Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-76)
SIR PAUL
LEVER KCMG, MR
CHARLES GRANT
AND DR
ROBERT DOVER
19 JUNE 2007
Q60 Linda Gilroy: As to prospects
for further enlargement of NATO, have we reached the limits of
the formal expansion of the Alliance?
Dr Dover: In Eastern Europe, yes.
If one goes further the two obvious ones are Georgia and Ukraine.
I think there are some serious question marks about whether NATO
should want those countries in membership anyway.
Q61 Linda Gilroy: What questions
does that raise?
Dr Dover: I refer to the geopolitical
questions on whether Russia then becomes so intransigent and/or
aggressive that it is counter-productive to do so.
Q62 Linda Gilroy: Should they have
a veto on membership?
Dr Dover: No, but in effect they
will have just through conduct. I do not know enough about the
Ukraine to comment on the desirability of membership, but I think
there are question marks on the internal governance of Georgia.
Sir Paul Lever: In other contexts
we have seen the risks of taking into an organisation a new member
that does not have control over its own territory, or what it
claims as its own territory. There are some countries that would
like to be members of NATO in that situation. It is a difficult
conundrum. Do we give Russia a veto? I am sure that we would all
answer no, but that is not the same as saying that if any country
applies to join and that is its sovereign choice we take it in.
The North Atlantic Alliance has an interest in its own security,
and there is a certain balance of obligations and entitlements
and any enlargement must be examined from that perspective. My
feeling is that, as with Turkey and the European Union, it is
not never but it is not on the immediate agenda. NATO probably
will not in practice enlarge any further in the short term and
thereafter, depending on what happens in the Balkans, there may
be scope there. One always must note in this context that if hypothetically
Sweden or Finland changed their long-standing defence policy,
which I do not think is remotely on the cards, that would be a
different matter.
Mr Grant: As to the Balkans, as
with the EU countries they will join in the long run if they do
the things we want them to do. I do not believe that existing
members would have strong objections to taking in Balkan countries
if and when they were ready. We do not want to leave the western
Balkans as a kind of black hole on the map of Europe which breeds
nasty things that come out and bite us. I share the view of Dr
Dover on Ukraine and Georgia. I do not believe that we should
kowtow to the Russians or give in to them when they growl at us,
but we must recognise, as any brief knowledge of Russian history
will tell you, that Ukraine is rather different from, say, Slovakia
joining NATO. Ukraine is the kernel of Russian civilisation. More
practically, the Russian defence industry is partly based in Ukraine.
Ukraine's armed forces are pretty tightly bound up in Russian's
own military structures. It is a fact that Russians do not regard
Ukraine as a foreign country; they regard it perhaps a bit like
the English regard Ireland. Psychologically, given the paranoia
that genuinely does pervade Russian ruling circles, it would be
seen as a very aggressive move to take Ukraine into NATO. I would
not encourage it. As it is, public opinion in Ukraine, depending
on which opinion polls you read, shows that between 10 and 20
per cent of people want to join NATO. Although Yushchenko wants
to join NATO in my view he does not have much of a political future.
As for Georgia, one should not let in countries that have territorial
disputes with neighbours. I do not say never but I certainly do
not believe we should encourage Georgia. Although public opinion
there suggests that it wants to join I do not think we should
encourage Georgia to join NATO soon. The EU may be able to offer
them some feeling of safety and security by coming up with new
systems and schemes, for example including Georgia or Ukraine
in aspects of the EU's common foreign and security policy. That
would be less threatening to the Russians and create fewer problems.
Q63 Mr Holloway: In that case, why
are we provoking them with the talk of Ukraine joining NATO?
Mr Grant: I think that some people
in Washington are talking about Ukraine joining NATO. I am not
aware of any European government other than the Poles or Brits
that is keen to bring Ukraine into NATO. The president of Ukraine
wants to join NATO and he has raised the issue, but I do not believe
that the British Government and other Western European governments
or EU or NATO institutions are making a big fuss about it.
