Examination of Witnesses (Questions 213
- 219)
TUESDAY 30 JUNE 2009
GENERAL JOHN
MCCOLL,
MR MARTIN
HOWARD, MR
NICK WILLIAMS
AND MR
ROBERT COOPER
Q213 Chairman:
Good morning and welcome to a further evidence session on the
Comprehensive Approach. We are very grateful to our extremely
distinguished panel of witnesses this morning. We have, I am afraid,
a limited amount of time, so we will try to rush through many
of the questions, and I hope you will do your utmost to give concise
answers, but I wonder whether you could perhaps begin by introducing
yourselves. May we start with you, General McColl? You are the
Deputy SACEUR.
General McColl: I am the Deputy
SACEUR.
Q214 Chairman:
Tell us a bit more. You have also been a special adviser to President
Karzai?
General McColl: As DSACEUR I am
also, in my EU hat, the Operational Commander for the EU operations
in Bosnia, which is our theatre. So that is what I am doing at
the moment. In previous lives I have been the Prime Minister's
Special Envoy to President Karzai for a year, and I commanded
the first ISAF deployment.
Mr Howard: I am the Assistant
Secretary General for Operations. Before that I was Director of
Operational Policy in the Ministry of Defence dealing with Afghanistan,
Iraq and other operational commitments. In my current job I provide
the POL/MIL end of NATO's planning and conduct of current operations,
and that is obviously dominated by Afghanistan but also covers
Kosovo, Iraq and also the work we are now doing on counter-piracy.
Mr Williams: My name is Nick Williams.
I am currently Deputy to the NATO Senior Civilian Representative
in Kabul, before that I was deployed by the Ministry of Defence
as a political adviser to NATO forces in Kandahar and before that
I had served twice as Political Adviser in Iraq and twice in the
Balkans, once for the EU and once for the Ministry of Defence.
Mr Cooper: I am Robert Cooper.
I am Director General for External Affairs at the General Secretariat
of the Council of the European Union. More easily explained, I
work for Javier Solana. Mine is the level within the Council Secretariat
that brings together the political and the operational. Perhaps
I should also say, I also have a little bit of Afghanistan in
my history, as I was for a while the British Government's envoy
on Afghanistan, and I have a little bit of British Balkans background
as well, because I used to chair the committees on the Balkans.
Q215 Chairman:
Thank you. Some of you have given evidence to us before, and we
are grateful for you coming to see us again, so it cannot have
been too awful! During the course of our inquiry we have put a
question to some of our witnesses about how well we are doing
on the Comprehensive Approach. On a scale of one to ten, are we
doing well, are we just at the beginning stages of the Comprehensive
Approach or are we nearly there? Professor Farrell said, for example,
that "you need to distinguish between where we are in Whitehall
and the Departments versus the field", and he said, "I
think we are making reasonable progress in the field, so maybe
a six in the field and a four here", i.e. in Whitehall, but
then he said, "Where we are with NATO, NATO is back at one
or two." Brigadier Butler said, "I agree entirely with
the NATO coalition piece; it is nudging one and a half."
They suggest that NATO is in the very early stages of the Comprehensive
Approach. How would you suggest that NATO should adapt to bring
the Comprehensive Approach more to the fore of what they are doing?
General McColl, can I start asking you that, and I wonder if I
could ask you that—you might give different answers, I do
not know—first as the Deputy SACEUR in relation to NATO
and, second, the vision that you have had of it as seen as the
special adviser to President Karzai? You might have a different
perspective on it.
General McColl: Thank you, Chairman.
