Examination of Witness (Questions 466-503)
Q466 Chair: We are sorry to have
kept you waiting. As you know, we are trying to get to the bottom
of the reasons why we were in Helmand, and precisely how we got
to where we are now. The key time—a difficult time—seems
to have been 2006. We are most grateful to you for coming to give
evidence in private. The way it worked with Rob Fry and John Reid
was that they answered questions and a transcript was made. Agreement
was then reached between them and us as to what, if anything,
should be cut out and not for public consumption. Is that okay
by you?
Brigadier Butler: Karen explained
that to me.
Q467 Chair: I will kick off. What
was your understanding of the background to the deployment of
UK Forces to Southern Afghanistan in 2006? What was the designated
UK mission?
Brigadier Butler: I think everyone
was aware that I was involved right from the early stages in 2004,
when I took over command of 16 Air Assault Brigade. I first got
into discussion in early 2005, when it looked likely that we were
going to deploy a force to Southern Afghanistan. The debate in
early 2005 was really centred around the size of the Force and
whether it would be a PRT—a Provincial Reconstruction Team—a
PRT plus, or a battle group plus plus. Those sorts of debates
were going on, in terms of force levels.
Q468 Chair: You say you first
got into discussion—discussion with whom?
Brigadier Butler: The very first
discussions I had were with General Richards, who was commanding
the ARRC at that time. He and I discussed the concept of a Theatre
Reserve, and 16 Air Assault Brigade, being a highly mobile, aviation-led
brigade, would have fitted that requirement very neatly. As you
know, that was one of his enduring requirements as commander of
the ARRC, and then commander of ISAF.
Q469 Chair: He wanted a British
Theatre Reserve, didn't he?
Brigadier Butler: He didn't specify
that as such, but I think his preference would have been for a
British Theatre Reserve. That made absolute sense; it is something
that wasn't committed, and as a brigade we could have fitted that
requirement. That was the genesis of my actual engagement as a
brigade commander of my headquarters. The discussion took place
over the late spring and the summer—discussion about force
size, and whether it would be 16 Air Assault Brigade or 3 Commando
Brigade. The decision was taken in mid or late summer 2006 that
it would be 16 Air Assault Brigade that would provide the force
elements. How many, what type and what constitution of command
and control, and everything else, was still to be agreed.
Q470 Chair: What did you think
was the mission of the UK's deployment to the Southern part of
Afghanistan, as opposed to discussions of a Theatre Reserve?
Brigadier Butler: We can park
the Theatre Reserve, because that evaporated, not that General
Richard lacked the requirement for it. We were engaged intellectually
in this as a headquarters. I had most experience at a senior level
in the Army, having been there in 2001 and 2002. I had a reasonable
understanding of the Afghan environment and the sorts of things
we could and could not do there. I, in my discussions with various
people and my headquarters, could see a number of grand, strategic
reasons why we should be there, out of which we could see a mission
starting to emerge.
As for clarity of mission, that did not come
until much later. That was centred on the reconstruction of what
had been referred to as a failed state. We could see that the
future of NATO was going to be paramount here, and we could see
that there was going to be a role on the counter-narcotic side,
because we [the UK] were the G8 lead nation. There was already
a heavy emphasis on the UK's comprehensive approach. That had
to succeed as a concept, after its not-perfect roll-out in Iraq.
Lessons had been identified, however, and we knew that we should
do something joined-up. We knew that NATO was going to expand
its mission to Stage 3 and 4. We knew that preventing al-Qaeda
re-establishing itself in Afghanistan was critical. In the bigger
picture, we saw that the whole mission was set in the context
of the first offensive deployment of the war on terror. We made
those deductions on where we sat as a force.
It was early 2006 when we were getting that
clarity that we were going to be deploying on a reconstruction
basis. I scribbled some notes in my notebook: "We were going
to undertake security and stabilisation operations, within Helmand"—we
can come back to why it was only Helmand—"and the wider
regional command sites, jointly with our Afghan partners and other
Government Departments in order to support Afghan governance and
development objectives." That was reasonably clear to understand,
but a whole lot of sub-issues fell out of that, such as whether
we had done the investment appraisal on the resources needed to
meet all those requirements. We were set a mission. It was a question
of the achievability of those objectives with the resources we
had, the time to prepare and the time scales to deliver success.
