UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 57-vi

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

LESSONS OF IRAQ

Wednesday 21 January 2004

MR E CHAPLIN CMG, OBE, MS C MILLER,

AIR VICE MARSHAL C LOADER OBE and MR I LEE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1996 - 2088

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Wednesday 21 January 2004

Members present

Mr Bruce George, in the Chair

Mr Crispin Blunt

Mike Gapes

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Rachel Squire

Mr Peter Viggers

________________

Witnesses: Mr Edward Chaplin CMG, OBE, Director Middle East and North Africa, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ms Carolyn Miller, Director, Europe, Middle East and Americas Division, Department for International Development, Air Vice Marshal Clive Loader OBE, Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Operations), and Mr Ian Lee, Director General Operations Policy, Ministry of Defence, further examined.

Q1996 Chairman: Welcome. I must apologise for dragging you back. When we reach the end of a session we often find we have failed to meet our target, but we have never fallen so far short of our objectives as we did when you came to give evidence to us last time and this is basically an opportunity for us to put the remaining questions to you. Thank you for coming. Congratulations, Mr Chaplan, on your meritorious elevation. The aim of part two is to ascertain how the different arms of Government interacted in their planning for the post-conflict situation in Iraq; how successfully these plans were implemented; and are there any lessons to be learned. Looking at the document published by the Ministry of Defence, it had one particularly spectacular sentence that I want to draw to your attention, which is, "It was only after the fall of the regime that the extent of Ba'ath party domination of nearly all aspects of the Iraq state and society became clear. The impact of the second collapse of the regime was enormous, with the removal not only of top officials but the whole of senior and most of middle management." What aspects of Ba'ath party domination of Iraqi state and society did you fail to understand before the conflict? If you are saying the system did not fully understand how a deck of cards was going to collapse so swiftly then what the hell was intelligence doing, what were all of those experts across the machinery of Government trying to convey? I can understand why it is not possible to find weapons of mass destruction hidden in the sand in Iraq, but it really does seem to me bizarre that, with the weight of British academia, American academia and the British Civil Service, the military did not seem to be aware of the fact that a near totalitarian state dominated institutions so enormously and we were surprised at what happened when that regime had been defeated. Who is kicking off? Mr Chaplan, you can start off.

Mr Chaplin: Thank you, Mr Chairman. I think we did cover part of this at our last session. It really comes down to this question of the "departification" process that had to be handled after the regime had disappeared. Of course we knew the extent of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's regime and about the Ba'ath party apparatus he used, but also the other manipulation that he practised, all the aspects of the society, how wide and deep that went. I think what perhaps we and others had under-estimated was the extent to which there would still be problems after that regime had gone because as I was describing last time, a judgment had to be made about how far you went with departification and the tension there was between obviously not preserving in positions of status or power people who had been very closely associated with the Saddam Hussein regime but at the same time finding people who were capable, at a local level at least, and that is where we were helping with the restarting of the administration. Perhaps what we under-estimated was the extent to which popular resentment of the Saddam Hussein regime was so powerful. Certainly in the initial weeks and months anyone with even a relatively light association with the regime was seen as a clone of the regime and therefore was unacceptable and that did cause some problems. The other thing is the extent to which those long years of tyranny had robbed ordinary Iraqi people of any sense of their ability to make decisions about their own future and it was some time before people were willing to come forward because, if you had a political culture in which the only way to stay safe was to be silent and say nothing, it is obviously quite an adjustment to make when you are being encouraged by outside forces that are coming in saying, "It's alright, the regime has gone and now we want you to take responsibility for your own affairs." It is quite an adjustment to ask people to make at all levels, including the political level. I think I referred to the Nasiriyah conference on 15 April last year, the first political conference so to speak and the automatic reaction of Iraqis was to say, "Tell us what we should do," to which our response was, "No. We want you to decide what the first steps are for the future of Iraq," and I think it is that aspect we perhaps under-estimated. We were in touch with all sorts of sources of expertise on Iraq, including the academic community. Perhaps some of them had better estimates of what we would find when we got there. I do not know that anyone got it right. Perhaps some guessed better than others. I do not know whether my colleagues want to add anything.

Q1997 Chairman: Defend your employer, Mr Lee! Let me repeat, "It was only after the fall of the regime that the extent of Ba'ath party domination of nearly all aspects of the Iraq state and society became clear".

Mr Lee: I would agree with what Edward has just said. We had made assessments of the nature of the domination as it were from the top down, that Saddam Hussein and his inner circle had control over the security apparatus of the state and, beyond that, had exercised a good deal of control over any public appointments. Anyone in any position of authority obviously had to have some sort of allegiance to the regime. So there was a picture of the situation in that respect. What I do not think was clear before the event and I am not sure whether it could have been clear to anyone, was the extent to which the people on the receiving end of this state apparatus were oppressed by it and there was a difficulty in predicting their behaviour after the state apparatus was removed. We probably assumed that a good number of people within the apparatus, let us say at middle ranking level, were in the positions not really because they wanted to be but because they felt they had to be and that when the top layers were removed then they would still be there and the people beneath that, the police force for example, the actual policemen on the ground, would be able to play a part by assisting the coalition forces. In fact what seemed to happen, as Edward has described, is that no one remained in any position of authority at all and the entire apparatus more or less disintegrated straightaway. The conscript soldiers had melted away back to their homes, as I said in the last session and the police also disappeared off the street, so there was pretty much a vacuum and I think we had not expected it to be quite as fundamental as it was in that sense.

Q1998 Chairman: Thank you. Ms Miller, did DFID see things more clearly?

Ms Miller: We were very aware of the extent of the domination. We were also very aware from some research and analysis that we had commissioned - and we did fund some agencies on the ground prior to the war - that these systems that they had were very efficient and they were very highly skilled officials running a number of these and we felt that at least at this middle level those people would be available to carry on and that we would actually be able to support relatively early on the Iraqi take back of a number of their services. We were also more surprised than, obviously in hindsight, we should have been at the extent of the collapse. Perhaps in some of the areas that we have been dealing with like health and education it has actually been easier to get those back up and running and they have moved faster. Those were the areas that we were concentrating on. We were equally wrong in not anticipating the problem.

Q1999 Chairman: Was there a difference between Basra's problems and the rest of the country in terms of the total penetration of the regime through every aspect of society?

Mr Chaplin: I think the main difference in the southern part of the country, largely Shia, was the scale of resentment against the former regime and the extent to which the factors we have described apply. There were other problems in other parts of the country.

Q2000 Chairman: It was still strong, was it? There was a very strong domination by the Ba'ath party even in areas where the regime was despised, hated, feared, was there not?

Mr Chaplin: In those areas it was very difficult to find anybody who was not in some way associated with the former regime.

Q2001 Chairman: Thank you. When we went to Basra we heard that there were a number of expert functions being undertaken, such as running the Central Bank, that were actually being carried out by our reservists and apparently they did it pretty well. Did we anticipate that, in the absence of NGOs or structures to replace the collapsed structures, a lot of the work would in fact be done by the military, especially the reservists?

Mr Lee: The short answer is yes we did expect and anticipate that various functions would have to be undertaken by the military, in the short term. There was obviously an engineer capacity within the force that was sent and they did do work to remediate the infrastructure, water treatment plants and so on, even giving advice on the railway and other things of that nature as soon as they got there. In a sense we are back to the same issue as to the scale and duration of that period where the military had to carry the load. We had capacity to do that but we did not have capacity to do it on a very large scale. We did not have capacity to do it for a very long period of time because our assumption had been that once security had been restored after the end of actual fighting then it would have been possible to hand over a lot of those tasks to NGOs and to the UN agencies. In practice, of course, the security situation remained difficult for longer, not just in the east where we were but actually in and around Bagdad, but because of the general perception of the difficult security situation I think NGOs, UN agencies and so on were unwilling to go back to the country and did not necessarily make a distinction between the situation specifically in the south-east and the situation more widely, which resulted in there being a longer period where we had to try and undertake these tasks ourselves. A lot was done on that, as I am sure you will have been told when you visited Basra.

Q2002 Chairman: There is so much expertise in our Armed Forces. We were overwhelmed at some of the incredible work that was being done. One guy working for British Aerospace, who could not have been more than 26 or 27, appeared to be rebuilding Basra almost on his own with the sergeant. The work that was being done was formidable and the people are very talented. We have heard fairly recently - and Ms Miller will be incandescent when she hears the question - that the NGOs, like some others in the Department, were totally opposed to the war and one of the reasons they stayed out was not necessarily because of the security situation but almost to punish the British and the Americans for having conducted the war anyway. Do you think there is any element of truth in that?

Ms Miller: We talked to the NGOs a long time before the war actually happened and the majority of good UK NGOs were preparing a long time in advance, we funded them to do such work and they got there as soon as possible, so I do not feel that was the situation. It was the security issue that was really the problem.

Q2003 Mr Havard: We had a military officer saying, "Look, it's safe, you can come in" and the military officer's definition of what was safe was clearly different to the people who were invited to come in. The military officer's opinion was that some of them were deliberately not choosing the option that was safe, although their perception was clearly different. What is the process for deciding when it is and is not safe and when it is these people will arrive, because effectively what we have heard is a story where he managed to find some New Zealander with a lot of tankers and water and he did his own deal and effectively captured these things in order to get the process right. So they went extra process, extra "the official" process and extra the process of this NGO because these two men on the ground decided they were going to do it. What is the process for deciding when it is and is not safe and how does that work?

Mr Lee: I am not sure who the expert is on this.

Q2004 Mr Havard: This is absolutely crucial because we have heard this from the Americans as well. There is a perishable two to four week period after the war fighting finishes to get in the security to the people both in their hearts and minds and all the rest of it and security for the future. What are the rules?

Mr Lee: I will make a start. As I understand it the military would make their assessment of when they believe the situation is basically secure, but UNSECUR, which is part of the UN, is responsible for assessing whether a given area is secure or not. They will make a more or less formal declaration on that subject and once they have then that is the green light for UN agencies to move into an area. Carolyn will correct me if I am wrong, but many of the NGOs would take their lead from that as well.

Ms Miller: Some of the NGOs have their own security people, the larger NGOs; others would go very much on what the UN has said. We may be funding an NGO, but we leave it up to them. So it is their assessment of their own security. We would not make any imposition on them. The NGOs would vary as to how they did it, but generally most of them came back relatively quickly once it was declared secure.

Q2005 Chairman: The UN, for understandable reasons, got out pretty quickly after they had the disaster happen to them. Did they have people on the ground at the time to be able to assess how safe it was or were they doing it by proxy?

