Oral evidence: Decision-making in Defence Policy, HC 682Tuesday 6 January 2015

Oral evidence, 6 January 2015.

Witness

Pauline Hayes, former Head of Office in Afghanistan 2010-12, Department for International Development, gave evidence.

Chair

Thank you very much for coming. It would be very useful to the Committee to get a sense of where you think you can tie in most usefully to helping us understand how decision making operated in Afghanistan and what we could do to improve decision making in the future, bearing it in mind that you were not in Afghanistan. On the record, the Committee tried to request six times for DFID officials who were actually on the ground at the time, but for some reason DFID sent you. So it would be nice to get a sense of why DFID sent you and what you hope to be able to share with us.

Pauline Hayes

Well, what I bring is that I have been working in Afghanistan and other places, latterly, for four and a half years now, both in-country and at HQ. I think I can bring a perspective to how decisions were being made from 2010 onwards. I can also bring a perspective from the London end, because I have seen it from both ends. I have also seen the NSC in operation for the last four and a half years; obviously, that has changed the way that security decisions are made. So I can bring a perspective to that, I hope.

Chair

Okay. You have been listening to the testimony we just had from Dr Kim Howells. What did you conclude on the basis of that, as an official listening to that from a different point of view? What surprised you, what didn’t surprise you, what would you agree with, what would you disagree with in terms of what you have heard over the last hour?

Pauline Hayes

I think I was struck by just how far we have moved since 2004-05, which you mainly focused on. We have moved an awfully long way in terms of decision making and of accountabilities for those decisions as well. In terms of relationships between different Government Departments, too, we have moved a long way. I have noticed that myself, not just from my experience in Afghanistan but previously. I think you have seen from my CV that I worked in Iraq, and so on. So I have watched an evolution in those relationships and how we handle this kind of work and this kind of agenda.

Chair

So what has changed? What did you not recognise in Dr Howells’s description that you think would be different today?

Pauline Hayes

I think we would recognise that, in deciding to do X, Y or Z you need to do your analysis, gather it in and make decisions based on hard evidence. A lot of work nowadays goes into making evidence-based decisions. There was intelligence at the time, but it is not just about intelligence; you have to look more broadly than at the intelligence. You have to look at the political economy of wherever it is you are trying to operate; you have to look at socio-economic statistics; you have to look at the whole picture.

Chair

What Dr Howells suggested is that there was a lot of information out there. The problem is the gap between that information and decisions. In 2005 DFID hosted a series of three-day seminars, gathering all the stuff you are talking about. It was not just the representatives from SIS; there were also DFID people, contractors, consultants and Government experts. Socio-economic data was gathered and a full picture of Helmand was produced. As we have heard from witnesses, the conclusions were pretty gloomy. This whole package was produced for people in 2005, which essentially said that this was a fragile, traumatised, fractured province and it was going to be difficult for us to make any progress on governance, economic development or security; and yet the decision was still made. The sense that we are getting from evidence is that the decisions are still made because the people making the decisions, even if you provide all that information to them, are not burying their heads in that information; they are thinking about their obligations towards NATO or some grand NATO decision on troop movements or their place within the US alliance or the desire to get out of Iraq.

Pauline Hayes

Yes; but, as an official, you can only present the best evidence-based analysis that you have available. You can advise Ministers, but at the end of the day it is Ministers who will decide things. We provide the best professional advice. Technical, political, whichever Government Department we are in, we provide the best advice we can. But the decisions are made by politicians.

Chair

Okay. Finally, before I hand on to Malcolm. The whole model that Dr Howells was producing was dependent on this idea—you are using the words too—of hard evidence, of expertise, of people who really, deeply, deeply understand the situation. What is worrying me about that is that it might be an unrealistic model and that actually people do not really, deeply, deeply understand a situation. Dr Howells used a good analogy that might be worth thinking about, the analogy with Northern Ireland. He was suggesting that the kind of understanding that officials have about Northern Ireland is 1,000 times greater than they could ever possibly have about Afghanistan—they speak the language fluently and there is a large permanent civil service and a large police force on the ground, with the British Government directly in control, not working with an Afghan Government or coalition partners. Whereas in fact, with the best will in the world, officials are small teams of people who generally do not speak the local language fluently, are generally there on short tours and are prevented by understandable security constraints from actually getting out of the compounds and spending much time with Afghans, so it is very, very, very difficult to expect that you can produce this hard evidence. In practice, presumably, if I had turned up to see you in 2010 or 2011 and said, “It’s a disaster, Pauline”, you would have said, “It’s not so bad.” But really, what do any of us really know about the situation? That conversation has taken place without the depth of knowledge that we would have about a domestic situation, the amount of mileage that we have about Birmingham or Glasgow. We are the blind leading the blind.