Q471 Chair: When you say that
things fell out of that, can you translate that? Is it that they
didn't happen, or that they arose from that?
Brigadier Butler: In terms of
those challenges—these were recurring themes in late 2005
and early 2006 before we deployed, and throughout our tenure in
those first six months—we talked a lot about the "duality
of mission".
Q472 Chair: It sounds more like
plurality of mission.
Brigadier Butler: We can get on
to plurality, but "duality of mission" was the term
that we used on whether we were going to engage only in Helmand,
or in Kandahar as well. The important thing was that we determined
that we could only do Helmand; we couldn't do the second, wider
mission of Kandahar and Regional Command South operations. You
are right; that duality of mission perhaps because one of plurality.
There were competing missions, as we saw them,
within the theatre. We had—this was important from a conceptual
approach, and from a British brand perspective—Operation
Enduring Freedom, which was very much counter-terrorism, whereas
our stability, security and support of reconstruction and development
in Afghan governance was on the other end of the war fighting
spectrum; those were two diametrically opposed missions. That
was, again, a significant conflict of interest that we were recognising
and determining in 2005.
We then had the counter-narcotics issue. As
I have said, the UK was the lead G8 Nation—we recognised
that. We sought, throughout the deployment, clarity on our approach,
our rules of engagement and the legal position of our engagement
on counter-narcotics operations. We took a tactical view that
we wouldn't get involved in those, because we could see that that
was the quickest way of upsetting the ordinary Afghan farmer—the
man we wanted to protect. We didn't want to turn the farmer into
an insurgent; we wanted to turn the insurgents back into farmers,
so counter-narcotics was another contradictory objective.
It is also important to note that, as we were
trying to piece together what we were going to do and when we
were going to do it, we had the issue of the impact of the "operational
pause", or "political pause", induced by the then
Secretary of State, John Reid, for all the right reasons from
his perspective, but that made it very difficult to plan against.
There was the Dutch political prevarication and the issue of whether
or not they would commit forces to Uruzgan. Militarily, he was
absolutely right that we needed to protect our northern flank,
and he also saw politically that we could pick up the resource
bill from within coalition resources, to plug the Uruzgan gap.
That had a knock-on effect on our planning at a very tactical
level, for example, the mobilisation for Reserves and the authorisation
for urgent equipment requirements ***. It also impacted on when
we wanted to do our pre-deployment training. It was already going
to be very tight to get it in by an April time line, and it would
be even tighter by a January start date.
Q473 Chair: Would it be fair to
say that it was not the clearest of missions that you found yourself
being deployed to put into effect?
Brigadier Butler: No—and
I can try and give you the real nuts and bolts of this. On top
of these competing missions, and all the consequences and consequent
management that we have to put into effect from the purely military
side, there was a split planning effort as well: the American
OEF counter-terrorist mission, and the international community's
mission of reconstruction and development.
We had the American plan. They were still commanding
ISAF and had a plan of what their engagement was going to be in
ISAF, 2009-10. We had the ARRC conducting pretty well independent
planning—we didn't have any liaison with it, and General
Richards was focused on making sure that NATO's first out-of-area
operation was going to be a success. It was clearly a British
lead with a British-majority headquarters. It had to plan for
the transition from Stage 2 to 3, and beyond to Stage 4.
We also had CENTCOM doing its planning. We had
the Canadian Headquarters, which was relatively immature as a
military organisation. It was going to be the first combat operation
they had re-engaged in since their experiences in the Balkans.
We had the MoD, the other Government Departments, and then we
had PJHQ and 16 Air Assault Brigade. My Headquarters came together
after a relatively short period with PJHQ, in relative harmony
about what we were trying to do. You can see that five or six
plans were being written and developed in relative isolation;
that, again, added to what you might be getting at, in terms of
confusion, or confusing indicators.
Another important point, if I may, is. What
I call the synchronisation of the various political, military
and economic levers which were out of kilter. If we park those
independent planning operations, we had, within UK plc, the SIS
with one set of plans, objectives and end-states, the Foreign
Office, DFID and ourselves—the military—at a tactical
and a political, MoD level. The removal of the old Governor and
his replacement with Governor Daoud took place at about Christmas
time, which was the original deployment date for the operation,
before it was delayed by Secretary of State Reid's decision to
wait until the Dutch came on board. The Foreign Office had a different
set of time lines, and so did DFID. The changeover from Sher Muhammad
Akhunzada, who wasn't the straightest Governor, to a very honest
governor, took place three months prematurely. The lack of co-ordination
at the political level again led to a very disjointed planning
process. That's all the planning side. I can talk a little more
about other issues, which are all important, in terms of context.
