Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
RT HON
DES BROWNE
MP, MR MARTIN
HOWARD, LIEUTENANT
GENERAL NICK
HOUGHTON CBE AND
MR PETER
HOLLAND
20 MARCH 2007
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. This is the
first of our evidence sessions in this, the second inquiry that
the Committee has done into our operations in Afghanistan. We
are lucky enough to be taking evidence from the Secretary of State
this morning. The Secretary of State is coming again in May. In
the last year we began an inquiry which looked at the aims and
objectives of ISAF[1]
in Afghanistan and the UK's deployment there. Now we are going
to be looking at the developments over the last year and the extent
to which UK forces and NATO are able to create the conditions
for success and for progress in Afghanistan, and we have got a
further session next week with outside commentators. I am sorry
it is a bit cold in here, but we are trying to see whether that
can be improved. Secretary of State, good morning. Would you care
to introduce your team, please?
Des Browne: Yes, I will. On my
right I have Martin Howard, who is the Director General of Operational
Policy in the MoD, on my immediate left is Lieutenant General
Nick Houghton, who is the Chief of Joint Operations, and on his
left is Peter Holland, who is the Head of ADIDU, who obviously
has responsibility for the Inter-Departmental Drugs Unit.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you. May I begin
by asking you, Secretary of State, could you, please, be brief
and concise in your answers and asking the Committee, could you,
please, be brief and concise in your questions? I shall begin
by asking you, Secretary of State, could you encapsulate, briefly,
what our objectives are in Afghanistan?
Des Browne: Briefly, our objectives
are to help the Afghan Government extend its reach in the south
and in the east of Afghanistan in the way in which the Afghan
Government has extended its reach in the north and the west and,
thereby, to bring economic prosperity and opportunity to the people
of Afghanistan. Principally we seek to do that in the south by
the creation of security from the MoD's perspective of working
together with the Department for International Development, the
Foreign Office and NGOs and complementing that by building the
capacity of the Afghan Government, both centrally and locally,
to deliver that more broadly stated objective.
Q3 Chairman: Would you say that UK
forces were achieving their objectives?
Des Browne: Yes, I would say we
have made progress and we are achieving our aims. I stress that
we are there as a military force principally to enable others
to achieve their objectives—that is the Afghan Government,
the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development
and NGOs and other international partners—and our progress
needs to be seen in that context. We have helped the Afghan Government
to extend its reach, but to improve both their capability and
capacity to do that and the sustaining of that reach in some of
the communities of Helmand province will take time. I think we
have to realise that, particularly in parts of the south and in
the east, there was literally very little, or no, governance in
the past, substantially these were ungoverned spaces, and the
nature and scale of that challenge I think could be overestimated.
For decades there was little or no governance in these areas.
Q4 Chairman: Do you think we did
underestimate the nature and the scale of that challenge?
Des Browne: No, I think we realised
that we were facing a difficult challenge in the south and in
the east and, as I have said before, I think it would odiously
repetitious to repeat phrases such as descriptions of the nature
of the force that we have deployed and its ability to be able
to deliver force, and I do not think either you nor certainly
I want to disappear down the cul-de-sac of the interpretation
of one phrase of my predecessor. We realised that this was going
to be a difficult environment and there were aspects of it that
we learned as we deployed. We may come to discuss some of them
in more detail, particularly the nature of the Taliban behaviour
in the north of Helmand at the point of our deployment, which
dominated a good part of last summer, but the supplementary answer
to your earlier question is that the signs now are that the security
that we are creating is allowing the sort of reconstruction that
we had hoped to be able to engage in earlier in this process to
start to take place. We are now at the stage where we are spending
more on reconstruction and development projects than we are on
security in the Helmand province.
Q5 Mr Jenkins: One of the things
I was waiting for and I did not hear was a clear distinction about
creating an environment to allow the aims and aspirations of the
people of Afghanistan to be met. What we are not into is supporting
a westernised public government in Kabul which tries to impose
on the people of Afghanistan a westernised democracy and we are
there providing the infrastructure to try and bring that about.