Pauline Hayes

Yes, but I or any good official would, I hope, listen to the views of people who do know the stuff on the ground or look at research that has been done. You would try to put together a picture with which to make your best judgment of what direction you think we should go in, whatever the issue, and what advice you should then give to Ministers. But I would not be so arrogant as to have dropped into Kabul in 2010 and thought that I knew it all. I just think that is the wrong way to go. You have to listen to the people on the ground. You are right—we have to listen to the Afghans themselves and to take note. They know the country, they know the language, they know the cultures—

Chair

How do you listen to them if you do not speak their language, if you are not in their villages, not living with them and have not been there for more than a couple of years? It is all very well saying that you are listening to Afghans, but listening to Afghans presumably requires a really deep cultural and political understanding, which is—my sense is—not the key training. Your staff are trained specifically in development, in governance and in civil society, but not specifically in Afghanistan.

Pauline Hayes

Yes, but we have Afghans working in our office in Kabul and, originally, in Helmand. We work with Afghans both inside and outside the office. We work with Afghans in the Government, we work with civil society, we work with the private sector—

Chair

Do you not recognise that you face the challenge—

Pauline Hayes

Of course.

Chair

Do you not recognise that you are presenting a very optimistic model? Listening to you, you seem to be suggesting that it is fine—you have some locally engaged staff, you have some people you employ in the office, you go to see Ministers—but that is not beginning to touch the depth of information knowledge that would have been required to challenge the decision making in Helmand. It is not enough. It is not enough to know that things are going badly wrong. That tends to reinforce optimism.

Pauline Hayes

We are constantly, constantly learning. The longer that we are in Afghanistan, the more we are learning. We do not pretend to have all the answers—we didn’t then, we don’t now—but what we know is that we need to understand the issues on the ground, the motivations of people, the incentives for change, the behaviours and so on, all the things that you are describing, before we make various interventions if we want them to be successful. We are learning every day, because as you know Afghanistan is a hugely complex country and place. We are learning all the time. We do not always get it right, and we admit when we do not get things right, but we are trying our best to help that country, with the best knowledge and experience that we can gather to help it to be a better place.

Chair

Okay. I did say I would hand over, but I will just follow up on that. So you are trying your best, but there is language, tour lengths, movement and contact with people. What institutional reforms have been introduced into the civil service to reflect this very peculiar environment? Did people say, “Okay, we accept that we got this wrong in 2005; we didn’t know enough about it, so we are going to ensure that the majority of our DFID staff do at least one or two years of training in Dari and Pashto before they are deployed.”? Did anybody say, “We understand that we don’t know enough about this, so we’re going to run specific six-month courses on Afghan culture and history before people are deployed.”? Did people say, “We recognise we don’t know enough about it, so we’re going to change the security regulations, change the way things are done, push people out into more remote areas in order to live alongside people.”? What has actually changed in the HR/personnel-management structures in London in order to learn the lessons of our failures in 2005?

Pauline Hayes

A number of things. We haven’t done a deep immersion, as we call it, in the way you describe, but we do a lot of briefing and inducting staff before they go out to postings. They are shorter postings than in a more normal, traditional development environment, but going to Afghanistan is a voluntary posting. They are going to a conflict country without their family, so they are making a big commitment as it is. We can give them the briefing and induction they need, we give them all the support we can ahead of their going, and when they get there, there are further inductions and so on, but we have to weigh up the pros and cons of investing in two or three years of language training for what could be a 12 or 18-month posting, weigh up the investment and whether that is what we should be doing. I haven’t got the stats with me, but we are seeing more people going back to Afghanistan, so we have got an institutional memory building up. The International Development Committee asked similar questions a couple of years ago. We can demonstrate the ways in which we are building our knowledge and recouping that knowledge by people going back, not just once, but twice and maybe even three times. I would say, as well, that although there is a minimum period for people to go on postings, most people do longer than the minimum period.

Mrs Moon

Mrs Hayes, you said that the decisions are always made by the politicians. One thing that has become very clear is that the decision to move into northern Helmand was certainly made by a politician, but Brigadier Butler told us that the provincial reconstruction team in Lashkar Gar would have been privy to the discussion around the move into northern Helmand. What is your memory of that decision and the process of making the decision? What was the input of DFID? Are you aware of that?

Pauline Hayes

At the time I think we had one person in what was a very nascent PRT—a tiny PRT, as I understand it—and that person was relatively junior, I should add. So our ability to influence and shape those decisions would, frankly, have been minimal on the ground. People were aware, obviously, at the Kabul end, of various possibilities and decisions being made, and, obviously, at the London end as well, but at the field end that you are describing, I think that very little would have been known about it; just an awareness, really.

