Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
WEDNESDAY 2 FEBRUARY 2005
MR MARTIN
HOWARD, LT
GENERAL JOHN
MCCOLL
CBE DSO, MAJOR GENERAL
NICK HOUGHTON
CBE AND MAJOR
GENERAL BILL
ROLLO CBE
Q400 Mr Hancock: Money in Iraq banks
in different holdings. The suggestion is that there was so much
money around that military officers were using it to buy support
for their personnel and what-have-you, but there was no proper
accounting over where this money was going. There were literally
hundreds of millions of dollars floating around the country and
a lot of it is now unaccounted for. Nobody seems to know where
it has gone. I want to know, when we were paying, was it British
taxpayers' money that was being used or was it money that was
already available in Iraq? The coalition admit, the Americans
admit, that they had all this money and it was brought in to them
by the various units that found it and discovered it.
Mr Howard: This seems to me to
relate to a period shortly after the end of hostilities.
Q401 Mr Hancock: The first six months
after.
Mr Howard: Could I take it away,
Mr Hancock and check, because Bill was there a little later than
that.
Mr Hancock: Yes, of course.
Chairman: We have DFID coming in next
week, so we will serve notice on them to answer these questions.
Q402 Mike Gapes: Could I ask a question
that relates back to what Major General Houghton said about this
diversion, in response to Dai Havard's question—the $18
billion voted by the US congress and the reallocation by Ambassador
Negroponte. We were told when we were in Basra in December that
$3 billion had actually been taken away from reconstruction and
transferred into security sector reform. Can you confirm that
that is true?
Lt General McColl: If I may pick
that up, because I was there at the time. I cannot confirm the
figure of $3 billion. I can confirm that there was some rebalancing
from restructuring across to security, which, in the context of
what was going on in the country at the time, did make sense.
Because, not only is there a requirement to allocate funds, but
there is also a requirement—as the Americans would term
it—to "turn dirt", and to turn dirt they need
to have a secure environment in which the contractors can work,
etc. In terms of the sequencing of the operation, the requirement
was to create some kind of stability and security within which
the contractors could then enter the country and do their stuff.
Q403 Mike Gapes: You would not say
the figure of $3 billion would be completely wrong.
Major General Houghton: No, I
think that is about the right order.
Lt General McColl: I would not
say that.
Major General Houghton: At the
same time, there was a process in re-costing what the Iraqi security
architecture was going to cost. It was quite clear, against the
initial amount of money, that it was not affordable. Dr Allawi
had set himself an ambition for his security architecture that
then had to be costed, and it was in the context of that that
they realised they needed to make good—
Lt General McColl: I would also
like to emphasise the importance that the military as well as
the civilians, Negroponte and others, attached to the economic
and governmental lines of operation. So this was not taken lightly
this decision; it was taken after a great deal of soul-searching.
Mike Gapes: Sure, but it caused a lot
of discontent among the people who were dealing with the reconstruction—as
we heard.
Chairman: We are going to have to move
on. We still have a number of questions. A lot of this is based
on the US General Accounting Office report, but we will certainly
serve notice on DFID that we will be asking some questions.
Q404 Mr Havard: In terms of capacity
within the country, I would like to turn attention to the Iraqi
Ministry of Defence and the Army. Quite clearly there have been
all sorts of changes. There were declarations made about the size
and shape of Army, and it was then changed and so on, and, as
I understand it, structures are now moving forward in terms of
developing a Ministry of Defence. The question of the Army we
can perhaps come to a bit later on. One of the things that quite
clearly might have been difficult, as it says euphemistically
here, was "recruiting experienced professionals" to
the Iraqi Ministry of Defence. That echoes back to the point about
"purging". There is the potential for all sorts of internal
conflicts here, and whether or not you are going to develop a
"non-political" executive sort of approach to a Ministry
of Defence or whether it is going to be stuffed with people's
mates and relatives and various other people. In the structure
of the Ministry of Defence, as I understand it, a PUS has now
been appointed, but then the PUS is actually the Deputy Minister,
so quite clearly is not independent in the way that we would see
it for somebody in the British system. Could you make some comments
about what is happening in terms of forming this Ministry of Defence
structure, for example?
