Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-15)
Rt Hon Liam Fox MP, Mr Tom McKane, Mr Peter Watkins
and Air Vice Marshal Andy Pulford
21 July 2010
Chair: We have had a
statement today on Afghanistan, and we do not want to cover the
same ground that was covered by the Foreign Secretary on that.
Q1 Alison Seabeck:
What improvements do you expect to see in Helmand in the next
six months, and perhaps you could take that forward to the next
three to five years?
Chair: We are talking specifically about Helmand, rather
than the whole of Afghanistan.
Dr Fox: In terms
of the security in Helmand. I have already announced to the House
that we are going to be seeing British troops leaving Sangin and
concentrating in Central Helmand, and I think that I would like
to make the first point there, that now what we are seeing is
proper force equalisation, because there was the potential that
you would have the Americans in the North and the South and Britain
in the centre but, with a similar force size, trying to look after
a disproportionate proportion of the population. I think that
the agreement we reached with the Americans is very good overall
in terms of how we deal with the counter-insurgency in Helmand,
and I think it is very good for the United Kingdom's contribution
to that and gives us a chance to fully take advantage of our understanding
of the terrain in Central Helmand and the population in Central
Helmand and the political environment. So I see us, over the
next six months, consolidating that, and I see us pushing forward
in terms of the counter-insurgency strategy. We all are awaiting
the assessment by General Petraeus of where we are in, perhaps,
the wider spectrum, but I would hope that we would continue to
see more districts within the remit of the Kabul Government so
that we are on the process that we want to be on in transitioning
to Afghan control. I make the point perhaps unnecessarily, but
we are not a force of occupation, and we are there to ensure that
we get the Government of Afghanistan by the people of Afghanistan
for the people of Afghanistan as soon as we can do so. That requires
us to have a security environment where the Afghans themselves
are able to maintain their internal and external security without
the need for coalition Forces, albeit with a long-term requirement
for mentoring and training.
Air Vice Marshal Pulford:
Absolutely consolidation. The American surge will continue through
to the end of the summer, bringing them up to around 18,000, and
that will allow that tactical adjustment in terms of lay-down.
A fact that I will stress is that high-tempo operations will
continue. If we are to continue the momentum - and build on that
momentum - that was delivered by Op Moshtarak earlier in the year
and the progress that is now being made in Marjah, then we need
to keep the pressure on the insurgency, on the Taliban, and look
to deliver confidence to the Afghan people that we are there,
we are going to stay there and we are going to deliver the sort
of security which will convince them that we are the good guys
and the Taliban are very much the bad guys.
Q2 Alison Seabeck:
So it is enabling them to have the space to do that?
Air Vice Marshal Pulford:
On the security side, as you know, the counter-insurgency campaign
is about the people; the military aspect of it, the security aspect
of it, is about providing security to allow the other lines of
operation to get traction and to allow good governance to come
in. You have been told, I am sure, and be aware that the numbers
of districts that are being governed by sound governors - not
Taliban shadow governance - have increased - I think it is something
like 11 out of the 14 from five a couple of years ago. The civil
aid projects, the opening of roads, the opening of schools - all
these are quality of life issues for the average Afghan that go
alongside that improved security to convince them that there is
a better way than the intimidation of the Taliban. It is vital
this summer that that work continues, even if, I am afraid, it
does come with casualties on the British side, on the American
side - on the ISAF side - and, of course, within ANSF (the Afghan
National Security Forces), both Afghan Army and Afghan Police.
Dr Fox: Can I
just add to that that in counter-insurgency, which is population-centric,
there are security advantages to our own forces in this approach,
because every time we are able to extend the writ of the Afghan
Government to another one of the districts, with only three now
in Helmand not under the Government's control, it provides us
with better intelligence; people have the confidence to talk to
us, to tell us where IEDs may be planted, who may be planting
them and where their resources are coming from. There is, if
we are lucky, a virtuous circle that is created, but not without
considerable cost because the courageous restraint which is part
of the counter-insurgency strategy does require considerable risk
to our forces in achieving it.