Mr Lee: Yes, they were people from outside who were in Umm Qasr, for example, really quite early on, within weeks of the obvious end of the conflict in order to assess whether the situation there was satisfactory from their point of view.

Chairman: You say they were there in weeks, but it is that period we are really concerned about, from the surrender and the statues falling down. That is the crucial period when we needed civilians, NGOs, the military working there very hard. If it is true, and you may be correct that they were there within weeks, then that was weeks too late. If it is possible to let us know, Mr Lee, that would be helpful.

Mike Gapes: I asked a series of questions at the last session in December of Ms Miller, such as were there any political reasons within the UN system why more was not done to re-build the infrastructure and you said no. I would like to ask your colleagues whether their assessment is that there were political reasons within the UN system making it difficult for UN people on the ground, given the lack of political clearance from the Security Council which was split, the General Assembly which probably was opposed and the argument that this was illegal. Was that a factor in the criminal delay in getting people in to do the infrastructure where the military assessment was that the situation was safe?

Q2006 Chairman: We would not endorse "criminal" delay, rather delay.

Mr Chaplin: Others are more expert than me in exactly what was in the minds of those operating there at the time. They certainly were there in force quite quickly as far as I know.

Q2007 Mike Gapes: How quickly?

Mr Chaplin: If Carolyn cannot give you an instant answer, we can give you a note. I do not think any UN agency or NGO was taking any particular messages from the Security Council or General Assembly and, after all, the immediate needs they were concentrating on were humanitarian needs not re-construction needs. Re-construction was some way down the track. I do not think it is a question of them reacting to perceived sentiment in the Security Council and General Assembly on the question of the right or wrong of the war. They were concerned about the situation of the Iraqi people and reacted to that. The crucial factor about whether they could come in and help would have been an assessment about whether it was safe for them to do so.

Ms Miller: Just to clarify, there was never a constraint and there was never perceived to be a constraint for the UN in their humanitarian relief and reconstruction role, that is agreed under international conventions and certainly there was a lot of preparation by the UN agencies, part of which we funded. In many ways the UN was better prepared for this conflict than it was for many others that we have seen. During the war they still had their local staff on the ground and they were actually able to get back into action straightaway and stuff that we funded through them meant that projects could get up and running quickly. UNICEF and UNDP have local staff. The UN had their staff pre-positioned in the region ready to come in. So we saw no constraint whatsoever, other than the security situation which was worse than had been anticipated, for them to come back in. In terms of what we funded, the UN has played a very significant role in rebuilding.

Mike Gapes: Why did it take them so long to get people in? Why was there a delay of several weeks? If the security situation was assessed to be like you say, why did it take so long?

Q2008 Chairman: Especially in our area because things were fairly docile in our area.

Mr Lee: The security situation was not assessed to be safe immediately, it did take some time and it moves out in waves. Umm Qasr was declared as safe after a relatively short period of time and so material could be moved into that port, but it was longer - and again we will have to check the precise timing of this - before the wider area in the south-east was declared to be more secure. I am not really confident that even now some areas around Baghdad would be declared as safe. There are still obvious difficulties around. So even though some of these difficulties are localised and they are just sporadic attacks as it were, nevertheless the perception would be that it is still a somewhat dangerous place and there is not an entirely permissive atmosphere so far as NGOs or the UN deploying their international staff as opposed to the national Iraqi staff who live there anyway, that does pose a problem for them.

Q2009 Rachel Squire: We visited Iraq and Basra in July. Is it your assessment that at that time it was still not sufficiently safe in the British controlled area for NGOs to come in? Do you think that that absence of NGO and UN support has played any part in the subsequent security problems that we have experienced in that area where troops were left to cover the whole range of tasks and not able to concentrate as much on security in the very early stages of the post-conflict reconstruction?

Mr Lee: If we project ourselves back to July, I think it was relatively safe at that point. The security is a variable concept and it is not clearly ultimately the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence or the Armed Forces to declare on behalf of the NGOs whether an area is secure. We can give an assessment of the situation, but they have to take their own decision as to whether they believe a particular area is safe because they have responsibility for their own staff. One of the problems with the security situation which we still have to some extent is that it goes up and down, you could have a couple of good weeks and then have some serious incidents and therefore the perception would be that security has deteriorated again. Last August there was a strong feeling that security was getting worse. There had been something of a lull in the immediate aftermath of the conflict itself, but August was the month when the UN headquarters was bombed in Baghdad and there were other incidents still going on, an increasing number of incidents even in the south-east area. It has been quite difficult to declare that the situation is stable because there are still obvious problems with that. As for the question of did these sorts of problems inhibit the deployment of the NGOs and would the military have preferred more UN and NGO help, I think the answer is yes, obviously we would have and they have been stretched to perform tasks of various sorts which are not strictly speaking military tasks. The military will turn their hand to these sorts of tasks and particularly in some of the specialist areas of engineers and so on, they have got the skills that they could use for that, but they are not actually designed for taking control of and re-constructing a fairly large area of the country.

Q2010 Chairman: We are not trying to shift the blame for all the chaos onto NGOs, but these questions obviously need to be asked. Clearly the United States had a fairly large list of private companies ready and eager to go in pretty quickly. Did we have a list of civilians who could be deployed pretty swiftly? What kind of care was taken to draw up that list? Were these company contractors, experts, people who could go in and give assistance? Who compiled that list within the MoD or Foreign Office or DFID? Secondly, at what stage were they given instructions to go to Iraq and get to work?

Mr Chaplin: Just picking up on the previous question, I think the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August was the critical event for the UN view of security for obvious reasons. Before that the UN was certainly in the south in some strength. I remember visiting myself in July and most of the agencies were represented. I do not know whether they were there in sufficient numbers to take over as fast as some of the MoD would have liked, but they were certainly there in strength. After August it was clear they had to evacuate their international staff and that did have an impact. On the question of civilians, I think the US contractors you are talking about in the initial stages would have been brought in to set up the coalition provisional administration both in Bagdad and the provinces and that was clearly going to be a US lead, though I do not think there was any suggestion in the planning phase that UK companies would be involved in that. In terms of civilian expertise being brought in to perform particular tasks that are coming out of the lessons learned exercise, we ought to be able to do better on that. The third question of when is the right time for UK companies to come in and operate as normal commercial companies in a new market I think is still some way down the track, but there there was a lot of preplanning in UK trade and investment to brief companies about the opportunities that were coming up, including the question of their ability to bid for contracts funded by the US administration. So that was all taken care of by UKTR.

Ms Miller: Our conflict and humanitarian affairs department has lists of people who we can call on and at the time we had people with different expertise in different areas. We have that ready for all emergencies and a lot of those people are tried and tested and understand how to work in these situations.

Q2011 Chairman: How quickly were they activated?

Ms Miller: We did call on a lot of those people. The numbers involved were stretched and that is something we are looking at as part of our contribution to a stronger Whitehall capacity.

Q2012 Chairman: Was that list available to the other departments or did they have their own lists?

Ms Miller: We were working closely with the other departments all the time about what experts were needed.

Q2013 Chairman: Did you say to them "Look, lads, you've seen it on the TV that the war is over now. Get yourselves over to Heathrow and get over to Basra and get cracking," or were they asked later on at a more leisurely pace? We would be interested if you could tell us how quickly they were deployed.

Ms Miller: A lot of them were deployed very quickly. They are people that we know we can call on. I am not saying we had enough people. Sometimes throwing too many people in to the situation is not the right answer either.

Q2014 Mr Blunt: Can I raise an associated issue which is the problem and challenge of working as the junior partner in a coalition such as in Iraq. We have just been to the United States and all the evidence sessions we had with various officials from the State Department and the evidence the Committee has taken on its visit to Iraq and before that points to an admitted weakness in international planning for the post-conflict phase. In the middle of 2002, in informal discussions with you, Mr Chaplin, and also in exchanges with the Foreign Secretary across the floor of the House, in discussions with friends in the Armed Forces, I assume the Foreign Office and MoD were attempting to get the United States to focus on post-conflict Iraq. Can you take us through what efforts were being made and whether this was a real issue as long ago as July 2002? Perhaps what we would do differently now is to try and influence the administration more effectively.

Mr Chaplin: Again, this was an interdepartmental effort, but I will start off. You are right in identifying the middle of 2002 as about the time that we really started to focus on the sort of planning that we should have in place if a conflict was to take place, the situation we would be left with after and how it should be handled. Obviously as a junior partner we were anxious to discuss that with the Americans, who were perfectly open to discussion and we fed thoughts in in a number of ways, by drafting planning papers and sharing with the Americans and they were sharing papers with us, Towards the end of that year, I think it was November, a departmental team led by myself went out to Washington for quite intensive discussions with the Americans. I think we touched on some of this last time in that the State Department in particular had done a lot of planning, there was something called the Future of Iraq project in which they had used a lot of Iraqi exiles to help get quite detailed plans about what could be done in the aftermath of the liberation of Iraq in the different sectors and they shared that with us and we fed in thoughts. As I think I may have said last time, we fairly quickly realised (and certainly once the Americans had set up organisations for the aftermath such as ORHA under Jay M Garner) that the most effective way to feed our thoughts in was to have people seconded alongside the Americans and so we did that. So while that organisation was still in Washington, we had people working alongside, people like Major General Tim Cross and some people from the FCO who then moved with that organisation when it deployed forward to Kuwait and then moved again with them up to Baghdad and all the time we were adding secondees as the situation was seen to demand it. Having people in place was the best way of feeding our thoughts in rather better than sending papers into the US system which is not quite as joined up as our system. In our system you send a paper to the Cabinet Office and it will think it its duty to share it with every conceivable department who would have an interest, but it does not quite work that way in Washington, as you know, where different parts of the administration would have different views and getting a collective US view on what should happen was sometimes difficult.

Q2015 Mr Blunt: There is this admitted failure in terms of planning for the post-conflict phase. Is that a joint failure both of the misappreciation of the nature of Iraq and what would happen on behalf of the British and the Americans or are you seeing it as a frustration that we were not able to influence the US administration in the internal debate in the US over whether there should be a State Department lead with the Future of Iraq paper where it ended up with a Pentagon lead and a decision made in February 2003, or are we left with a sense that we would not have influenced things even had we been able to?

