 a gwneud i'r gondol Cymru, Central Asia ac y Corkaiddor, sy'n rhan o'r ffantau yma i'r cyflawni'r ysgol yma yma a'r ysgol Cymru. Mae'r ysgol yma yn ystod y Cyflawn Cynonodrwm, cyflawni, cyflawni'r cyflawni a gondol. Yn ymgyrch i'r ddweud ymgyrch, erhiwch ar y cyflawn, a rheswn ni gweithiol i wych yn rhan fawr, ac mae'n gweld hynny'n gofynu'r ddweud. Rhaid, yma yna! Mae yw'n gweithio'r cyho transcyffredig i ddweud, oherwydd yna maes yn cymhwys â ddweud, oherwydd yma. Yn dechrau, mae'n cyflawni yma yng nghylchol iawn, And the specialist's y servant is available for free on the internet until January and each of the articles is, I think you can download them, so take the opportunity to do so before January. Y llwyddiad cymaint yma yw'r ystyried gan ymddiad yma yw'r cyffredig a'r cyffredig yn yw'r ystyried ar Y MV 2014, sy'n ymddiad yw'r cyffredig yw'r cyffredig yn ymddiad yw'r cyffredig yn Afganistau. Ond yw'r amser hyn wedi cyffredig sy'n digwydd y cefnodol i'r ddweud yn ychydig, bod ynghylch yn cynllun yn cael yschodol iawn yn gorfod'r gyda hynny mae'r unig ar vacu allan am chi'r sefydlu rhywledd gyda unrhyw mewn gilydd ddweud sy'n myfyrdd o'r meddliadau yw ydw i am ddweud yfanc yn tylliannau at y dangos yma. Nes yn gwneud o'r cysylltu rhoi bod i gael'r ffordd ac ymddangos ar fy nghyfyrdd yn rhan o'r ddedw i'r gyfrifau yn wleithio gyda'r gadeginydd hynny iawn yw'n myfyrdd ..icking up more in the legal system to the importance of militias' to the role... ..play by aid international development in its political dynamics. They also make comparisons historically, between for example... ..the situation facing the country and its political elites today. And those that were having to be addressed by its leaders at the end... ..of the 1980s. Mae'r ystafell yn ystafell i'r tynnau yn gweithio i Gweithgatio Gweithgiadau erbyn'n gweithio yn y bwysigol erbyn y bydd y cyffredin iaith y byddai'n gwneud, i ddifrif sy'n ei ddifrif. Roedd y cerddur hynny o'r ffordd pwysigol wedi'u gwneud i'r rydych chi'n gwneud i'r realitau hynny i Gweithgatio Gweithgiadau yn Gweithgiadau i'r gyfly. Fyddo i'r ystafel, mae'n ddifrif yn ei gweithgatio pwysigol yn y bwysigol. A oedden nhw'n gobeithio'r gweithio'r gweithio o'r gweithio ar gyfer y gallwn cyfrifol yma, cyfrifol ar gyfer y gallwn Johnathan Steel, unrhyw ystod yn llwyffaidd sgolwm. Rhyw hwn yn rhaid i'r cyfrifol â'r Afganistau. A gynnyddol 1981, yn y gweithio'r gweithfyrdd y gallwn gyfrifol ar gyfer y gallwn cyfrifol ar gyfer y gweithfyrdd. Mae'n gyfrifol yn ychwanegol a'r llun o'r gweithfyrdd. is on Afghanistan, it's entitled Ghosts of Afghanistan, the Haunted Battleground and this is an eye-witness analysis of 30 years of war and destruction. Sitting to my left is Jonathan Gortan, who's Professor of Development Studies at SOAS. He studied in universities of Birmingham and Manchester, has worked as both a development practitioner in Afghanistan and Pakistan in Sri Lanka, and he's also, as an academic, analysed the political economy of aid and conflict, NGOs and peace building and post-conflict and reconstruction. Sitting in the middle last but not least is Aziz Akimi, who is a SOAS PhD student in the Department of Development Studies. He's also a researcher at an institute in Bergen, Norway. He's working on the important topic of US counterinsurgency and the role played by local militias in Afghanistan today. I think he's also worked for the variety of organisations within and beyond Afghanistan. I'm going to ask Jonathan Gortan to speak for exactly 12 minutes. After we've heard all of the speakers, I think we'll be able to have time for a discussion. Jonathan Gortan. I'll try and be in less than 12 minutes, but I'd also very quickly like to thank Professor Magnus Marsden, who was at SOAS. Now as a University of Sussex, but who stepped into chair of this session, is also someone who has been working in Afghanistan for many years, doing some extremely interesting anthropological research. OK. This, as Magnus says, is a special issue which is being co-edited by myself and Mark Sedra. We have tried to combine people who are quite long in the tooth like myself and Jonathan, if you don't mind me saying, who have been working in Afghanistan for many years prior to 2001, but also to younger, younger scholars and emerging scholars who have got a more recent engagement, but also a very deep engagement with the country. So we try to include people who have long experience and also some up-and-coming academics. And what I'm going to talk about briefly is about how do we understand the intervention in Afghanistan in relation to some of these broader debates on liberal peace building and state building. And what are the implications of some of the contributions to this special issue for understanding transition and this post 2014 scenario. And it's a very important time to be looking at this and taking stock, particularly with a great deal of uncertainty that we see at the moment around the signing or not the signing of the bilateral security agreement. Future trajectories are very much up in the air at the moment. So in our introductory article, Mark Sedra and myself, we first of all highlight the continuities between the wartime period and the post 2001. We don't see this as a water peace transition and really it's a new, what we've seen post 2001 is a new phase of protracted and very volatile conflict. And state building was an important part of the rationale and the policies around international intervention. We didn't start off like that. We highlight how, in many ways, the bond agreement, we can't understand this as some kind of transmission mechanism for the liberal peace. It involved messy compromises, it had illiberal and non-democratic elements. And what emerged was in many ways an elite pact, which didn't incorporate many of the key constituencies in Afghan society and within the region more broadly. State building emerged actually several years later. Initially, the impetus, the drive behind intervention was pursuit of the war on terror. It was only embraced subsequently with the realization that state building was necessary for some kind of an exit strategy and also to somehow legitimize the intervention. And there was quite a strong set of interests around Disastery Circus, one of the contributors has highlighted around building on and getting a heavier international footprint. Particularly the military and aid actors argued, based on a notion of what Circus talks about as critical mass, that there was a need to invest more resources financially, militarily, politically in order to overcome sources of resistance and to invest in a more serious way in Afghanistan. And as Circus argues in one of the kind of overview articles, this produced all sorts of contradictions. It produced contradictions around the idea of building up ownership of a strong state and yet at the same time these resources were creating a very top-down, renty