Chair: You have answered a lot of the
questions that we were going to come to.
Brigadier Butler: Well, if you've
followed that, I'm very encouraged.
Q474 John Glen: As the Chairman
says, you have looked at some of this, but can you just be a bit
more specific on the timings? Once the decision had been made
and you were given your command, what time period did you have
to plan the deployment? You have discussed the existence of a
number of bodies you needed to consult in planning that, but were
the FCO and DFID specifically involved in that planning process?
Brigadier Butler: If I look at
it purely from 16 Air Assault Brigade's perspective, in terms
of getting all the pre-deployment training done for the soldiers,
the Marines, the air force elements and the helicopter pilots,
and in terms of doing all the regulatory training requirements,
from individual courses to medical and so on, we started the process
in September 2005. Our original Interim Operational Capability—(this
is an important issue, when you get on to how we got into the
plan suddenly not surviving contact)—was going to be April
2006.
Mr Brazier: Sorry,
your regional—
Brigadier Butler: Interim Operational
Capability—it's a military term. You set out in a plan when
your force is going to be Fully Operational Capable—FOC.
This was important in the height of the summer. There was some
wariness back in London that we had engaged in operations before
we were meant to. I have got ahead a little bit, but that was
before FOC, which was meant to be June 2006, if I am not mistaken,
with an interim capability two months before that, at the end
of April or the beginning of May. Actually, I think it was May.
So we are talking about May IOC and July FOC, although I wouldn't
like to be held to those dates.
The original dates were three months earlier.
We were training and preparing for a three-month earlier start
date, and that would have been very difficult—almost impossible—to
have the force fully trained up to the required standards, with
all the equipment and all the urgent operation requirements. I
can list what we were already saying in the late part of 2005
that we were short of. So in some ways, it benefited us to be
delayed.
In September, we were given the authority to
liaise with other headquarters—again, that is a formal military
process—whether it was PJHQ, London, the Canadians or NATO.
Actually, the only ones we had a dialogue with were PJHQ and the
Canadians, and we sent a very small team over to see them in late
2005.
Q475 Mr Havard: When did you actually
go out?
Brigadier Butler: In terms of
the disjointed approach, to what was going to be a major campaign,
there was a capability called Preliminary Operations. It was formed
in late 2005 and involved DFID, the Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Unit (PCRU), a representative from the FCO and a very small force
from the military, who pulled together the Joint UK Campaign for
Helmand. That preliminary operations headquarters then had another
role which went on beyond December—initially it was only
going to be a short-term look at the problem to come up with a
comprehensive plan. It reported in December 2005 and highlighted
a lot of the issues which then became very apparent. That Headquarters
then continued with its role and deployed to Helmand through January,
February and March.
I stated at the time that, in my experience,
this did not make military sense, because my headquarters was
doing the planning to engage in all lines of activity in Helmand
Province in early 2006. By that stage, it was going to be not
before April, but another headquarters was already there doing
all the shaping, influencing and limited intelligence gathering.
Again, 16 Brigade did not have sufficient representation within
the Preliminary Operations HQ. My argument was that either we
start the preliminary operations in January to understand the
environment, the people, the relationships and the trust with
all the stakeholders, or you give it to what was in fact part
of the Joint Force Headquarters and it runs with the initial deployment
for the first six months; with the Force Elements from 16 Air
Assault Brigade. The decision was taken, "no, they can do
the first three months, then hand over to you". So we came
relatively cold into what was, at best, already very much a semi-permissive
environment.
Q476 Mr Havard: When was that?
Brigadier Butler: We started deploying
the first elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade in April 2006.
Q477 Mr Havard: I am trying to
remember back to then. I came to see you in, I believe, February.
I remember it was pretty damned cold in Wattisham, anyway. There
was a wind blowing up my shirt from somewhere or other. You were
having discussions at that point about what you knew about the
place.
My questions will be about intelligence. The
general question is whether we had the necessary intelligence
to deploy successfully. I remember discussions with you and then
visiting you pretty soon after you were out there and seeing a
very different analysis of what you discovered once you actually
got there. What was your take on whether you had the intelligence
to deploy successfully?
