Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
TUESDAY 9 JUNE 2009
PROFESSOR THEO
FARRELL, PROFESSOR
MALCOLM CHALMERS
AND BRIGADIER
(RETIRED) ED
BUTLER
Q40 Mr Jenkin:
That is a semantic point.
Professor Farrell: Actually it
is not. Look at the Musa Qala 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 Qala 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 24th 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 tack 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.
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