Q3 Ms Stuart:
There has been a change of leadership in ISAF. Do you expect
any short-term and long-term changes of that change of leadership?
Would you care to say something about potential tensions between
NATO and ISAF, at the moment?
Dr Fox: In terms
of the handover, they are quite different personalities, General
McChrystal and General Petraeus. In terms of the overall strategy,
I would not expect there to be very many changes, but there is
one question that does need to be dealt with, and I think is a
matter of some urgency, and that is that the current ISAF policy
is not to see sub-provincial transition till we get provincial
transition itself. My own view is that if we are able to show
our respective publics that we are getting sub-provincial transition,
it gives an idea of momentum and progress, and one of the problems
that we have is that there appears, in some ways, to be a lack
of progress which is diminishing public support that, ultimately,
diminishes our resilience in the long-term mission. So I think
that is one issue that needs to be dealt with. Another issue
that needs to be dealt with by ISAF is how we transition to the
end state, and there will be a number of countries who might be
in the less conflict torn parts of Afghanistan who might believe
that whenever they are able to transition in their part of the
country that is their job done, and they can leave. A consequence
of that, if unchecked, would be that it would be Britain and the
United States in the most difficult part down in Helmand, with
some of our other partners, who would be left on our own. That
I do not think is healthy for the Alliance, and it is something
that the forthcoming ministerial conference will have to deal
with in terms of how we keep the Alliance together by maintaining
for as long as possible the contribution of this wider range of
the members of the Alliance as possible.
Q4 Chair: Secretary
of State, you have just said that it is your own view that some
provincial transition could be helpful in showing a degree of
progress to our own population. Your own view or the British
Government? Clearly, it is not an ISAF policy, at the moment,
but is it the British Government's policy to go to that, or is
it your own personal view?
Dr Fox: I set
out my personal view on that. It is something that I will be
urging as we move towards the Conferences in the autumn. That
would be, I think, a sensible way forward for us. I do, however,
think that it will happen anyway; I think that other countries
will begin to transition at sub-provincial level and I think that
the ISAF policy will change, whether by design or default. I
think that we should be encouraging that particular change in
policy.
Q5 Mr Hancock:
One of the benefits, Secretary of State, of being on this Committee
for a long time is that you see many of your predecessors come
and go here and I remember the points that they have made over
Afghanistan, and I well remember John Reid saying, for example,
he expected very few casualties when we first went to Helmand;
that he did not expect too many bullets to be fired in anger.
The point that was made by successive Secretaries of State was
the actual strength of the Taliban. There was a time when we
used to publish headcounts of how many of the Taliban we had killed,
but the problem with that was when you added all those figures
up you discovered you had killed more Taliban than your predecessors
had estimated to the Committee had existed there, but they seemed
able to rejuvenate themselves fairly quickly. Now we have General
Richards telling us that, in his opinion, it is an inevitability
that we will have to negotiate with the Taliban. Just who is
it with regard to the Taliban who the Ministry of Defence, and
General Richards in particular, believe it is we should be negotiating
with? It certainly will not be Mullah Omah, will it, after what
he said last week?
Dr Fox: I think
it is simply a matter of history that insurgencies tend to finish
with some element of politics and not simply a military victory.
