Examination of Witnesses (Questions 308
- 319)
WEDNESDAY 26 JANUARY 2005
MR MARTIN
HOWARD, LT
GENERAL JOHN
MCCOLL
CBE DSO, MAJOR GENERAL
NICK HOUGHTON
CBE AND MAJOR
GENERAL BILL
ROLLO CBE
Chairman: Welcome to this further evidence
session that is focused on continuing operations in Iraq. The
inquiry follows last year's inquiry by the Committee into lessons
of Iraq. In late 2004 we took evidence from the Secretary of State
principally on the deployment of the Black Watch at Camp Dogwood.
Following the session we had the opportunity to visit the troops
when we went to Iraq in early December. This afternoon's session
will cover a wide range of issues all related to the Coalition's
efforts to stabilise Iraq, including security sector reform. In
the run up to the elections in Iraq these are very topical issues.
We expect to be interrupted by a series of divisions in the House
at about quarter to five. If we have not managed to complete our
session at that point—which we will not—then I understand
that you are able to come back on 2 February and we are very grateful
to you. The first question is from Peter Viggers.
Q308 Mr Viggers: It is convenient
to start with the military to police cooperation issue as we took
evidence on this subject this morning from several witnesses.
The policing dimension of the operation in Iraq was not considered
until the fall of Baghdad when the Association of Chief Police
Officers received the first call from the Home Office. What specific
lessons for international policing would you say have been learned
as a result of Operation Telic?
Mr Howard: Perhaps I could start
and then I will ask my colleagues to join in and give more expert
testimony. I think that we have gone through a process of recognising
in Iraq that we needed to provide support for the formation and
training of a police force. That has gone through a series of
stages. We have actually deployed police officers into MND(SE)
and they also operated more broadly across Iraq from a number
of nations. I think that we have had to take into account the
security situation as we found it and there is a sense in which
it has been necessary to focus on policing to deal with the specific
security situation which has tended to be more at the law and
order end and preserving law and order rather than necessarily
community policing and so on and so forth. Our training and advice
has focused on that. That is evolving and will continue to evolve
and will of course vary across different parts of Iraq. In terms
of lessons learnt I think policing is perhaps one of a number
of post-conflict lessons which we have learnt from both Iraq and
Afghanistan. One of the things that the Government has done is
to announce the formation of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Unit jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign
Office and DfID. The director of that has been appointed, as you
know, and we are expecting the Unit itself to have an initial
operating capability later this year. It is not only concerned
with policing but it is intended to deal with a range of, if you
like, non-military issues in the immediate post-conflict stabilisation
phase and certainly dealing with policing as well as immediate
reconstruction will be one of the issues it would deal with. We
would imagine that as the Unit develops that it would identify
officers that might be available for deployment into a post-conflict
situation. I think that will probably be one of the main strategic
lessons we have learned but I could ask Major General Rollo to
say something about his experiences as GOC in MND(SE) and then
perhaps Lt General McColl to talk more generally about the Civilian
Police Advisory and Training Team which was based in Baghdad.
Major General Rollo: From my perspective
you have to look at each situation as it comes. It seems to me
to be more important to adapt to what you find rather than necessarily
to say that there is a firm, clear doctrine which says we should
do this every time. Coming to it in July I found there was a large
police force backed up by a relatively small but relatively well-trained
national guard. We went from there through August and the upsurge
of violence then. That went away after Najaf and Sistani's intervention.
The things that were important to me were to improve the quality
of the police force and that had both an immediate and a longer
term component. The immediate component was to make sure that,
should there be a return to violence, there was a section of the
police force which we were completely certain we could rely on
for public order. Therefore we re-enforced the development of
what we call a tactical support unit of about five hundred people
and expanded the concept across all four provinces. In the longer
term there were measures to improve both the command and control
of the police force and also the quality of the people in it and
there was a Baghdad driven programme to do that. The other aspect
was counter-terrorism and some of the more specialist provision.
That, again, became more possible as we had increasing numbers
of police available to act as instructors through the Armor Group
and Dynacore. There are a number of strands you could take forward
but the key was to adapt to what we found and adapt it to the
circumstances.
Q309 Mr Viggers: Perhaps before you
answer further, General, I read last week that the Ministry of
Defence handbook on the treatment of prisoners of war runs to
106 pages and I realise the extent to which it is an inherent
part of military operations to plan for other aspects of the battle,
to plan in detail for how you would handle prisoners of war. Surely
there should have been similar planning for handling policing
matters.
