Facing the challenge of reconstructing Afghanistan (From Malvern Gazette)

Facing the challenge of reconstructing Afghanistan

10:03am Friday 19th March 2010

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IMAGINE trying to set up the infrastructure of an entire country from scratch. Now add opium, the Taliban, government corruption and suicide-bombings into the equation.

This is the task facing 45-year-old Paul Turner - a former Malvern schoolboy now heading the European Union’s reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Paul, currently seconded to the EU from the Department for International Development, is tasked with building up the country’s police force and judicial institutions, weaning rural farmers off poppy cultivation, and providing healthcare for its impoverished people.

It is a long way away from Paul’s childhood, when he attended Powick Primary and Hillside School, formerly in Malvern Link.

Paul’s journey to Afghanistan started back in 1990 when he gave up teaching to take a job at the Home Office.

He dealt with a range of issues, including the Northern Ireland peace process, before moving onto the Department for International Development, then headed by Clare Short, in 1997.

He picked up valuable experience working in post-conflict reconstruction with spells in the former Yugoslavia, including as head of the UK Government aid programme in Kosovo.

In 2005 the chance arose to apply his skills to Afghanistan - a country still reeling after the invasion by British and US troops in 2001.

He said: “They were looking for someone who had experience working in development assistance programmes in a post-conflict environment. It was for Afghanistan, which I had never dealt with before, but I had some experience planning strategies in Kosovo.”

Paul spends most of his time in Brussels, working for the European Commission, but visits Afghanistan twice a year - including having flown out again on Monday (March 15).

“It’s incredibly difficult because of the security situation there. In the five years I have been there I have seen the difficulties in the security situation increase and increase.

“We stayed in the Serena Hotel [in Kabul] up until 2007. It was actually quite easy to move around. The problem has come increasingly in the last year-and-a-half to two-years. There’s more and more incidents inside Kabul. It’s a mixture of factors. The Taliban have been able to re-group quite successfully in Pakistan. Also, in 2002 we thought we had won the war but actually it was never as good as we thought.”

The mammoth job facing Paul and his team is of course made harder by these security concerns. In June 2008, he was perilously close to a devastating bomb at the Indian Embassy in Kabul which killed up to 60 people and injured many more.

“I was at a guest house about 200 metres away. I heard the explosion and of course felt it. I was in the bathroom at the time. It blew the windows in my room. If I had still been in bed it would have covered me with glass.

“These things are so unpredictable and you do not know. But there’s certain areas that you try and avoid because you know they’re targets.”

While politicians may talk of ‘exit-strategies’ for Afghanistan, Paul is more pragmatic about the challenges of handing over control to the national army and police force.

“The emphasis is to try and hand over as much as possible to the Afghans. This in my view will take decades. With the Afghan National Police, only 10 per cent of them are literate. You can only go at the pace of the person you are teaching.

“The ordinary Afghans, they do not feel particularly secure and do not feel there’s adequate justice. Sometimes the Taliban can convince local populations its better to have them in charge. The negative to that is most of the time the Taliban work on fear and intimidation.”

But Paul is proud of the successes of the project. “In the health area now 80 per cent of Afghanis have access to primary health compared to under the Taliban where it was less than 10 per cent.

“There are now also six-million boys and girls who go to school.”

He admits there is a huge amount of work to do on stopping the trade in opium - which accounts for 90 per cent of the heroin on the streets of Europe - and believes the police, army and judicial systems remain the biggest challenges.

The current focus, said Paul, is on “reconciliation and reintegration” which involves targeting the less ideological insurgents in order to quell the strength of the insurgency. But it’s an uphill struggle in a country that has so much going against it.

“It’s got the development challenges of sub-Saharan Africa, but with opium and the Taliban,” he added.

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