Q64 Linda Gilroy: To move to the
international partnerships and the people who are joining us in
Afghanistan and who are not members of NATO, should those relationships
be formalised?
Mr Grant: Is this a question about
a global NATO?
Q65 Linda Gilroy: Yes. Australia
and other countries have come in to help.
Mr Grant: This follows on quite
nicely from the earlier questions. I guess that one impact the
East Europeans have had in joining NATO is that although they
are generally very atlanticist they take NATO away from the direction
in which many Americans would like it to develop in terms of it
becoming a global security alliance. East Europeans are very concerned
that NATO should be about Article 5, so there is a strange alliance
within NATO between the French who hate the idea of a global NATO
and the East Europeans who also hate it for different reasons.
Other people are better informed than me, but I am not aware of
very many European governments in NATO that are terribly keen
on the idea pushed by some in Washington to include the Japanese,
Australians, Singaporeans, New Zealanders and others in a kind
of global partnership. There is lack of enthusiasm within Europe
for this. I do not have any problems with it. It seems to me that
security threats are global and we need countries such as the
ones you mentioned to help us solve problems. I am very relaxed
about whether they become formal members of NATO or just close
partners of NATO who contribute to NATO missions and therefore
should be given a stake in the management of them. I do not have
a problem with that.
Q66 Linda Gilroy: You do not believe
strongly that there is a need to formalise that arrangement?
Mr Grant: China is a bit of a
danger here. Some people have made the case to me that if we did
make, say, Australia a formal partner of NATO and give it some
status within the organisation China would begin to perceive NATO
as an anti-China organisation, which it does not at the moment.
Maybe it is not the end of the world if it does so, but I do not
believe that we should particularly encourage China to feel that
the Americans are trying to encircle it. That would not be very
helpful.
Dr Dover: I am similarly relaxed
about ad hoc associations. I am not sure about full membership.
I can see the utility of having Japan within the broad NATO ambit
in terms of counter-terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue
states and that sort of thing; similarly with Australia particularly
in relation to counter-terrorism, but I believe that full membership
changes what NATO does so significantly and I am not sure it is
a good idea.
Mr Jenkins: I have been sitting here
thinking of NATO, Europe and Russia. Maybe we have lost the plot.
I believe that Russia is playing the old game. It is very much
involved in Iran and it has been sidetracked a great deal in Europe.
Russia went through a dramatic change when the country fell apart
and was on its knees. We could have helped it but did not and
the West, particularly America, wanted to humiliate it. Now it
has some power and is being sent extra money by the trainful from
Europe it will get off its knees. This was a country whose people
proudly strolled the world stage; it was one of the two superpowers.
It was humiliated and now it has a leader who promises to take
it back to the world stage. Therefore, for purely domestic reasons
I can understand what Putin is doing, but for purely strategic
reasons I cannot understand what Europe is doing.
Chairman: What is the question?
Q67 Mr Jenkins: No. We are putting
questions in a vacuum, so let us set the framework. My concern
is that NATO is so dominated by the US that it is not looking
after Europe's interests but America's. Europe needs Russia. Will
NATO be a stumbling block to our European future? I wish to see
the day when a quarter of a million Poles do not turn west to
work in Western Europe and Britain but turn east to work in Russia
with its falling population, which is the main concern of that
country, to help that country's development. All one hears is
the bright future for Europe, but what I get from the witnesses
is that we should not allow Russia to block the progress we have
made in pushing NATO up to its doors, threatening to site missiles
on its border and kicking in its back door to occupy the kitchen.
Mr Grant: I spend a fair amount
of time in Russia. There is real paranoia about NATO in Russia
which is linked to the belief that the colour revolutions in Serbia,
Ukraine, Georgia and Kurdistan would not have happened without
the CIA and Freedom House engineering them. As they do not like
to see American military bases in central Asia—there is
I believe only one left in Kurdistan—they have genuine worries
about the missile installations that have been in the news recently.