Mr Howard: As I have said, it
is a relatively new organisation. It is being developed in difficult
circumstances. But I think progress is being made and the various
component parts of the Ministry of Defence, policymaking, budgetary
control, etc, are developing. The quality of the staff in each
place and their ability to do work is variable but it is improving.
We are making a contribution to that, in that, under an American
sponsored scheme, we have a senior British civil servant who is
working within the Ministry of Defence, advising the minister
and the Secretary General (which I think is the Permanent Secretary
figure you are talking about) and Mr Shaways. He leads a mixed
team, including other British civil servants and also other nationalities—there
are Australians, Americans, Italians, within that team—who
are going through a process of developing the ministry of defence
further. They are also working on the joint headquarters, headed
up by the Iraqi Chief of Staff, which is co-located within the
Ministry of Defence. As I observed earlier, progress on this is
still at a relatively early stage, because it has only existed
for a short time, but I think we are quite encouraged by the extent
to which the Iraqis have played into this and are taking part
and are responding to the training advice that we give to them.
It is worth saying that, unlike our own Ministry of Defence, they
have faced problems of assassination and kidnap—which has
been quite a major de-motivator, to put it no more strongly than
that. But, despite that, quite a lot of progress has been made.
If I may say, I was in Baghdad two or three weeks ago and I visited
the Ministry of Defence to visit our own team and the Minister
and the Secretary General and the Chief of Staff—and I also
visited the new building of the Ministry of Defence, which I hope
at some point the Committee will have a chance to visit when you
finally manage to go to Baghdad, which is extremely impressive.
The fact that a big project like that has been delivered more
or less to time, more or less to cost, in circumstances where
the building previously had been destroyed, I think is a testament
to a project which is 99% Iraqi. So there is a long way to go
and—
Chairman: Perhaps the MoD should learn
from the Iraqis in delivering projects on time! I am sorry, I
could not resist that.
Q405 Mr Havard: You do not want to
give the Committee ideas about getting into—
Mr Howard: Perhaps I should not
have mentioned that! I think the prospect is there of making progress.
There are significant weaknesses. We have already mentioned intelligence,
and the extent to which intelligence is dealt with in the Ministry
of Defence is part of that problem. We need to work further. The
other point I would make is that the Ministry of Defence is only
one of the ministries concerned with security. The other key one
is the Ministry of Interior, which has responsibilities for, particularly,
police—I do not know whether it does border enforcement
as well. I think it would be true to say that progress there has
been not as fast as it has been in the Ministry of Defence, so
there is another area where more work will need to be done.
Q406 Mr Havard: I was interested
in that and the potential of interfacing and the potential difficulties
that go with that. You mentioned border control, but there have
been particular comments about water-based activities and whether
that is a matter for Coastal Defence or the Iraqi navy. There
does not seem to be any clear Ministry of Defence structure in
this to deal with that in the round. There are issues like that,
are there not?
Mr Howard: I would agree with
that. As I said earlier on, in thinking about the development
of Iraqi security forces as a whole, quite a lot of emphasis has
been placed on getting the numbers in and making sure that they
are all equipped, but it is just as important that we do the more
intangible things like developing the ability of the Ministry
of Defence, for example, and the Joint Headquarters to direct
military operations and to support them through logistics, and,
looking further ahead, that the Ministry of Defence has the ability
to make forward plans for budgets, equipment and so on and so
forth. These are things which are happening but on which we need
to make more progress, and they are much harder to measure than
just numbers of people on units. But you are quite right to pick
it up as an issue which attention is being given to—and
one which will need to continue to be given attention to.
