UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 408-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Defence COMMITTEE

 

 

UK operations in Afghanistan

 

 

Tuesday 24 April 2007

GENERAL DAVID RICHARDS CBE DSO

Evidence heard in Public Questions 204 - 294

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 24 April 2007

Members present

Mr James Arbuthnot, Chairman

Mr David Crausby

Linda Gilroy

Mr David Hamilton

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Adam Holloway

Mr Bernard Jenkin

Mr Brian Jenkins

Mr Kevan Jones

Robert Key

John Smith

________________

Witness: General David Richards CBE DSO gave evidence.

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 HRLFs 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 very well!

Q220 Mr Jenkins: In this region what impact do you think ISAF can have in the long term, and what exactly is the campaign plan or strategy that you think we should adopt?

General Richards: If I may answer the second one first, NATO has what they call an 'O' Plan, which I think you could, if you read it, say: "That sort of is a campaign plan". I would argue that it is not entirely a campaign plan because it does not include things like counter narcotics which is a supporting task for NATO, but it gives us aims, it gives us objectives, it gives us parameters, and it does get into the strategic and political dimensions to a degree. What we need, though, and I am not alone in thinking this, is a proper campaign plan that brings together and integrates all the issues that have to be resolved, and tells us and people like me and others what our part is in the resolution of those problems so that it is coherent across the piece. That is what I have been taught is a campaign plan at Staff College, and so on and so forth. To get on to your first question, we tried if you like to substitute for the absence of that sort of coherent campaign plan with a common sense approach that led to the creation of this Policy Action Group, and the reason I am emphasising that a little bit is that it was in that body that we tried to find what you are getting at, I think, which is the comprehensive nature of the problem and of the solution. I do not think there is a sovereign head of state on that; President Karzai should really own that campaign plan and it should not be something the British or the Americans give him. He could adopt it and sign it off, which is mechanical, but it has to be President Karzai's campaign plan because it is his country we are going to assist. I am sure he would be very happy with it if you got it right but we, through the PAG, with all the ministers that, if you like, have some relevance - and you could say any and every minister does but these are more critical ones - in the conduct of the counter insurgency, with all the key international actors from the UNSRSG, principal ambassadors, people like me, would debate the key issues and agree, with President Karzai chairing one in every three or four, the agreed strategy or way ahead on whatever particular issue, and we were responsible for ensuring it was all coherent. So that is as good as we got, but I do think it started to pay dividends. For example, there was a shortage of troops and police down in the south overall so we at the PAG devised the creation of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police. Now that is not going to be the answer to every maiden's prayer but it is a good starting place, and it put more policemen on the beat, if you like, in some contentious places, allowing us not to risk this vacuum creation that often happened when you went into an area and then moved on and people filled the gap, the Taliban, so we wanted to fill it with police and that came straight out of the PAG. Getting finally to your first question, broadly we succeeded in bringing together the different actors, we have created the conditions for success, but we now have to make sure that the other actors, the non security actors, deliver on their part of the bargain. I used to talk about, and I am sorry to prolong this slightly, RDGP&S, and I do not know when you visited whether I had come up with this but it stands for Reconstruction, Development, Governance - (improvements in relations with) Pakistan, all within a cloak of expanding Security, RDGP&S, and that was the purpose of the PAG and is at the heart of a campaign plan. If you can meld all those five areas together efficiently and make sure all the various bits that are going on within each area are complementary, both within each area and between each area, then have you a coherent campaign plan.

Q221 Mr Jenkins: So what extra resources, pressure, or diplomacy are needed to make sure this campaign plan is produced?

General Richards: Well, I think someone has to take the initiative and offer to write it. NATO, when I was last involved, was looking at it; JSC Brunssum have started the process, and I am sure it will involve HQ ISAF and will involve SHAPE. We were asked as headquarters to play a role and it will then be up to General McNeill to ensure with the NATO senior civilian representative that the Afghan government are fully integrated in the process and I know the aim is that by the end of this year there will be an agreed campaign plan in the time I have just hinted at.

Q222 Mr Jenkins: So we are going to do some nation building then?

General Richards: That is the aim really!

Q223 Mr Havard: We want to ask you some questions about policing a little later on and also the broader effects in terms of the region as a whole in terms of the dual politics, as it were, but if I can just unpick a little of what you said about the plans at the moment though, on this recent visit this idea of regionalising seemed to be developing. When we visited you there was a very impressive Canadian chap running what was the south sector at the time -

General Richards: Brigadier General Fraser.

Q224 Mr Havard: Yes. What, however, you had then, and you have now to a certain extent, was the Brits in Helmandshire, you had the provinces, as opposed to looking at it on a regional basis, and it seemed as though that was a strategic view that was now coming and was a developing change, as it were, with more emphasis being put on each province individually being looked at more in terms of where it fitted with a more regionalised plan, and a flexibility of manoeuvre across a regional area as opposed to provincial areas.

General Richards: I am slightly surprised they have given you that impression because I talked about the risk of Balkanising the campaign, and I might have done when you came, because we saw this was a risk. Every nation that has adopted a province naturally enough wants it to succeed, Britain with Helmand, the Dutch with Oruzgan and so on. There is a risk that every nation becomes obsessed with its province and you Balkanise what must be seen as a theatre of operations. I have to say that as I left I thought there was less risk of that than I might have told you in the summer of last year, hence my slight surprise that you have come away with that impression, but it is a risk. What I have said to nations when I have gone to speak to them, because this is the most clear example of where you must not fall into the trap, is that if Kandahar fell, and it was reasonably close run last year, it did not matter how well the Dutch did in Oruzgan or how well the British did in Helmand, their two provinces would also, as night followed day, have failed because we would have lost the consent of the Bashtu people because of the totemic importance of Kandahar. Clearly the UK, for example, whom you could have accused, as some did last year, of being over-focused on Helmand, most definitely are not today. One reason no doubt is that we have a British major general about to take responsibility for the region, but they have also declared that they will provide, in line with the revised NATO CJSOR post Riga, a regional reserve to make sure it is available for use across the region. So I am not saying you did not but I am slightly surprised and a little disappointed that you were given that impression.

