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Afghanistan, Demining mission

Demining mission Kabul podcast with Nicolas Lunt NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan A baking hot, early July morning in Kabul. It's Friday, the one day when ISAF doesn't work at full steam – at least those of us working at ISAF HQ in Kabul don't. For our Afghan colleagues and counterparts, Friday is their day of rest, prayer and time with families. At 7 o'clock a Toyota Landcruiser pulls up covered in HALO Trust logos. I have been invited by the head of the Trust's operation in Afghanistan to spend the day in one of the many minefields they are clearing around this country. Afghanistan is probably the most mined country in the world. HALO estimates that there have been up to 640,000 mines laid since 1979. HALO employs 2,600 Afghan staff the vast majority of whom are constantly out in the field – or in their case in minefields. There are five international operations officers and I am being shown an example of the Trust's work by one of them. The HALO programme covers nine of the 34 Afghan Provinces. Its activities are split between manual and mechanical clearance, survey, unexploded ordnance disposal, mine awareness training and weapons and ammunition disposal.

Three hours north of Kabul we bounce our way down sandy and rock-strewn tracks to a Pashtun village, Kohe Safi. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the village was used as a base to launch rockets at the Soviet military base in Baghram. After one too many of these attacks, the Russians decided to garrison the village and then laid minefields around their new base as they did throughout the country during the ten year occupation.

A few years later the village was taken over by the anti Soviet mujahadeen. They laid their minefields. Finally, the village was taken by the Taliban and in the course of their war with the mujahadeen they too sowed mines.

So, three minefields and not one chart or map showing where the mines were laid. Somehow the laying of minefields in Afghanistan is indicative of the criminal damage that has been inflicted on this country's people who seem to have been treated as an irritant backdrop in the relentless killing of the past 30 years rather than, as is the case with ISAF, as the centre of gravity for all our efforts here. Two years ago, the HALO Trust was asked by the Kohe Safi elders to see whether it could make the land around their village safe again so their animals could graze and their children play. Significant numbers of villagers had either been killed or badly wounded by the randomly scattered mines. Although they had become cannier at avoiding the dangerous areas, children and livestock were still setting off mines on a regular basis.

The response from HALO was to allocate four teams of ten mine clearers. Let's be clear. This is a minute, desperately poor village with a population of around 1500. Electricity is a distant dream. The land is poor. Water is scarce. And yet one NGO has allocated more than 50 of its people for two years so far and for probably another few years in to the future. This is an illustration of just how vast the investment in Afghanistan will need to be if the people are to ever have a chance of building a future worth having.

Ten minutes after arriving at Kohe Safi I was rigged up with protective gear and found myself standing in the middle of one of the minefields watching a HALO team doing its stuff. The work is meticulous; each man clearing the ground, literally at times inch by inch. It is obviously dangerous but what struck me is that it must be mind numbingly dull and repetitive. Staying focused in the knowledge that some over enthusiastic prodding could be the last thing one does probably helps. While I was there the teams exploded five anti personnel mines in situ which must certainly have made the teams concentrate - but even so… The HALO Trust is just one of the 1200 NGO's, employing many hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens, currently operating in Afghanistan. HALO's work is clearly at the more exhilarating end of the NGO scale. However, it is typical in that it fulfils tasks that, for the moment, cannot be undertaken by a severely under–developed and under-funded government administration. It is also typical in that they are trying to work alongside Afghan people and in coordination with Afghan Government entities towards a collectively agreed plan.

The contribution made by the NGO's is obviously critical in a country with an infrastructure as damaged and dysfunctional as Afghanistan's. The complicated bit is getting all of these well meaning bodies to coordinate their activities and to focus on sectors that have been defined by the Afghan Government as priorities for the Afghan people.

The process or structure that is supposed to help manage and coordinate the NGO's output is the Afghan National Development Strategy – known as ANDS by everyone here. The ANDS was presented and agreed in principle at the London Conference on Afghanistan in January 2006 which also saw the launch of the London Compact. The Compact is basically a political deal between the Government of Afghanistan and the international community which sets a series of benchmarks for progress across three pillars of development – security; governance and rule of law; and economic and social development.

Both the ANDS and the London Compact are, in truth, extremely ambitious given where Afghanistan is today and given the challenges of getting the Provincial authorities to implement activities planned from Kabul. But perhaps an ambitious vision is what Afghanistan needs after so many years of mediocrity at best (and rarely at that) and of chaos and corruption for much of the time. In the end, Afghanistan's return to some sort of normality will be realised through economic and social development not through the deaths of terrorists and insurgents. So how does ISAF fit in to the world of the NGOs? After all everyone agrees that development and governance are best delivered by civil entities, preferably ones that are indigenous. ISAF is a decidedly military organisation and is clearly not indigenous.