Mrs Moon

What advice and information would either that one person or the Kabul team have been sending back to London? What insight and role did they have in helping the decision-making process to be fully informed?

Pauline Hayes

They would have been aware that decisions were about to be made to go north and so on, and they would have been feeding that back to the centre. Then there would have been the normal structures that were available at the time, decision-making structures both to officials and ministerial. So it would go up the chain, essentially.

Mrs Moon

What about Brigadier Butler? What opportunity did the PRT have to influence Brigadier Butler’s decision-making process?

Pauline Hayes

I can’t answer that. I really don’t know the answer to that.

Mrs Moon

It is said that the PRT system is the best model for co-ordinating and implementing policy in conflicts. Would you agree?

Pauline Hayes

I don’t think it is the best model. I think it is a model that we should consider. It is interesting to watch the evolution of the PRT. It started as a very small thing and it grew to something much bigger by 2009-10. It learned a lot of lessons along the way, in terms of interactions and so on, and in its last years it had developed into a really useful model. Whether or not it was the best model, it was working reasonably well in Helmand.

Mrs Moon

How did the model influence the decisions that were made? How did it feed into the decision-making process?

Pauline Hayes

Having a group of people based in a province, with their ears more closely to the ground than they could be in Kabul or London, is obviously good. You get a much better sense of what people’s views are, what the issues are, etc. It is important that we remember that it was not just a UK PRT but an international PRT—we had the US, the Danes and the Estonians there—and it was a mixture of military and civilian personnel. I think that mix is good, in terms of getting better co-ordination and a better sharing of views. It was not perfect in the early years—I would be the first to admit that, given what I heard about it—but we learned the lessons very quickly, and it was establishing itself as a good model. I was sat in Kabul, but I obviously visited Helmand regularly, and I would hear about other PRTs—some that were working well and some that weren’t. The view was that Helmand was one of the better ones, but we shouldn’t forget that there were other good ones as well.

Mrs Moon

Did you feel that part of your work was to feed back intelligence information that would influence decision making in Westminster?

Pauline Hayes

There were intelligence people on the ground in Helmand who were feeding intelligence back to Westminster.

Mrs Moon

No, I mean from the PRTs. As you said, they were the people on the ground interacting with the local Afghans, taking in information and understanding what their wishes and needs were. How much of that did you see as valuable intelligence to feed back into Westminster to form part of the decision-making process?

Pauline Hayes

Obviously, we heard and saw useful information or intelligence—whatever you want to call it—which we would feed back to try to inform decision making. I should add that Helmand would join London meetings by video conference, and so on, and the head of the PRT would join in those discussions. It wasn’t a case of feeding it back on a piece of paper or third hand. They were directly engaged.

Mrs Moon

On a scale of one to 10, with one as absolutely useless and 10 as absolutely spot-on brilliant, where would you say the British PRT concept sits?

Pauline Hayes

I would say seven and a half. I would not say that it was perfect, but in the time that I watched it evolving and being wound down I could see it becoming a better vehicle for what we were trying to do down there. I was struck by the ways in which the civilians and the military—certainly from 2009-10 onwards—were working together much more effectively. I can give examples, if that would be useful.

Mrs Moon

What would you need to see changed to improve the way it worked, in terms of influencing the decisions about what needed to happen on the ground?

Pauline Hayes

What makes me a little cautious is that sometimes the ambitions and the time scales were unrealistic. I think we were getting it right towards the end, in terms of monitoring and evaluation work. We were checking whether what we said we would do was having the right effect. As a development person, I am in a long-term game. Whatever I do, stuff takes time. You are trying to change systems and behaviours. I think sometimes we are unrealistic about how long development takes. I think we have to be realistic and we have to recognise the environment we are working in and tailor our objectives, our timelines, etc., to that.

Dr Lewis

Following straight on from that, were you ever aware of any serious discussions being held at the highest level by your Department about the wisdom of a long-term nation-building approach in Afghanistan?

Pauline Hayes

No, not in the time that I have been working on Afghanistan. Afghanistan is one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world, as I am sure you are aware. For DFID to be working in Afghanistan—it goes without saying we would work in a country like that, given our priorities, but we recognise it is a long-term game. We recognise—assuming the Afghans still want us—we could be there for 20, 30 years working on Afghanistan. That is how long it is going to take to develop Afghanistan, and we started from an extremely low base when we first arrived there in 2001-02. Should we not be engaged in Afghanistan? No, I cannot say I have ever heard that discussion.

Dr Lewis

So that was taken as a given. You mentioned the coming of the National Security Council. Can you explain in what way, if at all, that has affected the way in which you get political direction?

