Examination of Witness (Questions 204-219)
GENERAL DAVID
RICHARDS CBE DSO
24 APRIL 2007
Q204 Chairman: General Richards, welcome
to the Committee. As you know we are doing a second inquiry into
Afghanistan. We were in Afghanistan last week, and we first met
you to discuss this in Kabul last year, and we were very grateful
for your help then. You have now returned to Germany, I think,
as Commander of the ARRC. I wonder if you could begin by telling
us about the ISAF IX and telling us whether you believe that it
achieved its objectives?
General Richards: In all humility,
Chairman, in one sense definitely, in that I had the military
task—and I would like to pay tribute to a fantastic headquarters.
It is a real prize that the UK possesses and needs looking after,
because I have been told as an aside that there was no other headquarters
available to NATO to do what I am about to tell you other than
the ARRC, and the fact that ISAF X is now a composite headquarters
as opposed to another of the HRF(L)s in the NATO armoury probably
substantiates that fact. But in one sense definitely we achieved
the aim which was to extend NATO command over the more difficult
south and east regions. If you remember when I deployed I only
had responsibility for the capital region, the north and the west,
and quite clearly that was achieved. In a technical military sense,
although we did it and there is not much song and dance about
it, it was very demanding and my headquarters, if you like, as
a result proved that NATO can do the most demanding of operations
so I would just like to pay tribute to the people who worked with
me. Did we achieve the other task? Well, in the military we talk
about "implied" tasks and "specified" tasks.
What were my other tasks that we might consider? I think it was
bringing greater coherence to the overall international effort
and in that respect—and remember I am talking as a NATO
officer; although I am in front of you as a British officer it
was in my guise as a NATO officer that I was doing this—it
was through the creation of mechanisms like the Policy Action
Group in Kabul and through the development of concepts like the
Afghan Development Zone concept, which was how we tried to implement
the PAGs plans in the provinces, that we achieved greater co-ordination
because it was needed. I would say, and I was talking to SACEUR
yesterday, that co-ordination of all the different actors and
actions in Afghanistan remains a weakness in what we were all
trying to achieve there. But we did improve things—not yet
proved to the point where it is working as smoothly as you or
I would like, but then does any nation function as well as that?
I do not know. But it certainly could be better. Did we establish
what I call psychological ascendancy over the Taliban? Again,
I think we can claim that happened. They set out to defeat us,
and I know you probably will want to look at it during Medusa
in the early autumn; they failed, and we won in a narrow tactical
sense. Whether we were able to exploit that tactical success is
something you probably want to talk about, but we nevertheless
left that battle—which is what it was, an old-fashioned
battle—the victors, and almost uniquely they said at the
time that they had to conduct a tactical move out of the area.
So I think we achieved that. Did we facilitate the degree of reconstruction,
development and improvement in governance that we all know lies
at the heart of this problem? No, there is a lot more to be done,
but I would like to think things are better today and after our
time there than they were when we arrived when, do not forget,
there were two different military operations so inevitably you
were competing for space and influence. I have given a long answer,
Chairman, but I think we can look back on it and say that we achieved
certainly the military aims of the mission and probably did a
lot more, but it was setting the conditions for more work rather
than solving all the problems.
Q205 Chairman: Did the aims and objectives
change at all while you were there? Did you think: "This
is not the right direction to be going in; we need to be moving
in a different direction"?
General Richards: That is a good
question. Any military operation evolves and certainly ours in
Afghanistan did, not least obviously in the numbers of troops
that were committed to it. Did our aims and objectives alter?
The answer is no. I remember having been given my orders, if you
like, before we did our final work-up exercise in Stavanger, Norway,
in March, interpreting that and passing my interpretation back
up the NATO chain of command, and it talked about extending and
deepening the writ of the government of Afghanistan, creating
the conditions in which reconstruction, development and governance
can start to prosper—all of those. That remained extant
throughout my time and it led to the creation of the Policy Action
Group and the ADZ concept. Those two factors lay at the heart
of everything we did and still remain, as far as I know because
my successor inherited them from NATO, the bedrock, if you like,
of what he is trying to do. How you do that might then get on
to a different thing, but the aims and objectives remain pretty
well constant.
Q206 Chairman: You say "as far
as I know" because you have no current role in relation to
Afghanistan?
General Richards: No. I left on
4 February. Obviously I have kept an interest in it and I have
e-mail contact with people there, but I have no formal responsibility
or role.
Q207 Chairman: What would you say
were the three headline lessons you learnt, or, if you would like,
four—
General Richards: Or twenty!
Q208 Chairman: —from ISAF IX?
General Richards: I suppose the
most important one is that as a NATO commander, and I think I
could say as a commander of any coalition operation, you have
to learn how you can exert a decisive influence on the campaign
when you do not actually have all the levers to pull. I was just
one of many influences, yet I and my headquarters probably had
the most critical role to play, and I did not pull the levers.