Q225 Mr Havard: Maybe I expressed it wrongly, that there was already what you have just described but I got the impression that was now being consolidated and developed, as it were, to improve it in the sense that, with the real changeover of all of the Operation Enduring Freedom, that part of it that is collapsing in, as it were, to the ISAF operation in proper terms was going to be melded into that process that you described to us in a more co‑ordinated and coherent way in order to avoid some of the issues you had alluded to.

General Richards: Balkanisation?

Q226 Mr Havard: Yes.

General Richards: That is great. Certainly General McNeill was very alert to the risk and he did not want to go down into a provincial approach.

Q227 Mr Havard: Exactly.

General Richards: I am sorry, I was at cross purposes. I think that is an old problem but, when push comes to shove, every nation will still want to make sure its province works well and there is a certain amount of rivalry but I think they have all, if you like, matured so it is less of an issue than it was and I am glad to hear it confirmed.

Mr Holloway: Are the Pakistanis acting unhelpfully within Afghanistan's borders? If so, what are they doing, and does General Musharaf have any say over their activities?

Chairman: I think I would like to raise that later on in the session, if we may. Rob Key?

Q228 Robert Key: General, what account does the ISAF mission take of the difficulty of building a democratic system of government without the participation of the female half of the population?

General Richards: I cannot remember the statistics but a relatively large number - and I am getting into deep water here but I think more than in Westminster - of the MPs in the Afghan Parliament are female.

Q229 Chairman: It is 25 per cent.

General Richards: They are not well represented in government but they are certainly well represented in the political process, and in Kabul I did not really sense that it was a big issue for the international community. The civil rights leader was a woman who I, amongst others, had a good relationship with so I do not think it had a big effect and all I would say is, and again this is getting into slightly more contentious area, that we should not hurry them too much in this area. We have really got to let the Afghans develop their understanding of this, and if you impose it on them too quickly it could just backfire. Certainly in the provinces it is a different issue. There is no doubt that we never would be introduced to a woman virtually, except in Kandahar where occasionally there were women involved, but then a very effective Kandahari MP was killed, sadly, murdered, by the Taliban for speaking out. So I am not trying to avoid the question but it just was not an issue for us, and I do not really remember people talking about it in Kabul.

Mr Jenkin: Just on that, we met two very able members of the Provincial Council in Lashkar-Gah who were women, who were very vocal and certainly were not short of opinions!

Mr Havard: 50 per cent of the delegation, in fact!

Q230 Mr Jones: Can I turn to the threats in the south at the moment? We had a very strange organisation called the Senlis Council before us a few weeks ago and their assessment was that there had been a dramatic deterioration in the stability of southern Afghanistan. You in a recent interview in that great supporter of the Armed Forces the Guardian said that you were winning the war against Taliban. What is the threat to ISAF forces? Is it diminishing or is it, as the Senlis Council told us, increasing?

General Richards: I do not think either my statement or the Senlis Council's - but I will get on to the Senlis Council's view - are necessarily inimical ‑‑

Q231 Mr Jones: The Guardian has you in quotation: "we are winning the war against the Taliban".

General Richards: Yes, because I think we are. I do not see that the Taliban are, and when we talk about Pakistan's efforts in this regard we can look at that too, winning. You could say that that means that at best there is some sort of neutral stand‑off, but I do not believe that. I believe we are still winning the war; if you like the campaign is going our way. That does not mean that in a particular area, and this is where Senlis might be coming from, things have not deteriorated in the sense that there is more activity, and that certainly is the case in Northern Helmand. The British contingent under, first of all, OEF and then under me went into an area of Helmand into which no one had been for years, for all I know, other than the drug lords, and that upset the equilibrium of those living there, and there has been a lot of activity which you know as well as I do. So if you look at it from that perspective Senlis is right. Before we went in there it was relatively calm but was it good? Were we right to do something about it? Arguably, undoubtedly, yes, and there are other areas where the Taliban writ broadly ran that we are taking off them so there is more instability during that process but, as I have said to other people before, you do not - certainly not I as a general nor you with your knowledge of defence - look at a campaign on any given day; you are planning like a chess player four or five moves ahead. That is why I am confident that if you look at where we are going, and I know we had a spring campaign plan to contain their spring offensive, and it is very important that we use those two terms because "offensive" is nothing but more blood and despair whereas a campaign properly run introduces reconstruction, development, improvements in governance and all those sorts of things, and we had that broadly ready for the spring, and so far, with a little bit of "touch wood", things do not seem to be going too badly for ISAF. So it is those sort of judgments that led us to deduce that with some way to go we were winning the war but there will be tactical setbacks and there will be places within the overall plan, both geographically and by time, where things are not so brilliant, but you know that around the corner we have a solution to it.

Q232 Mr Jones: It has been emphasised that the so‑called well‑publicised spring offensive has not actually occurred. What do you think the priorities now after the summer for ISAF are?

General Richards: General McNeill will be modifying the plan that we gave him and he, do not forget, has to obey his orders, and there is this NATO 'O' Plan which tells him he has to protect the Afghan Development Zones and create conditions for improvements in governance and so on and so forth, so there will be no fundamental change over what we were doing other than hopefully he will continue - and you remember I mentioned that our aim was to expand the writ of the government, in very crude terms - to expand that writ based around expanding Afghan Development Zones. You remember the Afghan Development Zone is an area within which reconstruction, development and improvements in governance hopefully can flourish, and the aim was to let the Afghan population, particularly in the south, see quite clearly improvements and then you can put a lie to the Taliban propaganda, at which they are very adroit, that was saying that the Government cannot govern and the international community is not delivering, and we can say: "Oh yes, it is, where you allow it to happen we are making really good progress", so that remains at the heart of General McNeill's plan for this summer.

Q233 Mr Jones: Certainly when I visited Lashkar-Gah this year you can see progress in terms of the redevelopment that is going on in Lashkar-Gah in terms of what is being done, and in terms of what we are told in terms of development in the Sangin Valley, which could not have been done last year. What was emphasised to us both by Provincial Council and also by the MPs for Helmand that we met was the importance of the Kajaki Dam project. Do you see that as a key turning point in terms of success and improving the writ of the government of Afghanistan?

