12:01pm Monday 1st February 2010
By Mike Pryce
BATHROOMS in Kabul haven’t necessarily been designed as bomb shelters but Paul Turner was glad of some solid Afghan brickwork when a blast ripped through the street where he lived in the summer of 2008.
Two hundred yards away across the central Shahr-e-Naul district of the city the Indian embassy lay in ruins. Fifty eight people were dead in the smoking rubble and nearly 150 injured. It was half-past eight on a July morning and Paul had just risen from his hotel bed and gone to the bathroom.
He said: “The whole building shook and you knew immediately what it was. When I went back into the bedroom I found the windows had been shattered and shards of glass blown across the room cutting the bedsheets to pieces. If I had still been there I could have been killed or at best badly injured.
It was only sheer luck I wasn’t.”
The suicide car bomber had drawn up at the embassy gates just as staff were arriving for work. It was the deadliest attack since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and underlined to all concerned what a dangerous place Afghanistan was.
But Paul Turner, ex-Worcester King’s School and Powick Primary, knows that all too well. Since his first trip in 2005 he has visited the country 10 times, not as a soldier but as a civil servant, and seen it become progressively more menacing.
He said: “The first time I went there I remember walking around the carpet shops in downtown Kabul with a colleague. You wouldn’t do that now.”
For the past five years Paul has been one of the leading UK government officials tasked with reconstructing Afghanistan. He works for the UK’s department for international development and is seconded as a “national expert” to the European Commission in Brussels. His brief includes supporting Afghan police and judicial reforms, financing rural development to help find alternatives to the opium economy and extending the reach of primary health care.
His father was a planner with the joint Hereford and Worcester County Council and the family lived at Powick, near Worcester, at the top of the village near Hospital Lane.
Paul went to the local CE school, then on to Hillside preparatory school, Malvern, and the King’s School, Worcester, from 1977-82, where he won the history prize and played for the rugger and cricket teams.
University courses at Reading, Oxford Brookes and finally Oxford followed before he chose a teaching career, working in the US and Canada.
He returned to the UK in 1988 and spent two years at a co-ed in Oxfordshire.
Then it was a career change to the civil service and the Home Office, initially working on civil emergency planning and then, in December 1997, Paul was appointed private secretary to minister Clare Short in the newlycreated Department for International Development.
He described his time there as colourful and eventful. He said: “I was working for someone who spoke from the heart. She was the right sort of person to get things going.”
Then, in April 2000 he moved to Kosovo as the head of the UK Government Development Office based in Pristina and had intimate experience of the intellectual challenge that involved up to 50 international development agencies trying to work together.
From 2002 to 2004 Paul was the head of the European Commission’s reconstruction programming in Macedonia and then it was to Afghanistan, where security is at your elbow most hours of the day.
He said: “You live with it.”
His work there covers three basic areas. Firstly there is the spread of primary health care, a somewhat unheralded triumph seeing as it now covers almost 80 per cent of the country. Secondly, there is the much more high profile aim of trying to wean Afghan farmers away from the opium crop. A topic that held a few surprises.
Paul said: “It’s not always about efforts to get them to grow something else but improving the infrastructure so they can get it to market.
“So we are investing in new roads and communications. Onions, in particular among the roots crops, are more profitable for growers than opium, if they can get them to market.”
Paul’s third area of concern is “police and justice” with the EC being the largest doner to the police sector in Afghanistan. It makes a major contribution to the salaries and training of the local police and is soon to draw up a major programme of reforms in the judiciary and legal services.
But the 64,000 dollar question is will it work? Ever?
The response was remarkedly candid for a civil servant.
Paul said: “The Afghan people we work with tend to be English speaking and western educated, so we don’t get a very realistic picture of Afghan society as a whole. We are, of course, aware there is a whole tribal mosaic of people who may not be so enthusiastic.
“They want the security the international force brings and the vast majority don’t want the Taliban back, but neither are they particularly keen on a westernstyle democracy.”
However, in a country where cricket has been played for 150 years, there must always be hope.
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