House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

defence committee

 

 

iraq

 

 

Wednesday 2 February 2005

MR MARTIN HOWARD, LT GENERAL JOHN McCOLL CBE DSO,

MAJOR GENERAL NICK HOUGHTON CBE and MAJOR GENERAL BILL ROLLO CBE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 95

 

 

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 2 February 2005

Members present

Mr Bruce George, in the Chair

Mr James Cran

Mr David Crausby

Mike Gapes

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Peter Viggers

________________

Witnesses: Mr Martin Howard, Director-General, Operational Policy, Ministry of Defence, Lt General John McColl CBE DSO, former British Military Representative in Iraq, Major General Nick Houghton CBE, Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations) and Major General Bill Rollo CBE, former GOC MND (SE), examined.

333. Chairman: Gentlemen, welcome back. We will be continuing with our session on British operations in Iraq. Thank you for making yourselves available. Last time we ended our discussion with a series of questions about troops in multi-national divisions south and the strains that the Dutch withdrawal from Al Muthanna province may place upon British forces. Since then the Secretary of State has announced further deployments to cover any gaps which have arisen. We will return to that later on this morning. Last week I told you we would start the session with questions about the elections. I, for one, am absolutely delighted, despite the loss of life, that the elections passed off far more successfully than many in the media and some here had feared or, dare I say it, in some cases hoped. We will come to this shortly. Obviously what marred the election further was the loss of the aircraft and British personnel. Without prejudging any inquiry that is obviously taking place, is there anything that you would like to add to what might have appeared in the media which may or may not have reflected reality?

Mr Howard: First of all, obviously we share your pleasure at the outcome of the election. We were very pleased; I think it was highly successful. If it will help the Committee, General Houghton will be prepared to say something about the security operation and how that went a little later, when it is convenient. We were very pleased. I think there was a very good turnout, particularly in the North and South. As expected, the Sunni turnout was low but in some areas it was encouragingly high, where there was less intimidation perhaps. It is, of course, just the first step and there is a process which you are familiar with of going through to draft a constitution, a referendum, and then elections at the end of this year. So a very good start. Without pre-empting what Nick may say later on, I think the general view was the security operation went well both in terms of performance of Iraqi security forces and the coalition. On the crash of the C130, I think the first thing to say is that everyone in the Armed Forces and the MoD is thinking of those who have lost their loved ones in the crash. It is too early to say very much about what happened on the day, there is a very thorough investigation which is underway now. I think I would prefer not to come up with any detailed points when that investigation goes on. In answer to your direct question, Chairman, I do not think there is much I can add at this stage.

334. Chairman: When you have small Armed Forces the loss of any soldier in any circumstances is distressing. Obviously we, on the Committee, send our condolences to the families and friends of those who were killed wherever they stand. General, you mentioned security support for the election turned out very well. Were there any incidents involving British troops? What did they disrupt or disturb or find? Was there any departure from your description last week that they would operate on the third outer tier of a security ring? Were there occasions when they had to go closer in towards the polling stations in order to support the Iraq police?

Major General Houghton: No, there were not. There were - and there was some press coverage of it - some pre-emptive operations on the eve of election day during which there was some interdiction of explosives and bomb making materials which was very good, intelligence led. There was no requirement for British soldiers to close in on key point defence of election sites, they maintained a reaction force capability in depth. There was some element of framework patrolling which went on. Across the piece, as a whole I would echo Martin's comments that security on election day passed off well in the round. I think it reflected great credit on the security arrangements provided principally by Iraqi security forces but also, of course, the supporting troops of the multi-national force. To give you just a statistical feel for what went on on the day, there were in overall terms a total of 260 incidents reported, 108 of those targeted directly against election sites, polling booths, that sort of thing, but the lethality of these attacks was low, reflecting the fact that many of them were either poorly planned or else pretty speculative in nature, firing small arms from great distances, more to have some sort of an atmospheric effect rather than targeting specific people. No single attack penetrated any polling station. There were a total of eight suicide bombers and collectively those eight suicide bombers caused ten deaths and 33 injuries.

335. Chairman: Overall?

Major General Houghton: This is overall in Iraq. The total casualty figures for the day were 44 killed and 161 injured and whereas one certainly cannot make light of that, it being very sad, I think that against what some of the worst case prognoses might have been, this can be seen as a relatively good success for the nature of the overall security operations.

336. Chairman: Were Armed Forces involved in escorting ballot boxes to wherever the collecting points were?

Major General Houghton: To be perfectly honest, I will have to come back to you on that, that certainly was not the plan that they needed to. I would not want to give you a definitive no without checking that out.

337. Chairman: Maybe in support of those who were carrying them. If it is possible, when you have more information, perhaps you could give us a fuller account because that would be very helpful. I think we are all delighted - except some journalists who are now having to revise what they wrote - that the elections were very successful and have led to a democratically elected sovereign authority and we have been able to play an important part in achieving that objective. It is much too early, I suppose, to start thinking about security for further elections but I think we are reasonably satisfied. While we will get to a more detailed discussion of security sector reform later in our discussions, can you provide us with an assessment either in full or in part now, or if you cannot provide it in full now perhaps by letter, as to how the Iraqi security forces performed? Was there evidence of them all turning up for work? I know we were informed in some very dangerous parts of the country there were a few sickies sent in to their employers and a lot of people did not turn up for duties.

Mr Howard: Is that during the election, Chairman?

338. Chairman: In the run-up to the election, were they fully manned?

Mr Howard: I think the picture with Iraqi security forces varies from unit to unit and province to province and we can give you a more detailed note, certainly, rather than go into all the ins and outs now. In general, I think in certain areas, even against quite demanding opposition, the Iraqi security forces have done well. For example, units performed well in Fallujah in support of coalition action, also in Sada City and Samara and Najaf. There have been other occasions where they have performed less well, I think Mosul would be an example of that, and certainly in some areas there have been problems of desertion and absence without leave. It is varied across the piece. I think generally in MND (South East) we have had perhaps a better performance overall. No-one would suggest that they are fully effective at this stage to take on full security duties, that is obviously a priority for our policies during 2005. Nick, do you want to add anything?

Major General Houghton: I could not instantaneously give you - and they are not yet available, as it were - percentages of turnout figures on the day for the various elements of the security force architecture within the Iraqi security forces. Martin is right to reflect that in general terms, not just for the elections but in operations leading up to the elections, the turnout within the Iraqi security forces has been a general reflection of the nature of the security situation in the area in which they are operating, the level of intimidation that they and their families are subjected to in the local environment and the degree of training and battle inoculation which has gone into the preparation of those particular units. Clearly this varies quite significantly across the piece. In the normal run of things we would expect to get some sort of percentage feedback on the figures for turnout on the day because this feeds back into the training mechanism.

Chairman: It is rather humbling for politicians who ponder over the elections in Iraq and the bravery of people involved, when you think that at the last election 40 per cent of the electorate in this country decided for one reason or another not to vote without any threats of being beheaded en route and so it is very encouraging for the future of what I hope will be a democratic Iraq to see people who were courageous enough, especially those people who were Sunni where the threats must have been infinitely greater for them to vote. I think we ought to express our admiration for everybody concerned in the process. The last question on this: I know areas other than our own are not your responsibility but if in the course of your work you come across any studies which are more or less open sourced in other parts of the country I think it would be very helpful if you would not mind alerting us to the authors or maybe, with the permission of the authors, pass them on to us because this is such an important part in the evolution of contemporary Iraq. Thank you very much. We have a few questions on the coalition troop levels.

339. Mr Viggers: The Prime Minister has commented on the handover of control and his spokesman said that the Prime Minister was setting out "a timeline, rather than a timescale". I do not know if you can distinguish between the two?

Mr Howard: I think the way we would see it, and the way Prime Minister Allawi has seen it also, in his statement last week on the subject of 25 January, is that in looking ahead to the potential withdrawal of British troops and coalition troops more generally, it is more a question of defining the right conditions under which that withdrawal could take place. I should make the point, also, that no-one would expect the sudden withdrawal of everything, it will be a staged process and it will be linked to the security situation in the province but most of all linked to the ability of the Iraqi security forces to take on responsibility, both at provincial and national level for containing and ultimately defeating insurgency. The Prime Minister's spokesman obviously speaks for himself but the thinking that we have in the Department is that we try to find conditions against which reduction can take place, and ultimately withdrawal can take place, rather than saying "It will happen by date X". As our thinking refines itself, and as we are clear about progress on development of Iraqi security forces, it may be possible to give more precision about timings but at this stage I think we would be quite cautious about putting a date on it.

340. Mr Viggers: At the moment it is going the other way, is it not, with Ukraine and Portugal announcing their withdrawal; with Poland, the Netherlands and Hungary saying they will be withdrawing their troops after the election, in fact we are increasing our commitment by a net 220 which will reduce to 150, according to the Minister of State.

Mr Howard: Each nation has to decide on its commitment to the coalition, and a number of nations have said they are going to make changes and make reductions. It is worth saying that other nations have said, also, that they will stay the course. The Japanese announced that they are staying until the end of 2005, as have the Koreans, so the picture is by no means universally one way, and there is still a very strong coalition presence both in MND (South East) and elsewhere across Iraq. I think the important thing is that the coalition, working with the Iraqi Government, sets out a clear strategy for the forthcoming year, to 2005, which makes progress on the security front which matches the progress that we hope is going to occur on the political front and where we made a very good start last Sunday. You are right in the sense that some nations have decided to scale down or pull out but I think that is part of being within a coalition.