Pauline Hayes

Well, I think the NSC is a good model. It is a kind of whole-of-Government approach to looking at national security issues. I think whatever we do is couched in a wider national security strategy. Under that we have the Building Stability Overseas Strategy. I can see a sort of cascade system that I think works much better than the models we had previous to that. From a DFID perspective, we have a seat on the NSC. Our Minister is there and can take full part in those discussions and try to influence and shape those discussions. I think the fact that the NSC is chaired at the highest political level is good as well.

Dr Lewis

What we are trying to get at is, at what different level does what different type of political decision get taken that gives you a direction in terms of your operations? Can you give us some examples of decisions that would be taken locally in theatre, as it were; for example, those that would have to go to London and be taken in the Department, those that would have to go higher, where those decisions that go higher would actually be taken, and what sort of decisions those would be?

Pauline Hayes

In terms of DFID’s programme—in terms of budgeting decisions—we are obviously given a budget, and then we have a quite simple sort of delegated authority system for how we spend that budget. We devise operational plans that set out how we are going to use that agreed budget. We can determine that operational plan. However, in Afghanistan everything we do is also driven by an NSC strategy for Afghanistan. So DFID’s operational plan must obviously fit within that NSC strategy, which it does. The two things sort of work in parallel, almost. Once the NSC strategy for Afghanistan is determined, we can then shape our operational plan and what we are going to prioritise within that, how we are going to spend money, what policy areas we are going to focus on, and so on. The implementation and delivery of that operational plan is down to the head of office in Kabul, but obviously under my direction. But then, even for delivering that operational plan—it is over £500 million now—where we are doing projects the Minister will still approve business cases for them. So there is still a heavy degree of ministerial involvement and decision making in what we are doing in Afghanistan. Going back up to the NSC, when we are reporting back as officials how the NSC strategy is progressing, it has a series of measures of progress, so we have a very clear set of indicators. Obviously, what DFID is doing as a contribution to that feeds back up to the NSC.

Dr Lewis

If I were to ask you to give me some specific examples of decisions that have been taken in the NSC that have affected what DFID has been doing in Afghanistan, what would you say?

Pauline Hayes

Well, obviously decisions were taken two or three years ago about closing down the PRT in Helmand, and the wider decision was taken in terms of exit because the Afghan Government said that they wanted all PRTs closed. So we agreed an exit plan and strategy and that affected DFID’s plans for how it would close down its operations in Helmand and basically move everything back to the centre again. That would be one example.

Dr Lewis

Thank you. Finally, could you give me an idea of, both before and after the coming of the NSC, your concept of where the ultimate responsibility lay for policy in Afghanistan and where the centre of direction for Departments such as yours was located?

Pauline Hayes

I would say: in the NSC.

Dr Lewis

And before the NSC?

Pauline Hayes

Before the NSC there were Cabinet committee structures—I am sorry, I have forgotten the acronyms—but they did not operate in the same whole-of-government way that I described for the NSC. So you have all the key Ministries engaged and I think that that in itself brings different perspectives to the strategy.

Dr Lewis

And you did not feel that, for example, the military were pursuing their own agenda or anything like that.

Pauline Hayes

I have not seen that, no, and I would say that the NSC meets and then there is an NSC operations level, which is permanent secretaries, and a senior officials level. There is a whole cascade of people working on this stuff. I think that, in particular over the last four and a half years, there has been a reasonable consensus across Departments about the direction of travel in Afghanistan.

Richard Benyon

The evidence we got from Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles suggested that even though the military were taking their orders by and large from NATO, there was still a lot of unilateral activity going on and papers were being written about Britain’s view of the future of Afghanistan or Helmand. Is your experience that that activity has been going on, with different policy streams coming from different areas, and that there is a rather hubristic view that Britain somehow could dictate a solution on the ground in a province, or even in the country?

Pauline Hayes

No, I do not think so—I am putting my development hat on now. Whether you are working in a military sector, a political sector or the development strand in Afghanistan, it is really important that you do not operate in isolation; you have to operate internationally. In my work, I cannot just say, “The Brits are going to do this”. First and foremost, I discuss with the Afghans, because what we do should be guided by their priorities, strategies and so on, but then we will talk to the US, the EU and other bilaterals such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF. We have to work in tandem to deliver in Afghanistan.

Richard Benyon

Did you feel that military decision making fitted in with what you have just described? Does that lead to internal conflict at times with the MOD and military people or even with politicians from different Departments who may not understand what you are trying to achieve on the ground and your time scales for that? There is quite a drive for politicians wanting to see much quicker goals achieved, so did you feel that that caused internal conflicts that were sometimes irreconcilable?