Will you make it clear that that is not our intention, never has
been our intention, but we are trying to support and trying to
develop organisations in Afghanistan to allow these people to
meet their aims and aspirations?
Des Browne: I think democracy
comes in many guises across the world, and I do not think anybody
who is involved in politics or understands that is in a position
to say that there is one template. I am very strongly of the view
that the governance that will survive and be sustainable in the
long term in Afghanistan is governance that grows out of the people
and is supported by the people, and we have very overtly supported
that sort of development, for example, in the Musa Qaleh Agreement
and the support of Governor Dauod and subsequently Governor Wafa
and their relationships with their local communities. We are very
much of the view that governance ought to reflect the culture
and the aspirations of the local people; but that having been
said, I do not want anybody to come away from this answer believing
that I have accepted that President Karzai's Government could
in any sense be described as a perfect government. This is a properly
democratically elected government; it operates in a different
way; the Executive has a different relationship with the Legislature
than our Government does, but this is the Government that the
people of Afghanistan themselves democratically asked for and
it faces some serious and difficult challenges and relies substantially
for help on the international community, but it is not just one
or two countries, it is almost 40 countries in the world who are
supporting them; so I do not think we should allow what the Government
is doing or how it is being supported to be categorised in that
way.
Q6 Chairman: Secretary of State,
during the course of this morning we will be trying to get into
the detail of some of the individual aspects of what you are talking
about now, for example, the nature of the Karzai Government and
things like that. Could I ask you to try to summarise the main
lessons that have been learnt over the last 12 months?
Des Browne: I think the obvious
lesson that was learnt, and I have spoken about this before publicly,
was that the Taliban reacted to our presence in a way that had
not been expected in terms of the violence and the nature of the
way it deployed the troops. I am no expert on that. I have the
CJO to my left and, if you want to explore that in more detail,
I would defer to his military expertise and analysis. We knew
that both the Taliban and, for example, the drug barons were the
people who had a lot to lose from improved security and were bound
to oppose improved security, and, indeed, the Taliban overtly
said that that is what they would do as we and others deployed
entered the south of the country, but most experts did not anticipate
full conventional attacks. So that was a learning experience for
us, but we defeated them, and we believe that in the long run
that will turn out to be very significant and will have quite
a strategic effect on the Taliban. So that is the first lesson.
Q7 Chairman: That is not a lesson,
so much as a surprise.
Des Browne: We learned the lesson
of how to deal with that in that environment and we deployed our
forces in a way that did that. We have also learnt the lesson
that we needed to reinforce particular capabilities, and I have
announced, and I will go through the detail if the Committee wants
but I am sure you are very familiar with them, that we needed
to reinforce certain capabilities—more helicopters, for
example—in some cases new equipment, Predator UAVs—and
we have deployed and are beginning to deploy different vehicles.
In the last announcement I made I announced that we would be deploying
a company of Warrior.
Q8 Chairman: We will come on to those
as well. Would there have been a greater degree of success if
a reserve had been deployed last year?
Des Browne: The overall force
structure, of course, is a matter for NATO. I am not in a position,
I do not think, retrospectively, to answer that question. What
I do know is that as regards the degree of force that we faced,
we overmatched everything we faced then, and I suspect, in fact,
that we would have been in that situation, looking back from now,
in any event. What we were not able to do, of course, was to do
that and also do the reconstruction work that we had intended
to do, particularly in Lashkar Gah, at the same time.
Q9 Chairman: That is a different
question, I think, because the CJSOR, as the Chief of Defence
Staff told us a couple of weeks ago, was not fulfilled. Would
we have succeeded better if it had been?
Lieutenant General Houghton: Can
I perhaps mention something from the perspective of the then COMISAF,
General Richards, who I think is on public record as saying—there
was a stage in respect of a major operation towards the end of
last year, Operation Medusa, which took place in Kandahar province—that
in his estimation a more decisive defeat at the tactical level
might have been delivered to the Taliban had he been able to deploy
a reserve in pursuit of the Taliban enemy that fled up the Panjwai
Valley.
