The Halo Trust Interview: The West Is Making A Mistake By Ignoring Afghanistan
The Halo Trust chief executive James Cowan and crossbench peer Lord Evans of Weardale, the chair of The Halo Trust and former head of MI5 (Credit: Dinendra Haria)
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is putting pressure on the international treaty against landmine use. The Halo Trust tells Sophie Church the West must hold firm
When Prince Harry recently recreated his mother’s famous walk through an Angolan minefield, the world’s media barely noticed.
The uncomfortable truth is that the issue of mines – and the deep and lasting damage they do to local communities – is no longer top of the international agenda. Indeed, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is growing pressure on the international treaty banning their use, awareness of which the late Princess Diana did so much to promote in 1997.
Amid cuts to international aid budgets, there are worries that demining operations may be scaled back in conflict zones around the world. Now, demining organisation The Halo Trust is fighting back, insisting that the West must not abandon countries scarred by mines – even those like Afghanistan whose governments are less than ideal partners.
Ukraine are not embracing technology as rapidly as I would like when it comes to humanitarian clearance
To hear the case, The House meets The Halo Trust’s chief executive James Cowan – who commanded Task Force Helmand in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, then became head of counter terrorism in the Ministry of Defence – in Parliament, together with crossbench peer Lord Evans of Weardale, the chair of The Halo Trust and former head of MI5.
“The West has turned its back on the Taliban for perhaps understandable reasons to do with their behaviour towards women and girls,” Cowan says. “But the people who are actually being punished are not the Taliban – they’re the ordinary people of Afghanistan.”
“The West is arguably making a mistake by ignoring Afghanistan,” he emphasises. “It is a place, after all, from which 9/11 arose. You ignore that country at your peril, even if you don’t care about its humanitarian impact. We are very much committed to it.”
The country has transformed since Cowan’s time there – and, he claims, not necessarily for the worse.
“I went back to Helmand three weeks ago, and it was both dislocating and actually quite heart-warming to see the change,” he says.
“It is really very peaceful. Now one can travel anywhere. I went to all the places that previously I would have had to fought to get to – Sangin, Kajaki, etc – but now you can drive there. I sat by the Helmand River and had a picnic.”
The Halo Trust clears minefields in Afghanistan (Credit: ton koene)
Unexploded weapons kill roughly 60 Afghans, mostly children, every month – with improvised explosive devices laid by the Taliban and munitions left by Nato states both responsible. Worldwide, 60 million people in nearly 70 countries are directly affected by landmines.
And yet with Russia’s continued aggression in Europe, several countries – Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – have now said they will pull out of the Ottawa Treaty banning such weapons.
In June, the UK government signalled it remained wedded to the ban on landmines. Does The Halo Trust fear it will change its mind?
“This government is very rock solid behind the treaty,” says Cowan. “Given that Britain has such a strength in this area – it is a uniquely British strength – it would be very perverse if Britain did.”
He adds: “There are people who want to pressure the government to change its position, but I think we have very solid arguments, and we can make those arguments very clearly to any government.”
When at last peace comes to Ukraine there will be a massive demining operation to be done – but Cowan says Kyiv is failing to prepare for that day.
“There are still elements of Ukrainian bureaucracy that I would indeed like to see changed,” he says. “They’re not embracing technology as rapidly as I would like when it comes to humanitarian clearance.
“It’s a huge country. The traditional hands and knees approach to land mine clearance is too slow given the open field systems [large, flat agricultural fields split by narrow woods]. It really lends itself to mechanisation, and they should be embracing that much more rapidly than they are.”
Ukraine estimates that 150,000 square kilometres of its land is contaminated with mines – an area roughly the size of Florida. But by using satellite and drone imagery, Ukraine can more precisely pinpoint contaminated areas to clear, says Cowan.
“When you find that hazardous area with satellite data, and then you apply machine learning to it, you can actually reduce that area down massively and find that it’s probably a 10th of that area, so you probably save $20-30bn.”
Karolina Prysiazhniuk, originally from western Ukraine, works for The Halo Trust as a deminer in the country’s Kharkiv Oblast, occupied by Russia in 2022. She tells The House that Ukrainian people face near-daily threats to their life from unexploded ordnance.
The West is arguably making a mistake by ignoring Afghanistan
“Even if you’re not following the news for this particular thing, you can see articles about accidents very frequently,” Prysiazhniuk says.
However, laws prohibiting the use of drones in certain areas make clearing these devices more difficult for The Halo Trust.
“Drones can be used for different reasons, like we can use them for research, but other people can use them to gather information for Russians,” she continues. “I know bureaucracy can be challenging, and slow. Government is trying, but not at full speed.”
Unexploded mines remaining in Ukraine will also prevent Donald Trump from realising the benefits of his minerals deal, in which the US will receive revenues from minerals mined in the country.
“You can’t mine unless you can first demine, and whatever is in the ground – whether it be on the surface with agriculture or under the surface with minerals – needs to be done safely,” Cowan says. “So, of course, those land mines need to go as a precursory activity.”
Working amidst an ongoing conflict presents The Halo Trust with particular difficulties on the ground. But with the UK government cutting overseas aid to fund increased defence spending, Cowan says the UK’s reputation as a leader in demining is “likely to be harmed” abroad.
“To cut one to fund the other is absolutely robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he says. “Defence spending and overseas aid spending are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have a coherent foreign policy unless you’re doing both in a responsible way.”
While the overseas aid budget has been reduced from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 0.3 per cent, the government has insisted the UK will continue its humanitarian efforts in conflict-struck areas such as Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan.
“We very much hope that the government will decide to maintain the Global Mine Action Programme amidst the understandable reduction in overall overseas development aid,” says Lord Evans, referencing the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office-funded project implemented by The Halo Trust.
“We hope very much that that will continue to be funded because it’s a way of helping to prevent the conditions for conflict, which will then otherwise lead to problems that need to be sorted out at considerably more expense.”
Poor investment into conflict resolution abroad will only fuel instability in the UK, warns the former MI5 boss.
“We need to continue to invest in stopping conflicts and stopping the conditions for overseas conflicts. If there are a lot of those conflicts which are destabilising, that does drive political extremism, migration and economic dislocation – and all those things impact on us.”
With over 750m illicit weapons in circulation globally according to the UN, The Halo Trust is working with governments to locate and destroy weapons and ammunitions left over from war.
“Breaking that cycle of conflict is really important, both for the people locally and their humanitarian needs, but also for wider stability, which feeds into our own security here,” Evans says.
Reminding western powers of the importance of the Halo Trust’s humanitarian efforts, while they reel from wars just fought or those still ongoing, presents the non-government organisation with an unprecedented challenge.
“It’s the perfect storm, really, of the rising use of land mines in war, notably in Ukraine, but also pressure now on the Ottawa landmine ban convention with various states beginning to question their membership of it. The coming together of those two things is perhaps a unique challenge for our movement,” says Cowan.
“There’s a huge job to be done.”
