CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 523-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

 

 

COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH

 

 

Tuesday 9 June 2009

PROFESSOR THEO FARRELL, PROFESSOR MALCOLM CHALMERS and

BRIGADIER (retired) ED BUTLER

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 95

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence
2.	Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, 45 Great Peter Street, London, SW1P 3LT Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 9 June 2009

Members present

Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair

Mr David S Borrow

Mr David Crausby

Linda Gilroy

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Adam Holloway

Mr Bernard Jenkin

Robert Key

Mrs Madeleine Moon

________________

Witnesses: Professor Theo Farrell, King's College, London, Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), King's College, London and University of Bradford, and Brigadier (retired) Ed Butler, Chief Executive CforC Ltd, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Good morning, this is the first of our evidence sessions into the Comprehensive Approach. I never know which of the Defence Committee's inquiries is the most important one we do, but this must be up there as being extremely important because it permeates all that we do in terms of our military and foreign policy. I would like to welcome our witnesses, Professor Farrell and Professor Chalmers. Brigadier Ed Butler is going to be joining us at I think 11.30. We will then ask him some of the questions that we will begin by asking both of you, if that is all right. Welcome to our first evidence session on the Comprehensive Approach. Can you define the Comprehensive Approach, please?

Professor Chalmers: Thank you very much for that introduction and we are very pleased to be here. Perhaps I could say what I think a comprehensive approach is, which I think is relevant to defining what the Comprehensive Approach of the Government is. It seems to me a comprehensive approach is one which seeks to elucidate how the different elements of national power and influence can be brought together to solve a particular problem. I think that has at least two dimensions, one that I might call the horizontal dimension, but also a vertical dimension. The horizontal dimension is the familiar one of making sure the different elements of the UK Government-DfID, FCO, MoD and so on-work together in pursuit of the common objective. The vertical dimension of a comprehensive approach is, in a sense, looking at the different stages of approaching and responding to conflict or potential conflict from, in the first instance, a common understanding of what the problem is and a common agreement on what the HMG strategy for responding to that problem is, then moving on to the specifics of how one might do it in a particular theatre-the sort of thing one sees in the Government's Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy document-and then finally, at a more operational and tactical level, how the different arms operate in particular in Helmand or Lashkar Gah or wherever it might be. We have to understand the comprehensiveness in both those dimensions.

Q2 Chairman: Professor Farrell, is that right?

Professor Farrell: I guess the way I would think about it, which is consistent with Professor Chalmers, is a definition that would have four elements. The first element is the deployment of military and non-military instruments; the second element is that they would be employed in a co-ordinated and concerted national response to complex operations overseas-and I say co-ordinated and concerted as opposed to integrated because they do not necessarily have to be fully integrated; the third element would be that they have a shared understanding of the operational objectives and end-state; and the fourth element is that they would engage in joint planning, execution and evaluation of all operational activities.

Q3 Chairman: At some stage this concept of a comprehensive approach was developed. Can you tell us when and why and how it was developed?

Professor Chalmers: I am not sure I know the answer to that. Do you know?

Professor Farrell: I know from a military perspective where it came from. It comes from I think two things principally. The first is lessons of operations really from Bosnia onwards. From Bosnia onwards the British Forces found themselves in operations that they recognised, where development activities, humanitarian activities and political activities were integral to the kind of objectives and end state they were trying to achieve, where they appreciated that they had to work more closely with non-governmental, humanitarian agencies. UNHCR for instance was the lead agency in UNPROFOR II operations in Bosnia. Likewise, we learnt that in Kosovo they went in after the end of our air campaign. Of course in Sierra Leone likewise they learnt that and finally in Iraq in 2003 with the failure of post-conflict operations. I think that is one direction it comes from. The other direction, which we really cannot overlook, I think is fundamentally important is the development of effects-based operations the whole doctrine, thinking and concepts that come from the United States. It is picked up by the British military from 2004 onwards. I know it appears in the 2003 Defence White Paper and I have seen a report from this committee where I think you were reasonably critical, and for good reason, in the early stages because EBO seemed to be new-fangled thinking that was not well worked out at that stage, and certainly it was not well worked out, but the British military put a lot of thinking into trying to work it out. They went through a phase of experimentation between 2004 and 2005 and they found that the American approach to effects-based operations was flawed and they adapted it to suit British command culture and military practices. Then in 2005 and 2006, in September of both those years, we see two iterations of a doctrine called the effects-based approach to operations (EBAO). That is fundamental because that is the framework in which the British military begin to think about a comprehensive approach in a more structured, coherent way and hence we see between those two versions of EBAO doctrine in January 2006 the Comprehensive Approach doctrine that is produced by DCDC (Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre), which is the UK's doctrine command.

Q4 Chairman: So they did it drawing on lessons learnt from Bosnia onwards, created by a recognition of some form of failure in Iraq?

Professor Farrell: I think it is lessons learnt from Bosnia onwards, a succession of them, including lessons from Iraq, combined with the conceptual apparatus that was coming from the United States at the time, and that helped them begin to produce coherent thinking and the beginnings of a doctrine on how we can, in a more structured way, co-ordinate with our non-military partners to have a comprehensive response. It is those two elements coming together.

Q5 Chairman: You referred to the flaws in the American effects-based operations. What were those flaws?

Professor Farrell: Put simply, the American approach was a very scientific approach to operations they were trying to develop, based on a thing called systems and systems analysis where you look at the operation, you look the opponents you are trying to engage and the objectives as a system with a network. For instance, the enemy becomes a network and there are nodes in his network; you try to identify them and target them with precision strikes or non-kinetic activities and you cause his scheme of manoeuvre to collapse, and therefore you can defeat the enemy without having actually to obliterate them and the environment in which you operate. It is a very scientific way of thinking about it. When the British tried to apply it here-they did an exercise in 2005, Joint Venture 2005-they found it was a very staff-heavy approach that does not work with the British Army's approach to mission command, which is a very command-led approach, and in fact the exercise failed because the commander was so frustrated by his staff, he tried to do a run-around and the whole thing just ground to a halt. That was really useful because that caused DCDC to stop, to think and say "How can we re-work this to make it make sense for us?" Whereas from 2005 onwards our approach to effects-based approach to operations is really more key towards soft effects, influence operations and critically operations with civilian partners in British military thinking, on the American side, EBO doctrine, effects-based operations doctrine, continues along the science of warfare path, which of course fails eventually because it has just been abandoned by US Joint Forces Command as a doctrine.

Q6 Mrs Moon: I just wonder, Professor Farrell, how much of our time in Northern Ireland influenced the way we thought this through. Did it have any influence at all having to work so closely with the civilian population for so long? Was there any influence there?

Professor Farrell: I would have thought it must have influenced it because I think our experience in Northern Ireland has influenced British peace support operations doctrine and the development of civil military (CIMIC) doctrine and both those bodies of doctrine actually define foundations that you could build and you have built stabilisation upon. So I think it has. Whether that was a critical influence, I do not think so. The difference in Northern Ireland of course is that you are operating in an environment which is a well-developed environment-all the instruments of government are there-whereas the whole point I think about the Comprehensive Approach is that we are going for the most part into extremely dangerous environments where we are trying to rebuild states from the ground up. I am sure we will get to this eventually; personally, I think that a comprehensive approach is precisely designed for these stabilisation operations and it has very limited utility for conventional war fighting.

Q7 Mr Holloway: Is that not kind of the point that in Northern Ireland you have the consent of most of the people? The comprehensive approach is designed to win over the people, to separate the people from the insurgents. Is that not what we are missing?

Professor Chalmers: I would have thought in the Northern Ireland conflict there was significant discomfort with the British position.

Q8 Mr Holloway: The majority of people in Northern Ireland were behind us. In Helmand Province, the majority of people are not with us. Is not the point of the conflict that it is supposed to win them back?

Professor Farrell: That is an interesting question. I think the Comprehensive Approach is a critical aspect of our thinking about how we would for instance win hearts and minds but it is not necessary because you could apply a traditional COIN framework, the counter-insurgency framework, which has principles like co-ordination with civilian partners, etc. but is not attempting to be as comprehensive as the Comprehensive Approach. The Comprehensive Approach also I think is not just about mission specific although an application, as Professor Chalmers says, must be mission specific. I think it is actually about developing the conceptual and institutional capabilities, capacities, so that we can then apply it to each operation as it comes along.

Q9 Mr Holloway: Do you think if we were less ambitious we might do better? Are we trying to do too much?

Professor Farrell: With the Comprehensive Approach?

Q10 Mr Holloway: Yes? Are we being over-ambitious? Should we perhaps scale down the extent of our ambitions?

Professor Chalmers: The question then being what would you not do and what you would leave behind in your less ambitious approach, and certainly an approach which was more predominantly military and had less civil components and less emphasis on securing the people, as it were, might be less effective in Afghanistan. It depends on the particular case. I think I would emphasise what Professor Farrell said in the sense that this is an attempt to move beyond CIMIC on the one hand and hearts and minds on the other, which often have a tendency to be seen as add-ons to the existing defence ways of doing things, to think more comprehensively, but the cost of moving to the more comprehensive, interdepartmental approach is that the transaction costs become much more considerable. A lot of resources are spent on co-ordination at every level and that can slow down the process of decision making.

Q11 Mr Crausby: You say, Professor Chalmers "a comprehensive approach" in the sense presumably that it needs to be adapted to the particular circumstances. You make that as a particular point. Could you tell us something about what would be a suitable comprehensive approach for current and immediate future circumstances?

Professor Chalmers: I think arguably there has always been an attempt to have a comprehensive approach to conflicts going back historically. Even World War Two, the paradigmatic military-dominated conflict, also had political objectives. There was a development aspect to the follow-on to World War Two in terms of what happened in Germany and what have you. Those are all very important but I think in traditional state-on-state warfare there is a certain sequencing in which at a certain stage the military component was dominant and then political and development aspects were dominant at a later stage. What is happening therefore I do not think we should see as distinct from history except that we are dealing with different sorts of conflicts and it will continue to be so. In the particular sort of situation in which the British find themselves in Helmand, it is necessary to have, I would argue, these different elements of government working simultaneously rather than sequentially, though clearly in some circumstances some particular places and times will be dominate and another will not.

Q12 Mr Crausby: Are there any particular circumstances where a comprehensive approach is inappropriate in the sense of should we not be careful that we sometimes might over-manage these situations?

Professor Chalmers: It is clearly important to have systems in place that do not over-complexify and impose undue burdens. I think the challenge is to have an approach which recognises the complexity of the problems but then has clear lines of command and division of labour which means that people get on with their particular jobs. What that often means is that the comprehensive nature needs to be at the planning level, at a relatively high level of discussion, but once you get down to specific tasks being done by Army brigades or by DfID field officers or whatever, they have a job and they get on and do it. They do not necessarily have to be consulting all the time with their counterparts.

Q13 Mr Jenkin: Would you describe this as a mature doctrine now and if you do, where are the fault lines in it? As we are applying it to Afghanistan, does the Comprehensive Approach apply equally to the tactical, to the strategic and the grand strategic level and are we not in danger of just applying it at the tactical level in Helmand when we just do not control the strategic or grand strategic theatre at all?