Mr Chaplin: I think it is difficult to calculate where we had problems and where we did not. There was a very intensive dialogue going on at different levels, both on the military and civilian side and I think the questions that we posed certainly stimulated debate and got people focusing on areas that perhaps they had not paid sufficient attention to. Whether we can take credit for the answer that they came up with is difficult to estimate. In the end the decision on what arrangements should be put in place was an American one, this was a US plan informed by our participation, but we were very much the junior partner and that is one of the reasons why we found that the most effective way was that they set up ORHA. I do not think we had been consulted in great detail about what the structure of ORHA should be. It was an organisation that focused largely on the suspected humanitarian problems in the aftermath of the military conflict. I do not think we were consulted very closely about what that organisation should look like, but what we did find effective was to respond to American requests to join in the process and once we had people there that was a good way of influencing US decisions day-to-day.

Mr Lee: I think perhaps I could just add that at the time we are talking about we could not really even use the phrase post-conflict planning because there was still a hope that there would not be a conflict. So we were trying to predict and assess what might happen. There was a determination that the situation in Iraq would change and there would be a day after of some sort, but whether that day would follow a conflict or whether it would follow some other resolution of the issue through the weapons inspection route or diplomacy was not known. It was also not known whether the conflict, if there was to be a conflict, would be undertaken with a full UN backing in a second resolution or not - not as it turned out. There were an awful lot of issues which were uncertain about the lead up to this situation and clearly that was compounded by the difficulty of assessing what the situation would be on this hypothetical day after. I would say that our approach to this, considering the issue as early as we did, trying to put the problem to the US in as joined up a fashion as we could by going to Washington ourselves, did raise the profile of the issue on the US side, it did stimulate them to have inter-agency discussions, if only to meet the team that was coming from London! I think that in itself was probably positive, not the entire solution of course because their system is more disparate, as Edward has described. We did have separate discussions with the military staff, the joint staff in the Pentagon for example and we had officers embedded within the planning headquarters at Tampa and all of these same points were being made. To be fair to the US, they themselves were thinking about the nature of a post conflict or a day after planning task, but at that stage clearly an awful lot of energy was going into the preparations for a potential conflict and it was quite difficult for anyone to leap over that and have plans of equal specificity for an unknown period afterwards. So I think the sheer complication of not knowing what was ahead of us at that stage was a problem and will always be a problem in any similar situation in the future.

Chairman: That is the first question dealt with. If we take as long with the other 12 I am afraid we are not going to let you out at all!

Q2016 Mr Viggers: DFID has told us that the international and humanitarian agencies were better prepared for this emergency than they had been for any other in the recent past, and Ms Miller has confirmed that this morning. There are two aspects to this. One is that the preparations focused on the humanitarian crisis, which did not happen. Did it not happen because of the preparations or would it not have happened anyway?

Ms Miller: Some of the preparations for the humanitarian crises, getting food pre-positioned and all those things will have made a difference, but clearly there was not the scale of humanitarian disaster that we had planned for in some scenarios. It was, however, quite right to have planned for all of those because that might have been the outcome and we would have been criticised if we had not done so. Some of the preparations will have helped and others were there for an "in case" scenario, particularly plans for large scale displacement which did not actually happen at the time, but UNHCR had put a lot of effort into planning for that and those were not necessary. I would see that as good planning.

Q2017 Mr Viggers: So that is the planning eventuality which did not really materialise, but now, nine months after the conflict began, the British military are still the principal actor in southern Iraq in terms of governance, security, humanitarian assistance and reconstruction. Can you please write to us with UNSECUR's assessment of the security situation in Iraq, if necessary broken down into different geographical areas? Can you also let us have in writing the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's assessment of security in different areas at different times, because that clearly is one aspect? Has the categorisation been the main cause for the non-governmental agencies apparently dragging their feet?

Ms Miller: Our assessment is that the NGOs have provided a lot of valuable assistance. Our funding to UN agencies, ICRC and the NGOs has been quite significant and a lot of good work has been done on the ground, but they have all been hampered by the security situation rather than feeling hampered by the assessment which they disputed. People have been quite concerned about security at different stages as different things have happened, but a number have carried on and are able to do things through having people on the ground in some difficult situations.

Q2018 Mr Viggers: I am not claiming for a moment that this is as a result of a scientific survey, but the information we have had from soldiers who have recently been in Iraq is that they do not really see much of the NGO activity in Iraq, they feel that this is outside Iraq and it has not got up to the front line. Is that DFID's assessment?

Ms Miller: We publish a regular weekly update which is available on our website which lists all the NGO projects that are funded and there are a huge number of them from a lot of the UK well known agencies and they are all ongoing. Some of them have had to pull their international staff in and out on occasions, but most of those have been doing good work and have made a difference. It is a large country and those NGOs are working throughout the country, but there has been a lot of effort by the NGOs.

Q2019 Mr Viggers: Is it your assessment that NGOs do not wish to be seen to assist the coalition? Are they concerned?

Ms Miller: There was a concern prior to the conflict from the NGOs about how they would work with the coalition, but this was not actually borne out by their response at the end of the day when they did come in as quickly as they could and started to work.

Q2020 Mr Viggers: Are they reluctant to be seen to be operating with the military?

Ms Miller: That is not something that I am aware of.

Q2021 Mr Havard: Following that up, you said that some of the NGOs supply their own security, would they be prepared to accept military security? We now know this is a three block war idea, fighting is still going on in one area whilst reconstruction is taking place at the same time. That is going to be the reality in future conflicts, if we are learning lessons from what we have just seen, apart from criticising what has been done or not been done we have learned lessons but are the NGOs going to have to learn lessons? Does the military learn lessons? The Germans are talking about having a reconstruction force, the Americans may be thinking about these things, I will be blunt with you, if others are not going to provide the military are we going to be dumped with the job? If so the military ought to be given the resources to do this job. Are the NGOs so reluctant they will not take military assistant, what does that discussion look like?

Ms Miller: Can I just clarify, it is their own security assessment that I was referring to rather than their own security.

Q2022 Mr Havard: Are they seen to be part of it or are they tainted by the fact they are working with the military in terms of the perception of them, is that the tension? Where are the points of difficulty here?

Ms Miller: There has been discussions in the NGO community to the extent to which they are allied with what they might see as an occupation or the wrong kind of military involvement, this was a major concern of theirs before the conflict started. It was raised in overall discussions with the FID and elsewhere. Normally if the situation is secure enough for them to work they are quite happy to work there. Some of the concerns that we were slightly worried about did not materialise. There will always be some concerns from the NGOs in certain conflict situations if they feel they are too much associated with something they believe is wrong. In our assessment the majority of NGOs in this situation were there and able to work quite quickly, but, yes, it is an issue for them.

Q2023 Mr Havard: Can I ask what the military view might be of this?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: In the immediate aftermath of warfighting clearly the aim of the military is to help provide the sort of secure situation which would enable the NGOs to prosecute their activities. It is also obvious that if the security situation was so bad that the NGOs would require a significant amount of additional security given to them by the military we would then, I guess, take our own view on whether it was wise for them to be there. Why? First of all, can we guarantee their security? Equally important would we have the assets or would they have the assets to be able to prosecute the other task which would still be there, for example in Iraq rounding up and tracking down terrorists and other criminals who are carrying out activities against the infrastructure, that sort of thing. There has to be a blend here, if the NGOs were to come in and require an inordinate amount of security to do their job it may be detrimental to the overall effort. You need to get the ground situation correct before the NGOs can come in.

Q2024 Mike Gapes: The British military has a lot of experience from the Balkans, Afghanistan and else where in dealing with this kind of operation and the post-conflict phase, what lessons from peace-keeping, reconstruction and state building are applicable from the Balkans and elsewhere in this current situation in Iraq?

Mr Lee There is one example that I could quote which was a direct read-across from the experience in the Balkans and that was the effort that was made in the immediate aftermath of the warfighting to set up some sort of structure at a local level, local councils of some sort, they are known in the Balkans as Joint Commissions, where the military will find someone, some person of standing within the local community and try and set up an informal, ad hoc sort of council with that person or persons in order to set about the very basic initial task of providing some local administration. That was a concept which was applied in the Balkans and the forces on the ground in Iraq right from the outset had the intention, even before the conflict started, of trying to introduce that system as the very first stop gap, if you like, by way of a new public administration before any more permanent arrangements could be brought in. That sort of arrangement requires the military forces to engage with the local population to find who the suitable people are who are broadly acceptable to the locals and set up a system of that sort to keep civil society going as best one can. That sort of thing has been read across, if you like, from previous experience.

Q2025 Mike Gapes: What about the relationship with the local population in terms of creating a perception of dependence on yourselves and the need to prevent mafia-type criminal groups taking over in the absence of any state power, have you learned lessons from the Balkans on that?

Mr Lee: I am sure we have. It is obviously essential to try and engage with responsible people in local society and get them to understand that their own stability depends on trying to root out any destabilising elements whether they are terrorists or in this case former regime elements or just straightforward criminals. The effort throughout this is to try and pass over these responsibilities to the Iraqis themselves. The difficulty is that the structures that they had for carrying out those tasks disappears, as we said earlier. Nevertheless an effort must be made to pass the task as quickly as possible back to them for pursuing those objectives. We have tried to avoid getting into a situation where they do become dependent. We have made it clear throughout that our intention is to stay in Iraq as long as it is necessary for us to stay there but it is also our intention to leave as soon as we can, as soon as there is a reasonably stable system, a self-sustaining system for them to carry on with.

Q2026 Mike Gapes: Have you made any assessment of comparisons between the Iraqi situation and other areas that the military have been involved in of a similar kind?

Mr Lee: We make those sort of assessments on an informal basis all of the time because of people's experience, I am not aware we have made a formal comparison.

Q2027 Mike Gapes: Perhaps you can check and if you have anything you can send it to us.

Mr Lee: The situations are extremely different in almost all respects.

Q2028 Mike Gapes: I understand that. There may be some lessons, even going back as far as the Japanese occupation by the Americans, or Germany in terms of how you deal with the situation, things to avoid and things that do work.

Mr Lee: Yes.

Chairman: The best comparison with Iraq is Iraq. One only has to look at the occupation of Iraq and I think we see a number of situations occurring.