341. Mr Viggers: Are you able to give us further information about the Luck Commission, the inquiries/investigations made by General Luck in Iraq which were reported back to the American President?

Mr Howard: I do not think we can add anything to what we said at our last evidence session. I think the American administration is still considering the findings of the Luck review and I think it will be premature for us to say anything more until we are clear about what the President, the Defence Secretary and others have concluded about that.

342. Mr Viggers: Are you able to comment on the press story that appeared to be quite authoritative in its source that there has been an agreement between our Secretary of State, Geoff Hoon, and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State for Defence in the United States, about the withdrawal strategy?

Mr Howard: I have seen a number of reports on that. I do not think I want to comment in any detail other than to say we are obviously in touch with the Americans and as we draw up our suggestion for a strategy it is something we need to discuss with the US authorities. Obviously that will happen at all levels, including between the Defence Secretary and Mr Rumsfeld.

343. Chairman: I can see why you have risen up the hierarchy, Mr Howard, a very Yes, Minister response. We will look forward to asking you when more information is made available. Before Peter finishes, there were some stories in, I think, it was the International Herald Tribune that some countries in the European Union which were pretty hostile to sending in the troops seemed to be, by congratulating the parties in the elections and other statements, indicating, according to, I believe, the Herald Tribune, that the door is not completely closed as far as some countries who were opposed to the war and not deploying troops. Is the door slightly ajar? Do you think there may be countries who have not committed troops, if they believe in the preservation and enhancement of democracy in Iraq, that may now be prepared to send troops in order to assist the emerging government to secure its own structure and identity?

Mr Howard: I think there are some signs of that, Chairman. Certainly the public statements made by a number of governments in Europe and elsewhere I think have been supportive of what happened on Sunday, and the outcome of the elections, and that is clearly a good thing. In terms of commitment, there are indications that quite a lot of countries are prepared, for example, to contribute to the proposed NATO training mission which will have a component inside Iraq and a component outside Iraq. Some countries will be more inclined, I think, to confine what they do to operations outside Iraq rather than inside for political reasons. I think outside of that framework there are also indications - more than indications - some countries have offered to provide training, for example, for police forces rather than military forces outside Iraq. I do not think it would be appropriate for me to list now all the indications we have had because I would need to check the extent to which that has been made public by the governments concerned. If it would help the Committee we could try and produce a snapshot on paper of where we think things are. It may have to be classified.

344. Chairman: In a couple of weeks, clearer and closer to the publication of our report, at least if some countries who were being difficult to NATO in training the Iraqi Army, if they consider withdrawing that veto or obstreperous behaviour as a nation to other people who want to assist, then that in itself would be exceedingly welcome.

Mr Howard: Yes.

345. Mr Viggers: Can I say if you are producing such a memorandum for us, it would be extremely helpful if you could include anything you can say about the possible NATO involvement in Iraq and possible EU involvement in Iraq?

Mr Howard: Certainly we can do that. I would rather do that because the NATO situation is quite complex and I cannot remember all the details, so it is easier for me to put it down on paper and send it to you.

Chairman: We know the general principles.

346. Mr Havard: I just want to go back to this Luck Commission. I have not seen the PowerPoint slides myself that we heard about. One of the things which certainly is in discussion in America is the question about how you give resilience to the Iraqi forces, how you build them up and all that. One way of doing that, it is suggested, is that in some way or another you can integrate coalition forces into Iraqi units, whether this is the National Guard Units or the emerging Army, I am not quite sure, in order to bolster them in terms of their effectiveness but also as mentors to expand their training and so on. What I am wondering is whether or not this is an active discussion and whether or not there have been requests from the coalition partners or from the Iraqi Government or anyone else in order to examine putting in British troops into that sort of process?

Mr Howard: Again, I do not think I want to say anything more specifically about Luck.

347. Mr Havard: Sorry, I mentioned it in that context because, as I understood it, part of the argument from Luck was that if you do this then you bring forward their capacity more quickly and hence you bring forward your exit more quickly.

Mr Howard: There are a number of ideas being addressed both in the US and in London about how best we can mentor and bolster Iraqi security forces. As of today, I am not aware of any requests which have come for us specifically to integrate groups of people into Iraqi units. We are working already very closely with Iraqi units. For example, the headquarters of the 10^th Iraqi National Guard Division is co-located with the headquarters of MND (South East). There are different ways of approaching this but the basic objective is to bolster the capacity of Iraqi security forces ultimately for them to act on their own. I think it is important, also, to say that it is not sufficient simply to bolster the fighting capacity of individual units, it is important, also, that the necessary command and control higher direction logistic support is there also. This is not so obvious and a bit harder to measure but it is just as crucial as building the capacity of front line units themselves.

Major General Houghton: Bill might be able to comment from his experience first hand within MND (South East). On the business of military assistance to Iraqi security forces, there is an extent to which this, as a concept, has been enacted already within MND (South East) where the degree of integration between British forces and forces within the multi-national division have been, to an extent, mentoring the ISF. This has not been as easy to do in those areas of Iraq where the nature of the security environment had not allowed it to that extent. Clearly this is one way of helping to accelerate the quality as well as the quantity of Iraqi security forces to give them assistance at first hand in some of their street craft, battle inoculation, that sort of thing. Bill might be able to comment further about the experience in MND (South East).

Major General Rollo: If I split it out into the National Guard and the police, when we started raising the National Guard in the South East - and this was before my time - we did it in a slightly different way from other people by giving the task to a single infantry battalion which then split out. For instance, each of the National Guard battalions was looked after by a company, either initially the Parachute Regiment and then the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and then so on down, you might end up in the end with a junior lance corporal or a private soldier instructing a particular section. That worked extremely well and they were brought to a relatively high level of training, relatively extremely quickly, and that process ran really until the beginning of July. At that point they said "We are ready, we can do this on our own, please back off a bit and we will be fine". For the sorts of tasks they were being given to do with rural security initially it all appeared to work very well. In some areas it took a step back with the outbreak of violence in August when they came under a lot of additional pressure. I was quite careful that I did not ask them to do things which, in my view, they were not ready to do either because they did not have the firepower to do it or because morally and politically - and you are talking about people having to fight people from their own town - I felt it would be placing too great a burden on them, I would rather keep them in being and then be able to pick them up and move them on afterwards rather than to confront them with a challenge they were not ready for. What became clear in that process was that you needed both to continue the process of improving their standards of training and to provide that helping hand and human contact which said "Look, we understand the political pressures you are under, we understand from your point of view this is still a society that is pretty damaged, the political future is not clear, you do not know who your boss is going to be or which political party is going to be in power next year, but nevertheless you are servants of the state and your fellow citizens expect you to maintain order." We set up a process, therefore, of partnering again and of restarting that process of saying to each battalion "There is a commanding officer who will come and give you whatever level of mentorship is appropriate and likewise the companies will do the same". We put in place, also, a number of training programmes, really from the bottom up to take their junior NCOs and give them a three week package. You could see that from day one, when they were all fairly uncertain, by day two the thing was rolling, and they were enjoying it and they were good. That process has continued, I know, because I spoke to General Riley last week. On the police side, again there has been a similar process. Whereas earlier in the year we were focusing very heavily on people going in on a daily basis to police stations, I think after a while that process has reached its sell-by date in a way, it is no longer welcome or probably necessary. Where we have put a lot of focus has been on the special units because, again, it seemed to me that each governor needed to have an organisation on which he could completely rely, which was trained and equipped to the right standards to take on public order challenges which were there and also on the command and control where we produced these integrated joint options, and I think you may have seen at least one of them when you went out there, where we have military and police staff integrated with the representatives of the various Iraqi services. That is a long answer to your question.

348. Mr Havard: That is helpful. We will deal with some of the detail on those issues later on. The presentation of British regimental sergeant-majors leading Iraqi troops, an integration of British forces into Iraqi forces to bolster, is some of that a caricature?

Major General Rollo: No, I do not think that is a vision you should have in your mind.

349. Mr Havard: It is not one I have in my mind, it is one that has been put to me and that is why I am asking you the question.

Major General Rollo: Certainly that was not what was happening while I was there and I do not believe it is now.

350. Chairman: Obviously you cannot have the troops being trained and organised in one part of Iraq totally different from other parts. What level of co-ordination is there between ourselves and the Americans so we are not going off in different directions or seeking to imply different values that might make integration of total police forces or security forces generally more difficult?

Major General Rollo: If I might refer back to General John in a second. From the National Guard's point of view low level infantry skills are low level infantry skills, there is no tremendous difference in doctrine or anything else in terms of how you train a rifle section or a platoon. On the police side, there were national curricula for the various courses that were run. In some cases we developed them and sent them up to Baghdad and in some cases they came down from Baghdad, and that was fine. There was an increasing degree, I think - but, again, it had become relatively mature before I got there - of central control over what was being taught, even though it was being taught by different people. But inevitably, you will get a different gloss if you are a policeman being taught by a carabineri or a Dutch Marechausse officer in one of the other two provinces, than you will by somebody from Devon or Cornwall constabulary down in Basra. But the subject matter is essentially the same.

351. Mike Gapes: Could I take you back to something Mr Howard said just now about the withdrawal of some countries. Do you think the withdrawal of countries, some in NATO and some outside NATO, means they will not go back? Or if there is a NATO heading or if there is another UN resolution, which there has to be, will this then mean that the countries that have taken their forces out or are about to take their forces out will reconsider and come back under another heading?

