I am the Acting Programme Director for ANBP, which is a joint Government/UNAMA initiative. I think most of you are aware that we, over the past six months, have been conducting pilot projects in five key areas and to date we have disarmed, demobilized and reintegrated just over 6,000 ex-combatants that belonged to the Afghan Military Forces (AMF).

We are now moving into a new phase and toward the end of March there were serious discussions between the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and ourselves. This was presided over by President Karzai. The Government set two very ambitious targets. The first is 40 percent of the AMF will go through the DDR process by the fifth of July this summer. The second target is that 100 percent of heavy weapons will be collected before the elections. And I say ambitious because there is an awful lot of work to be done to achieve those targets. The 40 percent represents 85 units ranging from division down to regiment that will either be decommissioned, in other words completely removed from the structure, or downsized so that they will then go into the next phase for decommissioning by the elections. So break that down and that means forty percent by the fifth of July and a further 20 percent by the elections – that’s 60 percent of AMF forces that are sitting out there.

On the heavy weapons collection, again we were set this target of 100 percent. To achieve that, we have been involved with the MOD. They have led this. They have led a series of heavy weapons teams to go and survey the scope of the problem. And it is quite a considerable problem. There is a lot of metal work out there in the form of tanks and artillery. Some of it is working, some of it is movable under it’s own steam, some of it not and it’s not reparable. The intention is to collect them into a minimum of eight, possibly nine cantonment sites, one in each region. That takes considerable lift capacity to achieve. And it’s more capacity than we have here in Afghanistan. We will be going outside of Afghanistan to get hold of that lift capacity to help us with this project. It will take all our efforts, and it will certainly take all our time to achieve this target by the elections, but I think it’s important that we try and do it.

Question and Answers

Question: How are you supervising this disarmament which is managed mostly by the MOD? How is one supposed to be confident that this is actually working?

Mr. Babbington: These teams are led by the MOD, but members of the team come from ANBP. It is also supported by the PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams), and we are also supported by the UNAMA military liaisons and the UNAMA field officers. There is an international element to all these teams. We are confident that where we have been we are seeing 100 percent. There are still some areas that we haven’t completed for a variety of reasons. We are still working in Herat, we are still working in Mazar and we are still working in Kabul, and by Kabul I mean the region that goes up into the Panjsheer and Parwan. The other areas we have now completed. The information is coming in and it’s very comprehensive. The interesting thing that we discovered is that there is a lot more out there than the MOD suspected it had out there. And they are surprised at how much equipment is sitting out in the country.

I am confident that within two weeks we will have a fairly good database of all that information. You can back that information up with aerial photography, which is what we are doing.

Question: Can you tell us how these 85 units were selected?

Mr. Babbington: Basically we sat down with all interested bodies, including the MOD, UNAMA field officers and the PRTs, and we looked at units that would affect a free and fair election. Units that had shown some involvement – and not good involvement – in what was going on with the selection of the delegates for the Constitutional Loya Jirga, for example, and where the military forces had an influence but should not have. We have identified units that are prone to problems. The problems we have seen in Herat, the problems that we have seen Myanmar, the problems we have seen in Mazar and so on and so forth. So where we have identified those units that could cause problems, those units have been put on the list. Of course, the MOD also has units they want to downsize or remove from the order of battle. And so those have been added.

The target was to achieve this 40 percent, or 40,000. If you take the top figure of 100,000 and take out those that have been through the pilot phase, we are looking at a figure of about 33,000.

Question: Is the program voluntary?

Mr. Babbington: The whole process is voluntary, but I am not entirely sure that every soldier who is going into it is a volunteer, as such. The unit is volunteered for DDR, but I am not entirely sure that you can say that of every man there. Our belief is that we demobilize them and return people to civilian life and at that point they can make their own choice. If they choose to join the new ANA (Afghan National Army) and if they meet the criteria of what the ANA is looking for then they can rejoin as a private citizen.

Question: Of the percentage of the 33,000, how many are going to be foot soldiers and how many are going to be officers?

Mr. Babbington: When we say a unit is decommissioned, it is decommissioned completely from cook to commander. So everybody is included. Many units in Afghanistan don’t have a lot of foot soldiers because they have gone back to what they were before, whether it was working on the land or whatever. But what are you left with is quite a heavy number of professionally carded officers or jihaddi officers. They are part of the process and will be included.