Q2029 Rachel Squire: In terms of lessons learned, and coming back to Air Marshall Loader, I am interested in the military perspective, two things: I have been lucky enough to attend seminars on the civilian/military interface in the past and what I have constantly heard from military, and I ask you whether you would agree with it, is that NGOs are not good at joined-up government, they are not good at working in partnership, they want to be entirely independent. Firstly, do you agree with that? Secondly, more recently, and in respect to Iraq, I have heard from the military the view that NGOs are risk adverse, they want the kind of safe environment, level of safety that you would expect back in your own home town. I would like to ask for your perspective on that?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: First of all with regard to the first question I certainly would not say that they are not good at the joined-up process. I would say, and admit, that we are learning. We did mention this last time, the generic campaign planning process and looking at the threats that seem to pervade to some extent or other most of the campaigns we have seen in recent years now - their security sector has reformed, their governance, their infrastructure, and so on - tend to be in each place we go. You will be aware that one of the things we look at is whether this ends up as a sort of checklist along all of those potential lines of operation so that when we are in the planning phase we can be more high fidelity, as it were, in identifying the likely things we will need to do and who will be responsible and what sort of provisions we have to make in advance. That is an abiding lesson which has come out of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. With regard to NGOs being risk adverse, all I would say is this, when you join the military you join the military and you expect certain levels of danger potentially in your career. I think most military people would not expect most people who work for NGOs necessarily to accept anything like willingly the same level of potential danger, I certainly would not and I suspect most of my colleagues would feel the same.

Mike Gapes: Thank you.

Q2030 Mr Hancock: Can I ask a very quick question, just going over the evidence that you gave before the suggestion I got was that part of the problem about the reconstruction was that you did not know enough about the deconstruction that had taken place before the war started. I am interested to know why you feel with all of the people who were there, bearing in mind you and inspectors were in there looking for weapons of mass destruction, no one came out with evidence to say, "by the way in Basra the whole of the water infrastructure is shot". Why was it that you knew so little and why was it that you have not got to that stage of dealing with the deconstruction before the destruction of the war?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: You did ask this before and as I recall my reply was, yes, we had a broader awareness of the nature, particularly in the south east of the country and the levels of beastliness that the regime inflicted on those people. I think there were two other ingredients which we touched on last time, they were that, firstly, a lot of criminals were let out by Saddam in the immediate weeks prior to the conflict and those criminals applied their trade very quickly and efficiently, and still continue to do so, in some areas, pulling down power cables, smelting the copper, and so on. The second aspect was - if it was a failure of planning then so be it - I do not think we realised, again particularly in the south east, the level to which after years of Ba'athist oppression they would get their own back, and they did. They ransacked schools, hospitals and took away things they never had in their houses, beds, chairs, and so on, or they just wrecked things. It was not just the state that it had been in for 20 years of so of neglect, state-sponsored neglect, as it were, they produced a cocktail of difficulties with which we found it very difficult to cope.

Q2031 Mr Hancock: We have several thousand Marsh Arabs seeking asylum in this country, were any of them spoken to?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: I do not know.

Chairman: I think we are going over a question that took 40 minutes and anticipates Mr Blunt's next question.

Q2032 Mr Blunt: Take an example of what we did or did not know about what we were going into in Iraq, a decision was taken to disband the Iraqi Army, as far as the public was concerned there was in a sense three security forces in Iraq, the Iraqi Army, the Republican Guard and the Specialist Republican Guard, it would almost seem that the Iraqis had pre-sorted it, especially those who were loyal to the regime, and the Iraqi Army was left rather less well armed than the remainder. We accepted that they disappeared in the conflict phase, to what extent do you think the problems being reported now in the Basra area appear to be rioting Iraqi army pensioners who are demanding that they now receive pensions to which they are entitled? To what extent are those issues linked with the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the problems the army is now facing in terms of civil disorder, either in forms of civil disorder from people demanding pensions or actual insurrection from people who have joined the army?

Mr Lee: I will make a start. The reports that we have are that they have a range of different grievances, no doubt a lack of pay and a lack of pension is part of it. Clearly with large scale demobilisation of that sort and very high levels of unemployment there are going to be difficulties of that sort which will inevitably take some time to overcome. It is our understanding that there are other reasons mixed up in these demonstrations of a more local nature to do with people protesting about various appointments that have been made. I do not want to point fingers at anyone in particular - and this should not be taken as too specific - but a given mayor or a given governor who is abusing his position in some way, appointing relatives to positions, those sort of issues which are bundled up together with a wider political situation and the controversy that exists about the nature of the interim election and the nature of the setting up of the process which would lead to setting up an interim government all of these things coming together are part of the fuel for those demonstrations.

Air Vice Marshal Loader: I do not think I have anything to add.

Mr Lee: I am not denying some of these demobilisation issues are bound up in that as well.

Q2033 Mr Blunt: That seems to point to a lack of understanding of the nature of Iraqi society, could we or should we have taken more steps to understand the Iraqi society that we were going into?

Mr Chaplin: I am sure we could have done better perhaps. As I said earlier, we were using all sorts of information we had, including from the academic community, it was the factors I talked about earlier that we underestimated. I think it is difficult several months ahead if you do not know how the conflict is going to turn out and how the civilian population is going to react in the way that it has been described and the looting, and so on, and see what you will be left with and the extent to which civil society breaks down and institutions that might have helped you put the civilian society back together are simply not there and you have to start at a lower level. In hindsight one should have been able to see and I do not think anyone was making better guesstimates at that than we were.

Q2034 Mr Blunt: Obviously the military bore much of the burden of reconstruction and administration in this period, what steps were taken before the conflict and what steps have been taken since the conflict to ensure that the troops on the ground shared what understanding we had of Iraqi society and how do you promulgate the lessons learned as they are learned?

Mr Lee: From the troops on the ground there is obviously an extensive system of reporting back up the chain of command from the people who are on the ground. As the reports come up the chain the key points are distilled out of that, the engagement, which I described a moment ago, with informal, local councils that were set up, all of that is reported back. There are different advisers with the troops and there are what are known as political advisers, mostly MoD civil servants, in various headquarters who engage in that sort of process. All of their reports are feed back up the chain. Once here, as it were, in Whitehall they are shared as part of the inter-agency process that we have of meetings which we described in the past and this specific permanent unit which now exists - which is lodged physically within the Foreign Office - collect together all of that sort of reporting. There is quite an extensive daily, weekly updating feedback of all of that.

Q2035 Mr Blunt: That is up, is there anything down?

Mr Lee: Guidance is passed down to the extent that it is possible to do so. Discussions in New York earlier this week about the nature of the process leading to setting up a transitional government, all of that kind of reporting, will find its way down as guidance to the extent that it is relevant to the people on the ground.

Q2036 Mr Blunt: Will political advisers meet together to share information?

Mr Lee: Yes, they will do that. The Coalition Provisional Authority has an office in the south in Basra headed up by a Foreign Office person and they liaise very closely with the divisional headquarters in Basra in order to share an appreciation of the situation from the military and from a political point of view.

Q2037 Chairman: You are struggling a bit, Mr Lee, it does not seem there is much formal advice and meetings?

Mr Chaplin: I think that is wrong, actually I think there is a great deal. To go back to the early months that you seem particularly interested in, there was the setting up of the coalition administration, the local branch of that in Basra, the idea was that the civilian task should be passed as rapidly as possible from our own forces to that civilian structure. It is probably fair to say there was frustration on the military side, they did the civilian task brilliantly but there was an expectation that they would be able to pass this task over to a civilian structure headed by a Foreign Office person more like quickly than happened to be case. We started off with a structure which turned out to be inadequate, the head of it had to be changed and it took time to build up the capacity and in the meantime the military was stuck with the civilian task. That was the situation. The situation now is very joined-up and the civilians on the CPA side work very closely with the military on the day-to-day task and they work very closely with the provisional council, which Ian was describing, that is one of the success stories, the way in which really quite quickly by July they set up a provisional representative. Although people were still in their individual capacity the provisional council which was receiving money from Iraqi ministers in Baghdad was giving an image of running their own local affairs.

Mr Blunt: I wonder if it is possible to have that brief included in our submission of evidence about what the sense of the political structure was in terms of political advisers for the military at the start of the occupation and what that structure has transmogrified into now and the nature of the relationship between the political advisers?

Chairman: When all of the changes take place that Mr Blunt was asking about how are they communicated to the guys and gals on the ground? If they have to rely on six day old copies of newspapers or what they see on television they may not have authoritative information.

Mr Blunt: While I can understand the structure now as opposed to when the military went in and what lessons have been learned I would hope that brief would then answer that question because I assume the role of the political advisers now is to ensure that local commanders have immediate access to information?

Q2038 Chairman: When you read the transcript you will be confused. What we would also like to know is not just how the situation was perceived by the CPA or our own people in Basra and communicated down the chain to people but could you also give us some examples of documentation or an indication of what is said to people coming in to the province or coming into the military in Iraq on what local customs are, the same way as if we go out to the Middle East they tell us not to make total fools of ourselves - they do not always succeed? It would be interesting to see copies of the documents the soldiers have when they arrive as to the do's and don'ts of the area, especially in an area which is still dominated by tribal traditions and tribal structures?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: I know they are given briefings because as we know the delivery of a stable and secure environment very much rests right down to the hands of the most junior soldier who is walking the streets of Am sari or Basra, wherever it is. One of the great things we have with our military is they are able to make this transition from quite robust warfighting to sometimes equally frightening peacekeeping in a different environment and they are able to obey the social laws and customs and not upset people, that is one of the great strengths of the British Armed Forces.

Chairman: They do it very, very well.

Q2039 Mr Havard: Given that we seem to know there was a plan for what I believe is now being called a catastrophic success there does not seem to be a plan for a catastrophic collapse, which is what actually happened, I would like to know what is happening in relation to unexploded ordinance, basically munitions in general? Whatever we did not know we knew that Iraq was one of the most heavily mined places on the earth so there ought to have been a plan to deal with this sort of situation. We have already seen circumstances where quite clearly there are munitions available to terrorists and criminals, that is why they are blowing people up. It is important from the point of view of security currently in that regard but it is also important from a humanitarian point of view. We also know whatever the political questions are about whether we should or should not have delivered things like cluster bombs there is ordinance on the ground and there is a danger to ordinary Iraqis who cannot go about their normal lives unless fields are cleared, and all of that, so for both of those reasons these things are very important. There has been criticism that there was not speedy enough action taken to deal with munitions dumps and caches of munitions that were potentially and probably actually known about at the end of the warfighting, I have a question that really falls into two parts, there was specific criticism of the British in this regard, particularly within the first six week period in and round Basra that they did not do enough to secure munitions - whether that is true or not we will hear comment about that in a moment - what I am really also concerned about is what could have been done and what could be done in order to protect ordinary Iraqi civilians from unexploded ordinance and to prevent this stuff falling quite clearly into the hands of people who have no interest other than continued destabilisation?

