Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
TUESDAY 9 JUNE 2009
PROFESSOR THEO
FARRELL, PROFESSOR
MALCOLM CHALMERS
AND BRIGADIER
(RETIRED) ED
BUTLER
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-a"-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 10%—that
70% of the violence takes place in 10% of the areas and affects
6% 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 6% 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 a"
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.
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