Professor Chalmers: I would agree entirely with your last point. I think it is very important when we are dealing with Helmand and indeed Afghanistan. The way that the Government has recently formulated this is within the context of I am not sure grand strategy is quite the right term but a broader approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan, looking at that and situating what our Armed Forces are doing in Helmand within that broader context. I think that is very important because if you do not have a clear idea of why you are there and what your objectives are, then you are less likely to achieve lasting success. Even if you have tactical success, you will not achieve operational success.

Q14 Mr Jenkin: Is that then not the shortcoming in the whole Comprehensive Approach? The Comprehensive Approach is about having a sort of global view of the whole problem and yet we are very good at doing sticking plaster and holding positions in Helmand but that is all we can do because we do not have the capacity to do anything else?

Professor Farrell: I would approach it slightly differently and say: this is part of the problem, which is the enormous complexity. We are seeking to be comprehensive within our national response and we are seeking to be comprehensive in our engagement with non-national assets (NGOs, UN, etc.) and we are seeking to be comprehensive with our ISAF partners, so it is at three levels we are trying to be comprehensive and that is where the problem lies in those separate fault lines. In terms of our own national response and whether it is comprehensive, and this is where I would slightly disagree, I think at the highest strategic level there is not sufficient political direction perhaps, or has not been in the past, in our campaign in Afghanistan. At the campaign operational level, I think it has been comprehensive. If you look for instance at the two key campaign plans-the Joint Plan for Helmand that was produced really from October 2005 onwards and the Helmand Road Map that was produced in early 2008-both of those were comprehensive in their production. Both efforts were led by what was then the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit and then in 2008 it became the Stabilisation Unit. The Joint Plan for Helmand was led by the PCRU involved in collaboration with PJHQ. It was highly comprehensive in its generation. It had a flaw in terms of connecting what were those aspirations at an operational level generated in Britain with what was happening on the ground. The Helmand Road Map was designed to address that. The primary authors were despatched by the Stabilisation Unit into Lashkar Gar and they worked with 52 Brigade and they took 52 Brigade's campaign plan, its operational design, and built around that a reformed plan for Helmand. Both of those are great examples of comprehensive planning actually. I think both at an operational and tactical level as well we are seeing much more of a comprehensive approach. For instance, the Civil-Military Mission in Helmand is a great success. A part of it is taking the J5 cell of our brigade at Task Force Headquarters and co-locating them physically with the PRT, and they built around that the Helmand Civilian Military Mission. That is very comprehensive in its approach. Now practically all of the major boards that are used by the Task Force and critically the Joint Targeting Board are comprehensive; they have civilian people on that trying to co-ordinate kinetic and non-kinetic activities. I think at a national response level our approach is comprehensive and getting more comprehensive. There are issues of resourcing, etc.. There are issues still of course in terms of training, etc., but it is becoming more comprehensive. It is at the ISAF level that we are having a problem. That is the critical problem in Afghanistan, I think.

Professor Chalmers: If I could just add briefly to what Professor Farrell has said, I think he is right in characterising where we have got to now but I think we have gone through a significant learning curve since 2006. I think the civil component was sadly under-resourced and under-available at the beginning on 2006. We have learnt-and that is a very positive thing; we should never be complacent that there is not more to learn. Having a Comprehensive Approach does not mean that we have the right comprehensive approach. The real debates are more about what the right comprehensive approach should be rather than whether there should be a comprehensive approach.

Q15 Mr Jenkin: Is a comprehensive approach effective in Afghanistan if it is not also addressing Pakistan?

Professor Chalmers: No. You have to address the regional dimension as part of a comprehensive approach; that is one of the benefits of having one.

Q16 Chairman: Professor Farrell, I think you said that at a high strategic level there has been insufficient co-ordination. What did you mean exactly?

Professor Farrell: Certainly, if we look at the early phases, and this is where I completely agree with Professor Chalmers, we did not have that degree of co-ordination and commitment of resources across all the government departments as we were going into Helmand in 2006 onwards. I think that was possibly because we had not appreciated the scale of the challenge that we were facing going in. I also think, though-and this is more of an intuition than any analysis I have done, so I will be cautious in what I say-that in 2006 and 2007 part of the problem that we had with our campaign was that we were still extracting ourselves from Iraq, and that was diverting resources and attention at the national command level in terms of the two campaigns. My intuition is that there could have been until quite recently at the highest level better co-ordination of our campaign in Afghanistan and particularly in terms of figuring out what we are trying to do and communicating that to all the various constituencies in Britain to gain support behind it. I have the strong sense that in Britain we are only slowly waking up to the fact that we are fighting a war in Afghanistan and the Government has not been successful in mobilising Westminster, the likes of yourselves, let alone the population and the wider community behind this effort. In that sense, whenever I go to America I am struck by the difference because in the United States there is no mistake about this.

Chairman: I think this will be a major theme of our inquiry. It is interesting that you say that.

Q17 Mr Hancock: Professor Chalmers, it is good to see that you practise what you preach, having progressed from peace studies to war studies at various times in your experience. I am interested to know where the Comprehensive Approach actually begins-and it touches on what you have just said, Professor Farrell, about whether you start with your own people, your own population-and where do you begin with this comprehensive approach and why have we failed so miserably to learn from the experiences we have had over the last 60 years?

Professor Farrell: It is interesting because your comments to my mind suggest the issue about whether the Comprehensive Approach is anything more than a way of aligning institutions in government to produce a more co-ordinated response to these national operations, whether it is beyond that about mobilising society and other political institutions.

Q18 Mr Hancock: It is everything, is it not?

Professor Farrell: That is interesting. I am not convinced it is, actually. I would be very cautious about advocating a comprehensive approach that extends beyond mobilising the instruments of government in a more co-ordinated fashion because we find it so complex and difficult just to do that, and then connect that bit to our coalition partners, because that is where it has to happen. I think if you add social and political mobilisation to the mix of co-ordination that would be too ambitious. I am not saying those are not important themes. I am just saying they do not necessarily belong in the Comprehensive Approach.

Q19 Mr Hancock: I think you need to go to the military funeral of somebody who has been killed in Afghanistan and listen to what the families and friends say about the lack of a comprehensive approach to the public because the one question they ask is "why?" If you cannot really give a comprehensive approach to your own population about what you are trying to do, there comes a time when they say "no more".

Professor Farrell: Let me give you an example to illustrate my perspective on this. For instance, if we do another Iraq 2003, hopefully next time we will have the Comprehensive Approach waiting to apply to deploy when we finish the major war-fighting phase and sequence it in so that we can begin already to deploy a comprehensive approach in those areas of territory that we will have captured from the enemy. But when we are in a war-fighting situation, I think it has much more limited utility; it is waiting to be deployed. But we still should obviously be mobilising society and our political institutions behind the national effort, which will be a war, so it is a separate thing.

Q20 Mr Hancock: Who should lead this then, both of you? Who should take responsibility for the Comprehensive Approach? Where should the top be?

Professor Chalmers: I think ultimately it has to be at the centre of government with the Prime Minister at the highest level, and therefore with the Cabinet Office working to co-ordinate the different departments in furtherance of that objective. That puts a lot of strain on the centre but I think inevitably, if that is the case, in implementing particular aspects of the Comprehensive Approach, however, in Afghanistan for example, different departments will take leads depending on what the particular issue is.

Q21 Mr Hancock: In hindsight, would you say that was the biggest failure of the way in which we handled both Iraq and Afghanistan, that that was not there?

Professor Chalmers: There was a very interesting report in David Kilcullen's excellent book The Accidental Guerrilla, and perhaps you recall it, when he was interviewing government officials about how our approach in Afghanistan and Iraq fitted within our overall counter-terrorist strategy, and the answer that was given, which I think is perhaps not entirely true but is nevertheless revealing, is that the UK did not see Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a counter-terrorist strategy; it saw it as part of an Alliance commitment. I think it is very revealing because in a sense you have to go back and ask why it was the UK engaged its forces in Iraq in 2003 and in Helmand in 2006. Given that we are a relatively small player in both those conflicts compared with the United States, the relationship with the United States is inevitably important for our strategy. So a comprehensive approach, a comprehensive definition, in relation to the particular theatre but also in relation to our public has to define I  think more clearly how we articulate what we are doing with what our major ally is doing.

Q22 Mr Hancock: I thought his conclusion was that nobody gave him the same answer and that was the problem he found.

Professor Chalmers: True.

Q23 Mr Hancock: What do you think the Armed Forces' role is in this and have they accepted the Comprehensive Approach theory?

Professor Chalmers: The Armed Forces include a large number of people. I think by and large they have accepted the principle. In practice, I think it does vary and it does depend on the constituencies at the time. As I have said already, one of the big challenges in a comprehensive approach, the Comprehensive Approach, is the transaction costs involved. One example is command and control. The Brigade Commander in Helmand reports in theory to PJHQ back in the UK, but there is also a role for the British Ambassador in Afghanistan; there is a critical role for President Karzai, the Afghan Government, and there is a role for ISAF. It is part of the skill I think of a senior military commander to be able to navigate that but that nevertheless can cause problems, as we saw in action in both operations. In the Musa Qala it was an Afghan Government initiative rather than a Coalition initiative that in the end led to the operations there. We just have to keep confronting those issues. They are not easy ones. Inevitably that sort of issue does cause frustration. There is also frustration inevitably between different government departments. We have different cultures, different resource availabilities, and it seems to me one cannot impose a comprehensive approach from above entirely, though there is an element of essential leadership that is important. One also has to have mechanisms to encourage a culture of joint working in which each department finds that they can achieve more together than separately, even if they have often rather different emphases in terms of their objectives.

Professor Farrell: I have actually done work on this, so I can give you some empirical answers on this issue of military acceptance of the Comprehensive Approach. I have emphasised that it has to be understood in the context of the effects-based approach to operations. Even though the doctrine has now been abandoned by Doctrine Command, the principles that underpin it have not and they exist in doctrine and they are the ones that underpin the Comprehensive Approach. The first of the three things that I would look at is doctrine. If you look at the new stabilisation doctrine, and a draft has been produced called JDP3-40 and it was the main effort this year for Doctrine Command, clearly in that they have the notion that future operations are going to involve phases where the military is the supported element but then it leads to where the military is the supporting element. At the heart of the doctrine there is this construct whereby there are four phases in operations: engaged, secure, hold, develop. As you go from engage and secure to hold and develop-although it is idealised, it is not actually sequential-you move from the military taking the primary role to the military taking the supporting role, and they accept this. Secondly, if you look at training, and I have done the training to be a joint operations planner (it is called the JOPC at PJHQ), quite clearly in that training and in the exercises where they applied it you have very much the notion that these operations will involve very close, essential to them, collaboration and co-operation with civilian agencies. In a major exercise, which is a complex PSO exercise, the lead person in the exercise is a civilian. Also, finally, I have done survey work on military opinion. For instance, I surveyed the officers in the Joint Service Command Staff College, a small survey with 128 responses. I asked the question "Would future operations constitute a holistic mix of military and non-military elements focused on strategic effects?" and that is the kind of thing you would see in a comprehensive approach, 79% said that they would. Then I have done a survey of the NATO school, a survey sample with 2,460 responses, of which 146 were British. There we had an 86% positive response rate that they recognised the Comprehensive Approach as the future of military operations. In those elements (doctrine, training and officer opinion) I think there is now broad acceptance of the notion of a comprehensive approach. It comes back to what Professor Chalmers said: everyone agrees this is the future of these kinds of operations and now the discussion is over exactly how they make it work.