Certainly, I have been told by American diplomats that America
gave verbal promises to the Russians 10 years ago that the enlargement
of NATO would not lead to any US military facilities being stationed
in the new members. American diplomats have told me recently that
basically the US has reneged on the verbal promises that it gave
Russia. The Russian fear of encirclement is genuine and not just
an act. Having said that, if Russia does launch an economic blockade
against Georgia as it has recently threatened, cut rail links
to Estonia and cut off oil supplies to Latvia and Lithuania—Putin
himself has said he will have to target European sites with his
missiles to punish us for taking missile defence systems—that
does not create the kind of ambience which allows us to have a
very constructive relationship with Russia. Frankly, the way things
are going in the Russian leadership at the moment it is very hard
to have a constructive relationship.
Sir Paul Lever: I do not think
I can add to that.
Dr Dover: Perhaps I have gone
soft on Russia. I think it is important to frame Russia's current
behaviour in terms of thinking of its offensiveness as defensive.
In the 1990s it felt humiliated by policies initiated and/or forced
upon it by the West. Now it is finding its feet because it has
a resurgent wealth through natural resources in one sense it is
trying to solidify what has happened to it on its borders and
that is why it does not want NATO to expand, but it is also trying
to roll back some of the humiliations that it felt in the 1990s.
That is quite clearly seen through energy policy. Even though
most of us think of Gazprom as being a state-owned enterprise,
it is a private company and so we can apply more rational company
logic to the way it acts. I am more dovish than Mr Grant on this
matter because I think that Russia must be seen in the context
of almost a caged tiger; it is responding to a feeling of oppression
rather than offensively trying to push its borders, be they political
or geographical.
Mr Grant: I agree.
Q68 Willie Rennie: Referring to Afghanistan,
what lessons do you think can be learnt about the failure to fulfil
the requirements of the deployment from fellow NATO members? What
are the implications for being able to conduct future deployments
like this?
Dr Dover: Afghanistan will be
informative for all sorts of reasons, one of which may be the
experience of a strategic failure, not a military loss. That failure
will fall on all of NATO member countries because they are collectively
responsible for that. Technically speaking, the work that was
done as part of ESDP on the capabilities catalogue, which I think
is still unfulfilled, shows where the blame lies in this regard.
It lies with free-riding European member governments that are
not willing to sort out their capability shortages. Clearly, that
bears heavily on the ability of the Alliance to do similar activities
in the future.
Sir Paul Lever: One of the complaints
made in relation to NATO's performance in Afghanistan is not just
the unwillingness of some NATO members to provide forces and equipment
but their insistence when they do provide it on applying so-called
caveats to their use. In the latter context my view is that we
need to be realistic. When a British government deploys our Armed
Forces abroad we take quite a close interest in how, where and
under what rules of engagement they are to be used. We are usually
pretty relaxed in a NATO deployment, but in other contexts—I
think of UNPROFOR—we have been very insistent that ultimately
we retain control over how they may be used and in particular
the extent to which they should be put in harm's way. It would
undoubtedly be highly desirable from the point of view of the
conduct of the NATO operation in Afghanistan if all allies gave
what might be called carte blanche and said, "Here's our
contingent. Deploy it as you like", but that is not how the
real world is. In some countries the constitutional arrangements
bind the government quite tightly as to how to deploy their armed
forces; in others there are domestic political realities. One
has to accept that there is public opinion and governments must
be able to choose the terms under which they contribute, given
that this is an exercise whose relationship to their national
security is indirect. It is not about territorial defence but
the projection of force for wider purposes of security. Therefore,
it may be a bit counter-productive to be too critical about those
countries which say they will deploy here but not there.
Q69 Willie Rennie: How should other
members respond to these events?
Sir Paul Lever: It would be highly
desirable if they were less restrictive, but the reasons some
of them are restrictive are not just a matter of perversity; it
is because they have either domestic constitutional arrangements
or domestic political constraints which mean they are more comfortable
with their armed forces being used in one particular theatre.
Q70 Willie Rennie: My question is:
what do we do about it? Do we just accept it? What are the implications
of failure?
Mr Grant: The only thing one can
do is use the power of persuasion. NATO is not a supra-national
organisation. The secretary-general cannot override national caveats
set by national parliaments. NATO is a collection of democracies.
