as well as individual reimbursement.

Best as I can determine, it costs between $125,000 and $150,000 for a developed state to sustain a troop in the field for a year. The United States, closer to $200,000. There's more fighting, more maneuvering. Even not doing too much it's about $125,000. So we're talking 10 to 1 difference in cost or at least budgetary cost.

The UN has generated several tiers of standard training modules for peacekeepers. NATO has a long history of, and a long series of standardization equipment agreements for equipment and operations. Together I think these can be combined to create and promote interoperability amongst a wide range of potential peacekeeping providers.

On the other hand the G8 has the Global Peace Operations Initiative, with no implementing secretariat, modest funds and not real indication that they're going for this kind of standardized training across the board. And that would be unfortunate, since there are standards out there to be used.

Well, to kind of summarize, NATO is a capable military organization, but with limited physical reach, and no built-in capabilities for the civilian side of post-conflict reconstruction that others need to do.

It functions in a world of complementary organizations. These complementaries should be emphasized and collaboration increased as, I think Chantal wisely suggested, between NATO and the UN.

NATO is not only powerful, the UN is not only powerless. Regional organizations outside the EU, outside Europe, either have very low resources, or they face very high political hurdles. I'm thinking of East and Southeast Asia, to having substantive regional resources to apply to regional purposes.

In reality, in terms of NATO-UN cooperation, we're talking primarily about Central and Southwest Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa. I think when we say global reach, that's what we really mean.

PRINS: Thank you very much. Then I'd now like to give the floor to Ms. Clare Short.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CLARE SHORT (Member of Parliament and former Secretary of State for International Development, U.K.): Thank you. My view is that when... remember that moment in '89 when the Berlin Wall came down and Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and there was that wave of optimism that spread across the world about how we could use the resources that had gone into mutually-assured destruction to build something better, we fantastically underestimated the challenge to our international institutions of the change.

Because for 50 years they'd been made around the Cold War and every structure, every tension in the world, the nature of the UN, all the conflicts in Africa, the function of NATO and so on, was all built around the Cold War, we could dream of something better. But when we got down to a real world of growing disorder, because the permafrost of Cold War thawed, we found an incompetence in our international institutions that I think we're still living with and we're seeing a problem of very great disorder that's very threatening.

I found the discussion that I listened to this morning interesting, but too optimistic for my view. I think we're in a lot of trouble and we need to sharpen up our minds about what the problems are, what can be done, and how we can reshape our institutions to deal with the problems we've got, and we're... the kind of... the mindset has lagged, the leadership of the world has lagged, the institutions are stuck in their old roles, and we're doing very badly.

So post-'89 we had a couple of moments of continuing optimism. Some of the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and Nelson Mandela, the saint of politics of our age, but being elected and the transition in South Africa from apartheid to democracy without violence.

But then it was failure. Somalia, failure. And it's still a failure. It's a complete failed state, and its people are dispersed across the world.

Rwanda: we all signed up after the holocaust in Europe to always move to prevent genocide. It was threatened and the UN was warned, and the world knew it was going to happen, and we completely failed to intervene, and nearly a million people were slaughtered under orders in three months.

And the Balkans and we remember Srebrenica today. Very belatedly and with weak competence there was a move on Kosovo, but we let it develop and my own country has major responsibilities for preventing the international system being able to reach agreement to act in the Balkans. But the story of the Balkans is a story of failure. I mean, we should remember that. And we came very late, and that we still haven't resolved... haven't resolved the problems.

I think part of the problem is that the mindset still sees war and the military as about conflict between armed forces, whereas the new world disorder is disorder and conflict within countries, with lots of civilians being hurt and displaced, women and children suffering terribly, massive sexual abuses of women as an instrument of war, that isn't discussed sufficiently.

And I think this is where the whole issue of reconstruction should come centre stage. If we've got a new kind of disorder, and if it's largely within states, rather than between them, and within states that have been ... that are weak states, with weak institutions, then reconstruction is absolutely essential, both for people to enjoy peace, and to prevent conflict breaking out again. Because all the evidence is very clear that the greatest chance of conflict in the world is in countries that have recently emerged from conflict. And as our chair's very important remarks at the beginning, about the fragile state of process in Bosnia and Kosovo.