Mr Lee: That is a difficult question.

Q2040 Chairman: It is a long question.

Mr Lee: Shall I make a start on this, I think a lot of effort has been put in by the forces there to try to educate people about the dangers of unexploded ordinance. The responsibility for clearing up unexploded ordinance is passed across under the authority of the National Mine Authority in Iraq to NGOs who would be operating in our area. I have here the names of four NGOs who have been working on this, Mine Tech, Danish Church Aid, a Danish De-mining Group and Intersos. They are given the task, this is the normal practice of the military, as it were, to subcontract humanitarian de-mining to NGOs and others of that sort and deal with un-exploded ordinance where it is posing a direct threat to our own forces. That is the system that is set up in place. I have been passed a note that says "in our area 1,600 sites have been cleared and 619,000 munitions have been made safe to date". Our education campaign has been commended by the UN, that is a summary of how the subject is treated. I do not know if that helps you at all.

Q2041 Mr Havard: To a certain degree it does but there was criticism that this was not done speedily enough at the end of the initial conflict and it is not being done speedily enough now in some respects. There are questions about the efficacy of the process in order to deal with this issue, I would like some comments about that?

Mr Lee: I suspect it is always possible to say that this sort of activity is not done speedily enough, I am sure we would say the same thing ourselves. The ideal situation would be to have the clear-up, as it were, completed in hours ideally but the practicalities of the situation ---

Q2042 Mr Havard: Given it was a known to a large degree in the way that some things were not known there must have been specific plans to deal with this situation? I am also concerned in relation to things we discussed earlier the extent to which military personnel are diverted off things they might be doing because they are having to do other things which are not appropriate because others are falling down?

Mr Lee: There were plans to deal with this. There are people as part of the initial force and people still there who are EOD specialists who will be dealing with this. I think the figures I read out indicate the scale of the problem. If there are 1,600 sites in our area it is clearly a problem as to how one is going to secure and clear up all of those sites as speedily as one might wish. That is just a problem across the board of resources. It is also, unfortunately, the same security problem we have talked about before to the extent that this is an NGO-lead activity, if NGOs are not present because of the wider security situation that places a break on the progress of this activity, and that is unfortunate but that is the situation we are trying to deal with.

Q2043 Mr Havard: Why were these caches near to large centres of population not dealt with more quickly or earlier? Is there any comment about this criticism that this was not done?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: I am not aware of ---

Q2044 Mr Havard: I am referring to the Human Rights Watch people who went in and made this criticism?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: You are quite right, I was aware of one case where an arms cache which we had put in the guard of some Iraqis the Iraqis were not robust in their defence of the cache and a lot of things disappeared, including some particular weapons. I think, as I said earlier on, when you are still warfighting in some areas or doing other things in terms of trying to catch the terrorists, and so on, there is a question of priorities. If those weapons were out of circulation and not being used I expect they might have been a priority. I suspect that is the reality of only having so many military people on the ground and what you can do with them.

Mr Havard: I am concerned we did not keep them out of circulation in some regards.

Q2045 Rachel Squire: Can I ask you about interpreters and what provision was taken before the operation began to ensure that troops had sufficient access to reliable interpretation?

Mr Lee: I am sure there were Arabic speaking people there. I do not have specific details on that I am afraid.

Air Vice Marshal Loader: : I cannot help here. I do not know what basis there was for an assessment of how many we would need. One of the things which is worthy of saying here is again it comes back to the nature of the society in the south east, particularly as it is the area for which we are responsible, where people who would otherwise have come forward - and there are plenty of well-educated Iraqis that would have been able to fulfil the role - were very reticent because they thought by coming forward if the regime did not topple they would be in significant danger. I do not know what assumptions were made with regard to indigenous Iraqis who would help us if we had to preposition and get going earlier.

Q2046 Rachel Squire: It seems to us that the assumptions were over-optimistic, the MoD Lessons Learned Report admits briefly to a shortage of linguists, there were 28 military interpreters, 28 deployed in to theatre to a ground force of 26,000 personnel. It certainly has been our impression that that was a severe shortage. I would be interested in your views on what our troops would have been able to do better if they had had more linguists?

Mr Lee: I agree this is a problem area even with a language like Arabic. It would have been a problem in other theatres such as Afghanistan where languages are not so widely spoken. I would say the key area where it effects us is obviously in our ability to engage with the local population, all of those processes we were describing earlier, trying to relate to local councils, and so on, all of that and any form of engagement with the local population is rendered more difficult if you are dependent on finding English speakers in that local population. Obviously there are going to be far more than 28 bilingual people in our area. There are a large number of Iraqis who speak English, if you see what I mean, and how many of those would be willing to come forward and act as informal interpreters? Clearly that is something that one cannot be sure of in advance. It is certainly an issue, language training is something that we do need to look at if we are to be expected to be more involved in these expeditionary operations in future. There were a couple of interpreters that were shot at a fairly early stage and that will have a pretty negative effect on others' willingness to take-up the roles. Whether or not there were assumptions that were made earlier on which were proven to be inappropriate I think you need to look at that. That is certainly an issue for us. There is the issue of interpreters who are with our own Armed Forces who we trust, they are, as it were, totally on side and so we need to have the appropriate levels of vetting and understanding to make sure they are people who are not going to act against us.

Chairman: The British military has been engaged with a variety of Arab countries for decades, if not centuries, and I am sure, Mr Chaplin, you learned Arabic in your long career, possibly in university, I think it would be helpful for us to know - sorry to impose it upon you - how many Arabic speakers have undergone training either within the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence and how many did we have available with us as interpreters during the war? How many Arabic interpreters/translators were available to help patrols going round and what are we doing to train more Arabic speakers? It would be really helpful if our joined-up government could saying something on the Arabic language, how good are we at it, how good are our civil servants and diplomats - I am sure they are all very good because of the strong tradition of affection for the Middle East in the Foreign Office - I am sure it has been produced. There must be files filled with these articles, please, if you would not mind could we have that information?

Mr Lee: I am sure we can do that. I know Edward is an Arabic speakers and one of my staff behind is, I have no words of Arabic myself.

Chairman: Yesterday we heard about problems of intimidation, it would be quite possible if you had Arabic speakers from outside Iraq who are imbedded within the accommodation and structures and could be protected, they could come from other parts of the country, there must be some ways the MoD can find ways of getting sufficient numbers of translators and interpreters to assist the traditional method of shouting, which is not always understood in countries where we operate?

Q2047 Rachel Squire: Can I add to that, Chairman, you received a reply from the Prime Minister on 2 September to say that the Foreign Office had approached Arabic speaking countries to see if they could provide Arabic linguists to work with the United Kingdom forces and does it seem we are right to conclude those approaches were largely unsuccessful?

Mr Chaplin: We made some approaches, I can check what the results were.

Q2048 Chairman: We should have seconded some more people from the Foreign Office.

Mr Chaplin: Our pool of Arabic speaking people was relatively small given the scale of the task.

Q2049 Mike Gapes: Can I ask you some questions about policing and the steps taken to involve Iraqis generally in providing security and their own security for the transition and for the future, what steps have you taken to ensure that that is happening?

Mr Chaplin: Clearly it was a priority from a very early stage to transfer as much as possible the task of providing a secure environment to the Iraqi force themselves. We already discussed the hope that there would be a nucleus of a police force to build on. We ran into problems of the unacceptability of that police force with regard to local populations, certainly in the south, where the police were used not in the role of a traditional police force but as an instrument of oppression. We started from a lower level than we had expected. A lot of effort has gone into the rapid training of the Iraqi police and that has been going on inside Iraq and outside Iraq in Jordan. I think the numbers deployed now are some 60,000 plus. They is a deployed, training programme going on and we will be getting trained Iraqi police on to the streets as fast as possible. There is also a process of mentoring that goes on all of the time. In the early stage the Royal Military Police were heavily involved in this process.

Q2050 Mike Gapes: 60,000 in the area that Britain has responsibility for or the whole of Iraq?

Mr Chaplin: It is the whole of Iraq.

Q2051 Mike Gapes: How many in our area?

Mr Lee: I have them here somewhere.

Q2052 Mr Hancock: Are they existing policemen being retained or recruited policemen?

Mr Chaplin: Both, some are ex armed forces, some are ex-police and some are a variety of backgrounds.

Mr Lee: Numbers, the number required in our area, the southeast area is 12,370. That number has been recruited but they are not yet fully trained. As Edward said there is a process of training and a process of mentoring them as they set about their deployment. There are lots of other security ---

Mr Chaplin: There are other security forces as well.

Mr Lee: So far as the police are concerned that is the situation. Shall I say what the numbers are for the others? There is a border police and customers service, again for our area there is a requirement for just over 1,600 of those, about one third being recruited so far. There is a Facilities Protection and Security Force protecting power stations and such things, a requirement for 5,500 of those, about 70 per cent have been recruited so far and most trained. Then there is the Iraqi Civil Defence Corp 5,300 odd, of those required in that area 90% of those have been recruited, and about two thirds trained so far. Beyond that there is the new Iraqi Army itself and we are expecting about 3,000 in our area, 25 per cent are so far recruited and there is also an Iraqi Rivery Patrol Service, a smaller outfit, 225 in our area, all recruited.

Q2053 Mike Gapes: Last October, maybe things have improved since then, the Assistant Chief Constable Stephen White who was the Director of Law and Order of CPA in the southern area, and who had extensive experience in a number of areas before he went to Iraq, was quoted by the BBC as saying he had been shocked by the limited backing he received from the authorities and that order would only be restored if there were more international police officers, and in fact there should have been an expected contingent of 1,500 and he only had 15. What is the position today and why was there such a shortfall?

Mr Lee: I am afraid that is beyond my area of expertise.

Mr Chaplin: It is probably fair to say that in terms of the lessons learned this subject has come up and in a similar situation we would probably have a larger number of international police ready to go in and help the local population.

Q2054 Mike Gapes: Where would they be from?

Mr Chaplin: From a variety of other countries. The OSCE as an institution is quite good at providing this help, the European Union has also been involved in some fields. There are sources of such expertise.

Q2055 Mike Gapes: This goes back to this old issue about international legitimacy and lack of support from other countries.

Mr Chaplin: It goes back to the old issue which we have probably discussed to death about the extent to which the Iraqi police force itself would be available for deployment.

Q2056 Mike Gapes: The Assistant Chief Constable said that he expected 1,500.

