Examination of Witnesses (Questions 164-179)
MR ROBERT
FOX, MR
RORY STEWART
AND DR
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
27 MARCH 2007
Q164 Chairman: I should give you too
a warm welcome to our evidence session. I wonder if you could
possibly introduce yourselves and say what your experience is
of Afghanistan and of what we are doing there. Can we start with
you, Robert Fox?
Mr Fox: My name is Robert Fox;
I have been a journalist for 40 years, I am also a part-time historian
and I am now involved with ARAG at the Defence Academy where I
have been involved with Afghanistan. I am not experienced as the
gentleman on my left, but I first went there in 1989 to see the
Russians withdraw and spent a lot of time there then, then I had
quite a long break. I have been back four or five times since
2001 and I lately went on General Sir Michael Jackson's last visit
as CGS in the summer and I spent a fortnight there at the end
of January and beginning of February which was very instructive.
I must add that do a lot of work with the British formations going
out there, including divisional headquarters and, lately, the
12 Mechanised Brigade. It is on the media perception, just how
journalists might or might not perceive the narrative that will
unfold and that they will participate in.
Q165 Chairman: Were you there at
the dam?
Mr Fox: I spent four days up on
the Kajaki Dam and I would, if I am allowed later on, Chairman,
like to talk about some specifics. I should explain to you that
I have had an extended experience of being embedded with British
forces, notably in the entire Falklands campaign and I have also
travelled in Iraq. I have been in Iraq rather more frequently
than I have been in Afghanistan and I have lately started taking
up Afghanistan.
Mr Stewart: I was briefly in the
Army and then I joined the Foreign Office. I served in Indonesia,
then in Yugoslavia, then in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. I spent
21 months walking on foot from Turkey to Bangladesh, I wrote a
book about Afghanistan and a book about Iraq. I now live in Kabul
where I have lived for the last 18 months running something called
the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. We are involved in restoring
part of the historic commercial centre of Kabul and we train Afghan
craftsmen and try to find markets for Afghan goods.
Dr Williams: My name is Michael
Williams and I run the transatlantic security programme at the
Royal United Services Institute. Since 2005 RUSI has been engaged
in research and writing on operations on the cusp of warfare and
post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year
my research has focused on civil-military relations in Afghanistan
supported by the government of Canada and NATO, essentially strategic
concept modelling trying to pull apart what has happened so far
and where the crisis is headed.
Q166 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Can I start with the mission and can I ask you first, Dr Williams,
are you clear on what the UK ISAF mission in Afghanistan is?
Dr Williams: Yes and no. The stated
mission is to support the government in Kabul and extending governance
throughout Afghanistan by maintaining security. NATO has adopted,
and in turn the UK Government adopted, a very broad conception
of security which means that it can do everything or nothing essentially.
By assuming everything NATO has put itself into a corner I think
in that instead of being one part of the solution, it is being
seen by the public, by the Afghan Government and by the majority
of people looking at the scenario as responsible for the entire
situation whereas really it should be a component. UNAMA is not
doing very much, the international community is not doing very
much; we need much more co-ordination and cross-communication
in terms of international approaches to Afghanistan. NATO should
not be doing all the work by itself.
Q167 Chairman: Would you like to
add anything to that, Rory Stewart?
Mr Stewart: We are in a very dangerous
stage. The initial strategy of course in Afghanistan was for a
light footprint in 2001, 2002 and 2003. That was a considered
approach led by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative.
He believed that deploying too many troops on the ground would
both undermine the capacity of the Afghan government and spark
an insurgency. Since then we have begun to increasingly expand
our ambitions and the range of activities we are involved in,
including of course the deployment of more troops and we are now
in a situation in which we are simultaneously trying to pursue
quite different objectives that stretch from counter-insurgency,
counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, state building, development,
democratisation. Very few of these issues are logically connected
and each one of them could be pursued on its own. I believe that
the deployment to Helmand is a dangerous distraction from the
core activities of the Afghan Government and that we are wasting
resources and valuable policy time on a mission which I cannot
see succeeding.