What we have found in the pilot phase is that the number of soldiers to officers was out of proportion. But the thing to remember here in Afghanistan is that they have no NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) in their structure. Many of the officers are holding jobs that in most Western armies would be held by non-commissioned officers so you see this slightly disproportionate figure of officers. It is an important topic and one that we have to address because they generally have higher aspiration as to what they want to do. And it’s up to us in ANBP to find the route of reintegration for those people. One the whole one would expect the officers to have a better education, not necessarily always the case but the majority of the cases. That allows us to put them into key reintegration areas. One of the things the previous speaker mentioned was the shortage of teachers in this country. There is an area that we are looking at with the Ministry of Education to see how we can turn some of these officers into teachers.

Question: Are you going to keep some units that are AMF in the south and southeast that are fighting the Taliban alongside the Americans?

Mr. Babbington: That is nothing to do with me or ANBP. That is not our choice. These are, I think, discussions that go on between the Coalition and the MOD. From my point of view, it makes it more difficult for us. We have to look at how we will identify those organizations and we would look to the MOD to give us lists of names of people who are correctly taken on the payroll for that sort of function.

Question: Are you confident that you have a balance across the country?

Mr. Babbington: Yes, very confident. That was the whole basis of our discussions with the MOD to keep that balance. It was very definitely to be even-handed across the country. We have not picked on one area against any other area. We are trying to be completely even-handed so no different body or ethnic group can claim we are trying to disenfranchise any other group.

Question: Can you put a figure on the amount of heavy weapons that you have now found?

Mr. Babbington: To date, we have over 4,000 items identified. And I would not be surprised if we have reached 5,000. Some of those can be moved relatively easily, but I would suggest that the majority of them will need some heavy lift asset to move them, such as cranes and so on. It’s a big tidying exercise really.

Question: What is the progress of heavy weapons cantonment in the north?

Mr. Babbington: You have seen some of the heavy weapons cantonment go on in Mazar. Up in the northern region, we probably have about 70 percent already cantoned so that already happened. There are one or two commanders who are being very open about where their weapons are but are saying you are not going to move them if they are going to be under so and so’s control. What we are trying to put in place with the MOD when these cantonment sites are put together is that the weapons will be disabled within them, and the intention of the MOD is that the cantonment sites will be secured by the ANA. They will not go under other commanders. We will try and get past this distrust.

Yes, nowhere is easy here. The whole DDR process is not easy. I am not expecting this to go smoothly; I am expecting there will be stops and starts. We had to negotiate our way through the pilot project – encouraged, twisted arms, persuaded, used all means possible to get the pilots all completed. I don’t expect the next phase to go any smoother. But I get the general feeling that there is more willingness to start this process. I get the feeling that these commanders know it’s coming in their direction so they may think it’s going to be better to get on board this DDR process earlier rather than later. The impression we are getting is positive.

Question: Who is going to control the cantonment sites? Who will have the keys?

Mr. Babbington: The cantonment site is going to be an open field with a whole heap of junk weaponry put on it. Let’s face it, most of this stuff is not in immediate working order. It would require some work to get it in immediate working order. And we also disable it. You can put all these weapons in a big field, and you put a security guard there. It’s exactly what we are doing in Mazar.

Question: Who is deciding who can use these weapons?

Mr. Babbington: The weapons are under the control of the Central Government. We are handing those disabling pieces to the Central Corps ANA in Pol-i-Charki, where they are under control there. It’s a controlled site. The keys of these containers are controlled by the MOD and the Japanese Government, the Japanese being the lead donor on DDR. There is a dual key system. It’s the same place we store all the light weapons.

Question: When are you going to start?

Mr. Babbington: I am loath to put anything like a starting date here. We are in the process now of gathering the lists of those 85 units. There will be a point in time to be decided between ourselves, the international community and the MOD on when we can start. What we would like to do is we have four of these mobile disarmament units and we would like to start in four places at the same time. When that point is reached will be sometime in the very near future.

We originally did set a date, but actually by doing that in many ways you become a hostage of fortune. We are still meeting some areas of resistance, in terms of some commanders a little unwilling because they are not sure what is going to happen. We are addressing that. The lists have been slow in arriving, but I expect that to pick up in the next week through a variety of initiatives. I would like to think in the very near future we will indicate a start date that we will be able to keep to. I’d rather not give a date that we are held hostage to if we don’t have sufficient lists, we don’t have sufficient verification done and are then seen to fail because we are not starting on a certain date.

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