Q10 Chairman: Yes.
Lieutenant General Houghton: I
think it is public record that he said that, but that was relative
to the overall NATO operation after the specific operation was
conducted in the Panjwai Valley close to Kandahar.
Q11 Chairman: So, in essence, the
answer to the question is, "Yes", there would have been
more progress made if that reserve had been available?
Lieutenant General Houghton: There
would have been, at the tactical level, a greater amount of progress
made against the Taliban in that area at that time.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q12 Mr Hancock: Can I ask two questions
arising out of what you have said. One is about the lessons, and
you said you did not really foresee the reaction of the Taliban.
Considering we have been in the country for over five years, surely
our intelligence was such that we must have anticipated a bit
better than we appear to have done the reaction of the Taliban.
What was the reaction you expected from them: to run away?
Des Browne: That is not what we
are saying. I think you have to be absolutely honest and realistic
about what the force disposition in Afghanistan was prior to the
decision to deploy forces into the south. There were, as I recollect
it, about 100 American soldiers in Helmand province who were in
a PRT, if my memory serves me correctly, in Lashkar Gah. That
was the force disposition at the time and that was the basis on
which any military information could have been collected, and
since my understanding is that they seldom left the PRT, it was
highly unlikely that they were going to be collecting information.
Whatever people may now say retrospectively, the accepted wisdom
was that we could expect a reaction from the Taliban and, indeed,
possibly from others but that the nature of it would be what people
refer to as asymmetric. We were being advised by all the experts
that that would be the nature of the way in which they would deploy
their violence. It turned out that they did not. It may well be
(and, as I say, this is all qualified by the fact that I have
no expertise to make these observations) that from their point
of view, strategically, they made a great error and that they
suffered a degree of casualty that they cannot sustain in the
longer term, but time will tell. In fact, the way in which they
deployed their forces, particularly in Northern Helmand, and we
have already heard about the activity later in the year in Kandahar
where they pinned down a significant number of their forces, caused
us to have to concentrate in those areas, and the operational
commander made tactical decisions about the response to these
environments which were exactly right, but they had an effect
on the plans that we had otherwise.
Q13 Mr Hancock: But they were effectively
running the province, were they not? The Taliban were back in
control of the province, even if they had at any stage given up
control of the province. I cannot believe that you did not have
sufficient intelligence to tell us (1) the sort of numbers that
the Taliban would have had at their disposal, (2) the reaction
of the—. Mr Howard is shaking his head. Maybe you should
answer the question then, Mr Howard.
Mr Howard: If I can add to what
the Secretary of State has said, we anticipated a violent reaction
from the Taliban and others. One of the problems you face, though,
is that out of a strategic intelligence judgment it is impossible
to get the granularity of tactical intelligence until you are
there on the ground in strength; so that is what has managed to
fill out our intelligence picture that we have had since then.
As the Secretary of State said, the tactics used by the Taliban
were unexpected, in the sense that they used conventional forces,
conventional tactics rather than asymmetric tactics, but we never
expected it to be that there would not be a problem, and in terms
of numbers, I think it is always very tricky to talk about numbers
of people like the Taliban, because you immediately run into the
problem of definition. We in the MoD talk about tier one Taliban,
tier two Taliban, and below those sorts of levels it gets very
murky as to what counts as a Taliban. Is it someone who is organising
these sorts of attacks or is it someone who is being paid by the
local Taliban to join in? To come up with a number, I think, is
always a tricky area, which is why, perhaps, I shook my head.
Q14 Chairman: General Houghton, in
answer to my question about the reserve, you mentioned Operation
Medusa. I am afraid I have left the impression somehow that Operation
Medusa was something less than an outstanding success, but it
was a dramatic success towards the end of last year. Would you
agree?
Lieutenant General Houghton: Yes,
in the estimation of the NATO commander, Operation Medusa was
undoubtedly a success and dealt the Taliban a severe tactical
blow. The point that I was making was that in his estimation,
had he been able to, over and above that, deploy a reserve in
pursuit, he may have been able to capitalise on that success to
a greater extent.
