Examination of Witness (Questions 280-294)
GENERAL DAVID
RICHARDS CBE DSO
24 APRIL 2007
Q280 Mr Jenkins: That is the problem
I have got in that we do need the regional conference, we do need
the players involved to make commitments, and that is India, Pakistan
and Iran, the whole area. How do the Americans who are the lead
players and the ones pushing it sit down with Iranians? How do
we get them to understand that Iran in this area has a positive
role to play, it has a commitment to stop the drugs going across
its border, but 60% of it still goes across the border, and we
have got to sit down and discuss these strategies as far as this
is the only way we are going to get a regional plan to bring Afghanistan
back to the civilised world as such, so when do we get it, how
do we get it?
General Richards: Your judgment
on this is better than mine but I do think first of all in my
discussions with US officers about it, they recognise this issue,
that there is a regional solution. It does not necessarily have
to be dependent on a US lead, the heads of the states in the region
do and can come together more frequently and for what it is worth—I
know this is certainly not my business—the US were very
happy for that to happen, so we have got to encourage the heads
of state in the region to do it and then take it from there.
Q281 Mr Jenkins: Can I ask you the
other side of the question which is about Pakistan? We went to
Pakistan and they said they are doing all they can to try and
avoid people going over the border, we went to India and the Indian
government said the Pakistanis could be doing more, and so on.
What was your experience, because we have Operation Enduring Freedom
going to continue in terms of, if you like, chasing al-Qaeda and
terrorism, alongside the ISAF operation; what was your take on
relations with Pakistan in particular and whether it really is
the problem that everyone says and the engine from which a lot
of insurgency comes?
General Richards: Firstly, OEF
and ISAF operations cohabit the same space and it worked tremendously
well actually. The chairman of the joint chiefs said it would
and he would trust me as the ISAF commander and I have to say
that that was great, I could not ask for more, so I do not think
that is key to this issue although I quite see why you have raised
it at the same time, it is manageable. The thing is that inside
Pakistan, just like I am told inside Iran, there are people who
are causing us trouble. That does not mean it is Pakistan Government
policy to cause trouble. Indeed, in my experience of some very
good and detailed work with the Pakistan Army they are doing a
tremendous amount and they are, in many respects, unsung heroes.
It is all too easy to blame someone else, is it not, for things
that are going on, in this case inside Afghanistan, so there is
a difference between what is happening and the amount you can
deal with it—ie on the part of Pakistan—and the degree
to which it might be engineered in some way by the Pakistan Government.
I just do not buy that. Clearly in the past, they will be the
first to tell you, there were elements that we know historically
supported the Taliban, but that was a different era and I do not
think one wants to confuse that period with today. We had very
good relations with the Pakistan military; I obviously had the
privilege of talking to President Musharraf on at least three
occasions and I had good and convivial relations with his military
leaders. Inside Kabul—I do not know if they talked to you
about it—there is now a joint intelligence and operations
centre so you can have Afghan officers, Pakistan officers and
ISAF officers sitting in the same building doing the planning
in intelligence operations between the tri-partite commission
meetings which are also another military success. The real issue
now is that the military is doing everything it can, but going
back to what has been the thrust of much of our discussion, it
is much beyond just military endeavour and we now need to get
into a more strategic approach that sees—this would be my
own view—Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations in the
region coming together to solve it as a regional issue. There
is no mechanism for doing that at the moment; there are bilateral
arrangements and we now need to develop those one step further
to create a regional structure or mechanism that allows these
nations to actually discuss the issues. These are a joint problem,
they have got joint solutions there, and I know from my bilateral
discussions with both presidents that they are talking about many
of the same things, but there is no mechanism for bringing them
into harmony.
Q282 Chairman: But at all levels
of Afghan society there is a deep conviction from what we saw
that this is the fault of Pakistan not doing enough about Taliban
people having a safe haven in the Pakistani border region. Do
you think that that fear is justified and do you think there is
something that needs to be done to put that right that we are
not doing?
General Richards: It is rather
like when I was asked last year do I have enough and I would say
no, I never have enough, no general ever has enough and, as we
discussed, it was a close-run thing on occasions. The same criticism
can be levelled against Pakistan, you are doing a lot but please
do more, and I am sure that they would be the first to say to
me, yes, we do need to do more. In my last meeting with General
Hyat—he is effectively the head of the Army—he described
how they are now putting the Army into the border zone to try
to do more, and since I left I have noticed that some other leaders
have been either driven into Pakistan or been dealt with within
Pakistan one way or another. What I would say though is that this
is not just Pakistan's business. On our side of the border, the
Afghan side of the border, we need to do much more too. NATO needs
to put more effort into it and one of the missing elements of
the CJSOR that we discussed earlier is a battalion that would
enable the commander of RC South, shortly to be a British Major
General Page, to look after our side of the border, because the
Pakistanis would quite rightly say to me "We understand we
have to do more, but what about you lot on your side of the border?"
and they were absolutely right, we had virtually no one on the
border and it is a very, very difficult border to police. In Ireland
we would have to control an 80 mile border, they have a nearly
2,500 kilometre border in some of the most inhospitable country
in the world and the tribes that live either side of it have forever
time gone across it. This is a very, very difficult subject and,
yes, they could also do more, we need to do more, but let us stop
viewing it in that way and let us act together to solve the problem
in the way that two of you have suggested.