Mr Chaplin: I am not aware of what was behind that remark, I suspect he was expressing his frustrations at the resources which were available for him to do things more quickly and more effectively. I think the job has been done pretty well. The training programme is going well and more and more people are being trained week by week. What you are getting at, and it is fair enough, is whether the planning process could have been better and there could be greater international effort on hand to help that process along.

Q2057 Mike Gapes: Can I ask one other question then? How do you make it safe and secure for Iraqis to provide information to co-operate with the police? Given the difficult environment what steps have been taken to assist that process?

Mr Chaplin: Do you mean hotlines and walk-in facilities?

Q2058 Mike Gapes: If you have hotlines, I do not think you have.

Mr Lee: No. That is a level of operational information that I do not have to hand.

Q2059 Mike Gapes: Perhaps you can write us to if you find out?

Air Vice Marshal Loader: I suspect this to be a whole range of routine contacts which the military commanders have with people on the ground and the Iraqi civilians in town hall meetings. There will be other less overt means but I do not know off the top of my head but you can be sure there will be a full gamut of contact, including, I am sure, taking appropriate recognition of people who give important information who, of course, will be in danger so it will be done in ways that I would prefer not to discuss here.

Q2060 Chairman: It is a little bizarre because the policeman that Mike referred to who spoke us to and expressed hope that the community would respond with a large number of police officers. When we went to Bosnia every copper in the world had a brother who was there, from people who looked as though they were off the set of In the Heat of the Night to those from Georgia with sunglasses on, Pakistanis, Malaysians, the RUC, the MoD Police, it was an incredibly impressive international operation. What Mr Gapes rightly said was it did not appear to materialise. The private sector industry responded, it seems rather strange that the private sector has reacted very strongly to going in, some of who are unarmed. This is a rather sad day.

Mr Lee: I think there is definitely an issue here about deployable police, which is something that there is not enough of internationally. The Balkans is a more stable environment where arrangements have developed for putting policemen into Bosnia and elsewhere. The situation we are talking about here is a much more rapidly deployable force of international policemen and it is a problem really that such a thing does not exist. We get round it in different ways either by volunteers from different places or the fact that some countries have carabiniere type of forces who are part military and part police. We have certain specialised forces who have extra capability, they are used to carrying arms as a matter of course, generally speaking the United Kingdom does not have a force of that sort. It is something which in this wider lessons learned process of how to deal with all of these sort of conflicts and the aftermath period of conflict which will come more to the fore as an issue, as the sort of civilian resource that needs to be on hand, planned for. I believe that police officers in the United Kingdom who are deployed would go as volunteers, they would have to go as volunteers, they cannot be ordered to go in in the same sense as the military.

Q2061 Mike Gapes: What particular additional allowance and so on they would get?

Mr Lee: I am afraid I do not know the terms and conditions, we would have to enquire through the Home Office I suspect.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q2062 Mr Hancock: I have some questions to ask on that subject or related to that. Can I ask when you write us to on the question that Dai asked you about, the mine clearance and munitions, I was very interested in the figure you gave, it was very impressive, that 600,000 munitions have been destroyed, it would be a good indication for the Committee if we know out of what sort of proportion is it 10 million munitions expected to be found there. 600,000 is impressive but it is no good if 600,000 bullets were destroyed and a considerable number of landmines are still effectively laid. I was under the distinct impression the Government were funding private mine clearing operations in that part of the world, is that true?

Ms Miller: We funded two NGOs in the UN.

Q2063 Mr Hancock: Are a private organisation that specialises in mine clearing a bit like the police we were told about earlier, are we not involved in funding private mine clearing?

Mr Lee: I just do not know, we can include that in the note.

Q2064 Mr Hancock: Can I go back to the policing bit and Mike Gapes' question, the same as in the Balkans, George Robinson had to virtually shake the native country and the EU, shake them up and say, "you have to deliver your component of the MAPE exercise", it was undersubscribed and took several years to get enough confidence in the police force to be willing to allow their personnel to go in. We need to establish for the record what the British government are doing. Like the Chairman I remember being in Albania meeting an Essex policemen teaching people community policing when at the same time the kids were trying to sell us Kalashnikovs for $50. They were talking about community policing in schools and kids were selling guns in the street. The point here is, are you going to have confidence in the police in an area like Iraq? Is it wise to continue with the existing police force where people would have seen them very much as part of the old regime, is it possible to continue to use these people?

Mr Lee: That is the question, as to whether they would have been seen as part of the regime, or would they have been seen as a necessary part of providing a secure environment. In surveys that have been done in Iraq, people's number one concern is security; having a secure environment. They might well have taken the view that the Iraqi police service providing that service would have been something they would have welcomed, even though some elements, in a sense, would have been associated with the old regime. As it was, as we have said several times, the Iraqi Police Service disintegrated so they did not have to face that question. Can I just say there is a fundamental difference between the military forces and police forces? It is an obvious one, I know, but we hold military forces as a contingency force who are, by definition, there in order to be deployed to trouble spots around the world. Generally speaking, countries do not hold police forces as a contingency force, they have them for policing in their own countries. So any deployment of policemen overseas is taken at risk to local security in whichever country, which is obviously going to be more of a problem. Whether countries should have more police contingency forces which are maintained for deployable purposes, I feel, is obviously a question that does need to be addressed in the light of recent experiences.

Q2065 Mr Hancock: Can I go on to the question of the way in which you have given, as a government, instructions to our military commanders, in the area where we are responsible, for the way in which they co-opt local groups to take control of the situation and how you prevent them being seen to be very much the puppets of the coalition, and then resentment builds against them. Then we are deploying troops to secure their security. What is the advice?

Mr Lee: That is something which we certainly agree can be done and can be a very useful method of spreading the security effect. So that if it is possible to identify local groups in a neighbourhood who are able to, on a sort of "neighbourhood watch" basis, provide security of a very basic type in an area and are deemed to be reliable for doing that and not cause the sort of backlash that you are referring to, then that is something that the commanders on the ground need to judge and go ahead with. That is the sort of issue which is very much delegated to the operational theatre and the people there, who will know much better than we can from here what the dynamics are of a local situation and whether the balance of advantage is in allowing a certain neighbourhood to be more or less self-policing. Obviously the overall responsibility for security will remain, at the moment, with our forces, though they will always retain the ability in Iraq to go in and sort something out if they thought the situation was going off the rails. However, it is not something we can dictate in a tactical sense from here.

Air Vice Marshal Loader: This is the classic example of the British way of doing things on the ground in the theatre; the theatre commander and his various commanders beneath have their contacts with the local community, religious and tribal leaders and so on, and they hold these town hall meetings where certain initiatives are discussed: whether or not they are practicable; what will be the reaction of the local populace to them, and there is a sort of "taking ahead together". So it would be clumsy to - and they do not - introduce initiatives which will clearly get the back up of the majority of the population; so it has to be movement forward together, and that is the means by which it is done, very much this joint council aspect that Ian mentioned earlier.

Q2066 Mr Hancock: You have given us statistics about the numbers required and the fact that in our sector it would appear that we have met the recruitment levels and the targets we were set. When you write to us on other matters, which you have been requested to do, can you write and tell us about the retention of the people you have recruited - how many of them have actually stayed the course - and could you also tell us (and maybe you can answer this today - any one of you) about the problems you have experienced where intimidation is now forcing people to leave security forces once joined? We understand, if you believe the reports that are coming out of the Sunni triangle and more around Baghdad, and even now in northern Iraq in the Kurdish areas, that police recruits have suddenly started to leave in quite significant numbers because of threats of intimidation on their family members and the wider family unit is under quite distressing circumstances in the village somewhere - there is widespread intimidation. Could you tell us whether or not that is something you are experiencing now, what you can do about that, whether or not you are forced into relocating these people so that a policeman in Basra is not working in that area but somewhere else? Is there a systematic system of giving them an opportunity to serve in the police but, maybe, not where they are readily identified - similar to what we exercised in Northern Ireland for a long time?

Mr Lee: There is obviously a relationship here between the overall security situation and this potential problem of retention, or intimidation. If we can achieve general improvements, by definition there will be less of a problem with intimidation. I am not aware that we have a problem in our own area of intimidation of the sort you are referring to. We can certainly look into whether there are any examples of that and what the retention rates are so far (it is early days, of course). I think we have had reports recently, in the last few weeks, that joining the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps is actually quite a popular thing to do and is regarded at street level in Iraq as a good, respectable profession. It is a new organisation and it is seen as doing one's bit to provide renewed security, and it does not have associations with the previous regime. So there are hopeful indications on that front.

Q2067 Mr Hancock: Is there any evidence at all that in the part that we administer British authorities are turning a blind eye to the organised crime elements that go on, in the sense of keeping them quiet? One of the press reports that consistently comes up is that the Iraqi on the street is unhappy because law and order has not been restored and that crime now is the most significant element, particularly in our area; where somebody is shot it is not for a political cause it is because of settling a crime-related activity. Is there any suggestion that we are unable to secure that criminal element sufficiently to give you the confidence that law and order actually does mean something?

Mr Lee: I would say quite the reverse, actually. We have been quite active on this question of dealing with crime. It is obviously a long-standing problem in that area, where smuggling predates the conflict and probably predates Saddam Hussein, but there have been a number of specific operations targeted on dealing with criminals, and it is a very high priority as a matter of course. Behind the additional battalions that have moved forward into Iraq over the last three or four months has been this question of providing capacity in order to mount operations against criminals in addition to the mentoring of the Iraqi police service, which obviously in itself is part of the effort to deal with crime.

Q2068 Mr Hancock: I only raise this issue because one of the things that you hear consistently in the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo, is that despite the significant military presence, a very intensive police presence and a retrained police force, the one element that has flourished more than anything has been organised crime, and the one thing that nobody has been able to deal with is the fact that crime is still the biggest growth industry in the region. It would be a terrible indictment on us if this were to be the situation in Iraq.

Mr Lee: Indeed, I agree, crime is undoubtedly a problem. The question is what is the answer? I think our answer would be to deal with it in the short term within the resources we have available and deal with in the longer term by setting up indigenous Iraqi security forces and a whole system of public administration in Iraq which can deal with the problem. If you are asking me is it a serious problem, yes, I would agree, yes, it is.

Q2069 Chairman: I have long been interested in informal policing and non-state policing. A good example of "neighbourhood watch" Iraqi-style is the growth of militias who would not just give you a gentle reprimand but might do far worse. In Maysan Province, clearly, militias are operating, apparently under the authority of the British - or the British are acquiescent to religious-led militias. If you do not know perhaps you can find somebody that does, but to what extent, certainly in Shiite areas, are there militias operating and taking quasi policing functions - extreme Muslim style or any other style - and are these to be equated with the religious groups that one would find in Saudi Arabia or in Iraq - matawas (?)?