General Richards: I was always very keen on the Kajaki Dam project. One has to be careful not to be driven by totemic things, one has to be hard‑nosed about it, but if we are about anything we are about improving the lot of the average Afghan and it is through that over time that you can win what is often an information battle, a propaganda battle. If you are giving people lots of jobs in the Sangin Valley, or if you are leading to a supply of electricity which allows the generation of small‑scale industry and jobs, because the bottom line for most of these people is jobs, as I know we discussed when you came over, then that must be good, but it has to be part of a wider something, which is in this case the expansion of the government's writ and, most importantly, the creation of an alternative economy which can draw some people increasingly away from the narco economy which currently runs Helmand.

Q234 Chairman: Going back to the issue of what is being done in Afghanistan in the spring and summer, I think you said earlier this year that there was a window of opportunity for us really to be successful in Afghanistan during the spring and summer. Am I paraphrasing you wrongly there?

General Richards: Not really. Sometimes people say I should not say it but I do think that in any society there is a point at which they will get a bit fed up with pledges that they think have been made that are not being met and that sort of thing. There has to be what I call an upward trajectory of progress to keep people with you, because by being there there is inevitably going to be fighting on occasions and they have to see that it is all worth it, and after 25 years of war there may be a point reached at which they say: "Actually you are not achieving what you said you would achieve". I do not think no progress is good enough, they have to see it is all worth it, hence the ADZ concept. We could not do it across every province but we had to be able to demonstrate that progress is possible and manifest. Why I have said words approximate to what you just said is that I felt that on occasion our trajectory of progress was not upward enough and that was not really buying people's enthusiasm support into the long term, so that is where that came from.

Q235 Mr Holloway: Somebody in the PRT in Lashkar-Gah said to us that Lashkar-Gah was secure so where was the development? How does that fit in with this line that we are always hearing that there cannot be development without security when, according to this guy, we are not providing any development even where there is security?

General Richards: He was not getting pedantic about the difference between reconstruction and development, was he?

Q236 Mr Holloway: I do not know, you would have to ask him, but it was just this thought that in this Afghan Development Zone, where there was theoretically a degree of security, nothing was happening for the ordinary Afghan who, as you say, is the key to all this.

General Richards: Well, I think the reason why he might have been speaking about development is that development tends to be longer term, whereas reconstruction should have started to take place, whether it is schools or roads.

Q237 Mr Holloway: What sort of things might we have seen in Lashkar-Gah in terms of reconstruction, then?

General Richards: I would have thought new schools, new roads, new mosques. The shorter term projects should be able to be implemented pretty quickly and I am surprised he was saying none of that was happening. The development might get into what I think is so important which is the growth of an alternative economy with all that goes with it, rather than the alternative livelihoods that you so often hear people talk about to replace the narco economy, because chucking a few seeds at a farmer is not going to persuade him not to grow poppy, for example. It is not only a matter of feeding their families: we are now talking about substitutes for income, and they do not necessarily want to go back to a peasant economy where they are just feeding themselves with a very limited market. So they are getting used to having a reasonable income from poppy and we need to develop an alternative economy, so that is where the development word would come in.

Q238 Mr Holloway: Sure, but do you think we are communicating by what we do sufficiently to the Afghans that we are there to help and not just bringing, as they might perceive it in Helmand, war?

General Richards: This is all about information operations, and an information operation has to be rooted in substance for it to work ‑‑

Q239 Mr Holloway: Absolutely.

General Richards: ‑‑ which is what you are saying. Was he a member of the PRT?

Q240 Mr Holloway: No. Fortunately we heard from an Afghan.

General Richards: Good. Well, if an Afghan is saying that then I think we need to take notice of it. I used to go round on my visits - and I am talking about at the height of the problems last year largely - and they all wanted what you are talking about, jobs, and I do think that this gets to the point you were making about the pace of development. If you have an upward trajectory that is exciting people then they will stay with you. Clearly in that particular individual's case we were not exciting him.

Q241 Mr Holloway: But do you think we are doing enough on this in the south?

General Richards: No, I do not. I do not think any of us are doing enough.

Q242 Mr Holloway: Do you think the lack of it threatens the strategy?

General Richards: If I looked at it from across the country ‑‑

Q243 Mr Holloway: No, from the south.

General Richards: In the south? We have to play catch‑up, hence this relationship with security. if Lashkar‑Gah is broadly secure, which I think is the case because that was part of the Afghan Development Zone concept, if the development side, the reconstruction side and the improvements in governance are not yet there, then we need to catch up quick, I agree.

Q244 Chairman: One of the things that one of the two women we met from the Provincial Council was saying was needed was something like a carpet factory where they could employ women to do things that were not involved in the narcotics trade. Roughly how long would you expect that sort of reconstruction or development to take before local Afghans began to see it as something they could point to?

General Richards: Well, I think very quickly. This is exactly the sort of thing I was advocating. Where is the small business adviser in the provincial government that will say to somebody who is interested and prepared to take the risk: "This is what you need to do". There is a huge shortage of capacity of understanding. Where are the small start‑up loans, the micro loans that have been so successful in Bangladesh? Could they be provided by the lead nation for each province? I do think it is reasonably easily done. We are tending to focus on the longer term development, the roads, the power, the Kajaki Dam type project, and not enough on what most affects the average Afghan, which is jobs, job opportunities and the creation of small businesses - which they are pretty good at. Pakistan is not far from there, there is a big market there, it is a country that wants to do more with Afghanistan, there is a huge potential there but are we providing the wherewithal to kick-start it? I did not see a lot of it, I have to say.

Q245 Chairman: Moving to Operation Medusa, you felt the lack of a strategic reserve. It was a serious and major victory that you had; however much you may play down your success it was a success. Do you think you could have done significantly better with a strategic reserve?