Q283 Mr Holloway: Are ISI or other
Pakistani civil servants behaving unhelpfully within southern
Afghanistan? Secondly, if they are, does General Musharraf have
any influence over their activities?
General Richards: Very certainly
he does. The ISI is commanded by a serving lieutenant-general
in the Army and he made it very clear to me that he does as he
is told.
Q284 Mr Holloway: Are there Pakistani
civil servants in Afghanistan doing unhelpful things?
General Richards: I do not know
the answer for certain and therefore this is conjecture, but I
suspect there are people—if any, but this is where the perception
comes from—that either were in or are in and, but this is
conjecture, who are having a problem after 20 years of helping
the Taliban, which is what they did historically, for understandable
reasons at the time. They are having a problem seeing that the
head of state—I have used the analogy of a super tanker
and I believe the Prime Minister said something similar recently
about how the super tanker has been told by the captain on the
bridge to change course in that direction, but a super tanker
takes some time to turn into the new direction. There are some
people in the engine room or somewhere, who have not quite got
the message, and those are the people who I think on occasion
surface and explain why ISI are still up to what they were doing
before. I suspect that is the reason, but I am quite clear that
it is no longer an act of government policy on the part of Pakistan
to support the Taliban.
Q285 Mr Hancock: Can I ask you, General,
if in your opinion there can ever be a policy which would be successful
in eradicating the opium trade?
General Richards: I think there
is, the issue is how long will it take. If I may say, although
I am on record as saying you have to be cautious and it is all
about timing, the principle that it has got to be dealt with in
the context of the counter-insurgency I have always fully supported
because the Taliban are drawing a lot of their money and influence
through the opium trade, and in other words we have got to beat
the Taliban in that sense, we have to start dealing with their
source of funding or a very important source of funding. The issue
is are we at the point where we can sensibly do certain things
and I think it is the second and third order consequences of eradication
and the other things that we are doing that need to be carefully
thought-through—have we got the troop levels right, are
the police ready and trained to take on whatever the narco-warriers
chuck at them in their last throes, those sort of things. It goes
back to the coherence of the campaign, have we got a campaign
that is really coherent across the piece, in which case fine,
but I think we are a little bit far from that yet.
Q286 Mr Hancock: Where does the policy
of ISAF troops giving out leaflets saying "We're not responsible
for eradication of poppy fields come from?
General Richards: I have to say
you have caught me on that one because it did not happen in my
time as far as I know but, strictly speaking, somebody has interpreted
the O-plan correctly in that the counter-narcotics effort is not
a specified task for NATO troops, it is a supporting task. It
is not our task, for example, to eradicate poppy.
Q287 Mr Hancock: If we go back to
what you said about the difficulty of communication and the sort
of message that is sent out, does that not send out two different
messages?
General Richards: On the part
of the international community's effort as a whole, yes, but on
the part of ISAF—and I am not trying to defend it, incidentally,
I did not know that that had happened and I would not have wished
that to happen and it did not in my watch as far as I am aware,
because of the muddle—in one sense, whoever decided to do
that may have been playing for short term gain in that if his
troops had been identified as eradicators you would have had even
more people opposing him and therefore there was some rationale
in it, but I would not endorse it for one minute for the point
you are making.
Q288 Mr Jones: I have to say I am
a bit confused in terms of what the policy was, as Mike is probing
at, but how it was explained to us—and actually when we
flew into Lashkar Gah the farm next door to the compound had a
nice poppy crop growing—was that the poppy eradication for
the large scale narco areas was still carrying on, but what they
did not want to do was actually eradiate the small farmer who
had, say, half an acre of poppy growing in the short term because
of potential conflict. That is how it was explained.
General Richards: It might have
been that that was the case. Particularly if it was within an
ADZ it would be perverse if the only people who were eradicated
were those within the ADZ; at the same time, in one year's time,
if the alternative economy that we have been discussing can be
created, then you can eradicate because you have an alternative.
Q289 Mr Hancock: But it is confused,
and one of the things that confused me was when we met in Lashkar
Gah the American who was in charge of their programme for alternative
lifestyles, and when Dai asked him what is the connection between
your programme—which did give some good examples of how
they were bringing in alternative lifestyles—and the eradication
work, he said there is no connection between the two. It worries
me a little bit—not the mixed messages so much because I
do think that practically what is actually happening is right,
but longer term it needs to be more joined-up between eradication
and alternative lifestyles.