There are 37 nations in ISAF, there are people outside ISAF like
the Japanese who have an influence, there is the World Bank, and
so it goes on. Even within the Alliance the USA understandably,
and I think rightly, were the major influence, the only nation
that had a national role because of the OEF operation but also
because of the amount of money they are putting in across the
whole country. So all these different influences must be brought
to bear in a coherent way, we might say in the military into something
that reflects unity of effort, unity of command, yet you cannot
just order it. When asked to compare others in my position people
often mention Templar in Malaya. Well, he was in charge of a single
nation's campaign there, and basically he ran it; he did not really
have to go and ask anybody. I either had to ask or to co-ordinate
and influence a whole host of actors. How does someone in my position
achieve that is something I think we learnt on the hoof, and maybe
there are some useful lessons to be learned. It led to the creation
of the Policy Action Group and other mechanisms. Another question
in the context of Afghanistan is what does "hearts and minds"
actually mean? Afghanistan is a nation that has been in a state
of conflict for 30 odd years, and I learnt there that you cannot
get at the heart except through the mind, it is not something
that is necessarily a concurrent activity, and the Afghans, until
you can prove that you can militarily win, are not going to give
you their hearts because they just cannot afford to take the wrong
decision, back the wrong horse, if you like. Hence that led to
the fight in Operation Medusa in September, when we had to fight
a conventional battle—not a huge scale one but given the
amount of ordinance that was dropped in that area and so on it
was pretty big. So that was another lesson—do not just buy
that "hearts and minds" necessarily means soft action;
it can mean hard action because people are not going to take a
risk. The comprehensive approach I think goes back to my first
point, really; it is no good. As wonderful as it is in a country
like the UK which has the comprehensive approach here in Whitehall,
when you are not running the operation or the campaign as a single
nation in the theatre of operations, having a comprehensive approach
can count for relatively little if you have relatively little
influence in the country concerned, or if you do not integrate
your thinking and your approach with all the other nations and
all the other actors in, in this case, Afghanistan, and I think
that is a lesson that we have all relearned probably. Those are
three lessons; I am sure you can pick on many others, but I think
trying to stay at a higher level those would be my major ones.
Q209 Chairman: In purely military
terms, have you made any changes to the Allied Rapid Reaction
Corps as a result of your experiences in Afghanistan?
General Richards: Not yet. We
are as a result of our lessons learned process having a structural
review of the ARRC. Broadly, because we had long enough to train,
we were about right, but I think we need to look at air/land co-ordination
and we are going to strengthen that part of it. On the question
of intelligence, I do not know whether it will help but I think
our current full Colonel intelligence boss will become a one-star,
so it is those sorts of factors, which are not massive. The ARRC,
because of Kosovo and because of Bosnia, broadly is comfortable
with this but running a theatre of operations is something that
you cannot just pick up and do at the drop of a hat. It is a whole
area of skills and experience that a headquarters needs to work
at almost on a daily basis, and that is what the ARRC was lucky
enough to be able to do.
Q210 Chairman: Do you envisage that
the ARRC could, in the medium or even short term, be returning
to Afghanistan?
General Richards: I think that
is probably quite likely. I do not think there are any plans for
it at the moment but I know they are under discussion, because
you have in the ARRC a headquarters whose raison d'être
is doing this sort of thing. It seems a bit bizarre if you do
not use it again when it is sitting ready to be used certainly
by 2009. So I think that is being looked at but no decision has
yet been taken, and it would certainly get my support.
Q211 Mr Crausby: So how well do you
think that ISAF X will do, and do you expect that the approach
to ISAF X will differ greatly from ISAF IX?
General Richards: ISAF X as a
headquarters will take time to get into its stride because—and
I know SACEUR is looking at this—they came together as a
group of individuals without the benefit of coming from a well-found
headquarters like the ARRC, where we live and breath and socialise
as well as work together and train together, some of us for nearly
a year. I know as I said that NATO is looking at how a composite
headquarters, as it is called—and you visited it—can
be as efficient and work as well as a team as the ARRC was able
to do, and I see no reason over time, if they trickle-post people
into the headquarters, as is the intention, why at some point
they cannot reach the same standards as I like to think we are
at, and in many degrees I suspect they already are at. They are
having, if you like, to work up on the job. At some point they
will be as good as we were. I am sure we would like to think we
might be slightly better but that is just a bit of headquarters
pride at stake, but I think they will be fine—and I have
every reason to think, with the extra resources that General McNeill
has got, he will be able to continue and build on the work we
did.
Q212 Mr Crausby: So has continuity
between ISAF IX and ISAF X been achieved?