Pauline Hayes

There are tensions, inevitably. As I said earlier, development is a long-term game. It would be fair to say only that some of the military would get frustrated that we couldn’t do things quicker and politicians get frustrated that things can’t happen quicker, but we are where we are. We are working in a very fragile environment in Afghanistan. We are working with a very weak capacity Government at central level—sometimes it is a barely functioning Government. We are working with a nascent private sector and a nascent civil society. This is going to take time. We are always saying this, but that does cause tensions, inevitably. But we can only move as fast as we can move.

Richard Benyon

When we are operating in an alliance of different countries, does the fact that some of those countries have a different way of doing foreign policy, defence policy and aid and a different organisational landscape cause added difficulties in how decisions are taken?

Pauline Hayes

Again, it can cause tensions. Don’t forget that my counterparts in other countries are under the same pressures, so we all face those same tensions. But again it depends on their approach to development. It depends on how much aid they are putting into that country and whether they are taking a long-term perspective or whether they see themselves as putting in aid only for the very short term. There are all those dynamics going on as well. But I would say that over the last few years, there has been greater coherence among the development community than there was in the past. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think there is a greater movement together to speak with one voice and to make sure we act more coherently, and in a fragile environment like that, that is absolutely vital.

Richard Benyon

It is impossible to be specific, but if we were to find ourselves in another situation in another part of the world in which there was a requirement for a military response to be co-ordinated with development outcomes, would that now work more smoothly because of changes to decision-making processes, particularly in terms of being able to garner understanding of cultural and community issues at a very low level, or are we still going to be—

Pauline Hayes

I think that if that situation were to happen, we would see much better decision-making processes, but also better ways of working and better understanding of where each of us is coming from. We have learned a lot over the last decade and more.

Ms Stuart

I am trying to get myself out of the hole we seem to have dug ourselves into. I hear a lot of description of processes, learning and decision making, but I still don’t know what it is we have done, so let me look at something very specific. I also note that you sometimes prefix an answer by saying, “Wearing my development hat”. I am not entirely sure what that is meant to say. Does it mean “I need 20 years longer”? This is about how we achieve things, so let me get to the point. UK plc goes into a country like Afghanistan in a coalition and it has various means by which it tries to achieve an outcome, which is both short-term and long-term. One outcome is that we want people to change their behaviour. Let us just be clear: we wanted the Afghans to do certain things differently from the way they had done them before—like educate girls. It may be very culturally specific that a whole section of the Afghan population do not wish to educate girls, but we are trying to get to a point where we have to assert our values and say, “It is in your long-term interests to do so.” In the decision-making process in which you are involved, you wear your development hat and the military wears its hard-power hat, because girls will not be able to go to school unless we can make sure they don’t get shot or blown up on the way to school. Then there is a long-term political outcome. I am trying to understand this: in your dealings with politicians and the decision-making process, where do you pause and say, “What are the values we wish to assert—what is it we are doing?” rather than describe the process of doing it? Where in your work is that moment when you say, “Now we fulfil a specific function that is value loaded”?

Pauline Hayes

First I would say that this wasn’t us saying that more kids need to be educated and more girls need to be educated—the Afghans wanted that as well, so we are responding to what they want.

Ms Stuart

Is that really all we do—responding to it? Don’t we suggest some things to them that they might want?

Pauline Hayes

Yes, we do suggest, but we can’t make them do it. It is a bit of a cliché that you can take the horse to water but you can’t make it drink. They have got to want to do it. The Afghan Government wanted to expand education, or whatever, and we have helped them to do that. We have obviously pushed for more girls to go to school, because we think that is the right thing to do because of the opportunities it offers, which go far beyond education—I probably don’t need to tell you that. But at the end of the day it has to be responding to them, and they want to do this.

Ms Stuart

Okay. Let us try a different example—the poppy crop. We don’t want them to grow poppies. They don’t particularly want to grow them other than as a revenue exercise. There is nothing redeemable about the process of growing poppies, so we cannot even argue about its merit. How did we arrive at the decision on what to do? There were some serious debates going on—for example, do we spray this stuff?—and then, whatever we did, it did not work. Tell me, where was that discussion going on?

Pauline Hayes

As I understand it, it has continued for many years. There have been long discussions about the way to tackle the poppy issue. The bottom line is that there is no magic bullet.

Ms Stuart

At the moment there is no bullet. They are growing more of the wretched stuff than they did before.

Pauline Hayes

Yes, but what DFID was advocating from day one was creating alternative livelihoods. You have to give them an alternative to growing poppies.

Ms Stuart

So why did that not work? That has been the story since day one. We have always known that the only way we are going to get the farmers off poppy growing is to create an alternative livelihood, but clearly that has not worked. Where is the analysis of why it has not worked—are you doing any analysis on why?