Mr Howard: I endorse what Major
General Rollo says; it is a question of the situation that we
found on the ground at the time. I think that one of the things
that happened at the end of the combat phase of Operation Telic
which was not really expected was the extent to which the existing
Iraqi security forces—and you have to recognise that the
Iraqi police before the war were a rather different animal from
the police now—as a whole very largely melted away. We found
ourselves in a situation where there was a very large security
vacuum. There was a vacuum in other areas as well in terms of
civil governance. As Bill said, what we had to do was deal with
the situation on the ground as we found it. I believe that the
Coalition actually moved quite quickly to try to recruit Iraqis
locally to provide rudimentary police services. It is not the
way ideally we would have gone about it, but, as I say that was
how we reacted to the situation on the ground. Perhaps I could
ask John to say something about the Baghdad perspective on this.
Lt General McColl: The Iraqi police
training was wrapped up within MNSTCI run from Baghdad; the Multi-National
Support Training Command based in Iraq had an element in it which
was devoted to the training of the police. The numbers of those
police were revised during the six months I was there last year;
they were revised upwards. I think the point about reassessing
the requirement and adjusting to the circumstances we found ourselves
in is absolutely right. Not only that, but there was also the
requirement to alter the way in which the police were perceived
and the idea of police primacy which certainly was not something
which was the case in the posts at Almeira; the police were very
much the bottom of the pile which explains some of the problems
we had about the quality of the people we initially had in the
police. There was a requirement over time to review that and try
to improve it; that is still going on. In terms of lessons that
came out of it, I do not think this is something which the police
were able to do on their own in the particular circumstances of
Iraq and I think the same thing is true in Afghanistan. I don't
think it is something the police can do on their own. I think
the lesson is that there is a requirement for an integrated approach—police
and military—which varies depending on the circumstances.
Q310 Mr Viggers: Are you now confident
that the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit will be given the mandate
and the funding and the place in the Whitehall policy process
to be effective?
Mr Howard: That is certainly our
intention. I am on the board which supervises it as the representative
of the Ministry of Defence and we are very keen that this Unit
is a Unit which actually delivers effect on the ground when it
is needed. So yes, that is our intention, but it is still developing;
we are still recruiting staff. In particular we need to develop
the database of outside experts that the Unit can call on to be
deployed. Of course, that is not just police as I said; it is
a variety of experts. I am confident that that is what we would
want to do and that is what we will aim to do.
Q311 Mike Gapes: Mr Howard, can I
ask you about the MoD's perceptions in March of 2003 as to what
was going to happen with regard to this situation? In the evidence
session this morning it became quite clear that the Foreign Office
and the Home Office had not done anything or thought about this
question of policing and you referred to the collapse of the Ba'athist
regime. Did the Ministry of Defence have any prior thought about
that issue? Did you talk to the Home Office or the FCO before
the actual start of the operations in March?
Mr Howard: I was not in this post
at that time. In fact I was in a related post, I was Deputy Chief
of Defence Intelligence at the time which was pre-war. I was certainly
aware of intelligence assessments of the possible course of conflict
if it should start. I do not recall anything from those assessments
which suggested the complete disintegration and disappearance
of the Iraqi security forces that we actually experienced. However,
those were from a military or a defence perspective and obviously
the focus was primarily on Iraqi combat units rather than the
police service which, as John has said, was very much the lowest
of the low and really did not figure in our calculations. I am
not aware of anything from my knowledge where we explicitly looked
at how we should deal with policing in the aftermath of conflict.
I think in general we were thinking about how we would work with
the civil authorities in Basra which was obviously the principal
city that we would be occupying. Obviously security was part of
that. I do not recall anything specifically about policing but
I could research that for you and come back to you.
Q312 Mike Gapes: That would be helpful
because clearly there is a real lesson to be learned here for
future operations, a gap where you have to start again with the
training—we have seen the training that goes on and the
various other things when we visited—and there is that period
where there is nothing. That is part of the problem. The legacy
of that is what we are still dealing with today. It amazes me
that no-one in any of the departments seems to have given any
forethought to that issue in February and March of 2003.
Mr Howard: All I would say, to
repeat what I said earlier, I do not think anyone expected the
sheer extent to which the security forces and the bodies that
would supply security in Iraq would simply just disappear. It
would have been not unreasonable to have expected some of those
still to be have been intact for us to plug into and help manage
with the local civil authorities, but in fact there were none.
While I accept there are lessons to be learned I think we need
to be careful that we do not draw an absolute doctrinaire lesson
from the particular circumstances of Iraq. General Rollo was very
eloquent on that point.
