Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120 - 139)

TUESDAY 24 JULY 2007

RT HON BOB AINSWORTH MP, MR DESMOND BOWEN CMG AND BRIGADIER CHRIS HUGHES CBE

  Q120  Chairman: We would not expect details.

  Mr Ainsworth: That is what we are going to have to see and that is what we are going to have to talk about when we see what over-watch is. If it goes as smoothly as the other three provinces then there can be real hope and we can discuss that situation at the time, but until we see what it is—in an actual over-watch situation we cannot get much below 5000 because we have to be able to sustain the force and self-protect the force itself, so over-watch in itself does not take us down a lot lower than that.

  Q121  Mr Jones: A simple question; what is over-watch?

  Mr Ainsworth: What is over-watch? Over-watch is being there, able in the absolute extreme to offer support, but to stand back and allow the Iraqi Forces themselves to try to deal with the situations that arise.

  Chairman: You have been talking about Provincial Iraqi Control, Minister. Willie Rennie.

  Q122  Willie Rennie: You have already mentioned that you would hope to achieve Provincial Iraqi Control in the near future, and I can understand why you do not want to be any more precise about that, but why has it been so difficult and would you respond to our concern that the reason why it has not already been achieved is for domestic American purposes rather than the ability of the Iraqi military to be able to cope in the South?

  Mr Ainsworth: We are a sovereign nation and there is a process that needs to be gone through in order to get to Provincial Iraqi Control. We have not got sole control of that process, that is true, the Iraqi Government themselves have been part of that, our allies have been part of that, so those discussions have to take place and we have to be part of that. It is not true to say that it is the Americans who are preventing that; the biggest single part of that discussion is the discussion with the Iraqi Security Forces themselves: what is their capacity, what is their capability, are they ready for it? We may be approaching that point where they are.

  Q123  Willie Rennie: If we had already achieved the military capability, surely that is the overriding factor rather than the domestic politics of perhaps another country.

  Mr Ainsworth: They need to understand as well the consequences of us going to over-watch and what we will and what we will not do. It is no good them accepting provincial control and assuming that we are going to come in and support them on a regular basis because that will not be the situation.

  Mr Bowen: Can I just say that there are criteria and some of the criteria that need to be dealt with cannot be dealt with in a completely objective and scientific way. There are four criteria: one is about the security situation, another is about the state of the Iraqi Security Forces and their ability to cope, another is about the state of governance—in other words the political control and the processes—and the fourth is the ability of the multinational forces to support Provincial Iraqi Control. There are therefore some very clear categories, against which we can report in order to make the case for Provincial Iraqi Control and then there is a process which has been established which involves submitting to Baghdad, and in Baghdad both the Coalition and the Iraqi Government coming together to agree that province X or province Y is ready for transfer. That same process has been applied not just in the South but elsewhere and fairly recently in the North.

  Q124  Willie Rennie: You do not believe that domestic US politics were a significant factor in the decision not to transfer already.

  Mr Bowen: There is a process. All I can say is there is a process which is Iraq-based, in Baghdad, involving the multinational forces and the Iraqi Government and that is what has determined the PIC of provinces across Iraq.

  Q125  Chairman: Can you tell us what the current status of the Governor of Basra is, please?

  Mr Ainsworth: Well, he is ...

  Q126  Chairman: It sounds as though the answer is no.

  Mr Ainsworth: It is in the public domain and everybody knows that there have been attempts to remove the governor from within the structures within Basra. The Prime Minister himself has said that he should cease to operate and no longer has effective office there; nonetheless he does continue to operate. That is a matter for the Iraqis at the end of the day, we cannot intervene in that, we can only say to the Iraqi Government it is not an aid to stability that they are unable to sort that situation out, they need to get that situation sorted out one way or another and they need to bring clarity to that. It would be a huge help if they did.

  Q127  Willie Rennie: Going to the other provinces that have already handed over to PIC, how are they performing in terms of security and politics and what has our role been in those provinces since they were handed over?

  Mr Ainsworth: We have not had to intervene.

  Brigadier Hughes: We have on a couple of occasions.

  Mr Ainsworth: Two of the provinces have been better than the other in terms of the degree of problems that there have been. Maysaan has been the more difficult of the three, but by and large the Iraqis have dealt with those problems themselves. The Brigadier can give you some information on the interventions that we have had to make.