Mr Fox: The expression was used
in the earlier session about the mission losing focus, and in
practical terms I think it has because, as my colleagues have
described, there is a great divergence of view because it is undoubted
that the main point of effort for the British is in Helmand province
and it is counter-narcotics. I doubt if many of the other NATO
allies would see it in those terms. The US still, from my encounters
with US commanders and diplomats, see it as part of the global
war on terror and enduring freedom. The question that has arisen
in the minds of NATO allies is whether this is in fact strategic
ground, whether it is a discretionary or vital operation. I work
a great deal with the Italian press, I have just been to Germany,
and they certainly do not see it as urgent as we do. It is becoming
very atomised, the view of the mission. The NATO spokesman, I
should add, Mark Laherty, about a year ago said that the main
effort must be to sustain NATO, NATO's credibility is on the line.
This does not play either with the majority of the allies or with
the majority of the media, I must say, the way that the media
message has gone through.
Q168 Chairman: Given what you understand
of the mission, do you believe its objectives are achievable?
Mr Fox: Given the resources and
the issues that run throughout both parts of this discussion of
sustainability, I would have to be unequivocal and say no.
Q169 Chairman: Would you agree with
that, Rory Stewart?
Mr Stewart: I would also say no
and I would say it would be very dangerous to believe that simply
bringing in more troops or more equipment was going to make any
difference to that. We fundamentally neither have the understanding,
the will, the resources nor the consent of the local population
to try and pursue this kind of policy in Helmand. Simply bringing
in more troops will make the situation worse.
Dr Williams: In Helmand I very
much agree with my fellow presenters here. Kevan Jones made the
point quite rightly that there are areas of success in certain
parts of Afghanistan which should not be overlooked; however our
current objectives and the resources put to those objectives,
coupled with the lack of support within our own populations for
the campaign, I find it very doubtful in some cases that it could
be successful.
Q170 Mr Holloway: Mr Stewart, in
the New York Times and elsewhere you say that you think
this is deemed to failure whatever you do in a sense because this
is a very traditional, Islamic and xenophobic society. Can you
expand on that?
Mr Stewart: I do not believe the
mission in Afghanistan as a whole is doomed to failure, I believe
there is a lot of opportunity for us in Afghanistan but we are
wasting our resources on Utopian ideas. We have set the bar much
too high and I am very worried about what currently seems to be
happening. People seem to be talking in a highly moralistic language
and when I say "Can we defeat the Taliban?" politicians
reply "We have to defeat the Taliban." When I raise
the problems in southern Afghanistan people respond, "Surely
you are not saying that we ought to sit back and do nothing".
The answer is of course we can do a great deal. Primarily we can
defend ourselves against the terrorist threat from Afghanistan,
we can do considerably more projects which prevent the population
from becoming disillusioned. I am not talking here really about
traditional development projects, I am talking about heavy infrastructure
projects, projects which deliver to Afghan demands which are essentially
for jobs and infrastructure. Thirdly, we can do serious, sustained
development projects of a traditional kind in the country, but
acknowledging our limits is both an empowering thing—it
is something that allows us to focus on what we can actually achieve—but
it is also something that should make us cautious about trying
to pursue a radical policy of, for example, elimination of narcotics,
attempts to suddenly change gender relations, attempts to destabilise
the political structures in southern Afghanistan when we have
no credible alternative. As the members of the Committee are aware
we have now been through three governors in a year in Helmand.
This represents a real failure on the part of the international
community—because it is largely the international community
that is putting the pressure on Karzai—to understand what
would be required from the governor of Helmand. We have gone from
Sher Mohammed Akhunzada who was portrayed as a drug-dealing warlord
to Engineer Daoud who was an English-speaking NGO friendly technocrat
from Kabul and we are now back to an extremely eccentric and peculiar
governor who appears to have the merits of neither of his predecessors.