Q24 Mr Hancock: Did you throw up a sense of frustration on the part of senior commanders, particularly once they had left the Services, and their comments about the lack of a comprehensive approach which actually restricted them militarily because they were never sure about how far they could go and what their real role was? There seemed to be more than a degree of frustration. Does the demand for this comprehensive approach come from that failure?

Professor Farrell: If I can just respond to that because I have read all the post-operation reports and in none of them does a Commander express the view that their having to operate through a comprehensive approach has restricted them.

Q25 Mr Hancock: But that was when they were serving.

Professor Farrell: These are confidential, post-operational reports.

Q26 Mr Hancock: That was when they were serving officers going up the chain of command. Why is it when they leave the Services so many of them have been critical?

Professor Farrell: I sense a different criticism, which is that the civilian partners within the Comprehensive Approach have not delivered the resources to enable a comprehensive approach. That is different. It is also quite fascinating if you compare 12 Brigade versus 52 Brigade, which was critical because in 2007 is where we make the transition from really a war-fighting phase in Helmand into a much more clear-hold-build kind of thing that we expect to see in the COIN operation. 12 Brigade started off attempting a more classical COIN approach but ended up getting bogged down in a very kinetic campaign, but even in that, in the post-op report, the Commander feels that the Comprehensive Approach by and large works, in the sense that it makes sense and it delivers what he is trying to achieve. With 52 Brigade, which has a much more comprehensive approach to my view, and there were a number of factors which they benefited from but also because they were more focused on this going in, there the Commander is highly critical of the Comprehensive Approach and says in fact, "We stopped using the words 'comprehensive approach' because we felt it did not reflect what was happening on the ground" and yet their campaign looked much more comprehensive. So I think part of the issue is also: what are the expectations of commanders going in? If you have very low expectations, you will think it worked OK; if you have very high expectations, you will think it is disappointing. In that sense, there is division in the military opinion in terms of the expectations they take with them into theatre.

Q27 Mr Havard: Can I ask questions about money? There is all this evolution that has gone on. I have watched it since 2003 on the ground in these various places. As I understand it now, the Stabilisation Unit and the Stabilisation Aid Fund and so on, the question really is about where does the money come from and who controls it. Is the money controlled by the Ministry of Defence or is it controlled by DfID? In other words, how does that play in terms of the questions I want to know whether you have asked of them in their assessment of whether they think the Comprehensive Approach is a good or a bad idea, whether you asked them any questions about how the money works?

Professor Farrell: I detect a slightly different issue which is not where the money comes from ---

Q28 Mr Havard: Who spends it and how can I spend it?

Professor Farrell: Yes. There is a fascinating comparison between an American PRT and our PRT. In the American PRT, they can directly deliver quite a lot of aid very quickly through the CERP programme. They can do up to $100,000 a month without authorisation to make a very quick impact. I know that British Commanders tend to be ---

Q29 Chairman: Remind us what that programme is, just for the record?

Professor Farrell: It is the emergency response programme, and so it is the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Basically it enables PRT to target finance. The American PRTs are military led. A military PRT has access to $100,000 of aid that they can just deploy like that per month to make a difference. In our case of course a lot of the aid comes through the Stabilisation Unit and, as I understand it, is then distributed into NGO partners and Afghan Government schemes, so it is less immediately responsive in that sense. I think Task Force Commanders find that frustrating because they cannot simply say "We can placate opinion this way quite quickly by deploying money"; instead there are these other schemes that they must work through. Then again, for instance, the Stabilisation Unit, or certainly DfID, would argue that the more long-term approach is better.

Q30 Mr Havard: I know the argument. I just wonder what the attitudes were from the people you have surveyed about the Comprehensive Approach and whether the finances featured heavily in those influences, if you like, on their opinion as to whether or not they thought it was a good or a bad idea in practice

Professor Farrell: The survey that undertook which at 14 questions had one question on effects based and most if it was about military transformation.

Q31 Mr Hancock: Is that survey the closest we have got to any sort of review on a comprehensive approach and did you do it for the MoD?

Professor Farrell: No, it was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Q32 Mr Hancock: What was its purpose then of it?

Professor Farrell: It was a two-year research programme on European military transformation. I would have thought the Stabilisation Unit conducts fairly regular reviews.

Q33 Mr Hancock: Do you have any knowledge of those?

Professor Farrell: The one I have is that the team that was deployed in late 2007 from the Stabilisation Unit into Helmand was actually deployed to conduct a review of how the PRT was functioning, how the campaign was going. When it arrived on the ground, it realised there was a need to re-do the plan and then, in collaboration with Brigadier Andrew Mackay, the Task Force Commander, they re-did the plan, so it was on their initiative.

Q34 Mr Jenkin: One battle group commander lamented to me privately that after he did a two-company attack on a village in Helmand involving helicopters, Apache, light artillery, fast-strike aircraft, when they got in there and had taken casualties, he wondered how much money he had just spent and if he could just have walked into that village with a suitcase full of money, the same money, would it not have been a much more effective way to take that village. Is that not the Comprehensive Approach and should we not be empowering our front-line commanders to spend money, much as they did in Anbar Province for example under the Americans, rather than deny our front-line commanders the use of cash as a weapon system?

Professor Chalmers: We should certainly be asking those sorts of questions and asking whether the approach you suggest would be more effective or not. Whether that is a task that should be left solely to the military, however, is more questionable. I think in order to answer that sort of question you have to do the broader analysis of what the likely effects of that sort of cash option would be.

Q35 Chairman: Surely the whole purpose of the Comprehensive Approach is that that question should not be left to wholly to the military?

Professor Chalmers: Exactly, but you are absolutely right that a broad range of options should be examined because if only one actor dominates the Comprehensive Approach, they are likely to emphasise those tools in which they have a comparative advantage. I wonder, Mr Chairman, if I could just say a little bit more about resourcing and financing or are you planning to come on to that later?

Chairman: We will come on to that.

Q36 Mr Jenkin: Is not Whitehall still asking the military to operate within too narrow a doctrine? The fact is the post-conflict reconstruction effort is probably attempting to over-civilianise it when the civilians cannot operate in that environment and we are denying front-line commanders access to cash which will enable them to win hearts and minds in the villages with a soft power rather than kinetic power, which actually alienates the population? Have we still not failed to grip that part of the Comprehensive Approach?

Professor Farrell: I would just be very cautious here. Coming back to your question, it seems to me there are three issues it raises. One is our model versus the American model. The American model is the military-led PRTs deploying money quite quickly to make a quick impact versus our model which works through a Stabilisation Unit, DfID's more longer-term projects. Why is there a difference?

Q37 Mr Jenkin: They have the money and they control it.

Professor Farrell: Our PRT is more comprehensive. Very few civilians are deployed in the American PRT; they are primarily military. They have no doubts in their mind that money is a weapon, whereas the Stabilisation Unit, DfID working through the Stabilisation Unit, is constantly reminding commanders that money is not a weapon, that we are both trying to stabilise and develop the society. There is some virtue to that perspective. The virtue is that you are probably going to have a better chance, in terms of the long term, of winning hearts and minds if you genuinely engage in the process of development than if, in a very operational sense, you deploy money as a weapon, and locals know this. The other problem also, by the way, is that Task Force Commanders who are deployed for six months may not have sufficient appreciation of the human terrain to avoid being manipulated by locals in terms of the expenditure of resources.

Q38 Mr Jenkin: That begs the question whether you do the Comprehensive Approach with six-month tours; the standard for America is 15-months tours.

Professor Farrell: Correct. The Civil-Military Mission in Helmand obviously contains Stabilisation Unit-deployed assets, and these people will be there for longer than six months, and that gives it a slightly longer-term perspective and a better appreciation of the human terrain. There are two other points, by the way: you said that a battle commander said he could just walk in with a suitcase of cash and that would achieve the objective. I personally think that one thing that has been under-appreciated is that we are engaged in a war against an enemy of which the Comprehensive Approach is a key element in our national strategy and our coalition strategy, but we must necessarily engage in some elements of war-fighting. It probably was unavoidable that in 2006-2007 we had to engage in a heavily kinetic campaign. Something else has been done now in Iraq that clearly shows that a successful COIN campaign is not all about this soft hearts and minds stuff.

Q39 Mr Jenkin: If I may just say so, one of the fundamental precepts of counter-insurgency warfare is that you use force as a last resort, precisely because it has such a negative collateral effect. It depends what you use that cash in a suitcase for. If you just use it for bribing, I totally agree, but actually these villages need money in order to fund that area and security. They have projects that need to be funded. Of course I am not talking about bribing their way in but it is about using cash to win hearts and minds and get that development going before you have to fire the kinetic weaponry. For you to say, "Oh, well, we had to do some hard war fighting, we had to make some kinetic effort", every time a counter-insurgency effort resorts to force, it is a step backwards.

Professor Farrell: Let me give you an illustration of what I mean, and, by the way, I disagree entirely that the principle of COIN is force of last resort; the principle of COIN is minimum use of force under the principle of military necessity. Sometimes that can require considerable force. Look at the Musa Qa'lah campaign.

Q40 Mr Jenkin: That is a semantic point.

Professor Farrell: Actually it is not. Look at the Musa Qa'lah campaign; there we used lots of force. The question is: how did we use it? Over a period of months, from October onwards, the commander had moved forces on both flanks at Musa Qa'lah large packages of force, and he engaged in very restrained use of kinetic activities. The precise purpose was that his concert of operations was not that we were going and engaging in a fire fight in the town but. in so far as possible, by using large packages of force, we would coerce the enemy and push them out, so then we could go in and take the town whole and that would give us a better platform to bring people back in and rebuild it. That concert of operations essentially worked.

Q41 Chairman: Professor Chalmers, do you want to add anything on that?

Professor Chalmers: Yes, I think I would. It is important to have money available when you get into the hold phase but I think it is even more important that when you get to the hold phase you provide security for people at that phase and you have a sophisticated understanding of what you will achieve by helping one group as against another. It is too easy, I think, in a situation where you do not have a full appreciation, as perhaps was the case early on in Helmand, to find yourself siding with one group against another through economic assistance or through eliminating drug and opium production in one place rather than another, and to provide economic advantages to groups which are not simply for us or against us.

Mr Jenkin: Any use of kinetic force, any use of money as a weapon system, has to be used intelligently and in the right way. I am not denying that but at the moment I just stick with this point: that option is not available to our commanders.

Q42 Mrs Moon: One of the things that we know about change is that it has to be bought into and it has to be bought in bottom-up, not top-down. How successfully do you think the various institutional players that we have in our comprehensive approach actually work with local nationals and how successful are they at engaging locals in the change programme?

Professor Chalmers: I think this is an absolutely central question in theatres such as Afghanistan, but indeed in most of the operations which we are talking about in terms of the broad counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns, we are not in the business of occupation, of colonisation. The only hope for success in Afghanistan or Iraq is a situation in which local people, who have more stake in their security than we do, create a sustainable process. Because we can support but we cannot replace, that is true, in the whole phase in the clear hold of the build because we do not have the resources but also because I think foreign troops in the end do not have the legitimacy to provide sustainable security. You would have to have tens of thousands, maybe even more, Coalition forces in Helmand in order to hold every village in that province, and then it would look very much like a replay of the nineteenth century, and that is certainly not what we want. The key to that success is finding ways of helping to build a state. Some of the interesting dilemmas, for example in aid, and I think the UK has a relatively good record of channelling more money through the state, is in helping build up fragile local capacity rather than always going for an easy option of getting contractors and NGOs in to build things on behalf of Western donors but not actually connecting with local governments. The Taliban will lose in southern Afghanistan if there is a successful alternative, a successful Afghan alternative, and some of the greatest weaknesses right now in Afghanistan-and indeed in Pakistan-is because right now local people are not convinced that the Afghan or Pakistani alternative to the Taliban is preferable to sticking with the Taliban, both because they fear the Taliban but also because the government alternative is not necessarily one which they see as any better.