So helping countries reconstruct and build competent, modern institutions that can deliver security and development and hope and the chance of a better life to their people is the essence of dealing with the disorder of our current times, but it was at the last election, I think, to be fair to President Bush, not something I reach out to do very often, but the one before, when he famously said, we don't do nation-building. Which says something about the mind-lag of the world and the problem of not noticing the way in which the world had changed, and the need for the world to be able to do nation-building in order to have any order and any security and therefore any economic development.

So if we look we've had some success, and it's limited. If you take Sierra Leone, there was a flawed peace deal that involved the people responsible for horrendous violence being given impunity and coming into the government. The U.K. went in to bring out the Europeans and the U.K. citizens, and then stayed there because it was suddenly embarrassing to run away when a state was going to collapse.

It's talked about as one of Blair's wars. Britain didn't go to war in any way in Sierra Leone. We kind of sat there, and then a failing and collapsing UN peace mission, which was made up of small troops from lots and lots of different countries, that started to be held hostage, if you remember, by very weak rebel groups, but to deep embarrassment, and including Indians and so on, you know, from countries with some considerable discipline and so on.

And then it was turned around partly by the U.K. being there, and that was sort of psychological. It gave kind of more sense that the UN was backed up and the rebels... and the U.K. went in to get one of their own that had got out and that kind of gave some strength to the UN operation.

And the nation-building process started, and they still got them going, but when you're trying to help a country rebuild its institutions from scratch when they've all been destroyed, it is a very, very long term, very, very, very difficult operation. And Sierra Leone goes on and it's still fragile and it's still got enormous corruption problems and weak judges and weak law enforcement and so on and so forth.

So that's an example of success, and it's a very small country in a very unstable region of West Africa, that's going to be of more and more interest of course, because there's such rich oil resources in that part of the world. And there's a large number of very, very weak states there. Of course Liberia has come to peace, but the job of rebuilding isn't there.

East Timor is an interesting example that's probably worthy of more study as a success story. And Rwanda, funnily enough, despite what it's come from, in terms of rebuilding is doing remarkably well, but that's partly because you had a rebel army that was strong and powerful and secured order. And it's often the case that you haven't got anyone there that's securing order, and therefore you can't start the economic rebuilding and the getting children to school and all the rest of it.

But Kosovo, I mean, what... it was an enormously high profile operation for the world, and some of the biggest countries in the world. But when the military phase is over, which is the easy bit, the interest moves elsewhere. A complete... unwilling... I mean, a fractured complex decision-making structures are left there to help Kosovo rebuild, and then a complete failure to tackle the question of the final status of Kosovo, and therefore continuing disorder and an inability to rebuild the economy because people who... the World Bank can't engage if you're not a national state, and so on and so forth.

Very high levels of unemployment, nobody knowing what the final status is. I consider that very weak and it's... and that's a consequence of just weak capacity to make thought-through decisions that would then enable the job of helping the people of Kosovo to rebuild.

Afghanistan similarly, I think is... is a disastrous error in that of course the military phase was going to be very short, but the test was to help the Afghans build a country that gave them a better life, and this is one of the poorest countries in the world, where one in four children die before the age of five.

And there was a lost of discussion... I think the Bonn process, the political process, led by the UN, was extremely high quality and very good, and built consensus. There was cooperation all across the world to come in and support Afghan rebuilding. But there was an unwillingness to tackle the fact that you had warlords all over the country in different factions and groupings. If they weren't going to be demobilized and stood down and a national army be rebuilt then you couldn't get order and you couldn't deal with the drug problem. It was a failure there, and on it goes. And I'm not at all sure that Afghanistan is a success and is getting any better.

NATO went in, of course, to help stabilize Kabul, and that was a very limited task and it was successful, but it's not Afghanistan and the country isn't stable. And then belatedly we got the reconstruction teams in the big cities, which should have happened much earlier, but it's touch and go. When you go to see Karzai he's got American security all around him. It's like a symbol of someone who isn't governing his country. I don't know how I'd feel if I... he was a very nice man, but I don't know how I'd feel if I was an Afghan.

On the question of Iraq, whatever views we all take about the rush to war, the failure to prepare for afterwards is criminally incompetent. And it's another example, I think, of the dislocation, because of the quick change from the Cold War to a new world. A failure to have the capacity to analyze what the task is and what needs to be done afterwards.