Mr Howard: I think that is entirely possible. Indeed, some countries which are scaling down their presence, as it were, on a coalition basis within Iraq are switching their effort to supporting the NATO mission in a different way. A number of nations have done that. As the political process moves on, what you have described, I think, could well happen. But it is rather difficult for me to speculate and say, "Well, this country will do that." As I say, we will try to cover some of the detail on this in the note that I have promised, but certainly some countries have already indicated that, although they will no longer formally be part of the coalition, they would actually take part in the NATO training mission, either as trainers or, indeed, in providing protection for the NATO training mission.

352. Mike Gapes: We also understood that there would only be 300 people as part of this NATO provision there, so there is a problem of manpower, is there not, in absolute terms? Would there not be a need for some other mechanism, if we are going to get the outside assistance up higher? Or, alternatively, the United States and ourselves will be expected to do even more.

Mr Howard: I think there are a number of points in that. First of all, we need to distinguish between the number of trainers which NATO are providing - and I think that is the 300 - but there will also be quite a number of others who will be committed, as it were, to protection. In a sense, that helps deal with the numbers problem. The other issue really goes back to what I said earlier on about our strategy for 2005, which is increasingly towards providing training, support and assistance to the Iraqi forces, which would in turn imply that, as they become more capable, we would need to do rather less for inward operations - which is what can sometimes lead to the numbers. I think that just doing a numbers' analysis is probably too simplistic. It really needs to be related to function and the development of Iraqi capabilities rather than just saying, "Well, if the number of coalition troops changes by this amount, that has that particular effect."

353. Mike Gapes: But you are going to send us a detailed note.

Mr Howard: I shall certainly send you a detailed note about what other nations are doing and on the NATO proposals and also what we know of what the European Union is considering.

354. Mr Cran: On to the insurgency, the structure of it and how many, if you can answer those questions for the Committee. Because this is a destabilising influence, without any question of a doubt at all. Happily, as the Chairman said, not as destabilising as prevented the elections at the weekend - so that is a good thing. Structure first. General Abizaid, the former head of US Central Command, in November 2003 said this was a very loosely based organisation. Do any of you have a feel for the structure of the south? Is it loosely based? Is it rather more organised?

Mr Howard: Perhaps I could kick off and then I might ask colleagues to chip in. We did touch on this at the last evidence session, Mr Cran. I think it is a complex insurgency, in the sense that it is not a single unified group of people. There are a number of components within it. At one end of the spectrum is a sense of perhaps alienation and disenfranchisement among the Sunni population, which in some cases spills over into relatively low-level violence. It is worth remembering that Iraq has traditionally been a very weapons-rich society - there have always been lots of weapons around - and also, to some extent, that may manifest itself in support and sympathy for those who are at the more extreme end. That moves forward through groups of people who were part of the former regime, who, again, even more so, feel disenfranchised and, moreover, perhaps have the training and residual organisation to carry out attacks. That then, again going through the extremes, moves into people like the Zarqawi's group, who are motivated by a wider Jahadi Islamist agenda, if you wish to characterise it that way, who have recently associated themselves with al-Qa'eda. These are people, as we all know, who have carried out the most appalling atrocities and the most devastating attacks. The fourth identifiable component would be Shia extremists like Muqtada al-Sadr, who have been responsible for violence but who currently seem to be more interested in taking part in the political process - though we will have to watch that. Swirling all around that is the criminality and violence associated with that, and some of that overlaps. So it is actually a very complex picture. You mentioned numbers. I would be very dubious - and I have studied this for a couple of years now in my previous capacity - of trying to put numbers and say, "There are x thousand insurgents." I think that is actually quite a dangerous route to go down. That is my general characterisation. John, would you like to say anything, from sitting in Baghdad and a bit closer to it.

Lt General McColl: Yes, I will give a Baghdad perspective, from my experience last year. I think the insurgency can be divided roughly into three. The first element is what I would describe as the Shia militias, epitomised by al-Sadr and his people. They, in the uprising in April and then in the uprising in August, were dealt, I think, a fairly serious blow - and one can see that in some of the ways in which they have modified their behaviour - and whilst I think they will continue to be a threat, particularly in the South, I do not think they will represent a strategic threat. The second element is Jihadists, epitomised by Zarqawi and his group. I think that, as long as there is a significant Western presence in Iraq, we will continue to see significant Jihadist activity. Having said that, during the time I was there we analysed the number of attacks that were emanating from Zarqawi and his people, and it was around one per cent of the total attacks. So, whilst they are very high profile and whilst they are very effective in terms of grabbing the headlines, in terms of the numbers of attacks they are actually quite limited. Which brings us on to the third group, which is the former regime elements. I think, by common consent, over the last year they have developed in terms of coherence and sophistication. I do not think we can deny that. They are trying to represent themselves as freedom fighters, in terms of the western and multinational force and coalition presence, and, in doing so, bind themselves with the other two groups that I have just mentioned. However, I do think the recent successful elections will have been a significant blow, in terms of trying to dent that, because I do not think there is a great deal of support for the former regime elements but they can develop support based upon this idea of being some kind of freedom fighting organisation. I think those are the three elements. There is no doubt which poses the major threat, and that is the former regime elements and those who coalesce around them, and those are the people we need to target. Certainly the development in democracy that we have seen just recently is by far the most effective way of doing that.

355. Mr Cran: Given your background, do you have a feel, in relation to any one or other of those three groupings, what the influence of, let's say, those coming in from Syria or other countries around is? Is it hugely destabilising?

Lt General McColl: I think the multinational force commander General Casey is on record as saying that the freedom with which the movement of personnel and resources across the Syrian border, particularly in association with the former regime elements, is allowed to happen, is unhelpful. And I would agree with that. From the briefings that I was given over the six months out there, they are unhelpful, deeply uhelpful.

356. Mr Cran: If I could just be unfair for a second and ask any or all of you to prognosticate, that is, to look into the future, because I suspect the strength of the insurgency is going to be one of the elements that is going to enable us to exit Iraq either rather more quickly or rather slower than we would like. The question is: Are they weakening, do you think? I am particularly interested, General McColl, in what you said about the effect of the elections. Do you think they will weaken because of developments that have taken place and lose a bit of heart?

Lt General McColl: It is difficult to quantify, but I would think there are grounds to assume that it will weaken their level of seed-corn support. I do not think there is any doubt about that. Also, positively, I think it will develop the legitimacy of the Iraqi security forces. Because one of the key factors in their effectiveness is the degree to which they are considered to be legitimate nationally and locally and I think the fact that they are now working for an elected Iraqi Government will develop that sense of legitimacy and directly impact upon their operational effectiveness.

Mr Howard: I would completely endorse that. I would add that there will be an onus on Iraqis, particularly Shias and Kurds to find a way of bringing Sunni people into the political process that goes on. The more that can be done and be seen to be done, the more that will tend to undermine any broad support and sympathy for the groupings. But I do not think we should think it is just going to go away very quickly. I mean, there are still people out there who are very determined to do that, and the motivation of someone like Zarqawi is really not influenced by elections at all. The only other point I would make is that it is a fact that, if there is a unified theme across those who are responsible for the insurgency, it is the hostility to the coalition, to those who they describe as "occupiers". In that sense, the extent to which the security profile is seen to be more and more Iraq and less and less coalition may also help to demotivate, particularly the "softer end" of the insurgency, if I may describe it like that. But this is speculation, Mr Cran, you understand that.

357. Mr Cran: I realise that - and I guess speculation goes on the whole time in the MoD: "If this happens, what are we going to do?"

Mr Howard: Quite.

358. Mr Cran: So I think it is fair to ask the question. Do you think, given your professional background - and I suppose I am really looking at General McColl now - that we can get the Iraqi police force, and, for that matter, the Iraqi armed services, to the professional level that they themselves are going to be able to deal with insurgency?

Lt General McColl: Yes.

359. Mr Cran: Could you give us an idea of how far away that might be - and, again, I am asking you to speculate, but I guess you are all doing that anyway.

Lt General McColl: They need to be effective based on the threat which opposes them. Therefore, one side of the equation is the effectiveness of support we can give to the Iraqi security forces. There are positive signs there. This is very, very tough, particularly in the Sunni areas, but there are definitely positive signs and I think the way in which they performed over the election period is a sign that, even in those difficult areas, they can deliver security. But on the other side of the equation is the degree to which the insurgency continues to generate general support, particularly - and I am now really focusing on the FRE elements and the support around the FRE elements, as Mr Howard said - in relation to the idea of freedom fighters against occupancy. Once we begin to undermine that, then the pressure may well begin to subside slightly in the insurgency and that, again, will impact upon the Iraqi security force's ability to deliver effective security. So I think those two things combined give grounds for optimism.

360. Mr Cran: If I could go on, Chairman, to the question of numbers. I know, Mr Howard, you rather dismissed this and said you are not getting into that, but I rather would like to get into that for just a second because others have. General Abizaid himself in November 2003 said he thought there were around 5,000. General Shahwani, who as I understand it is the Iraqi intelligence chief, says there are 40,000 hard core fighters, along with 200,000 part-time fighters, who provide intelligence, logistics, shelter and all the rest of it. Have you made any estimates of this? Other people are, but are you not doing it?