Brigadier Butler: Importantly,
one of the PCRU reports stated at the time—sorry, I think
it was part of a preliminary operations report, the main report—that
we simply did not know enough before we went in to come up with
a coherent, long-term campaign plan for Afghanistan. A very short-term
view was taken by some Government Departments that this was a
three-year commitment funded at £808 million-odd, to be capped
at 3,150 troops. We said, "You cannot come up with that sort
of figure and timeline." I wrote one of my directives to
my headquarters and said that we would be engaging in a very complex
insurgency. We recognised in 2005 that we were getting into an
insurgency.
We didn't have enough of the "picture"
to start making the sort of judgments that we were making. When
I say "we", I mean UK plc collectively. I knew the challenges
of the terrain, and as repeated in many briefs that we did beforehand
we were severely underestimating the terrain, and the effects
of heat and altitude on men, machines and equipment—the
resources needed to do that. I knew from personal experience,
but also from history, that the Afghan, whichever hat he is wearing,
fights extremely hard. We also recognised that there would most
likely be a transfer of technology, tactics and techniques from
Iraq to Afghanistan through foreign fighters.
We were making a lot of assumptions, some based
on experience, some on history, but we recognised, as the operators,
that this was going to be a very different environment we were
getting into. Actually, the intelligence that was coming back
from the prelim ops headquarters in January, February and March,
and from the American accounts and from Operation Malaya, (TA/SAS),
was that before April 2006, Helmand Province was already in some
form of crisis. We had compulsory eradication of the poppy crop,
which we knew intuitively was not the right approach if you were
trying to get on with a reconstruction and stabilisation mission.
We knew the Taliban, over the four years post-2002,
were re-arming and re-equipping. We were hearing, open source,
from their information campaign, which was extremely effective,
that they were going to throw us out, as they had done on the
three previous occasions. I remember one account said, "Our
fathers and forefathers are scratching at the lids of their coffins
to come out and throw out the infidels". They were already
challenging Daoud's authority. This was a very complex tapestry
with Sher Mohammed and his previous regime and all the links he
had into the narcotics trade, warlord-ism and the Taliban. He
was already mischief-making at best; at least, we would call it
that.
We were recognising from the liaison we had
with the Americans that their approach, through operations such
as Operation Mountain Thrust, were very kinetic. We could see
that Helmand, at best, was in some form of turmoil and changing
already. We were going to arrive at the beginning of April, in
what I sometimes referred to as "half-time in the war-fighting
season". That is exactly what happened, but your point—I've
come a long way round it—is that we did not know enough
about the very complex tapestry, the tribal relationships, the
"narco" mafia, the patron-client relationships and all
that.
Q478 Chair: To carry out the mission?
Brigadier Butler: Actually, to
carry out a detailed assessment—what I'd call an investment
appraisal—of how long, how much it was going to take in
terms of people and how much it was going to cost from a development
and reconstruction perspective to achieve these aspirations. I
think there was some wishful thinking by some Government Departments
that we were going to be welcomed with open arms, because we were
coming in on a reconstruction and development operation.
Q479 Bob Stewart: Brigadier, you
outlined a whole series of tasks but not a mission, I think. Did
someone give you a mission at all before you deployed, or did
you deploy with a whole series of tasks but not an actual mission,
in the simple sense, to do something?
Brigadier Butler: The mission
was to conduct the security and stabilisation operations within
Helmand and the wider Regional Command South, jointly with our
Afghan partners, other Government Departments and multinational
partners, in order to support the Government of Afghanistan and
the development objective. What I would call a more tactical mission
was that we were going to deploy the force and establish our footprint.
Remember, Camp Bastion had just a fence around
it and we were living in tents. You guys have been there, probably
more recently than me. It was totally different then. Gereshk
was a very small Forward Operating Base, and Lashkar Gah had been
just a small Provincial Reconstruction Team with very limited
force protection. If we could achieve getting the force in, build
up the bases, establish a "central lozenge"—the
Triangle was between Lashkar Gah, Gereshk and Camp Bastion—stabilise
it and then progressively expand our capability out and build
up some form of intelligence picture for 3 Commando Brigade, that
would have been success.
Q480 Bob Stewart: So your first
mission was to deploy the Force—to get in, deploy and establish.