Q407 Mr Havard: The suspicion goes
further. The suspicion is that the Ministry of the Interior and
the Ministry of Defence, the various ministers and their ministries,
are establishing their own internal structures, with units loyal,
as it were, to that ministry or the people creating it, like special
police commandos and so on. This could very quickly slip into
this sort of process, could it not?
Mr Howard: The special police
commando is an interesting example. They have actually been quite
effective when they have been deployed on operations.
Q408 Mr Havard: Are they loyal to
the Interior Minister or the Minster of Defence?
Mr Howard: You have raised an
issue which is something that I think needs to be considered and
watched. Ultimately, these are Iraqi decisions. The Iraqis need
to produce machinery which suits their own culture and their own
traditions. It would be quite wrong of us to impose upon them
our own structures. Where we can provide advice, it should be
on principles and on ways of doing things efficiently and effectively.
This is not to deny the problems you describe are there, but it
does seem to me they need to be dealt with by the emerging Iraqi
political structure rather than for us to say—
Q409 Mr Havard: There is also discussion
about the Army itself. It is going to be this shape, this size.
It has moved around. As I understand it, there will be four Army
divisions, and the National Guard then may be converted later
on and subsumed into the Army. Is there a final plan? What is
the structure going to be? What is the situation currently? Because
our military, our Army, as it were, are presumably already in
the process of training and putting it together, are they not?
Lt General McColl: And changing
ourselves at the same time.
Q410 Mr Havard: Absolutely. No point
in being a one-trick pony.
Lt General McColl: That was not
supposed to be a cheap shot. The point I am making is that they
are changing, but all armies change all the time. In these particular
circumstances they changed—and I was involved in a number
of those debates—partly as a result of the consequence of
the situation, partly as a consequence of the views of politicians
who were coming into the frame and having new perspectives, be
it Allawi, be it the Ministry of Defence, be it the Ministry of
the Interior—so all of their views had to be taken into
account. I think what is interesting is that we are about to get
a new set. It would be highly surprising if they did not appear
on the scene with their own ideas about the way in which they
think the operations ought to be conducted and the way in which
the organisation ought to be constructed. So we can expect—
Mr Howard: I think you are right.
The ministers will almost certainly be different once the political
process which started in Sunday's elections pans out.
Major General Houghton: To a certain
extent this was foreseen when they first wrote the TAL (Transitional
Administrative Law) which prevented both the Transitional and
the Interim-Governments from making a whole range of destiny decisions
about ultimate matters relating, perhaps, to the Constitution,
security sector architecture and all that. So there has to an
extent been a tension between what has been able to be determined
in terms of long term force structures and what has been needed
to be decided upon in order that the Iraqi security forces are
such that they can inherit the requirement to prosecute what will
still be a relatively complex counter-insurgency at some stage
in the future. So it is perhaps not surprising that the nature
of the ultimate security force architecture is dynamic and I think
will probably remain dynamic.
Major General Rollo: Can I put
a provincial gloss on that: on the one hand, if you are in Baghdad,
I suppose, or if you are looking at Baghdad, you can see a risk
of minister producing bits of armed force which are loyal to them—and
one has to say that the TAL set up some fairly decentralised institutions—and
from Baghdad's point of view, looking down at us, I suspect they
felt they probably did not have enough control over what was happening.
I saw with certainly mixed feelings, right at the end of my time,
the requirement to send policemen, my particularly well trained
ones, to Baghdad. On the one hand, I did not want, frankly, to
see them go—particularly as I was not sure whether they
were going to come back—but, on the other hand, what was
important was that there was the centre asserting control to move
force to where it was required—and I could not argue about
the fact that it was quiet with me and it was not quiet where
they were going. And the other thing that impressed was that they
went, and there was that degree of discipline and authority within
the system. I saw that, frankly, as a thoroughly positive sign.
Q411 Mr Havard: You have anticipated
my last question. You said yourself earlier on that this command
and control thing is key to the current situation but it also
has to be in terms of the future structures. I am very interested
in what you just said about that. They are having difficulty,
are they not, in formulating that structure? This is the key area,
is it not? Is it difficult getting people with experience, and
therefore are we and others going to have to continue to contribute
for some period of time to make sure they can do that properly?