Mr Howard: We obviously do intelligence assessments of the insurgency all the time but I do not think we try to put any precise numbers. It is interesting that the two numbers you have quoted, Mr Cran, are wildly different and may equally be valid or invalid depending on how you measure it. It is so hard: do you count someone as being part of the insurgency if, because they do not have a job and because they feel they are being excluded, they occasionally go out and take a pot-shot at a passing convoy? Is that someone you would include in the insurgency? I think that is debatable. At the other end of the extreme, someone who is making bombs and planting bombs clearly is part of it. Experience of insurgencies elsewhere suggests that sometimes the hard core could be quite small, but I think it would be very difficult for us to come up with a number that is really very meaningful. But I have not actually sort of double-checked on our most recent intelligence assessments. I will go back and check again to see if we have come up with numbers, but my feeling is that they would have to be hedged around with all sorts of caveats. It is not a question of not wanting to give you numbers or dismissing them, but it just is a precision which is not justified.

361. Mr Cran: I must say I am surprised that you have not tried to estimate the numbers, if for no other reason than as a policymaker, and perhaps the Secretary of State for Defence, perhaps the Prime Minister, knowing that they would like to get out of Iraq sometime, I would like to know whether the insurgency is growing or getting smaller. Yet no estimates of that have been made between our American allies and ourselves.

Mr Howard: I can double-check to see if we have produced any numerical analysis, but actually the more useful analysis for us is an analysis of incident types and numbers. That is a better measure of the effectiveness of the insurgency. The extent to which they are using new technology in their weapons and things like that, is more useful to us in measuring the strength in insurgency. It is actually more useful to people on the ground who have to deal with it.

Major General Rollo: If I may go back very slightly, while we all share an analysis of the three different groups within the insurgency, they do of course apply at different levels in different places. In the South-East, if I may take them in turn: Zarqawi - where we had the bombs last April and then virtually nothing until, as I understand it, some things very recently around the elections - no attraction there, no apparent interest in coming down there, and not much of a welcome to be had, for fairly obvious reasons: he does not like the Shia; they do not like him. The FRE - again, Sunni-based - at present, certainly in terms of activity, at very low levels: one or two bomb making teams, a trickle of incidents. They do not go away, every now and again you catch some of them, and then nothing happens for a period - which I think reflects on the fact that the numbers you are dealing with are small, because a relatively low level of attrition on them appears to have quite a major effect on their activity. Then you have al-Sadr and his militia or his organisation, which, seen from Baghdad, is definitely a second order problem, but, seen from Basra, is clearly my principal problem. Not an issue in June and July, because he was part of the political process; in August, clearly it was a very big issue. If you look at the number of incidents in August, there was a huge great spike, and at the end of August, broadly speaking, it went right back down to where it was. So the politics of this are critical. If al-Sadr is within the political process and is content with that, then, while he may have some people who do not want to go along with that or continue to carry out a low level of attacks just to prove they are still the big men or they are still in town, essentially it is not a major security issue. Were that to change, it would be, but this is where I would come back to your point on numbers. In August, they were quite a strong organisation, there were quite a lot of people around; after that, in terms of activity and the number of people taking part in hostile action to us, very small. How you estimate that in terms of numbers is quite difficult.

Major General Houghton: There is a fascination on numbers, both on how many numbers are within the various insurgent groupings and, indeed, on the other side, what is the numerical strength of the build-up of the Iraqi security forces. But, in many respects, although it is interesting, because you can put a numerical metric against it, it is not that relevant to the pursuit of a counter-insurgency. It is actually to do with the motivation of the leadership and the mechanisms that command control, intelligence feed, and those sorts of things within both the insurgent side of the equation and the Iraqi security force side of the equation. Most things can move. A relatively small number of people, well motivated, well led and with a good cellular structure which is intelligence-fed, can be a significantly dangerous insurgency but in numerical terms it can be quite small. I think we ought to try to resist the temptation for a numerical quantification, as if you only defeat an insurgency by attributing a certain numerical strength within it. Clearly that is not the nature of the way the counter-insurgency operation is conducted.

362. Mr Cran: I think you have all convinced me. What you now have to do is to get all these other generals to stop talking about numbers and then it will stop us talking about numbers. Is it your collective view, based on where we are at the minute, that this is containable; that is, the threat that the insurgents pose is indeed containable. It is containable not only when British and American forces are in Iraq but also when we depart.

Mr Howard: That is our assessment. We cannot sit back in a satisfied way. It will still require a lot of hard work in terms of dealing directly with the insurgency and building up the ability of the Iraqi security forces to deal with it. But, yes, if that works and that continues - and, crucially, the political process continues and has the broad support of the Iraqi people - then certainly the insurgency is containable.

363. Chairman: I suspect the Iraqi Government will be rather robust in seeking out those who are trying to destroy it. I have one small question that you may or may not be prepared to answer. They seem to have a limitless supply of young men and women who are prepared to kill themselves and anybody else within distance. Do you have any idea who is supplying these people? Are they Iraqis? Are they external? Is it a mosque that is the breeding ground for suicide bombers? Are you prepared to disclose anything on that which you might have?

Mr Howard: I think there are probably limits to what we can say in open session about that. We could look to see if there was any written material which we could provide on a classified basis for that. But the one thing I would say is that I do not think there is any single source of supply. The suicide bombers have more exclusively been involved with Zarqawi. He has been a major source of them. He has declared Iraq as a key theatre, if you like, for a broader campaign against the West, and so there is an element of people going to Iraq because that is where the action is, where the fighting is - rather in the same way as Afghanistan was ten years ago. But I do not think I would want to go into any more detail on that.

Lt General McColl: The analysis, at least during the time I was there, was that relatively few of the suicide bombers are Iraqis. The majority of those come from elsewhere across the Middle East and from elsewhere.

364. Mr Jones: On this point about numbers, I wonder whether it is a view shared by our US allies, because, when David and I visited Afghanistan a year ago, the head of operations from the US side in Pakistan was very much talking about how he saw his role as that of counter-insurgency and it was a body count. He referred to the fact. Is it a different philosophy they have in Afghanistan from that in Iraq? Or are the Americans saying one thing -----

Mr Howard: There are obviously differences in philosophy, in terms of how we present things between the US and the UK, and I am not in any sense saying one is better than the other. There is also a sense in your specific example, Mr Jones, where a coalition force, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, is able to say, "We have killed or captured x numbers of insurgents or terrorists" and that is clearly a perfectly valid statement to make.

365. Mr Jones: He was far more open than that. He saw this like a successful indicator of his operation. He had photographs of "dead Taliban" as he called them, "a body count". Certainly we saw that and we very alarmingly said, "How do you know you have got the right people?"

Major General Houghton: I think if you are talking about at a particular time, 12 months ago, Taliban, then you are talking about a different nature of operation and enemy. You are not talking about necessarily a counter-insurgency; you are talking about relatively well-founded military capability which was indulging in relatively conventional open tactic. In that respect, an attritional approach to determining success does have some merit in it. But, if you are talking about a relatively covert counter-insurgency, then the attritional approach is not the right one. I think we are contrasting two separate theatres and enemies there rather than necessarily talking about the same thing.

Lt General McColl: I would just make the observation that the security line of operations, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, will really only serve to contain the insurgency. Winning the insurgency is won along the lines of governance and economy, and, within that observation, I do not think it is particularly helpful to talk in terms of numbers and body counts

366. Mr Havard: If I could turn to the counter-insurgency operations, their conduct and so on and the lessons we have learned as far as that is concerned. By accident, I saw a programme on the television last night dealing with the Americans in Vietnam. They started off by measuring business as an attrition rate of the numbers of Vietnamese they were killing. There are parallels in terms of how you deal with operations on the ground, because there is a great difference between the methodologies employed by the British and the Americans. As you know, this is a matter of some contention. Mention was made earlier on of the conduct of operations in relation to Fallujah, for example, where the net effect or result of Fallujah may be to disperse people or to undermine them and make them, as I think you said, General, now to be "not a strategic threat". But the question all the time is: Are the counter-insurgency techniques being done in such a way that they are, if you like, killing it off? Fallujah was at one point billed as the death blow for these people. Clearly, it was not that. All the questions about proportionality of response, human rights issues, how you deploy on the ground are obviously the meat and drink of this discussion. I would like to know, in conducting counter-insurgency operations, are there specific lessons we are learning about how we change our own approach and how we will deploy? Because future capabilities tell us that more often than not in the future we will be in coalitions and very often coalitions with the Americans. Are there specific lessons coming off the ground and how are they being accommodated?

Mr Howard: In general, we are always learning lessons, because, as the insurgency develops, we develop new tactics to deal with it. I think at the heart of it we need a clear campaign plan. I know that John, when he was in Baghdad, was very heavily involved in producing the overall coalition campaign plan for dealing with insurgency. Perhaps you would like to say something about that, John, to give a background.

Lt General McColl: Just to give some balance to the impression of the way the Americans consider and think about the campaign. I particularly make the point that when General Casey arrived and Ambassador Negroponte arrived they were very clear that an integrated campaign which wrapped together the security line of operation, the governance line, the economic line and the information line, was absolutely critically. In fact, when General Casey arrived, part of our initial conversations was a comparison of the way operations were conducted in Vietnam and the way in which they were conducted in Malaya and the lessons that could be drawn from that and the requirement for this kind of integrated approach. He set in train a set of work, in which British officers were centrally involved, to produce a campaign which did wrap together all of those lines of operation and, indeed, which integrated with the Iraqis - because of course the Iraqis were critical to this as well. So I think it would be unfair to characterise the American understanding of the counter-insurgency campaign as in any way being naive. Of course, there are - and we have discussed this before - significant differences in the way in which the Americans have to conduct their campaign, by dint of the areas of Iraq in which they are based and the threat with which they are faced.