What was the mission after that, once you were in theatre and
established? Was there a single mission then, or did you go back
to the original?
Brigadier Butler: No. That overarching
mission, in terms of the principles of supporting governance and
going in—we did a lot of this Estimate within 16 Brigade
in 2005; we'd talked about it. We'd been asked in. We were in
support of the Afghan Government, and we were going in to help
the Afghan people.
Q481 Bob Stewart: Those became
the key tasks below the mission?
Brigadier Butler: They were, but
I'm trying to keep it in non-military-speak, in simple language
which is much easier for people to understand. What happened was
that there was an assumption—I had a difficulty with this,
and this is, again, part of a split planning approach—that
we were just going to deploy the Force into a permissive environment
and when we had reached full operation capability in July 2006
then we would go out and start engaging with the people. Well,
funny old thing—
Bob Stewart: Once
you went out, they started engaging you.
Brigadier Butler: As soon as we
arrived in those conditions—and as I have said the Province
was already in some form of crisis; they were certainly ready
and waiting—of course they wanted to engage us. We used
to say that there would be a reaction to our size 12 Boots going
into Helmand Province, whether from the Taliban, from the opiate
dealers or from the warlords, because we were threatening their
very existence. We were trying to turn a failed state into a steady
and successful one, which was contrary to all their aims and objectives.
We knew full well, as reasonably experienced military men, that
we were going to have a reaction. What happened—this was
again the tension, and it impacted on resources and the in-load
of people—was that we were trying both to deploy the force
and to employ it at the same time. Doctrinally, you don't do that.
Q482 Bob Stewart: I understand
that. Did you give tactical missions to the battle groups or the
battalions, as such? Were they different?
Brigadier Butler: No, the overarching
ones for the Brigade were the same for the Battle Groups. Clearly,
3 Para battle group, which was a large battle group, was slightly
different from the Joint Helicopter Force. Most of the focus was
very much on getting the force in. When the enemy had a vote,
the situation changed very quickly and we then got into a radical
change of the situation.
Q483 Ms Stuart: Earlier you mentioned
the things that we didn't know, such as the heat and the altitude.
With the benefit of hindsight, which of those things could we
have known and should we have known, and which are just simply
things you find out once you go there?
Brigadier Butler: I knew it; I'd
been there. We'd already had forces there. The Americans had been
there, up in the North, and they had been in some parts of Eastern
Afghanistan as well. At the end of every presentation I gave at
16 Brigade in Colchester, in 2005, I used to list a whole series
of things, one of which was that we were underestimating the environment—the
time and distance, and the impact that was going to have on helicopter
hours and just getting people from A to B to C. We were also in
danger of underestimating what the reaction of the Taliban was
going to be.
What I would liked to have done—it would
have been slightly more conventional, and I tried to state this
case—was to deploy the force into Kandahar and build it
up so that we had bundles of capability that could look after
themselves in terms of finding things, defending themselves, reacting
to things and recovering themselves, as well as providing the
conditions of security that we were there to do. We could have
achieved that. We could have done that from the safety of Kandahar
airfield but, again, with the split planning effort, that was
not deemed to be the way others wanted to do it.
Would it have mitigated the heat? We had taken
steps to address that. We did our pre-deployment exercise in Oman,
so we were in the heat and the soldiers got used to it. Water
was the critical requirement, and these guys were drinking a couple
of gallons a day to start with. That was the intensity of carrying
70 pounds of equipment and fighting 20 hours a day, water intake
was almost more important than ammunition. The trouble, again,
with the imposed [Dutch Government] delay, was that we had people
in Oman who were acclimatised, but we brought them back and some
of them didn't go into Afghanistan until May or June, so they
were sitting back home re-acclimatising to English weather.
Q484 Mr Havard: Part of the question
that I was going to ask about the impact of limited intelligence
has come out. For the record, I have got in front of me John Reid's
statement to the House when you deployed, in which he said, "I
want to make a few things clear. The size and structure of the
Task Force has been guided by a careful assessment of the likely
tasks and threats that it will face. What matters is that we put
the right forces in to do the job and to do it safely and well,
and I make no apology if that requires more soldiers than some
people initially envisaged."
What you seem to be saying to us is that a careful
assessment was made, but there was more than one assessment made,
and in a sense, the assessment which was made was done so by the
group that you said were deployed to do it—rather than you
making the assessment. The Quetta Shura made an assessment all
right and they'd been planning for you to arrive for some time.