  Brigadier Hughes: We will go round clockwise. In Al-Muthanna, which was the first to go, west of Basra, it has been largely peaceful but it is largely desert as well, which is one of the reasons for the peace. It was interesting actually that straight after it gained PIC the Australians, who had been there—along with the Japanese but the Australians were looking after the security as part of MND (South East)—tried paying an early visit to the governor in Al Muthanna just to check that everything was okay; they were given a pretty quick cold shoulder: we are now looking after this, we no longer require you in Muthanna and, indeed, we have never had to re-intervene there. Dhi Qar has been a little more problematic, particularly recently in An Nasiriyah, the main city in Dhi Qar, where there have been similar sorts of militant JAM versus Iraqi Police Service issues that have been going on in Basra. There was a stand-off there a few weeks ago which the Iraqi Security Forces dealt with, with Coalition support, but when I say "Coalition support" it was air support and ISTAR—that is surveillance and target acquisition assets—rather than boots on the ground. In Maysaan, again, there have been some challenges up there but it is worth saying that actually what is going on in Maysaan is difficult to tell, even when you are there, so some of this is grey to us. There have certainly been issues with militias and the police service in Maysaan; the Iraqis have dealt with that largely themselves and the only intervention there has been into Maysaan Province, again quite recently, over the last two or three weeks, which has been a national operation because even after a province has PIC'd the national government keeps responsibility for terrorism. There was a Coalition operation, a US operation, into Maysaan which Prime Minister Maliki approved and Prime Minister Maliki gave down to there, but we have not re-intervened at provincial level back into Maysaan. The short answer is that there have been one or two blips, as we expected, this is not peace, love and harmony through three provinces, nobody would pretend that, but it has been largely good. Basra, of course, is a different order of issue because of the population, oil, etc.

  Q128  Willie Rennie: Relations between the central government and these provinces on terrorism or anything that is reserved to the central government, how are they developing?

  Brigadier Hughes: Normally on a mobile phone. It is that, it is the personal relationships that you see out there; if something is going to go off it does need the Prime Minister or his known representative to make a call, it cannot be done in the administrative way that we would recognise here.

  Q129  Willie Rennie: Relationships are good?

  Brigadier Hughes: They are mixed, and it depends on who is after what at any one time, so you will find that Governor Wa'ili, for example, will quite often say "I need to go and check with Baghdad" and then at other times he will ignore Baghdad, so they shift around depending on who is after what, frankly, but they exist, the relationships exist.

  Q130  Mr Jenkin: Just as a supplementary and as a linked question, that sort of Maysaan operation that we have been doing, is that the sort of thing we might continue doing from the position of over-watch after transition?

  Brigadier Hughes: It is possible. What we do not envisage in over-watch is one package fits all, so if the Iraqi Security Forces were going to ask us for support once they have got provincial control, we do not envisage them necessarily meaning that we have got to put a battle group into the middle of the city. What they might be short of is intelligence and surveillance assets, so it might be just flying something high up, or it might be another niche capability or a piece of logistics that they need putting in place. We foresee in over-watch maybe nothing or maybe very limited and a scaled approach to it.

  Q131  Mr Jenkin: To carry on giving Min(AF) a little rest, could you give us a thumbnail sketch from a military viewpoint, where are the Iraqi Armed Forces now in terms of capability and development, particularly the 10th Division, what more do they need?

  Brigadier Hughes: The 10th Division, as I have said, has had some genuine success and we have been pleased and we have had people with them whilst they have had that success, with battalions up in Baghdad and with some operations down in Basra Province and elsewhere in South East Iraq. They do have routine control alongside the police, but largely it is the Army in the three provinces that we have mentioned that have already gone to PIC. They have had effect in some of the operations in Basra; where we have seen difficulty is where the loyalty issue then comes into play and, as I have said, we have been trying to address that. In terms of equipment levels, they are well-equipped at the moment with their frontline kit so they have got 100% of the up-armoured Humvees that they were due to get and their other vehicles and equipment. The British Government has put £54 million through OSIRIS[1] into the Iraqi Security Forces as well as the equipment that has flowed down from Baghdad, originally from the Coalition and now from the Iraqi Ministry of Defence. Where they still lack and we know they still lack is at the rear end; they have not got a big logistics footprint yet, but that was planned, they do lack some of the intelligence assets, but are they a reasonable force, given where they have come from in the timeframe that they have come from, yes they are. Do they have problems? Yes, they do. In terms of the defence border, the Department for Border Enforcement (the DBE) we continue to mentor them. We have seen them make quite impressive strides at some of the key crossing points with the Iran-Iraq border where we have tightened up some of the real issues there, and it was where a lot of the smuggling was going on—it is where some of the smuggling is still going on because you are not going to stop that. They continue to be taken forward and, as I say, we continue with the SSR process on that. The Iraqi Police Service is the biggest challenge; there is no doubt about that and it remains so in Basra. We identified quite a while ago and we have continued to work on this with the Iraqis, on getting the Iraqi Police Service in Basra as best as it can possibly be. Effectively there is a small, murderous, criminal element within the Iraqi Police Force which we have to root out, and indeed we have upped our strike and detention operations against them in recent months in order to do that because they are truly irreconcilable. There are those within the Police Force whom General Jalil, for example, has said recently are totally incompetent and will always be so. If that is the case then we need to drive forward with trying to get them out of the Police Force in some way. Jalil is charged with that and only the Iraqi Government is going to be able to do that, with some sort of resettlement package if you like that is going to keep them quiet once they have gone. The rest are trainable and we continue to train where we can—during Operation SINBAD last year, for example, going into every police station to make sure that certain standards were met and with direct mentoring and support to specialist units such as the CID. We understand, therefore, what a problem the Iraqi Police Service in Basra is, but we are doing what we can to put that right as far as we are able.