General Richards: Yes. Being slightly pedantic I call it a theatre reserve but it is the same thing; it is a reserve. I have no doubt that the extra three months it took to pacify that area probably could have been done in the space of a few weeks immediately after the main battle, because essentially we culminated; I could not do any more by the end of September. The troops were exhausted and the Taliban, although they fled, some south but mostly to the west, started to trickle back in and I had very little left to deal with it with, hence we came up with the Afghan National Auxiliary Police because I got so fed up with not having anything. President Karzai was keen to do it anyway so we accelerated the whole process. That is why I missed it on that occasion, and what I had to do is create ad hoc reserves at any given stage which meant robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the problem with that is you created vacuums into which the Taliban could flow if they recognised the vacuum, which inevitably they sometimes did. But I would like to say that to a degree my problems are General McNeill's benefits because nations and NATO, as a result of their understanding of how we were managing without a reserve - just - have given him a reserve. He has a theatre reserve; it has been very active in Helmand and in Kandahar provinces already; the UK is shortly going to deploy a regional reserve, so while I would say, wouldn't I, that no commander should have been sent into this theatre of operations - and I am on record as saying it at the time - without a reserve, the fact is nations have also now agreed and it looks to be a dead issue, which I think is great.

Q246 Chairman: But is there a sense that if NATO had provided you with the forces that were first requested it would have saved NATO a lot of trouble, a lot of money, and possibly a lot of lives, and we would be far further forward in Afghanistan now if NATO had done what you first asked?

General Richards: As a commander I clearly felt at the time that we were not being listened to and nations tried their best but were not able to give me one, so I suppose you could deduce from it the deduction you have. How much better who knows because, as it happens, we managed, but there was a period during Medusa when it was pretty close and I would wish never to repeat that.

Q247 Mr Jenkin: Coming now to the question of the broader counter insurgency campaign, the overwhelming anxiety that I am left with, however impressive the effort, is that there are two very fundamental gaps in the strategy, that we cannot deny the terrorists their home base and, because of the ineffectiveness of the ministries, and particularly the policing, the "G" part of your acronym, we cannot really address the legitimate grievances. How do you win a counter insurgency campaign if you cannot deny the home base of the terrorists and address the legitimate grievances?

General Richards: Well, you come up with a plan that would allow you to address them and then you implement the plan, hence my RDGP&S. President Karzai and I talked a lot about governance, the "G" bit of it, and it is obviously linked to security because of the police role within that, but all I can say is that he has the bit between his teeth on it but there is an Afghan way of solving these problems and he is going about it in that way. There is relatively little complaint over most of the country, but I know he feels that there are some provinces that still are weak in this respect. What I would like to say, if I may, is that it is not all to do with corruption. A lot of it is pure capacity and again I think we, the NATO nations, can do more to help here. The Education Minister, and you probably heard this on your last tour and if you did not I will tell you but please excuse me if you have, the Education Minister in Oruzgan province, I am told, is unable to read or write and he is the Education Minister, and there are certainly going to be others who cannot do these things which are pretty basic in running a province. Now, why are not we putting money into developing capacity rather than simply criticising them for corruption? A lot of it is because they know no better. Are we addressing that issue? For example, could every nation that has adopted a province find a little bit of money to train and develop capacity? It could be in‑country or it could be back in Britain in the case of the UK for a year to train them up. We need to look at that as well as replacing man with man, because the replacement often may not be any more able in capacity terms to do the job than his predecessor.

Q248 Mr Jenkin: Nevertheless because of these grievances and the terrorist capacity you are forced to rely on perhaps using far more force than you wish to, and that itself is counter productive?

General Richards: Yes. This goes up to my upward trajectory of progress across the board, because there is a risk that you alienate the population by using force when an improvement in governance might solve the issue, and I was the first to see that relationship. Originally I was asked by people: "Why are you banging on about governance issues at the PAG" or whatever, and I said: "Because they are the Taliban's biggest recruiting sergeant and I have every right to tell you about it", so I think everybody sees that it has to be a holistic approach to the problem of which that is a key part, but what I am saying is you cannot just get at the Afghans on it; they know they have an issue here and I think we can be more helpful than perhaps some nations are trying to be.

Q249 Mr Jenkin: And the Platoon House strategy? That was an imperative but, again, did that not produce a negative reaction amongst the population?

General Richards: Clearly the immediate vicinities of the Platoon Houses became areas where the average civilian with any sense left and his home was destroyed, etc, so I am sure that they probably in most cases did have a negative influence on opinion. Whether or not they achieved some sort of ascendancy over the Taliban in a military sense is something that one might debate, but in terms of hearts and minds they probably are not very helpful.

Q250 Mr Jenkin: And we picked up a very negative reaction about Musa Qala, particularly from Afghan MPs who very sincerely believed that you had done a deal with the Taliban, and the Chairman explained that that was not the case and it was a good opportunity for us to do so. You talked about the information campaign. Did you not lose the information campaign on Musa Qala?

General Richards: Almost certainly, but of course it depends who you talk to and I can almost now envisage the MPs that gave you that line. I could find another half a dozen that might have given you a different line because it depends on their tribal background, but I think the consensus amongst, if you like, the key southern MPs was what you have just relayed - and thank you, Mr Chairman, for putting them right! Musa Qala, and I think you know this, was not my initiative; I did not do a deal with the Taliban; it was something that came out of Governor Daud and was endorsed by President Karzai for a while. I viewed it as an opportunity to exploit to bring a bit of a breathing space to hard‑pressed British troops and to allow some reconstruction development to take place in Musa Qala, which it did - not as much as I would have liked because it took time to get people in there to start doing it. Musa Qala in one sense was successful in that 5,000 odd people now bitterly dislike the Taliban because they have seen them in their true light, and do not forget in early February they rebelled against the Taliban in the area and fought against them and arrested Mullah Ghafour, who was then subsequently killed I think on the morning that I left, but that has rather been obscured by various factions because it was seen in very black and white terms as surrendering in some way to the Taliban. I chose to think that if it could drive a wedge between, if you like, reconcilable Taliban and irreconcilable, of whom there are sadly always going to be a number, then that was an experiment worth trying. Sadly, we did not bring the average Afghan member of Parliament along with us; for what reason I never really divined, I am afraid, but you are right to say that we did not win the information campaign in the macro sense and there is a lot of suspicion about it.

Q251 Mr Jenkin: Do you think such an arrangement might be repeated elsewhere?

