CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 554-iv

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

OPERATIONS IN AFGHANISTAN

WEDNESDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2010

BRIGADIER SIMON LEVEY and GENERAL SIR NICK PARKER KCB CBE

GENERAL (RTD) SIR GRAEME LAMB KBE CMG DSO

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Wednesday 17 November 2010

Members present:

Mr James Arbuthnot (Chair)

Mr Julian Brazier

Mr Jeffrey M. Donaldson

John Glen

Mr Dai Havard

Sandra Osborne

Bob Stewart

Ms Gisela Stuart

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Brigadier Simon Levey, Director Royal Armoured Corps and formerly part of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, MoD, and General Sir Nick Parker, Commander-in-Chief, Land Forces, and former ISAF Deputy Commander, MoD, gave evidence.

Q228 Chair: Let us begin. We are a minute early, but that is a good thing. May I welcome you to the Committee’s inquiry into operations in Afghanistan? When the Committee of the last Parliament was in Afghanistan in January we met both of you there, and we are most grateful to you both for the help you gave us. In spite of having met you before, it would be helpful if you would kindly introduce yourselves, and tell us what you now do and what you were doing then.

General Sir Nick Parker: I am Nick Parker. I was the Deputy Commander of ISAF based in Kabul, and I also had the role of the National Contingent Commander. I am now the Commander-in-Chief, Land Forces in Andover.

Brigadier Levey: I was the Combined Training Advisory Group Commander, dealing with army training in Afghanistan under the NATO training mission there. I am now the Director of the Royal Armoured Corps.

Q229 Chair: What would you say have been the key issues in Afghanistan over the last couple of years?

General Sir Nick Parker: My experience of Afghanistan directly started about late October last year, so my sense probably covers the two years that you are talking about. The McChrystal review brought three fundamental changes: first, to the resourcing of the operation, which I will come back to; secondly, to the culture of the operation; and thirdly, to the structure-the way the operation was conducted. Those were the three principal military strategic changes that the McChrystal injection made. I am not criticising those who went before him; I am saying that this was a process of evolution that suffered a bit of a revolution when he came in and conducted a formal process of analysis.

On the culture, having population-centric operations was essentially changing the emphasis. We were conducting counter-insurgency before then, but McChrystal focused people on the people that we were there to protect, emphasising the fact that if you poison them, you are never going to be able to win the security fight. He injected emphasis into that through the tactical directive that he issued in about August last year, and also through the process of partnering, which is a very big change. He realised that we had to partner ourselves with Afghans both to behave more in an Afghan way and to understand the culture that we were operating in.

On the system, he introduced the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, the joint detention operation 435 and, importantly, the ISAF Joint Command. He broke the theatre-strategic and operational levels apart to give greater clarity to the command and control that was necessary. That was manifested in a much more directive command. He told people what to do and where they were to do it. He elected to undermine the insurgency in the South. His predecessors had only ever been able to co-ordinate and ask. That was absolutely nailed by the introduction of additional forces-the 30,000 that President Obama announced on 1 December last year and the additional NATO troops. If you add the 20,000 American Forces who had previously been allocated to Afghanistan, that gave General McChrystal the opportunity and the ability to operate in a more aggressive and forceful way in those areas where he wished to do so. That was when he started to undermine the insurgency in the South.

Q230 Chair: Brigadier Levey-from your point of view?

Brigadier Levey: By definition, my prism is far narrower than the General’s. I can only cover the Afghan National Army training piece. The bit that I personally saw was the significant uplift in resource, of both men and money, to enable the growth of the Afghan National Army at pace. That was the biggest significant change from when I started in December ’09, when it really picked up, until I left Afghanistan-the biggest single change.

Q231 Chair: The issue that came up when we were watching the training of troops in Kabul was that more money and time spent on training in Kabul would pay dividends once they got to Helmand. Was that resolved by the British sending more people to do training?

Brigadier Levey: In fact, all the other NATO countries sent a lot more people to do training. I had roughly 340 people when I started, and there are now some 1,400 trainers. The numbers increased exponentially, not only from NATO countries, but across the board. That made a significant difference to the quality of what we were able to do. That enabled us to put in place quantifiable, measurable tests to see that the quality of the training was improving. We knew that we were increasing the quantity significantly. The Afghan National Army has grown by 58% this year from November to November. That is a big growth, but it is the quality that has really improved with the advent of the NATO Training Mission, where the emphasis changed from just quantity to improving the quality. Those trainers and the money that went with it allowed us to improve the quality. I can give you lots of stats, if you want them, on how it improved.

Q232 Sandra Osborne: With regard to the situation in Helmand, what are the particular challenges that the Coalition faces there?

General Sir Nick Parker: That is probably one for me, isn’t it? I speak very deliberately from the theatre-strategic perspective. It is terribly important for us to understand that Helmand is a part of a greater operation and that we risk, if we only look at what is happening in Helmand, possibly misrepresenting where the military security pressures are across the whole of the campaign. I absolutely understand that for UK Forces, the risks and the threats in Helmand are of prime importance. Our job was to look at this across the whole theatre. As an aside, just because we can win a battle in Helmand, it does not mean that ISAF success is guaranteed. We must ensure that we guarantee ISAF success from a security perspective.

There are three big challenges in Helmand that I recognised when I arrived. First, we needed to make sure that the density of force was appropriate, to the people that we were trying to secure. There was need to continue the process of increasing force density. The second thing is that, as part of the McChrystal plan to get people to partner effectively with the Afghans, we began, before it was being talked about, the process of transition, because ultimately it is an Afghan solution. We had to start getting our Forces closely alongside the Afghans, building confidence and using them effectively. Thirdly, we had to connect people to give them better situational awareness. That is a rather military term, but we have to understand the environment that we are operating in, and Afghanistan is a very difficult country to operate in as a Westerner. We needed to continue to improve that so that our military judgments were based, as far as possible, on accurate assessments of what was going on around us.

Q233 Sandra Osborne: Has the security situation improved since the increase in troop numbers?

General Sir Nick Parker: Yes, it has, but we want to be really careful about the messages that we send. I consider myself as having been guilty of being over-confident, or appearing to be over-confident, in February last year. Before Operation Moshtarak started, I deliberately said that it was going to go well. I was using the language of 60, 90 and 120 days for bringing in things such as governance in a box. With the benefit of hindsight, that raised expectations to an unreasonable level. I rationalised that by saying that I was doing it because our men and women were about to go into a very dangerous operation and we needed to be confident in their ability to do that. I think that the wider public message that we sent raised expectations of progress above what was achievable.

Today, we have demonstrated in some really difficult parts of the south, both in Helmand and Kandahar, that we can deliver consistent security and that we can do it with our Afghan partners. That is beginning to send a powerful message to the insurgents, who are beginning to make a balance of judgment that says we-ISAF and the Afghans-are going to be around for a credible length of time, and their allegiance should start to change to us.

Q234 Sandra Osborne: You have laid great store by the need to bring the Afghan people on board. Do the people in Helmand trust the Coalition Forces?

General Sir Nick Parker: I think it has been and will always be qualified. They trust us by our actions, but they would wish to have their own armed forces providing security for them, like any country. Ultimately, they see us as a bridging force that should be able to transfer to their own people. But I don’t think they mistrust our motives.

Q235 Sandra Osborne: How much has governance improved in Helmand province?

General Sir Nick Parker: It has been slower than we would have wished. I am not sure whether Governor Mangal has spoken to you in any other forum. He has significantly increased the levels of governance inside Helmand over the last four to five months-12 governors out of 14 districts. Those sorts of statistics are bandied about. If you dive down into the detail, the district governors in Nad-e-Ali and Sangin are both building confidence, but it is a work in progress. Stepping back to what I said before, it is the governance of Kabul and governance at the provincial level and the district level that need to continue to develop. All three levels are challenging. My work was mostly in Kabul, working with President Karzai’s immediate advisers.

Q236 John Glen: We have a memorandum from the MoD that sets out the 47 countries represented in the Coalition-from the three personnel from Austria to 78,000 from the US. I would imagine there are considerable strains in trying to run a coalition. Could you tell us about how that works and what the issues are in making that coalition work when you have such a large number of participants from different countries?

General Sir Nick Parker: It is important to recognise that in military terms the US is effectively the lead nation. Therefore, automatically, there is a deferral to them, because they bring the greatest amount to the operation. Having said that, because the military culture is pretty consistent across all those nations, people fit into that well. Provided they believe that they are reasonably represented, there is no great challenge in the military sense in managing the Coalition. However, it is something that one has to work on all the time.

Working on behalf of both General McChrystal and General Petraeus, I have found that getting nations to reflect their grand strategic policy inside the theatre-strategic decision-making process was quite difficult. I would hold fortnightly meetings-I chose to-with the senior national representative of the eight principal nations, and it was sometimes difficult to get a dialogue going with them over things where we needed to understand what their capitals were thinking in order to be able to shape the military theatre decision making. It works much better than it might appear, because there is a lead nation. There are eight principal nations that we need to corral, but that is hard work and we need to do it better. I do not want this to sound at all derogatory, but they tend to come along because they respect the way the thing is organised.

Q237 Mr Brazier: Let us move on from the change that the McChrystal strategy has made. Brigadier Levey, do you feel that the fall in the level of civilian casualties is helping recruiting for the Afghan National Security Forces?

Brigadier Levey: Are you asking for a personal opinion?

Mr Brazier: Yes.

Brigadier Levey: To be honest, I don’t know, but I do know that recruiting has remained pretty constant throughout. Ever since I was there and they ramped up the recruiting numbers, we have essentially been able to feed the training machine sufficiently to exceed the targets of the number of soldiers we needed to train. By October we had to be at 134 and I think we were at 138, so we are ahead of schedule. The recruiting has been consistently sufficient to meet the requirement-in fact, above.

Q238 Mr Brazier: That is obviously welcome news. Do you think that we will be able to make more progress with getting Pashtuns from the south into the army and police?