Professor Farrell: What I would say in answer is that I think this difference between top-down versus bottom-up and how we think about development and targeting aid, etc. is a critical one. It goes to the heart of why we had the Helmand Road Map because our initial Joint Plan for Helmand was too top-down, it was not connecting to the locals in Helmand. The Helmand Road Map was trying to address that. Essentially, here is the quandary. The advantage of top-down programmes is that you can do big projects like the Kajaki Dam project that had a big impact for a lot of people; it can demonstrate the effectiveness of the Government of Afghanistan. Key to what we are trying to achieve is to build support and the appearance of capacity and the actuality of capacity of the Government of the Afghanistan's capabilities and therefore public support. You want to do some big top-down projects to show the Government of Afghanistan is delivering a road, etc. The problem is that that does not necessarily meet what the locals want. The locals might have very particular requirements at a really local level. So you want to do some really local projects to demonstrate that you have responded to what they want, but that tends to be a contractual relationship between you and perhaps local aid workers and them and not necessarily evidence of the Government of Afghanistan delivering that capability and those services. So you have a natural tension. We have tended to focus on the bigger stuff because for Task Force commanders when they come into theatre, it fits into their campaign plan: "for six months I will do X, Y, Z, some of this big stuff, and then I will depart and I will have achieved that." There tends to be a predisposition towards that. There has been a slight change in that for 52 Brigade, they were very focused on the local engagement. They were looking at: how can we better target stabilisation and development activities to meet the requirements of locals? They developed a methodology called the Tactical Conflict Assessment Framework (TCAF), which is one of the big success stories for Britain, by the way. It was a methodology that conceptually was developed by the Americans, by USAID but USAID could not get any military buy-in and it just so happened that coincidentally both the Task Force Commander of 52 Brigade, Brigadier Mackay, and his chief of engineers were very unsatisfied by the experience in Iraq because the methodology they were using for measuring effects was too artificial and abstract; they wanted something that really connected to what people wanted. He happened to meet this guy called Jim Derleth in Washington. He had developed the TCAF methodology for USAID and they brought him over to help until they figured out the way to make it work in Helmand. Arguably, it was very successful; it was four simple questions that you ask the population as you encounter them, which is about the kinds of services that they really require and who should deliver them, and then you keep asking the same sets of questions as you encounter these people over a period of months to see if it works. They trialled it in Lashkar Gar because they realised that in Lashkar Gar you had a displaced persons population on the outskirts of the town. The primary methodology by which you communicate with locals, the key leader engagement, was missing these people because the key leaders in the Lashkar Gar were thinking about their own population and they were not concerned about the displaced people on the outskirts of the town, and yet that was the primary recruiting grounds for the Taliban. We want to target the displaced persons. They used the TCAF methodology on one bunch of displaced persons; they applied the methodology and responded to what they required. For the other bunch they used the methodology but they did not respond to what they requested. They used a controlled experiment over three months. They admit it is not a perfect methodology but it seemed to bring results when you combined it with key leader engagement and the survey work that they were doing as well. There is a very critical article in the RUSI journal by 16 Brigade because they abandoned TCAF. I think the point of article that it is not a perfect methodology is a very fair point. The point for everyone here to realise of course is that 19 Brigade subsequently adopted it; 11 Brigade, when they go in, are going to use it; the Marines are using it as they deploy the Second Marine Expeditionary Force; and the Americans are using it in Iraq-they have taken it to Iraq. They see it as the British having developed the methodology; it works for them and we are going to use it too. That is partly because the 24^th Marine Expeditionary Unit that was embedded within 52 Brigade saw it being very effective and took the message back into the US Marine Corp with them.

Q43 Mrs Moon: How central to this engagement has been the institutional players' understanding of UN Resolution 1325 and the engagement with women in post-conflict reconstruction? Is that happening at all because whenever I speak to military personnel who have come back, they know what I am talking about. Is it there within the thinking or are women in Afghanistan just being marginalised as part of those local players in reconstruction?

Professor Farrell: I do not know the answer to that question.

Chairman: We will have plenty of opportunities to ask others, I am sure, during these evidence sessions.

Q44 Linda Gilroy: I am pleased you mention tactical conflict assessment. I was going to ask you about that because I actually saw that when I was out in Afghanistan visiting 29 Commando and 3 Commando Brigade, and they were using that. I did not read about it until I cam back and it does seem to be a very effective tool. That illustrates, and I think you said this, even within a region between what is need locally in a village and the big strategic Kajaki Dam type approach, but are there tensions between how our Government relates to the deployment at local level and at national level? You mentioned that if there was a part that was not bought into the Comprehensive Approach it was at the international ISAF level. What are the tensions that exist there in terms of how we go about delivering it? In a way, you are setting up the checks and balances in a region; you are introducing civil, military, rule of law and governance, media players and the sort of legal framework and yet that can be in conflict with the relationship presumably between the UK Government and the national Afghani Government because it is local government versus national government and there are tensions in every country between those. Is that resolved in some way or is it a tension that is permanently there and will exist and just has to be worked through?

Professor Chalmers: I think it is the latter. It is certainly not resolved. We are in a very difficult situation in which we are inevitably major players and ISAF more generally are major players in Afghan politics, but Afghan politics, as in any country but even more so, is riven with tension and conflict and it is difficult for us to behave in ways which do not favour one actor over another, but in particular in Afghanistan there is a real issue and a debate about the extent of devolution of powers to provincial or sub-provincial levels. The provincial governors are appointed by the President.

Chairman: I want to come on in a moment to the international tensions, but I think one of the questions Linda was asking was about the tensions within the British Government. Am I right?

Q45 Linda Gilroy: Yes, but that is a tension, Chairman, for the British Government. How do you resolve those issues in terms of the UK comprehensive approach contribution?

Professor Chalmers: In particular, in the case of Helmand, how far do you give weight to the views of local actors as distinct from national Afghan Government actors? I do not think there is a simple answer to that.

Q46 Linda Gilroy: To come back to the UK contribution, we have talked about bits of this but can you just both perhaps say a bit about how well the different government departments do work together and perhaps more importantly what scope there is for improvement from the position that has been attained?

Professor Chalmers: For me I think there has been significant improvement in recent years in relation to Afghanistan. One of the challenges actually will be, if there are future conflicts, whether we can learn the lessons of the last years in future conflicts because I think the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is actually that this civil component took some time, perhaps for structural reasons but also for cultural reasons, to catch up and can we make sure that is not the case in future? To do that, it seems to me, we do have to look at resourcing and funding and the basic asymmetry between the nature of the different departments, the three main departments (MoD, DfID and the Foreign Office) which are likely to be involved in this sort of operation in future. The MoD, the Armed Forces, is an organisation which appears to have significant spare capacity in order to be able to intervene. They also have an arrangement with the Treasury, which is clearly fraying right now but it certainly has been in operation in recent years, where the additional costs of operations are funded from the reserve. That is not the case with DfID and FCO. DfID has I think around 1500 home-based, UK staff globally; they do not do development directly so much as manage development contracts. The average DfID member of staff has £3 million a year to manage. They do not have a surge capacity and also of course there is a very large number of countries in which they are engaged. The Stabilisation Unit is one way of getting round that issue providing some civilian surge capacity but I think there is an issue about whether that is large enough for the demands. Finally, the Foreign Office again has a wide variety of different responsibilities. Certainly the way in which Foreign Office engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq has been funded in recent years is by being asked to re-prioritise away from other areas into Afghanistan and Iraq, which indeed they have done, but inevitably that is a slower process. I really think resourcing and financing arrangements and having a more level playing field between the different departments is actually critical.

Q47 Linda Gilroy: Are you saying that the funding and the way funding is organised in different departments actually impedes the Comprehensive Approach at the moment?

Professor Chalmers: Yes, I think it does.

Professor Farrell: Is this a question about tensions between the departments?

Q48 Linda Gilroy: Yes.

Professor Farrell: Cost is one, and I absolutely endorse what Professor Chalmers has said, and so you need to appreciate obviously from DfID's point of view that Afghanistan is not necessarily the main effort and it draws resources away, and perhaps this is partly true for the FCO. I would also point to culture, conceptual differences and operational differences and if you go down through those, it perhaps helps you appreciate how far we have come is quite extraordinary, given these natural tensions. When DfID and FCO and MoD get into a room together they barely understand the language they use together. DfID personnel sometimes do not even understand what they mean by these words and that makes it very, very difficult to build shared understanding.

Q49 Linda Gilroy: Do they have enough opportunities to train together?

Professor Farrell: No.

Q50 Linda Gilroy: Who should lead that? Should it be FCO or DfID?

Professor Farrell: The basic problem with training is that the military have a whole series of training regiments and various exercises, but DfID in particular, FCO to a lesser extent, simply lack the spare capacity to give staff over for these exercises, it is as simple as that, whereas for the military it is built into how they work, it is built into their personnel structure, they expect staff to be doing this. Let me come back to the conceptual thing which I think is interesting. We do not have a cross-government doctrine on the Comprehensive Approach. The doctrine that we have was developed by the Doctrine Command, DCDC, in January 2006. Note that it was a "Joint Discussion Note", that is very important. They used the word "discussion" because they wanted to indicate to the other government departments that this was not a Joint Doctrine Note, it was for discussion and they were going to engage them, but, of course, they immediately rubbed up against the other government departments because they feel this is military led, which it was at the time, and they do not understand why they should buy into a military concept. As yet we still do not have one (Interagency doctrine) whereas the Americans are developing a joint doctrine. The State Department has a project which is, led by a British Colonel. In terms of operations on the ground, just understand the different perspectives. From the military point of view, when they arrive on the ground they have spent six months training for deployment and they will have fully developed plans which they then calibrate. Then they encounter folks in the PRT, some of whom are very well trained and very experienced, some of whom are not, some of whom have been there for a year and some of whom have been there for a few weeks, who will have regular breaks that the military do not have, who will not work the kind of hours the military do, and they begin to question the knowledge, the skill and the commitment of these staff who are perhaps prevented by their departments from deploying to forward operation bases because their departments have a different risk appetite. From the civilian point of view you have got military commands that arrive for six months. They arrive, they want to do everything they want to do in six months and depart. They do not have the longevity of knowledge that the PRT perhaps has and do not understand what DfID is trying to do, which is long-term development, but instead, from the civilian point of view, they think, "Well, the military think we're really some form of 'developmental follow-on forces'." So there are these fundamental differences of perspectives. It is true that the key to getting them to work together is better training, which would be nice, but I suspect-obviously Brigadier Butler would have a better perspective on this-that a few months into deployment those personal relationships build up and that is when you get a better understanding.