General Richards: It is being repeated. The new Governor of Helmand, Waffa, tried something rather similar very early on with stricter codicils; in the East the Americans - who were not happy with the Musa Qala deal on the whole - have implemented a different version, but it is quite similar, which allows the local population to take the war into their own hands, if you like, and to govern themselves. Some of them will be successful, others will not, but at some point we will hit on the right formula. If you do not try it, what is the alternative? You are constantly fighting the population, or there is a risk of you constantly fighting the population. If you can give them what they want and fight alongside them, which is what President Karzai was seeking to do in these various arrangements, then you become a partner with them, and I think that is what we needed to do more of actually and there will be more of them.

Q252 Chairman: The Americans were opposed to the Musa Qala deal mostly because there were not those stricter codicils in place, is that right?

General Richards: I think so. They remained polite to me over it, but I had a number of conversations and it was clear they did not like it. They saw it as some form of surrendering to the Taliban, but that is not how we viewed it. I saw it pragmatically as a means of allowing hard-pressed troops to have a break and to redeploy them into a more mobile role to manoeuvre, because at that point, if you remember, most of the British troops were pinned down in Platoon Houses and it gave the initiative away to a greater degree than I was happy with to the Taliban - they could move around, we could not, we were pinned, either in the Platoon Houses or re-supplying the Platoon Houses, it took every British company in Helmand to do it. Finding some means of allowing manoeuvre which started to give us back, potentially, the military initiative was at the bottom of my thinking. It also was driven by this desire to try and drive a wedge between good and bad - for want of a better term - Taliban and to demonstrate to the people of Musa Qala that it would spread out. Do not forget Nouzad tried to do something very similar, the elders of Nouzad, the elders of Sangin, at the time they all wanted to do something like Musa Qala because they got fed up with the fighting. This gave us a potential route out of the problem, but the Americans saw it as surrendering the initiative which is, as I have just explained, something I failed to get across to them, but they are very clear, I had long debates with the US ambassador about it and, obviously, with General McNeill on arrival, and they absolutely understood the rationale; they did not always, in this case, agree with if you like the detailed implementation of it.

Q253 Mr Holloway: We are talking on an immense scale, but if you say, for argument's sake, that we have the consent of 70 per cent of the people in Helmand and therefore do not, for argument's sake, have about 30 per cent, these are traditional Muslim, highly xenophobic people: we may not like it, but that is the way they want to live their lives. When we talk about Taliban, therefore, we are to some extent just talking about a percentage of the population that are up there. Is there an argument that says that in recent months we have killed an awful lot of Taliban people who, in the future, we may actually have found quite helpful to buy off in order to provide stability and we may have now made ourselves much more open by not dealing with them initially in a non-kinetic way to asymmetrical warfare, increased numbers of foreign fighters and so on. Have we made, possibly, a mistake?

General Richards: It is, I suppose, wise after the event. There is a risk of that and that is the conundrum in any counter-insurgency, you have to preserve the consent of the people and what you are saying is that slowly you may be losing the consent because you have turned them against you.

Q254 Mr Holloway: I am saying we have killed key leaders who might have been quite helpful later on.

General Richards: There is something in what you are saying, but if you are being shot and being opposed physically by force you cannot really at the time say "Hang on, can we parley about this" other than through some arrangement like the Musa Qala deal.

Q255 Mr Holloway: But we have taken the war to the Taliban in recent months.

General Richards: We went into those areas, we did not fire a shot first ever.

Q256 Mr Holloway: No, but since then we have taken the war to the Taliban.

General Richards: We are trying to establish the military initiative within those areas, and if you know through your intelligence that X person is planning to kill your troops tomorrow, you are not going to hang around and let him have a go at you. There is something in what you say but it would be too neat to take it too far down the line you are going.

Q257 Mr Havard: The question that has been asked in the press and elsewhere is that during the last summer, in Helmand and Kandahar, the Taliban did not really concentrate their forces, they attacked in places simultaneously rather than concentrating all their effort in one place. Given you did not have the reserve and there is now going to be a reserve, if they change their tactics what is the situation there?

General Richards: They have lost the opportunity to concentrate force and fight ISAF conventionally, which I think is what you are saying. Actually, they did of course do it once and that was during the Medusa battle when they had over 1000, some estimates say 1500 fighters, in a very small area geographically, because at that time they had persuaded themselves and the population down South that they could defeat soft old NATO - remember all the media speculation about whether NATO was up to it - and so in the back of my mind there was another rationale for making sure that we did confront them if we had to, but they were defeated, as the Chairman has kindly reminded us, and I think that they will not risk doing that again. Actually, at the risk of giving them a bit of military advice, it would be the worst thing they could possibly do because we can concentrate not necessarily only the troops, but we can concentrate combat power against them in a way they could never manage, and the old formula for an army attacking a defensive location is three forces, three to one. We did not have anything like three to one in the battle of Medusa, it was nearer one to one; what we had was fire power and some very brave fighting from some wonderful Americans in particular, led by an outstanding Canadian general. I do not think they are going to do it again in a hurry.

Q258 Mr Havard: Brigadier Lorimer seemed to be suggesting that over the summer - given that the spring offensive has not come along and the Taliban day labour as it were is still in the fields taking the harvest and has not come along yet, the tier one, tier two Taliban situation - his objective is probably high intensity counter-insurgency activities. How would you see that as different to what went before last summer?

General Richards: It is a term I do not really recognise, but I can infer from what you are saying that you could say that was happening last year when there was some very intensive fighting was high intensity counter-insurgency. I would like to think that with luck - and we will see what happens at the end of the poppy harvest - Brigadier Lorimer will be able to concentrate his expanded force more on securing reconstruction and development progress and keeping the Taliban, whatever numbers they may be, at distance from the Afghan Development Zone which is at the heart of his little provincial campaign. Going back to what we discussed earlier, by the end of this year we must be able to demonstrate real progress in terms of reconstruction and development, both in the Helmand Afghan Development Zone and in the others; we have got to show that in 2007 we really started delivering not only the long term stuff like the Kajaki Dam but the jobs, the alternative economy, that we have been discussing this afternoon.