Brigadier Levey: I know that there is a big push to get more Pashtuns from the south into the army. Pashtuns are in the army in roughly the right sort of numbers, but not from the south, as you know. Post-Eid, which has just happened around now, there is a big drive going on right now to do more recruiting in the south. I think-this is a personal opinion based on professional knowledge-that with what has been going on in the south, where the secure zones have increased, it is likely to be more successful than it has been in the past.

General Sir Nick Parker: I have two final remarks. First, it will be incredibly important to the credibility of the ANSF in the south to get more recruits from the south. They realise that, and this additional effort will help. There is an initiative called the Afghan Local Police Initiative, which we must be very careful about not over-emphasising, but it essentially creates a much better-disciplined locally recruited security force. It is working reasonably well, and I know that General Petraeus believes that it should be spread further. That would offer us an opportunity to get people out of the community into a bridging role-it shouldn’t be permanent-to provide security inside communities.

Q239 Mr Brazier: That is an interesting point. The Chair said that he feels that one of the questions has not yet been fully answered. How much difference do you think the McChrystal approach of courageous restraint has made? The impression obviously is that it has been very positive. Do you feel that it has made a real difference?

General Sir Nick Parker: Yes, I think it has. Courageous restraint is a difficult label; we want to be very cautious of it. I think we went through a bit of a wave. We over-corrected in order to bring people back from what was on occasion a very aggressive approach, where the risk balance between protection and offensive action was a little out of kilter. McChrystal recognised that, and brought it back into line.

We then experienced subordinates who were over-correcting, and who were losing their initiative in order to protect the population. There was a very clear sense, which I am sure you will have seen over the summer, when General Petraeus took over, that the American trooper needed to have more freedom to act so that he was not as vulnerable as I think it was felt in the American chain of command that he had become. General Petraeus reissued the tactical directive with exactly the same basic principles, but with greater emphasis that the chain of command was not to add to the conditions, and that we were not to be concerned to take action if the lives of our troops were at risk. The principle was right. It took us a bit too far and was over-corrected, but it is now operating in exactly the right way.

Chair: I’m glad you answered that, because that is not a narrative that we have heard before in so helpful a way. I am grateful to you.

Q240 Ms Stuart: I have come to Defence new. All my previous visits to Afghanistan have been with the Foreign Affairs Committee. Last week, this Committee went to Permanent Joint Headquarters. I am trying to understand how the chain of command works. It seemed to me that there was a duplication in it, but it may just be me coming to this new. I wonder what your perception is.

General Sir Nick Parker: I think-

Chair: Brigadier Levey is very much enjoying the fact that you have to answer this.

General Sir Nick Parker: Can I defer to you, Brigadier Levey? Two contextual aspects before I answer the question. First, Coalition Operations are extremely complicated. There are 47 different nations, and in this case, a NATO chain of command, and therefore each one is different. Secondly, I think our approach is developing all the time. So every operation is different, and it morphs as it goes along, so there is a lot of change.

My professional opinion is that we do not yet understand the theatre-strategic level clearly enough in the British Armed Forces. There needs to be a greater understanding of the importance of the decision making that takes place, in this case in Kabul. The linkages between Kabul and the grand strategic or military strategic decision making in London need to be clearer and better understood. I believe that that was a reflection of why I was sent out as the National Contingent Commander, although I don’t believe I was given sufficient resource to do the job as actively as I needed to. There is a need for greater understanding of the critical nature of pulling levers in Kabul because you can pull as many levers as you like in Helmand, but it won’t make any difference to the way that the campaign is being run by the big command level. That is very important.

But I was not in a position to deploy, sustain and recover a very complicated British Force. There is no way that that could have been done effectively in Kabul. In my current job, where I am generating the land element of this force, I need to feed it through an organisation that can consolidate it, can ensure that what is being done is correct, and then deploy it and sustain it effectively. I firmly believe that there is a role for the Permanent Joint Headquarters to deploy, sustain and recover, and it needs to understand what’s going on, but I think we should look carefully at its true pure command relationship because it cannot influence decisions that are made inside the Coalition in Kabul.

Q241 Bob Stewart: General, hello. Did you have difficulty in establishing yourself as the National Contingent Commander? And when you used the word "London," did you actually mean PJHQ?

General Sir Nick Parker: No. I had the normal challenge that you would have whenever you introduce a new element into any chain of command. So I had to educate myself, and those around me and up the chain of command where I felt that I could add real value. I had to demonstrate a bit of success in order to build confidence, and I quite understand that. By "London," I meant the Ministry of Defence.

Bob Stewart: Not PJHQ?

General Sir Nick Parker: No.

Q242 Mr Havard: You talked about the training. Our experience and understanding of it is that, as far as the training of the ANA is concerned-the army component-you are teaching them the physical and conceptual components of military activity, but how do you train soldiers in the ground? One of the questions we want to ask you is about the moral component of an army and what the aspects of trying to deal with that in training the Afghan Army have been and how you are dealing with that.

General Sir Nick Parker: Can I start at the top level and then get Simon to answer the question properly?

Mr Havard: Sure.

General Sir Nick Parker: The general loyalty of the Afghan National Security Forces is something that we need to help. We need to nurture it. The relationships that the Minister of Defence and the Minister of the Interior have with President Karzai and with that close-in group of people, the Cabinet, are something that we must not undermine. In my job, I was very conscious that one needed to sustain the confidence of the President and the Cabinet in his armed forces so that they felt that they were doing what was right for the country. We need to continue to do more to that so that the Security Forces have the confidence of the higher level of Government.

Q243 Mr Havard: That presumably includes the issues about the laws of armed conflict, the Geneva Convention, the rules of engagement and the ways of doing, as well.

Brigadier Levey: On the training side, the Afghans certainly have already incorporated into their training all of that element that you have just referred to. They have a thing called RCA-religious and cultural affairs-which is a sort of combination, in our terms, of a padre and welfare officer and a few other bits and pieces put together. That branch school is already up and running in Kabul and training the people who then go out to the battalions and live with them. That is part of it.

At the same time, all those soldiers going through their basic training and who come back for their courses with their officers, NCOs or not, get all the other bits that make up the moral components. They get taught the laws of armed conflict. They get taught in basic training about looking after civilians. All that element is covered in various parts of their training, just as we do in our army. So, it is covered.

Q244 Mr Havard: We hear reports about absenteeism rates, the fact that people cannot work unsupervised and the low numbers, so the quality question comes in. But this is meant to be a people’s army, looking after the people as opposed to something else; that is why we are asking the question. What is happening with that? We seem also to be training a lot of people who are then disappearing, and you are on a treadmill. Is that what is happening?

Brigadier Levey: I can talk to you about the absentee rates. The absenteeism is caused by a number of different factors, as in any army. One of the particular problems in the training base is that the soldiers have such a compressed time scale-going from basic training, through their specific branch training and through their collective training-and they do not get any leave during that. Therefore, if they want to get their pay home, sometimes they take themselves off, pay and come back. So we know that we get soldiers coming back eventually who have not really deserted; they have just been absent to go and pay their families.

That side of life is being looked at to try to improve the way in which the soldiers are paid, but that is only one element of it. There certainly was an element of soldiers going absent if they were sent down south-that was definitely the case. There was a higher proportion of soldiers going absent from those battalions who were going to be sent down South. That particular issue was resolved by making sure that we topped up the battalions before they went.

In the army as a whole, they are seeing how they can improve retention by having what you have probably heard referred to as the red-amber-green cycle-where they do a bit of training, have a bit of leave, and do a bit of operations-so that they do not all get consumed in the fight all the time. That has improved retention.

General Sir Nick Parker: I agree with everything that Simon has said. The high-level point is that we have grown-we have done "growth"; what we have not done is "capacity". Are we doing sufficient to build capacity inside that growth? Yes, we are starting to, but we are doing it in phases. We have a lot of what they call attrition. Now we are starting to build better offices, better schools, and better cycles, so that people come off the front line. All those things are being built and they will take time. You can build the number to 137,000 in the year, but have you got the capabilities? No, that is thin and we need to continue to build that.

Q245 Mr Havard: We have asked this question about ethnic mix, distribution and so on. In the end, the best of Kunduz is full and the best of Helmand is not so full-we have seen all that. That is why we are asking whether it is going to be a national army that is deployable across the whole of the nation of Afghanistan, or whether it is a large number of people, but not a sustainable quality group of people who stick.

General Sir Nick Parker: It can be done, but it requires time. You can grow quickly, but the capability takes longer.

Brigadier Levey: The year ending in October this year was all about building the infantry. That was the deliberate plan. October to October next year is all about the enablers-the logistics element and all the other bits and pieces that make an army complete. That is why the literacy programme has been expanded so dramatically, because there were not enough literate soldiers.

All those things are contributing to building the other element, and even when that is done, you will not be there fully, because you will still need to keep the institutional training base supported to ensure that future generations are brought alongside.

Mr Havard: You have been reading some of my questions; you have been looking over my shoulder.

Q246 Mr Donaldson: Gentlemen, you will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that our Forces who are training the Afghan National Army are billeted side by side with them, whereas the Americans create some kind of a barrier between the two-they sleep in different quarters, and so on. I may be wrong about that. We had the recent incident when the three soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan National Army, including Lieutenant Neal Turkington. I wonder about the wisdom in all circumstances of our soldiers being billeted alongside those of the Afghan National Army.

General Sir Nick Parker: The circumstances that you are talking about are not in training; these are people who are conducting operations together. This is the concept of embedded partnering and at Patrol Base 3, where that incident took place, they slept in separate tents in similar parts-they were actually in slightly different compounds, but on the same FOB, defended by the same security force.

The issue is: is the risk worth the benefit? The risk is that in a large armed force you are almost certain to have a few mavericks. If we are fighting an insurgency where we are battling for people’s minds and wills, you will inevitably get some infiltration. Is our vetting sufficiently good? Are our biometrics sufficiently good? Those are the sorts of things that we have to continue to press on, to try to mitigate the risk of a maverick.

But we must not forget the benefit, which is huge. It is about operating alongside people-even if they’re Tajiks and they come from the north-who understand the place so much better than we do and who have very good low-level tactical fighting skills. When you partner our people alongside them, you get real synergies with our technical capability, our weapons systems and our training with good, natural soldiers who understand the environment they’re operating in.