The reality is that ISAF is still searching to find a comfortable niche in the pantheon of Afghanistan's international civilian supporters. ISAF's mandate here is to create the conditions in which the international community's support can be implemented and to provide the time and space for Afghan government bodies to build up their human resource and their professional skills. What this really means is firstly delivering security where Afghan police and military resources are currently struggling to operate. Secondly and increasingly it means applying enormous amounts of energy in to the creation of trusted and competent Afghan security forces. If ISAF had a defined exit strategy the creation of credible and capable Afghan security forces would be it.

However, there are many in the international development community who are concerned that ISAF's laudable desire to be seen to be more than just a fighting force sometimes leads us in to places where, to be frank, they feel we don't really fit very well. The 25 Provincial Reconstruction Teams are a case in point. PRT's as they're known are an entirely logical response by ISAF to the challenges of delivering development in regions where security is entirely or mostly absent. The mixture of low level development and low profile security makes sense in principle.

In many places ISAF's PRT's are doing truly outstanding work. But there are concerns that in mixing development and security, ISAF has militarised all development and governance assistance. In doing so this has damaged the careful relationships built up by international NGO's and their local counterparts and beneficiaries over many years of in the field operations. For example, Afghan Aid is a UK-based development NGO. Afghan Aid has been working successfully here for 25 years. Its networks are comprehensive and its relationships profound. For many NGO's their ability to operate effectively and safely here depends on Afghan perceptions of their neutrality. In the parts of Afghanistan where Afghan Aid is operating, attitudes towards any outsiders, never mind foreigners, can be less than friendly. These are profoundly closed, feudal societies whose people understandably find it hard to distinguish between different categories of foreigners. So there is a real threat to Afghan Aid's ability to operate safely and effectively if it somehow becomes associated with ISAF military operations as recently happened inadvertently in the east of the country. Although there are some in the NGO community who take a hard core line on this issue, the reality is that there is no simple answer. The conundrum of delivering assistance to a country like Afghanistan has been neatly encapsulated by President Karzai whose much repeated mantra is that there can be no development without security and no security without development.

ISAF's challenge is to find a way to insert itself in to this chicken and egg situation so that its immense resources can be exploited to the best advantage of the Afghan people. This is work in progress but like the other challenges that have confronted ISAF since its deployment here there is little doubt that its dedicated people will be equal to the task.

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Demining mission

Kabul podcast with Nicolas Lunt
NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan

A baking hot, early July morning in Kabul. It's Friday, the one day when ISAF doesn't work at full steam – at least those of us working at ISAF HQ in Kabul don't. For our Afghan colleagues and counterparts, Friday is their day of rest, prayer and time with families. At 7 o'clock a Toyota Landcruiser pulls up covered in HALO Trust logos. I have been invited by the head of the Trust's operation in Afghanistan to spend the day in one of the many minefields they are clearing around this country.

Afghanistan is probably the most mined country in the world. HALO estimates that there have been up to 640,000 mines laid since 1979. HALO employs 2,600 Afghan staff the vast majority of whom are constantly out in the field – or in their case in minefields. There are five international operations officers and I am being shown an example of the Trust's work by one of them.

The HALO programme covers nine of the 34 Afghan Provinces. Its activities are split between manual and mechanical clearance, survey, unexploded ordnance disposal, mine awareness training and weapons and ammunition disposal.

Three hours north of Kabul we bounce our way down sandy and rock-strewn tracks to a Pashtun village, Kohe Safi. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the village was used as a base to launch rockets at the Soviet military base in Baghram. After one too many of these attacks, the Russians decided to garrison the village and then laid minefields around their new base as they did throughout the country during the ten year occupation.

A few years later the village was taken over by the anti Soviet mujahadeen. They laid their minefields. Finally, the village was taken by the Taliban and in the course of their war with the mujahadeen they too sowed mines.

So, three minefields and not one chart or map showing where the mines were laid. Somehow the laying of minefields in Afghanistan is indicative of the criminal damage that has been inflicted on this country's people who seem to have been treated as an irritant backdrop in the relentless killing of the past 30 years rather than, as is the case with ISAF, as the centre of gravity for all our efforts here.

Two years ago, the HALO Trust was asked by the Kohe Safi elders to see whether it could make the land around their village safe again so their animals could graze and their children play. Significant numbers of villagers had either been killed or badly wounded by the randomly scattered mines. Although they had become cannier at avoiding the dangerous areas, children and livestock were still setting off mines on a regular basis.

The response from HALO was to allocate four teams of ten mine clearers. Let's be clear. This is a minute, desperately poor village with a population of around 1500. Electricity is a distant dream. The land is poor. Water is scarce. And yet one NGO has allocated more than 50 of its people for two years so far and for probably another few years in to the future. This is an illustration of just how vast the investment in Afghanistan will need to be if the people are to ever have a chance of building a future worth having.