Mr Howard: It is certainly a key
area. I would completely agree with that. I also think it is a
priority for us to provide assistance where we can. But that does
not mean to say I do not think the Iraqis are capable of actually
taking these tasks on. They will do it in their own way. It will
be important—and, again, this is an Iraqi process rather
than a British or American process—that the Iraqi department
does actually attract the right sort of people and employ the
right sort of people to come and carry out these tasks. I mean,
I met Professor Shaways, who is Secretary General at the Ministry
of Defence, and he is an extremely impressive individual. I hope
he continues under the new arrangements. There are others within
the Ministry of Defence who I suspect are less impressive. There
are good people there and it is up to the Iraqis to make sure
they staff these ministries with the right quality and the right
mix of expertise, both civilian and military.
Chairman: It is very encouraging for
those who do not like the size of the British Army to know the
Iraqis can go from zero to 115,000 in two years. There is some
hope, General, if you find the numbers are not adequate.
Q412 Mr Hancock: If I can take us
back to the police but also reflect on what you have said about
the Army. Is it possible for a nationally accepted police force
to exist in Iraq, where a policeman from Basra could operate in
the North? Is it possible for members of the Armed Forces actually
to operate across the country, in any location, with impunity,
with respect, and a general acceptance that they are there doing
a national role rather than on the whim of a particular element?
Major General Rollo: I think the
short answer to your question is yes. It has happened in the past.
I spoke frequently to Iraqis who had previously served in the
Armed Forces or the police who had served elsewhere. I think actually
it is terribly important that it does happen like that. I think
there are risks in the current policy which seem to infer that
only local people should have authority. That is understandable,
if you think that they associate people from outside with repression,
but it is not helpful because the local man is subject to all
the local pressure. There is quite a sound argument, I think,
for having a police chief from the North in Basra. That was not
always an argument which was locally appreciated, but the theory,
I think, is sound. You want a guy who is not susceptible, putting
it bluntly, to local corruption and local pressures. Likewise,
with the National Guard, which was raised locally, it was one
step above the police, who were quite definitely, seriously local,
and we put them in a barracks and said, "You are liable to
be moved around." They have now been incorporated into the
Army—I think that was one of Prime Minister Allawi's last
moves before the election, and I remember having conversations
with several of them and saying, "Look, you have got to get
used to the idea that you are going to move around. You cannot
sit outside al-Ahmarah and say that is where you want to spend
the rest of your life, and nor, if you want a career, is that
what you will want." So I do think it will happen, but, like
everything, it will take a bit of time.
Q413 Mr Hancock: Was there much discussion
about how you would prioritise? Which was the most important force
to get up and running nationwide? Was it the police force or was
it the military?
Lt General McColl: There was some
discussion of that nature. May I go back to the first question.
First of all, I think a nationally recruited, ethnically integrated
police force is undoubtedly in the national interests and generally
accepted as such. It is quite difficult to do, because that is
not the way it has been done recently. Having said that, we do
need to be careful about committing formed forces from one part
of the country into another. For example, Kurdish troops into
Mozul—a very sensitive area, and probably not something
we would wish to do. So there are sensitivities and subtleties
there which are best handled by the Iraqis. However, the point
about an ethically integrated force is undoubtedly something that
is in the national interest.
Q414 Mr Hancock: On the question
of prioritising which was the most important force, your colleague
Nick made the point that there were so many versions of the military
and other elements there. Surely a national police force should
have been the major priority.
Lt General McColl: Indeed, and
it was recognised as such. In discussions that I observed with
General Petraeus and General Casey, there was discussion about
priorities and there was a very clear understanding of the importance
of the police force. Of course, the difficulty with the police
force, as we alluded to earlier, is that it had further to go
than others because it was, during Saddam's era, the lowest of
all in terms of priority and in terms of those who would consider
joining. So there was a huge mountain to climb there in terms
of developing a force which was in the lead in the counter-insurgency
fight.