I have read the testimony of others that have appeared before
you, so I understand the opinions of Brigadier Butler. The first
thing I would say is that the Comprehensive Approach is undoubtedly
viewed as being important by NATO. There have been a series of
agreements. In April 2008 there was an action plan produced by
NATO and there was a Comprehensive Strategic Political Military
Plan, which Martin is better able to talk about than I, produced
by NATO. In September 2008 there was a meeting between the UN
and NATO, an agreement rather, and in April 2009 there was a declaration
by heads of state of government which included a confirmation
of the priority afforded to the Comprehensive Approach. I was
at a meeting of all the military commanders in Allied Command
Operations and Allied Command Transformation (which makes up NATO)
last week, and we were asked what we wanted to see in the new
strategic concept, and number one on that list was clarity of
the Comprehensive Approach, what NATO meant by it and how we might
deliver it. So, in terms of the importance of it, I think there
is no doubt that within the military aspects of NATO, on which
I am best able to comment, there is huge importance attached to
it. In terms of where we stand, I think there is also no doubt
that NATO is considerably further back than the UK, if you were
to mark them, and that is because it is significantly more difficult
for NATO to reach agreement on these matters, and perhaps we can
go into that later on. I can go into that, but I do not think
you will want me to do it right now. It is far more difficult
for NATO to do that than the UK. Whereas from where I sit in my
NATO position, I would have to say that when I look at the UK,
in comparison to other nations, it is often commented to me that
the UK is joined up in this respect. When you look inside the
UK and understand the various difficulties that we have in delivering
that Comprehensive Approach, it may not appear quite like that
to us, and there are difficulties and there are areas where we
can make improvement. In terms of where does NATO stand, I would
agree, the marking given by Brigadier Butler is quite harsh, and
I am not sure that he was quite aware of the commitments given
and the progress made since April last year, but given the fact
that it has really only been since last year that we have given
ourselves a commitment to do this, it is not surprising that the
UK—which has been at this for slightly longer—has
made far greater progress.
Q216 Chairman:
Is it more difficult because it is a military alliance?
General McColl: It is more difficult
because it is primarily a political alliance and, in order to
move forward on something as complex as the Comprehensive Approach,
you need consensus from all nations and there are a number of
obstacles to that. The first—and I would describe it as
the primary obstacle—is our relationship with the EU. As
you go round capitals, you will find capitals outdoing each other
in explaining how important they view the relationship between
NATO and the EU, and yet the reality on the ground is somewhat
different, and the reason for that is because there are some nations
who deem it unacceptable for us to sign a security agreement with
the EU. What that means, therefore, for example, when the PSC
and the NAC meet—I take it we know what the PSC is: it is
the European equivalent of the NAC—they only have one item
on the agenda, they can only have one item on the agenda, and
that is Bosnia, because that is under the Berlin Plus arrangements.
They cannot talk about the other theatres into which we are both
deployed—Afghanistan and Kosovo—in the counter-piracy
arena. Let us Afghanistan: in Afghanistan we have been unable
to sign an agreement between ourselves and the European Police
Mission that is deployed. The European Police Mission has had
to sign separate agreements with every nation that runs a PRT
on a bilateral basis: because we do not have security between
NATO and the EU. Similarly, we have not been able to develop a
tracker system which shows where the EU vehicles are and NATO
vehicles are: because we cannot pass classified information from
NATO to the EU. So the only system we are going to be able to
develop (and it has taken two years and we are not there yet)
is one which demonstrates where EU vehicles are to NATO vehicles,
not where NATO is to the EU. I am sorry, I am going on a bit,
but I am demonstrating, I hope, that one of the key difficulties
we have in developing the Comprehensive Approach within NATO is
the fact that, despite the best of intentions and good work on
the ground by people who are making this work, there are practical
obstacles to the operation because of the issue of a security
field. I think I will stop there.
Q217 Chairman:
Okay. Mr Howard, can you expand on that or add whatever you would
like to the question I asked?
Mr Howard: Let me start with the
evidence you had before from Brigadier Butler and others. I thought,
like General McColl, that was a rather harsh marking, and I think
it does not reflect what has happened since April 2008. General
McColl mentioned the Comprehensive Political Military Plan that
we drew up and endorsed at Bucharest in April 2008. This is the
first time that NATO has actually pulled together a true political
military plan, as opposed to a military operational plan, to guide
civil military activity in Afghanistan. It was a major undertaking.