Q51 Mr Jenkin: Professor Farrell, I think you have given us an extremely important account of what is happening, which we saw on the ground last year, with PRT operating very capably and in a very integrated way but with a tiny amount of money and on a relatively short time-frame and then DfID operating in Kabul from some points of view on a different planet, working to a very long-term timescale that seemed completely divorced from the reality of what was happening on the ground. This is not an accident, is it? This is a deliberate act of policy on behalf of the Government. It has been legislated for in the Development Act and cemented in place and held there by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. What you are saying, are you not, is that this has got to change?

Professor Farrell: On this point I would be entirely in agreement. I understand why it was committed into legislation that DfID would work towards the Millennium Goals, but in the context of the kind of operations we are going to be engaged in increasingly in the future, where we are going to deploy national assets, where Britain can provide most types of force for good in the world, then we need better alignment between DfID's departmental objectives and goals and those of our other government departments.

Q52 Mr Jenkin: Can this be done without amending the Overseas Development Act?

Professor Chalmers: It does seem to me that a lot of this debate is about the best route to achieving development in a country which is conflict affected such as Afghanistan. Most of the poorest countries in the world are conflict affected. One of the primary reasons they are poor is because they have not managed to find a way of managing and resolving those conflicts. We should not too easily assume that there is a fundamental conflict between security and development objectives.

Q53 Mr Jenkin: Is that a yes or a no?

Professor Chalmers: My instinct is that it is not necessary to amend the Act.

Q54 Mr Jenkin: From my point of view we have got soldiers, our constituents, dying in this war and an increasing number of people, like Lord Ashdown, are saying that maybe these lives are being wasted because our effort is not being as effective as it should be. I do not think it is time to have an academic discussion about whether this can be done within a framework of a particular Act of Parliament; I just want the Government to get on with it. It does not make sense to me to have Afghanistan as the fifth largest project for DfID when Afghanistan, as our primary foreign and security policy preoccupation, is straining every sinew of the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces. That seems to me completely misaligned. How do we align these two departments so they are pushing in the same direction instead of being disconnected, as they are at the moment?

Professor Chalmers: I do not think that changing the relative funding priority for Afghanistan compared with Nigeria or Tanzania requires a change in the International Development Act.

Q55 Mr Jenkin: Except the DfID people say, "We do not do wars, we do poverty. We didn't want to go to Afghanistan. They've created that problem. We're going to concentrate on this, that and the other."

Professor Chalmers: My experience of DfID is that there are competing cultures within DfID. There are an increasing number of people who are very well aware, for the reasons I have given, that you have to tackle conflict in order to alleviate poverty. From the other side of the debate as it were, which has been polarised in the past but I think is much less so now, the Counter-Insurgency Doctrine quite rightly puts a central emphasis on the need to respond to the security and development needs of ordinary Afghan people in this case if you are to achieve your broader political objectives. So it seems to me there is a convergence rather than divergence about the need to integrate security and development.

Q56 Mr Jenkin: Should there not be a Secretary of State for Afghanistan? Should there not be somebody other than the Prime Minister at the highest political level who has overall responsibility for cross-governmental policy? At the moment we have a Cabinet committee that meets once every two weeks. It is not working very well, is it?

Professor Chalmers: The Prime Minister, as I said in an earlier response, has the lead responsibility.

Q57 Mr Jenkin: He is busy.

Professor Chalmers: The question is whether the Prime Minister should delegate responsibility for that to somebody other than one of the principal officers of state. If that person was a politician, I would find it hard to work out how you could then have a situation in which that person sitting in the Cabinet Office or Number 10 had the clout to tell the Secretary of State for International Development or Defence or Foreign Affairs how to do things. I do not think that would work. The Foreign Secretary in particular is one of the senior officers of state and would not take kindly to having somebody between himself/herself and the Prime Minister. It is entirely appropriate to think about whether you need to strengthen the apparatus on an official level so that there are officials with primary responsibility for Afghanistan or whatever the priority is at the moment in Number 10 or the Cabinet Office, but as for having a political appointment at that level, either they would be too junior and then they would be ignored or they would be too senior and would throw into question more general questions about our machinery of government.

Professor Farrell: It would not address the real problems we are experiencing. I do not think the problem now is the allocation of resources. I think by and large there has been a great improvement in this past year in the allocation of resources to the campaign and in terms of the civilian commitment of resources in terms of growing the PRT, etc. and also in terms of, if you look on the ground, the relationship between the FCO 2 Star who is controlling the Civil-Military Mission and the task force commander, and the ambassador is widely recognised as being an extremely capable fellow who is doing a fantastic job. He was able to help facilitate the development of the Helmand Road Map which was developed in theatre but got buy-in back in Whitehall. It all seems to be working pretty well. The problem is co-ordination at ISAF level and with the Afghan Government.

Chairman: Brigadier Butler, welcome to the Committee. You will get your chance in just a moment.

Q58 Mr Borrow: I wanted to follow up on the point that Bernard has made and it is perhaps taking a different tact altogether. One of the concerns I would have would be the undermining of the DfID philosophy by making the Comprehensive Approach work in Afghanistan, because the philosophy within DfID in terms of the priority of poverty reduction and development-and it is not hands-on development but working through partners which is critical-is the way in which DfID works throughout most of the world, but when it is working in Afghanistan it needs to work in a different way. The question I would ask is whether or not there ought to be something different than DfID to deliver that in Afghanistan? Rather than change DfID into something else, recognise the fact that if you are asking UK plc to work alongside the military to do development in a conflict zone then some sort of other organisation is needed and that may be needed separate from DfID. It would really worry me if the culture and philosophy of DfID, which I think is one of the successes of the UK plc in the last ten years, was undermined because we wanted it to do something else in a conflict zone.

Professor Chalmers: One of the rationales for the establishment of the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit and now the Stabilisation Unit was precisely to answer the concern you have and to create a mechanism which was not bound by the International Development Act and interpretations of it and was specifically geared up for providing some sort of spare capacity in relation to conflict zones. The other interdepartmental mechanism which has recently had its funding cut but which has had a role in this respect is the Conflict Prevention Pool, which again is an interdepartmental mechanism which can fund the sort of projects, such as security sector reform, for example, in Sierra Leone, which DfID would have been unable to fund. There are questions of resourcing in relation to those mechanisms, but I think we do have mechanisms and principles which can address that problem.

Q59 Chairman: I want to follow up on Bernard Jenkin's key question about whether there should be a Cabinet minister in charge of Afghanistan. Professor Chalmers, you said that at official level there could be an improvement in the mechanism. Would you be talking about a Permanent Under-Secretary in charge of co-ordination perhaps with a separate department for the Comprehensive Approach or in relation to Afghanistan? What exactly would the improvement look like?

Professor Chalmers: I was thinking of something much more evolutionary. If you feel there is not enough co-ordination or central direction in relation to Afghanistan or any other problem then you can reallocate the resources within the Cabinet Office and ask somebody at a PUS or a fairly senior level in the Cabinet Office to take on that role in reporting to the Prime Minister about how he/she is achieving that. It is no more than that. I am not convinced right now that we have a central problem in this regard, but if we felt we did have such a problem then clearly you could have somebody at that level.

Mr Hancock: I am interested in the concept of the Comprehensive Approach at the other end in a place like Afghanistan. Can it work where you have the basic ingredient, the rule of law, where you have a government which is perpetrating corruption and does little or nothing about it to the great frustration of our soldiers on the ground there who see their colleagues dying and yet they see this corruption around them all the time? The Comprehensive Approach also has to embrace them, does it not, in some way?

Chairman: I am wondering whether that is a question you should put to Brigadier Butler in a few moments' time, if that is okay.

Q60 Mr Hancock: It is a follow-on from what we are doing here. There has to be the same leadership in the country that you are working in, does there not? The Comprehensive Approach cannot come just in one direction, it has to come both ways, does it not?

Professor Chalmers: Yes.

Q61 Robert Key: Chairman, the Professors have explained that although the British do not have a single unified Comprehensive Approach or doctrine, at least we are thinking about it and moving towards it. Would you say that the Americans are ahead of us in that game and are better at delivering a Comprehensive Approach on the ground in Afghanistan, for example?

Professor Farrell: No. I think quite the opposite.

Q62 Robert Key: Can you explain why?

Professor Farrell: If you look at American PRTs, they are military led, they have much more military personnel, they have very few civilian personnel, it is much more a military asset, whereas ours are a much more serious attempt to co-ordinate civilian and military assets in a single framework. If you look at recent reports by the General Accounting Office on attempts by the State Department to raise deployable assets, they have plans in place, but they have not recruited yet the staff to the levels you would expect. There is a State Department project to produce a document, which would be a cross-government document, encouraging embryonic adoption on stabilisation/Comprehensive Approach, but I think it is very instructive that the effort is being led by a British Colonel.

Q63 Robert Key: Is there any thinking going on along these lines in, for example, NATO?

Professor Farrell: Yes. The Comprehensive Approach Political Guidance was adopted in the Riga Summit in 2006 and the Comprehensive Approach Action Plan was adopted at the Bucharest Summit in 2008. So there is a political acceptance that the Comprehensive Approach is the way forward, but things are progressing quite slowly. The action plan is a bit vague. There are a number of problems. There has been some progress. For instance, the Multinational Exercises 5, which ran from 2006 to 2009-these are a whole series of exercises, conferences and seminars designed to develop the Comprehensive Approach understandings among partners-is obviously very good. NATO had deployed in 2003 a senior civilian representative into ISAF command, but that has not really worked because he sits alongside the COMSAF/ISAF and spends most of his time trying to figure out where his authority is. There are two basic problems that are delaying progress in the Comprehensive Approach understanding within NATO and developing the mechanisms. The first one is France. The French are concerned that if we see significant progress in developing the Comprehensive Approach in NATO that would further NATO's global role and the French are uncertain as to whether they want that vis-à-vis balancing the EU role versus the NATO role. The second problem is that the NATO partners disagree themselves over the fundamental nature of the campaign in Afghanistan. As we know, the British, Canadians, Dutch, Americans and Danish all basically accept that we are doing an ongoing stabilisation campaign whereas the Germans, the Italians and the Spanish see this more as a peace support operations-type of campaign and, therefore, they are coming at this from different perspectives. And yet Afghanistan is the canvas on which NATO is trying to develop the Comprehensive Approach.

Q64 Robert Key: What about the United Nations? They signed up to the Comprehensive Approach.

Professor Farrell: I do not know the answer to that question.

Q65 Robert Key: What has happened to the National Security Secretariat? If you turn all this around and look through the other end of the telescope, we should be doing horizon scanning to identify failed states and where the new dangers and threats are coming from and we could surely identify these. What has happened to that National Security Secretariat that was meant to be doing this?

Professor Chalmers: As I understand it, there is going to be a refresh or a new edition of the Government's National Security Strategy before the Recess, so we anticipate that eagerly. In a way the National Security Strategy is an example of a Comprehensive Approach. It is starting with an identification of the issues and then talking, albeit in rather general terms, about how all the different elements of national power might meet those particular problems. On the National Security Secretariat, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about whether we have got the right allocation of resources in the centre in terms of co-ordination. Part of the problem here is that in a whole range of issue areas you could say that the logical conclusion is that you should have more and more resources put into the centre to co-ordinate, but if you go too far you end up taking scarce resources, scarce people away from the actual line departments themselves and thereby institutionalizing their conflict. This is a central dilemma of the British machinery of government which we are not going to solve today.