The benefits that we’ve seen from this embedded partnering are huge. So I have to say that the risk still exists, but we should not just accept it; we should continue to try to mitigate it. What we shouldn’t do is stop and lose sight of the benefits, which from a military perspective are very significant.

Chair: It was interesting that when we were in Afghanistan in January, the British soldiers there told us that their greatest protection was the Afghan soldiers they were working alongside.

Q247 Mr Havard: You’ve dealt with some of the stuff about partnering. Can I ask you a specific question about where women sit in relation to the Afghan National Army and about the women within it? How is that training done and how is that process developing?

Brigadier Levey: In my time there, we had the first ever female officers’ course. It was not my idea; it came from General Ameenullah Karim, who is the Afghan National Army Training Commander. He got the idea from his wife, who said to him, "This is a really good idea." He then proposed it and drove it through. There was considerable opposition among other Afghan army personnel.

The key thing about this particular idea is to recognise that we are talking about Afghanistan, not Europe, and it has to be done at their pace. If we had tried to impose that on them, it would never have happened. The fact that the General was personally so keen and drove the idea is what made it succeed. They now have their first 29 female officers in the Afghan National Army, and another course is about to run. It is a small step, but it needs to be in keeping with their culture to make it succeed.

Q248 Mr Havard: You said it is at officer level?

Brigadier Levey: These are officers.

Q249 Mr Havard: What sort of level is that?

Brigadier Levey: Well, it means they can come in as second lieutenants and lieutenants. They will not be used in a combat role; they will be used in administrative roles.

Q250 Mr Havard: You were talking about logistical support and other things beyond basic manoeuvre warfare and teaching them about other components that make up a whole military. You say it has only just started, but how is that progressing? Is there a role and a function for women more in that area of activity as opposed to perhaps the infantry, as it were?

Brigadier Levey: Female numbers are very small at the moment. The numbers going through could not keep up with the vast numbers we are putting through the logistics schools and all the other schools that are starting up. Those are the ones that have got to make the effort this year-the military police, the logistics, the engineers and all those bits and pieces. They are growing exponentially just as the infantry did the year before.

That is why all those schools were put in place: to allow this growth to happen for this year. In addition, of course, they are establishing logistics bases around the country. They have established four in the last year. So the whole thing is happening in parallel. The real mark of success will be at the end of October next year, when we’ll see if the growth has happened, as it did this year, with all those schools filling all those places. Based on what has happened currently, I see no reason why they should not succeed.

Q251 Ms Stuart: Can we turn to the Afghan National Police? Could you, Brigadier, just give us a quick rundown on retention rates, literacy rates and problems on retention in relation to drug dependency-those kinds of figures? In your opening remarks, you said it was not just the quantity but the quality that was improving. Can you just give us a quick rundown of where we are?

Brigadier Levey: On the police force?

Ms Stuart: Yes.

Brigadier Levey: I can only give you a very superficial view because my job was with the Afghan National Army, not the police.

General Sir Nick Parker: You’ve got to be careful, Simon. If you want real fact-

Q252 Ms Stuart: I was very conscious of the fact that the Afghans call their soldiers "warriors" and their police "soldiers." When we talk about the Afghan National Police Force, our nice distinction is that these aren’t community support officers. Which one of you can give us an answer?

General Sir Nick Parker: We can both give you a general answer, but I think we should offer you some real, clear statistics in writing, if we may.

Chair: Real, clear statistics in writing would be helpful, but do please answer to the extent that you feel able to.

Brigadier Levey: The Afghan National Police Force certainly had a problem with-I am talking about from the time I started until the time I left-retention, drugs and corruption-and recruitment, for that matter. All those things were acknowledged. The police force, not the army, became the main effort in my time there.

All the key effort in terms of intellectual and physical resource started to be diverted into the police and it had an impact, without a shadow of a doubt. Drug testing across the board for everybody. They did biometrics of all the police. That meant that they could then get rid of those who said they were working and weren’t, because they knew who, physically, was at work.

Huge strides were made in the training of the police. Of course, a large proportion of the police had never been trained, so not only were they recruiting and training new ones, they were also training those who were in the police already. A huge amount of effort went into that and I know that the Brits, down in Helmand, have had their own involvement in that, doing a really good job training up the police forces.

It has not been a good news story throughout, but huge strides have been made. As I was looking over the fence at the police, I was quite surprised at how well they had caught up, considering that they were starting at a much, much lower base than the army. They were starting at a really low level. They are not there yet, but they have done a good catch-up job.

The Afghan National Civil Order Police, which is one particular part of the police, was very high-end and they put a lot of effort into improving their retention. The commandos is the other sort of model. The commandos had a 98% retention rate-really good. They did the cycle of red-amber-green, so they went on leave-training-operations. No matter what was going on in Afghanistan, they did that. They started bringing that in for the ANCOP, which then improved retention and you get this virtuous circle happening, so the good lessons from the army have been taken across to the police. That is, I am afraid, all I can give you, but it is really only a broad-brush perspective.

Q253 Ms Stuart: Earlier, you mentioned the methods of payment of the Afghan National Army. The police occasionally did not get paid at all, never mind being paid and then having to take it back to their families. Can you say something on that? Also, do you know about the weapons going amiss after they had been issued?

General Sir Nick Parker: The key area for development has to be the police force, and it is the most challenging one. It is going to take time. Even in an Afghan sense, a more sophisticated security organisation that is community-based is going to take us four or five years.

A lot of the early steps with the police have been quite frustrating. There have been difficulties; two steps forward, one step back has been the feeling. The Petraeus Afghan Local Police Initiative is designed to produce a community-based security organisation that will bridge between now and the time when the ANP will become better trained and better led. Leadership was one of the key things that we were trying to build up, so that local leadership would be better.

In any organisation that is not terribly well led and is being formed, you get-if I call it leakage that may appear to belittle the loss of ammunition and the loss of weapons-those sorts of things happening, and we were having to tighten up on that. We are having to tighten up on the discipline of the organisation, but it is an area that we watched very closely, because it is the area where improvement will have a very significant impact. The Afghan local police initiative was designed to try and catch up on some of the areas where we were losing.

Brigadier Levey: On the specific issue of pay, the army and the police are paid in the same sort of way. They are paid the same sort of wages. What the army does is get paid by phone. You have probably heard of that system where mobile phones are one of the ways to get paid. It should be improving, particularly with what they did with the biometrics and the registering of every single policemen, physically, to make sure that they were all there.

On the weapons side, the army does not have the same problems. They all have NATO weapons. Therefore, we know how many weapons there were in the first place, because we issued them and they are all checked very regularly.

On the police side, it is a bit more difficult. There are so many AK47s around, we don’t know how many there are, so it is a bit of a trickier problem. With the army, I knew in my time that we lost one pistol and one rifle. The rifle was recovered and the pistol took a little longer. We know exactly how many NATO ones there are; it is the other ones that are trickier. The police are now bringing in systems to do what the army does. The problem is that there is such a proliferation of that particular type of weapon that it is harder to control.

General Sir Nick Parker: Our hope was that the Afghan local police would bring their own weapons, so you would start to regularise or legitimise the AK that was under the bed.

Q254 Ms Stuart: The Afghan National Army recruits across Afghanistan and tries to create a national force. The Afghan National Police attempts that, too, but it’s less successful, isn’t it?

Brigadier Levey: No.

Ms Stuart: I thought that the aim was that we move to a national police force-

Brigadier Levey: In different sorts of police forces, you have one sort that is recruited locally-

Ms Stuart: Is that what the Americans are funding? I am trying to understand.

Brigadier Levey: I am not sure about the funding aspect. One sort is recruited locally and works locally. Another sort is recruited nationally, so it depends which police force it is and what role it is going to play. So there are different types of police forces that do different things. Some are local and some, which I refer to as being like the commandos, go in to do a particular job.

General Sir Nick Parker: We can send you the details. There are five pillars of the police force. The criminal investigation-what I suppose we would call the specialists-are nationally recruited. The uniformed police are recruited by province, so they are locally recruited. The ANCOP that Simon was talking about are recruited nationally, too.

Q255 Ms Stuart: I have one final question on prisons and on building a criminal justice system and law enforcement. When Governor Mangal came to a briefing, he gave us a good view as to where we are going to be, but I didn’t really get a sense of what we have at the moment. Could you update us on how many secure places we have?

General Sir Nick Parker: I can’t give you the exact details. I would commend Task Force 435 to you. It is the detention’s taskforce and is run by an American three-star. From a Helmand perspective, the NDS in Lashkar Gah has a facility with, I think, about 100 beds. There is also a prison in Lashkar Gah, which is different. It is not run by the NDS, but by the prison service, and it has greater capacity, but needs some serious development. That was being introduced.

Lindy Cameron and those sorts of people will be able to talk about that. On the statistics for the Pul-e-Charkhi prison for the new facility that the Americans are working at, we would give you those things in detail.

Q256 Bob Stewart: I want to look at what happened in 2006. We have heard from General Messenger, who said he didn’t have enough personnel to carry out the tasks in Helmand in 2006. Would you like to comment on the lack of personnel for the tasks allocated to us in 2006?

General Sir Nick Parker: I hope you won’t think I’m being rather wet.

Bob Stewart: I know what you are about to say, actually.

General Sir Nick Parker: Because, in this and my previous position, I had no direct military responsibility for what was going on in 2006. I start from a real understanding of what was occurring in 2009. All I can say is that my experience has been of a very dynamic insurgency and, as I said earlier, an insurgency where our understanding of the environment was extremely challenging.

Q257 Bob Stewart: I will let you off, because I think that you had to say that. What about the number of troops that we have now? Do we have it about right?

General Sir Nick Parker: Yes. From an ISAF perspective, the south has just about got it right, but we mustn’t be complacent. The effective growth of the ANSF is critical to start to complement what we have. As far as the British are concerned, exactly the same philosophy applies: we must continue to grow an effective ANSF. I could not commend highly enough the Afghan National Police training organisation in Helmand. These are really important to continue to put as much high-quality Afghans among our people as we can.