Mr Howard: Just on Fallujah, which you have picked up, Mr Howard, there is no doubt that in October and November Fallujah had to be dealt with. One could argue about the best way of dealing with it and the timing, but the point I would make is that, firstly, it was ultimately the Iraqi Government that said, "This has to be dealt with" and for very political reasons it had to be dealt with. Secondly, I would say that it was actually successful in dealing with the problem of Fallujah. It had become a sort of ungoverned space, where terrorists were able to operate freely, and that is no longer the case. There are still lots of problems, in terms of restored services and so on, and that work needs to go on, but it would certainly be wrong to describe the Fallujah operation as a failure, because actually it did succeed in what it was intended to do.

367. Mr Havard: I do not want to debate Fallujah with you but I would say that you destroyed two-thirds of the city, you knackered the infrastructure and murdered other people - human rights issues. There is an alternative view about what actually went on in order to achieve that success, therefore, in relation to neutralising some capacity for insurgence. So proportionality and how you do it, that is a different debate, in one sense. But in a sense it is not, because it is how do you win the hearts and minds thing; how do you conduct operations that are hard operations to sort people out, pull them out of the community, all of that, at the same time as doing that. This is being done day-to-day on the ground as well. Fallujah is one big incident, but there is a lot of that activity happening, with small platoons out doing it day by day. I am trying to find out what the lessons we learn are and how we view that coincidental with the Americans. Because, if you are saying to me, "We have one single area where the Americans are operating, which is where all the bad boys are, and we have another area in the South which is more benign and therefore we can afford to employ different tactics," to some extent that would be true. But that is not really getting at the question I was trying to get at of how you are part of a combined approach, so that you get some unity across the whole area in terms of the end result. Because we are trying, as I understand it, to keep Iraq within its current borders, not break it into three states.

Mr Howard: That is certainly true. I think John made a very telling point in describing the development of the campaign plan with its three or four lines of operation, of which security is only one - and that campaign plan is a national campaign plan for Iraq, but the point to make is that, in different parts of Iraq, the emphasis inevitably will be on different parts of the lines of operation. In areas such as MND (SE), overwhelmingly the emphasis can be on governance, on economic development and on the so-called "hearts and minds" operations, and, elsewhere in Iraq, where indeed we do not operate and where the Americans are operating very effectively, the same thing applies. But when you are facing an insurgency which is actually becoming very violent and very effective, from time to time you will need to take the harder-edged security measures. It so happens that they tended to be concentrated in particular areas for reasons we have discussed.

368. Mr Havard: Could I step down a level from the big picture to the operations on the ground. The suggestion is that in the short term the US and UK operational concepts are antithetical and in the long term are mutually exclusive. What I am trying to get at is that we went on a number of occasions - and we visited Northern Ireland last year, and essentially it is the Northern Ireland experience, the Malayan experience, the Cyprus experience of dealing with counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency - the same sort of idea - and what you will see is this nexus between the military and the police and how you deploy on the ground. In Northern Ireland, you can see the way in which the British would work: they would expect to deploy in a way that, once they had an incident, they would tend to be more moving towards trying to hand it over to the police service to deal with the crime. So there is a question on how the Americans work and how the British work day to day and what lessons there are on that.

Mr Howard: I think I might ask one of my military colleagues to say a little about that. Shall I start with you, Bill, and you can talk in general terms.

Major General Rollo: I suppose my preamble would be that I did not feel I was conducting a counter-insurgency in the South East. There was not an insurgency - there was in August, but the rest of the time there was not. I had a counter-terrorist campaign going on, against a very small number of people, and quite a lot of what I did was designed to make sure I did not have to do a counter-insurgency. The maintenance of consent was always on our minds, and, fundamentally, we intended to win it by making progress politically and on the economic side, which would remove any underlying reason for .... We went back to motivation, Chairman. But if you felt that part of al-Sadr's motivation and ability to recruit was based on the fact that there were a large number of unemployed young men, then clearly getting the economy going at one end, and having a political process which is clearly independent of us, was part of removing that motivation. That is what we were doing. If I looked at my peer group, the American divisional commanders, who I used to meet up with once a month, and the sort of conversations we had round the table, there was absolutely no doubt in their minds that they wanted to be able to do the same thing, that money was ammunition. When I think of General Corelli in Baghdad, he could not have been clearer that the way to solve the issues there was by improving life for the occupants of the North East. He would wax eloquent on it, if I may put it as politely as that. He was vehement about it. So there was no lack of understanding at that level about what they wanted to do. If you look at the minor tactics, we were fortunate in Basra in that we did not on the whole face a threat from suicide bombers, and that allows you to treat people normally: soft caps when you can, you drive normally. When you go to Baghdad, or, indeed, when the Black Watch went up to North Babel, the threat was different. If a car had driven around a roadblock in Basra, you would not immediately think it was out to come up beside you and blow itself up, which allows you to treat it in a number of slightly different ways. In North Babel, that was different, and the rules were different, and everybody understood it - both the civil population and us - that that car was a potential suicide bomb and had to be treated as such. People's response had to sharpen up as well, and it was not so easy to play the "soft caps/hearts and minds" side. To some extent, you respond to the threat you face. I think we always understood it, but going to North Babel made that very clear.

369. Mr Havard: So that was more counter-insurgency than counter-terrorism.

Major General Rollo: Very much so, yes.

370. Mr Havard: It was all a matter of stopping it happening and -----

Major General Rollo: Yes.

Lt General McColl: I would just make the point that there is an element of attrition in counter-insurgency. You do need to deal with the threat you are faced with and so there will always be an element of attrition, and the degree of attrition depends upon the threat - which really is the point Bill has made. In terms of the synchronisation of the campaign, there is a process in Baghdad for the synchronisation of the campaign, to which Bill has just referred, which occurred once a month, in order to make sure we were all following the priorities along the lines of development. Interestingly enough, my recollection of those synchronisation boards was that they were all about the economic line of operation. It was all about how we could improve the lives of the individuals. And, when there was not discussion about that, it was normally about governance and the way in which we were going to empower people. So, if there is what you might regard as an over-reliance upon attrition in the American area, it is not because that is what they want to do, it is because that is what they have to do because of the circumstances they are faced with. The final point: you mention police primacy. There is a clear understanding in Iraq of police primacy amongst the Iraqis and, indeed, with the Americans, but in order to do that you need to have a circumstance in which the police can operate and you need a police force that can operate, and in a lot of the American areas neither of those two factors currently exist and we are in the process of generating them.

371. Mr Havard: That was another question I was going to tackle, as to how much influence you had in relation to Baghdad, but you have already answered that. The other thing we learned from British police officers on the ground - which was the second point you just made, and it will probably come out later on when we discuss the relationships with the police - is the question of police supremacy and the fact that they cannot cope. There was not enough forensic ability, there was not enough ability to hand it over quickly enough. There seemed to be a huge gap that British police officers were saying needs to be developed and needs to be dealt with. But maybe that will come out in future questions.

Lt General McColl: I would be very happy to take it now.

Mr Havard: It is for the Chairman. Will we be coming to the police service later on?

Chairman: Yes, please.

372. Mr Crausby: I would like to come on to some questions about cooperation between the coalition and Iraqi forces. It has been suggested that the American military command were not prepared to enter into serious partnership and interoperability with the Iraqi forces. Paul Wood, for example, the BBC correspondent who was embedded with the US Marines, has said that nobody trusted the Iraqi forces to "protect their flanks", so, when the marines had conquered the city, the Iraqis were bussed in to give the illusion of Iraqi involvement in the operation. I have to say, having visited Iraq, I understand where he is coming from: I am not that sure that I would want Iraq forces to protect my flank. But it is quite an issue in the longer term as to how we bring Iraqi forces on. Does that attitude apply to UK commanders as well? For example, are we prepared to cooperate with the developing Iraqi forces, sharing crucial intelligence with them?

Mr Howard: I think there is a basic point to be made on your first point, Mr Crausby, which is that, ultimately, in carrying out a military operation you need to take into account the capability of the units taking part. In the case of Fallujah, which is the one you mentioned, clearly there was Iraqi participation but that was limited to tasks which both the coalition commander and the Iraqi command chain felt they were capable of doing. So there is going to be an element of being able to do what they can do, and, as we said earlier, there is still quite a long way to go to develop UK forces. In terms of UK soldiers working with Iraqis, I will ask Bill to say a bit more about what went on in MND (SE), but I will repeat what I said earlier on, that there is petty close coordination. I mentioned that the Iraqi divisional headquarters is now co-located with the British divisional headquarters. The issue of sharing intelligence is obviously a potentially sensitive one. I think it would probably be true to say - and Bill may want to comment on this - that, where we are able to share intelligence, I think we will want to do that with the Iraqis, but there is always an issue about security - protecting sources and so on - and that applies whoever you are working with and not just Iraqis.