So there was in the U.S. State Department very, very detailed planning for what's to be done after the conflicts. There was complex and detailed planning done in the UN. Quietly, because it was contentious for member states, but it was done. And my own department, we were in touch with the... my old department in the U.K., the State Department, the UN, but then decisions were made to suddenly hand the responsibility to the Pentagon, set up all which was done right at the last minute, a sort of delusional optimism about what would happen in Iraq, and now we are where we are.

I mean, I am stunned at the institutions of this world of ours, with all their sophistication, can end up with such incompetence, and I think Iraq is a quagmire of enormously serious consequence for the world and for all of us as well, of course, of its own people. And I think it's increasingly going to conflate with the situation in the whole of the Middle East and we could be seeing decades of it, and that will break up our international institutions and our capacity to act together.

Similarly, in Africa, the Congo, there was a peace... a very sensible peace process put in place and it ... there is a UN operation, and the French went in to the east to prevent a real surge of disaster, but there is not enough attention to driving that peace. And then you've got the country of between 50 and 80 million people in the whole central part of Africa, crucial to the centre of Africa, full of rich minerals that are being grossly misused, that really needs concentrated attention to bring the militias to baulk, stop the arms supply, start building the institutions of a state. It's going very slowly and badly, in my view, and it's another exemplification of the incapacity of the world to act on post-conflict reconstruction.

Similarly, Darfur, we just had the G8 and you know, lots of concepts for Africa, two million hungry, displaced people with women being raped when they go out to get firewood, and we've got NATO deploying just logistics behind a tiny African Union monitoring mission, that hasn't got the powers to enforce peace and to prevent people... the use of violence to displaced people.

So my own conclusion is we have the capacity in the world, and the knowledge, if we look at some of our success stories, to start to bring together the competencies we have to support and help countries to rebuild, but we're not engaging them. We haven't got... the world's going backwards in its sort of analytical capacity and its leadership capacity, and you've got institutions casting around for their role, rather than pulling together the institutional competence that we have.

So I think we're living in an era that could be an era of advance. We could move forward on peace in the Middle East. I think we could even overcome the errors that have been made in Iraq. And I think in Africa and so on, we could have an era of great advance if we'd get behind the peace agreements, and help the rebuilding and start to create competent modern states that could get their regional economic integration and start to grow their economies and trade with Europe and so on.

But I think we're not doing it. And I think we're in enormous trouble. And I love the dream of NATO and the UN coming together. There's no doubt, of course, the UN as dreamed of by Roosevelt and Churchill and so on, had a military capacity that's never been put in place. And of course, in a sense wasn't needed during the Cold War years because it wasn't going to deploy and is really needed now to be able to think through what military operations are needed and so on.

But there we are. I'm very pessimistic in the short term. I think some terrible lessons are being learned, and are going to have to be learned. And the tragedy of this time is we could be moving forward, but I think we're moving backwards.

PRINS: Okay, well, thank you very much. As you say, that's a far less optimistic story than we heard today. I'd like to turn the floor now to Barbara Stapleton for practical experience. (inaudible)...

(SPEAKERS OVERLAP)

BARBARA J. STAPLETON (Advocacy and Policy Coordinator, Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief): Thank you. Well... thank you, Margriet.

Well, the good news is that the majority of Afghans are still onside. The bad news is that there's an awful lot of ways for NATO to get toasted in Afghanistan.

Before moving onto what I've got to say in my paper, I'd like to thank the NATO Public Diplomacy Division and Stefanie Babst in particular for giving me the opportunity to present a range of perspectives from the field at a number of recent NATO conferences, and I hope I find something to say that's still refreshing for both Jamie and Stefanie. I think it's my third round with you.

My thanks to WIIS. I do hope a chapter can be opened in Afghanistan where there's a lot of very powerful women underneath those burkas, and ACBAR would be delighted to facilitate in that.

Just the caveat that my paper's written on the personal basis, and it reflects concerns shared by the 90 Afghan and international NGOs ACBAR is extremely proud to represent. It is just that in a personal capacity. And I hope my remarks will be viewed within the framework of the constructive critique they're intended, rather than used to legitimize different NATO member states' agendas.

Afghanistan needs more engagement of the right kind, not less. And if lost, Afghanistan will be lost by default. Afghans do not want to be returned to any aspects of their recent past, apart from perhaps the filtered memories of a golden age under the monarchy.