Q66 Robert Key: The delivery of a lot of these efforts depends entirely upon the non-government organisations operating with those countries, does it not? The Americans see money as a weapon. We do not. We see our money going through the NGOs on the ground with different objectives and working at a different pace. If we cannot take the NGOs with us will the Comprehensive Approach ever work?

Professor Chalmers: One has to distinguish between two sorts of NGOs. There are NGOs who are in the category you have just mentioned where they are subcontracted to provide particular services by official actors, but the other category, which perhaps presents a whole different set of problems, are NGOs who are operating independently, who are not funded by government and who are performing humanitarian missions. There is clearly a tension between those who would argue that they should be integrated into a more general approach and the NGOs themselves who would say that they are quite prepared to co-ordinate but they are independent actors with different objectives and indeed sometimes have problems when the actions of the military appear to increase their insecurity.

Professor Farrell: This is a very interesting point. It comes back to this issue about whether one changes the remit of DfID to better align with national objectives in Afghanistan. I would have thought the problem there is that a lot of DfID's funding goes into the NGO community to then provide the services that are required. What is very important practically for all the NGOs, with only a few exceptions, is the appearance that they are independent, that they are not connected to some kind of national form of military effort. That is fundamental to the identity of the people who work within it and therefore goes down to the identity of DfID because it recruited when it formed up in 1997 from the NGO community. It is fundamental to their ability to operate because they have to be seen as neutral because they have to go to dangerous areas and work with people. If that impartiality was lost then their physical security would be threatened and also their ability to work with the locals.

Q67 Robert Key: I am absolutely not seeking to be judgmental about this, but could you suggest which are the NGOs who maintain their integrity and their independence above all else?

Professor Chalmers: There is a publication which was brought out in April on "Civilians and the international security strategy in Afghanistan" which was offered by 11 NGOs, which was expressing precisely the sort of concerns I mentioned earlier, which I can gladly give to the Clerk later.

Q68 Chairman: Brigadier Butler, would you like to add anything to what has been said on this question?

Brigadier Butler: I could give you a quick overview from a practitioner's perspective having served in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and other places. I think the issue with the Comprehensive Approach is it means all things to all men. I am sure if I asked all of you here what the definition of it is we would have 30 different definitions. I would also suggest that the tribal tapestry here within HMG is as complex as we see in Afghanistan itself. We have come a long way since the early days of what is now known as the Comprehensive Approach. Certainly at the tactical end what you see in Helmand now is far better than it was in 2005/06, but you get the divergence from the tactical to the strategic, which goes through Kabul and then comes back here, which is quite a wide spectrum and that is part of the problem. If you asked again in the PRT or back here across government, the four main areas which we are interested in, governance, security, reconstruction and development and counter-narcotics, what their definitions of success and the end state was you would get completely different answers to that. We are working to different timescales, whether it is 30 years for reconstruction and development or maybe a ten-year horizon in terms of capacity building for the Afghan forces or Iraqi or others who we might be helping. If you times that by the power of 40 for the number of troop contributing nations to the power of three for their own government departments representing those then you have a hugely complex problem, again which the two Professors have touched on. I think the challenge was-and I will allude to some of them which I faced in 2006 as the Commander of British forces in Helmand itself-what individuals' definitions of security and sufficient security was all about and that was linked to what individuals and departments' thresholds for risk were about. Most risk averse was DfID and that was institutional, legal, personal and cultural, then you had the FCO, then members of the security services and then the military, and trying to get a common consensus of what was secure and sufficient security to go out and do the business, in this case reconstruction and development, was extremely frustrating on all sides. If we look at 2006, there was a common perception that views diverged on what was happening on the ground back to here. I sense that the judgment of those in Whitehall was that the whole of Helmand was burning. In the case of 2006, it was only North Helmand which was having a serious battle with the Taliban. There were plenty of other opportunities for the development and reconstruction to take place and that was a frustration felt by the military and by the Afghans who had the expectation we were coming in to do something about it. There is a statistic-and I would not argue whether it was plus or minus five or ten per cent-that 70 per cent of the violence takes place in ten per cent of the areas and affects six per cent of the population in Afghanistan. That is an awful lot of Afghanistan where I would argue one could be doing reconstruction and development. If you looked at what was going on in Helmand, then that is part of the six per cent of the country which may be more seriously affected and I think there are some deductions you can draw from that. We know what the legal duty of care, health and safety problems are, but if we put our minds to it those would all be resolvable. Perhaps I may suggest how one might sum up the options of how you might fill what people might call the stabilisation void in crisis and post-crisis areas. Clearly the first 100 days, we missed those in Afghanistan and in Iraq. I think if we all recognised that before we got into conflict, the military and other government departments, then we could resource, plan, think through and engage all the levers which would bring about stability, reconstruction and development. Firstly, there is still a crying requirement for one plan and one lead in Afghanistan and I think that is the same on all operations/campaigns which we deploy on. We have touched on a potential czar to bring this all together. Where it started to work was when Dr Reid was Secretary of State for Defence and he was the primus inter pares between DfID and the FCO and the military. He really got to grips with things in the last part of his tenure as Secretary of State, in those two or three months up to his move to the Home Office. He knocked heads together. We discussed/argued what the priorities were, what the issues were, what those definitions of sufficient security were and then he knocked their heads together and action was starting to take place. So it can work while you have one Secretary of State who is responsible for delivering stabilization operations in a campaign.

Q69 Chairman: So you would suggest that the personality of the person, perhaps in the Ministry of Defence although not necessarily, is the thing that can provide that co-ordination?

Brigadier Butler: I think in his case it was personality but also considerable experience. Having been a minister in the Ministry of Defence before, he understood the military and he clearly understood the other government departments which he had been a part of at various levels within government.

Q70 Mr Hancock: When you were in command and you felt these frustrations there, how was that received through the chain of command in the military back here? How do you think that portrayal that you were giving on the ground through your superiors was getting through to ministers so that they could actually look at what was not happening and what was not going right?

Brigadier Butler: Most of that was little understood because no one really knew what type of campaign we were in, they knew very little about Afghanistan. We had been preoccupied across government, especially the military, with what was going on in Iraq. As ever, we did not clearly think through what type of campaign we were going to get engaged with, the nature of the threat, the nature of the environment and what the degrees of corruption and everything else were about until we actually arrived there and then it did come, as we know, as a considerable shock to people. What is of benefit now, three years later, is that we know what the problems are and we are starting to think about some of those solutions. Whether we can resource those solutions and have the political will and appetite and resources to see it through, others may judge differently.

Q71 Mr Hancock: Were you surprised at what you found when you got there as opposed to what you were told you could expect to find before you left here to go to Afghanistan?

Brigadier Butler: No, because I had been there twice before. I was one of the few senior military commanders who had been in Afghanistan. I knew quite how hard the Taliban were going to fight. I knew the logistic difficulties because it is a vast country with very little infrastructure. Merely surviving was always going to be a challenge.

Q72 Mr Hancock: Were you surprised about what you were being told? You had that advantage but other commanders had not. Were you surprised at the lack of information and co-ordination that was needed to make this operation work let alone succeed?

Brigadier Butler: Yes, because we do not have a genuine cross-government strategic lessons learned process. We had just been going through-and we are going through exactly the same now as we saw in Iraq-how you pull everything together, how you think through to the finish, and how you think about "Phase 4" as it was known in Iraq. We have re-learned extremely painfully and expensively all those lessons which we learned from 2003 onwards.

Q73 Mr Jenkin: Would it be helpful if you gave us a short account of how the Government approached the tasking of HERRICK, how you felt it developed and how the Comprehensive Approach was being applied to the military tasking before you deployed? Could you talk us through a bit of the history of that?

Brigadier Butler: In 2005 it got off to quite a good start because the preliminary operations headquarters was drawn from the Permanent Joint Headquarters and included representatives from the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and what was then the PCRU, and they all sat down in Kandahar with the military and came up with the UK's Joint Campaign Plan for Helmand. They identified a lot of the issues, they identified the resources and they identified the timescale challenges. When this was presented back in December 2005 I think, unfortunately, their recommendations and the areas they highlighted as "severe" and other challenges were not taken forward. For example, the military was only ever resourced for £1.3 billion for a three-year campaign despite the fact that we were only just getting out of the Balkans after ten years and we were still heavily committed in Iraq itself. Secondly, the other government department members from the FCO and DfID highlighted that Helmand was not going to be turned into what I think we have loosely referred to as Berkshire or one of the Home Counties inside that three-year timescale and that was going to take considerably longer. There was no agreed definition of what a successful end state looked like. I have always challenged people saying, "Look, if Afghanistan is the sixth poorest country in the world, if we want to turn it into the tenth poorest country in the world, if that was a metric we were after, we could probably resource it in terms of time and money and define what it would take to raise it out of the poverty level, out of a cycle of low level violence let alone insurgency, which might be there based on international data and our own experiences from other conflict areas." A lot of these problems were raised logistically, resource wise, starting in December 2005, but they were not acted on principally because we were very heavily, politically and militarily, intellectually and physically, engaged in Iraq in 2005/06 where Iraq was not going well on a number of fronts.

Q74 Mr Jenkin: What about the capping of the manpower at 3,150 people? Was that your choice or was that imposed from above?

Brigadier Butler: No. The 3,150, which then rose to 3,350 to take account of additional RAF personnel, was a Treasury imposed cap on the number of men which we could deploy with. Our assessment deductions said that if you had a steady state, ie simply sustaining the force and doing routine business and I think under-taking only one significant operation a month, then those forces could just about hold the ring in Helmand itself, but they would not stand any stresses of a higher tempo, more engagements with the enemy or particularly challenging environmental conditions.

Q75 Mr Jenkin: Did you at any stage begin to wonder whether this was going to work and whether you should recommend to your commanders that you just should not go?

Brigadier Butler: No. We certainly highlighted all the military challenges. There were only three days in July 2006 when I did not have a senior visitor come to see us, but we spent-myself and my staff and the other government departments-six months raising these issues and really educating those people about what the nature of the fight was, what the enemy was doing and the challenges which we were going to face. It was not a question of going in with open eyes. I think it was that those eyes were not looking and focusing on the core issues, the strategic issues and the policy issues of what we wanted to achieve in Afghanistan.

Q76 Chairman: In those senior visitors you had Ministry of Defence ministers, Foreign Office ministers and DfID ministers. Did you ever have a Treasury minister?

Brigadier Butler: Not in my tenure, no.

Q77 Mr Crausby: Professor Farrell has already indicated that within the Armed Forces there is a broad acceptance of the need for a Comprehensive Approach. How far do you think that the Armed Forces have bought into the Comprehensive Approach? To what extent is it top-down through the chain of command?

Brigadier Butler: The Armed Forces of today are more sophisticated than they have been for a generation and that goes from the bottom to top. If you take a young Lieutenant or Captain, a Lance Corporal, Corporal or equivalent who served in the Balkans, he is now a Commanding Officer plus in Afghanistan. So from the mid-1990s to late 2008/09 he has gone through the ranks. He is very sophisticated. He knows that one of the many things he achieved in his military career was buying time and space for other activities to take place. That may be a UN Security Council Resolution, it might be an election or it might be a reconstruction and development plan to be unrolled. The military fully recognise that force alone is not the answer and it is only temporal. If you apply too much of it you lose the consent of the people you are trying to help, which rapidly goes from tolerance to them not wanting you there; and if we lose too many casualties we lose the popular support of our people back here. So the military are very aware that they can only buy some limited time and the space for the Comprehensive Approach, and the other lines of operation (reconstruction, development and business). What we are not applying, is a sufficient business approach and investment from the private and economic sector into these areas. One of the Professors mentioned the difference between maybe a relatively new member of DfID or the Stabilisation Unit or FCO coming in on an early tour. He may go to Afghanistan or elsewhere for the first time and he is already mixing with a very mature breed of people who have been there for a considerable amount of time.