Q259 Mr Havard: One question I wanted to ask you was about the Afghan National Army and their role in this because one of the things that is different in a sense, to answer my own question, is that he has more capacity in terms of using Afghan forces in a way that perhaps you did not because they have developed more over the period of time. When we spoke to General McNeill he was looking forward to the armoured manoeuvre capability that would come later in the year as well, teeing himself up for the next calendar year as it were and putting more resources in, and using the Afghan Army more involved in doing these things. What is your assessment of the development that the Afghan National Army requires in order to consolidate and perhaps be used to consolidate more? It is this horrible phrase about an Afghan face, it is not an Afghan face, it is an Afghan plan, it is the Afghans actually consolidating the plan once you give them the advantage.

General Richards: Two things, if I may. Under the Afghan Development Zone concept - and I have never liked the term Afghan Development Zone - it is actually a very well co-ordinated plan of how to take forward the counter-insurgency at provincial and regional level, and in that it sees Afghan National Army and police doing the less demanding but very necessary tasks of securing the ADZs and some limited offensive action, while the more demanding work is, if you like, done by the better trained, better equipped ISAF forces. That is how I see and I think General McNeill sees the Afghan Army being used more and more. It reduces this risk of creating vacuums as you go out of an area and in come the Taliban; you have got to somehow preserve your progress and the ADZ concept needed that missing link: that is where the Afghan Army should be able to focus. The problem is that we must not ask too much of an army that is still being trained; in other words we are developing it at the same time as we are fighting it and there is no doubt that one of the reasons for the high absentee rate in the Afghan Army is we are just asking too much of them, so we have to watch that carefully to make sure that it does not get to the point where the Afghans in the Afghan Army say this is more than we signed up for, because they are a volunteer army who are not paid a huge amount and they are often operating a long way from their homes, it is difficult to get back and all those things. The other thing I would add that is pertinent to this answer is that the USA is pouring billions of dollars into the Afghan Army this year and next, and I have absolute confidence that we will see a step change in the capability of the Afghan Army. This is why 2007 is an important year because you will not really see that come through until the end of the year and, in the meanwhile, we have just got to get the balance of use versus training and development right.

Q260 Mr Havard: That is quite interesting really. I do not know General McNeill very well but I assume he is a poker player because he was very clear about possibly not only being happy with what the Brits were giving him, but maybe they could give him a bit more a bit later on because he wanted another battalion now he has got one. It was this question about capacity, about being able to dominate the ground, and he was talking very much about using the Afghan National Army in that sort of process.

General Richards: You can dominate what has been secured - in other words you go into a semi-defensive mode relatively easily. The difficult thing is gaining the ground in the first place and then, after you have gained it, you secure it, and that is where the Afghan Army and police can be used very successfully.

Q261 Mr Havard: More in consolidation and less in manoeuvre because they do not have the manoeuvre capability.

General Richards: Yes, they are not at that stage of training and nor do they have the equipment, so I saw a nice little synergy developing between the more capable ISAF troops that, if you like, go forward and expand the ADZ while the security of the expanded ADZ can be more and more given to the Afghans.

Q262 Mr Havard: One final quick question, General Wardock was asking for more British embedded trainers. What was your view of how successful or otherwise that process was and was it a big enough contribution from the British in terms of helping develop the Afghan National Army?

General Richards: The British are pretty squeaky clean in this respect - I speak as a NATO officer - in that we, the UK, provided all the OMLTs (or "awful omelettes" as they were called) that we were asked to provide. I know that that process is still ongoing. There is no doubt, speaking to SACEUR again yesterday, that NATO as a whole needs to provide more OMLTs. If the UK had the wherewithal to do more then that would be great, but I do not think that the UK should by any means be singled out for anything but praise on this one.

Q263 Mr Havard: It is an additional contribution that NATO needs to make.

General Richards: There is no doubt that we have not met the original number of OMLTs and, of course, as the Army expands this number of OMLTs is going to expand too. That is a dynamic process and the UK is well ahead of the game at the moment in that respect.

Q264 Mr Jones: General, can I ask about military assets available to ISAF. When you were in charge the headlines in newspapers here were about lack of helicopters. Firstly, what is your position on that now and, secondly, what additional assets does ISAF actually need?

General Richards: There is a CJSOR which has now been agreed. That was a pretty long drawn-out process last summer and I remember we talked about it on your visit.

Q265 Chairman: Just remind us.

General Richards: Combined joint statement of requirement. That is put together by D-SACEUR on behalf of SACEUR in shape. As I understand it, talking yesterday - to bring you entirely up to date - after Riga and in the process immediately after that within the CJSOR an additional eight battalions were agreed to. Five have now been met, that is three US, a British battalion and the Polish battalion. If we the UK can provide this regional reserve later in the year, which is the plan now, then six of the eight will have been provided to General McNeill. There is more progress that needs to be made on it, but if you compare it with the situation last year it is pretty good and SACEUR is cautiously optimistic about it all.

Q266 Mr Jones: One thing that I certainly was impressed with was the contribution that some of the new NATO Allies are making, which does not get a great deal of press over here. When you were in charge though, were you happy with the support that you were getting from NATO?

General Richards: There is NATO and there are the nations of NATO, I always was careful to draw a distinction, because NATO is as good as its constituent nations allow it to be and my chain of command could not have been more supportive to me, so I have no problems with NATO but I also now know more about the politics of the 37 nations of ISAF and the 26 nations of NATO than I ever thought I would.

Q267 Mr Jones: Just on that point, one of the issues which clearly I do not quite think the British media have got round and I do not think certain elements of the Conservative Party have got their head round yet is the fact that this is a multinational operation. What more can be done to actually expose, for example, what is actually happening, certainly with the tremendous work and dangerous work that the Dutch, the Canadians and others are doing and also, like I say, some of the new aspirant nations. Is there a selling exercise that needs to be done here in terms of British public opinion and also broader European opinion on this?