They saw this as a political advantage. There had been a small
number of Americans and special forces roaming around. We didn't
really have a lot of intelligence, did we? So, how did you mitigate
this when you got there? How much impact did that really have?
Brigadier Butler: The numbers?
Mr Havard: The limited
intelligence.
Brigadier Butler: If I go back
to your claim and where the figures came from, a reconnaissance
was done in early 2005 by a planning team out of PJHQ. They went
in and looked at troop numbers for Helmand Province only. They
judged that then, and I suspect, like all things, that they would
have liked longer to do it.
Q485 Mr Havard: This was all about
putting the turbines into the Kajaki dam, was it?
Brigadier Butler: I don't think
they were looking at Kajaki at that stage.
Mr Havard: This is PJHQ.
Brigadier Butler: This is staff
officers—I suspect they saw Helmand as relatively permissive,
because the American special forces, which were 100-strong, weren't
challenging any of the opposition groups, or all those other opposing
groups I talked about earlier. They were probably exchanging bags
of gold to keep the peace. When people went there, they thought
that it wasn't too bad—"This is the total number of
people you need, and this is the total number of helicopter hours
you need, just to do Helmand." Going back to my point about
the duality of mission, people hadn't started saying such things
as, "You've got to support operations in RC South, and you
have to provide a Reserve to them. You may have to provide a Reserve
to General Richards. You're going to have to support US-led operations
such as Operation Mountain Thrust." We said, "3,150"—as
it was then—"is just about sufficient to meet Helmand-only
tasks." We had very detailed figures then, if we were standing
still. We could do one deliberate operation a month—we planned
for that—and three or four reactionary operations. Clearly,
when we got there, the situation had changed. It had gone from
permissive to semi-permissive, at best, and we were engaged in
a ferocious engagement with the enemy, almost from the start.
We identified the numbers right from the planning stage. If you
split the planning team from those who have to deliver it—
Q486 Mr Havard: So that intelligence
was done, if you like, on a solid-state environment, which they
thought that they were going to enter. This was something that
would be over and done in three years, which would cost £800
million. The timing was quite clear, and a limited process had
been planned for.
Brigadier Butler: And this was
all documented in the UK Joint Campaign Plan for Helmand by the
prelim ops team, which had cross-Government representation. It
was said that the assumptions that had been made were not deliverable,
and they weren't affordable. We needed more intelligence to take
a proper view, and it was going to take far longer than three
years. We knew that.
Q487 Mr Havard:
A cross-Government assessment?
Brigadier Butler: Cross-Government,
which was the prelim ops team. That was the PCRU—Post-Conflict
Reconstruction Unit—DFID, the FCO and military.
Chair: Getting back to the issue
of troop numbers—Penny Mordaunt.
Q488 Penny Mordaunt: Following
on from that, you spoke about the planning team being separate
from the delivery team, in terms of bottom-line troop numbers.
Could you say a little more about the process after that had been
realised by the delivery team? How were you able to feed that
back? Could you describe that, because we are interested in what
actually happened on the ground?
Brigadier Butler: Is this before
or after we deployed?
Penny Mordaunt: Both,
actually.
Brigadier Butler: We contested
very heavily the number of 3,150. Every time that we recognised
there was a new threat or a new requirement, we did another assessment
of the time and distance to fly a helicopter from Kandahar to
Bastion, to Gereshk, to Lashkar Gah and whether it was just a
routine post, getting people out on R and R. We went into detail.
Every time we wanted to bring in a new capability, we were told,
"No, it has to fit within the cap of 3,150."
Q489 Chair: When you say, "We
contested", who is "we"?
Brigadier Butler: The Brigade
Headquarters. The people who were going to deliver it.
Q490 Chair: You contested it with
whom?
Brigadier Butler: We staffed
the case very strongly to PJHQ. Where and what happened to it,
we don't know, but the message was always the same: "It is
3,150, which is what the Treasury is going to fund you at. You
can have any composition you want underneath that, but 3,150 is
the limit." We then went to 3,350, because someone had forgotten
to count in the number of C-130 support crew. That was an exception,
but that went to Chiefs' level to get that cap raised to 3,350.