Pauline Hayes

We have done analysis, and others have as well. We have taken account of that analysis.

Ms Stuart

And the analysis said what?

Pauline Hayes

That we have to diversify.

Ms Stuart

Yes, but you knew that before. Has anything happened? In the past 10 years have we changed any part of our approach? This is something that we have known is a problem, and we thought we had the answer, but in between none of us have made it work. At what point do you step back and say, “This clearly isn’t working, is it?”?

Pauline Hayes

We have changed our views on this. The UK view now on counter-narcotics is very different from where it was a few years ago. But I think you need to talk to colleagues in the National Crime Agency and the Home Office on the switch in strategy in counter-narcotics.

Ms Stuart

No, it hasn’t changed. We are still against it.

Pauline Hayes

In terms of how we tackle it. The views of eradicating—

Ms Stuart

What I am trying to get to is this: as we are trying to improve the process of decision making we are trying to find the space in which someone, or a group of people, pauses and says, “Here are the facts on the ground. Here is our aspiration. It just is not happening, is it?” At what stage does the group of people say, “Where do we change tack? What we wish to happen is simply not happening.”?

Pauline Hayes

Those discussions have happened and decisions have been made in terms of what the UK strategy should be on counter-narcotics. It is not about eradicating poppy in Helmand, and so on. It is much more about intercepting the trafficking that goes on inside and outside Afghanistan and across the region. There has been a complete acknowledgment that we needed to change tack but, as I say, if you would like more details on that, we can get that for you.

Chair

Can I just have one more bite at the same cherry before I hand over to Derek? We don’t really see inside the machine well enough. When do you acknowledge failure? At what point does the institution say, “We really screwed this one up. We wasted five years doing something that didn’t work. Five years ago, we said that we were going to be able to significantly reduce poppy production. Five years ago, we set up rule of law programmes. We set up governance programmes. We were eliminating corruption. It didn’t work. It’s been a big failure. We’re holding these people accountable. We’re changing these structures”? Does that happen? Is it just that we don’t see it? From the outside, I ain’t ever heard anyone say, “We’ve failed.” All we hear is, “We’ve learnt some lessons.”

Pauline Hayes

Those discussions do take place, and they now take place through the NSC process that I described earlier. There was a discussion on counter-narcotics at a senior officials’ level. There were papers written saying, “This is the direction of travel that we think this needs to go in.” That would get fed up to the NSC and a decision would be taken that this strategy was—

Chair

Put bluntly, you wrote a paper saying that this failed; it didn’t work. What then happens? Do you fire people? Do you change procedures? Do you look back at how you got it wrong? What reforms did you then introduce to make sure that you would not make a similar mistake in the future? I don’t mean on counter-narcotics. I mean learning the lessons in terms of what is wrong in the institution, because you will make a mistake about something else in the future unless you change that.

Pauline Hayes

We do document where things go wrong. I will speak for DFID now. A project goes through an annual review process, and at that point you measure progress against the original indicators that you set yourselves. It gets a score. This is all published; it is all freely available on websites. If the project is scoring below a certain level, we make a decision about whether to continue it, rectify it, stop it or whatever. A decision will be made at that point. Usually, that report will say, “Rectify it.” Unless something has gone dramatically wrong, there is usually a good reason why it has not gone as well as you thought it might go—because of external circumstances or something changing that you had not foreseen. But there will come a point where you will say, “Actually, this project just isn’t working and we need to stop it.” That is quite a difficult decision to take, because there are various stakeholders involved in that project, whether it be the partner Government you are working with or it could be a private sector or civil society organisation. If we really feel that this project has to stop, we will make that decision. It is documented and it is available. In terms of the lesson learning, all these documents have a section on lesson learning. Obviously, that then gets fed back into—it is a project cycle. In anything new that you are designing, you make sure that you are taking account of the lessons learnt with whatever the past intervention was. That is, again, in the next iteration of the next project business case.

Derek Twigg

In the early years following our intervention in 2006—I visited Afghanistan a number of times between 2006 and 2008—it was very clear that there was a big disconnect between what DFID was expected to achieve or could achieve and the views of, say, the military, the MOD or other Government Departments. I was there a number of times, and in my experience, there was clearly no clear agreement. In fact, I remember one DFID official saying to me, “Well, we’ll get there in the end,” or something along those lines. What I would like to know is: what do you think has changed since then in terms of the mechanics of how such decisions between Government Departments are arrived at to establish what can actually be achieved within the resources, military climate and governmental operations at the time? What has changed since then that would give us more confidence that we will not repeat that situation?

Pauline Hayes

There is a greater realism.

Derek Twigg

What do you mean by that? How would I feel that? How would I know that there is greater realism? What can you provide as evidence that that exists?