Ten minutes after arriving at Kohe Safi I was rigged up with protective gear and found myself standing in the middle of one of the minefields watching a HALO team doing its stuff. The work is meticulous; each man clearing the ground, literally at times inch by inch. It is obviously dangerous but what struck me is that it must be mind numbingly dull and repetitive. Staying focused in the knowledge that some over enthusiastic prodding could be the last thing one does probably helps. While I was there the teams exploded five anti personnel mines in situ which must certainly have made the teams concentrate - but even so…

The HALO Trust is just one of the 1200 NGO's, employing many hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens, currently operating in Afghanistan. HALO's work is clearly at the more exhilarating end of the NGO scale. However, it is typical in that it fulfils tasks that, for the moment, cannot be undertaken by a severely under–developed and under-funded government administration. It is also typical in that they are trying to work alongside Afghan people and in coordination with Afghan Government entities towards a collectively agreed plan.

The contribution made by the NGO's is obviously critical in a country with an infrastructure as damaged and dysfunctional as Afghanistan's. The complicated bit is getting all of these well meaning bodies to coordinate their activities and to focus on sectors that have been defined by the Afghan Government as priorities for the Afghan people.

The process or structure that is supposed to help manage and coordinate the NGO's output is the Afghan National Development Strategy – known as ANDS by everyone here. The ANDS was presented and agreed in principle at the London Conference on Afghanistan in January 2006 which also saw the launch of the London Compact. The Compact is basically a political deal between the Government of Afghanistan and the international community which sets a series of benchmarks for progress across three pillars of development – security; governance and rule of law; and economic and social development.

Both the ANDS and the London Compact are, in truth, extremely ambitious given where Afghanistan is today and given the challenges of getting the Provincial authorities to implement activities planned from Kabul. But perhaps an ambitious vision is what Afghanistan needs after so many years of mediocrity at best (and rarely at that) and of chaos and corruption for much of the time. In the end, Afghanistan's return to some sort of normality will be realised through economic and social development not through the deaths of terrorists and insurgents.

So how does ISAF fit in to the world of the NGOs? After all everyone agrees that development and governance are best delivered by civil entities, preferably ones that are indigenous. ISAF is a decidedly military organisation and is clearly not indigenous.

The reality is that ISAF is still searching to find a comfortable niche in the pantheon of Afghanistan's international civilian supporters. ISAF's mandate here is to create the conditions in which the international community's support can be implemented and to provide the time and space for Afghan government bodies to build up their human resource and their professional skills.

What this really means is firstly delivering security where Afghan police and military resources are currently struggling to operate. Secondly and increasingly it means applying enormous amounts of energy in to the creation of trusted and competent Afghan security forces. If ISAF had a defined exit strategy the creation of credible and capable Afghan security forces would be it.

However, there are many in the international development community who are concerned that ISAF's laudable desire to be seen to be more than just a fighting force sometimes leads us in to places where, to be frank, they feel we don't really fit very well.

The 25 Provincial Reconstruction Teams are a case in point. PRT's as they're known are an entirely logical response by ISAF to the challenges of delivering development in regions where security is entirely or mostly absent. The mixture of low level development and low profile security makes sense in principle.

In many places ISAF's PRT's are doing truly outstanding work. But there are concerns that in mixing development and security, ISAF has militarised all development and governance assistance. In doing so this has damaged the careful relationships built up by international NGO's and their local counterparts and beneficiaries over many years of in the field operations.

For example, Afghan Aid is a UK-based development NGO. Afghan Aid has been working successfully here for 25 years. Its networks are comprehensive and its relationships profound. For many NGO's their ability to operate effectively and safely here depends on Afghan perceptions of their neutrality. In the parts of Afghanistan where Afghan Aid is operating, attitudes towards any outsiders, never mind foreigners, can be less than friendly. These are profoundly closed, feudal societies whose people understandably find it hard to distinguish between different categories of foreigners. So there is a real threat to Afghan Aid's ability to operate safely and effectively if it somehow becomes associated with ISAF military operations as recently happened inadvertently in the east of the country.

Although there are some in the NGO community who take a hard core line on this issue, the reality is that there is no simple answer. The conundrum of delivering assistance to a country like Afghanistan has been neatly encapsulated by President Karzai whose much repeated mantra is that there can be no development without security and no security without development.

ISAF's challenge is to find a way to insert itself in to this chicken and egg situation so that its immense resources can be exploited to the best advantage of the Afghan people. This is work in progress but like the other challenges that have confronted ISAF since its deployment here there is little doubt that its dedicated people will be equal to the task.