Major General Rollo: Again, it is all based on trust. We have one example of that in Fallujah. I think it also depends on what the situation is and: Trust to do what? It developed when, again in July, the cry from the Iraqi security forces was, "Thank you very much, Brits, you have got us here and we now have had transfer of authority and we want to push on on our own." That did not mean to say we took our hands completely off, and we continued to meet and support and mentor and train. I think, after August, that cry became a bit more realistic. But over the last two months that I was there, there were an increasing number of operations where we were working jointly. For instance, if we were doing search operations we always wanted to have Iraqi police with us, and if an arrest were to be made then ideally we wanted an Iraqi to arrest somebody. But increasingly we produced more integrated operations, not only between us and the Iraqis, where, for instance we might provide a cordon and an element of Iraqi police would do the search, but also to get the Iraqi forces to work with each other: so you would have Iraqi police doing a search, with the National Guard doing the cordon, and we would be further out or just in over-watch. That feeling of mutual competence, both between them and us, and - frankly, much more important for the future - between the police and the National Guard, takes time to build and we had a number of joint training programmes designed to build it. In terms of intelligence, I think Martin has put his finger on it: source protection is very important. That is an area which, I was quite clear, we needed to improve, and we put in place mechanisms to share intelligence. Part of the joint OPS for us was a section where intelligence could be produced, stored and analysed, but I would certainly say that is an area where there is further progress to be made. But the most important thing I want is for the Iraqis to develop efficient intelligence services for themselves. The more we can step back and let them get on with it, the better.

373. Mr Crausby: What about Baghdad? Do you have any comments from Baghdad?

Lt General McColl: I made the observation that the Iraqi forces are of mixed capabilities, and we do need to be careful about the ways in which they are committed in order not to over-face them, and, indeed, also, in order to ensure we do not expose our own troops. There, reliability is a combination of a number of factors. It is a combination of training, experience, threat, and, I think, critically, legitimacy: legitimacy in the eyes of the people within which they are operating. I think that is particularly so with the police forces and the Iraqi National Guard, who are of course locally recruited. I come back to the point that I made at the very beginning, which is that I think the recent elections will be important in that respect. It will not happen immediately but I think over time we will see an increase in that legitimacy and, therefore, I hope, a significant increase in their local effectiveness.

374. Mr Crausby: The future is obviously the Iraqi National Intelligence Service to be improved, but we are advised that their ability is, to say the least, limited. What is being done to improve it?

Mr Howard: Perhaps I could say something about that. You are right that INIS is relatively embryonic at this stage. Of course, it is only part of the picture. That is the intelligence service, and there needs also to be a broader intelligence architecture which is able to task any agencies, is able to analyse intelligence and reach useful conclusions for analysis which helps policy-making and the conduct of operations. That machinery at the moment is pretty embryonic and I think will need developing. It is part of what I described earlier as developing the higher level sort of superstructure of the Iraqi Government to be able to conduct and direct operations. We believe that there are things we can do to assist in that. It is certainly one of the areas that the British Government and, I have no doubt, the US Government will be looking at pretty closely during 2005 as we try to develop these top structures. It is perhaps worth making the point that the key ministries, if you like, have only been in existence for a very short time. I mean, even at the most optimistic end, when they were first formed, I do not think the Ministry of Defence has been in existence for a year yet, and, from the point at which sovereignty was transferred, it is only sort of seven months. It is hardly surprising that the ability of organisations like the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior is still relatively rudimentary in such a short time, and, particularly, in such difficult security circumstances. So there is a big task there to be done, but we have identified it as one of our priorities.

375. Chairman: I am taking a question out of sequence on detainees. In 2003 there were 130 internees in the Division Temporary Detention Facility in MND (SE). When we were there on 18 December, there were 18, although that figure might have changed in the month that has elapsed. The continuing need for this power was set out in the letters dated 5 June 2004 which were sent to the President of the United Nations Security Council by US Secretary of State Powell and the Iraqi Interim-Government Prime Minister Allawi, describing the tasks of the centre as authorised by the UN Security Council resolution. We did not meet any of the detainees, because that is forbidden - and rightly - by international law, but we were told they are a mixture of former Baathists, al-Qa'eda terrorists and a few "ordinary" criminals who have been picked up during operations. The cases of internees are reviewed regularly. The ICRC are informed regularly and have unlimited access. I have several questions around this. I am constrained obviously by constraints, as the court martial is taking place. We are not allowed to ask any questions on the individual cases of those facing trial or inquiry. General Rollo, the US and the wider coalition has faced tremendous criticism over the Abu Ghraib scandal and the abuse of the Iraqi detainees. A High Court ruling has ordered an inquiry into the September 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen and a court martial is underway. Have these incidents, scandals, whatever word one wishes to use, made the job of UK forces on the ground more difficult? If so, to what extent?

Major General Rollo: I was not there when the Abu Ghraib stories broke, and nor, clearly, have I been there recently. I was there when there was the flurry in, I think, September when a bunch of photographs did appear in the press alleging similar behaviour, and there were mixed reactions, I think. There was not, certainly, a discernible change of mood, but we obviously monitored the local press and the Arab television channels quite closely and, on the one hand, there was: "Well, told you so, they are all just as bad as each other" and, on the other, the article that sticks in my mind was the one, a really furious article, by an Iraqi, saying, "How on earth can you compare the two? How can you compare - even as bad as Abu Ghraib is - that with what Saddam does, or, indeed, what happens elsewhere in the Arab world?" - his words, not mine - and: "Who are we kidding? This is just posturing and rank hypocrisy." I think people take them as they find them. People on the streets of Basra know how they have been treated and how British soldiers behave to them and they behave accordingly and respond accordingly. People are human. I think the record speaks for itself. We would not have the low level of violence, the really - still, I think, on the whole - very amicable relations we do have there, if there had been an overwhelming belief that we were all like that. It just did not happen.

376. Chairman: General McColl, you would have viewed the situation from the North. Did you detect any deterioration in relations - really bad publicity, people very, very angry at what had happened - (a) under the American control and (b) in the area under our control? Was the job of the troops more difficult?

Major General Rollo: I was in Baghdad when the Abu Ghraib issue broke. I would reiterate the point that Bill made, which is that there was significant commentary making the observation that there was no comparison between the treatment and the way in which we were conducting ourselves and Saddam, and it was unreasonable for that comparison to be drawn in Al-Arabiya and Aljazeera, which were the two major outlets which were influencing Iraqis. Having said that, there was significant exposure in those two outlets and others, and there is no doubt about it that that did get across to the Iraqis at large.

377. Chairman: And to a wider Arab and international community.

Lt General McColl: Indeed.

378. Chairman: Which was and still is informed.

Lt General McColl: Of course, it had an effect on the way in which the coalition, and the multinational force, in particular, was regarded. Having said that, I sensed that the majority of that criticism was focused on those who were directly responsible; I do not think there was a general condemnation of the way in which the force in general, and the British in particular, were conducting themselves.

379. Chairman: Did it have an effect on our Armed Forces, diverting time and energy away from what they might otherwise have been doing either on operational or reconstruction matters? Were there demonstrations, increasing violence?

Lt General McColl: Some of the incidents that took place, I think, could be attributed to the adverse publicity which was associated with it, so, yes, I think there were some aspects of the threat which could be reasonably associated with that adverse publicity. But I am not in a position to quantify it, I am afraid.

380. Chairman: As far as the British are concerned, they worked very hard - generally very successfully - at creating a very good image. Do you think this temporarily dented or permanently dented it, to a limited extent or severely?

Lt General McColl: I think the effect of the Abu Ghraib issues did not significantly adversely affect the reputation of the British forces. That would me by view in theatre. Would you agree with that?

Major General Rollo: I would.

381. Chairman: What plans are afoot to transfer cases of detainees in British custody to the Iraqi authorities for criminal prosecution?

Mr Howard: We have a policy in terms of detainees. When we hold them, there are three things we can do. First, if they, in our judgment, represent an imperative threat to security, as defined in the Security Council resolution, then we can detain them, subject to the safeguards, Chairman, which you have already mentioned. The second class is where we have picked someone up who on the face of it is guilty of criminality, in which case we would hand those over to the Iraqi authorities. Anyone else we pick up, for whatever reason, who does not fall into either of those categories, we release. We do one of those three things. So, yes, we do pass those who are prima facie guilty of criminality across to the Iraqi authorities and that has been going on for sometime.

382. Chairman: When we were there, it was pretty deserted. One British newspaper reported that a British citizen was transferred from that detention centre to a court in the UK. Is that correct?

Mr Howard: We do have one British citizen who is detained at the moment. I did not think he had been transferred to the UK, but perhaps I could check on that particular case and come back to you.

383. Chairman: The reference we had - and we do seek all sorts of information to see if it is worthy of our attention - was The Sun, 24 January last year. I am sure you are an avid reader of that illustrious newspaper.

Mr Howard: All the time, Chairman!

384. Chairman: We do now! Perhaps you could drop us a note.

Mr Howard: Certainly.

385. Chairman: For those who will not be transferred to the Iraqis for prosecution, what plans are there to transfer the responsibility for physically keeping those detainees to the Iraqi authorities or other facilities?

Mr Howard: I think, if an individual is not being handed over to the Iraqis because he is going to be prosecuted because we think he has committed a crime, he is simply released. We would not hand him over. He would just be released into the community, unless he is being held under UNSCR as an imperative threat to security.

Chairman: Thank you very much. Now back into the sequence of questions, turning to the cost of security sector reform.

386. Mr Viggers: Could I ask, first, about the numbers of those who are Iraqi trained security personnel? The estimates have varied dramatically. The Secretary of State for Defence told the House of Commons on 10 January that 115,000 Iraqi security personnel are trained, equipped and operating across Iraq. We have had General Schwitters of the United States saying that in August 2004 only 3,000 of the men in the Army can be regarded as trained. We have had General Petraeus, also of the United States Armed Forces, saying that in September 2004 there were 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of whom 100,000 were trained and equipped), along with 74,0000 facility protection forces participating. Wildly differing estimates - which is not surprising, because it depends what you mean by trained. Can you please give us a realistic estimate of how many Iraqi forces are now trained in the security field?

