BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4 TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4”- AFGHANISTAN CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 19th June 2007 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 24th June 2007 1700 - 1740 REPORTER: Kate Clark PRODUCER: David Lewis EDITOR: David Ross PROGRAMME NUMBER: 07VQ3913LHO THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. “FILE ON 4” Transmission: Tuesday 19th June 2007 Repeat: Sunday 24th June 2007 Producer: David Lewis Reporter: Kate Clark Editor: David Ross ACTUALITY OF POLICE PASSING OUT CLARK: Newly qualified police are being drilled on the last day of their training. They’ve learned how to be ethical members of the force. But these new recruits will be joining a service that many Afghans regard as a source of crime. The problem’s not just with the police. Afghans describe the constant demand for bribes from state officials of every variety. Tonight, File on 4 investigates how corruption has penetrated the very institutions of the Afghan state. Is this the ideal which the west has nurtured with billions of dollars of aid - and which today British troops are fighting to defend? SIGNATURE TUNE ACTUALITY IN LORRY CLARK: It’s night time, I’m hidden in the back of a lorry cab, and I’m driving across Kabul. I’ve gone undercover to try to witness bribe-taking by the Afghan police. It’s difficult to see normally, because they don’t like to take money in front of foreigners. We’re in the lead vehicle in a seven truck convoy that’s taking a load of steel across the country. In Kabul alone, there are multiple police check posts for them CLARK cont: to get through. Unless police actually try to board the truck, I think we’ll be safe enough. We’re being pulled over now ACTUALITY OF ROW AT TRUCK CLARK: They’re trying to bargain the police down, to pay a lower bribe. The policeman’s cursing the driver’s wife and mother and he’s threatening to beat him up. What happened? ARSHAD: We paid 1,400 Afghanis, which is $30 for our group. Our group has got seven vehicles, for one check post. I said to him, is it possible if I pay you just 200 less, they started swearing at me. Whatever they want, they can do to us. CLARK: Is that what you have to put up with every day, driving in Afghanistan? MAN (VIA INTERPRETER): I’ve just come from the Tajikistan border and I’m driving down to Pakistan. Every trip, I pay $600 in bribes. The security police at the checkpoints take the money. Trip by trip, the price of the bribe is getting higher all the time. They even bargain with us. It starts off high and we try to get them down a bit. CLARK: What do you think about your country when this sort of thing happens? LORRY DRIVER (VIA INTERPRETER): Our documents were all completely in order, but they wanted money. If you don’t pay, they beat us. They will do whatever they want to us. I don’t have any hope for my country at all. CLARK: Another glimpse into how to make money illicitly is provided by a former police officer, who used to work at Kabul international airport. His descriptions of bribe-taking should worry anyone concerned about airport security. What did you take bribes for? OFFICER (VIA INTERPRETER): At the airport, to let people jump the queue to get their passport stamped or not to get it stamped. I would let them pass through illegal stuff – opium, heroin and sometimes antiques, alcohol - stuff that they wanted to smuggle into or out of Afghanistan. CLARK: Was everyone taking bribes? OFFICER (VIA INTERPRETER): Yes, that was the reality. Beside my salary, I would need to get another $180 or $190 a month just to survive. You couldn’t afford to live otherwise. CLARK: The Kabul airport authorities say they‘ve cleaned up the airport – although they admit there’s more to do. Even so, the impression of Afghan officials generally – police, judges, civil servants – isn’t good. ACTUALITY AT MARKET CLARK: This is bustling Kabul – a typical neighbourhood, with unpaved roads and nasty green water in the ditches alongside the paths, but it’s busy. Children are coming home from school and there’s a good mix of shops – butchers with sides of meat hanging outside, tailors, greengrocers, music shops, even an estate agent. I wanted to find out what people here think about their government. MAN: Let me tell you clearly, whatever you are going to do in government offices, you have to pay a bribe. Without a bribe, you can’t get anything done. You have to pay a bribe. MAN 2 (VIA INTERPRETER): Thank God it’s certainly better now than during the war, when the factions were looting. Mr Karzai has certainly done a lot for us, but the people are not happy with him now, because of the bribes and corruption. MAN 3 (VIA INTERPRETER): Bribery? It’s just too much now. Before it did exist, but it was minimal. Security was better too. All we want is security, peace and work. This government hasn’t done anything for us. You can’t call it a government. Anyone who has power these days is a government for himself. CLARK: When Afghans list what they now have to pay for, you realise the seriousness of this issue – getting a passport, getting a driving licence, paying an electricity bill, getting a marriage certified, payments to judges if they’re taken to court, payments to police if they run into trouble or if they want them to investigate a crime. There are honest civil servants, but still the overall impression is that Afghan officialdom’s main job is to fleece the general public. The research and campaigning group, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, surveyed 1,200 Afghans from across the country to ask them about bribes. Their director is Lorenzo Delesgues. DELESGUES: The survey was mostly looking at administrative corruption, so what we would call petty corruption, and the results are quite alarming, because we’ve realised that there is a proportion of the population which is 70% that experienced bribes in the last year. We have also calculated through the survey results that there is an average of $100, which corresponds to about two months of an average civil servant’s salary that are given in bribes by each household in Afghanistan in 2006. And when you calculate the sum, it’s the financial equivalent to between $250 million and $400 million, which is a figure which is comparable to the Afghan GDP. CLARK: So the same amount of money that the Afghan economy makes in terms of GDP, you think that’s the total amount probably paid in bribes? DELESGUES: Yes, it’s very very close. CLARK: You paint a picture of a state which is sort of predatory rather than actually doing things for the people. DELESGUES: You have some civil servants who are really doing a great job and hopefully they are there, but you also have a part of the state that is really used as a generator of private incomes, and this is a big and massive problem in Afghanistan. CLARK: Alienation from the state is nothing new in Afghanistan. Historically, people associated government with taxation and conscription – and during the war, with far worse forms of oppression. But this time, it was supposed to be different. Expectations rose after the fall of the Taliban. People were promised the government would bring peace and reconstruction – and the world would be backing its efforts. ACTUALITY IN BUILDING CLARK: A digger prepares a road for tarmacking in the north of Kabul. This is the sound of transformation. In 2001, much of the city lay in ruins, it had been devastated by the warring Mujahedin factions in the mid-1990s. Today, the ruins, like the old front-lines, remain only in people’s memories. Kabul has been re-built. Houses, shops, hotels and Afghanistan’s first multi-storey shopping mall have mainly been financed from people’s own pockets. But aid money has paid, amongst other things, to build clinics, schools and roads in a national programme of reconstruction. Such aid isn’t likely to come again - $4.5 billion were pledged in 2002, $10.5 billion last year. And this year, America alone is planning to spend more than $11 billion. It’s impossible to track how much of that promised money has actually been spent, but still the sums are huge. What then has been its impact? ACTUALITY ON ROAD CLARK: This road’s only a year old, but it’s pot-holed, the surface is cracked, and you can understand why people are very unhappy with the result. Here comes another pot-hole. It’s really horrible. The driver is having to slow right down, otherwise he’d wreck his suspension on these pot-holes. We’ve had heavy rain today and it looks like there isn’t any drainage. There’s huge pools of water filled with rubbish floating on the side of the road. To find out what went wrong, I’ve come to meet a former construction company employee. He’s just resigned, for reasons which will become obvious. He asked not to be named. SIRAJ: Kabul municipality wanted asphalt to construct the roads inside Kabul city. They needed 30,000 tons of asphalt. The company who won it, he won it for $360 per ton, which actually was incredibly cheap, because according to my information, because we were also part of this bidding process, we were taking part in it, after long effort the cheapest we could get it was $450 per ton in Iran, and including transportation and everything in Kabul it would have ended upto $550. So it was quite amazing and incredibly very cheap. I think he delivered more than six thousand tons and they started using on the roads. CLARK: But after just six months, the road started to crack. At the same time, control of Kabul municipality changed and the new administration launched an investigation. SIRAJ: They found that 20% was asphalt and the 80% nobody knows what was it. It was some black material that he had put together. I am 100% sure that the engineers, the procurement section in the municipality, they knew that it’s impossible to provide the quality of asphalt they needed for such a price. But there was something going on inside. CLARK: You think there were bribes being paid? SIRAJ: Yes. There are people who are getting shares and they don’t care what is the quality of the product that they’re bringing in and they are using it. CLARK: And has that company got further bids? SIRAJ: I think in the municipality that company has been blacklisted, but it’s very easy in Afghanistan, you just come up with another name, the same company, same guy, just it’s a matter of one day to register a new company. That company definitely is going to get more bids. CLARK: But problems aren’t just arising in projects contracted by the government, says this whistleblower. He and other people working in the construction industry have told us of kickbacks being paid to get contracts from foreign and Afghan consulting companies, they work for the big donors, and also from the foreign military. Such corruption may just be an inevitable side effect of the massive flows of aid into the country. If the end results are positive, that would be one thing. But what worries our whistleblower is that all too often, it’s the work itself which suffers. SIRAJ: If I am