After we deployed, it was probably May when
reality was starting to be recognised back here in London. Remember
that this was a theatre that people didn't understand, and we
had gone in in the context that it was going to be reconstruction
and stabilisation. There was the unfortunate soundbite from John
Reid that we were going to go in and not fire a shot in anger,
and come home having made it a better place. He was caught out,
which was surprising from my perspective, as he is a very skilful
man in his understanding of the media. Funnily enough, they didn't
say what he'd said before or after that, but it set the conditions.
There was the backdrop of all of that, plus
what I described as wariness within London—and I use that
broadly—that we shouldn't be operating before full operational
capability came in July. So we said that we needed more people
as we were getting engaged in multiple things—this is before
the platoon houses, just at the operational level. We had already
flagged up that we knew we would always have shortfall in troop
numbers of about 12%—this is an important point from generation
of force numbers—because that's how many people would go
out on the R and R flights. That happened within a month of any
six-month tour. That was well-documented.
I had discussions with PJHQ and said, "Look,
3,150 is the cap, we understand that, but is that 3,150 in theatre?
Because you're actually going to have 320 people out of theatre
at any one time before you have any attrition, illness or anything
else. Why don't we go for an additional 300 but never have any
more in theatre if that's what politicians or the Treasury are
concerned about?" We were already coming down to under 3,000
to try to carry out this very complex operation. We staffed this
on a very regular basis, trust me. It was a weekly issue on reports
back to PJHQ, which is where we reported to from theatre.
Q491 Penny Mordaunt: What would
you say was the impact of the failure to deploy the right number
of troops?
Brigadier Butler: The impact is
that we have now got it right and have 30,000 troops in Helmand
Province alone. We understand the environment, and we can cover
and maintain the ground that we are trying to occupy and everything
else. It has taken us six years to get there.
Q492 Chair: That won't do.
Brigadier Butler: That won't do?
Chair: No, and "Now we've got it
right" is not an answer.
Brigadier Butler: I actually said
to the Chief of the Defence Staff at the time—in about May—when
he asked whether another battalion would make a difference, I
said rather quickly, "No you'll need a Division here,"
and I remember saying, "but even with a Division we're not
going to conquer the Afghans by strength alone." He then
said, "You're not getting a division, Ed, what about another
battalion?" I said "It's not 600 more people we need,"
which is about the size of a battalion, "we need all of the
enablers. We need the helicopter hours." In terms of the
shortfalls of equipment it was helicopters; helicopter hours;
force protection—ballistic matting was a particular issue
for vehicles; electronic countermeasures; interpreters; ISTAR;
anything that flew in the air in terms of giving us that SigInt—signal
intelligence; over head surveillance (UAVs) in terms of predators.
I said, "It's the enablers. We can get more out of the blokes
if we have more enablers, more medical supplies, and all of those
issues. I'd love to have another 600, but you've got to give a
commensurate amount of enablers."
Q493 Mrs Moon: So did you have
enough enablers for those 3,150 when you first went in? Did you
have enough helicopters, for example?
Brigadier Butler: No, we didn't.
We did some very detailed planning, and I was fortunate in having
a very competent and large headquarters from the RAF and the Army,
and people who understood Air-Land operations—getting in
and out of helicopters or C-130s was the Air Assault Brigade's
role. We were the proponents of this. Going back to my earlier
point: steady state, one deliberate operation a month and three
or four reactive operations—we could do that within Helmand
itself. Everything else you asked us to do above it, or if the
enemy had a vote, which we knew they would, we were going to be
very short. We knew that we were going to short: by May we could
actually say it for sure, but we were saying it in 2005. We were
some 20% over our hours for support helicopter—Chinooks—we
had six of them. We were already 11% over on our attack helicopter
hours. The C-130s were operating at 92% of their maximum output,
so there was the resultant impact on spare parts, crew fatigue
and everything else. We staffed back in May a requirement for
a 30% uplift on all air and aviation capability. We had the hard
facts by that stage; but we knew them already from our estimate
process beforehand.
We also knew before we deployed that we had
something in the order of a 45% on average shortfall of vehicles.
We had already identified that Snatch was not an appropriate vehicle
for the desert. We wanted WMIKs and Pinzgauers, logistical vehicles,
DROPS, container vehicles, equipment support vehicles, the small
Scimitar CVRTs. It was on average a 45% shortfall across the fleet.
That was compounding the manoeuvre problem that we had. All those
things were identified and staffed into PJHQ.