General Richards: There is. The Dutch have been brilliant down in the south. Everyone was very wary of whether they would have the stomach and actually they are conducting a model operation in Oruzgan, the Dutch Major-General, General van Loon, in Kandahar showed that a Dutch general is every bit as good as any other general with some very innovative thinking. Obviously, the Canadian effort I cannot praise too much, it is just wonderful the sacrifices Canada has made. I would like to say - and I know everyone knows that they are heavily involved - we would be nowhere without the USA in every respect, both in the amount of money they are putting in, through the bravery of their troops and their preparedness to take risk and to fight when not every nation yet has that offensive spirit. The smaller nations like the Estonians, the Danes, are filling vital slots that, say, in the case of the UK we would have a problem filling because of other commitments, they are being picked up by these other nations. The other one if I may, whilst I am praising a few others, is the Romanians. They have been a model of how new NATO perhaps should function. They picked up the Zabol commitment and moved out of Kandahar at a time when actually, in many respects, they would like to have stayed there because it was a relatively easy task, but they took on, with American help, the much more demanding Zabul province. My biggest heroes outside are the Portuguese, funnily enough, because they were my one little reserve, I had one company of light troops from Portugal, Britain's oldest ally, who did a hell of a lot of things that made a lot of difference, particularly in Farah province in a very demanding side shoot or offshoot of what was happening in the South.

Q268 Mr Jones: You saw the arrival of the first troops of Jordan coming in and also nations like the United Arab Emirates and others contributed forces. How important do you think it is to actually try and get non-NATO forces into this coalition?

General Richards: Eleven nations in ISAF were not in NATO and the Australian commitment, in particular, is an interesting one because that is becoming more significant still. There was a recent announcement from Prime Minister Howard that they were going to increase their contribution to about 1000, which is fantastic news for everybody because they are extremely capable troops. Your point about Jordan and other Muslim states contributing is very important and I know that the Secretary-General of NATO is working on encouraging other Muslim nations to contribute and NATO held a very successful symposium in the Middle East not long ago, looking at that amongst other things. It would put the lie to any suggestion that this is a sort of us versus them, which it quite clearly is not. The other area that we are not allowed to get onto yet is obviously Pakistan and how can we do more with them.

Chairman: We will, shortly. John Smith.

Q269 John Smith: This is a bit of an unfair question, Chairman, but if the General is in a position to answer it, he was the military commander in the field during the Riga Summit and I just wondered whether you were encouraged by that summit, did it mark a step change in your opinion as regards the long term commitment of NATO to Afghanistan, or was it the same old posturing?

General Richards: Initially I thought same old stuff here, but actually what flowed from it has been nothing but good. I remember the then SACEUR - it was General Jones, it was his swansong really - ringing me and he asked me to write something, which I did, which in the corridors behind the main meeting, amongst all the other work that was going on, clearly did have effect. If you look at post Riga - and this is a point the new SACEUR made to me yesterday on the phone - there are now five battalions more in Afghanistan than there were pre-Riga. Whether it was all Riga I do not know, but we have every reason to think that there is very solid support within NATO as an institution for what NATO is trying to do in Afghanistan and the proof of the pudding in terms of Riga is that we have had quite a big increase in troops.

Q270 Chairman: Is there anything that you want to say about caveats, or has it all been said?

General Richards: I am happy if you are that we have discussed it and it has all been said. ROE, for what it is worth, I never saw as a problem; we are fighting within the ROE today and so it has not been an issue for me. Caveats you are as well-versed in as I am; troop numbers were the real issue rather than caveats. If we just pursue it slightly, without wishing to sound like some sort of apologist for what, for example, the Germans or the Swedes or any nation you like were doing in the North, or the Italians in the West, simply being able to move their troops from the North to the South would not have been a solution to me at all because we have got just about the right number of troops in the North to contain the situation there, which is broadly stable. I had no incentive to move them out; what I was always after - going back to your question - which has now been fully accepted was an increase in the overall number of troops, it was not really caveats because within the area where we were doing the fighting we were able to fight.

Chairman: Thank you. We have three issues left to cover; you have to leave at five o'clock. I would like to cover civil/military assistance etc. until twenty-five to five, international/regional context, including the issue of Pakistan, until about quarter to five, narcotics until about five to five and the final five minutes for contingencies. Civil/military assistance; Dai Havard.

Mr Havard: We saw a much more integrated organisational set of arrangements as far as development work in the PRT and so on than we had seen previously, and quite clearly a lot of work had been done on that. All of those people, including the Afghans involved in some of the NGOs, told us about the difficulty of actually carrying out their work on the ground - are we going to deal with policing under this, Chairman?

Chairman: You could concentrate on policing.

Q271 Mr Havard: One of the things that clearly comes screaming through is that that is the gap, the development has gone on in the Army, General Wardak said to us "I want embedded trainers for policing as well as for the Army, that has been a success there, I want it here", but it is missing. One of the things that I was interested in discussing with the President was this business about auxiliary policing, and you have mentioned it two or three times. Can I just say that I am confused about it; I am confused about it because on the one hand people described it as a militia, right through to being the community bobby, but it is the tension between that and the Afghan National Police, so now we have a discussion about should it be the Afghan National Police or these auxiliary police. What would you say about what should be done in relation to trying to develop that policing activity that does not, if you like, become counter-productive in the sense that it causes one force to clash against another because it becomes a regional force rather than a national force?

General Richards: There is no doubt that the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Auxiliary Police is part of the Afghan National Police, so anyone who said they are militia is just being mischievous. There were some that saw it as a militia but the parameters within which it was drawn up very clearly put them under the Minister of the Interior and under the police, but there were certain nations that did not like them, but in fact the PAG signed up to it and while I understand - and I checked last week because I thought you might raise it - there are still birthing pangs, broadly the aim is being achieved which is that they are securing localities. In that respect the idea that they are a local bobby is right, but obviously there is a slight difference in that they have to be armed and they have to be prepared to fight to secure their locality. The whole issue of the police is a good one for you to get your teeth into because, if you like, the Afghan National Army is doing pretty well. Yes, it has further to go but there is a huge amount of money from the USA, they had ETTs and NATO is now partnering them through the OMLT concept. The Afghan National Police is at least two or three years behind the Army; it will benefit from a huge input in resources from the US again into the police, this year and next, which is why I keep saying how much we all owe the USA in this respect because both in absolute and relative terms they are putting in much more money than any other nation and they are also through a contract putting in trainers. They are ex-policemen who are being paid to go down into the most difficult areas and mentor and train the Afghan police, including the Afghan National Auxiliary Police.