Pauline Hayes

If you were to see a project objective—what you are trying to achieve, the length of time you think you will take to achieve it and how you will know if you have got there—you would see a greater realism. Something that we talk about a lot in DFID is that in the past there was “too much optimism” bias. You like to think that you can get there faster than you can. I think that there is now a greater realism about how far and how fast you can go.

Derek Twigg

But who signs that off in Government and says that this is what we can achieve in x amount of time through development in a particular situation, say even in Afghanistan now for the next five years? Who signs that off? What is the mechanism for ensuring that there is a co-ordinated effort by all Government Departments involved?

Pauline Hayes

In terms of DFID’s work and operational plan, the Minister will sign that off.

Derek Twigg

Is that then agreed with Ministers in Defence, the Foreign Office or with No. 10? What happens?

Pauline Hayes

In putting together that operational plan, we will consult with other Government Departments.

Derek Twigg

So is it signed off via a Cabinet Committee or something like that?

Pauline Hayes

No, our country operational plan will be signed off by the DFID Minister but there will have been plenty of consultation before. As I mentioned before, it has to fit in with the broader NSC strategy. It has to cascade. That higher-level strategy for Afghanistan is there and our operational plan fits into that.

Derek Twigg

So if Defence, the Foreign Office or No. 10 said that they did not agree with your view, who makes the decision?

Pauline Hayes

That discussion would have to take place at the NSC level, if there were very strong views.

Derek Twigg

So it has taken place in terms of what we are currently doing in Afghanistan.

Pauline Hayes

Nobody has taken it to that questioning level. People were satisfied with what we were trying to do. I think that is because we had had the high-level discussions about the broader NSC strategy for Afghanistan, such that our work fitted in well. So there was not really anything—

Derek Twigg

You are saying that the NSC would have to act to overrule the Department if other Government Departments did not agree with what DFID is proposing.

Pauline Hayes

If there were serious questions, yes; but that is unlikely to happen because we are being guided by an overarching NSC strategy for Afghanistan.

Derek Twigg

A second example in policy is that there are different views in Government about counter-narcotics as opposed to development generally in Afghanistan. How are policy differences resolved between Departments?

Pauline Hayes

In different ways and at different levels. Obviously, there will be discussions, and I am thinking about the past now, on the ground about how to resolve counter-narcotics—

Derek Twigg

I am just concerned. Let me make the point before you respond. There is a strong view about what we do in our Department on counter-narcotics, but you have a strong view that you have to do x amount in Development. There is a bit of conflict here, which might cause a problem, because we are being too hard or not hard enough according to one part of that.

Pauline Hayes

There will have to be a healthy debate, obviously. If the issue cannot be resolved, the decisions now will be taken to the NSC. They would have that debate and a decision would be taken.

Derek Twigg

So the NSC will make these decisions now.

Pauline Hayes

Yes.

Richard Benyon

In terms of our inquiry into decision making, your Department can make decisions that could result in Defence and other people in Government not having to make a decision about whether to go to war. If you do the right development in the right ways, and support governance, society and the economy in an area, it could bring more stability. When you do your in-country calculations about whether a project is justified, are you absolutely embedded with the local post—the FCO personnel in-country? Is that decision making from the ground up now happening to ensure that any strategies that HMG might have through the Foreign Office in terms of stabilising an area and the development drivers of NGOs and others are merged and proper decision-making policy is being taken that could avoid the need for us to have more expensive conflicts?

Pauline Hayes

Yes. We are not doing the work in Afghanistan in isolation from other Government Departments, on the ground. It is important to remember that we are embedded in the British embassy in Kabul.

Richard Benyon

I mean in other countries—I am talking not just about Afghanistan but about Africa and places like that.

Pauline Hayes

Okay. We are working as one HMG to achieve whatever it is we are trying to achieve in that country. The embassy will have a UK strategy for that country. What DFID is doing development-wise will be part of that UK strategy, so we are working as one. That is not to say that there are not differences in directions of travel or how far or how fast—all the things I was describing earlier. We are basically working as one HMG, which is how it should be.

Mr Havard

Where to start is the thing, Pauline. I remember having a discussion with you in 2010. I think it was in Kabul—and there were very different discussions taking place in Kabul than there were in Helmand, among the Afghans. It was a pretty variable discussion among the Afghans themselves, equally as much as it was with us. There was a lot of discussion about government, but what you were doing there was governance. It seems to me that there were very strong governance processes in Afghanistan and they are there still. They may not be the ones that we wanted to foster under our central Government process; but there is no lack of governance in Afghanistan. Whether you agree with it or not is a different matter. So you were trying to change culture. You have talked about—I think it is the building influence overseas policy—is that what it’s called?