I believe, therefore, that we need to acknowledge that communities
in Southern Afghanistan are considerably more conservative, anti-foreign,
than we acknowledge, that there is genuine local support for the
Taliban, that we have tended in talking about hearts and minds
not really to focus on hearts and minds so much as on bellies,
by which I mean we tend to think like Marxists and assume that
people's primary motivations are economic. Of course, the military,
of anybody, should understand that it is quite possible for money
to have non-economic motivations and in the case of many communities
in southern Afghanistan those are religious, ideological and it
is quite easy in Quetta at the moment to recruit by saying "come
and fight the English". Therefore, I would say we perhaps
need to acknowledge that Southern Afghanistan may remain for the
foreseeable future fragile, traumatised and not fully under governmental
control, that we need a much more decentralised governmental system,
that Karzai's approach to the southern areas perhaps needs to
be closer to the approach that Pakistan takes to the federated
tribal areas, which is to say he needs to rely more on local surers
at a village level, not just at provincial level and on the use
of political agents, and that we need to invest in areas where
they are generally welcomed. It is a disgrace currently that in
Kabul the garbage is seven feet deep in the city, 200 yards from
the presidential palace. This is a massive national political
symbol that we have the resources to improve, win consent and
support from the Afghanistan people, instead of wasting our time
trying to pursue development projects in areas where security
does not allow us to do development and where the population often
do not wish us to be present.
Q171 Mr Jenkin: Let us just be absolutely
clear. There is a reason for us to have a footprint in Afghanistan.
Do each of you regard that as essential for our national security
in order that we prevent al-Qaeda coming back, or is this something
we could walk away from and not worry about, apart from the humanitarian
crisis? Strategically do we actually need to be there?
Dr Williams: I think it cannot
be doubted to say that we must be in Afghanistan for national
security reasons. Leaving Afghanistan and walking away we would
have the same situation in Iraq which, unfortunately, is not of
our own making, it cannot be done. I do not think that we should
abandon Afghanistan. We made promises to Afghanistan going in
there that we would deliver on certain things which we have not
done and to walk away would be negligence. From an internal security
perspective, the heroin problem that you have on the corner of
the street in Brixton is intricately linked to the situation in
Afghanistan as well, and I am not at all endorsing a complete
counter-narcotics programme at the moment, I agree completely
with what has been said by my fellow panellists here on that subject.
But, to look at Afghanistan as something that NATO can walk away
from and the UK can walk away from is to ignore lessons from history.
Q172 Chairman: Do you think we are
having any sense of a positive impact, UK and ISAF forces, in
Afghanistan in any direction?
Mr Fox: I would like to answer
the previous question.
Q173 Chairman: By all means.
Mr Fox: I think it is very important
because it is all very well for military experts and think-tanks,
as we have heard, to say that it is absolutely vital, that we
need to stay there for X and Y reasons, but I think this is where
in the public domain, and I deal with the information pool that
goes out there and I know what my editor, publishers and readers
are interested in, as we got in the BBC polls in Iraq we are getting
a very similar thing from Afghanistan: were you to use some of
these terms, is this strategic ground? It is an open question.
It is very difficult to get it across now because actually not
too many people talk about al-Qaeda being there and, good God,
if things go really wrong if you are a farmer in Panshway then
al-Qaeda will come back. The Panshway farmer is talking about
the equivalence in his mind and in the mind of his family between
the violence coming from the skies from NATO and the violence
coming from the guns of the extortionists, the mafia entrepreneurs
of Taliban. I think it is going to be very, very difficult as
this goes on that we do not see terribly great success this will
move from a very difficult situation in the public perception—this
is the real danger—into the too difficult box made famous
by Henry Kissinger when you have the in-tray, the out-tray and
the too difficult tray and it could end there and it is not absolutely
vital. I think that the drugs argument is not necessarily being
won. Do you fight the battle of heroin or whatever on the streets
of Marseilles, Milan, particularly London and Brixton, by tackling
it upstream? It is a very, very open question. I think that this
is going to be one of the big questions as to whether Afghanistan
is strategic ground, particularly if you are talking, as American
and British military commanders, about a commitment of 20 years.