I'd like to second the remarks made this morning by NATO's Permanent Representative of the Republic of Lithuania and Dr. Judith Yaphe, regarding key obstacles to NATO's potential success, lack of political will and lack of resources. That's particularly apparently in the example of Afghanistan.

And I want to emphasize that money alone will not, however, solve Afghanistan's problems, which above all will have to be addressed over time. And that management of Afghan expectations, which has been done appallingly up to now, will entail NATO having to deliver to Afghan concerns on their human security, pushing forward on establishment of the rule of law and order, and especially confronting the issue of corruption, which is skyrocketing. Issues of transitional justice have barely been touched in Afghanistan.

My introductory remarks in the first section of my paper are intended to provide a realistic overview of the challenges that face... that NATO faces as it expands its presence in Afghanistan. And in the second half I attempt to propose some ways forward that could help ensure that NATO preserves the integrity of its mission in the eyes of those Afghans, school teachers, elders and moderate mullahs, who command and wield influence within the fabric of Afghan society.

Keeping the right Afghans on board will be crucial, particularly as NATO's involvement increases... as NATO's involvement increases in complexity, with the dual challenge of involvement in peace enforcement, as well as peacekeeping operations, as stages three and four of its expansion are reached.

The absence of Afghan national security forces capable of securing the state's control over the means of violence in the short term meant that stabilization following the overthrow of the Taliban depended on the international community's ability to react swiftly and effectively to security challenges emerging in the so-called transitional period.

Potential response to the threat that a widening security gap posed to the Bonn process, such as a regional expansion of ISAF peacekeeping forces in 2002, were constrained by a number of factors, however, and at this point I'd just like to pay public tribute to the sterling efforts of Dr. William Durch, that was such an asset to those of us who were at the rock face of advocacy attempts in 2002 to try to get that expansion of ISAF at that point.

Paramount amongst the reasons why that didn't happen was the perceived interest of the U.S.-led coalition forces in its prosecution of the wider war on terror in southern Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq. But international support for ISAF's expansion was also withheld in European capitals. Not only for reasons of insufficient political will, but also due to European dependence on UN capacity when it came to the airlift requirements entailed in any significant force expansion regionally in Afghanistan as Bill Durch touched on in his address.

And by the summer of 2002 the coalition was reportedly already moving assets out of Afghanistan in preparation for the war in Iraq. Repeated requests to the UN Security Council for ISAF's expansion from President Karzai and the head of the UN mission then, Lakhdar Brahimi, went unheeded.

Instead fears that the state-building process was slipping out of the international community's control drove the development of an expansion in civil military affairs, which was launched in Kabul in November 2002. It was, as one of the architects of the Provincial Reconstruction Team Plan said to me at the time, a question of doing nothing, or trying to do something with the limited resources available.

The establishment of the Afghan state's stability in the long-term was to be founded on an interrelated security sector reform process consisting of five pillars: justice, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, or DDR, police, army and narcotics. But meaningful progress in all these pillars, with the exception of the development of a new Afghan army, depended on prior political reforms in the relevant ministries of the Afghan government.

The international community lacked leverage, however, and political reforms where they occurred were partial and subjected to long delays. This was particularly apparent in the implementation of the DDR, the disarmament process, which didn't start until October 2003.

The success of police reform, for which the U.S. government plans to allocate a further $910 million, will also depend on reform taking place first, or at least concurrently at the Ministry of Interior, for which there appears to be no strategy, and I must just touch on the fact that deepening concerns about security in Kabul are very much linked to a Ministry of Interior which is out of the control of the... of President Karzai's office, and is seen as being run by criminalized gangs.

Outcomes of the security sector reform have been poorly analyzed. Another side effect of the security situation which has militated against the conduct of independent field research by senior academics. Academic research halted at the end of the 1970s in Afghanistan, and despite the sterling contribution of the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul, policy makers simply do not have enough detailed objective information about the actual outcomes of policies being enacted.

How successful is the reintegration component of DDR? Are the huge cash-for-work programs being implemented by U.S. aid as an adjunct to poppy eradication efforts being manipulated by local government officials?

Despite numerous calls from the NGO sector, evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of other development actors, including the private sector and the military, have been virtually nonexistent.

Despite this, informed Afghans and expatriates alike, know that ultimately the disarmament process has mainly been an expensive charade, serving to deepen existing problems of illegal armed groups and police reform. Neither will be resolved before the parliamentary elections in September.