Q313 Mr Havard: We took a lot of
evidence this morning—you can read it later—that we
have a Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, a lot of talk with the
police this morning about the Strategic Task Force (which seems
to be going to do a lot of things between now and July) largely
run by the Foreign Office but with the rest of you involved. There
was a lot of talk by the police about doctrine to deal with these
issues. There is military doctrine but they need some sort of
doctrine centre to understand how they go on and how these things
mesh together. There are all these processes being unveiled to
us which we are being told would obviate the problem that we saw
last time, which is that some of these things were not necessarily
done as quickly as they should have been. I have a local chief
constable who says to me that the police were actually asking
to get involved in this process and yet the process did not allow
them the involvement as they would like it. It is a question about
embedding people, is it not? You had military people from Britain
embedded in the American planning process and vice versa, so how
is this process embedded in? How are they going to be involved?
You then meet circumstances which change so how then do they adjust?
We did not seem to have processes to deal with that; we seemed
to be dysfunctional. Has that lesson (a) been identified: yes;
(b) learned: maybe; and (c) applied? That is the bit I am after.
Mr Howard: I think you are right
about processes.
Q314 Mr Havard: So are they going
to be involved in the planning next time?
Mr Howard: I would like to think
so. Of course, this is not necessarily something for the Ministry
of Defence.
Major General Houghton: You are
quite right to identify that nationally we have not previously
held a standing deployable capability of police instructors or
trainers; this has been done on an opportune basis, a voluntary
basis at the time. As we have gone into a conflict situation we
have relied upon our own military police capability and the ability
of our military to train domestic police in skills appropriate
to immediate post-conflict situations to bide time for this more
voluntary effort to be generated within the UK. But also in an
international context there are other nations who do have deployable
police capabilities: the Italian Carbonari and French Gendarmerie
and those sorts of things. I think, as Martin said earlier, the
identification that this was a national shortcoming is represented
by the formation of the PCRU and the fact that they will now proactively
be involved in the planning for the post-conflict phase ab initio
and at the time that the conflict phase is embarked upon they
will be starting to join up those capabilities—not just
police but more widely within the civil sector—that are
needed to be employed rapidly in the post-conflict phase. With
some degree of assurance, but only as viewed through Ministry
of Defence eyes, the advent of the PCRU and the work it has embarked
on should go a long way towards rectifying this identified shortfall.
Mr Howard: An important point
to add perhaps is that we would expect the PCRU to be very closely
involved in planning for any future operations—this is an
essential part of what we do—so that they are aware of what
the military planning is and can plan accordingly.
Q315 Richard Ottaway: I appreciate
that lessons have been learnt, but you almost seem to be admitting
that there was no planning at all for the post-war conflict period
so far as the police were concerned.
Mr Howard: As I have said, I would
need to check that in our records to see if there are any documents.
I should make the point that in the Ministry of Defence our primary
concern was, in the first instance, the defeat of the Iraqi forces,
and also the general provision of security. Our interest would
have been, as quickly as possible, to be able to hand over to
appropriate civil authorities on the ground. The fact that those
civil authorities—including the police—simply were
not there was a factor that we had to deal with at the time. I
do not think planning for establishing from scratch a civilian
police force would have been one of the things that we would have
assumed we would have to do prior going into Iraq.
Q316 Chairman: Any future operation—which
will not take the form of Iraq—will need to be up and running
far quicker because that fatal couple of weeks had long-term consequences.
The next conflict is not the same as the last one, but the luxury
of training people like in Bosnia or Kosova is a luxury we cannot
expect as a matter of routine. We will come back to this next
week and, as Mr Havard has said, the session this morning was
very interesting and I am sure you will have a look at it before
you come next week. I have a question in two parts—one is
now and the second part will be the first question I will ask
next Wednesday—and that is about the elections. The determination
of the Coalition and the interim government to hold the election
is matched by the resolve of the insurgents and their terrorist
allies to disrupt the election. I am not going to fall into the
trap of what I would accuse the media of, of being obsessed with
the negative side and neglecting the positive side. There are
125 political parties which I think is positive in the Iraqi context
and there is excitement about voting and the will to vote despite
the negative side of people getting killed and maimed in order
to exert their pressure on a future Iraqi government. Without
wishing to let the enemy know what the planning is—which
is not something I would particularly relish and you would not
fall into the trap if I were setting it, which I am not—is
please can you tell us what you believe the strategy to be overall
in Iraq and certainly in our own area of the different layers
of defence and the fact that in one area a lot of policemen have
not turned up for their duty? In some areas there will be far
too few police officers which I hope is a gap which will be filled
by the Coalition troops who are there. Obviously being very careful,
perhaps you can give us a few insights and then next week the
first question is: congratulations, it all went all; or where
were the mistakes made?
Mr Howard: You are quite right
to say that it would be inappropriate to go into detail, but I
would like to make two points. Firstly, the security situation
will vary enormously across different parts of Iraq and so there
is no one size fits all here. The second point in principle is
that as far as possible we want security for the elections to
have an Iraqi face rather than a Coalition face and that the Coalition
should be there in support of the Iraqis providing the first line
of security.