I think this is going to be very difficult. To follow your question,
I do not think there is a quick victory in this one. General Richards
has talked about Operation Medusa thwarting the attack on Kandahar
last year in September as a tactical defeat for the Taliban. The
Taliban, both socially and demographically, have infinite resources
compared with the NATO presence and I think we are in a cycle
now. I do not mean to nudge the agenda of the Committee but we
really must say what the violence is about. What do we mean by
the insurgency? What do we mean by the Taliban? I have read the
transcript of General Houghton talking to you and I was rather
concerned that he seemed to be implying that it is one unified
enemy with several points of command; it just does not work like
that, even in my limited experience and my experience of talking
to Afghanis in Helmand.
Mr Stewart: Just briefly on this,
this definitely is not my area of expertise but it might be worth
conceptually distinguishing more clearly between counter-insurgency
and counter-terrorism. It is quite clear when you talk to General
McNeill, the new US commander who has replaced General Richards,
that he is thinking of counter-insurgency. He does not believe
that his fight against the Taliban is part of the key fight against
al-Qaeda or that US national interests are directly concerned
with the counter-insurgency campaign. The counter-insurgency campaign
is really about pursuing forces opposed to the Afghan Government.
Very few of those people who we are killing have any intention
of launching attacks against United States soil or UK soil. It
is quite plausible that we could continue to pursue a good counter-terrorism
strategy of the kind that we pursued in 2002-03 through intelligence
operations and Special Forces operations, I do not think it requires
trying to dominate every inch of ground with NATO troops and taking
on these Taliban associated groups.
Q174 Chairman: Do you think the actions
that we have been taking in Helmand have been a distraction?
Mr Stewart: Absolutely.
Q175 Chairman: Do you think it was
a mistake to have the counter-clockwise move around Afghanistan?
Mr Stewart: I think it was an
error to spread out too much. I think the 200 US troops sitting
in a base in Lashkar Gah, who have been mocked a great deal, was
probably a better approach than putting 5,500 British troops into
the Province. The objectives that we set ourselves were clearly
unachievable. A very disturbing aspect of this is that a year
and a half ago, two years ago, when we were sitting around debating
whether or not to deploy to Helmand it seemed to me that the majority
of my colleagues in the Foreign Office and the military believed
it was a bad idea but somehow this policy proceeded and a lot
of the things that were predicted happened. The notions that were
being sold that somehow within our deployment we would be able
to allow NGOs to operate freely, get drugs under control, improve
governance in the Province, none of these have been achieved.
It seems to me that at the same time there are many areas of Afghanistan
that are crying out for our assistance and genuinely would welcome
us and invite us in. I cannot quite understand why we think this
is a sensible policy.
Mr Fox: I do agree. It is 20/20
hindsight, I would agree with that. To make Helmand the centre
of gravity of British operations in military terminology has been
a mistake. I would like to just add to that. There was a great
problem with the concept of operations. I recall very well the
3 Para Battle Group had been in for about six weeks when I visited
with General Sir Mike Jackson and we were briefed by Colonel Stewart
Tootal, the Battle Group Commander, and by Brigadier Ed Butler,
the commander BRITFOR, and what it was predicated on was capacity
building right across the piece of local Afghan forces. I think
this is a fundamental weakness and it was one of the most worrying
aspects that emerged during my most recent visit, and it is the
fragility of Afghan forces. Let me put it like this: I did an
interview with General Wardak, the Minister of War, who claimed
that there is a usable force of 45,000 soldiers in the Afghan
army. I hope it is not an indiscretion but I had a long conversation
with somebody I know extremely well, Major General James Bucknall,
the Chief of Staff of the ARRC and Chief of Staff, therefore,
to General Richards' command. He said how fragile it was, that
at best by the end of this year you are going to have 15,000 usable
Afghan troops and only in particular regions. James Bucknall had
experience of training the Iraqi army and I think that this is
illustrative. The problem with training the Iraqi army at points
was that you had broken it before you made it. We are in danger
of doing the same in Afghanistan. This brings me back to the concept
of operations in Helmand, particularly in the northern reaches
of the Helmand river system, in Musa Qaleh, Sangin, now very well
known in the headlines. That was predicated on the idea that you
would build a platoon house, you would build out and you would
get out within weeks or months and hand over to Afghan national
forces. This is simply not obtainable. The word I heard right
across the piece from multinational trainers of the Afghan army
in the base outside Kabul, where they are doing terrific work,
18 hour days and you name it, they are really working on training
at all levels, one senior British officer used the word again,
this is very "fragile". We are on an edge and I think
perhaps far too much is being expected of local Afghan forces.