Q15 Mr Hancock: Do you think we have
fully explored why we left it so long to deal with areas in Afghanistan
like Helmand province, bearing in mind the majority of the British
people felt things had gone quiet in Afghanistan for a substantially
long period of time? Do you think there has been a satisfactory
explanation to the British people of why we left it nearly five
years before we tackled that issue of what was going on in that
province and in other parts of Afghanistan?
Des Browne: I am quite often asked
to speak for lots of people, but I am not sure that I can speak
for the British people necessarily as to whether they are dissatisfied
with the explanation.
Q16 Mr Hancock: Do you think there
has been any satisfactory explanation given as to why it has taken
so long for us to tackle the issues like Helmand province?
Des Browne: I have certainly tried
to give them the explanation that the plan was to concentrate
on the north and the west and progressively move round, as it
were, the faces of the clock in an anti-clockwise direction into
the south and the east, but you have also got to bear in mind
that there was, and still is, in part, another operation going
on in Afghanistan known as Operation Enduring Freedom which we
have been conducting substantially in the east and part of the
south. A judgment has to be taken as to when it is appropriate
to deploy forces in order to begin the process of reconstruction.
I was not party to the timelines of this, but I can clearly understand
that those who had responsibility for it felt that it was important
to consolidate the north and the west and consolidate the governance
there, and there were other challenges there, some of which, you
will remember, people said would defeat the ability of the international
community and the Afghan Government to be able to turn this country
round; but the measures of success in the north and the west are
quite significant now, so I think you either have the ability
and the circumstances to be able to do it all at the one time
or you do it progressively, and it was chosen to do it progressively.
I was not party to that process, but I can understand why it was.
Q17 Mr Hancock: The original deployment
was 3,300, we are now up to 7,700, according to the latest statement,
and we have suggested that they would be in place until June 2009.
Do you expect them to remain in numbers like that beyond that
date?
Des Browne: I think we have got
to get back into discussions about conditionality. Of course conditions
change and the 2009 figure, the deployment out until 2009, was
not ever at any time a prediction of any nature, it was a planning
timetable, and it still remains a planning timetable. Our need
to continue to provide force at that level will be a function
of the rate at which the Afghan's own security forces can take
over responsibility, because, after all, part of our ambition
in building governance is to build the ability of the Afghans
to be able to deliver their own security—that is the acid
test—and it may start before April 2009 but it will happen
at a different pace in different areas. I do not think it would
be anything other than speculation at this stage to say exactly
where we will be in April 2009, but we are beginning to make progress
on all of those fronts.
Q18 Mr Hancock: What is the specific
role of the battlegroup that is deployed to Kandahar?
Des Browne: The CJSOR had the
requirement in it for a battlegroup to act as a reserve, as it
were, in the south and in the east, and we undertook to provide
that. It will provide the sort of reserve in that geographical
part of Afghanistan that the Chairman was asking questions about
earlier.
Q19 Mr Jenkin: Briefly on this point
about original tasking, the Chief of the Defence Staff accepted
that running the Armed Forces very hot, very tight and very stretched
makes the danger of wishful thinking when tasking operations a
reality. Is this not an example of where we hoped for the best
rather than deploying what was really needed at the outset?
Des Browne: I read the evidence
that the CDS gave. There were some pages of this. Wishful thinking
was a summary that was put to him at one stage. I do not entirely
recollect that he accepted all of it and did not qualify it, but
that aside, I do not believe that what we did was wishful thinking.
We had a very clear strategic plan, I think it was the right strategic
plan, we deployed an appropriate force to be able to deliver that
strategic plan and, at the point at which we deployed, the commander
on the ground was called upon to make a tactical decision, which
was entirely the correct thing to do because of the nature of
the threat that was posed to the Afghan Government at the time,
and by responding to that in the way in which he did, he, I think,
used resources in a way that we had not planned that they would
be used, but was entirely the right way, and I think may well
have significantly improved the prospects of being able to succeed
in this mission by overmatching the Taliban where they chose to
attack the Government.
1 International Security Assistance Force. Back
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