building a school and I give share to someone, it means that I should make the quality of the construction of the school, I should change it, I should make it of low quality, which I can’t accept. And this is not the story of one or two days, it’s going on and on. Corruption has become part of institutions. CLARK: You’re saying basically it’s impossible to work if you’re honest? SIRAJ: It’s very difficult, really difficult. I have been visiting personally in Wardak and in Rasny schools that has been built for $140,000 or $160,000 that hardly survived for one year, and after two winters the building was collapsed. Hardly they had spent $40,000 on each school. If you give a cut, definitely you have to reduce the quality and this is the result at the end of the day. Officially the government announce, okay, we have made this much schools this year, but actually if you go on the ground and see what kind of job they have done, it’s heartbreaking really. CLARK: And even if there’s no corruption, if every part of the paperwork has been legal, the US campaign group CorpWatch believes there are still major problems with the way some aid has been dispersed. Last year, it looked at some of the rebuilding projects, focusing on USAID, the aid arm of the US government and the largest donor in Afghanistan. It looked at how USAID was using private contractors to build schools, clinics and roads. The group’s researcher, Fariba Nawa, said their main concern was that the way projects were managed was inefficient – and that there seemed to be little, if any, quality control. NAWA: You have a security problem in this country, so you’re constantly subcontracting, and you have on one project you have like six different companies working on it, from the international to the government to the Afghan government and to the local subcontractor. And again the money is siphoned off, each company takes their overhead, their salaries, whatever is needed for them to keep going. CLARK: This layering of subcontracting, what sort of percentage actually goes out of the project? NAWA: I think, from what I was told, there is a 6% to 20% for each contractor on the job, and you’re talking an average of three to six contractors on each project. By the time you get to the actual project you end up with bad quality. CLARK: She found clinics with holes in the roof, poor drainage and no provision for sewage, and road schemes that were built using materials that wouldn’t survive without continual maintenance. We asked the US embassy for an interview. They declined, but officials told us privately that USAID has tightened up its oversight and its contracting systems and they believe that most projects have been successful. Still, damage appears to have been done. Afghans listen to the radio and have heard the sums of money promised with such fanfares by the world – and then they look around at what has actually been done. The sums don’t appear to add up and the assumption is that the foreigners are also corrupt. EXTRACT FROM NEWS REPORT NEWSREADER: It’s ten o’clock, this is the World Tonight, with Claire Balderson. [SOUNDS OF RIOTING] A night time curfew has been imposed in the Afghan capital, Kabul, after violent protests … CLARK: Just over a year ago, rioters overran parts of the Afghan capital. Enraged when a US military vehicle crashed into civilian cars, their anger went far deeper. Foreign aid agencies and police posts came under attack. It was a wake-up call to the discontent which had been simmering under the surface. NAWA: Overall, in Afghanistan there is a sense of being tricked, and talking to people, they will tell you that we’ve been gypped and the international community has lied to us and reconstruction is not happening fast enough, it’s not happening, there are millions of dollars coming here – where is it going, we don’t see it. And what that does, I think, is that builds resentment and resentment turns into violence. I think the riots in Kabul last year, they were shouting death to America, death to Karzai. Some of it, I’m not saying it was the only reason, some of it was because you don’t see what they had expected. Why aren’t the roads built? Why don’t we have power yet? And I will say that in some cases Afghans do expect too much too fast, but that’s because they were promised and you’re dealing with a primarily illiterate population. CLARK: Do you think that the issue of corruption and shall we call it lack of integrity on some of the aid projects, is that having a knock-on effect on how legitimate the government is viewed and how the foreign aid effort is viewed? NAWAR: Absolutely. I think it’s a huge reason for the lack of support that this current Afghan government has, and it’s also discredited the international effort to rebuild this country. CLARK: It all feels like a feeding frenzy. At every level, people fear that if they don’t demand bribes or embezzle money, someone else will. For many people, particularly former fighters, there’s a sense that this is payback time for the sacrifices they believe they made during the civil war. But Afghans returning from exile in the west also feature among those accused of embezzling state resources. As for who might be policing the corrupt officials, well, there are also problems with the Afghan police force – despite the best efforts of the big foreign donors. ACTUALITY OF RECRUITS MAN: You have successfully completed many hours of training … CLARK: It’s graduation day at one of the US-run police training centres. Ranks of men - and one woman – are smart