estate dependent on external resources. There was a contradiction between, on the one hand, the Afghan constitution, which is one of the most centralized in the world, and de facto political processes, which were highly decentralized and fractured. There was a contradiction between building up these formal structures which were actually underpinned by informal political networks, something that Timor Sharon, in his article, highlights very nicely, and producing what might be called a rhizome state. There are the formal structures that are visible and the informal networks where real power lies with networks linked to jihadi groups that emerged in the wartime period. Now, over the length of the intervention, the international approach to state-building changed quite radically. Thomas Barfield, the American scholar, quite nicely summarizes this when he says that, in 2002, the problem was seen by international actors as the absence of a strong, legitimate state with the capacity to achieve a monopoly of violence and provide services within its territory. By 2008, this had changed to being seen as the problem was actually the existence of an overly centralized, corrupt and illegitimate state. The shift manifest itself in a turn towards what Aziz is going to talk about in a minute, towards embracing the local, engaging with hybrid forms of governance, reinventing local traditions, whether it's militias, whether it's informal systems of justice, whether it's working with civil society groups, and so on. This kind of shift, in many ways, highlighted the contradictions within the intervention at so many different levels. On the one hand, the promotion of, at least rhetorically, local ownership while at the same time creating parallel structures and systems that circumvented the state. The promotion of rule of law while at the same time funding and supporting local militias. In many ways, intervention and so-called liberal peace-building failed as much because it was undermined by sponsors because of resistance by domestic political elites. In the bigger literature on international intervention around the critiques of liberal peace-building, there's an assumption often that the international sphere is an area of coherence of common interests around liberal values and norms. The local is the area where there's foot-dragging resistance and conflict. The contributions to this special issue show is the actual contradictions, the fractured nature of the external intervention, the different sets of interests, the different kind of strategies that were involved. What is being produced now as we look back and look to the future is a very volatile and fractured political economy. What the political scientist Douglas North would call a limited access order in which a political coalition has emerged and that the interest, the political coalition has glued around the interest in gaining rents. The main sources of rent in Afghanistan's political economy now are international funding through the military, through aid and also the drug economy. The problem is this limited access order is extremely volatile. It doesn't incorporate all the key wielders of violence so the Taliban are not part of this. And also there's a constant hedging between the state actors at the centre and political military actors in the periphery who are kind of oscillating into and out of this limited access order. They're hedging all the time and so no one is prepared to credibly commit to the rules of the game. So, just standing back from the Afghan case before moving forward to transition, what kind of models are commentators looking at and drawing upon? On the one hand there's this idea that Afghanistan is one of a whole series of experiments we're seeing in the post-Cold War world from Kosovo to East Timor to Cambodia of liberal peace building. This idea of the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution of market sovereignty and democracy. On the other hand, and we can see many, many kind of examples of programmes which seem to subscribe to this kind of template including rule of law programmes, good governance and so on. On the other hand, many commentators including counterinsurgency experts and the military actually use the model of the kind of the late colonial wars, Algeria, Vietnam, where decidedly illiberal strategies and interventions were deployed. And in a way there's this kind of Janus headed face to international intervention in Afghanistan, there's this kind of at least rhetorical and not just rhetorical commitment to democratic norms and liberal values. And on the other hand, there's highly liberal militarized forms of intervention and it's oscillated between these two constantly. To finish off, there seem to be now three different narratives around understanding what's happening in Afghanistan with important implications for the future. On the one hand there's this narrative around the window of opportunity thesis that there was a window of opportunity to get it right but opportunities were lost in the early years of the intervention. And people of this kind of this orientation argue that in 2000 up to 2004 to 2005 there were some very positive changes going on Afghanistan. There was a national NSP, there was all these tangible improvements in education, mortality rates, literacy and so on. But the model was too parsimonious. There wasn't enough resources invested, there wasn't enough coherence in the model. And essentially it wasn't liberal enough. Liberal peace builders became increasing illiberal as the insurgency increased. So that's kind of one and the implication of the drawdown is actually of this kind of understanding is actually a very bleak one that reducing funding is actually going to increase the increased likelihood of a return to civil war is the logic of this kind of argument. The second is that the second kind of narrative is that it was doomed from the outset that essentially this is a narrative path dependency, the situation was over determined and the international footprint was part of the problem. It produced these pathologies, these contradictions and throwing more money at it through the surge actually amplified rather than resolve the problems. So in the event of the absence of an inclusive enough political settlement, the absence of consensus in the international and regional level in exogenous state buildings never going to work. And then the third kind of narrative and I have to finish off now is the kind of the imperial thesis that was never about liberal peace building. It was always about geostrategic sets of interests, national interests. So although there was a kind of a justificatory narrative around liberal peace building, this was never the intention to finish off. And this is kind of stepping out of the article really is this although the different articles have different analysis and there's no kind of universal kind of prognosis. They