I feel very strongly about the need to apply normal military judgments to the tactical operation. We must allow our commanders, at the appropriate level, to be able to use reserves in an effective and dynamic way. We must have sufficient force and capability to be proactive and to stay in front of the insurgent. At the moment, we have, but it is a dynamic insurgency, and we must stay on the balls of our feet.

Q258 Bob Stewart: Withdrawing from Sangin, was there an impact on morale in any way? What about our relationships with the US Forces? Did our reputation suffer a loss?

General Sir Nick Parker: I consider the withdrawal from Musa Qala, Kajaki and Sangin as absolutely essential ISAF military moves in order to concentrate forces properly in the population centres of central Helmand where they were needed. Again, you are going to think that I am being rather naive, but the transfer in Sangin was no more than the Royal Welsh handing over to the Royal Irish. This was a straightforward RIP where a UK Force was being relieved by a US Force, because they had the resource to do it, and we put 3 Para into central Helmand, which was where it was necessary to be. It was a very straightforward military move.

Q259 Bob Stewart: I understand that, but I was really quite concerned that it was perceived, in some quarters, that we were actually cutting and running a little bit. I would like to hear your counter to that comment.

General Sir Nick Parker: It could be seen like that if you view it from a very particular perspective. It was absolutely the right military thing to do. If you talk to somebody from 40 Commando, they don’t feel that they were being abandoned. The US Marines were in there for six weeks before the RIP took place. It was a really carefully conducted handover.

Where I think we have a potentially subjective issue is that the lives that were lost were British lives, and the people who are there now are American, but, from my perspective, we’re all ISAF. This is a very challenging area, and both the British and the American commitment to that particular part of the country have been extraordinary. You will have seen the statistics of the battalion that took over from us, and it is a very challenging area. Now, 3 Para will be having a very challenging time in Nahri Sarraj. So it is the label of Sangin, if you view it from a very particular perspective, which, I have to say, us military men must not do.

Q260 Bob Stewart: I’ll keep going, because I will be corrected very quickly by the Chairman. Intelligence in Helmand was nowhere near good enough in 2006. You probably won’t be able to answer the question as to why, but is it that much better now in 2010?

General Sir Nick Parker: It is hugely challenging. I think this is very close to the critical capability that we need to continue to develop. Our situational awareness and our understanding in a very strange cultural environment with a very dynamic insurgency have got to be absolutely cutting edge. I think we’re learning all the time. I think we’re a heck of a sight better than we were when I got there-not me-but the process is constantly evolving, and it must continue to do so.

Bob Stewart: I am not going to ask the last question.

Q261 Mr Havard: There is a question about lessons learned here, and there are questions about 2006 and so on. We withdrew from Basra. We ended up putting more of a component into Afghanistan. We are just wondering whether, having taken troops out of Iraq earlier, perhaps, in order to train them up, that caused us some risks in one theatre in order to invest in another. Whether we invested enough because we didn’t know enough and didn’t have enough to send is a question I think we are struggling with. It is not a case of blaming an individual; it is about learning from that process. Is that a fair assessment of the general situation that we saw ourselves in from 2006 up to 2009?

General Sir Nick Parker: I can’t-I’m pathetic.

Mr Havard: You can say no.

General Sir Nick Parker: My professional observation is that we misunderstand the importance of hierarchy. I am concerned that we may have allowed brigadiers to make decisions that are beyond their capacity or capability. I feel very strongly that, when we operate in a coalition environment, we must still make sure that there is a hierarchy of wisdom within the UK commitment that ensures that the right decisions are made. We did not have such clarity at the two-star level in the chain of command during our early days in Afghanistan. That would make me quite nervous today. I think that it is very important that we support the perspective that allows us to make really difficult military judgments about capability and tasks.

Q262 Mr Havard: That is interesting. Could I put a proposition to you that has been put to me? Essentially, all we managed to do between 2006 and 2009 was maintain the situation. We’ve learned lessons since then. In the south-I take the point that it’s an ISAF operation with the involvement of lots of countries, and that it is the whole country, not just Helmand-it is essentially no longer a NATO mission, it is a coalition of the willing dominated by the United States of America, although there are thousands of Danes, and so on. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but there is a set of policy questions that come from that, particularly for NATO, in terms of how we form the various components. The Brits put their hand up and said, "We’ll go," but perhaps there’s a better way of doing such things.

The reality of the situation is that it’s only America’s volume and capacity that can do it. As far as NATO is concerned, the proposition that has been put to me is that, in situations such as this, there are limits to NATO, as has been demonstrated by this activity, and it’s important that defence policy makers in the UK are aware of that. The egalitarian multinationalism of the NATO axis attempted in the south doesn’t work with such risky military aspects of the overall command. What lessons are there about who decides to deploy what and where have we learned from that process?

General Sir Nick Parker: The lesson is properly to empower the ISAF chain of command, and in this case it is, as I said right at the beginning, effectively American led, because they are the people who have the major physical stake in it. I think that our interpretation of coalition, NATO, or whatever type of operation it is, has to take account of those who provide the largest amount of resource.

Q263 Mr Havard: We are going into a risky area, and when you go into a risky bit, it’s really a coalition of the willing with the Americans, because it’s not really the rest of NATO.

General Sir Nick Parker: Well, yes-

Mr Havard: The other bits are fine, because there’s less of a risk up there, and there’s less fighting.

General Sir Nick Parker: They may not be. Georgia, Denmark, Estonia, Canada-

Mr Havard: There are some others with us, yes.

General Sir Nick Parker: And the Dutch. There are significant numbers.

Q264 Mr Havard: We don’t want to diminish their contributions by any stretch of the imagination.

General Sir Nick Parker: But they are relatively small stakeholders, and therefore one has to rely on those ISAF mechanisms, which are designed to take account of those national interests, and the German Chief of Staff and I are involved with that. That comes back to my point about the importance of investing in decision making at the theatre strategic level. That is the interface between the national interests and military decision making, which is where we must apply our influence.

Q265 Mr Havard: Those decisions in 2006 weren’t British decisions in isolation.

General Sir Nick Parker: I can’t answer that.

Q266 Mr Havard: Well, they weren’t. They were NATO’s.

General Sir Nick Parker: I can’t answer that.

Chair: You were in Northern Ireland at the time. We don’t think you’re pathetic.

Bob Stewart: From the answers we’ve heard, not from you, but from others, we might imply that the chain of command wasn’t right in 2006.

Chair: I think we can now move on.

Q267 John Glen: Over the past four years, concern has been expressed at various times and in various degrees about the shortages facing UK Forces in terms of the lack of helicopters, Close-Air Support and counter-IED capability. How do you see the Armed Forces now in terms of having sufficient quantities of what they need? Are there any gaps remaining?

General Sir Nick Parker: It is a balance between capability, tactics and the plan. Those three interrelate. If your tactics go wobbly you’ll start to lose the initiative; if you either don’t have sufficient capability or employ it incorrectly you’ll start to lose the initiative; and clearly, if the plan is wrong you’ll start to lose the initiative. My judgment when I left, speaking as the British National Contingent Commander, was that we had those things broadly in balance. You have to keep watching them all the time and there are two very important things that I think we should recognise. First, we need to ensure that we generate continuity so you don’t have six-month chunks of ideas. You must allow those ideas to flow so that you can react to things in a considered way. Secondly, we have to accept that the insurgent is very dynamic and therefore what looks great today will have to be adjusted when he changes his tactic. As a military man, I think we have force densities that allow us real flexibility now. When you have insufficient force density and your capability is stretched, your flexibility is reduced. We are not in that position at the moment.

Q268 John Glen: To give us some detail, could you comment on how well ISAF and UK Forces are dealing with the IED threat at the moment?

General Sir Nick Parker: Yes. The IED has clearly gained considerable interest because of the numbers of casualties that have been caused by it. The effort that has been put into it across all ISAF nations has been extraordinary and considerable but we must not kid ourselves: what we call the counter-IED fight is not against the IED, it is against the system that it is operating in. If you can defeat the insurgency, if you can eject the insurgent from the community, the IED goes away with no technical assistance at all. So we need to continue to improve our situational awareness; improve our intelligence; improve our tactics; make sure that our soldiers remain really brave and are prepared to do offensive operations and don’t become defensive; keep the proactive edge; and we need our technicians to keep watching developments because as sure as night follows day, once we get on top of one capability, it will morph into something else.

Q269 John Glen: Is your assessment that we are on top of it at the moment? You have spoken in general terms about the moving nature of the target and being appraised of the need to have more resources pumped in. I am really keen to get the explicit view from you now about how well that is going and whether there are sufficient resources to deal with the nature of the threat at the moment.

General Sir Nick Parker: I’m going to give you an answer which I worry about because I think it will give you the wrong impression. The statistics show that we are on top of it and that it is getting better. I think that when you get into that position you start to become complacent and you start to think you are winning. So this conversation worries me, partly because it is an open session and partly because I think there are positives and there is a danger that they could be misinterpreted. But if you look at the statistics and you look at the trends, you’re going to see something positive, but for God’s sake don’t let that make us complacent.

Q270 John Glen: Last week we took some evidence about bandwidth and communications infrastructure. There seemed to be some different views about what the UK Armed Forces had compared with the Americans. Do you think that the UK Armed Forces have access to enough bandwidth to use their communications systems in the best possible way? What is your view on that at the moment?

General Sir Nick Parker: There have been some remarkable advances. In 2009, when I came in, it was poor. I think we have shown a capacity to increase our bandwidth, thank goodness, which allows us to operate in a much more effective way. Fusing information in order to stay on top of it is critical. I believe that the culture of communication in my part of the Armed Forces is wrong. We have to take a very different approach to communication-the flat information environment-and it is in that culture and that attitude, the willingness to use the sorts of technology that are available to allow us to communicate today, that we have to change the way we do our business.

Q271 John Glen: It is much improved, but there is a long way to go.

General Sir Nick Parker: A long way to go, and culture, not necessarily stuff, is critical.

Q272 Sandra Osborne: You have referred to the loss of British lives, and that of course is one of the major concerns of all our constituents. Many of them wonder what the purpose is and what is actually being achieved. The Prime Minister has said that we will withdraw by 2015, "make no mistake about it." How confident are you that that can be successfully done?