Mr Howard: The picture is complicated by the fact that the Iraqi security forces have a number of components: National Guard, Army, facilities protection, order enforcement, etc. Nick will probably go through that in a bit more detail. Also, there is a question, when we talk about training, as to which level. Trained to carry out, for example, basic policing functions is very different from being fully trained and equipped to carry out hard-edged counter-insurgency operations. So there is no one definition of trained. With that observation, perhaps I could hand over to Nick.

Major General Houghton: Essentially, you will get from me a fourth version of what the numbers might be. But, first, just a bit on what Martin has said. It is complex, because within the overall Iraqi security architecture there are many things which may or may not feature and within that there are different levels of training accomplished. In very broad, outside terms, you have the Army, the navy, the air force, the police, the department of order enforcement and the facilities protection service. Within, for example, just the Army, you have the Iraqi Intervention Force, the regular Army, the Iraqi National Guard, and some special operations battalions. If I could take them in bite-sized chunks: in the facilities protection service the level of training is relatively minimal, and 74,000 - the figure you had, I think, from General Petraeus - is probably about right. In the department of border enforcement (which itself is an amalgam of border police immigration police and customs services), it is certainly in excess of 16,000, with a target figure of 28,000 - so, as of today, 20,000 is probably a broad order of those who are the trained and fielded. Within the police, the aim is to be at 135,000 by the end of this year. In terms of those who have formally undergone any element of training, we are looking at about 90,000 - again, as of today. In the navy and air force, a relatively small number. In the navy you are talking about the manning of five patrol boats and five inflatables, and you are talking about a small number of hundreds. Within the Army, the Iraqi Intervention Force, of those who are trained and equipped and fielded we are now at 12 battalions, so perhaps about 6,000. In the regular Army, the six operational battalions at the moment aspire to be nine by February, so you are probably talking about another 3,000 or 4,000 there. The big numbers rest within the Iraqi National Guard, where there are 42 operational battalions - battalions again varying in strength, but you could take an average of about 500 strong - so upwards of 20,000 in the Iraqi National Guard, and a couple of special operational battalions. These, if you like, is their SF type equivalent - probably about 1,000 strong there. I caveat all those because they are, sort of, moving and dynamic figures; the quality of the training differs within each; and you have heard previously of the fact that there are - as I think the British Army would call them - "retention difficulties" with some of them. But I would be very content, as it were, given that broad order sort of feel to it, to commit to paper a more detailed assessment of quite where all the various elements of the Iraqi security architecture were deemed to be at the moment. But that is a reasonable, broad order statement.

387. Mr Viggers: Thank you very much. How confident are you in the skills and willingness of the security forces to fight the insurgents?

Major General Houghton: It is almost an impossible question because it will differ from region to region, from battalion to battalion, from individual to individual. I think I indicated when I tried to steer people away from the numerical assessment that it is things other than numbers that are important in determining the competence and capability of Armed Forces. It is the old: the moral is to physical as three is to one. It is to do with the motivation of individuals; it is to do with the competence of leadership; it is to do with - General John mentioned this - a sense of legality which they enjoy within their own local community; and it is a sense of overall motivation and purpose in what they stand for in a new and democratic Iraq. One can only but think that the success of elections over the weekend buoys up elements of all those ingredients, and that it will vary over time. It will probably not be a linear progression, there will be setbacks, but I think that, given the nature of those elections, given the undoubted willingness of vast numbers of Iraqis to volunteer for service in the various components of their security architecture, I think one can take a strong degree of comfort and confidence.

388. Mr Viggers: The head of one of the parties in the election, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, has said that if his party were to gain power he would purge Iraq's Iraqi security forces and intelligence service. Would that be a seriously counter-productive step?

Mr Howard: I have not seen that statement, Mr Viggers, but I am not quite sure. Purge them of what exactly? Of particular types? I think I am more inclined to give weight to statements from Prime Minister Allawi and those who are keen to build the capacity for security forces and also want security forces to represent the ethnic make-up of Iraq as a whole. Without knowing more behind what was meant by that statement, it would be rather hard to pass judgment on it.

389. Mr Viggers: Are you able to recruit from the United Kingdom people who can assist in the build-up of security forces in Iraq? Are you successful in recruiting from the police and other areas?

Mr Howard: It is rather hard for me to give a comprehensive answer to that because, of course, I can talk about what the Ministry of Defence is doing and the Armed Forces. It is rather difficult for me to comment on others. A lot of the assistance, of course, is being provided by serving officers, soldiers, sailors and airmen, and, indeed, civilians from the Ministry of Defence and other organisations. Yes, we have been able to find the right quality of people and will continue to do that. We have contracted others to carry out some training, and that I think has been successful. Armour Group, for example, have helped with police training, but that is more of a Foreign Office issue. In general, we have not had any major problems in being able to find the right level of expertise to assist. I think there have been some issues about whether we have been able to get sufficient policemen out to train - I think that was the issue that came up in you evidence session from a few weeks ago - but I am not really in a position to comment on that.

390. Mr Viggers: What is the cost of security sector reform in Iraq? What contribution is the United Kingdom making to this?

Mr Howard: I do not have a figure for that, Mr Viggers, but I shall try to come up with a cost.

391. Mr Viggers: Who is the budget holder for this sector?

Mr Howard: Within the United Kingdom?

392. Mr Viggers: Which department is subsidising the reform of the security sector in Iraq? Is it defence? If so, who is the budget holder?

Mr Howard: It goes across a range of departments. Different departments have responsibility for different elements of the security sector reform. The Foreign Office are helping on policing, as is DFID. We, as I say, are providing assistance to the Ministry of Defence and to the Iraqi security forces. In terms of who the budget holder is, again that would be spread across the different topical budgets within the Ministry of Defence. A point I would make is that, where the Ministry of Defence has incurred additional costs as a result of doing this, we will get this, reimbursed by the Treasury under normal routes from the contingency fund.

393. Mr Viggers: If the numbers are not readily available, would you please write to us?

Mr Howard: We will try to do that.

394. Mr Havard: On security sector reform, there are obviously numbers in America around being on a continuum of $30 billion to $100 billion, and now the President has gone back for more money. Between May, our previous visit, and December, we saw a lot of development in infrastructure, particularly of the water and sewerage system in Basra, and when we get there in December we are told, "The money is not coming, and it is not coming because it has been diverted specifically to deal with the increasing costs to the security sector reform." That is disappointing because these things are not mutually exclusive, as everybody has been demonstrating today. What is happening with the costs of security reform, if the money for the water infrastructure in Basra has been stolen in order to deal with it?

Mr Howard: I have not come across that particular phenomenon. As I have said, I will try to provide a note on British costs for security sector reform. There have been issues about money designated for reconstruction having been focused more on Baghdad and the centre of the country, possibly at the expense of the South East, which is something that we will be concerned about given our responsibilities down there. But that is more for reconstruction elsewhere rather than money being diverted for security sector reform.

Major General Houghton: I have very general views - but, again, I will revert to Martin's note for more accuracy. When, 18 months ago now, Mr Bush went to Congress for a congressional supplement to finance certain activity within Iraq as a whole, a congressional supplement of about $18 billion was voted. The way in which they voted was against certain pre-determined headings as to where that money should go: so some was allocated to security sector reform, some to the major industrial reconstruction projects and that sort of thing. When, in the immediate aftermath of the passage of sovereignty and Ambassador Negroponte went over - this might well have been in John's time, and he might have more granularity than me - the whole of that congressional vote was subject to a re-scrutiny to make certain that it was being apportioned in the most appropriate way to the current circumstances, and I am pretty confident that as a part of that re-scrutiny there was a movement of some elements of the UN Congressional supplemental over into the security sector reform area and away from some of the major reconstruction projects.

395. Mr Hancock: I listened very intently last night to a File on 4 programme about finances in Iraq. It was talking about the huge sums of money that were available, cash - $1.7 billion in one instance, all in cash, being made available - and it being dispersed very willy-nilly with no proper audit chain, a lot of it financing the training of police and what-have-you, and senior American officers being very critical of the way in which the cash that was available in the country was handled, and the way in which the programme for the training was actually being financed and who was controlling it. I am interested to know in the sectors where we had sole responsibility, were we taking orders about the way that money was spent from the coalition commander (ie, an American) or where they decisions that were left to our commandeers to make, to exercise the way in which that money was properly spent? Because there are some very serious questions that are being asked now in the American administration about the way the money was used and where this money ended up.

Mr Howard: I will ask Bill to comment from the MND (SE)'s point of view, in a moment. I think I would distinguish between the cost of security sector reform, which, as I say, if we are talking about what we, the Brits, have been doing in MND (SE) would be the cost where we are providing training teams or contractors - and equipment as well. You will be aware that we have actually authorised something like £27 million worth of relatively small-scale equipment for Iraqi forces. That process is controlled through our normal budgetary processes. The commander, someone like Bill, has a command secretary who deals with the finances. That is one issue, and Bill may want to say a bit more about that. There is another issue, which is about reconstruction - where the money, as well as from British sources, comes more from American sources. I think it would be helpful, Bill, if you would say a bit about how that works, because you are much more familiar with it than I am.