General Richards: I think we can
say it was. From an early stage we set ourselves the additional
task of ensuring that ISAF X got a good run in. Most of the key
staff, that is the colonels, brigadiers and a number of two-stars,
actually served under me for between seven weeks and a minimum
of two weeks, so with my own chief of staff and others remaining
in theatre to sit alongside them—the Americans call it left
seat/right seat driving—I think we were able to give them
a pretty good run-in. General McNeill obviously has huge experience
of Afghanistan and I am sure he took it on to new heights.
Q213 Mr Crausby: Finally, what is
the command structure between Commander of ISAF through to the
Commander of British Forces?
General Richards: The Commander
of British Forces is in the ISAF command structure; he is double-hatted.
I think it is now Brigadier Lorimer, who you visited—
Q214 Chairman: Yes.
General Richards: He is a NATO
officer and the British National Contingent Commander, I think
or COMBRITFOR, so he answers up two chains. I think it works.
Q215 Mr Jones: General, could I ask
about your role in the relatively short period of time you were
there? When we met President Karzai one of the issues he raised
with us was, and he obviously had great respect for yourself and
what you had done, that you were really there for a relatively
short period of time and by the end of it you had got your feet
well under the table, you understood the politics of the country,
but you then moved on. Do you think there is a reasoning to have
a commander out there for longer than the period of six months
they are there at the moment?
General Richards: Well, I did
nine months, which was an improvement from the six months that
most ISAF commanders did; General McNeill will do a minimum of
one year, so I think NATO is addressing this. I think there is
a strong case for the top leaders, certainly the commander, for
doing maybe as long as two years, but if you are going to do that,
depending on how far down the chain you take it, you need to change
the conditions of service, certainly for British officers. The
Americans do not pay any tax, so it is quite an incentive for
Mrs McNeill to know that the mortgage will be paid off at the
end of the two years, or whatever it might be. So I am all for
it but you need to look at the conditions of service because everyone
is working very hard and I think we must remember that it penalises
our families. It is not fair on them if you do not give them a
little bit of incentive and there is balance to be struck but
in an absolute sense there is a definite case for longer tours,
although I do not think you necessarily have to take it all the
way down to Corporal Higgins in the mortar section, and that sort
of thing.
Q216 Chairman: But presumably you
have to take it some of the way down otherwise you would be separating
the commanders from the troops that they have been commanding?
General Richards: That would be
one of the issues you would have to resolve. If the CO of X Battalion
in Helmand was to do a year then you could not do that without
his whole battalion staying logically because he commands the
battalion. There was talk of me staying on but the ARRC leaving.
Well, I can absolutely assure you if I was at all successful it
was because of HQ ARRC solidly behind me and I did not want to
do that. We were a team or we were nothing, so you do need to
go through all that. But at the top level, in the case of ISAF,
having a composite headquarters does have the advantage of allowing
extended tours because one person can do one year, another can
do two, and they just trickle-post through the headquarters, but
to get it down lower into, if you like, the fighting troops you
have much more of a complex problem and it would have to be worked
through, which is why I say you would have to look at conditions
of service and a host of other things.
Q217 Mr Jones: I do not think it
is necessarily down to the troops. I think on the three occasions
I have been there with the politicians you meet there you can
see it is a very complex society which is based on relationship-building,
which you obviously did very well, and the new people who come
in try to establish those relationships. What the President was
saying is that keeping those relationships longer actually helps
the process.
General Richards: You are absolutely
right and I would agree, which is fine, but you have to somehow
compensate the individual and his family for two years living
in those conditions, and so on and so forth.
Q218 Mr Jenkin: General, very briefly,
what about the idea of extending permanence further up? Again,
it was in President Karzai's thoughts that there would somehow
be some UN-mandated international co-ordinator precisely to achieve
those comprehensive effects which you say are quite difficult
for a purely military commander to achieve.
General Richards: Well, again,
in theory the UN SRSG could fill that role, Tom Koenigs, and he
is there on I think a two-year contract, so I think the mechanism
is already in place in terms of extended tours for key civilians
there. The ambassadors and so on tended to do more, and I know
our next ambassador is due to do a two-year tour, for example,
but for some reason that co-ordination and, if you like, that
dominance of a single individual has not yet occurred, and it
was to a degree because of that that I felt what was perceived
to be a little bit of a vacuum and we created the Policy Action
Group and so on. It could be a military man but I do think that
there is a strong case for a dominant international partner alongside
President Karzai as his trusted adviser and friend to whom he
can turn when necessary and with whom he has a very good relationship.
Q219 Mr Jenkins: You are quite right
to make a plea for extra bonuses and operational bonuses for staff
who stop long. But please do not repeat your idea of not paying
taxes. I like people paying taxes because it pays my wages, yours
as well, and it might catch on which would be very detrimental
to us!
General Richards: Yes. I do understand
very well what you are saying!
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