General Sir Nick Parker: I think that is an entirely reasonable order to give to the military. The resources and the plan are there. We will have to manage a whole series of risks, and we should be planning to do so, but we should stay on the balls of our feet to deal with the unexpected.

Q273 Sandra Osborne: But given everything that you have said today about the difficulties of training the army, particularly in relation to the police and the whole scenario of the culture of the area, none of these things are new. They have been going on since we first went into Afghanistan. The culture is well known, for a start. How can you be so sure that this will work?

General Sir Nick Parker: Because I feel that with the plan that McChrystal brought in, that catalyst for progress injected something into this campaign that is starting to develop momentum and cautious optimism. It is entirely reasonable for our political masters to turn round to the Coalition and say, "Do it by 2015." I think that time frame is entirely reasonable, even with those challenges that you talk about. I am talking about out-of-combat operations, because that is what I read in the instruction.

There is still a debate to be had about how much we will need to be helping in the institutional capacity of the Armed Forces to sustain this. Dealing with the Afghans and making sure that they are content with what we are doing is another serious area that we need to consider.

Q274 Sandra Osborne: When will ISAF be able to withdraw?

General Sir Nick Parker: That I can’t answer. I am saying as a military man that it is entirely reasonable to be told to plan to get out of combat operations by 2014 or 2015. That is an entirely reasonable ask, and if we cannot do so we should pull our finger out. The situation is very dynamic, however, and we need to stay prepared to react. We need to continue to plan for contingencies that are unforeseen now.

Q275 Sandra Osborne: But you have talked a great deal about the need to keep the Afghan people on board, and you have also said that things might look good today but situations can change. How do you convince the Afghan people that we are not just going to cut and run in 2015, no matter what the circumstances?

General Sir Nick Parker: At our level, by honest relationships, by trust and by showing them the blood that we are spilling on their behalf. I work with all the principal advisers and the Ministers in the Government. They understand the degree of commitment at our level. I am not in a position to answer the question of how much political commitment there is from the Coalition nations.

Chair: General Parker and Brigadier Levey, thank you both very much indeed. That was really worthwhile evidence, and we are most grateful. We will now take evidence from General Lamb, but not at the same time as you.

Examination of Witness

Witness: General (rtd) Sir Graeme Lamb, KBE CMG DSO, gave evidence.

Q276 Chair: Welcome to the Committee. You come here on a regular basis, and we are most grateful to you for coming in again so soon. Because you have been here so recently, I don’t think it’s necessary for us to ask you to introduce yourself. As you have recently returned from helping the Americans in Afghanistan, do you mind telling us what you think the key issues have been in Afghanistan as a whole and in Helmand over the past two years?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: The reality is that I came out at the beginning of July, so I’m already four months out of date and in a collapsing circuit, one might say, by way of an informed position. At the time I was in Afghanistan I was principally driving towards the reintegration programme in support of General McChrystal’s adjustments in the campaign, but I was obviously privy to a host of conversations and had access to how they were developing their thinking and approach.

I think it’s quite important not to see Afghanistan as we tend to, which is to clump it into an act that started in 2001-and I recall that only too well-with the removal of the Taliban and how it is now, saying, "Well, it’s been a long campaign and look at where we are now." It has been a long, bloody and difficult campaign and it was always going to be that. However, one has to see the wave pattern of the initial removal of the Taliban, most of whom just went to ground and/or disappeared, because the Afghan people had dismissed them and they had lost their authority. They recognised retribution as, sort of, "That’s entirely understandable," on the basis of what had happened in the United States. There was that period when our eye was taken off the ball and we somehow thought it would be an easy ride.

Q277 Chair: Our eye was taken off the ball by Iraq?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I think Iraq, obviously, was a large factor, but it was also, in many ways, a sense that these things somehow have a beginning, middle and end. It’s a never-ending story. Savage wars of peace continue well beyond-well, I’ll be long dead by the time Afghanistan plays out and through. We are still engaged with Kenya. We don’t have any combat troops there, and we left it a long time ago, but the truth is that there is a continuation of policies, diplomacy, force and use of military force, training, training individuals, good governance, building capacity and so on. That has gone through.

The interesting thing with Afghanistan, in particular, was this cold realisation, which came about in the period towards the end of 2008 and in early 2009, that the situation was really very serious, to borrow a line from General McChrystal’s assessment. A lot of the expectation-you know, hope is not a plan-was that it was going in the right way, but in this case, there was a realisation that it was not, and that it was going in the wrong way.

You have heard me before, referring to what I saw when I turned up in 2009, which was a sense of perceived and real intimidation that had taken a grip across the country. It was very persuasive and intrusive across areas where we had no people, or in areas where we did have people but were not actually connected to them-that sense was there. Therefore, the campaign, in many ways, took a clear and new direction with the assessment that General McChrystal wrote. It took him three months to write it, and it took four months of contested consideration in Washington before the force or the resource that was needed to execute it was agreed-the President made his decision, as I recall, in the early part of December-because it was such a change.

In many ways, what we are seeing is a change in direction, and we should not view the campaign today as being from 2001. We should see it from 23 August 2009, as we understand how that began to change. I think I have put on record that in the first meeting that General McChrystal had with President Karzai, he arrived in his dress greens. That was not to impress the President with how many medals he had or who he was, or because he was a very swish dresser. It was not the case; it was to show due respect to the sovereign President. I sensed that President Karzai had not enjoyed that level of respect, and that level of understanding that here was a sovereign nation, over the previous years. There was a sense of him being given responsibility.

A number of campaigns were running concurrently, which were independent of the sovereignty of the nation. Sovereignty is important to the Afghan. General Mattis and General Petraeus created the counter-insurgency doctrine, which I call an extraordinarily good piece of work. They changed the direction, and brought in, in many ways, the embracing of what we had seen from Afghanistan, understanding, living with and going in and among the people; that was being drawn through. I recall-in fact, I think that it is recorded in a Bob Woodward book-General McChrystal saying that it was not either counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency. It is both, in the sense that both have to be brought to bear, which is important. The campaign that we are seeing is one that has been drawn from that period of 2009, when the change in direction was set by General McChrystal in that first year, and it is now being delivered by General Petraeus.

Q278 Chair: Yet we were told earlier today by General Parker, and last week by others and General Messenger, that the McChrystal doctrine was not a new thing. It was a development of a process. Do you think that that is wrong, in view of what you have said?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Yes, I would. I am a straight-talking individual.

Q279 Chair: Ah, it’s wonderful when you have retired.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I was pretty straight-talking when I was serving, actually. Everyone in uniform would sit there listening, waiting for the comment. When I turned up in Kabul in 2009, I looked at an organisation-a structure-and a relationship with the embassy and with the Afghans, as well as the civ-mil connection, which was not fit for purpose. You can dress it any way you want and put lipstick on it, but it was not fit for purpose. In that short space of time, General McChrystal turned all that. He restructured, reconnected and re-engaged. He drew the pieces together and changed the overall culture.

Q280 Mr Havard: You say that there was the counter-terrorism operation, Operation Enduring Freedom, the ISAF thing and all that stuff going on, but this is a much more joined-up operation. You have counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism in a unified package, with support and so on. It is not just a simple change, saying, "Let’s end the separate mission that the US were conducting and integrate it with the rest of the ISAF mission." Or was it? You seem to be saying that this is something conceptually different to that and much greater than that. As I understand it, there is four times more SF activity going on than there was during Operation Enduring Freedom, but that does not matter, because it is part of a more unified process. Is that right?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Correct, sir. The term "unified" is exactly the right one. There is a way to go yet, so the idea that the civ-mil peace is tidy would misrepresent the reality. It is a lot better. The relationship between ISAF and the United States-between the different approaches-has been brought together. Chains of command have been improved, and they needed to be, because they were pretty ineffective. They were operating in single lines of operation. I sense that time will draw out the legacy of the McChrystal year, in terms of the change of culture and the change of force command control, as well as the sense, whether it was in Europe, Washington, or even Westminster, that this was do-able from a military point of view. The campaign began to conform and respond to that. That was a new draw.

America would not have sacked Dave McKiernan-he is a fine officer whom I worked with in 2003, when we went into Iraq, and has a good track record-if he had been able to embrace the change that was seen to be necessary and that was then brought about by General McChrystal. At that time, there was a range of relationships between NATO, ISAF, America and Karzai, who was going through the difficult period of an election. All that occurred at the same time that he was building relationships that, in many ways, General Petraeus is now able to fuel off so as to proceed on a course that was set in that earlier period of change. The movement in that period was a Herculean effort by all those involved. At that time, it was driven and the course was set in a quiet and unassuming way, but with his inevitable delivery, by McChrystal. That included both counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, and it brought those together, because they had been parallel activities or divergent activities, and they had not been inclusive of the population per se.

Chair: I regret saying that it is wonderful when you retire, because I remember from what you told us in Iraq that you did not seem to mind speaking most controversially, even when you were not retired.

Q281 Mr Brazier: General Lamb, would you like to share with us your views on the effectiveness of the PJHQ, which figures heavily in the pamphlet that you recently co-authored, and particularly on its general effectiveness and on the specific issue of overlap with the Operations Directorate in the MoD?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: My views on the PJHQ are partly expressed in the paper that we pushed out for the Policy Exchange. I had the good fortune to sit at the back and listen to General Parker-I have a huge amount of respect for him-and his observations were right on the money. He talked about the need for such an organisation, when you are dealing with a complex, multi-service commitment, to be able to prepare, deploy, sustain and recover. The term that is in question is the issue of command.

I read a recent article by the Professor of the History of War at Oxford, Hew Strachan, who nicely captures the dilemma of theatre and the rear, in a way that is hugely insightful. He is a master of the pen; I could probably kill somebody with one, but I certainly cannot write with the damn thing. He puts it nicely when he talks about this operational and strategic divide. That was an area of some confusion.