That will be true in Afghanistan. The question is when and with
whom. I think they are the key questions. We need to understand
the nature of Afghanistan. I think commentators in the United
Kingdom tend to talk about Afghanistan as though it is some sort
of homogenous country. If I - just for the sake of completeness
on this - point out that if you compare Iraq to Afghanistan: whereas
in Iraq 67% of the population were urban, only 24% are urban in
Afghanistan; life expectancy is hugely different; Iraq had a 74%
literacy rate, Afghanistan has 28%. So who your interlocutors
are going to be will be very different. I think that the key
element as in any insurgency is to determine who of what we call
the Taliban are reconcilable to the Afghan Constitution and to
the writ of the Afghan Government and who remain irreconcilable
and will, therefore, remain enemies of the State. I think it
is also worth pointing out that we have made big gains in the
original reason we went to Afghanistan, which is the dismantling
of the al-Qaeda network. We seem, on occasions, to have lost
focus on that. There will be elements of the Taliban who remain
committed to an ideological struggle, but there will be those
who, in my view, are reconcilable. They will be more reconcilable
if they see that we have a counter-insurgency strategy that is
population-centric, that we want to protect them, and also that
there are economic benefits to them that flow from it. So these
elements are tied together. Ultimately, it has to be, I believe,
for the Afghan Government to determine exactly who they talk to,
and the enduring relationship has to be between the Afghan Government
and those reconcilable elders from its own people. There is a
limit to how much we can dictate from the outside, I think, realistically,
on that.
Q6 Mr Holloway:
Secretary of State, one of the problems has been held that President
Karzai has not been particularly serious about getting on board
this process because he and the wider Popalzai tribe are benefiting
from insecurity to the tune of over $1 billion a year. How do
we deal with so many people in the Government that we are rolling
out enthusiastically into places like Helmand Province if they
have a gigantic stake in continuing insecurity?
Dr Fox: One of
the big challenges we will face is not simply dealing with what
we might call excess corruption (if we make the assumption that
in large parts of that part of the world, what we would term corruption
they would regard as a normal way of doing business). When I
was last in Afghanistan what a businessman said to me there was:
"It is the excess level above the background of corruption
that makes us angry; it is that funds that are meant to be for
ordinary people are disappearing and we lack judicial authority."
So one of the things that I think we need to be bringing is the
concept of judicial authority right down the system. It goes
all the way from being able to establish a proper rule of law
and apply it - a rule of law that applies equally to the governing
and the governed - but, also, right down to the lowest level,
to dispute resolution. A lot of the things that ordinary Afghans
are looking for is not access to a Supreme Court, it is dispute
resolution over small property deals and land, and if we are not
able to deliver that to them then they will turn to the alternative
source of justice, which is the Taliban.
Q7 Chair: Secretary of
State, we have three more questions and three more minutes.
I do not want to deal in the first question with the timescale
for withdrawal because people are getting rather obsessed about
that and I do not think it is in the interests of the country,
frankly, to try to drive wedges between yourself and the Prime
Minister about whether there is a timescale or what it might be.
What I would ask is what are the criteria for when our troops
withdraw? You say a "stable enough" Afghanistan; what
does that mean?
Dr Fox: It means
in national security terms a position where the Afghan National
Security Forces have both sufficient number and capability to
manage their internal security, largely through the Afghan National
Police, and I welcome the agreement now reached between the Ministry
of the Interior and their partners in the United States to try
to push that programme forward at a much greater pace than it
was, and also to manage their wider national security through
the Afghan National Army. There will be continuing challenges
in that because it is not simply getting the numbers; it is also
getting the capabilities and getting the quality that will enable
them to continue themselves. I would just add a word of caution
that beyond having combat forces in Afghanistan we may require
those mentoring forces and training forces to raise that standard
for some time. I think remarkable strides have actually been
taken already. Already we have met the target on the ANA of 134,000
and the Afghan National Police are due to reach their target of
109,000 by October. The ANP is a very good example, Chairman.
The numbers are one thing but them having the capabilities on
the ground is another. We have recently been moving from the
previous practice which was recruit, deploy and train to recruit,
train and deploy, and that makes a very big difference on the
ground. It is within the difficulties I set out a moment ago
about very low levels of literacy where training is having to
be done on a "show and tell" basis and this within a
very different economic environment to one that people would have
foreseen. If I were just to point out that we are trying to police
training in a country that falls below Eritrea, Ethiopia and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of their per capita
wealth as defined by the UN.
Q8 Chair: Secretary of
State, we now have no more minutes but we still have two more
questions. May we ask them?
Dr Fox: You may
indeed ask, Chairman; whether we run out of time for answers is
another matter!