and well-drilled, waiting for the ceremonies to begin. MAN: You have proven yourselves worthy to be … CLARK: In the last week, thirty-five police recruits and their trainers were killed when their bus was bombed in Kabul. And it’s police who are taking the brunt of the casualties in the fight against the Taliban. There’s no doubt there are brave and capable police officers. But they can’t escape the force’s reputation for corruption. ACTUALITY AT CENTRE CLARK: This centre’s run by the private security firm, Dyncor. The trainers here, like Anthony Garcia, believe they are doing a good job, but they’re aware of what awaits the recruits when they go back to their home areas to start work. GARCIA: We give classes to ethnics. When they leave here, just by talking to students, they have the right idea and the right things in mind of what they want to do. It’s just whether they at some point in time they might lose hope or get bullied into whatever the things that they do out there that might not be ethical. There’s a lot of corruption in the police. We just have to work on kind of weeding that out a little bit. CLARK: A lot of the reports about the Afghan police have suggested that the corruption is right at the top. GARCIA: You know what they say about what rolls downhill. Okay, if you’ve got somebody on top, he’s got to be giving orders to the guy at the bottom, so yes, if there’s corruption at the top, you’re going to find corruption at the bottom. CLARK: One recent study found that in most parts of the country, the police are corrupt, predatory and, as far as the general public is concerned, doing more harm than good. A key allegation is that police posts are bought and sold because there is so much money to be made. It’s an open secret within the force, as one police general confided. GENERAL (VIA INTERPRETER): I have a masters degree in law and experience in criminal investigations. But I was not assigned to a relevant post and I saw someone else who had no degree and no experience being assigned to those posts. I have been asking myself why they got those jobs when they’re not qualified. I don’t know who hired them, but I’ve been wondering. CLARK: Do you think money changed hands? GENERAL (VIA INTERPRETER): There are two things: political, factional relationships and money. CLARK: But you see people who were not qualified getting jobs? GENERAL (VIA INTERPRETER): Yes. I saw a lot of people who were not qualified getting jobs. If I were the minister, I would fire those kinds of police, because they don’t have the capability to be a police officer. CLARK: The talk among police here in Kabul was of a senior police officer who’s just paid $70,000 for a post which had potential for skimming money off multi-million dollar contracts. He’d been appointed by the Ministry of Interior, which controls policing in Afghanistan. And it’s the ministry which is the fundamental problem, says Andrew Wilder of the Kabul-based institute, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit. WILDER: The Ministry of Interior is one of Afghanistan’s most powerful ministries. Unfortunately not only is it extremely powerful, it is also extremely corrupt. CLARK: How does the corruption play out? WILDER: Well, many ways. I mean, one of the most notorious is in the selling of jobs. Because they are responsible for appointing governors, district governors, chiefs of police, there’s often reports of paybacks to get some of these WILDER cont: powerful positions, to the extent that one person I interviewed for my research referred to the Ministry of Interior as a shop for selling jobs. CLARK: These accusations are serious. If basic state institutions are corrupt, what hope is there for the country? Zamarai Bashari, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, concedes there have been major problems, but says they are now busy cleaning up. BASHARI: Two months ago we had a review and as a result of that review we were able to fire forty 40 generals who were involved in some human rights violations and some of them were involved in corruption, some of them were involved in illegal activities. CLARK: Do you think that you have a clean police force now? BASHARI: I must say that the reform is still going on. To 80% extent I can say that we have a clean and good police force serving for this nation. CLARK: Are police posts still being bought? BASHARI: No. CLARK: And yet we have talked to senior police officers, who say yes, it goes on. BASHARI: Look, if someone is not assigned and selected as a police officer in the position that he was working, so naturally he will scream and he will say that these things are happening. But on the ground, what’s the reality? The reality is this, that it is monitored by the international community. The person that’s assigned, is he qualified? Otherwise he would not be considered, the chief police of the district. CLARK: There have indeed been sackings – but only after months of tenacious pressure from the UN and the major donors to clear out the most egregiously corrupt elements of the police. But that struggle has only just started. And the rot is even more widespread. If you’re a judge, I was told, try to get a position where there are land disputes and vendettas – you can earn more money in bribes. And then there are the appointments of provincial and local officials like this man, a former mayor from a town in the south-east. MAYOR (VIA INTERPRETER): The economy of my town is good. It’s got six hundred shops and the municipality collects one month’s rent as