all show a hint at a kind of a major paradox now that we're faced with in Afghanistan that exogenous state building has produced all these pathologies, has produced these contradictions as being the sources of a whole range of problems. But now the sudden reduction of an international footprint could be also deeply damaging because the Afghan political economy is being adjusted by this intervention, that its political networks are in many ways glued together in order to access rents from international aid and so on. So one of the implications of the volume I think is that the need to think very carefully about a sudden reduction in international presence because society and the economy has been adjusted to its existence and some form of engagement may be necessary into the future. Otherwise we may be faced with Najibullah scenario that Jonathan may be talking about. Thank you very much Jonathan. If you could pass the contraption along to Aziz. Thank you very much. My contribution to the special issue which I think is timely because there is now again a surge of concerns about Afghanistan and its future. Jonathan summarized some of them. It is entitled Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians, Counter Insurgency and the Remaking of Afghanistan. It focuses on the emergence and evolution of the Afghan local police, a pro-government militia supported by NATO and U.S. military among other places in Wardak province. It's important to keep in mind that the LP was not the first such experiment in militia formations going back to early years of intervention. The U.S. military intervention, the Northern Alliance Commanders and World Wars were used as foot soldiers. The original send really dates back to 2001 but also around 2005 and 2006 when the insurgency spread from the south to the center and the north, the U.S. military started arming local militias. There were a number of them, the National Auxiliary Police, the Afghan Public Protection Program and the Local Defence Initiative, which was just before the ALP. The advent of the ALP in response to the spread of the insurgency, before the advent of the ALP local militias and the U.S. military control had taken an ad hoc and very decentralized character, which is, I think, an interesting point because the way the Americans are going about arming militias in a way, I argue, forced the government and President Karzai to transcenderalize the means of coercion and the patronage that was around that. So it became a key priority for the Afghan government. In 2009, after winning a second term, President Karzai made it very clear in his inaugural speech that within three to five years he would build the Afghan regular forces, army and police, but at the same time he said that within two years he would adopt more stringent measures to improve the regulation of local militias and especially the operations of private security companies, which he had a big problem with that. To achieve his first objective, that's improving capabilities of ANCF, he did a couple of things. First, he pushed for a greater combat role for the Afghan army and police because he was arguing that as long as the Americans were fighting and were taking lead in combat, they would never invest enough in the police and the army. So that was his argument for also pushing the date of transfer of security responsibilities from 2013 to 2014, basically to give the army and the police at least a year in which they were taking a lead in combat and they were also getting used to their role. And that way he knew that as long as Americans were not fighting and the Afghan forces were fighting, then they would be forced to invest in them and training and equipping the Afghan national security forces. To achieve his second objective, that's improve the regulation of local militias, he embarked on what I call a twin initiative. One was the establishment of the Afghan local police and the other one was the establishment of the Afghan public protection force, which is a government in Ministry of Interior force that replaced private security companies. And that's how basically his former minister of interior justified basically the arming of local militias, although the president was initially quite critical of it. But right from the beginning he faced a lot of resistance from donors and the western militaries because a lot of them depended on these private militias and local securities. Among other things for protecting the logistic convoys and also securing military bases. So when it was approved by the Afghan government in 2010, the Afghan local police basically incorporated all previous militia formations. On the one hand gave it legitimacy, on the other hand allowed the US military to expand the program. So the ALP, I argue, represented the struggle between President Karzai and the US military over the control of local armed groups. It was an imperfect solution that allowed Karzai to centralize his hold over the murky world of US counterinsurgency represented by the fragmentation and decentralization of violence involving a variety of armed groups and the patronage that was of course associated with that. So it was basically a fight over the control of armed groups and patronage. By the end of the decade, the US military were also presenting the efforts to arm local militias very much in the language of tradition and respect for Afghan culture and values. Because NATO somehow hoped that the still tribal Afghans could be once again armed and used against Taliban. And it's also interesting to point out that NATO's efforts in this direction were presented as a corrective to Western interference and imposition of liberal norms and institutions on non-Western and non-liberal societies. But it was also somehow a vague and endless revealing critique of earlier Western attempts at nation building. So experts overall agreed that in the diagnosis that Western failures to build a centralized nation state enhance double their efforts in engaging and cultivating the traditional and customary field. A discursive shift from earlier sort of nation building rhetoric involved the invocation of colonial imageries in reference to Afghanistan's own authentic tradition and institutions. But these were however primarily framed through a military lens and the pursuit of a military goal basically to justify and indeed legitimate the continuation of NATO's policies exemplified by the war on terror. I show in the study of the ALP in Wardag that there remained a significant gap between Western claims made about authenticity and non-interference and the actual processes through which local forms of security were promoted. The so-called local solutions were in fact imposed from above. This is an example of how some Americans fetishized culture. The ALP was initially envisaged as a short-term solution. Initially the argument was for two or three years until the regular forces