Q9 Bob Stewart: Secretary
of State, we are taking quite a casualty rate at the moment in
Afghanistan, as we all know. The casualty rate that worries me
personally, having been involved in it for a long time, is the
mental casualty rate. You know that because I have been to see
you on another occasion. I think our casualty evacuation system
and our dealing with casualties while people are wearing uniform
is first class now, but I am worried about how we as a country
deal with our veterans once they are released from the Armed Forces.
I know you personally have a view on that. Could you just tell
us where you are at and what you intend to do?
Dr Fox: Thank you
very much for that. I have had a long interest not just in mental
health issues for the Armed Forces but outside, and they do overlap
here, because I think that in this country, frankly, the quality
of care we give to people with mental illness we simply would
not accept for any other sort of illness that afflicts one in
four of the population. I think it is a measure of how civilised
we are as a society how well we deal with the most vulnerable,
and those with mental health problems are within that. Very often
they are in the Cinderella service in healthcare because they
are the very people who will least be able to complain or least
want to make their voices heard, so I think we do it against a
poor backdrop. The reason that matters is that the interface
between the Ministry of Defence (those who are leaving in particular)
and social services and the NHS is of enormous importance. There
is not nearly enough tying up between departments. My colleague
Andrew Murrison is currently undertaking a study as to how we
can better get those together. I think we need to look - and
we will look - at work as to whether rather than some of the less
than justifiable medicals at the point of discharge from the Armed
Forces, we are capable, with the medical science, of looking at
psychological profiling to see who might be most vulnerable and
to proactively follow them up rather than waiting to see if they
fall through the safety net. I think that is a big piece of work
that needs to be done. The Americans are quite far out. I went
to the Walter Reed Hospital two weeks ago and I spoke to the Department
of Veterans' Affairs which I visited there to see whether we could
be involved in joint working as the science emerges to see if
there is any predictability. I have one particular worry that
goes beyond Mr Stewart's question and it relates to the reserves
because if you are coming home with a group of your comrades who
have been through the same experience at least you have people
to talk to who have been through the same thing. If you are in
the reserves you can be in Helmand on Friday and you can be the
milkman in Dorset the next Friday on your own with no-one to talk
to and potentially a disinterested population that cannot understand.
Q10 Bob Stewart: And
a wife that does not understand.
Dr Fox: And families
who may find the readjustment very difficult. If it is possible,
we have an even greater duty of care there because there is an
excess vulnerability there which we will pay a very high price
for, and if we are not careful and we do not try to identify people
who might be at risk, we will as a society potentially be sitting
on a mental health time bomb.
Q11 Mr Brazier: Just
applauding your comment on that, the All-Party Group testimony
we got from King's was that interestingly those who went as formed
units were very comparable to the regular army; those who went
off as individual reinforcements had much higher levels for the
very reason you say. Could I ask about areas of equipment and
training which you feel need enhancing to help the mission succeed.
In particular, quite a lot has been said on IEDs and you may
want to say something more about that because that is right at
the heart of it, but also the issue that comes up at every single
presentation is the shortage of helicopters.
Dr Fox: Of course
with the US surge and the fact that they have brought a huge amount
of equipment with them, including helicopters, has actually been
very beneficial in terms of access for UK forces. In terms of
the counter-IEDs, I do not know whether the Air Vice Marshal wants
to comment.