It was agreed by 28 allies and 14 partner nations and in that
sense had a lot of political buy-in and, for the first time, gives
a proper POL/MIL framework for the conduct of the campaign in
Afghanistan. In that sense I would submit that at the strategic
headquarters level it is by no means perfect, but it is not a
bad example of the Comprehensive Approach being made to work and
it is now guiding what we do. In terms of the distinction between
what happens on the ground and NATO headquarters, I recognise
the picture that your witnesses talked about in respect of the
UK also applies to NATO. I think co-operation on the ground, as
General McColl says, is generally pretty good, though it is hampered
by some issues that he has raised. At the headquarters level,
I still think there is a little way to go, despite the progress
we have made on the POL/MIL plan for Afghanistan. On NATO/EU,
I agree with the General: I think this is a serious institutional
problem. If we are going to make the Comprehensive Approach work
well, NATO cannot do everything. We are primarily a military security
organisation. We are not a development organisation; we are not
in the business of helping to develop law and order. We need to
find ways of working with other entities that do that, and in
many ways the European Union is one of those. It is not the only
one, but it is the one where we have a particular difficulty.
This is something which is very difficult for NATO as an institution
and the EU as an institution to solve. It has to be solved by
the Allies and Member States, 21 of whom, of course, are the same
countries.
Q218 Chairman:
You say that one and a half is a harsh mark, but everything you
have said suggests that it is not.
Mr Howard: I think it is always
difficult to put figures on this. I would have perhaps given us
three, or three and a half. I read Brigadier Butler's evidence
very carefully, and there are a lot of things that have happened
in the last two years which were not mentioned by him, or, indeed,
by anyone else in the evidence session, and I feel that in terms
of what has happened since then, just to take a more practical
example on the ground which Mr Williams could elaborate on, we,
last year, generated a NATO-wide policy for PRTs and PRT management,
a very practical piece of work, and for the first time the work
of PRTs is now being co-ordinated through a committee called the
Executive Steering Committee, which is chaired by an Afghan, Dr
Popal, and has the NATO SCR on it, has the UN Special Representative
and, indeed, also has the EU's Special Representative on it as
well as from ISAF. That is working on the ground.
Chairman: We will come on to Mr Williams
and what is happening on the ground in just a moment.
Q219 Mr Jenkin:
This institutional paralysis between you and NATO has become part
of the landscape of European security policy. Should we not just
learn how to work within that framework, and is not, in fact,
the NATO nation relationship the way forward? Should not the EU
simply act as a co-ordinator and enable and encourage individual
nations to have these bilateral relationships with NATO on the
ground? Actually it has the advantage that in counter-insurgency
warfare you do want a single command and it puts NATO in command
of the civilian effort, which sounds to me more comprehensive
than having a double-headed monster which the EU and NATO threaten
to become when they are operating side by side. I wonder if John
McColl would comment on that. Actually the model we have got in
Afghanistan should be the model we make to work, instead of pretending
one day there is going to be a sort of EU/NATO nirvana?
General McColl: I do not disagree
that pragmatism is important, and I do not disagree that we need
to make this work on the ground for the benefit of those who are
in harms way, and, indeed, that is exactly what is happening.
People are doing what they must in order to make sure that co-operation
works, and in many ways, to pick up the point that was made by
Martin Howard, co-operation on the ground is, particularly in
Afghanistan, rather ahead of the policy development that we have
in NATO. Having said that, I do not think we should accept it.
I actually do not agree that it is part of the landscape that
we should just accept: because it gets in the way of opening what
could be an extremely fruitful and broad relationship between
ourselves and the EU, and that is not just in Afghanistan, it
is in Kosovo, it is in counter-piracy and it is elsewhere. That
is all blocked at the moment, and I think that is extremely unfortunate.
Chairman: Yes, but you have got to sort
out Cyprus, then, have you not.
|