Q415 Mr Hancock: If that decision
was made, and the police were given that sense of priority, where
was the back-up that was needed to give that force some pride
in itself; the right equipment to make sure they were as well
armed as the people they were having to deal with? Why was it
that they were not all given the right sort of vehicles? One should
ask really what happened to the equipment that was there before?
Did it suddenly evaporate, was it all destroyed, or was it all
sold off or looted. There seems to be a strange dilemma, does
there not? I listened to Iraqi policemen on Sunday being interviewed
and they said, "They have asked us to protect this polling
station but we have got weapons here with hardly enough rounds
of ammunition for all of us to have a full clip." That did
not seem to be the right way to equip a police force who were
putting their lives undoubtedly on the line.
Mr Howard: In talking about the
importance of a national police force, that is absolutely right,
but, of course, that is to provide general security, general policing.
It is not necessarily, in thinking that, that we were thinking
about their desire or their ability to counter insurgency. There
is that distinction. Of course, in dealing with insurgency, the
police are only part of the answer in fact. There are other Iraqi
forces. In that sense, the heavy end of the equipment budget might
not necessarily have gone to the police, it might have gone to
units like the Iraqi Intervention Force who were required to do
more demanding tasks. That is not to say that it all went perfectly
well: there were problems about making sure the equipment was
delivered. I think there were problems early on about getting
the stream of equipment delivered into all Iraqi security forces.
One of the reasons why we supplemented it with UK funds in MND
(SE) was to try to increase the flow of things like individual
weapons, body armour, communications and so on. I think the flow
now of equipment to the Iraqi Armed Forces is actually pretty
good. After a fairly shaky start—and there were reasons
for that—I think it is actually going rather well. But John
is probably in a better position to comment in detail.
Lt General McColl: I would just
make the observation that there was a very clear understanding
of the requirement to give the police the equipment to do the
job. Having said that, the whole Iraqi security force generation
programme was a huge programme: 250,000 I think it will be by
the spring of next year—really, from a standing start. So
the whole equipment and training of that is a huge undertaking.
Inevitably, the speed with which the Americans, particularly,
but ourselves as well, have been able to deliver equipment has
not been as fast as we would wish—or, indeed, the Iraqi
police force or, indeed, the Iraqi National Guard or the Iraqi
Army. There are areas where people have been regrettably ill-equipped
to do the job, but that is rapidly being turned around and the
equipment really is coming on stream now. I think, during the
latter part of our time in theatre, we observed it coming on stream
very forcefully.
Q416 Mr Hancock: You suggested that
the police in the old regime were at the bottom of the pecking
pile and had low esteem and what-have-you. The one thing you want
is a police force in which the public has some confidence, not
only in a security sense but in a policing sense.
Mr Howard: Yes.
Q417 Mr Hancock: To know that all
the day-to-day crime is going to be properly detected and is going
to be tackled in a proper way. Do you sense that is a possibility?
Or is it already happening? Is there greater confidence that this
new police force is something that the public can feel confident
in, or is it just much of the same?
Major General Rollo: There is
a mountain to climb. In Iraq traditionally the Army has been the
defender of the nation and that has been the service which people
ascribe to join. And the police force has not. What are the components
of police morale? We have touched on quite a lot of them this
morning: legitimacy, training, equipment. As John McColl has said,
we could do the training; the equipment came in slowly—which
is why I turned around to the Ministry of Defence and said, "Look,
I understand where I am in the priority system within Iraq, but,
from my UK national point of view, I want to make progress here
and it would be very helpful to be funded," which I then
was, but that still then took time. We focused then on small bits
of the police force, to make sure that they really worked and
did have self-esteem and pride. That, if you like, was the bit
I put real effort into, because that was the short-term requirement
but in the backdrop to that was a much longer, slower process,
being driven from Baghdad, and slower because it was a much larger
scale, which was going to look at, if you like, revalidating the
entire membership of the police force. They were going to look
at everybody: everybody then had to be re-documented and looked
at in terms of age, educational qualification and general suitability.