were built up and then they would be either disbanded or integrated into the National Army and police. The ALP story is also illustrative of a broader dynamic of how everything is short-term based on expediency and pressure to float immediate solutions and then deliver them in the envelope bearing a seal of culture and tradition. In short, I argue, imperialism on the cheap. However, the US military's attempt to resuscitate age-old traditions of self-protection notions that were based on an idealized and reified vision of the past prove problematic. For that matter, the willingness of Afghans to stand up to the Taliban. Government-backed militias were very unpopular and especially in a place like Wardag, which has a history of factional fighting. As a strategic resource, in a way, the conflict exacerbated conflicts. A sense of insecurity also prevented ordinary people and villages from involvement in the program. Most villages were very insecure and could not associate themselves with a program that was basically funded by the US military. So as a consequence, the US military struggled in Wardag. There was also, because of the transformation in the countryside and the loss of influence by so-called traditional leaders who played in the past an intermediary role, a brocering role, it was very difficult for the Americans to find authentic tribal leaders. So as a result, the main beneficiaries of the program were commanders, local commanders and power brokers who reinvented themselves and their militias and expanded their power. As a result, the local intermediaries earned a premium as a function of their brocering role and those seen as tribal were trying to break out and wanted a modern state. The US Special Forces also used local militias mostly for counterterrorism purposes and nitrates. So in that sense, they played a very little role in protecting civilians, which was its original aim. Since the ALP played a negligible role in improving security in the spring and summer of 2012, senior Afghan officials and US Special Forces were now discussing a more dramatic, if problematic solution. And that was arming Islam, which was a local jihadi group that have been in conflict with the Taliban for many years. So with the failure of ALP in Wardag, the US military in many way abandoned counterinsurgency and all the language around protection and all that, and went back to counterterrorism tactics and the use of proxy militias. However, the human cost and the political cost of this shift was so great that the subsequent stages of US military presence in Wardag severely strained relations between the Afghan and US government. And in the spring of 2002 also there were changes in the US military structure. As part of Obama's plan to withdraw forces, regular forces were taken out and special forces came in. And that was sort of the background to the war crimes that were reported in early 2013. Although the president appointed three commissions, it was very little clarity as to what happened and everybody knew what happened, who was responsible for these crimes. Americans denied it and Karzai kept on saying it was ISAF and US Special Forces. So this has remained as such and I argue that one of the reasons why there was no resolution to the issue was because somehow this was useful. The more ambiguous it remained, it allowed US Special Forces and some were even arguing CIA to basically avoid responsibility for what had happened. In conclusion, I argued that Wardag constitutes a microcosm of the dynamic of conflict in Afghanistan as a whole. Western politicians invoke the image of Afghanistan as an ungoverned space, a zone of chaos and a frontline in the war on terror. Wardag in this discourse is positioned as a frontline of the war against Taliban barbarians. In this seemingly mythical confrontation, civilisations and barbarians sustain each other. The Taliban thrive on the presence of foreign infidels, a reference to NATO and US Special Forces, while at the same time, Taliban's continued armed resistance against US and NATO forces provide the justification for continued US military presence. I'll just digress a little bit. This morning the palace put out a statement in response to an earlier Taliban statement welcoming Karzai's position on the bilateral security agreement. He refused not to sign it and it was an interesting statement because Karzai basically said, you know, they may be welcoming my stand but you have to look at the broader dynamic which is and this basically was what I was saying earlier that the Taliban basically thrive on the US military presence and the US justify their continued presence in Afghanistan because they see the threat of Taliban and al-Qaida and I think it's a very telling statement but also on the other side the whole discussion around the bilateral security agreement and some of you who follow news on Afghanistan, there was a consultative jerger in the third week of November. One of the interesting things that came out of that jerger was how those who benefited from the US presence and the NATO presence were actually the strongest advocates of a position asking Karzai to sign this deal and it's emblematic of the broader problem because Jonathan referred to this. What happens when all this dries out and the implication of that especially is what I'm going to do. Thank you very much. Okay, well thank you. Afghanistan has been mired in civil war for 35 years. At least two decades of that time, it's been overlaid with foreign intervention. We had nine years of intervention by the Soviet Union and we've had 12 years and still continuing intervention by the United States and NATO. It'll be exactly a quarter of a century next February that the last Soviet soldier left and I and many other journalists rushed to Kabul to see what would happen. It sometimes seems like yesterday because when one sees what's going on now, the comparisons and similarities are so acute with that period in 1989. What I've done in this paper is to sort of compare and contrast the two retreats, the Soviet retreat in 1989, 1988, ending in 1989 and NATO's current retreat. And then to ask two key questions. How significantly does this NATO retreat differ from the Soviet one? And more importantly perhaps, can Afghans expect a brighter future now than the turmoil and tragedy they suffered after the last withdrawal in 1989? Now let me first deal with the similarities and of course one can find similarities in the origins of these two interventions as well. They were both done by outside powers, super powers. They were both designed to topple a regime and start nation building to support the modernizers against the conservatives. And of course they soon found that they were fighting an ever increasing insurgency, which made it both more difficult to withdraw and yet in a sense ultimately more essential that they did withdraw. It took the Russians almost a decade to reach