A culture of impunity, well-documented by human rights organizations, both indigenous and international, continues to rule. Judicial reform has made painfully slow progress, while the crisis caused by the lack of prisons delays plans to bring well-known narcotics traders to specially-convened courts. An integrated, coherent approach to Security Sector Reform does not exist. And the lead national format to SSR does not appear to have facilitated the formulation of one.

Overall the security gap has slowed the pace of reconstructing Afghanistan's war-shattered infrastructure, and significantly increased its cost financially. The cost of insecurity was not factored into donors' development funding calculations at the first pledging conference in Tokyo in early 2002. Foreign investors, needed to the private sector and provide jobs, have been frightened off. Consequently the private sector, designated the driver of Afghanistan's economic development by the Afghans government and its international supporters, remains and is expected to remain absent.

Economic development is also hampered by the weak outcomes of civil service reform so far at the centre, which does not bode well for attempts to reform provincial administrations in which its envisaged PRTs will play a role.

Most damagingly of all to the long-term success of the Bonn agreement, the security vacuum provided optimal conditions for the restoration and rapid expansion of the opium economy.

The narcotics trade has fuelled corruption at all levels of government, and assisted criminal networks to virtually capture ministries at the centre, as well as administrative structures at the provincial and district levels. All government administration tend to be simply ineffective, due to a chronic lack of capacity. Overall, the failure to address the overarching question of security at the outset has led to the creation of a vicious, rather than a virtuous circle, in Afghanistan.

As early as March 2003, the then Minister of Finance, Ashraf Ghani, was publicly warning donors in Kabul that the country was becoming a narco-mafia state. Opium poppy eradiation efforts so far have made little impact. A recognized expert on the opium economy in Afghanistan, William Byrd of the World Bank, warns that current eradication measures have resulted in the cultivation of poppy in parts of the country where it had not been cultivated before.

At a conference in May on Afghanistan, post-Bonn, hosted at Wilton Park by the British government, and attended by representatives from leading donor nations, members of the Afghan government, and head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, the recognition that Bonn represented unfinished business, resulted in the agreement of a post-Bonn compact or framework between the international community and the Afghan government.

It was also agreed that the UN should continue to play some kind of coordinating role following the parliamentary elections this September. Details were not discussed, but any diminution in the political role of the UN in Afghanistan would be a backward step, given the capacity constraints of the Afghan government currently masked by expatriate technical assistance.

The question was also raised as to whether, in the event of the political process failing in Afghanistan, the international community had a Plan B. Critics of the international state-building efforts in Afghanistan so far would question whether there is even a Plan A.

Fears that the establishment of the Afghan Parliament may result in the political paralysis of the executive were also aired at this conference.

The issue of long-term U.S. bases in Afghanistan is a highly controversial one and it's being used in the campaigns of Karzai's political opponents in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. Ethnic polarities, clearly identifiable in the 13 patterns of the October 2004 presidential elections, are reportedly hardening on the back of the Northern Alliance's subsequent loss of key ministries, and the belief that the reconciliation program, aimed at the political rehabilitation of so-called moderate Taliban, signalled a resurgent (inaudible) political agenda at the heart of government.

Political disaffection from the centre has increased in parts of the north. A UN representative who naively opened a meeting with local notables recently in Feyzabad, by stating that he was there to support the central government, did not get the response he expected.

Should current trends continue, the stated objective of the PRTs, to expand the legitimacy and authority of the central government, could prove to be more of a liability than an asset. Strategists need to start thinking bottom up in their approaches.

Prospects for Afghanistan's reconstruction area are also affected by the regional context, as NATO analysts will be fully aware. Afghan alarm that some of its neighbours are getting up to old tricks is growing. But growing instability in Baluchistan and Izbekistan and recent political outcomes in Iran will be further factors to be taken into account.

There's no denying that the operational context in NATO's expansion is complex and challenging. All that under any circumstances the obstacles to building a viable polity in Afghanistan to which exist strategies are linked, are both historic and formidable. Much will depend on NATO having clearly defined its mission in Afghanistan and having a strategy in place to reach identified goals.

Since November 2004, I've attended a series of conferences linked to NATO in which ways to enhance the synergy of civilian and military actors have been examined. These have focused on NGOs, but although NGOs continue to provide the lion's share of the acutely needed implementing capacity the government lacks, they are not involved in the political scenario that NATO has to confront. And like all development actors in Afghanistan, the long-term developmental role of NGOs has been subsumed to the short-term political objectives that have punctuated the ambitious Bonn agreement.