Pauline Hayes

The building stability overseas strategy—

Mr Havard

That’s it. Pauline Hayes:—which is a cross-Government strategy.

Mr Havard

Yes. We had the conflict resolution pool, which is now called something else—I forget what. These were things that developed out of the PRT system—is that right? You said that you thought it was seven and a half out of 10. But presumably that is seven and a half out of 10 for co-ordination of the UK assets in-country, is it, as an operating PRT?

Pauline Hayes

No, no. When I gave it seven and a half out of 10 I was thinking of the PRT as a whole. The PRT was an international operation.

Mr Havard

As a concept—a process?

Pauline Hayes

As a concept, and also in terms of the results it was delivering. It was delivering some good results towards the end, in many ways. I can give examples of that.

Mr Havard

Against what was an in-country plan? If we are talking about Afghanistan in this circumstance, then the Afghans have got their plan. For example, George Bush wanted the turbine stuck in Kajaki dam before we left, so we spent a lot of money doing all that. There is no electricity coming out of it—it is not turning. From your point of view it might have been better to have smaller, decentralised generation systems, from rivers, solar and everything else. But that is not going to happen, is it? So there is co-ordination, but where does the policy co-ordination come in terms of deciding what is best for the development of the local economy?

Pauline Hayes

I know you don’t like saying we are learning lessons, but I think we have learnt lessons.

Mr Havard

We have learnt a lot of lessons; what we are trying to figure out is whether we are applying any of these lessons.

Pauline Hayes

I think latterly we were applying them in Helmand. We were being more realistic about what could be done, whether it was getting power up and running, building roads, services, and so on. I think we were being more realistic and doing it in a more co-ordinated way. People would listen to what DFID had to say about timescales and the need for indicators, the need to build capacity and so on. The PRT did shift in those latter years from building things and doing things to supporting the local government to build their capacity. That shift did happen.

Mr Havard

So you were supporting the local government to do things rather than doing things for them; so that is your role in the function. What I want to get to is this. There is a lot of talk about the NSC now as the co-ordination process for Helmand, which seems conceptually the right thing and a good thing to do. Out of that come the political decisions, based on the advice that is given. That is cross-Government. It has got the Treasury in it; BIS is in it; you are in it; the Foreign Office is in it; our friends down the river are in it; the Home Office is in it; and the Border Force, presumably, is brought in whenever it needs to be. So it is a mechanism whereby you can have a whole cross-Government process. Descriptively, it looks great. But what is happening, for example, with the development in the Ministry of Defence of the idea of defence engagements, which Richard mentioned earlier, about how you get in front of some problems now, to you try not to be in a conflict situation in the first place and engage with countries longer term, along with DFID? You have a doctrine called Forward Defence or something similar, or is that what other people call your doctrine?

Pauline Hayes

I don’t know; I haven’t heard that.

Mr Havard

Well, there was a very different attitudinal approach to all of these things between the Ministry of Defence and DFID, wasn’t there? There certainly was when I went to Afghanistan in 2003, 2006 or whatever. It was very different. It was different in Iraq. That presumably is resolved, so how do you see DFID and the Ministry of Defence developing a coherent doctrine that they can take into all of the discussions that they might have in the NSC?

Pauline Hayes

In a number of ways. I think the way we have increasingly had to work together on the ground in many different conflict situations, and humanitarian situations as well, means we have begun to understand each other better. We are different, but we understand each other and where we are coming from better. I think there is much more interaction now. DFID staff go on some of the MOD’s training courses—command courses and so on—to understand the MOD, the culture, where they are coming from and also, frankly, to learn because there is some good stuff that we can learn from. Equally, we have had one or two MOD staff seconded into DFID. We have the stabilisation unit, which is a joint FCO-MOD-DFID entity. I think there is a lot of cross-learning and cross-working going on there, which is good. We have a lot more interaction in terms of briefings, with senior military officials coming in for briefings ahead of going on whatever deployment it is, and vice versa. We have come a long way. I worked on Iraq 10 or 11 years ago—I was based in London, but visited frequently—and we have come such a long way; there is no doubt of that. That is not to say that there won’t still be differences or frustrations, but I think if we were going into something else, as I said earlier, there is a much better understanding and there are much better ways of working.

Mr Havard

Do you think that there have been these institutional organisational changes that are going to make—

Pauline Hayes

Yes, I do.

Mr Havard

The decision making better and inform the decision making? How does that inform the politician? How is that done? Through the NSC?

Pauline Hayes

Formally through the NSC, but obviously they have their own informal mechanisms for talking to each other as well.

Chair

Thank you very much for your time and that draws the session to a close. Oral evidence: Decision-making in Defence Policy HC 682 28