that point. Although the political awareness that the war was unwinnable came within two or three years of the original intervention, which was easy and quick, they toppled the regime very quickly in Kabul just as the Taliban were toppled very quickly in 2001. But by the mid 1980s there were three things happening which I think are very similar to what is happening now. One there was war weariness on the Soviet side. Because of the lack of success, the amount of lives and money that had been spent in Afghanistan and failure to see any real perspective of things changing over time. And of course that's the same mood among western public opinion and the electorates in the United States particularly and in this country. People are just fed up and they see the future in continuing this war and they're glad that it seems to be coming to an end. The similar thing too was the frustration of the leadership, Soviet leadership was frustrated with Afghan quotes allies as just as much as the Americans and NATO are frustrated with Karzai and the Afghan allies today. The reasons for the frustration differed. In the Soviet case it was incredible in fighting. Although it was a one party state Afghanistan under Soviet occupation there were two wings of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan PDPA, the ruling party that were loggerheads most of the time in terms of ideology, in terms of tribal and ethnic issues and often came to blows. Just whereas the western governments are more frustrated with the sort of corruption that they see at all levels of the Afghan administrative system and the lack of good governance. And third thing that's so similar is this hope that somehow the center will hold. That the Afghan forces that have been trained by the occupiers will somehow be able to keep the insurgency at bay. I hope best it's a sort of prayer at worst. Now there was one other important similarity in terms of the context of the two interventions and that was that halfway through a new leadership emerged. In the Kremlin of course Michelle Gorbachev came in and quickly saw that the war really was going nowhere. In the United States Obama came in a war that he'd inherited from George W. Bush but he didn't see as clearly as Gorbachev had seen that the war was unwinnable. In fact he insisted that whereas the Iraq war which he'd opposed was a war of choice he said, quite rightly, I mean it's quite correct for definition, Afghanistan he claimed was a war of necessity. Gorbachev never trapped himself in such language which of course makes it hard to go into a U-turn. And the military, the Soviet military were also convinced after the first two or three years that they could not win so it was a matter of retreating in an orderly way with dignity and without having to admit publicly at least defeat. One big difference was there was no surge. Gorbachev didn't come in and say well we'll have a last big push and perhaps my predecessors were wrong and we can have another go. Obama as you know tripled the number of American forces that were in Afghanistan from the number that he inherited from Bush. But now of course the NATO is retreating and pulling out. They're not doing it as quickly as the Russians. The Russians withdrew in nine months in an orderly fashion from April 1988 when the treaty was agreed in Geneva which gave the date for their withdrawal until February 15th 1989. NATO's retreat is much slower and of course the other big difference is it's not necessarily going to be complete. When the Russians pulled out they pulled out lock, stock and barrel and only a very few number of troops perhaps in the hundreds maximum remained to guard the Soviet Embassy. There were some special forces in the northern part of Afghanistan which that time bordered on what was then the Soviet Union before Tajikistan and Uzbekistan became independent. They did have some special forces but they weren't significant. Nothing like what NATO is planning to keep perhaps 15,000 troops if this agreement is eventually signed. Now that's not just a technical difference. It's crucially important politically because when Najibullah who was the Afghan leader in 1989 found there were no Soviet troops he wasn't happy that it was happening. But he managed to make a virtue out of necessity by saying I am now leader of an independent sovereign country. We do not have foreign troops here. We are masters of our own destiny. And it wasn't just a propaganda ploy. There was some genuine feeling among Afghans that they were now proud to be sort of on their own. And if you talk to Afghans of a certain age in Kabul today many of them will say the Najibullah period was the best one they can remember in their lives because they didn't have foreign troops in the country. They didn't have the indignity of seeing these Humvees going down the road in Kabul all the time reminding that they were under a foreign occupation and they felt they were running their own country. And life actually for three years in Kabul was much more secure than it is in Kabul today because the insurgents were basically held at bay by the Afghan forces without the need of foreign troops. When the Najibullah did eventually collapse three years later it wasn't primarily because the Mujahideen as the insurgents were called in those days moved forward through military superiority and captured Kabul it was because the Russians who were now under Yeltsin not under Gorbachev had very different priorities decided to cut aid to Afghanistan, cut the money, cut the fuel that was vital for the Afghans. And army to keep its equipment going and cut the weapons supplies as well. So I suppose if what comes on now to the lessons for today one lesson is that if you want to keep the regime going you do have to maintain aid even if you don't have any troops there. And I think many people in Kabul now are just hoping that western aid will not dramatically reduce of course publicly the west says we're going to continue applying four billion dollars a year for the next ten years. That's what's been agreed but there's still a fear that when it comes down to it local the governments of the NATO countries will gradually erode amount of money they're giving. The second thing is that lesson for today is that ultimately there has to be a political settlement. Gorbachev did try and do that and he was urging Najibullah to conduct what they called exactly as they call it today political reconciliation. But it was much more genuine I think in the Najibullah period. There was a real opening to the insurgent forces to try and find some kind of compromise leadership to produce the government of national unity that would end this civil war which I mentioned is the key thing when I started this talk. The NATO definition of reconciliation is hardly ever spelled out but when it is spelled out it means surrender. It's not really reconciliation it's that you have to reconcile with me