Interview conducted by Lieutenant Hugh Blethyn Royal Navy, Officer Commanding, Combat Camera Team, Task Force Helmand

HB: So Phillip, you have been up here in MSQ for some time now, could you describe your role and what you have brought particularly.  

PA: I am the battle group CIMIC Officer and what I do is I provide an interface between the governance and the battle group to feed the civilian side of what we are up to in with the military side and providing the glue between the two.

HB: So what has been achieved in MSQ since December?

PA: Since December there has been an extraordinary amount achieved, not only militarily but also with the support of the military from a civilian perspective  for establishing governance within MSQ where we have essentially gone from what was a standing start to now where we are at the point where we have a functioning government which is interacting with the people and dealing with the peoples issues and problems and the matters which any community faces on a day to day basis and as I say that is quite an extraordinary achievement in a relatively short period of time.  

HB: Now I understand that the planning was well underway even before the operation started, I wonder if you could comment on how the plans were put in place and how much planning was undertaken before the operation commenced.

PA: There was a huge amount of planning even before the first bullet was fired in terms of the military campaign and on the r & d side of life, there were numerous contracts that were put in place not only for what became the governor’s residence, a civil secretariat building – a civilian building for the conduct of government and ANP headquarters but also projects for the local community such as the reconstruction of the bazaar road and the renovation of the local school and the construction of a number of other roads, projects for water towers so that running water can be reintroduced into the town and a number of other civil sector projects to just aid the general life of the community and also to show that with the retaking of Musa Qaleh there was a sea-change in governance for the people and the benefits that they would derive from that

HB: We have seen over the last few days the installation of a generator.  What impact or rather what improvement will that bring to the people of MSQ?

PA: That’s going to have a huge impact on the local people.  That generator is only going to cover the DC unfortunately as to power the whole of Musa Qaleh you would need to a much more significant infrastructure and we just not in the position to install that level of infrastructure at this stage – but certainly for the DC which is where the main area of commerce is – it will enable the shops to have power and the local community that lives here to have the benefit of electric light and all that comes with power.  One remark that has been made is END

HB: Same question asked again due to background noise: So Phillip we have seen over the last few days, the installation of the generator, what impact or rather what improvement will that make to the livelihood of the local nationals?

PA: It will be a significant impact for those residents and business in the district centre of Musa Qaleh and it will enable them to have power – although not 24 hrs a day - but certainly for 3 to 4 hours a day and that will be an enormous change to the lifestyle that they enjoy and the way in which they are able to conduct business and so is a profound improvement on what they have had until now.

HB: So the change in environment or rather the circumstances here since December for the people of Musa Qaleh must be fairly significant in terms of governance and the move towards a democratic governance here.  Could you describe the changes for the people here since December?

PA:  Certainly, there has been a huge change allowing access to a governance which has the capacity to act on their behalf and for them so you now have a governor who has been appointed by President Hamid Karzai in Kabul along with an Executive Shura, and that Executive Shura consists of ten senior local elders from the MSQ district as part of the traditional Afghan way of doing things.  Those senior elders have a significant representative impact upon their local communities and through the exercise of the Executive Shura, the Government is now able to listen to the problems of their local community – ask them what sort of projects they would like to see, what sort of issues they have or would like to see resolved and also to assist them in identifying who is best placed to provide these services and there is a number of key governmental institutions that can provide that. So the way it is has been working is that you will see a constant stream of elders who will sit down with the executive shura and through the process of drinking a lot of tea and a lot of chatting and talking they will work out what are the key issues or projects if you are talking about reconstruction and development that each village is most interested in.  And of course top of the list or rather the typical ones are electricity, water, education, mosque projects and such like.  Now the organisations that that this governance is able to key into are ministries such as MRRD which is the Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development and that is a ministry which is specifically charged with the responsibility for drilling wells, doing road projects, introducing schools to local villages and such like – so very much at a local government level they are facilitating the infrastructure for these communities.  You have also got the IDLG which is the Independent Directorate for Local Government and what that ministry does is to essentially mentor and facilitate good governance and that is once again supported by Kabul and this is yet another resource that this governance can tap into and of course you have the ministry of education and the ministry of the interior which assist with things like the ANP and to perhaps a lesser extent the ANA, but certainly the ANP supplying them with vehicles, munitions, weapons, uniforms, training etc.

HB: Today when we were in the bizarre we noticed how a lot of local nationals are employed in the projects thereby helping you help them, how many local nationals are being employed, broadly speaking in the projects to date?

PA: One of the most successful projects that we have run is the cash for work programme and this programme has taken some 350 members of the local community and employed them doing the sort of jobs that you would expect a local or municipal or civil works department to have undertake such as canal clearance, drainage clearance, rubbish collection and street sweeping and all those sorts of similar activities.  One of the projects that we have been tasked with is replanting all of the trees on the main north south road that runs through the centre of MSQ and also through the bazaar as well as replanting all the gardens that used to exist once upon a time in the bazaar so hopefully that is something that will in time result in a real change in the aesthetics of MSQ for the local residents.  It has had a particularly useful in terms of the military operations in that AYPO which is the Afghan Youth and Peace Organisation who are the organisation that are now organising the cash for works where wherever we can we are handing it over to an Afghan based organisation and AYPO is that Afghan Organisation in this case.  Once the local Afghans got on board they immediately recognised ways of making it better and bringing the security element into the cash for works programme and so not only was it providing jobs for young fighting age males and thus providing them with an alternative and it was also providing security cordon around the dc and what they have done is to establish teams of 10 to 15 workers in numerous villages around the MSQ district and in so doing essentially and so to use a modern term, made those workers stake holders in the new government because it is known that the cash for works programmes is supported by the government and therefore by working for the cash for works programme they are working for the government and they have a real incentive therefore to keep the Taliban out their villages.  The Taliban don’t like the cash for works programme because of the association with the Government indeed ISAF and so you have had a reverse effect by bringing those people into the process they then keep the Taliban out of their village and so on a very simple level so they work hard to make sure there are no IEDS laid in their village and that there are no Taliban activities taking place from their village and that is obviously pretty important for us from the security perspective.

HB:  And lastly we visited the school yesterday and that is a fairly significant step forward from Taliban times in MSQ.  I wonder of you could day a few words about the school and what you have done in that process.

Yes the school has really been wonderfully successful project that the whole of the British military effort can really take a can really take a great deal of pride and association in.  In the whole time that the Taliban were running the town they never managed to open the school, they did actually make an attempt to open the school but this was totally unsupported by the locals and by contrast the school was opened within two months of the town being retaken and now having been completely renovated and restored and where we started off with 150 students within a week it is now up to 850 and so therefore a huge increase in the number of students and families therefore that are supporting that school in the space of about six weeks.