NATO's ability to transform itself in the post-Cold War era is now linked to its fortunes in Afghanistan. Equally, Afghanistan's chances of charting a path away from the past that holds an illegitimacy for its people, to a stable future, will also be increasingly linked to NATO.

It's highly unlikely that NATO member states will depart from the PRT format, which has actually been labelled as an attempt to provide security on the cheap. How then, can existing resources be recalibrated and refocused to further these mutual interests?

At a meeting with a senior policy maker at the National Security Council in Washington in June it was emphasized that progress towards a democratic, accountable Afghan state was an Afghan responsibility, and that to the degree that people have voice in power they can pursue change.

Afghans, demonstrating considerable bravery and sophisticated powers of judgement, are attempting to do precisely this, and if you could just bear with me for a couple more minutes I'd like to provide a recent example to extrapolate a few lessons learned from them.

The essentially non-confrontational German PRT approach in Konduz, and subsequently Feyzabad in the north of Afghanistan, has not received the approbation that other PRT approaches, exemplified by the British, perhaps, have won. The latter tackled security issues more directly and also demonstrated a willingness to conduct far-reaching patrols on a regular basis to the out lying areas of the five northern provinces it covers from its PRT base in Mazar-e Sharif.

These patrols and regular meetings with local notables within and outside administrative structures boosted Afghan confidence that the international community was paying attention to their problems, though in effect the British PRT has punched above its weight in the promotion of raising local perceptions of international attention. That can still be enough to assist Afghans in challenging incidents of corruption and the abuse of power, and altering the status quo in the process.

In northern Takhar, at the end of May, there was a popular uprising against a commander led by teachers, elders and Mullahs, who commanded respect locally, and were able to mobilize several hundred people. Approximately 150 militia men started beating the demonstrators up, which precipitated a response from the German PRT. The Afghans had gambled on drawing in the PRT and their gamble paid off.

In addition the local police chief, who'd been recently appointed, had the confidence of the demonstrators. The German PRT is now working much more closely with UNAMA analysts in the field in terms of information sharing in the aftermath of the demonstration, and is conducting weekly patrols. It has maintained contact with the leaders of the demonstration, thereby shielding them from retaliation.

What lessons can be learned from this incident, and this departure in the German PRT approach?

That popular actions can shake the international agenda, and that shifts in perception of power locally are possible to effect, with active support from the PRTs. But that momentum in this and similar cases will depend on maintaining PRT engagement in support of the high expectations raised.

The increased confidence that results from this type of incident, that occurred in northern Takhar, news of which would have immediately spread on the Afghan grapevine, may at long last serve to put the Afghans in the driving seat, who up to now, as a colleague of mine often ruefully observes, haven't even been in the car.

Lessons learned also indicate the importance of keeping the pressure on the central government, to ensure the appointment of police chiefs capable of winning the confidence of Afghan people. Reportedly there was also good coordination with the Afghan National Army.

These are the kinds of synergies that are capable of delivering a transition to a more stable future in Afghanistan. It may sound like a small beginning, but if NATO member states could commit the political will to utilize existing resources, and allow PRTs the flexibility to engage directly in the protection of the mutual space that at a minimum Afghan civil society actors need, one thing might just lead to another.

Thank you.

PRINS: Thank you very much. Also not a wholly optimistic story, but there's a way out. Maybe.

I'd like to turn... how much more time do we have? We started 15 minutes late. So I would now like to turn to the questions from the audience. If you have questions then please introduce yourself and also state to who you'd like the question to be addressed.

Please.

Q: Can... you can hear me? Gale Mattox, and I wanted to direct mine to Barbara, the last commentator, but generally to the panel, it's very thought-provoking, really good, I think, discussions, and discussions points. But let me just take off on a couple of points from your comments, Barbara.

And that is, in particular on the PRTs. I mean, when you're talking about the PRTs, you know, I'm hearing a very difficult thing then what I usually hear about the PRTs, which is very positive. And you have some really interesting comments, and one in particular was when you talked about better to work from the bottom up. And I'd like you to go into that a little bit more. I mean, how would you envisage... I know there has been, of course, this focus on bringing... on making Kabul the real centre and going out. What kind of changes, exactly, would be necessary in your idea of the ideal PRT? Could you be a little more specific?