by dropping your guns accepting my constitution and taking part in the political process that I have set in motion. That is not reconciliation that is surrender and the WikiLeaks things that came out three years ago if you remember revealed all that because in the diplomatic cables at the State Department we found out what Richard Holbrooke who was then the special envoy of the president was saying to people in the private meetings when he said basically used the phrase surrender. He said remember what happened at the end of our civil war in the United States General Lee surrendered and you know Muller Omar the only way we'll see him again is if he surrenders. So the third point is that if there are peace talks and reconciliation they're actually going to be very difficult. The lesson from 1989 and the 1990s is that peace talks among Afghans are always notoriously difficult. And in fact they led to civil war throughout the 1990s the Mujahideen having captured Kabul then broke down into civil war and it was out of that that the Taliban emerged as the strongest faction in this civil war. So I think to come to a conclusion the situation is quite gloomy for Afghanistan now because I think first of all there are no peace talks. Fighting is going to continue. They are obstructed by outside powers. Pakistan is as relevant now as it was in 1992 which is arming the insurgencies so there's no sign of really being willing to push for peace talks. And I think the Taliban will gradually erode the power of the Afghan national forces in the whole of the south and the east where the Pashtun population is predominantly living and the aid I think will be eroded to the center from foreign countries. So I think it's going to be a very messy situation. Don't forget that the casualty figures of the Afghan national army are colossal. They're losing something like 100 men a week, 75 lease, 25 army. This is a nutrition of 5000 a year. That is in one year they're losing more people than the whole foreign occupiers lost in the 10 years they've been there. 900, 9000 Afghans are becoming IDPs internally displaced losing their homes every month because they have to flee from the villages where the fighting is intensifying or the Taliban are taking over. Collaborators, people who are seen as collaborators are being assassinated at an incredible rate, roughly 12 a week. So there's incredible erosion of the Afghan administrative system as the Taliban move in. Will they capture Kabul? Finally I'll end on that note. The insurgent didn't capture Kabul for three years after 1989. I don't think the Taliban will capture Kabul for three years after 2014 but I think they will take hold of a large part of the south and the east and eventually essentially the civil war will carry on. Thank you for that gloomy but none of the rest really stick. I just realised that Sarasen's armed with a stick whether this is an Afghan event or because what's been going on outside. But I'm going to brandish it as you ask your questions to make sure that there was short and concise and to the point as possible. I suppose this is the fourth time Britain's aged war against Afghanistan and at first people was talking about the reduction in income of the Afghanistan states. Do you think Britain should pay more reparations to Afghanistan? It didn't pay the first time, second time. I don't think you should see it in those terms. This was not a war between Britain versus Afghanistan. It's very simplistic. There is a huge constituency of the lower jugger, because the consultancy of the lower jugger showed very clearly. Much of the deal was in the verge of tears asking Karzai, please sign it. It's not. It's very complicated. A lot of emotions involved, a lot of stakes involved and Karzai is not just doing it because he's mad. He also has genuine concerns. As a president, you don't want to go down in history as someone who basically couldn't stop the Americans bombarding and carrying nitrates and assassinations because he believes, and this was sort of the gist of the statement that he put out this morning, which was, as long as I can't stop the Americans from killing Afghans, that sustains the Taliban. That empowers the Taliban, and I've got to do something about that. You can see it as he's been on meds and all that, but it's not really that simple. He really genuinely believes that this war must come to an end. He also has a stake in trying to make sure that he centralizes his hold over whatever is there so that the scenario that Jonathan Steele presented to us doesn't happen. I think it's been hinted at a little bit in your speech at the beginning, but what do you think about the Bakhtun identity polemics internally? Because this is also a subject we don't get enough reference to. Earlier you mentioned the hybrid system of governance throughout. You mentioned the Jirgaard and the kind of view it's being broken up. There's also something internally within this community, if you don't mind me saying this community. But what about the identity polemics there? Because that's also feeding into this Taliban movement, feeding into a resentment. There's an interesting struggle going on there, which has been for some time, but I think now it's resurfacing. Do you think that the presidential elections are going to matter? Is there any hope that someone being elected out of that who would have enough mandate to either reform some of the corruption in the state or to be able to undertake negotiations? About the UNSF, the Financial Security Forces, and maybe with particular reference to this British Supported Office Training Academy. So the officers have finally their own academy and the British Army has committed to training these officers for the next three or four years at least. And we have also seen evidence of the increasing capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces. It is undeniable that the training is a passive report, but in the last three or four years there have been increasingly good reports that actually they're getting better quality training and are improving. So what is the likelihood and how might it happen that perhaps we could have a lull and maybe be able to sustain the situation and then the Afghan Army with a diverse officer class could actually start to expand from the centre to the other parts of the country in terms of establishing governance? So responses to those questions and I'll get another round. Some of these as easy as you should respond to. I mean, just to connect two questions on the question identity and presidential candidates. I mean, and will a legitimate and consensus kind of emerge. It's received wisdom that there will have to be a question. It will be unprecedented for an unpushed to become president. I mean, and Abdullah, the common analysis is that Abdullah would have to win in the first round if he were to become president. It went to a second round and the Pashtuns