As Sir Paul says, we have to accept that some countries will send
troops on certain missions with caveats. It is a real pain. Others
will correct me, but I believe that some of the caveats have been
listed in the past few years, particularly following the awful
events in Kosovo about three years ago when there was a riot of
Kosovars against Serbs. Some Serbs were killed and peace-keepers
from some European countries stood by and watched it happen because
the caveats did not allow them to use force. I believe that it
involved the Germans.
Q71 Mr Jenkin: It was not the Germans.
Mr Grant: I forget who it was.
Following that awful event in a NATO peace-keeping mission moral
pressure was applied. That is all one can do. In the broad sweep
of history, let us think where the Germans have come from 15 years
ago. At the time of the first gulf war when it was inconceivable
that Germany would deploy force the Schroder Government with Joschka
Fischler as foreign minister—I am a big critic of that government—started
little by little to play a more active role in justice and security
missions, sending troops all over the world. Although the Germans
have been criticised for not sending troops to the south of Afghanistan,
I believe that they have suffered 20 deaths through the use of
special forces and their deployment in other parts of the country.
As for the French, they have been rightly criticised for not sending
more troops to the south, but their special forces have played
a useful role. They provided troops for Lebanon last summer when
Britain did not have any troops available. The answer to the question
is that all we can do is use moral suasion which sometimes produces
results.
Dr Dover: To follow up one point,
on a broad sweep with Afghanistan—I know that the Committee
is doing work on Afghanistan separately from this inquiry—one
of the key factors for the Alliance is that it has learnt lessons
more quickly as people rotate out of theatre. That has been very
important. Counter-insurgency thinking is getting far better.
From my experience at the Defence Academy, even in the past two
years it is becoming far more nuanced, sophisticated and strong.
We are still doing COIN in the wrong way; we are using air power
as artillery and dropping 2,000-pound bombs on adversaries. That
is not connecting hearts and minds, even if it physically disconnects
people's heads from their bodies. COIN can be done only in terms
of managing a political concept, so learning lessons more quickly
and in a better way out of theatre is the key factor that comes
out of this rather than some of the more strategic aspects.
Q72 Mr Holloway: We visited Canada
the other day and met members of the opposition. I was surprised
to be told that unless others came up to the mark the Canadians
would leave Kandahar. That does not seem so unreasonable. Do you
believe that a bit more hard ball has to be played in order to
get people to remove the Brits, Canadians and Dutch from the dangerous
places?
Dr Dover: It is very difficult
to find countries, governments and militaries that are capable
of doing the sorts of operations we are talking about. The number
of militaries that are capable of doing the operations that the
British Armed Forces do is quite small, and certainly the political
motivation to do them is even smaller. In terms of Afghanistan
burden-sharing becomes a large issue, which feeds into what I
said earlier about whether we could envisage a system within NATO
where there was burden-sharing of payments. Therefore, one country
will do the operations whilst the others help to subsidise that
particular set of operations. I do not know the answer to that,
but I suggest that it is an attractive option for those who are
more capable and willing.
Sir Paul Lever: I think that one
area in which NATO has perhaps been rather unsuccessful is explaining
publicly the nature of the military mission in the south of Afghanistan.
In the north there was a mission to support provincial reconstruction
teams and apply military force to support reconstruction and civil
rebuilding. That was a mission that I think everybody could understand
and it had good public resonance in countries like Germany, but
NATO seems rather to have drifted into the south without very
much of a public debate or understanding of why exactly these
small pockets of NATO forces are holding small villages and defending
them against the Taliban and engaging in this type of warfare.
It is possible to understand the rationale for it in the north
and the use of special forces deployed by the Americans. There
are question marks about whether they are too heavy in the use
of air power, but you can see the rationale for going after al-Qaeda
in that way. What is not quite so clear is the purpose of the
counter-insurgency action that NATO is undertaking in the south.
That does not mean I criticise it; I just note that I do not think
it has been adequately explained in public.