Air Vice Marshal Pulford: It
has been a campaign which I have been personally involved in now
for some two years. It has taken a lot of time, effort and it
has taken a lot of money and the three elements - train the force;
defeat the device; and attack the system - is the way we have
approached this. I think our personnel are now going out better
prepared than ever, both mentally and physically, in terms of
the operations that they are going to have to undertake and the
environment in terms of the IED. On defeat the device, we have
made improvements on protected mobility, and our equipment to
detect the devices under the ground is now better than ever and
state-of-the-art and work continues on that, and some of the money
that was recently announced by the Government will continue to
develop that theme and continue to provide. Then of course there
is the multitude of effects to which we look in terms of attacking
the system, everything from these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in
the sky through to intelligence and the use of Special Forces,
so we very much welcome this latest addition of funding but, I
am afraid, like all these things, it will take time and much of
the latest package will go to equip our specialist teams with
something called the EOD Mastiff which is a protected vehicle
particular to the counter-IED teams themselves and we will continue
to deliver that, with deliveries being complete not until the
end of next year. Thus this is a multi-faceted fight and it is
one where the enemy continues to adjust its tactics and its procedures
against us. We have to be as adaptable as we can to that, but
in terms of the equipment for training and the preparation of
our people we are confident that we are doing all we can. I am
afraid it is requiring patience in terms of the ability to deliver
the equipment through industry but, more importantly, in terms
of the specialists, some of the training time for some of our
specialist teams is in years not months and, again, whilst we
are continually testing ourselves in terms of whether there is
another way of doing it, we have to be patient in terms of how
long it takes to develop our people to ensure they go out as well-equipped
and trained as they can.
Mr Brazier: Just a comment
on the IED. The message I get through this - and I have IED
on both sides of my family and background and a number of contacts
- is that we are actually in danger of losing the numbers rather
than growing them. Although the equipment side is very welcome,
the fact is the numbers are under absolutely intense pressure
and there is a real danger that we could lose critical mass with
the most experienced people. Going back to helicopters for
a moment ---
Q12 Chair: Before you
move off, do you accept that point?
Air Vice Marshal Pulford: It
is known and something that we are monitoring on an almost daily
basis and the adjustment we have had made within the defence system
that delivers the specialists has been adjusted at every level.
We have put financial retention incentives in to try and retain
the size of force and of course ensuring that we have got the
most out of the best possible trainers to deliver from the training
system the maximum number of specialists as possible
Chair: Back to helicopters.
Q13 Mr Brazier: Really
just on helicopters, the message that seems to come from everybody
is that it is not a shortage of machines; it is a problem in the
training pipeline again. Could I just urge you to get the Air
Force and the Army to look at what the Navy are doing in terms
of using reservists in their training pipeline, and indeed to
some extent on operations too, to deliver the training pipeline.
Air Vice Marshal Pulford: If
it were only as simple as training. There are three elements
that go together: the equipment; the ability of the engineers
to deliver out the hours on them; and the engineers themselves
and the crews. With all of our fleets it is a question of balancing
the various elements of that capability to ensure that we are
getting the maximum from it. Much of the work that we have done
most recently on increasing not just the number of airframes in
theatre but increasing the flying hours from them (which are up
about 140% on where we were two years ago) is ensuring that the
individual fleets are in balance and there are enough aircraft
and hours and people in theatre but also, much as you have just
described, there are sufficient numbers of aircraft and flying
hours back at home base to ensure that we are able to train and
prepare our people to go to theatre. That is a tension that Commander
JHC and defence right across all of our fleets is continually
adjusting.
Q14 Chair: Secretary
of State, did that note tell you you have to go?
Dr Fox: It was
a very good paraphrase, Chairman! May I add one final point
on this whole question of IEDs because it is very current and
that is defeating the IED threat is not just about equipment;
it is about understanding in its widest sense what is being planted,
where it is being planted, who is planting it, and as that essential
intelligence improves the more successful the counter-insurgency
strategy is and the more that we are able to show that we are
about protecting the local population as well as protecting our
own Armed Forces. It is a point that, if I may, I would like
to just finish on because the courage and the restraint of our
Armed Forces at the present time in demonstrating to ordinary
Afghans that they are not there to occupy but to protect them
is not only substantially improving the lot of the people themselves
but is contributing in the long term to the potential greater
safety of our own Armed Forces and also the time at which we are
able to leave without leaving behind a security vacuum.
Q15 Chair: Secretary
of State, thank you very much indeed. We are conscious of the
fact that we have overrun by 11 minutes and we are grateful to
you all for giving us that evidence. I think it has been an extremely
helpful first session and, dare I say it, I think you have impressed.
Dr Fox: Thank you,
Chairman.
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