Q272 Mr Havard: Is there a problem that the British Army might substitute for something there and end up trying to do that training as well.

General Richards: It would not be the first time.

Q273 Mr Havard: Without resources.

General Richards: Not without resources directly, but it would not be the first time that the British Army and other armies have had to act at least as role models to the police. I used to encourage all the NATO forces, if they saw there was a problem, not to just leave it but to get involved, whether it was misbehaviour on a roadblock or just not understanding what was about. I do not think it should become our role primarily, but we should not let bad habits develop sort of thing.

Q274 Mr Holloway: Helmand is where the Arab world would identify the British particularly and where we would appear on Arab television channels, perhaps to our own cost. Have we got the right balance of spending between military effort and reconstruction in Helmand?

General Richards: Difficult. I know it is a very crude use of my right arm, but if we agree broadly and crudely that we have to have an upward trajectory in progress which is sufficient to enthuse people to keep them with us, then from what you told me it would seem that we have not yet got that balance right, but it has to be much more holistic than chucking money at it. You need to look at how you develop capacity because if, say, there are not enough Brits or international people who want to go to Helmand, if you want to focus on Helmand, then there are plenty of Afghans that will do it.

Q275 Mr Holloway: I was about to ask exactly this, do you not think we are a bit self-centred sometimes because we imagine that only DFID or UN agencies can do stuff, but despite the lack of civil society there are actually a lot of Afghans who could do stuff with relatively small amounts of money that you could then expand when you have confidence, so why are we doing it?

General Richards: You need both, it is a balance. You will need DFID to provide the structure and the overview and all this sort of thing, but I do think you can give properly trained Afghans much more to do, but you have to train them and I do not, to be frank, always see that process going on. If there is quite a lot of criticism of corruption and poor capacity, where are the solutions to that in a properly worked out programme that over one or two years will start to solve it?

Q276 Mr Holloway: Finally, if we accept that at the tactical level we have defeated the Taliban - as part of that we have got air power and they have not - what happens to security and therefore development, or the other way round if you want to put it that way, when and if our enemy starts using increased numbers of foreigners and increasing levels of asymmetrical warfare? What does that actually do to your ordinary Afghan's attitude towards us in terms of providing security and providing development?

General Richards: That is why they are going down that route, because they see the import in what you are hinting at. The only way to win at counter-insurgency is to ensure that the people remain on your side, therefore they want to see you succeed and they will report that the foreigner has arrived in their midst.

Q277 Mr Holloway: Are we on target for that? Are we where you would want us to be in terms of hearts and minds right now?

General Richards: I think, going back to your point, that the balance between investment in reconstruction, development and improvements in governance needs to be looked at again to make sure that it matches the S bit in my RDGP and S, and I suspect that you are right, that with the honourable and notable exception of the USA - and we the UK are there or thereabouts - there is insufficient money and effort overall going into Afghanistan to be certain that we will continue to achieve that upward trajectory in the minds of people of sufficient progress to meet their expectations.

Q278 Mr Hamilton: General, all through the discussion you have used your right arm quite a substantial amount of times. I am a Member of Parliament, I represent Midlothian, and I have two major towns, Penicuik at one side of the county, Dalkeith at the other side; with all the 24-hour television, newspapers and infrastructure the people in Penicuik have not got a clue what is going on in Dalkeith, the people in Dalkeith do not have a clue what is going on in Penicuik most of the time. We are building new schools in Midlothian, we are doing a whole host of things, but information that we try to put out in a sophisticated way within the United Kingdom - sometimes the message does not get there. In how many areas within Helmand Province, Afghanistan, do you think that people know what is happening in one part of Afghanistan to the other part? When you try to get that information through to the people and tell them what was being done and how we can help them, is it not the case in one village that we might not be able to do that with another village because there is no infrastructure between them, they do not have a clue what is going on? How do you overcome that when you are communicating with the population to let them know individually that you are actually able to help? We find it difficult here, but it must be 100 times more difficult in Afghanistan.

General Richards: It is, and I could bore you with the woeful stories about the ignorance on the part of a lot of us about how you did that. For example, my PSYOPS chief came in once - a very short story this, Chairman, to substantiate your view - to show me a film he had made about alternative livelihoods, and it was really a very, very clever film, good stuff, showed greenhouses being built and tomatoes or something - the whole thrust was instead of poppy. I said to him "When is this going out then?" and he said "It will go out on Afghan television on whatever" and I said "How many poppy farmers watch television then in this country?" You are absolutely right and there are two things I would say: an information operation has to be rooted in substance and then if there is real progress - I will not use my right arm again - then over time, rather like the jungle drums, it does get out. The tribes often spread over a number of villages and they do meet, there are processes whether it is the provincial assembly or a regional substitute which they are beginning to develop, and then there are the various mullahs who are very important, so as long as it is rooted in substance it will happen. It is when you only, if you like, talk it but do not walk it that you have the problem over time that I think we have all identified, are we keeping pace with these people's expectations.

Chairman: Moving on to what we have all been waiting for, Pakistan and other areas. Dai Havard.

Q279 Mr Havard: It is Brian and myself actually who will try and ask about this, but one of the things I was interested in was the Iranian development work that is going on in Afghanistan and we had an interesting discussion with General McNeill about their involvement in the country and his idea of possibly also putting forces over to the West in Herat in the future and any mixed messages there may be in relation to the politics of that sort of activity in the South. We are interested in the Indian Government development programme building a road which links the ring road into Iran for trade purposes and so on, so the question really is about what was your experience in relation to the politics of the relationships with the Iranians.

General Richards: I had little interaction with the Iranians but I did meet the ambassador of Iran about three times and obviously I was well-versed in the amount of money and effort that Iran was putting into the West of the country but also into the Hazara population in particular, and it was clearly doing a lot of good work for Afghanistan. General McNeill's concern is a new development that I am really not in a position to comment on, I am afraid.

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 per cent 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 an act of 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 - i.e. 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 Hyatt (?) - 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 2500 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.