Major General Rollo: If I may go back half a stage, to the first question about money having been diverted: I think, in broad terms, that was correct and that was a frustration to me, but I did understand the logic behind it. The logic, basically, was that more effort was needed to go into building up the Iraqi security forces - and in the circumstances of last summer that seems a reasonable decision - and that took money. Indeed, unless you had a better security situation, you would not be able to spend the money on reconstruction anyway. So that is the first part of the argument. The second was that nobody else is going to provide extra money for building up the ISF, but somebody else might well provide additional money for reconstruction - and it is not just the US supplemental out there; there is also all the money that is in US trust funds and is, technically, at least, available. So at a macro level I could be very grown up and understand that issue; clearly at a micro level I was bouncing up and down, as you would expect, on Basra's behalf, saying, "This is terrible" and then clearly getting on with it and seeing what were the most urgent things and what could I do with the money that I had available.

396. Mr Havard: It would be difficult to find somebody from the UN to talk to about Basra, would it not? That is the other part of the problem. They seemed to be missing from the barricade when I was there.

Major General Rollo: I used to send my chief engineer off to find them, wherever they were, and he successfully did that. In terms of US money and how it was controlled and for what purpose it was spent, like all the divisional commanders I had an allocation of what was called CERFs - which I think were Commanders' Emergency Reconstruction Project Funds, or some combination of the same, but I knew what they were for anyway. I had a delegated authority to authorise the release of those funds up to $500,000 for particular projects. That was a maximum value of a single project. And there was a similar UK system. We had a system of boards where people would recommend projects up through the brigade commander and to me, depending on the value. If, indeed, there was something which was more than $500,000, then I could apply to General Metz - up to $5 million, I think - and he would either authorise it or would not. He had set out the intent very clearly as being for emergency reconstruction rather than for long-term stuff which should have been done by the supplemental. So this is not the $18 billion; these were funds that were allocated to me. We had a process which looked at what we were trying to achieve and then allowed us to score individual project proposals against a variety of parameters which basically would say, "Right, that quite clearly fits all the parameters, that will be our top priority" - because there were always more projects than there was cash available. In terms of accounting, first, we had to satisfy US accounting rules - and there was normally a US officer or a US authorised officer who had to do the detailed control of the release of the cash - and, secondly, we also applied our own accounting rules to it as well. Have I half way answered your question?

397. Mr Hancock: Did you have large sums of Iraqi money as well?

Major General Rollo: Not in my time.

398. Mr Hancock: What happened to the money that was available in Basra? A suggestion was that there were large sums of Iraqi money around - amounting to well over $1 billion in cash - which was around for the military in the first six months and which is now no longer accounted for. Nobody seems to know what happened to it. Were there large sums found in Basra?

Major General Rollo: I am not sure what we are on? Within my time in command, the sources of my money were either down through the American system -----

399. Mr Hancock: Through the coalition.

Major General Rollo: -- through the coalition or directly from UK funds under a separate scheme called QuIPS (Quick Impact Projects).

Mr Howard: Is this money, Mr Hancock, which was from the oil-for-food scheme, for example?

400. 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.

401. 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.

402. 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.

403. 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.

404. 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 per cent 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.

405. 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.

406. 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.

407. 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.

408. 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 ----

409. 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.

410. 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.

411. 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.

412. 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.

413. 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.

414. 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.

415. 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 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.

416. 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.

417. 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.

418. 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?

419. 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.

420. Mr Cran: You said there is a lot to build on, and that could mean a great deal, but I want to be clear that you think that cooperation is possible - and I would ask you to have a glimpse at the background. When in Iraq, we were told this - and I am not going to tell you who told us, because I think I had better not - "cooperation across systems" - that is, in Iraq - "fly in the face of cultural norms in the Arab world and are frequently seen as a threat to individual authority." You do not see that as the impediment, do you?

Major General Rollo: It is part of the impediment. I think that is what I said at the beginning, there is a mountain to climb in a country where the culture is that the Army is the lead service and we are saying you want to have police supremacy and a police lead. But it is not as straightforward as that, because it depends on individual characters, and there is considerable crossover, so that there are a number of senior policemen, for instance, at the moment who have previous military experience, and that helps to bring the two together because people know each other. Basra is not a big town and that particular class of people all know each other. At a more junior level, we were running three-week courses for a company of the police special unit and a company of the National Guard to work together. It is that habit of working together - and we saw a number of examples where it was successfully done, which I think commonsense says will work in the future.

421. Mr Viggers: Is there consistency and harmonization in training over the whole of Iraq? Is there consistency between training carried out by Americans in the North and the training carried out by the UK in the South?

Lt General McColl: Within the headquarters in Iraq is the headquarters of the Multinational Support Training Command Iraq ("Menstici" as it is known) which is General Petraeus's command, which is subordinate to General Casey. Within that command there is a number of different departments, looking after the Iraqi National Guard, looking after the Iraqi Army, looking after the Iraqi police force, and there are British officers integrated in that organisation. Up until recently the one-star running the police organisation was a British officer; we have now downscaled that to a colonel. The reason I explain that is because it is a multinational approach, and the object of that organisation is to produce coherence. There is coherence of policy, in terms of, for example, the way in which the police are trained: there is a common syllabus, and there is a common progression in the way in which they move forward. However, when you go on to talk about the ways in which, for example, the National Guard are trained, and the way in which you heard General Rollo describe the integration of one of our infantry battalions in the way it is done in the South East, there is a different approach in the American sector. They have what are called second-tier special forces elements who are given that responsibility and they do it in their own particular way. Within the general guidance from the policy direction from the centre, which is coherent, and which is designed to give a common approach, there are of course individuals of national interpretation. But I think you would expect that.

422. Mr Viggers: If NATO moves into the provision of training, could you explain how this will be coordinated with the Multinational Security Transition Command? If the answer to that is quite long, we would be happy to receive a letter on this.

Major General Houghton: It is very quick. General Petraeus is also the dual-hatted NATO commander of that training and organisation, so compatibility and coherence is established at the outset.

423. Mr Viggers: Are you worried that countries currently making a contribution in Iraq might switch their contribution, so that it is through NATO training rather than as part of the multinational force? This has happened in the case of two countries, has it not?

Mr Howard: I do not think it is a major worry. If we are talking about switching training being done under a coalition hat to being done under a NATO hat, I think we will be content with that.

Major General Houghton: Over time, one might positively encourage it. The whole nature of the shift will be that away from counter-insurgency and towards a security assistance mission, and therefore the nature of people's contributions, nations' contributions, should increasingly, over time, be more focused on the training and security assistance rather than training in counter-insurgency type tasks. So I think it would be, properly controlled, the right thing to be happening over time.

424. Mike Gapes: Could I ask you about the militias. In June, just before it transferred power, the Coalition Provision Authority issued an order outlawing non-governmental militias. We have clearly seen the militias have played a very important role in the stability in the Kurdish area and we know al-Sadr's militia is still around and might potentially be a problem in the future, so what is being done to abolish the militias and to integrate the militias together into an effective defence and security force for Iraq as a whole?

Mr Howard: The first thing I would say is that militias have traditionally been a part of the Iraqi politics of this. Most political parties have had a militia associated with them. From a British point of view, and, I am sure, from an American point of view, we would like to see the militias either disbanded or integrated as appropriate into the Iraqi security forces as they go on, but this now has to be an Iraqi decision on how they operate. In practical terms, I suspect it is not something you can just do overnight. I think it is a question of persuasion and developing mature political institutions and mature security institutions which make the need for militias redundant. But I do not think that is something that can happen quickly; nor can it happen at our behest or American behest alone. It has to be an Iraqi decision.

425. Mike Gapes: So the coalition is not going to play a role in dismantling the militias.

Mr Howard: I think we would be prepared to facilitate any action to disband militias and integrate them into Iraqi security forces on the back of an Iraqi Government decision to do so.

426. Mike Gapes: If the Iraqis ask us to play a role in getting rid of al-Sadr's militia, we would do so.

Mr Howard: I do not think it is quite as simple as that, because there would be a dialogue between the Iraqi authorities and Muqtada himself about, particularly, if Muqtada is taking part in the political process. He will be part of that process. They will then reach decisions about what will be the future of militias, and there are various things that could happen. They could be disbanded. They could be incorporated into the Iraqi security forces and, as part of that, they may come to the coalition and say, "Can you help with a particular aspect of that?" This is all relatively speculative, and I could not say, "Yes, we will definitely help," but obviously we will help where we can and where we think we can add value.

427. Mike Gapes: We will watch this space.

Major General Rollo: It depends what you think al-Sadr's militia is. If you have a vision of Ireland in 1914, with people drilling on street corners, it is not normally like that. It is a very shifting bunch of people, both in terms of the leadership and the membership, of a very varied size depending on how strongly people feel about a particular issue at a particular moment. I would go back to the huge spike of activity in August and then a very low level since then. I think I would start by saying the issue of militias was there before I arrived; it was not afterwards. I was aiming for a general acceptance across the political class, if you like, and for that matter in wider society that armed people on the street, outside the National Guard and the police force, were unacceptable, that, if they appeared, then they should be removed. That was not acceptable behaviour in Basra or any other part of our area. Once you get that, then the real answer to the militias is to take away the requirement for them to exist, as has been said. You give people jobs and you have a political climate in which militias are not necessary to either give you security or to gain you votes. But easier said than done.

Chairman: Thank you. We shall not be calling you back. We have had two bites of the cherry. Unfortunately, we will be writing to you because there are some questions that we were not able to ask because of the time constraints. We apologise in advance, but we shall be writing to you.