Q78 Robert Key: Do you think the American military commanders were fully signed up to the American Government's concept of establishing a Western-style pluralist democracy as the end game in Afghanistan, and was it very frustrating because pretty clearly we did not think that was very likely to happen?

Brigadier Butler: No, and I will come back to where I disagree with the Professor on my left who think the Americans do it differently and may not deliver in the Comprehensive Approach. In the early days, and I saw it in 2001 and 2002, and still in 2005 when I was visiting and then 2006, the Americans by and large, certainly from a military perspective, were still focused on a counter-terrorist operation. They were hunting down al-Qaeda and senior Taliban members and, I am generalising, the reconstruction development was a secondary effort. I think now that has changed and based on their hard-won experiences, the blood they have invested in Iraq, the multiple tours of their commanders and longer tour lengths, they have realised that reconstruction and development has got to be probably ahead in terms of effort and resources than the kill and capture mission. They have recognised that those who will never be reconcilable still need to be surgically removed and that the main effort has got to be convincing the people that you are here to stay and you are going to make a positive difference. Where the American military have the advantage over the British military is that they are resourced and empowered to do it. There is a conceptual difference here to me from what DfID may take in terms of what they would define as poverty reduction in a post-crisis era. That is generally a permissive environment. There may be criminality, you may get your laptop stolen and car jacked, but there is not a raging insurgency around you, whereas if you are trying to deliver aid and reconstruction within a semi or non-permissive environment, which you have got to à la the three-bloc war, then you have to have the ways and means of doing it, and currently that is only through the military machine. It does not mean that the military wants to do that, but in my view it is the only capability which can do it until you go down the route of having a dedicated core of people maybe who have been drawn up from reservists or civilians who are prepared and trained and equipped to work in less permissive environments than our current DfID and stabilisation FCO. A lot of them want to but they are constrained by the legal duty of care and health and safety issues. That is the distinction-they may want to; a lot of them cannot. I think the American military has come an awfully long way and has probably overtaken us in this issue of how to deliver reconstruction and development in a counter-insurgency context.

Professor Farrell: Perhaps I may just clarify what I said because I am not suggesting, and I think this is where we are in agreement, that the Americans are not focusing now on this because I think they are. There is a recent study that has been done by a CNA (Centre for Naval Analysis) team, it was published in March 2009, an assessment on three American PRTs in Afghanistan, which reaches the conclusion that it is a very efficient mechanism to deliver stabilisation and development. The point I was making was that for the Americans it is an almost entirely military-led effort with support from USAID, whereas our type of Comprehensive Approach is much more of a co-ordinated effort between civilian and military partners and which has seen improvement this past year in Afghanistan, and that is what I mean by saying we are more comprehensive as opposed to the Americans who accept the model that is much more military led.

Brigadier Butler: I think people would say that conceptually and intellectually you are right but the practicality of operating, as you say, in a semi-permissive or non-permissive environment where one of the main purposes of being there is to make a difference to the lives of the ordinary people you are trying to help is that you have to enable and empower those who can do it. The frustration which we had in 2006, and which I think is shared by my contemporary commanders there now, was that there was a view that the military could not understand or did not have the intellectual prowess for how to do development operations. My response to that was always, "If you give me the tramlines to work within then we can deliver the aid and the reconstruction". We are not going to go and do, in the commonly used rebuttal, "You will just build a school but not provide the teachers and the books and everything else within it". We have all been there and done it. People did that in the Balkans but, as I say, they are more sophisticated in their understanding now. If you said, "This is where we want to deliver education", for example, "these are the facilities, these are the people, these are the resources. We cannot go out there because of the constraints placed upon us", then the military (and again it is not their right role but they are the only people who can do it) could deliver that education effect, if I keep it general, until that builds up sufficient consent stability that civilians could then go in there and take on that commitment.

Q79 Chairman: You have talked about semi-permissive and non-permissive environments. When we were last in Afghanistan we saw a map of Afghanistan which showed the permissive nature of the southern part of Afghanistan looking significantly less permissive over the last couple of years than it had done before. Would you say that that was a failure of the Comprehensive Approach or that it was simply a factor of the injection of large numbers of troops into the southern part of Afghanistan, or that was due to some other condition, and, if so, what?

Brigadier Butler: I suspect it is a combination of everything. We certainly recognised in 2006 that if you put a large size 12 boot in the middle of a contested area where neither narco criminals wanted you there nor the former regime nor the warlords and the Taliban did not want you there, those were the opposition groups you were facing; all of those were going to resist you. That is the first factor: there was always going to be a reaction. The point you are making is that reaction has been greater and longer. I think part of that effect is because we built up the expectations from 2002 onwards when the international community pledged (I think Tokyo was $5 billion) that we were going to come in (the Taliban had been militarily defeated) for the last time and make a difference to them, so those expectations were raised. Four years later we have failed to deliver those from the word go, the first 100 days, because we were not prepared on all fronts-military, development, governance and reconstruction-to go in and deliver things simultaneously. What happened was that the military line of operation accelerated away because it had to, because by that stage, remember, four years on from 2002, the Taliban had re-equipped, re-armed, regenerated itself, rebuilt its organisation conceptually and physically, and it was certainly more than ready, which we knew from intelligence sources and from others who had been there that it was going to be, and they reacted to it. What we did not have was the capability and the capacity and the political appetite, because what we should have done, based on our experiences of the Balkans and Iraq, was in those areas which were not being contested to fill those with other lines of activity: economic, reconstruction, development, aid and everything else. That was very apparent. What has happened now is those have become smaller in my judgment because the opposition has got stronger. We have not become any more powerful even though we have put in more numbers because we, the UK military, within Helmand, and I think we are going to see a shift change in that with the arrival of American forces, have not put in sufficiently and proportionately more enablers for the numbers of troops we have got on the ground because our numbers of helicopters, information-gathering systems, have not grown at the same rate as our ground forces. I made this point in 2006, that, yes, you could put in two or three more battalions but unless you put the same proportion of helicopters and everything else in behind it those forces would fix themselves because of the terrain, because we knew that the Taliban would go asymmetric, use more IEDs. And regrettably we are seeing this, hence the number of casualties we have, that they have forced us off the roads, as the IRA did in Northern Ireland very successfully, into helicopters. If you look at the proportion between helicopters and ground forces in Northern Ireland, I think at one stage we had over 70 helicopters servicing 10,000, 12,000 or 15,000 troops. You can do the maths yourselves of 8,000 troops on the ground and how many helicopters we have to service them. The problems, the geographics and the threat from the enemy, are the same as we faced 25 years ago when things started hotting up in Northern Ireland.

Q80 Mr Hancock: What is the real downside of the Comprehensive Approach as far as the military is concerned and what effect does that have on their war-fighting capability?

Brigadier Butler: I think conceptually and intellectually, as I have answered before, the military are very much bought into it. Their frustration is that those who are meant to be delivering the reconstruction and development do not have the capability. They do not have their own aviation, they do not have their own vehicles. Those have to be shared out from doing visits and reconnaissance surveys to the delivery of large-scale aid. There is then the regulatory aspect: they cannot go out because they are not empowered to go out without sufficient degrees of security. Who is making that security assessment (which was my point before), the different risk thresholds and security assessments from across government departments? I have not been there so I cannot quantify it, but I do not know whether the two-star civilian is the man who signs off what the current security threats and assessments are in Helmand, and says, "Right; we have now agreed that this part of it is acceptable for civilians to go out there and operate with the appropriate levels of protection". I doubt we have progressed that far because I suspect there is still a blanket approach which says that Helmand, Afghanistan, is still in a high-threat area; therefore you cannot go off the main routes down to your offices in Lashkar Gah.

Q81 Mr Hancock: So as a commander on the ground, and you did not see anybody else coming in to give the local community the reassurance and assistance they wanted, you ended up presumably making decisions to allow your troops to carry out some of that work which then deflected from their war-fighting capability, so the two things really do have to be together, do they not, the whole time?

Brigadier Butler: Absolutely, and that is where you need the consensus. That understanding in Lashkar Gah is now probably far stronger than it was, and I think there are 80-plus civilians in Lashkar Gah now and in my day that ranged between two and six, but that is planning foresight. It is not even hindsight because we had been there and done it in Basra and the Balkans and elsewhere. I think if that understanding of where the priorities are, where the threats are, happens and they agree on those it is then about proportioning resources. Do you send out a company of men to go and defuse improvised explosive devices which are blowing people up or do you go and do an escort or provide the security cover or a military screen for a reconstruction and development team, someone from the PRT to go out and talk to the locals about an agricultural project or the rebuilding of a security checkpoint? There is always that tension because you have insufficient resources to do everything at once.

Q82 Mr Hancock: So, having seen it on the ground with all your experience, can this ever succeed in a place like Afghanistan?

Brigadier Butler: The debate is, are we past the tipping point or not? (And are we now in a different type of mission, but that is a question for another day). If we were to go into somewhere else, then absolutely the Comprehensive Approach, the joined-up approach, should and can work. If you are responding to a crisis, say a failed state and the leader has just gone for example if Gabon went completely pear-shaped because the President has just died and we decided we were going in there because there was sufficient British interest-then you have to pull it together last minute. However, if we said, "Right; we are going back into somewhere like Iraq", and we gave ourselves six months to really understand the nature of the operation, who the people are, really identify what the key local needs are, what the Iraqi requirement is, or the Afghan requirement is, as opposed to trying to superimpose (which we all did; I think most people would stick up their hands on that) a Western solution governance-wise, security-wise, rule of law-wise, and we are probably still guilty of that now in many areas, on the Afghans saying, "This is what you are going to have, wear it", as opposed to accepting that there is an Afghan problem which requires an Afghan solution, an Afghan approach and an Afghan lead. Whether your initial planning said, "Has the host nation government got the capacity, capability and appetite in terms of governance, corruption and everything else to deliver what you want to deliver?", if the answer is no or maybe, then you lower your expectations of what you are going to achieve and you agree cross-government in accordance with your foreign policy issues what success looks like. What we need to be doing, and my job was in Afghanistan, is totally recalibrating what that definition might look like, what we can afford to deliver there and then major on it, and that I think will take some fairly radical solutions and some thinking about how we might contribute to what will be a long and hugely important campaign there.

Q83 Chairman: Professor Farrell, do you want to add something?