I remember having a conversation with the American ambassador responsible for counter-terrorism, whose name escapes me. At the end of the discussion, he came out and said, "Graeme, I see all the intelligence that you have, and you are getting great access"-because of the position that I was in-"and I see some other stuff above that, which you do not see, but the truth is that I just don’t see it in the same way as you have just explained." I said, "That will be because you are 4,500 miles away." It is that simple.

There is a real danger that you end up with very sound and good reasons, from good people working extraordinarily hard, back here. They are trying to understand something, but they are already behind a massive time lag in following the nuances of change, and they are not living and breathing it. So, the theatre level of command is very important. The concern remains, whether about Sangin, Helmand or Basra, over this continual perspective from little Britain, which is where our people are. But they actually sit within a broader campaign, and it is the success of that campaign, not of Helmand or of Basra, that will deliver the out-turn. Our forefathers had the ability to understand. Churchill and his chiefs crossed the Atlantic two or three times to sit down and discuss the campaign against Germany and Japan over a number of days, and to set the broad course of action. Are we doing that? People will say that we have modern communications, but I say that they are sometimes just an excuse.

The question is how is the campaign being directed, both from an overall grand strategic point of view, or whatever the right level would be-I defer to Hew Strachan on this one-and from a theatre perspective. It is about the delivery of the campaign as a single action, not a series of individual national activities, which is where the campaign has gone to. We have Germans training the police, or not, as the case may be, and us responsible for drugs, or not, and not doing as well as we could have done. I don’t apportion blame very glibly; I just see it as it is. At the same time, we have the Americans with the high-value targets, the counter-terrorist approach, the drones, and what I call the specific targeting programme. All of that is running.

There is an importance in drawing all those together, because it is the sum of the parts that makes the Force-the Coalition-so superior to the individual asymmetric attacks or approaches that the opposition has taken. It learns and morphs very quickly, as Nick quite rightly pointed out, but the truth of the matter is that we need to bring not only the whole of Government, but the whole of the campaign, to bear.

If you look at the movement of troops, as Nick quite rightly pointed out, it was an absolute no-brainer to me and Nick Parker sitting in theatre. It was felt, for a vast number of legitimate reasons, back here that we will be seen to have failed in that, but that is just a battle of the narrative, and that is the narrative back here that needs to be run out. The right decision was about where we need to apportion our Forces in order to deliver the best effect in a campaign sense.

Q282 John Glen: Can we turn back to the attitudes of the Afghan people to the Coalition? What is your assessment of how they see things evolving by 2015 and beyond? Do they believe that the Coalition will just evaporate, or won’t have such a long-term commitment?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: We are light years on from where we were, in a dislocated relationship with the population. We are now very much more joined up in that sense. A sense of how this plays out to where we will no longer be delivering combat force is not unimportant to the Afghans. They see that as a natural transition to a problem that they themselves would realise exists, if you rubbed them hard enough, and that is about the level of intimidation. They did not enjoy their time under the Taliban-I am not talking about everyone, because they weren’t all over the place, but the majority of them-and the Hazaras had a bloody time. I remember going to Bamiyan in 2001, and there were grim reflections of people’s time under the Taliban. It wasn’t just the Buddhas being knocked down, but real people being knocked down. That was their greater concern.

We see this in stark terms, which is right. While we are here now, we are gone in 2015. As Nick quite rightly pointed out, the direction that has been given is that we will cease combat operations in 2015. What we continue to do in the way of training is for 2015, and for the government of the day to decide-how they want to play it out, the authority that is given and how the Afghans want the relationship. That is the next phase. Reducing some of the campaign’s forces, as set out in the near term, is, in my view, again entirely sensible because the Afghans begin to take the responsibility. The Afghans taking ownership of their army and police and, in a sense, their national responsibility, is an absolutely essential part of the transition.

Q283 John Glen: Do they see themselves as having sufficient support beyond 2015? Is that distinction in the nature of the evolving role of the Coalition?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I cannot speak for the Afghans, but my sense is that they are entirely comfortable with the idea of us beginning to relinquish the position that we hold in the coming years, in a way that puts them back into that sense of sovereignty, which is very Afghan. You often hear people saying, "Well, there is no nation of the Afghans", but I would contest that in every way.

Q284 John Glen: Moving into the area of a political settlement, there is a lot of debate over the degree of corruption and the role of President Karzai. How do you see him, in terms of being an impediment to a political settlement? Are we stressing enough the problems of corruption and trying to sort it out?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Corruption is pretty omnipresent anywhere in the world.

Q285 John Glen: What I’m trying to get to is the issue of how it impedes a reasonable political settlement.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Others will disagree, but my view is that an election took place, and there were inaccuracies during that, but the outcome was that President Karzai was affirmed as President. That is a democratic process. It may look a little ugly, and it may be slightly tarnished and rough, but that is the hand you’ve got. I have heard said in a number of other countries, "Oh, he is not the man we want. He’s not going to do what we want to do," and you think, "Well, that’s pretty bloody undemocratic." He is the bloke we’ve got, and therefore one has to try to help him help us help him, and so on. The transition is quite important.

Quite often, we will look back and say, "President Karzai is this" or "President Karzai is that." What I found fascinating is that when Stan McChrystal took President Karzai out to the shires-I am sure that exactly the same is occurring with General Petraeus-people were weeping because their President had come to see them. Their President, not ours. We somehow missed the importance of the sense of nationhood, nationality, and sovereignty, as it runs across for the Afghan.

Q286 John Glen: But the amount of corruption and the need to continue reform within the Afghan Government still remain. What you are attesting to is the democratic legitimacy, fundamentally, of Karzai. Is enough being done to address the corruption that is still embedded within the Afghans?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: You have the campaign for the rule of law, and people are actively engaging with FBI investigations. Some will hit the walls and be adjusted. Others will begin to chip away. The idea of delegating some authority is back out, because we were the ones who, in many ways, constructed the Bonn Agreement and how Afghanistan should be governed. We centralised the power. That was quite counter-culture. It made eminent sense to Westminster or Washington, but I don’t think that it made too much sense if you were living out in the shires in Farah.

Q287 Mr Havard: Yes, some form of Jeffersonian democracy might work somewhere, but not necessarily in Afghanistan. As for President Karzai being in transition, he is in his last term as President. We are talking about a continuum that takes us beyond 2014, when the next President will be in place. Presumably there will be another presidential election in America during that period. There are lots of questions about how the transition will work. How do you see the changes made by the Afghans and others to that constitutional structure affecting the ability to do the things that we have declared we want to do?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: If you take a run across to Iraq and look at Prime Minister Maliki, that continues to be a transition-a political change in progress. Exactly the same will occur in Afghanistan. An enormous amount of work is being done. Everyone recognised back in 2002-03, just as we did in Iran, that we need good governance. You then put lots of people in. There is lots of talk, papers are written and money is spent, and you turn around and say, "What is the output measurement of individuals who are now back in government, who have been trained in finance, or in the provinces?" A lot of that is going on, and it will increase because the importance has been recognised. I sense that it has been a little late coming, and that is the whole Government approach. The situation is often is put down as security stopping us being able to something, in which case nothing was done. Kipling wasn’t wrong when he talked about "doers". My view is that it will move forward.

Chair: We now have a vote. I guess that there will be only one vote, so I propose suspending the Committee for 15 minutes. Will you please come back at 4.15 pm? I am sorry to give you a break for 15 minutes while we do our democratic duty.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

On resuming-

Q288 Sandra Osborne: I wanted to ask about General McChrystal’s strategy, but I think you have made it perfectly clear that you see that as a positive strategy and one that has already reaped rewards. What impact have civilian casualties had in terms of the counter-insurgency strategy, and has the policy of courageous restraint made a difference in relation to securing the consent of the local population?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: On the position that General McChrystal took, to change a culture, quite often you push the boundary and then settle back into a position, which is where I think the campaign and General Petraeus are taking it to. General Parker explained that rather eloquently.

The importance of casualties to the Afghans had been a long-running sore. The assumption would be, "We are seeking the bad guys and if the two of them are among a group of whatever they may be and they are killed in the process, then by association they shouldn’t have been there, or that’s just how it is, because the bad guys are pretty evil individuals." But I think that some of that, year on year over the years, was a sore that grew that the insurgency then bled off. They were able to see that this was an attack against them and against tribes, individual clans, families, villages and communities. They operate in the communication space incredibly better than we do. It is the area in which we are horribly deficient. It was important, therefore, to change that dynamic through the way people drove-so it was how we were perceived by the population-and how we tried to reduce the casualties in the use of force and other ways.

Hobbes’s world is a grim old place. Both sides are getting broken up, killed and damaged in the process of this, and people try to apply a Surrey map to it, which just doesn’t work. Trying to reduce those casualties is recognised by the people. There was an incident in the North, in Kunduz or wherever it was, when a tanker was blown up and a number of locals who had been told by the Taliban to get the fuel were killed. McChrystal went straight there, and a lot of people said, "What are you doing? We haven’t had the inquiry yet and Germany are upset about this." The bush net of Afghanistan is every bit as good as the bush nets you will find in other parts of the third and second world. It is often far better than where we have a clever communication space. It went around the country that here was someone who was genuinely trying to reduce civilian casualties, and the vast majority of Afghans got that. So McChrystal was seen as somebody who was in charge of ISAF and the Coalition Forces who was genuinely aware of Afghans. That is not how they had perceived it before. That doesn’t mean that the previous Generals were not conscious of that responsibility, but it was not seen that way by the Afghans. That change in culture was very important, and him taking Karzai down on visits and standing shoulder to shoulder was very important for perceptions and, therefore, visualisation.

The adjustment in doing everything we could to reduce casualties-from those injured in road accidents to those killed under a collateral damage profile in the rules of engagement-was an important cultural change for ISAF and the Force, and that has borne fruit.