tax each year. That’s a lot of money. Then there are custom charges on imports. So that’s why the governor asked me to pay him four hundred thousand Afghanis – about $8,000. I asked him how I could pay him that much money when I wasn’t a rich man. He said, look, when you collect the taxes and rents, just don’t send the money to the bank. I could have earned $32,000 a year if I’d done that – stealing the government’s money. But as soon as I said, sorry I can’t pay you anything, he fired me. CLARK: The former mayor lives in an area where the insurgency always threatens to win over the local population. And it’s the Taliban he talks about, when I ask if corruption has had an impact on security. MAYOR (VIA INTERPRETER): Yes, a direct impact. For example, if I report a problem to the police, they’ll say they need money to buy fuel for the investigation and then divide the money between them. Usually it’s about fifteen hundred Afghanis. But the Taliban don’t ask for money and go immediately to try to solve the problem. This current, aggressive type of corruption is having a bad impact. It’s making the people join the Taliban. ACTUALITY ON FARM CLARK: It’s in the south of Afghanistan where corruption and predatory officials are probably most dangerous. If you’re discontented here, you won’t be rioting, you’ll be joining the Taliban. We spoke to poppy farmers in Helmand Province, where British troops are deployed. They describe how even the attempt to eradicate the opium crop has been transformed into an opportunity for getting protection money. POPPY FARMER (VIA INTERPRETER): I was growing five thousand square metres of poppy and they destroyed two thousand square metres of it. Then I paid fifteen thousand Afghanis – about $300 - and I managed to keep the rest of the poppy. I don’t know which police were doing this, but they were using green police vehicles and had police uniforms. Farmers who paid a bribe got to keep their poppy. Those who didn’t, it was eradicated by those men. CLARK: 40% of the heroin coming onto UK streets last year came from Helmand. This year, the UN forecasts that production in the province will more than double. Without question, the Taliban are taxing and smuggling opium, but the farmers we spoke to said its state officials, some of them former commanders from the civil war, who they see getting rich. POPPY FARMER (VIA INTERPRETER): In every area, all the powerful commanders have got more poppy then ever. They were planting in the deserts this year, where no-one’s planted before. When the workers came to our area for the harvest, the commanders pulled them off the buses and forced them to work on their fields first – and then didn’t pay them anything. When the harvesters eventually came to work for us, we had to pay the commanders for them. CLARK: Claims that the drug industry has penetrated the Afghan state are borne out by research published by the World Bank and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The co-editor of that report is the World Bank economist and veteran Afghan analyst, William Byrd. BYRD: Somebody pays to become a local official or police chief or whatever, and they’ve paid a lot and so they have to recoup it through corruption revenues. Essentially the drug traffickers, of which the middle and higher level ones are the ones who are involved in major shipments, what seems to happen according to that analysis in the report is that the corrupt figures in the police, say, will help smooth those drug flows. CLARK: How far is corruption between business interests controlling the drug economy and the state, how far is that cooperation or that consolidation gone, do you think? BYRD: It looks like it’s going pretty far, and certainly at the level of provincial and district police chiefs and stretching higher in terms of sponsors of the drug industry. CLARK: So are we talking about ministers? How far up does this go, do you think? BYRD: Well, the reports that we worked on was research, it was not investigation or anything like that, so the work we did did not get into individuals or groups of individuals. However, it seems very clear that it does go pretty high up in the government. CLARK: Back in Kabul, that’s a problem for those on a mission to clean up Afghanistan. ACTUALITY OF WOMAN CRYING CLARK: This old woman is among hundreds of people camped outside the office of one of the very few officials that Afghans have any confidence in. She’s living in a house that was bombed by the Mujahedin factions a dozen years ago and she can’t afford the bribes to get electricity and water. She wants to petition the Attorney General himself, Abdul Jabbar Sabet. Like everyone else, she’s come because she doesn’t trust local officials. Some people have travelled for days to get here. It’s quite overwhelming because of what it says about the breadth of corruption. The Attorney General tells me how he’s tried to investigate the affairs of two of the country’s provincial governors, both powerful men and former Mujahedin commanders. SABET: I went with thirty prosecutors whom I assigned to different offices. After three days, I think, two of them came to me and said that they were able to detect corruption in one of the provincial offices and they had written the arrest warrant for those two guys. But despite the fact that I signed the arrest warrant, as the Attorney General of this country, we were not able to arrest them, and I don’t want to tell you the truth, some kind of a conflict between the police and armed militia. CLARK: He said what he