Professor Farrell: I just have some points to make on this question about the costs of a Comprehensive Approach for the military. There is a very interesting debate going on in the United States about this at present. If by a "Comprehensive Approach" we mean getting involved in operations of this nature and posturing our force for operations of this nature, what is the cost? In the American military it boils down to an issue of how shall we posture the force, what kind of capabilities and platforms do we need to develop, and also, if we develop a force that is postured for these interventions, does this mean we are positioning ourselves strategically in terms of our national strategy for these kinds of interventions? It is all interlinked. It boils down to how you read Iraq also. For a 'traditionalist' in the American army, for instance, how they read Iraq is, "We do not want to do that again; that was a disaster", so do not posture for it because if you do not posture for it you will not have to do it; stick with the heavy war-fighting capability. Whereas what is commonly called the crusader camp says, "The future core is in stabilisation operations. We have to invest more in that capability". The fight then occurs over the major platforms, for instance FCS (Future Combat Systems), which is their more sophisticated version of FRES (Future Rapid Effects Systems) I think the argument has pretty much been won because Secretary Gates is quite clearly attempting to rebalance the force to give more capability for these (stabilisation operations) areas because in the West we are more likely to be engaged in these kinds of operations, or, even if we do a conventional war in the future, the real lesson from Iraq is that we have to stick around for a stabilisation phase. That raises two final points. One is that it seems to me a really important point that I take away from today is that in Britain we do not really have a very good strategic lesson-learning process. There are individual lesson-learning processes going on in the various government departments. It seems to me that that is one of the things the Government should be focusing attention on, less on what we saw and more on government departments across the board coming together to learn the lessons from the operation. An interesting question from Afghanistan is not where it went wrong in 2006, although that is very important. I personally would not read too much into 2006 as to what we do today, because in 2006 we went into an operation, which the Brigadier has eloquently outlined, where we had some appreciation but at the highest level of government it was not fully appreciated, where it was under-resourced, but also where conceptually we were only at the opening stages of developing the Comprehensive Approach. We have come along a lot in three years. The question is, if we were to do another operation tomorrow would we have the same appreciation of resourcing and capabilities that we have today in Afghanistan deployed to that operation? That is a very interesting question and the one caveat I would have is that if you look at the history of counterinsurgency, for instance, in all historical cases we have time and again gone in, made mistakes, learned from the mistakes, got a lot better, managed the operation, got into another operation and made the exact same mistakes again. We go through these cycles of constantly rebooting our memory and relearning. It is one thing that the British have yet to really get better at-institutional memory. It is about better learning and retaining the knowledge so we do not have to relearn the mistakes we have made.

Q84 Mr Havard: I have two questions. One is related to this whole debate about reconstruction forces, as it is often portrayed. You said a lot of these things to us when we came to visit you in 2006, so, fair play, I can validate the fact that you have been saying something consistent all the way through. In terms of the point about how you do that work, we were having that discussion then. You almost laid out a form of reconstruction forces earlier on in what you were saying, so I would like to talk about that but I would like to do it in the context of the Comprehensive Approach across UN, EU, NATO, all the rest of it. There is a change in Afghanistan from the American point of view. They, pejoratively in my view, now talk about "AfPak", which I think is bad language and they should shut up about that and talk about the two countries separately but also connected together. If there is a regional approach how is the Comprehensive Approach going to relate to that new approach of dealing with the two together and the whole regional concern? Is the way forward a form of reconstruction-type force that is maybe not a form of military force? What is the way forward for that and how does the Comprehensive Approach fit in that new international context? Two simple questions.

Brigadier Butler: There is a requirement and it has been recognised within the military, certainly within the Army, that there needs to be a reconstruction force, whether it is called a stabilisation brigade or otherwise. We need to challenge our intellectual boundaries far more on that and say why is it just limited to a military force but you put together a capability which harnesses the power of the military and the other government departments, but most importantly, and this is what I see and hear when I talk to more and more businessmen, the business community. If you turn to a businessman and say, "Would you like to invest in Afghanistan with its minerals or other opportunities there?", whether it is micro, mezzo or macro level, they would say yes. If you get them in at the planning stage, and I have already tested this hypothesis with them, you can say, "How long would it take to build a power facility, telecoms infrastructure, a port", if it is appropriate, "a 400-kilometre railway", they can do that because they stay in these places for 20 years. There is a huge wealth of knowledge, experience and appetite, I judge, where they can come in on some sort of dynamic new joint ventures where they are sharing the risks, sharing the CAPEX which they have got to spend, with the government, and saying, "We can turn this round". It will be for commercial gain because business does not work otherwise, but what do people want, they want an economic platform, they want jobs to break out of their poverty cycle.

Q85 Mr Havard: So we see an element of that in Basra then, do we?

Brigadier Butler: You could have that. If you want a really comprehensive reconstruction capability do not just restrict it to what you currently have within government or the military, Foreign Office and DfID. Go outside that to business, take an economic approach to it, get in the financial expertise. I would even say why have a serving military man in charge of it, because that is part of the cultural challenge. There are lots of other people you could transfer with the appropriate skills and background experiences into that organisation.

Q86 Chairman: Is this a job application?

Brigadier Butler: On your point about AfPak, the real positive step forward is that people have finally accepted that it is a regional problem. Is Afghanistan in a way a distraction from where the deeper rooted economic security problems really lie across the border in Pakistan? I think we internationally are in a more precarious position in Pakistan than we are in Afghanistan because I do not think we have necessarily understood the strategic dynamics of inter-relationships within that region and the wider region, the geo-political balance within it, and who is playing what tunes to what end.

Q87 Chairman: Professor Chalmers?

Professor Chalmers: I think one of the most interesting things about this whole evidence session is that, although we are talking about the Comprehensive Approach, in practice we are talking about Afghanistan. I think one of the things we need to reflect on most is whether we think Afghanistan is the template for the future or whether it is an exception, and history will tell. Many of the lessons which I think we can draw from this discussion are more generic, but some are not. The generic lesson, it seems to me, is that we need to provide a capacity across government to be ready to plan for future operations which may, as the Brigadier said, be at very short notice. If there is a requirement to go into Gabon tomorrow or if there is a terrorist attack launched on the United States from Somalia tomorrow, or whatever it might be, we need to have the capacity to respond quickly, and that I think does mean some quite fundamental changes in the way in which departments other than the MoD operate and provide capacity and our capacity for planning for that sort of thing. If we had had this session four years ago we would have been talking about Iraq but now Iraq has disappeared off our radar screens since we no longer have troops there. The final point I would make is in relation to reconstruction, which in the case of Afghanistan is in large measure construction rather than reconstruction. We have got a lot of experience of the limitations of using aid in sub-Saharan African countries where there are not the same problems of conflict and security. The problems of construction and using aid in countries with many more security problems are going to be greater, not less, than they might be in Kenya or Tanzania or Nigeria, so we should not build up our expectations of how much can be achieved in a relatively short period of time in terms of delivering development. In the end, in African countries or in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, the essential thing to moving forward, as the Brigadier was saying, from third bottom to fifth bottom in the human development index is going to be achieving some sort of rough and ready political dispensation which creates the conditions in which you can move forward on development and security. In the end I think probably one of the lessons from our experience of Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have some sense of humility as an international community vis-à-vis the local actors and do not think that by rearranging the way we do things we can change things without leadership from the local political actors.

Q88 Mrs Moon: I have a final question and it is broken into two parts but I want very quick answers. On a scale of one to ten, if one is the Comprehensive Approach in its foundation stages and at ten it is working absolutely fantastically and we have got it all right, where are we? Are we at three, four, five, six? What is your view? Where are we on that scale in terms of developing a Comprehensive Approach?

Professor Chalmers: I think we are at six but for a new operation there is a danger we could slip right back to one.

Professor Farrell: I would agree. I think you need to distinguish between where we are in Whitehall and the departments versus in the field. There has been tremendous progress in the field and in terms of planning and operations, and I think we are making reasonably good progress here, so maybe it is a six in the field and a four here, but then, of course, the key question is increasingly these are going to be coalition operations and where are we with NATO, NATO is back at one or two. That is what I think.

Brigadier Butler: Conceptually as a buy-in it, is probably six. If you look at what has actually been done on the ground, physically delivered, we are probably in the four bracket, and I agree entirely with the NATO coalition piece, it is nudging one and a half.

Q89 Mrs Moon: What is the step to get us from four to five and six to seven? What needs to be done in the field and what needs to be done at Whitehall? What is the next step to move us forward?

Brigadier Butler: You have to have a cultural mindset change, you have to have a political buy-in, you have to look at how you are delivering security, and you have to finally resource it. If you want to go to these places and make a difference then you have either got to go deep, go long or go home, so think through how much it is going to cost you. I use that business example. They can tell you exactly how long it will take and how much-a billion, two billion a year for 20 years-it will take to build something up based on the experience which is out there. Resource the cross-government plan and that will be the biggest change for it.

Q90 Mrs Moon: And that is in Whitehall?

Brigadier Butler: Absolutely; otherwise realign your ambitions of what you are trying to achieve.

Q91 Mrs Moon: And in the field? What are the changes we need in the field?

Professor Farrell: The two key things I would suggest are if we could somehow get a better integration of folk from the stabilisation unit in the pre-deployment training, particularly the mission rehearsal exercise, it is a bit patchy, that would help build the partnership between the deploying brigade and the PRT before the brigade gets into theatre, and it would presumably help transfer knowledge from the PRT to the brigade as it prepares for deployment. The other thing I would suggest is a better lessons learned capacity which is shared across government.

Q92 Mrs Moon: The human population would be so much improved if we had better learning commitments.

Brigadier Butler: I think that is right. It is training but it is also resources. You only get a handful of experts from development and reconstruction and stabilisation and they get worn out because you cannot keep on sending them back there, so there is resourcing of them again, whether they are military, civilian or a mil/civ mix, but also it is the regulations. It is the health and safety and the duty of care of what you are asking civilians, if that is who they are, to do. In the commercial sector you just pay a higher premium, you pay a higher insurance rate, and these people go out and do it. You can look at companies like KBR, G4S and all those other ones, they have 11,000 policemen on their books who could be used. You have just got to pay the price and they will go and deliver the training. The commercial sector will do it but at a price, but that goes back to the fact that you have to resource your plan and match your aspirations, your foreign policy objectives, with what you are trying to achieve.

Q93 Mr Havard: So your reconstruction force does not necessarily have to be a standing force of the military, British, US or anyone else, but a combination of perhaps some of that along with these people? Is that what you are saying?

Brigadier Butler: You have got to have more than just a framework there because otherwise you do not get the relationships built up, you do not get the training, you do not learn the lessons, you do not get the doctrine development. If you try and pull it together at the last minute, even over a six-month period, it will not work. That is a balance of having a standing force, but you can have cores of capability which you can then build up fairly rapidly from a pool of reservists.

Q94 Mr Jenkin: And it needs in your view to be under the political command of a single secretary of state?

Brigadier Butler: I think it has certainly got to be under one command. It has to be a political command at the end of the day. Whether that is a PUS or a Secretary of State would be for others to judge but it needs someone who has got the clout and the resources and the authority to say, "This is where we are going", having had the debate, the discussion and the understanding of what the art of the possible is going to be.

Q95 Chairman: Professor Chalmers, you have not said how we would improve the Comprehensive Approach, what the next step would be. Would you like to do that?

Professor Chalmers: I have just one last observation if I may, which is that it appears as if the Government is about to announce an inquiry into its operations in Iraq and large amounts of government resource will undoubtedly go into preparing and giving evidence to that inquiry. That, it seems to me, is potentially an opportunity for a lessons learned exercise in relation to Iraq and the Comprehensive Approach, and I hope that is something which we will all learn from and it is not simply about the initial decision to go to war, which in itself might have lessons for a Comprehensive Approach, but is about the whole conduct of those operations up to date.

Chairman: Can I say to you all three of you thank you very much indeed. It has been a very interesting session indeed and most helpful as our first evidence session.