John Smith: I thought that it was to
extend the writ of Kabul.
Chairman: We are moving on from Afghanistan.
Q73 John Smith: We are indeed, but
I think it is worth replying to that comment. Turning to capabilities,
what improvement have we seen in actual NATO capabilities in,
say, the past five years? Has the development of ESDP been a help
or hindrance in the development of those capabilities in relation
to EU battle groups? What more needs to be done?
Dr Dover: Improvements in capabilities
across the Alliance have arisen mostly in the American sphere.
Their capabilities with their limitless bank balance continue
to improve exponentially. The challenge for the European end of
the Alliance is the network-centric capability and whether or
not we wish to engage in that fully. Most recently, Lockheed Martin
has tried to promote within the UK the idea of having standard
platforms into which small businesses can plug their particular
bits of kit. That is an interesting development and one that will
hopefully generate some cost savings in putting new kit into theatre.
Across the European Union capabilities come under the same defence
inflationary crush. People try to do more with less; they put
high technology capabilities into situations where low technology
capabilities would be more suitable. The rationale is that you
can do low intensity operations with high technology kit more
effectively than to do high intensity activity with low technology
capabilities. The reality in places like Afghanistan and Iraq
is the converse is true, so my broad picture is quite pessimistic.
Mr Grant: It is almost inconceivable
that defence budgets will go up. The cost of defence equipment
is rising higher than inflation, so there is a real problem in
improving capabilities. I still believe that one way forward is
to pool defence assets. That could save significant amounts of
money in non-sensitive areas of defence equipment and organisation.
After all, NATO has its own fleet of AWACS and airborne ground
surveillance aircraft. Pooling saves money. As for the EU, because
a lot of countries are now buying the Eurofighter why not have
a single support organisation for the A400M transport plane against
single support operation? One could apply the same logic to catering,
engineering and the non-sensitive logistic bits of defence. We
could save a lot of money if we collaborated and built common
organisations.
Q74 John Smith: Is there a case for
developing non-military capability within NATO?
Sir Paul Lever: It is not what
NATO is good at and has done up to now on any significant scale.
There are two questions. First, when NATO conducts certain military
operations does it need to have in mind the non-military aspects?
The answer is emphatically yes. Second, should NATO itself provide
them through a single organisation? The answer is not necessarily.
There are other international bodies—one is the EU, another
is the UN and another is possibly OSCE—with which NATO can
interact. I would be slightly wary of trying to turn NATO from
an organisation whose essential purpose is military into one which
provides development aid, engages directly in civil reconstruction
and offers police training and so on. Those are things that need
to be done and NATO needs to be confident that they will be done,
but I do not think that means NATO itself needs to do them.
Q75 Mr Jenkin: When we were at NATO
we encountered some real frustration that the EDA was undertaking
weapons standardisation which is one of NATO's key tasks; it has
been doing it for years. Would it not be preferable to have one
authority in Europe attempting to standardise weapons rather than
two?
Dr Dover: Instrumentally, yes.
Mr Grant: Yes.
Q76 Chairman: There is a huge disparity
between the spending of the United States and the spending of
Europe on defence. Mr Grant says there is no chance of budgets
being increased. Given that huge disparity, do you think that
an alliance based on that disparity has a long-term future?
Mr Grant: As we said earlier,
the current US administration is very pro-NATO at the political
level. The State Department is full of NATO-lovers like Nick Burns
and Condi Rice, but in terms of your question at the level of
the US military and the Pentagon there is much less interest in
NATO than there was. I believe that fewer American top generals
have served in NATO and fewer people in the American military
think that NATO is important. Because of that disparity in brute
force, if you like, there is a real problem in getting the US
military to think that NATO and the Europeans matter and should
be taken seriously.
Dr Dover: If we are more pragmatic
about the roles and their disaggregation and which ones certain
collections of states play then the Alliance is sustainable; if
not and we insist on having the US involved at all or most points
then it is probably unsustainable.
Chairman: Thank you very much. It has
been an interesting morning and this first evidence session in
our inquiry into NATO has really helped us.
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