  Q132  Mr Jenkin: Very briefly, because you have given very comprehensive answers, but two very brief questions, how long is it going to take before we can take our hands off so to speak?

  Brigadier Hughes: We do not know. We know that we can continue to do what we can, but to some extent that SSR timeline will not be the driver because you will be driven by other timelines as well about Provincial Iraqi Control, so it is when the Iraqis decide and the Coalition decides that we are ready for transition that you will come to a view then as to what to take forward post-transition into PIC. We have programmes where we can tick off units, but to give you a dead stop time I could not do.

  Q133  Mr Jenkin: Concerns that were expressed to us about the Iraqi Government being very slow at their equipment programmes; would you agree with that and can that be addressed?

  Brigadier Hughes: It can be addressed. We have people inside the Iraqi MoD—in fact we are putting another procurement specialist in in the next couple of weeks. They have been slow; one of the issues is the anti-corruption law that the Coalition put in place to try and address some of the very serious corruption. That makes people quite frightened to sign contracts, but we do have people in place to try and drive that forward.

  Chairman: That struck us as being improved in terms of the Iraqi Government actually procuring equipment over last year. Dai Havard.

  Q134  Mr Havard: Within that, however, we had a meeting with the Defence Minister while we were there and he was very clear that General Mohan's appointment in Basra was an important step in unifying command and control for all security assets—that was the euphemism for going in and trying to sort the thing out and give a consistent, coherent pattern there. The resources he has at his disposal to do that, however, we also discussed that, and it is this 5th Brigade within the 10th Division and this 14th Division that apparently is going to appear and is going to apparently drop out of the sky as far as I am concerned. I have little confidence, frankly, that that is going to come on the timeframe that they were telling us and is going to be equipped—given our experience of 12 months to get to the stage we are with the 10th Division. Can you say something about that because this really relates to how long we are going to stay and what we are going to do, and this business about their capacity there to do it. General Mohan may well be able to knock heads together and accommodate militias and have some architecture of control; however, what resources have you got to actually police it?

  Mr Ainsworth: The equipment is there for the existing people, the existing 10th Division.

  Q135  Mr Havard: The 10th Division, yes.

  Mr Ainsworth: The idea is that they grow the 5th Brigade of 10th Division; they are already part way there, but they are not fully equipped, so they are still in the process of being formed, and then at some stage after that you can effectively split the division and create 14th Division and effect this turnaround that the Brigadier talked about, so that we can get the Basra-based people out of Basra and into the other provinces.

  Q136  Mr Havard: It is like the South Wales Police beating up South Wales miners—I have seen it, yes, I know that.

  Mr Ainsworth: It is a big job and whether they have got the numbers yet is part of the conversation that we are having.

  Q137  Mr Havard: They have not got the equipment, they have not got the capacity, they are not there. They are a fiction.

  Mr Ainsworth: At the same time that they are saying that they have not got the numbers and they are attempting to grow their capacity, they are equally beginning to express their confidence in being able to take over in Basra town and being able to take over in the province. We have to balance that conversation, we have to understand that conversation and they have to understand the size of the job they are taking on.

  Q138  Mr Havard: The Defence Minister seemed to think they would be there and they would be available by September. I am afraid I do not share his confidence.

  Mr Ainsworth: Who will be there by September?

  Q139  Mr Havard: The 14th Division.

  Mr Ainsworth: I do not think that is the timescale that people are working to but I am not very sure.

  Brigadier Hughes: Not everybody is giving the same date. You are right to be sceptical, things do not normally run to time. We have had some people say September at the left hand scale of it; we have heard some say early in the new year, January. Somewhere in there is probably about right, but the important thing here—and we have genuinely seen signs of this—is the Government recognising the importance of Basra. It is always uppermost in their minds, for perfectly understandable reasons, that Baghdad comes first and so a lot of the equipment flow has gone straight into Baghdad. If there is a genuine belief that Mohan can deliver, and in the importance of Basra, we will see it come on line quicker.


1   The UK funding support to the Iraqi Security Forces is provided through OPERATION Osiris and to date, around £13m of this has been used to fund support to Iraqi Army 10 Division. Back


 
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