I was quite convinced that the local Afghan forces around the
Kajaki dam, for instance, their loyalty was utterly tradable and
they would go over within weeks if they were under severe pressure
from the Taliban.
Dr Williams: Taking the larger
strategic context of the situation, it is a decision now whether
we leave the south to be an area where it is abandoned, no law
and order essentially, no governance, leave it be and just work
on the north. I have been to areas in the north of Afghanistan
that have been quite successful, they have got schools being built
and communities are part of the project, they are integrated.
The Germans have done fabulous work in that area which follows
on from the British approach in that area which was very, very
good. However, the strategic question is do we leave an area of
instability in the south unaddressed? I would pose that eventually
at some point that would come to challenge progress in the north
of the country. Whether you look at it in terms of the UN perspective
or the US perspective initially of operations to go in a counter-clockwise
motion, whether that was really smart, I am not sure. There is
a 2005 RAND study by James Dobbins, who is probably one of the
foremost experts on this subject, and I quote from that study.
He says: "There appears to be an inverse correlation between
the size of the stabilisation force and the level of risk. The
higher the proportion of stabilising troops the lower the number
of casualties suffered and inflicted, indeed most adequately manned
post-conflict operations suffer no casualties whatsoever."
It is interesting if you look at Kosovo, we had 50 times more
troops per capita in Kosovo than they do in Afghanistan. I accept
and we can talk about the very, very different strategic realities
of both countries, but the difficulties we face in Southern Afghanistan
are to a large extent a result of the fact that we are not properly
prepared for those operations, they have not been properly manned
or not executed. General Richards did a fabulous job, but he said
that if the Taliban had not chosen to say, "We will defeat
NATO here and now", he would have been out-manoeuvred, they
could have gone round him in Kandahar and he could have done little
about that. Again, that is from an interview with General Richards.
I am just giving my analysis of the situation. You have to take
that into the context of can you leave the south without having
repercussions on the north and if the problems are there in the
south is that because it is an intractable situation or is it
one that we have not adequately addressed and then, of course,
following the discussion from this morning, are you dealing with
the external dimension, which is can you address it by military
force. There is an external dimension that even military force
in southern Afghanistan might not solve the problem.
Chairman: I think we ought to record
that Rory Stewart was showing disagreement with what you were
saying. I also think we ought to move on because we are running
a bit behind now.
Q176 Mr Borrow: I just wanted to
pick up on a point with Mr Stewart on the distinction between
counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency and link it back to the
reason we are in Afghanistan in the first place, which is counter-terrorism.
If the Taliban had given up al-Qaeda we would not have gone in.
The key thing strategically is to ensure that a government or
administration of some sort does not come to power in Afghanistan
which could provide a haven for terrorist bases.
Mr Stewart: Definitely.
Q177 Mr Borrow: At the moment it
is counter-insurgency but that is to ensure there is a stable
administration of some type.