needs is some backing from international forces, the ISAF mission, which is currently run by NATO. SABET: ISAF is not unfortunately intervening in such cases. CLARK: Would you like them to? SABET: Yes, sure, 100%. If ISAF had been supporting me, then I would have brought to justice those two guys that I have mentioned to you. That’s not the case, unfortunately. They concern themselves only for the cases of terrorism or something like that. CLARK: Have you asked ISAF? SABET: Yes, I have talked to them, I have talked to them, yes, and they said that this is not their mandate. CLARK: We asked ISAF for an interview. They refused, but confirmed that backing the Attorney General would be outside their mandate. If this changed, it wouldn’t be British troops, who are already fighting the Taliban, who’d be called on, but soldiers deployed in relatively peaceful areas on reconstruction. Their governments have put conditions on NATO’s role. They don’t want to see their soldiers hurt or caught up in military action. But according to the longest serving diplomat in Kabul, the EU ambassador, Francesc Vendrell, without the support of international forces - and that means NATO - the Afghan state is incapable of purging itself. VENDRELL: There has been no disbandment of illegal armed groups. There has been no serious disarmament of commanders and warlords. These people exert a lot of power, because they have weapons, and the lack of disbandment of the leader-armed groups has fed directly into Taliban activities, because people are disenchanted and upset and find that there is little to choose between a warlord or a commander in the Taliban. It has fed into bad governance, it has meant that some top policemen align or are themselves commanders or warlords, and of course it’s fed into corruption. But let me say that without the involvement of the international forces in Afghanistan on the disbandment of these VENDRELL: groups, it will not happen, you are not going to get voluntary disbandment. You need one or two cases where the threat of force or force is used and then the others will get the message. And if that happened, it would be much easier to decrease corruption and do away with it. CLARK: Is ISAF going to do that? VENDRELL: You’ll have to ask ISAF and the member states. Now I think there may have been an evolution in thinking amongst the Americans or ISAF, but we need to find out. CLARK: There’s a sense of urgency here among diplomats, UN officials and many Afghans, that the very real gains made since 2001 could still slip away. The UK is certainly upping its game. The embassy is expanding and will soon be one of the largest British missions in the world. The new ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is a high-flier, an Arabic speaker with long experience in the Middle East. He’s now learning Pashtu, the language of President Karzai and the Taliban. Do you think it was right for Britain and the UN and America to actually support some of the warlords in the early years after the Taliban, because at the moment we see them and they’re all in very powerful positions, and I went to the Attorney General. He said there are men he cannot touch. COWPER-COLES: Well, I really honestly don’t know enough about what happened. I mean, one of the problems for us in this embassy is that we have not had, in recent years, the depth of political understanding of what is really happening here, the networks, the tribes, the individual relationships that operate beneath the surface of the society, and that’s something we’re putting right. CLARK: How did we end up here, when we’ve been working with this country for six years and these sort of corrupt systems seem to be coming ever more embedded? COWPER-COLES: There was perhaps, as the elections were held, very successfully with massive popular participation, a feeling that somehow Afghanistan was easy and it was Iraq that was difficult, and there was, as recently as two years ago in COWPER-COLES cont: London, a feeling that perhaps we could be starting to run our presence down here, that Afghanistan was now on a gradual upward glide-path towards serious sustained development. But what we’ve learnt, to our cost, last year with the insurgency across the Pashtun belt with the gathering storm clouds in the north, with the rise of corruption, we’ve learnt that this is going to be not a sprint but a marathon. It’s going to require sustained engagement by everyone who wants Afghanistan to succeed. CLARK: In early 2002, I asked the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, why Britain was backing the policy of bringing warlords and commanders into government. He said it would divert them from violence and ensure stability - as in Northern Ireland. But what we see today is war in the south, the threat of violence everywhere else and endemic corruption. If I look at the last few years, I see a state that for many Afghans is either ineffective or actually predatory, and it’s one that the British taxpayer is helping to support, British soldiers are dying to defend. STRAW: That’s, if I may say so, too facile. We’re not dying or spending resources to support a state in an unqualified fashion. We are spending resources, British soldiers are fighting extremely courageously – and, if I may say so, with great sensitivity towards civilian populations, not to support the state, but to change it and change it for the better. I do have a sense of urgency and I do have a sense of a series of rather large mountains we need to climb. SIGNATURE TUNE 1