would basically, they will be at some kind of arrangement to ensure a Pashtun kind of would win. I think the issue around I guess the elections is not about, is less about it's not going to be free and fair. It's not going to follow democratic practices and laws. It's whether a sufficiently inclusive political coalition will emerge and Karzai seems to be playing a very smart game and is retaining all the cards. So, yeah, there's a question there. The question then is will, it's not about whether it's going to be a democratic and open and fair process, but whether it's going to be one that will produce a stable, sufficiently stable and inclusive conduct. On the Pashtun dynamics, when you had this notion that the Pashtuns will marginalize in the beginning, the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks will be in charge, then a couple of years later there was concern around Pashtuns are taking over, others are being marginalized. I think at some point Sharon refers to this dynamic and I think it's very complicated because you can't see these blocks as monolithic. There's a lot of alliances and divisions within the Pashtuns. There are a lot of divisions within opposition, if you like, the Northern Alliance and the minorities. I mean, look at, and this also brings it back to the election issue, how Karzai basically did it. I mean, masterfully divided the entire opposition. He took Masood, I'm not sure Masood's brother and allied him with one of his candidates, brought Dostom to stand next to Ghani, basically completely demolished the opposition against Karzai and his candidates. He's playing a very interesting game. My fear is that because there are so many candidates and there is not sort of a strong personality, everybody's going to land up with 20%, 25% and nobody's going to sort of go to the 50 plus mark and then you will have probably a second round. And then we'll see the dynamics. It seems to me that he's just waiting and playing around and seeing how many people he can divide and then before we throw his support behind somebody. In terms of, yes, I mean, what to me is interesting is a lot of, there's a lot of sort of negative rhetoric around how Karzai is building or is ruling or the way he's basically governing the country in a patronage based and all that. But I see that not weakness, I see it as a strength. And don't forget the international, the flow of international aid has really, really positioned him in a very, very strong, put him in a very strong position because then he can sort of really deal with a lot of constituencies, buy some. In the parliament around election 2011 he did that very well, imposed his conditions and brought in some of his supporters. So the concern then of course is what happens when international aid dries up because that will leave him in the weaker position. Not just him, but any other president who comes in. I think I'll leave it at that. Somebody wants to answer that. Well, should I deal with it? I mean, you know, all the official matrix is that the Afghan National Security Forces are getting better and they're better trained and some of them got better equipment. But it's the results on the ground that count. And I really mentioned these statistics of incredibly high casualty totals, people being killed and wounded. So I don't, I mean, that's ultimately what it's all about. And clearly we know they don't have the same air cover that the Western forces have. They don't have the Medevac facilities, so they get a much higher number of people die who are wounded whereas the British and American forces have the efficient helicopter Medevac and very best kind of field surgery available, et cetera, et cetera. And there's massive desertion. I mean, roughly a third of the ANSF has to be recycled every year because people don't re-enlist all their desert or they get killed and wounded. So I think although the public justification for the withdrawal is from David Cameron and Barack Obama is that these forces are now in a position to take the lead and they are taking the lead and we can step back, et cetera. I think the results on the ground don't really bear that out. On the elections, I mean, I think everything really has to be focused on this issue of will the war continue? Will it get worse? Will it get less? Will there be peace talks? The one good thing about Kazai going is that the Taliban have always considered him to be a complete puppet with whom they will never negotiate. They've always said they will only negotiate with the occupiers, with the United States and so on. Well, as the US presence reduces, that argument may slightly erode on the Taliban's side and it makes it easier for them to negotiate with somebody who's not Kazai. So in that sense there's a slight glimmer of light at the end of the peace talks tunnel if Kazai is no longer in charge and if the US plays a less dominant role. But I think you still have to square the circle of will the Taliban give up their argument that there's no negotiation possible as long as foreign troops are in the country. And that's why the fact that there will be probably this bilateral security agreement will eventually be signed by somebody. And the US is obviously determined to elane if it can. It means that the peace talks again from that point of view also will be quite dubious whether they can really get anywhere we can start. We all know that Iran has this huge involvement and interference in Iraq, especially after the drawl of American forces from Iraq. And this obviously, you know, because Iraq has a major majority of Iraqis are Shiites, and especially the exile opposition before the Saddam Hussein were Shiites, so that's why it can play its role, a huge role. But what do you think after the drawl of the foreign forces from Afghanistan and the Iranian interference in Afghanistan going to be? And in which way? Do you think humanitarian aid is given in my fight connection to the military, whether it's perceived to be connected or it's actually connected? And do you think that with the military withdrawal that would change? I just want to ask about the role of the other Central Asian countries. For example, South Africa's Central Asian countries, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, in this process, in keeping the NATO forces in Afghanistan in order to maintain peace and economic development. Because even for example, in the case of Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan has already 137km border with Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has a long southern-kilometre border with Tajikistan and Afghanistan. So Iraq leaders can bring the rights to the Tajikistan, Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, sorry, to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So how do you see the role of the Central Asian countries? Are they now pushing the NATO powers to keep the forces inside of Afghanistan and