STAPLETON: Thank you for your question. Yeah, I'm delighted to take that a bit further, because there's a lot of discussion in Kabul amongst policy makers about decentralizing. That's a whole can of worms in itself in a sense because I think the important thing to realize in Afghanistan the emperor really does have no clothes, and if he has no clothes at the centre it's even worst at the periphery.

So if one's there to support the government then one has to ask what one's supporting increasingly in Afghan eyes. So the new flavour of the month is a development of mechanisms called Provincial Development Committees. And these are to be set up in all the main provincial areas of Afghanistan. They're to include the PRTs, NGOs, IOs, and local, at district level and provincial level, administrative representatives.

And the sort of theory seems to be that if the local community organizations are included in the form of these so-called "surers" which you may have heard of. Then they can ensure that there's genuine grassroots ownership of the development process, and some hope that it will be directed in a way that's relevant to the grassroots.

The problem with that is that, as I may or may not have touched on in my paper, that either provincial and district level administration is ineffective, or it's captured by criminal networks. And also we have the major problem of police reform, so there's endless ways to run circles around the best efforts of the PRTs and others.

If I can give an example, a recent community structure that was set up in Balkh, in the north of the country, which involved 125 representatives from the 125 identified communities, contained 30 commanders, former commanders, that had been through the disarmament process. Of course, still linked to their old networks, as indeed the police are, who've only been through brief training exercises of two, four and eight week duration, which are insufficient to break the links to the commanders.

So when I say bottom up, I'm thinking that... I think one has to sort of be very careful to identify the... those within the fabric of Afghan society who command respect. And those are the people, as I said in my address, that you need to keep onside. So one needs to get away from perhaps looking at civil societies, NGOs, which is what's happening in Afghanistan today and look at civil society in terms of what it means within the Afghan context. And it's always been fairly robust in the Afghan context.

I mean, one small example is a survey that was done in Kandahar, during the height of the Taliban period by a leading NGO with over 20 years experience in the field. It showed that more girl children were at school during that period, at the height of Taliban power, than at any time in the past. Afghans find ways of resisting. You need to identify who those actors are, and certainly in terms of information sharing, experience NGOs working at the grassroots, if those efforts were genuinely directed in those ways, I think would be willing to assist in that process.

But I'm not an expert on how these things are done. I'm sure there's others who can advise, but it does need now a bottom-up approach so that Afghan... and a protection of that space to allow genuine actors from the bottom to make their voice heard and to take things forward themselves.

PRINS: Thank you. Anybody else from the panel who'd like to comment on this question? Maybe we'll go to the next question then.

Q: (inaudible)... from the International Staff at NATO. My question is on UN-NATO relations, and as such goes to Chantal and William. I was actually intrigued by the comment of Chantal who said that although we talk about the NATO-EU strategic partnership, it's actually the UN who should be our natural ally and maybe we should focus more on institutionalizing our relationship with the UN. Now while NATO nations are currently discussing precisely this and some of the elements that you recommend are under discussion at NATO.

But my question is, how do you see actually the interest from the UN side on NATO-UN relations and what do they want from NATO possibly. And I think there's two different perspectives on the panel. Maybe that would be elaborated a bit. Thank you.

PRINS: Thank you. Yeah, maybe first Chantal, then...

DE JONGE OUDRAAT: Yeah, I think there's actually great interest from the UN side to get NATO involved. The UN has tried... the Europeans, the EU and ESDP, the Secretary General of the UN has repeatedly told and asked Europeans to come and contribute troops to UN peacekeeping operations, because what the UN is in dire need of is highly-trained military. And it hasn't got those.

So you know, I think after having tried the EU, it hasn't worked, the ESDP is not, you know, there's a sort of... the standby force that some at some point it would be for the UN, and so I think that's why the UN Secretary General is very interested in engaging NATO, particularly to get this type of highly-trained capable military, as well as procedures on the command control type of issues, information sharing, and things like that.

DURCH: Yeah, I would concur with Chantal. That the UN is very interested in having more NATO support than they certainly get now. Most NATO countries contribute forces to NATO operations. A relatively small percentage contribute other than the traditional sort of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean base on operations. Australia and Portugal had a special interest in East Timor, but other than that we've been most of the contributions diverted to NATO-flagged missions.

