Missing in action

QUOTE: ‘We could have done it a lot better. We should have done it a lot better.’ — Gordon Brown, Today Programme, 3 September 2007

QUOTE: ‘In Afghanistan we will work with the international community to match our military and security effort with new support for political reform and for economic and social development... in Basra Province, we will support economic development to give the people of Basra a greater stake in the future.’ — Gordon Brown, Mansion House, 12 November 2007

Gordon Brown’s pledges at the Mansion House in November represent no more, and in many respects considerably less, than what the British government has been trying to do in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. In both countries these attempts have largely failed, as the prime minister acknowledged in September in relation to Iraq and as is glaringly obvious in Afghanistan over narcotics, where Britain has been the ‘lead’ country. It is highly doubtful that fresh efforts will be any more successful.

There are several reasons for this, quite apart from the fundamental flaws within the fragile Afghan and Iraqi governments. The first is the most obvious and gets the most attention: the security situation in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, where the British are concentrating their effort, is dire, and that in Basra, which has been the prime area of British responsibility in Iraq, has greatly deteriorated since the coalition’s invasion in March 2003.

In both places the brunt of the British effort is borne by the Army. The small numbers of civilians — officials and contracted personnel — keep their heads down. In Basra, or rather outside of it, they are holed up in the airport. Since Iraqis who visit them there risk their lives in doing so, discussions have to take place outside the country. This makes the promotion of ‘economic development’ — a phrase which has come to replace ‘reconstruction’ — exceedingly difficult.

The second factor which reduces the prospect of success, even if the security situation were to improve, is well known and resented by many in the British Army but receives far less public attention.

The terms of service of civilian public servants, and the procedures for managing and administering them, have consistently impeded the deployment of civilian experts in sufficient numbers to produce results on the ground. Where they could, the Army have tried to fill the gap. But some crucially important sectors, such as agriculture which offers enormous scope for employment, have been neglected.

This situation is set to continue, even if the British focus is now limited to capacity-building of the Afghan and Iraqi central and local governments and the earlier attempts to mentor technical managers to help reconstruct those battered countries have largely been dropped.

To many of us who worked as civilians in the field and who tried to make the best of woefully inadequate resources and support, there was a glaring need for expertise and back-up: materials, transport and security arrangements.

What was, and still is, needed is an effective Civilian Expeditionary Force. Not some sort of standing army in sandals, but a sizeable stock of volunteers prepared to be deployed to hazardous environments, operating with or right behind the military.

Such teams, well-led and well-supported, working to co-ordinated policy and practice, would have to include a good proportion of officials sufficiently familiar with the mechanics of government to be able to influence policy at home as well as — generally much more costly — contracted personnel with technical and managerial expertise.

The present arrangements fall far short of this. The civilian staff in the provincial reconstruction teams deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq are pitifully small in number with a limited range of expertise. Expansion of numbers and roles is hampered by their UK-based managers’ fixation with their ‘duty of care’ which prevents government officials and contracted staff being exposed to anything like the risks which soldiers and private security firms face every day.

No wonder the Army asks, ‘where is combat DFID?’

Sadly, however, more lies behind this bitter question than a traditional gripe about the shortcomings of civvies. Nor is it entirely fair on DFID as the civilian effort in areas of conflict is managed jointly between several government departments, of which the most important are the development ministry (DFID), the foreign office, the ministry of defence and the Army (the last two having by no means identical views).

In practice the civilian effort is dominated by DFID, who have all the money. And the fact is that, for historical and cultural reasons, there is considerable tension between DFID’s policies and objectives — which heavily emphasise poverty eradication — and the more pragmatic approaches of the other actors.

But there remains strong residual doubt more widely within Whitehall about the desirability of sending civilians into the field when they had not signed up to risk and discomfort when they were recruited. The result is a serious imbalance between civilian and military engagement, which itself increases the Army’s expenditure of blood and treasure.

Does this matter? After all, the Army is specifically designed to operate in war zones while the civil service is not. And the Army has many skills and a proven ability to use them. The answer is clearly that the British effort would be far more effective if there were a larger and wider civilian presence on the ground — beyond the two or three dozen multinationals in Helmand and less than a dozen in the provincial reconstruction team in Basra.

When the military go into an area and render it safe, their dangerous efforts need to be immediately underpinned by negotiations with the local leaders and by advice on reconstruction and development priorities, both of which tasks call for civilian expertise. Only then might military successes be expanded into developmentally promising ‘ink spots’, fit to be joined up to other similar ink spots.

By such means development and security can go hand-in-hand, and the old squabbles about the relative priority of jobs and security start to lose their relevance. If the civilians lag behind, the opportunities are missed.

When, therefore, Gordon Brown refers to matching military effort with new support for political reform and economic and social development, as he did at the Mansion House, does he envisage a step-change in civilian deployment, and will he authorise a significant increase in non-military financial expenditure, which is currently orders of magnitude lower than that spent on military operations?

One must suspect not, since the measures he highlighted in an earlier announcement on 8 October were mainly about advising the Iraqis on how to spend their own money. And it would probably require legislation to be able to lift the dead hand of ‘duty of care’.

Seven years after the start of the Afghanistan campaign and nearly five years after that in Iraq, we are still trying to fight two wars with a civilian administration which, despite some tinkering, is designed for conventional development co-operation and diplomacy, and which is neither flexible nor hard-nosed enough to take advantage of a sometimes evanescent strategic space created by combat operations.

The lessons of the many post-Cold War campaigns in the Balkans and elsewhere have not been learned. Still less have they been implemented. It would be good to think that some efforts in this direction are now being made. But don’t hold your breath.

Sir Hilary Synnott, now a Consulting Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic studies, was the Coalition Provisional Authority Regional Coordinator for Southern Iraq and previously British High Commissioner in Pakistan. His book Bad Days in Basra is to be published by IB Tauris in the new year.