Mr Chaplin: I do not think they are equivalent to that, but on the extent to which militias are operating in our area I will hand over.

Air Vice Marshal Loader: We will have to come back to you, sir. In a time when, clearly, resources in this regard, for maintaining law and order, are stretched, then if they are producing the effect without undermining the future civil structure of society - and here, obviously, CPA and CPSL are important - then my suspicion is that it would be allowed to carry on. I was aware of this a few months ago ----

Mr Lee: It is definitely an assistance in the short term. The quantification that you are after, I think we will have to enquire about.

Q2070 Chairman: I think it is the Maysan Province. It is one thing having the good, old-fashioned British style in India or in Nigeria, where you delegated to a chieftain the responsibility for maintaining law and order, which was done, but the worrying thing is if situations are fluid and you delegate to somebody, either religious or political, and sub-contract to him policing functions that you cannot control, then you are not having delegated policing you are having purely self-serving policing, for political or religious purposes, that takes on a life of its own and is almost a prototype for a form of policing that can take place at the time when the Americans or British leave, which is not going to be Sir Robert Peel's London bobby circa 1829.

Mr Chaplin: Just to make a comment and a distinction there, I think when you are talking about militias you are talking about paramilitary forces, of which the best known operating in Iraq are the Peshmurgas, the Kurdish forces in the north, and in the south the Badr Brigade, so-called, associated with Skiri (?), one of the Shiite political parties. As the Air Vice Marshal said, provided they are contributing and not undermining the security of the areas they are operating in, they are left alone and they will be subject to the process of building up a new Iraqi army. There are plans at some stage to bring those militias into the Iraqi army, and clearly that is going to take some time and may have to wait until after the government is established, because that goes to the heart of what sort of armed forces we are going to have, which is really a constitutional question. Certainly the military will be taking action, I would guess, against any armed group which was actively undermining security, because our job is to provide the secure environment in which the political process can take place of transition, according to the timetable that has been set out for a transitional Iraqi government.

Chairman: The reason for this line of questioning was an article we saw in the International Herald Tribune on 15 July 2003 which said: "The British have entrusted security in Maysan Province, which encompasses Amara ... to militia units called emergency brigades. These men answer only to a self-appointed provincial council of Shiite religious groups, which wants no one else to deal with the British. The leader of the council, Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, has been named to Iraq's new governing council ..." etc. So that is something that may be expedient in the short term but looks worrying in the longer term. Just a few more questions to ask of another great British success in Basra.

Q2071 Mr Havard: This follows on, to a certain extent, the extent to which in trying to establish civil leaders you end up choosing functionaries or end up reinforcing personalised or otherwise networks - whether they be militias or anyone else - and effectively just simply institutionalising bodies that you, in a sense, were trying to get rid of in the first place. From this whole question about, particularly, this being problematic in terms of the idea of choosing potential Iraqi governors, given this federal process (I do not want to go into the detail of that, that is well-rehearsed) what lessons have been learnt about how you go about identifying, choosing and anointing, however temporarily or otherwise, potential and actual civic leaders for the process?

Mr Lee: I think the lesson would be "be careful".

Q2072 Mr Havard: I can write that down!

Mr Lee: There is a tension that exists between, on the one hand, wanting to get some contact with local, responsible people quickly and, on the other hand, not choosing someone who turns out to be the wrong person just because you want speed. That is, I am afraid, something that can only be judged in a particular circumstance at the time. I think, in fact, the first person that was chosen as being the de facto mayor in Basra turned out to be not acceptable.

Q2073 Mr Havard: An Iraqi general.

Mr Lee: Initially he had appeared to be quite respectable and it turned out that he was not. That only emerged after a period of comments from his opponents and so on. I do not think there is ever going to be an easy answer to this; it is always going to be a short-term expedient in this sort of situation and it is quite expressly that. I think the important thing will be to make clear that it is a short-term expedient and that one is trying to move towards some more legitimate form of representative election, however that is organised - and clearly there are complications with that but that must be the aim - and some system which is organised and controlled by the Iraqis themselves. These short-term arrangements have a place in the whole life cycle of the operation but they are not going to be a longer-term solution. They can have that risk of out-living their usefulness if one gets too attached to them.

Q2074 Chairman: Hartlepool chose a man dressed up as a monkey, so maybe as a nation - apparently he turned out to be quite good - we are not too good at imposing mayors or governors on anybody.

Mr Chaplin: I think one of the things that the British Army is very good at is getting alongside local leaders and feeling their way as to how to get the administration going again. I referred earlier to the provincial council in Basra, but that is an example of successful co-operation between the military and the CPA, including some FCO people on the ground, using Arabic language skills early on to talk to a wide range of groups that were putting themselves forward as wanting to participate in local government, and just by a process of shuttle diplomacy, if you like, ensuring that one group was not completely unacceptable to the rest and arriving at a provincial council which was broadly acceptable and everybody working together as individuals rather than representing political parties or factions in order to tackle what was the most urgent priority, which was getting local government up and running. That has been a success which has been replicated elsewhere in other towns throughout the south and throughout Iraq.

Q2075 Mr Havard: That brings me to the guts of what I want to ask, really, which is this difficult question of what is being done to actually introduce a process of political parties. If the declaration is an open, transparent democracy with free elections, there may be arguments, which you have just advanced, about expediency in the first term - take what is available to you in order to create a stabilised situation where you can introduce proper process - but what is actually being done? I understand that this question was asked of our allies in this regard, and certainly in America there were varying answers given to it. We would like to know what is being done to move on from the circumstances of immediate expediency to having a party political democracy established.

Mr Chaplin: I think I have described what we have been doing, and that is the first requirement and that is all that is needed in this initial stage. It is not a question of expediency, it is a question of finding a body of local people who, as individuals, come together, form a local council and are accepted. They are the instruments through which money is spent on projects - money that is coming from the Iraqi ministries in Baghdad. That is what is going on in the south at the moment. The question of the formation of political parties goes to the political process which only the Iraqis themselves can decide. I do not think it is our job to encourage the setting up of political parties. The drawing up of the law that would regulate such political parties is something that can actually only be decided upon by the transitional government. So the political process as set out in the 15 November agreement by the Iraqi Governing Council is designed to get to a situation by the end of June of this year where you have a transitional assembly and then a new transitional government, and only then will they be taking decisions on constitution and on what political structures you are going to have, how you can run elections and the census that will probably be needed to be carried out to prepare for those elections. That all lies in the future. I think the key thing that we saw as our responsibility was to create an environment in which preparations for that process can take place.

Q2076 Mr Havard: So the objective is not necessarily to set up a political-party-style democracy?

Mr Chaplin: No.

Q2077 Mr Havard: Why not?

Mr Chaplin: It is to set up a process which allows Iraqis to choose what sort of political structures they want. There are all sorts of questions in there, constitutional as well as political questions, about whether they want a federal structure, whether they want a centralised structure, the role of Islam in the constitution, the protection of minorities - all those things are sensitive matters on which it would be quite wrong for outsiders to push one option or another; only Iraqis can decide that. That process is going to take time.

Q2078 Mr Havard: Our military are going to be there for a period of time because there is going to be a need for security and stabilisation whilst all these processes continue, so they are going to be seen to be co-operating with different groups of people currently. You can imagine how this is going to potentially cause difficulty if it is not properly handled, because as this process unveils are they going to be seen to have been supporting particular groups of people or particular individuals and then the process comes along and these individuals --- To be perfectly honest, it would seem to me that some of the current CPA people might well not get elected under any new process, yet they are working hand-in-glove. So there are those sorts of issues and difficulties that have to be managed, particularly for the military on the ground. Let me just press the point: if you are doing all that, how are you creating institutions? One of the other declarations is to promote private business and do all these other things. We have had this discussion about contractors and others and companies coming in, and another related issue I would like to ask is, in all of that discussion how is an open, free trade union structure being looked at in terms of being established as part of the state processes? There are going to be large companies, foreign and domestic, hiring all the workers or working with international workers, and so on, and our military personnel relating to them. How is that question being addressed?

Mr Chaplin: Can I pick up one of your earlier points? I think the evidence is there (you have seen it yourself) that the military and civilians of the CPA who are engaging with local authorities are very alive to the risks you have outlined and take every possible precaution to ensure they are seen as objective and not favouring one faction over another. The CPA, of course, is the Coalition of Provisional Authority, and that has nothing to do with Iraqi politics; it is the provincial councils and the Iraqi Governing Council that have that responsibility. As far as taking action, as the coalition, on the future economic structures or allowing trade unions to be set up, these are matters where policy will be made by the CPA in Baghdad (this will be the subject of local initiative) and there are constraints - legal constraints apart from anything else - on how far it is right for the Coalition Provisional Authority to go in taking decisions which, if you like, pre-empt decisions which properly belong to the transitional and then fully legitimate Iraqi government. So I think there are some real constraints on how far down that track we could go.

Q2079 Mr Havard: We are looking at it from the point of view of where the Ministry of Defence fits into all of this. What we already see is that the military, effectively, is taking on tasks that others ought to be there doing, and that will potentially continue for some time. I can see engineers from the British military still being in there, working hand-in-glove; you are going to have all this mine clearance, ordnance and all the rest of it, as well as the security on a day-to-day basis, policing and all of the other things - terrorism and so on. So there has got to be some sort of thought-out plan, it seems to me, on how the military are advised and what the contribution is of the military in relation to these evolving, developing plans. It just seems to me that the question of nation building, quite clearly, is more difficult than the fighting, in many respects - that was the relatively easy bit, this is the difficult bit. It comes back to the questions we were raising earlier, and the extent to which planning is done and advice and proper relationships are established in order to achieve these different objectives. You have got to give us confidence that that is happening.

Mr Chaplin: I do not think I can add much to the description of how the CPA and the military are acting in this field in the period between now and the coming into office, according to the timetable, of a transitional Iraqi government. At that point the relationship will change and at that point if the new Iraqi government requires continuing outside assistance, as it certainly will, whether that is in security or in setting up civil institutions or help in preparing a census or help in preparing elections, it will need to ask for that assistance - probably, in some of those things I mentioned, from the United Nations. If they need continuing help from individual nations then I am sure those requests will be looked at very sympathetically. Certainly we will want to continue to play our part. The point is this will not be us deciding, as the occupying powers, this will be us responding to a request from a sovereign government, as we do elsewhere in the world.