Q289 Chair: Why do they operate in a communication space incredibly better than we do?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: It is long-standing. I travelled by train from Scotland today and read Paul Wolfowitz referring to a piece in one of the letters. I remember him coming out to Iraq and saying, "Graeme, we’ve got to get this message into the beltway." I said, "Hey, that’s your job, with due respect. My job is to get the message out to the old shepherd over the hill who doesn’t have a radio or television. We are here to try to make his life better. The beltway is your drama." And he said, "Fair call." Our sense is that we tend to keep looking backwards to the broadsheets, what’s driving neo-politics, and popularity-to today’s headlines-rather than recognising that that is important. At the end of the day, Clausewitz wasn’t wrong with his holy trinity of public, politicians and armed forces. Equally, we must recognise that there are some very important audiences regionally. That is why, in Iraq, we put a lot of effort into not manipulating or manoeuvring, but being able to express our case to al-Jazeera, because it was well listened to.

In ’82, we all remember that rather dull Jock-McDonald, I think he was-who went on, night after night, on the BBC. Eventually we thought, "He’s the guy telling the truth", so that mattered. The range of the audiences we are looking for-whether it is the Sons of Malik, through twittering-are widespread. Often we think that we have a really great message here, but it’s retired General Lamb. I get up and I’m a white guy, a Brit, so there’s no way I can carry the message.

So, they are very good at understanding who the messengers are in this world. They have taken a great deal of time building up and setting the conditions in the madrassahs in Pakistan or the like, so you have people who are absolutely inclined to a view that says that the twin towers was a CIA plot-a ridiculous view, but it is believed because they are able, in effect, to bring that to bear. We are badly responsive and, actually, rather ignorant in the way that we think that a message that makes eminent sense back here is absolutely or entirely appropriate. That should be understood by those forward. We just don’t do cross-culture nowadays-we don’t have Wilfrid Thesiger, who spoke six or seven local dialects and lived with the tribes, so that he understood them and they trusted him.

Q290 Mr Havard: Yes, we have had a lot of-well, some-evidence on that. I spoke to Governor Mangal last week or the week before. We have the "radio in a box" and all that sort of stuff, so there are clearly attempts.

Like you, I met the Afghan farmer in 2003 who had a bicycle and a donkey. I said, "What do you want?" and he said, "A mobile phone." Well, he’s had one for a long time now-all of that stuff. I think you are right about that.

The question I wanted to ask was this. While you have all that happening in the population, out of that population has got to come the country’s own security services. Can you give us your view of how you think that process is developing-that is, the development of the Afghan Security Forces, mindful of the fact that there are various components within that, such as the army, the police and so on? What is your general, overall assessment of how that process is now working?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, we had the bringing in of General Caldwell, with the energy he put forward, the money that went in behind him and the emphasis on training-NATO’s response had been a tad lacklustre. The investment in literacy before 2009 was zero, but now 27,000 individuals are literate. That is not unimportant.

The army and police sat almost static at about 60,000 or 70,000, as I recall, from about 2002-03 right through to 2005-06. And don’t forget that the police weren’t being trained-they were being given a uniform and told to go out there and be policemen. For all this period, you had this. Look at the increase over the near period, and not only in the infantry-the foot soldiers, whether police or army. There is now real investment in signallers. There were no schools for logistics, but there are now four, from my recollection of when I left.

All these changes are really important, because what they do is build up Q2-quantity and quality. We had almost no investment in quantity or quality for four or five years, year after year. Suddenly we began to put some investment into quantity, and only recently have we really increased that and ramped it up exponentially, exactly as we did in Iraq, and at the same time we have absolutely paid. Petraeus is driving that really hard now. Stan set the correction, but Petraeus really understands the idea of quality.

So, we have the investment in the quality base. I think the number of training seats went from 1,900 to about 9,300, almost doubling up in areas, and doubling in the police from about seven to about 14. All that has increased exponentially in the near term, with a view to improving the leadership and quality of the force. If you then put that in place alongside the partnership, the partnership is a two-way street; you have the Afghan police or army beginning to realise what is right and what is wrong, because when that person is operating, somebody says, "You don’t do that, son." But we have the individual on the other side-the British or American soldier-being told some of the cultural nuances, which, no matter what little training we can put in during the time we have available, has an effect. If you put that together, my view is that we are on a significantly better trajectory than we were. There was no trajectory for 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, in the form of the police. We have been able to improve a little, but we have been on a significantly better trajectory since 2009. As George Harrison said, "Give peace a chance." I sense that there are absolutely Herculean efforts going on out there to improve the quantity and the quality of the Forces, and they will make a significant difference.

Q291 Chair: What about the quantity of ISAF Forces? Have we got enough troops there now?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I can’t remember the exact figures. Not every province is a drama and not every district is a security crisis. I would not want to speak for General David or Nick’s replacement. It is for them to lay out whether they think they have sufficient forces. There is a danger sometimes of thinking we need to throw in more forces. I am quite clear that as you increase and ramp up the ANSF in both the police and army, as you begin to build in genuine governance and have PRTs operating and ranging widely, because one has managed to get over some of the ridiculous security constraints of being unable to leave the barracks or go outside the wire, but soldiers can. My view is that as we go into 2011 we will be in a position where I sense that it will not be an issue of numbers. Whether it is in that period or the near period of 2012, I think we will be considering whether we can reduce some of our force levels. The overall capacity and effect that the ANSF and the Coalition bring to bear will be significantly different.

Q292 Chair: Would you agree that the force levels we had before 2009 and the general build-up to the American surge were inadequate to do what we were asking them to do?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I would put it that the numbers were inadequate, and that was realised. President Obama should be given credit for increasing the numbers twice-the initial force was 21,000 and then in effect 30,000 when NATO asked for the additional 10,000, and rightly so in that period. The mere fact that you have a new campaign go in this direction probably will increase the force levels from where we were. Before, we were in a campaign that was just bumping along.

Q293 Chair: How did that come about?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: That came about because of a realisation that the campaign of intimidation was beginning to increase-the levels of violence, the levels of control across the country. Hence the reason that you had the Chairman, Admiral Mullan, go out and have that discussion with General McKiernan, who had already asked for more forces, but was in many ways not embracing the idea of a fulsome and fuller campaign to be able to address the underlying problems that needed to be addressed. That’s what Petraeus did. His assessment set the tone-"This is very serious"-and it was a report to be read in a cold shower. His requests for forces, if you recall, were 10,000, 40,000 and 85,000. There is a harsh-what I call appetite. You could change to the new campaign, but it would require at least a 40,000 figure to do that.

Q294 Chair: But somehow, we had got into the position where we were heavily deployed in Helmand in those terms, yet it was far too lightly to achieve what we wanted to do there.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, if one reads the Petraeus-Mattis doctrine of counter-insurgency-what I call the correlation of forces, the numbers game, and all the rest-that is self-evident.

Q295 Chair: But how did we get into that position?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Because, before that time, we were asking, "Where is the enemy?" My first point to General Stan in the briefing that I gave was that our strategic communications suck-this was in late August 2009. I had done my assessment and set the conditions in the context as I saw it.

My second point was that we had, for seven or eight years, asked the question, "Where is the enemy?" The question that we should have asked was, "Where should we be?"

Q296 Chair: Why have we not asked that question?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: I suppose you will have to ask others.

Q297 Chair: You were, at the time, in Iraq. Did you feel that you were having your forces whittled out from underneath you in order to fulfil this new priority in Afghanistan?

Q298 Mr Havard: In addressing that, I think that you were here earlier, and you heard the question that I similarly asked about our drawing down to train and to divert power, so perhaps you could incorporate a comment about that.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Don’t forget, I was in Iraq in 2006-07, for the summer period.

Q299 Chair: You could see all the focus moving from Iraq to Afghanistan, could you?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: No. Often it is about things such as the enablers-the number of special forces, the number of Predators, the systems, the bandwidth, the biometrics, which is just hardware stuff. There are also some electrons that go with that and then there are some people, because the dwell time was a continuous question, not only for us-our harmony guidelines-but also for America. Dwell time was a big deal because they had gone through a period where they had increased the pressure on their own forces. They were going out for a year, which was extended to 14 months and in certain cases 18 months-and a year turnaround. In these campaigns, if you are operating in Baghdad or Mosul, or where the Americans were-the Marines in particular, who were out in Anbar-it is absolutely hard pounding.

We were in Iraq at that point on a campaign that was the transition to handover-picking-they were the terms that I recall were around at the time. What is interesting is that at the time that America-that General Jack Keane realised that the transition was not going to succeed, that the situation was very ugly, and they changed their campaign focus, we were ahead, because Basra was what it was. We always knew that it required the Government of Iraq to take ownership of that, both with their own forces and with their political forces.

The question that the Committee should ask-I am not the one to answer it-is, "As that campaign change occurred, what was the discussion amongst the Coalition? What was the discussion between America and us, and America and the remnants who were still there, on that change in direction?" I sense that we carried on in Basra with the campaign that we were running with, and America had changed to a different direction, and the two diverged at that point. The consequences then ran out as we went through in and over time. Actually, it all worked out fine in the end-or where we are now, which is-

Q300 Chair: Well, it worked out fine after the Charge of the Knights, in a sense, because the Charge of the Knights succeeded in Basra.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: It is no different to when-I could be corrected on this-the Ardennes Offensive went through in ’44. Montgomery had to shift north very rapidly to help the Americans, because otherwise Antwerp was under threat. So within a coalition, the answer is that is what you do.

In this case, it is absolutely axiomatic that for the problem that occurs in Basra, at the end of the day, you have to bring forces in from outside, because of the nature of the problem, in order to help. It is interesting to see what they brought down; a lot of it, actually, technology-ISR, some helicopters, biometrics, bandwidth. It wasn’t just foot soldiers. Oh, and then Iraqis who were not from Basra, who we should have embedded with. So, all of that-the idea that your higher authority, your higher headquarters helps you-that is why Hew Strachan’s work is so very correct in the way he identifies it. Because in Afghanistan, in looking at where our force levels were and our density, our ability to bring about- Sangin and Helmand are a hard nut, in many ways the hardest nut that sits within Afghanistan. The idea that now this is "our" space. You say, "No, this is the campaign space." Success or failure there is quite important, but it’s the overall campaign that matters. As we saw, they push pressures up on to Kunduz and around on to areas to the north in order to try and draw forces away from that which was a correlation which was a superior level of force against the forces that were arrayed against us down in Helmand province.