Mr Stewart: I think we can certainly
achieve your objective of ensuring that a government does not
come to power that would provide safe haven for terrorist training
camps. That does not require trying to put 20,000 troops on the
ground to fight the Taliban in every village, and that is what
we need to be clear on. The other thing is we need to get out
of a world in which we are talking continually about what we ought
to do rather than what we can do. The reality, of course, is yes
there may well have been 50 times as many troops on the ground
in Bosnia but that would mean 2.5 million troops on the ground
in Afghanistan. It is simply inconceivable that we could have
the number of troops required to pursue James Dobbins' notion
of counter-insurgency. It is inconceivable that we could have
the kind of relationship with Pakistan which would allow us to
control the borders in the way that we would like. We need to
accept these things as intractable realities and design a policy
that addresses them rather than perpetually speculating that if
only we had a little bit more of this, that or the other we would
be okay.
Q178 Mr Borrow: If I could move on
now to the questions I was supposed to ask. The first one is to
Mr Stewart. In your opinion, how would you say the UK presence
is viewed by Afghanis and is there a difference between different
ethnic groups within the country?
Mr Stewart: Yes, I think broadly
speaking you could make that claim. Essentially the Uzbek, Huzara,
Tajik, Turkmen populations in the centre and north of the country
are quite well disposed not just towards British troops but towards
a foreign presence in general. The Huzara, for example, three
million people in the centre of the country, have been the great
winners from this intervention. They were killed in large numbers
by the Taliban and they now have considerably more freedom and
autonomy but the Pushtun groups in the south have tended to feel
angry and disenfranchised and in some cases, because through the
early 1980s we encouraged this great myth of Jihad and resistance
to foreign oppression, it is quite easy for people to draw on
that to frame their opposition to Britain or the United States.
Dr Williams: I just wanted to
support Rory in particular your first question on this idea of
what are the objectives. The ultimate objective is to prevent
a hostile government from controlling the whole of the country.
It may very well be that the operations in Afghanistan in the
south are unsustainable and I do not quote the RAND study to say
that we need to have that number of troops, but perhaps this year
we will not be able to do that essentially. To look at what we
do in the rest of Afghanistan, being able to support the government
and prevent the whole country from coming under Taliban control,
it might be a better strategy and the operation in the south might
ultimately undermine the larger strategic objective. I completely
agree with that assessment.
Q179 Mr Borrow: In the previous block
of questions Robert Fox talked about the fact that we are not
talking simply about a battle with the Taliban as a single unified
command structure. Do your colleagues want to elaborate on that?
Mr Stewart: It is a very difficult
subject because, of course, it has now become quite fashionable
for the military to say, "Well, who are the Taliban anyway?"
whereas nine months ago essentially it appeared that we had quite
a clear definition of the Taliban, the Taliban were the people
who we killed but not the people we negotiated with. Now we are
realising, of course, that you can cut them up any number of ways.
You can distinguish between extremely aggressive extreme groups
of leaders based in Quetta with whom no negotiation is possible,
you might be able to identify a middle group of people who remain
loyal to the notion of the Afghan nation but espouse a lot of
the conservative religious ideology of the Taliban, and finally
a third perhaps floating group of young men who are excited by
the notion of resistance to foreign occupation but do not have
a serious ideological commitment and might be won over. These
kinds of things become most interesting, though not as a broad
division into three, but when you get down to the village level
and try to work out in this particularly community who is in charge,
is it a tribal elder, is it a particular group of old men who
may have no connection to the tribal structures and how do they
relate to those groups, that is the kind of work that one would
hope eventually the Afghan Government would get involved in. It
is fundamentally not military but political work. It would involve
some kinds of negotiations. The Dutch in Uruzgan I commend very
much to the Committee as a very good model. They would say it
is not a Dutch model but an Afghan model but in essence they are
very much trying to work with communities that invite them in,
they are relying on a governor who was himself the Taliban deputy
minister and is quite a conservative mullah. They appear to be
able to slowly reach out but it is not the kind of strategy which
is being pursued by NATO so far and I am slightly concerned it
may not be the strategy that General McNeill is about to pursue
in the next six months.
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