That process was just starting towards the end of my time but
was designed to have, I think, potentially, a really quite dramatic
effect on the people who were in it. So all of those who had come
in on a fairly temporary basis the year before, because they were
there and they put their hands up, were going to be re-examined,
and if they did not fit the bill for a future police, then there
would be a large-scale redundancy programme—or that certainly
was the idea when I left—which would create room for new
policemen who had been much better trained and had done the eight-week
course to come in to replace them. I think it is a long-term issue,
but I do not see why it should not happen. But all those things
need to be done. The other aspect is the leadership. If we can
get the leadership right, so that our young, newly trained, idealistic
policeman does not go into an organisation where the first response
is, "That's all very well, sunshine, but this is the way
it works in this station," then there is scope for progress.
Q418 Mr Cran: If I may deal with
inter-force cooperation. I loved your expression about the security
architecture. It rather says what the problem is. You, Mr Howard,
spoke of the various security elements in the Iraqi front. When
we were in Baghdad, we were told about these things called Joint
Operations Centres, which is meant, I think, to bridge this gap
between these various forces. Could you tell us what is happening?
Are they successful? What happened in your time in MND (SE)?
Major General Rollo: Each province
is supposed to have at least one. The idea was fairly straightforward,
that there should be a single Joint Operations Centre which had
the representatives of all the people present. Perhaps I ought
to step back on that, because my predecessor, just before he left,
set up a structure which was, I think, adopted country-wide, which
was that there should be a security committee in each province,
chaired by the governor—so, I suppose, in some ways similar
to a police court—where he could set out policy and say,
"Right, these are the major security issues . . ." whether
it was security on route 6 or a spate of kidnapping or customs
or the protection of the oil infrastructure. He would then hand
that on to the Chief of Police, who has the lead, who then would
construct a plan, normally with our help initially, which would
then be executed by the Joint Operations Centre. Did you visit
one when you were in Basra?
Q419 Mr Cran: I do not think so.
Major General Rollo: If I could
suggest it, perhaps it would be helpful to do so next time. Where
there was, if you like, a watch leader, who was a colonel in the
police, and then there were representatives of the others there.
So information would come in and there was a sort of response
function for that but also a planning function. For instance,
with something like an election, then the people represented there
would be responsible for putting together the plan and we had
an officer in there permanently. Again, it takes time to get these
things to work together but they had some considerable successes
with planned operations, initiated, increasingly, as I left, where
bits of the police and bits of the National Guard would work together,
the police doing, for instance, the search and the National Guard
providing the cordon. There was plenty of scope to build on those
and to take it forward.
Lt General McColl: At a national
level, the PJOCs (Political Joint Operations Centres) and the
Provincial Security Committees worked. They were, as you say,
rolled out across the country. I think it is fair to say they
were everywhere—they worked better in some places than others,
but they were right across the country at provincial level. At
national level you had also an architecture which was designed
to integrate, first of all, the Iraqi Government and then the
coalition with the Iraqi Government. So you had a National Security
Committee which was chaired by the Prime Minister, upon which
sat the Interior Minister and Minister of Defence. Our own ambassador
would sit on that, as would Ambassador Negroponte and as would
General Casey. So that was a thoroughly integrated committee.
Below that, you had the Security Committee, which was chaired
by representatives of the MoD, the MoI, and one of my functions
was to be the co-chair on behalf of the multinational force—again,
predominantly Iraqi, but integrating the coalition and Iraqi operation
in a way which was as coherent as it could be. The architecture
sounds joined up, and I would not wish to pretend that it was
entirely coherent and there were not hiccups, but the structure
was there and the aspiration was there, and, as the capabilities
and the experience of the Iraqi ministry grows, as Mr Howard has
indicated, I think that is a structure which will be put in place
and we can build on.
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