General Richards: I would take
it one step further and that is that it should be integrated into
this overall campaign plan, because it is all these different
bits. I hope he would not mind but I said to SACEUR yesterday
what is the enduring biggest problem, because I wanted to make
sure that I was current, and he said it is co-ordination. It is
co-ordination within a district, between a district and a province
and between the province and Kabul, and of course it is the purpose
of the Policy Action Group to get at some of that and then we
try to recreate the efficiencies of the PAG at provincial level
and then ultimately at district level. I am told we have some
way to go.
Q290 Mr Havard: That is quite clear;
the USA policy was not necessarily joined-up with what was seen
on the ground. Quite clearly it is United States money going to
the President for the eradication programme and Dynacorp the American
corporation people hiring people to go and do eradication alongside
ISAF troops who were giving out leaflets, and we saw the leaflets
saying "We do not do eradication", so to the ordinary
Afghan it is how do you make all these subtle distinctions. One
of the questions I asked, however, is when that eradication programme
is conducted, wherever it is conducted, what is done about a criterion
of decision-making to decide whether or not it is a good strategic
or tactical manoeuvre in any particular given set of circumstances,
and I was told there was an elegant process somewhere that no
one could describe to me that allows that to happen.
General Richards: There was a
process for the first time in my last couple of months; I had
a one star Brigadier Nugee, a British officer, who sat through
with those who were designing—and it was a British lead—the
eradication programme, and they agreed with the Afghans and the
minister for counter-narcotics which areas would be eradicated
and which ones would not. The details probably I do not need to
go into.
Q291 Mr Havard: It is very much dependent
on the governors' structure, is it not?
General Richards: The governors
conducted their own eradication of course as well. There was the
central eradication which was funded by the US, AEF—the
Afghan Eradication Force—and then there was ad hoc eradication
conducted with money that each governor was given to do it. Actually,
more eradication is achieved through that than by the AEF.
Q292 Chairman: We will need to ask
questions of the secretary of state on this, but I hope that those
who are taking notes of this will note our confusion and concern.
General Richards: And mine.
Q293 Mr Hancock: Can I take you back,
General, about the article you wrote that appeared in the Guardian
and what you have slightly alluded to this afternoon which appears
to be your frustration about the lack of co-ordination, that the
money was being put there and yet not everyone was moving at the
same pace and so not everyone was actually up for the same game.
Did that persist through the whole time you were there?
General Richards: It goes back
to the issue of co-ordination being the Achilles heel of this
thing, and of course historically if a single person runs the
whole thing you do not have a problem with co-ordination. We are
in the real world where 37 plus nations were involved plus the
Afghans, so I do not think one can seek Nirvana here but there
is a degree of co-ordination that has yet to be achieved.
Q294 Mr Hancock: You specifically
mentioned the frustration you felt between the co-operation from
the FCO and the lack of commitment or maybe the slowness of DFID
to operate, which made co-ordination even more frustrating for
the British general and two British departments here not working
as one.
General Richards: Of course, I
was there in a NATO capacity but that is neither here nor there
really, but it did dilute my British role a little bit because
I had a lot of other things to do. From what I recall—you
may have it in front of you and I apologise if I am wrong—I
did say that in the summer things were not too good on the development
front, but in the eyes of DFID we were creating the environment
in which they could safely conduct their activities. I know, as
one of you mentioned earlier, that things have come on a long
way, and that co-ordination is now much better. The real issue
is not so much whether it is well co-ordinated, it is two-fold:
one is should we do more to win the campaign and, secondly, is
there some mechanism by which what the Americans call CERPS—Commanders
Emergency Relief Programme—which is a pot of gold for the
military commander to put in and implement shorter term things
that the local people really want, wells, short stretches of road
and those sorts of things which currently most NATO troops, other
than the US Army, do not have. It is not DFID's job really to
do that, they are focusing—I think by statute—on development
issues; they do take time and I understood that, but there is
a little bit of an area between that and the immediate stuff that
is being done by the Army, the fighting and the patting on the
heads, that sort of thing, that we could do which the Americans
do to great effect. I will give you an example: in one valley
in the East after a push through the valley by American troops,
within a couple of days they were rebuilding things, putting in
a road, building a new mosque, putting in wells, those sorts of
things that showed just how well this can be brought together.
My feeling is—as I said in that article—that we need
to give all NATO troops that sort of facility. It is rather like
sending troops into action without a rifle; in modern combat,
certainly in counter-insurgency, every commander needs a pot of
gold, and I do not think we have yet got that and where we have
got it, it is not really sufficient. That is the point I was getting
at really.
Chairman: There are lots of questions
we could continue to ask you but it is now five o'clock and we
must say thank you very much indeed for coming to give us evidence.
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