Q2080 Mr Havard: We have got the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry and DFID. What is DFID's position in relation to these matters?

Ms Miller: Obviously, getting a good governance system is one of our priorities. We would target our assistance at probably the next level down - getting ministries up and running, getting public administration and getting good economic governance. That is certainly one of our priorities for support.

Q2081 Mike Gapes: The UN have got people in Iraq today. There is a report in the newspaper this morning that the American administration is re-thinking its attitude to the timetable and that our Government is pushing them to do so. Without giving any secrets away, I would be interested to know whether you would prefer an election by the end of June so that there can be a democratically elected and legitimate government in Iraq from 1 July rather than have hundreds of thousands of supporters of Ayatollah al Sistani on the streets.

Mr Chaplin: There is absolutely no truth in the speculation that either the American Government or the British Government is pushing for an extension of the timetable which was laid down by the Iraqis, communicated through the Security Council, following their agreement of 15 November. What there is is a debate, and there was a meeting in New York on Monday (the 19^th)involving the Secretary General, the Secretariat staff, members of the Iraqi Governing Council and members of the CPA, including Paul Bremer and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, which was considering what more the UN could do to help in this process. The UN, under Security Council resolutions, already has a mandate to help in all sorts of fields, including the political process, but the question of course is going to be security. What this discussion was about was whether they could help in advisory and other capacities in the process between now and the formation of a transitional Iraqi government. In particular, their advice is being sought by the Iraqis in coming to address this question of what sort of electoral process they should have for the formation of that transitional national assembly.

Q2082 Mike Gapes: So that is not yet a resolved issue, as to whether you have an appointed, indirect system or you have some form of direct elections with, perhaps, people having coloured dye on their hands ----

Mr Chaplin: That is still being discussed.

Q2083 Mike Gapes: There is still a possibility. My question was, would you prefer a democratic election by the end of June?

Mr Chaplin: I think we would prefer as democratic a process as possible, but there are some real practical constraints, in the time available, on what sort of direct elections you have, given the security in some areas of Iraq and given the lack of preparations, electoral law and so on. There are, as you have referred to, other possibilities, using the food distribution system, but there are problems with all those options. The question is whether the UN can help to resolve those to the satisfaction of all the Governing Council and whether any adjustments need to be made to give even greater transparency and legitimacy to the process. It is important we should have the maximum level of legitimacy and transparency in the process that elects people to come together in the national assembly which is going to do some important things, including constitutionally.

Q2084 Mr Viggers: The Committee was in Iraq last July and the experience there, and in Bosnia/Herzegovina, is that we have seen just how effective military support in the humanitarian area can be in immediate work on restoring water, for instance, power, rebuilding the schools and so on. The budgets in those areas are really very modest. I wonder whether lessons have been learnt in Iraq and elsewhere as to whether it would be appropriate to review, and possibly increase, the budgets for military support in the humanitarian area. I can foresee a number of areas of difficulty because troops do not go into the armed forces to carry out humanitarian work.

Mr Lee: Yes, it is a road down which we are moving. I think lessons were learned from Afghanistan, for example, on how beneficial it would be to give the military forces a budget from the outset which they could spend on what they call Quick Impact Projects, which are essentially humanitarian in nature - getting infrastructure going again as quickly as possible. More money was set aside for this operation than had previously been the case for exactly that purpose. In addition to that, there was even more money set aside which would normally be from DFID's budget (another £30 million, I think) which could also be used in recognition of the fact that in the first few weeks there would only be military forces on the ground and they would need to take these sorts of actions. So the answer is yes, we have learned from experience previous to Iraq and we will be looking at the effectiveness of that system in the case of Iraq. I am sure we will look to do something of a similar nature if anything of this sort crops up in the future.

Q2085 Mr Viggers: The message that the Committee brought back from Umm Qasr was "Where is UK plc?" By that, the people putting the point to the Committee meant "Where is DFID, where is the DTI, where is British private enterprise?" Do you feel that lessons have been learned from this experience and that, facing this problem again, you would approach it in a different way? Has the situation improved since July?

Ms Miller: We will certainly be looking across Whitehall at the ability to deploy rapidly a range of experts - related to what I was saying about the number of people that we have available ready to deploy. So that is something that we can learn. This was a slightly different situation in that, clearly, you would have a wider range of other actors available to do some of this work, but part of the problem is that a lot of what DFID, in particular, had funded simply did not come under that badge of "UK plc". The United Nations, UNICEF and UNDP did a lot of valuable work very early on in restoring water and electricity, which we funded. The ICRC, similarly, which we also funded. Whilst, yes, we do need to look at how to get the UK co-ordinated effort better placed in a similar situation, we do have to remember that there was a lot of stuff being funded by the UK which complemented and worked quite closely with the efforts that UK troops and DFID and others were making on the ground.

Air Vice Marshal Loader: To put some granularity on that, General Brown (?) was deployed with £10 million of Quick Impact Project money which, within the usual sensible checks and balances, he was free to use as he saw fit, and he very quickly did. If you want to win hearts and minds (I know it is a slightly hackneyed phrase but, nonetheless, it is entirely apposite) then him having the freedom to go and do that worked very well. It is interesting how quickly that was followed up, in fact, when General Lamb was in theatre. We very quickly got beyond the scope of what the Royal Engineers and others could do but we could actually start the process where other projects were identified. The local tribal and religious leaders made the point very strongly that if we wanted to maintain the consent of the Iraqi people (and without that consent we could not stay in the country) other things needed to be delivered, and then the process very quickly kicked in, with DFID, of finding the companies which would have to come in through the good auspices of DFID to move those other projects forward which were now outwith the capabilities of the deployed military. So there was a blend of this process.

Chairman: Of course, it is very important that locals are employed. One of the great virtues of the system that you referred to, operated by the young man from BAe systems, was that (a) he was teaching local contractors how to put in a bid and convincing them you could win a contract without bribing any of the people making the decisions, and (b) it was a great opportunity for the local workforce. The guy was telling us that the time taken to fulfil his contracts was very, very short because there was so much surplus labour they would come in in vast numbers and do the job in a couple of days that might have taken a normal workforce much, much longer.

Q2086 Mr Havard: A quick, mechanical question, really. Given the point you have just made about the relationship between the military and DFID, what was the process? Did DFID have embedded people, as it were, in the same way as we had embedded journalists? There has got to be a way of doing it. How does that organisationally happen? It seems to me that however well it is happening maybe it is an area that we ought to lay emphasis on in terms of embellishing, improving or enhancing?

Ms Miller: We had people embedded with the military before the conflict started, during the conflict and after. In addition, we had people seconded to ORHA and the CPA who were working alongside the military, working in ORHA and the CPA. So as well as actually embedded people (and we were giving advice more than anything else), once we had our own staff and consultants deployed they were working alongside, in the same structures and very closely with, the military. Similarly, contractors, that we funded to get things up and running in the south, were also, I believe, working very closely with the military, who were doing some of that work.

Q2087 Chairman: Mr Chaplin, taking advantage of your enormous expertise in the Middle East and Iran, the question I want to ask is relevant but not entirely based on the question that we have undertaken so far. It almost sounds like an undergraduate essay. It is this (take your time with the answer and if you have any after-thoughts please let me know): what has been the impact on the Middle East and North Africa - your area of professional competence - of the war on terrorism and the war and the aftermath in Iraq? A: positive; B: negative; C: no change? I can think of a positive - Libya, Syria appears to be constrained and potential improvements in Iraq, but I can see a negative side as well. I am sorry to throw this one at you but could you give us some of your thoughts because we are working in this general area?

Mr Chaplin: It is fair to say that before the conflict took place there was a lot of anxiety being expressed by governments right across the region about the possible impact that that would have, particularly on the neighbours. We did a lot of talking to the neighbours to make sure we understood their views and could reassure them about what our intentions were. They were very fundamental anxieties about, for example, whether we were not going to preside over the disintegration of Iraq and whether we really meant it when we talked about preserving the territorial integrity of Iraq. So I think, in the aftermath, they are reassured and all very happy that the Saddam Hussein regime has disappeared, reassured that we do appear to be serious about ensuring that not only territorial integrity is preserved but that we are going to stay the course - because that was the other anxiety; that we would leave prematurely and leave an unholy mess behind which would impact on them - and ensure there is a political process in place which has the best chance of delivering a transition to a stable, legitimate and fully representative Iraqi government. They have some fears about the impact that any new political arrangements that may take place in Iraq might have, and different neighbours have different fears about different elements of that - for example, as regards the Kurds, whether the Kurds will be able to win too much independence, and the impact that would have. There have, as you say, been some positive results as well. Probably the most positive is the signal it has given of the determination of the US and UK Governments to actually take action against a dictator that had ignored for 12 years Security Council resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction; that it was simply not acceptable for that to continue. You mentioned Libya, and although it is difficult to attribute precisely the weight that the sight of that action had on the thinking in Libya, it is probably reasonable to assume that that did play a part. I think, nevertheless, there is continuing anxiety about the impact of the continuing instability in Iraq and anxiety about what the future may hold, particularly when it is combined with very pronounced anxiety (and this is not new) about the continuing other major unresolved conflict in the Middle East - the Arab/Israel conflict. That does have a severe impact on all the countries of the region - certainly on their thinking - and they are very anxious to see the international community engaged more, and the US Government, in particular, engaged more, in resolving that conflict. The more action that can be taken to put that process back on track then the easier it is going to be to pursue other objectives in Iraq as regards the war against terrorism and, indeed, in encouraging the process of modernisation and reform throughout the region. So I hope that gives you a flavour of how I see the impact, both before and after, in the region.

Q2088 Chairman: Ms Miller, as your competence includes the Middle East, is there anything you can perhaps add to what Mr Chaplin said? Is the Middle East a better place or a worse place as a result of events over the last few years? Certainly the perception of the UK and the US has not gone up significantly amongst a large number of people living in the region. That seems a pretty negative side.

Ms Miller: I think our main mandate is to look at poverty and inequality across the region, and it is far too early to see whether that has made any difference. Obviously, however, we are very much concerned about overall political instability. I would say the jury is still out, but certainly as UK actors in the Middle East we are still seen as very credible, having something to offer and I suppose one of our worries, that this might affect our ability to work in the area, does not seem to have been the case.

Chairman: Thank you all very much for your two sessions - immensely interesting and very helpful. In the next four or five months we will be going back to Iraq, and if things go bad for you we may ask you to listen to our views - but I do not think we will. Thank you very much.