what are they doing? So three questions on aid and international relations. I'll just kick off on, I'll just deal with Iran and Central Asia. Yes, I mean Iran has complicated interests in Afghanistan. On the one hand they don't want the Americans to be there and have bases there because they see themselves, it's not the same now as when the Iraq war was on, but when the Iraq war was on they felt they were surrounded. They had the American bases in Iraq, American bases in Afghanistan and could potentially be used for some kind of invasion. So they were, of course, delighted when the Americans pulled out of Iraq and they were very influential in persuading Maliki to get rid of the Americans and not to sign the same kind of bilateral security arrangement that the Americans are trying to get with Gaza. On the other hand they're not very happy with a sort of Sunni dominated Taliban regime taking over in Kabul where there are some contradictions. I mean I interviewed Gulbuddin Haqmatia, the head of Hesbih Islami, one of the most ferocious Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan in 2002, where was he in Tehran in a safe house provided by the Iranian government. He then later went and moved back to southern Afghanistan when the insurgency got going again against the Americans. So, you know, there can be extraordinary marriages of convenience between Mullahs in Tehran, can make a deal with Gulbuddin Haqmatia in 2002, maybe they can make a deal with him in 2017 or 16 or 15. And certainly there is evidence that they are sending arms supplies to the Taliban at the moment. Central Asia? Oh, Central Asia, yes. I think the countries are very concerned. Not only Central Asia but Russia. I mean it's one of the sort of great ironies of this whole thing, you know, even if you look at the Russian position in history in Afghanistan. The Russians actually want the Americans to stay in Afghanistan. In fact, I interviewed the Russian ambassador about a year ago in Kabul and he was saying, you know, he was just driving a coach and horses through this argument that, you know, the army is getting better. A transition is working and therefore we can withdraw. He said security situation is getting worse all the time, so how can they withdraw? They should recognise the fact that they have to stay here because security is going to go down the drain when they leave. So the Russians are actually more keen to stay now and it's not just for some kind of shard and froid or thing, they want to sort of see the Americans getting defeated or bloody noses all the time. It is genuine fear that if a Taliban regime takes over in Kabul with a sort of, it will give a great push to Islamic fundamentalists throughout the region in Central Asia and of course in southern Russia in the Caucasus area, Dagestan, Chechnya and the rest of it. So I think Central Asian countries are quite concerned about the American withdrawal and the Russians are too. Can I just add on the Central Asian? I mean, Afghanistan, and the intervention had a profound effect on the political processes within the Central Asian states. I mean, it's central, it's reinforced the trend that we see particularly in Uzbekistan and Pakistan towards authoritarianism. It's giving a lot of rent seeking opportunities for political leaders there because of concerns about the spreading insecurity of drugs and terrorism. But the withdrawal will probably heighten those dynamics. I mean, I was in Tajikistan six weeks ago and Tajikistan's this bulwark against the radicalisation of these insecurities emanating from Afghanistan. So I think it has quite an important political impact on the region more broadly. I just want to have a quick thing about humanity and aid. I mean, I don't know if it was six or seven act head staff were killed last week in Afghanistan. It's a very dangerous place to be an aid worker and most of the people killed are actually Afghans, not internationals or a lot of internationals have been killed. And especially should I do an article on NGOs and civil military relations. Clearly the Taliban are very aware of how international aid organisations, many of them have aligned themselves with the project in Afghanistan. They're being funded by occupying powers and the Taliban see this and make that connection. So clearly there has been a problem for NGOs working in Afghanistan and how do you remain autonomous, independent and so neutral and impartial in this kind of environment. One kind of ray of hope I suppose with the transition is that there's going to be a sorting process in the years to come. A lot of the organisations that are attracted to Afghanistan by the opportunities and resources, they will disappear and some of the long term NGOs are seriously working there for many years. I know the context well and I'm a quick plug for Afgan Aid because I'm a trustee of Afgan Aid. Organisations like Afgan Aid and many others who have been working there for many years, they have had to negotiate with all sides and continue doing that at risk to themselves but they will continue their function. If I could quickly jump on this humanitarian aid question, I'll be very brief. I recently was in Kabul and was speaking to classic humanitarian, humanitarian the ICRC and they are finding it very difficult operating in an environment with this fragmentation of violence. Because of the US military tactics, nitrates and taking out commanders, new commanders are coming to the fore and they are much more radical and because so many of these leaders are changing all the time, even institutions like the ICRC which has been there for donkeys are finding it so difficult to renegotiate and build relations and those relations are disrupted every time the commander is taking out. So it's very difficult and one of, I think it was last year that the staff in Jalalabad were killed. The acted story in Balwies is another indication but there's also one, you have to point out that most of the stuff that the NGOs are doing are not humanitarian. Most of them are involved in developing work, most of them are involved in programmes like the NSP and in fact is an implementing partner of the NSP which is a highly political project in itself. And there was also this debate with NGOs, the so-called old NGOs and the ones who have been operating in Afghanistan for a very long time could go back to this golden age of humanitarianism and I don't believe that. I think that age is lost or that age was never there. It was just imagination, imagine people's minds. So I see that if ICRC is finding it so difficult, I think a lot of other NGOs would also find it very difficult in the years to come. Well a little while earlier I did hear the tinkle of glasses and bottles and things. If that wasn't just my imagination then perhaps we should wrap it up now and say thank you to the speakers and we can continue our discussion over some professionals. Thank you very much.