The Secretary General of the UN asked for an interlocking system of peace support, and that means working out a good, not a subservient, but a mutually-supporting division of labour based on capabilities and resources, and of course, most of the UN's resources financially for all of its operations, come from Europe, from Japan, from the United States. It's something like 96 percent of peacekeeping funds come from the developed group. So there is a contribution already in terms of money.

But in terms of engineering units, intelligence capacity, field communications, special forces, understated, but very valuable... Swedish special forces were a part of Artemis in Bunia. They were very highly regarded. I really hoped that they would have stayed after the main force left. On the other hand, Sweden and Ireland I think are the only two European countries to contribute infantry troops to a UN operation that is in Liberia, where I believe they formed the mechanized reserve force for UNMIL. So both to be commended.

SHORT: Could I just add one thing? If you read Roméo Dallaire's book on Rwanda or the way in which the peacekeeping operation was put together in Sierra Leone, you see such fragmented and frightening decision making that as well as the interest in having NATO capability and there's real political problems about that deploying any NATO resources into Africa and so on as we all know, the tightening up of the ability of the UN to plan and organize these enforcement operations and so on, is desperately needed, and I'm sure a contribution could be made there.

I mean, clearly there's a growing sensitivity about NATO within a divided world. What I think people could be seconded, there could be a real effort, that would improve and enhance the effectiveness of some of the existing peacekeeping operations.

PRINS: There's one more question there, please.

Q: Yeah, I'm Maria Hugo, Deputy Chairperson of WIIS Germany from Berlin. I have a question basically directed to Barbara Stapleton, but also if someone else wants to answer to that, that is going back to Afghanistan. Everybody agrees that one of the major problems is narcotics, drug trafficking in Afghanistan and in particular the German forces that are out there are not allowed to participate in any missions against... on counter-narcotics. In particular German Parliament has said that's not one of their tasks because that's policing and not a military mission or military task.

Do you see... where do you see the solution? Do you think it really requires forces, or what other ways could that problem be handled?

STAPLETON: I was rather dreading questions on the narcotics situation because it's not an area that I'm an expert in, but I do... I would thoroughly recommend going to the World Bank site and downloading anything by William Byrd. Not only has he been based in and bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan for many years, what he has to say commands respect and agreement with Afghans as well as international analysts on the situation.

The problem with narcotics is such an immense one and it's one that's tied into, of course, the failure to address the security vacuum, and basically providing optimal conditions, as I mentioned.

And now the toothpaste is out of the tube whatever you do, especially with the fact that it represents such a significant percentage of the Afghan economy, and the fact that the people involved in the cultivation, and I don't mean even the landowners, I mean, the migrant labour in terms of within Afghanistan, that's brought in for the harvest and what have you, the drought conditions, everything makes it the perfect crop, and of course, the differentials between a metric ton of wheat produced and opium poppy.

So for the Afghans poppy means development. In small towns in Badakhshan where there's nothing there's now a few shops and people can buy cheap Chinese toys for their children for the first time and have a little bit of disposable income. It's not an easy thing to ask people to step away from this.

The other major problem is that at district, provincial and at central levels of the government those known to be deeply involved in the narcotics trade are within government, so why should they take seriously messages about opium poppy production being counted to Islamic norms, etc. etc.?

There will be no silver bullet for this, and a tremendous amount of money is being put into an attempt to fast forward alternative livelihoods. But what do phrases like alternative livelihoods actually refer to? They refer to the rural economy, which is linked into the wider economy in Afghanistan, which for reasons I touched on, because of the security, lack of sufficient administrative reform and other factors, the creation of jobs is not happening as was perhaps anticipated.

So everything is interrelated. We have from the NGO side, very much supported interdiction, which targets the drug traffickers, but we're very concerned about associative effects of eradication, particularly in the short term. And the Afghan NGOs amongst us, I've never seen them be so disturbed at the situation, because it has a huge knock-on effect. As many of you may or may not be aware, the access to the Afghan population outside of the north, particularly in the south, and southeast, is through our Afghan colleagues, and for them eradication policies hugely added to their personal security problems.

So it's a very, very complex question, and I would direct you towards the experts for any solution... well thought-through solutions rather than my sketching them.

PRINS: Well, thank you very much. I'm just told that our time is up. It's very hard to conclude this discussion, as we did go from one more optimistic voice that calls on NATO to make post-conflict reconstruction the core task, to...