Major General Houghton: I absolutely
endorse what Martin has just said. The nature of the security
operation will differ from place to place and one of the guiding
principles is that the security should wear an Iraqi face. If
one likes to tier the levels of security that will be provided
then it would be at the ballot boxes in the polling stations—of
which I think there are 5,300—that that would be an Iraqi
police face because that would be the most normal level if there
was a relatively normal level of security in that particular area.
The second level is that of Iraqi reaction forces primarily held
within the army—although some with police—whether
within the Iraqi intervention force whether the Iraqi National
Guard or Iraqi national units. Then as a backup to that Multi-National
Corps forces held back as a mobile reserve so that they could
move to have an effect in time and place in a particular area
where there might be a particular security problem. However, I
think more widely you need to put the nature of the security of
the elections into the nature of the security campaign as a whole.
For example, the decision to mount the operation in Fallujah before
Christmas was seen very much as a need to break some of the resistance
of the insurgency and shatter and dislocate them in a way that
they would be put on a back foot at the time of the elections
themselves. The nature of the security operation has been building
for some time. There are also certain resorts to emergency powers
that Mr Allawi's government intends to take. You might have heard
them in the press in terms of restrictions of movements and motor
cars and this sort of thing, so that it would be easier for Iraqi
security forces and Coalition forces to interdict potential suicide
bombs, vehicle borne IEDs on the move. I think the final thing
I would say without straying into anything that is too secure,
is that the nature of the security operation for the elections
does not end with the closing of the polling booths late on the
day of the elections. There is the need to preserve the security
of the ballot boxes and all that as they are moved to centralised
collection and that sort of thing. I think within the constraints
of security that is as much as I could sensible give as a flavour
for the sort of security that will be laid down.
Q317 Chairman: You did not mention
the UN protection force protecting ballot officials. Are they
an important element in this?
Major General Houghton: The UN
protection force is there purely to act as either inner- or mid-ring
security for UN personnel, not for the IECI personnel.
Mr Howard: IECI personnel are
Iraqi and it is essentially an Iraqi operation although it is
sponsored by the UN.
Chairman: All right, we will move away
from that. All I can do is to express the hope that all these
brave people who are coming out to vote will be in sufficient
numbers to create legitimacy for the election and I hope that
our forces and other coalition forces will be very secure. It
is not going to be an election as one would find in Switzerland
or Norway but I hope it will provide sufficient legitimacy for
any new administration. That is my personal view.
Q318 Mike Gapes: The United States
is sending a retired four-star army general, Gary Luck, to do
a complete assessment open-ended review of its entire military
operations in Iraq which, as I understand it, includes troop levels,
training programmes, what they are doing for the Iraqi security
and also counter-insurgency. Can you tell us, is our Government
in any way—or are British officers involved in any way—in
that process? Will they be working with that assessment team over
the next few weeks? Do we have any civil servants involved or
is this a purely American operation?
Major General Houghton: The Luck
Commission has been and gone and is now back. He returned last
week. We have had, as it were, a hot de-brief of its findings.
The UK contribution to it was two-fold. We had a naval captain,
Bob Sanguinetti, as part of the military element of the team;
we also, on behalf of the UK, had a senior policeman, Colin Smith,
ACC from Hampshire. You are quite right in the nature and scope
of the mission: it was to do some sort of audit purely about the
security line of operation and not the overall nature of the campaign
which clearly involves many other lines of operation. Its principal
focus was an evaluation on how well capacity and capability building
was going within the Iraqi security forces. It is probably premature
to reveal the considered view of that because it has not yet been
formally briefed in through an American chain of command and we
really only have the read-out from our element of it which did
not have access to every single piece of that mission's activity.
I think that the bottom line would be that by and large the nature
of the ISF capacity training capability plan in overall terms
is fine. There are no silver bullet solutions yet to be unearthed
but there are definitely some elements which, over the next twelve
months, the capability and capacity building needs to focus on.
I think I would perhaps summarise that as being less a concern
with numbers, less a concern with the kit, training and recruiting
bit; greater emphasis on leadership, greater emphasis on mentoring
and battle and operational inoculation and a greater emphasis
on growing those elements of security capability which are fundamental
to the Iraqi security forces inheriting the responsibility for
the prosecution of a complex counter-insurgency. By these things
I definitely mean the operationalisation of an Iraqi C2 mechanism
and greater capacity within its intelligence gathering capability.
Q319 Mike Gapes: Is there actually
a report that has been completed as a result of this visit or
are you just talking about verbal impressions?
Major General Houghton: It is
not the intention of General Luck to commit to paper a written
report.
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