Q301 Chair: Do you think we suffered reputationally by the withdrawal from Basra?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Yes. Was it some sort of catastrophic moment, some end-of-Empire, end of the British? Not at all.

Chair: That wouldn’t have been the question I would have asked.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: But is it a sore? It is no different from that naval debacle in the NAG. Most Americans say, "I can’t believe you didn’t fire back." So these things have a compilation. America, though, and people such as General Petraeus, General McChrystal, actually all the people I deal with-and I can only speak of those-and all the Senators and the individuals who I have gone across and seen, are only too conscious of the incredible contribution in blood and treasure that the United Kingdom has made to this campaign, and the importance of that in the overall condition setting for the opportunity of success.

Q302 Mr Havard: By design, default, mistake or whatever, it consolidated the Baswarian nationalism and the Iraqi nationalism-their aspirations to have their own country, do their own thing and get their own security.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Correct, but it wasn’t until they came down and did that. That was the time. That is why there is some similarity in Afghanistan-the importance of getting President Karzai to begin to accept and own, as the sovereign leader, those issues around Kandahar and the like, and how that goes forward. That is the route, which is a difficult one, because you have got constant conflicts of perceptions. President Karzai has a raft of audiences that General Petraeus does not. He has a different set of audiences. Both are looking for almost opposite statements, as is the United Nations. So, de Mistura’s position is very important. Mark Sedwill’s ability to be able to interface some of that. All of that is this complex mixture of communication that needs to take place. Some of what is said, you think is really unhelpful and is counter to what we want to do, but actually it is necessary in order to contain what I call the large majority of individuals who are looking for some sort of route and progress.

Q303 Chair: Have we, the British, learnt lessons from Iraq and Basra, that we are transporting into Afghanistan?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: If you look at the new Chief of the Defence Staff in the form of David Richards and if you look at Nick Parker sitting here today, here are people who have had intimate knowledge, in every sense, of the Afghan campaign. They are hugely conscious of how this thing has unfolded over time. They have personal experiences from Iraq as to how that should be read across. The question you might have to ask is not whether the generals have learned those lessons, but has the comprehensive approach, have the other component parts of the force, all drawn from that? Are we feeling, in effect, that those lessons are now learnt? The most misused term I come across in modern days is "lessons learned," because they seldom are.

Q304 John Glen: I refer back to the question that I think you probably heard General Parker address, which concerns the deficiencies-or not-in the supply of the UK Armed Forces with counter-IED capabilities such as protective vehicles and helicopters. There has been a lot of commentary about those gaps in provision over the various different stages. I wonder what your perspective is on that, and what the situation is now in terms of whether the Armed Forces are getting what they need.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, I’m a retired old bloke, at the end of the day.

It is in the nature of a fellow or girl in uniform not blindly to say, "We will overcome," but to work with the hand you are given, because that is the practical, pragmatic reality of what you have got.

In 2001-I can speak about this from a personal point of view-when we went into Afghanistan, I remember having conversations and saying, "Somebody needs to get me some serious ISR capability." The Predator, which was the original one, was up and running and I said that whatever it took and whatever it cost, I needed to have them. Each one of those takes a belt-load of people to operate it. You look at the Predator and think that it is unmanned, but it takes about 150 people to operate the damn thing, from the meteorological, to the commanding, to the fliers, to the maintenance, to the sustainability and all those aspects that come into play; my figures may be wrong, but it is a belt-load of people. My view was to say, "Whatever it takes, just get me an awful lot of these pieces of equipment, as we need."

My sense over the years was that we tended to run the two campaigns off supplementals. So the Treasury, which we can often find fault with and throw a dart at, actually did rather well on Urgent Operational Requirements-UORs-which are one-time-use equipments. It is a story that is not well understood. We tend to blame the Treasury for not doing this, but it put billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into the requirements that we needed.

Did we as an organisation take the equipment programme and shake it, break it, turn it around and deliver to a campaign that everybody thought would be over by Christmas? No, we did not. My father fought in a war that in four years went from Fairey Swordfish biplanes sinking the Bismarck, to us flying jet fighters. Even now we have I don’t know how many Reapers and Predators, but my view would be that we are well short of.

Q305 John Glen: Notwithstanding the changing nature of the need, and the fact that there was a deployment of resources from the Treasury in a timely way, what could have been done differently in the provisioning? Are there any lessons learnt from that overall experience, or is it really quite typical of what you would expect, given the changing nature of the need in the theatre?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Who would have said that Bosnia would last as long as it did? President Clinton absolutely got his time scale on that one wrong by some margin. The idea that one can be very clever and say, "It will last this long, and it will be over and we’ll be back by Christmas," is misleading. We then have the big programmes that run all the way through these, whether it is aircraft, tanks or grey hulls. They are running on to the institutions of the three services and how they operate. One has no idea how short or long these campaigns last.

Chair: But we do. We know.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Well, we do know, and history helps us. At the same time, there is the question whether this is a change in the nature or the character of warfare. My view is that we are now seeing changes in this century. Again, when talking about the Policy Exchange work, where industrial violence can be brought about by just a few individuals, which was the act of only a state before, that changes the ground rules fundamentally and for ever. Consequently, understanding that is no mean feat. There are some who understood it, there are some who sort of got it, but were stuck with what we were getting, and there are some good, honest people, who fight well, who just won’t get it as far as-to borrow a line from Parker-night follows day.

Q306 Sandra Osborne: So what’s your view on the chances of a successful withdrawal by 2014-15?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, I would agree entirely with General Parker’s view. I think it is a respectable time scale given the way that the campaign has shifted-the commitment to that campaign in numbers and resources. Are we seeing the same level of political diplomatic engagement in the region-China’s place, position and interests, both from a resource, but also, in fact, a stability point of view? There is Russia, Iran-all these individual players-and Turkey, which is a significant player in this game. Are we addressing that with the same energy that the young men and women in Helmand and those who are committed in Afghanistan are? My view is that the jury’s still probably out on that, and that the Foreign Secretary could do better yet.

What I saw in 2009 was a campaign that I have referred to as people marching along looking very smart and being overtaken by lemmings. The route was one that, in effect, would be really unsatisfactory in every sense. That has changed. Listening to the campaign that General McChrystal put together and the direction he gave it, and the way that General Petraeus-I know him well-is able to take that and push it forward, my view is that, as we were in Iraq, and as I look toward a whole range of little things beginning to occur, we should be cautiously optimistic right now. Watch as we go through, because I sense that that position will improve. So when you look as far as 2014-15, with a new set of directions and all the work that is going on, my instinct tells me that this absolutely has a shot at the title.

Q307 Mr Havard: On the current campaign, one of my questions was going to be about whether we are sufficiently joined-up across the UK Government to be supporting the current campaign. You made a few comments earlier on about that, and perhaps that has improved dramatically. Whether it is sufficient or not, I would like you to say something about that, and also about whether that is true across the international Coalition, because there are slight differences there. Perhaps in doing that, you could contextualise some of the things you were just saying about how that develops Afghanistan’s economic situation, its position with its neighbours, and its general context. At the end of the day, we have discussed this before-the regional dimension to this question is just as important as the domestic question in Britain or in Afghanistan itself.

Chair: This, you will be relieved to hear, is the last question.

General Sir Graeme Lamb: The well-known fact that there is $1 trillion-and rising-worth of resources sitting in Afghanistan was neither understood nor recognised by me in 2001. I’m not sure that it was recognised by David Richards when he was there in 2006. We had inclinations-we knew that the Russians had oil and gas-but we had no idea of the volume or potential wealth that sits in there.

I sense that you have two common interests for the region, and those involve Turkey, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India from a little distance, and China from a little more distance. The first is the real need for regional stability and Afghanistan is an unknown player in that. We have some great diplomats. The idea of engaging in that and helping where common interests meet in bringing about that stability is very important.

The second is, in fact, straightforward and selfish self-interest needs. If you are India and you have no copper-it is a developing nation and it is absolutely on a big development spree-at the end of the day you need copper. If you are China, the answer is you could probably take every single resource that exists in Afghanistan and you’ll still be short of what you need for a population that is growing at the rate it is and has to create 24 million jobs every year. So there is the demand from just those two before you then look at Turkey and all the rest.

I therefore think the opportunity of a successful outcome in Afghanistan is something that we have been slow to identify and slow to engage in. It is not necessarily about having the really huge multinationals come in, because what they will do is hedge their futures off in a reserve, which is Helmand, Afghanistan. We don’t want that. We want some small companies to go in that have to meet an in-year or very near to in-year or three-year target return of a profit on actually extracting. The Chinese embassy buying the mine outside Kabul, one of a series of very large, very rich copper deposits, was jolly good. That was $3 billion. That’s not the half of it. The important part is what that brings in over 30 years in the way of revenue to the country.

But the most important part is what does that bring in the way of jobs for Afghan people, whether it is railroads or an infrastructure that comes in and all the support for that? It’s about getting small starter companies up, which we were not so good at doing in Iraq and we don’t seem to be doing so well in Afghanistan. We should be looking to get in those who are looking for a near-term profit, whether it is in gold, oil, gas or some of the exotics like lithium. That is what we should be pushing hard to bring about: getting that investment in-it’s all about the money.

Q308 Mr Havard: Do you have you any confidence that our approach to helping them to develop their processes to do that-our cross-Government approach and the international community’s approach to developing Afghanistan along an Afghanistan plan, as opposed to some other beautiful plan-is what is really happening here?

General Sir Graeme Lamb: No. But I think your comment is absolutely right. What is the Afghan plan? How do we help the Afghans secure what they see as being important rather than what we see as being important? I heard comments when I was in Afghanistan saying, "Right. We need to concentrate on marbles and gems." My experience of gemstones in Africa is not a particularly attractive one. So the truth is say, "No, to hell with that." It is about the practical part. We should turn around and listen to what they want and let’s help them make sure that they safeguard it, otherwise the resource will be raped. Safeguard that resource and at the same time give them the ability to see how they can make both near money and then mid-term money in order to be able to fund a nation state.

Chair: On that very important point, I think we should finish. Thank you very much indeed for coming to help us. It was, as always with you, extremely interesting and, as usual, pretty controversial.