Go back to the political and strategic context:
we were still in Iraq. The assumption was that the drawdown of
Iraq would have happened by 2005. This goes back to 2004, when
the commitment was, yes, we will put a force in. The assumption
was that we were going to be drawing down out of Iraq, so these
big strategic enablers and some of the operational ones would
start to come across into Afghanistan. Iraq remained the Main
Effort, both politically for a lot of reasons that you will be
much more aware of, but also operationally.
We were also competing with the Iraq theatre—importantly,
intellectually. The thinking was all about how do we mitigate
what is going on in Basra and Iraq in 2005 and 2006. In terms
of Urgent Operational Requirements, whether it was through electronic
counter-measures, force protection for soldiers or vehicles, roughly
two thirds would go to Iraq and one third would come to us. That
was a difficult position to be in for everyone, because we simply
did not have enough, due to the long-term degradation—if
that is the right term—of our Equipment Programme. We were
suddenly having to accelerate the UOR process to meet two very
high-demand Medium-Scale operations. One was ongoing in Iraq—and
3,000 troops is closer to a medium scale technically than a small
scale. We had two medium scales that we simply could not resource
in terms of the urgent equipments I have listed.
Q494 Mr Havard: The reassessment
you are talking about was before you did the platoon house thing?
Brigadier Butler: Yes, May. This
is about the first Force Review we had.
Q495 Mr Havard: So that did not
include an idea that you would need more support for that approach
that you were about to develop?
Brigadier Butler: No.
Q496 Mr Havard: So how did the
reassessment all take place? As the thing developed, various reassessments
must have been done, and you must have made calls for both troops
and resources. How did that process run throughout?
Brigadier Butler: May was when
there was the first Force-Level Review (FLR). FLRs are a routine
approach in any campaign with PJHQ and the MoD. We were able to
formalise the figures and numbers of troops in this Review as
now had accurate data for it. That Force-Level Review was almost
a constant process. We were able to start getting in platoons'
worth of people from the Royal Irish—we got another platoon
plus out of Cyprus. That was all as a consequence of the Force-Level
Review.
I think with your question now comes on to why
did we move north.
Mr Havard: Partly.
Brigadier Butler: But you may
have some others.
Q497 Mrs Moon: I am interested
by the politics on the ground, and the role that Governor Daoud
and President Karzai were playing in changing the deployment plans.
Did they have an influence in the development of the platoon house
strategy? What role were they playing in terms of deciding what
the priorities were?
Brigadier Butler: That is the
nub of what a lot of people are interested in. There are a number
of variations of the account of how we got into this.
If we step back from it, why did we go into
Afghanistan? It was at the behest of President Karzai. We had
a UN mandate to go in. We were there to support the Rule of Law,
prevent human rights abuses, establish effective governance and
build up the capacity of the Afghans; we went in at their request
with all the mandates behind us. We were there to support them.
We were in a "supporting role" to the Afghans. We said
then that this must be an Afghan plan, an Afghan solution—you
will have heard the expressions. Actually, there was an Afghan
National Development Strategy, which was very fledgling, but the
trouble was that it didn't have the capacity, capability or competences
to support and deliver it. There was a complete dearth of Afghan
human capacity as well as Afghan infrastructure.
If you set that as the context, did Governor
Daoud say, "Right, I'm rewriting the campaign"? We knew
he didn't have the authority, but when the man you're trying to
support and protect and help to establish some pretty basic form
of governance, stability and security for which he could start
to bring in some form of Afghan democratic process and he is supported
by the President of the country: and your own Prime Minister has
said that we will do everything we can to help you. If they start
to say to you "We need you to support governance. We need
you to protect us. You need to give us the freedom of movement.
You must support me to be allowed to go round my own constituency.
If I can't do that, why are you here?"
They made it very clear, in very simple terms.
This is the iconic nature and importance of the Afghan flag, and
we see it in Libya now. It's quite interesting that whoever's
flag flies over a position of governance, whether it's at a district
level or at a capital level, is paramount. The Afghans, from Karzai—(I
had discussions with him, because I was privileged to go with
all the visitors who used to go there)—right down to Daoud,
were clearly saying, "If the black flag of Mullah Omar flies
over any of the district centres, you may as well go home because
we'll have lost our authority to govern in Helmand, and if we
lose our authority to govern and our ability to govern, then that
will threaten the South. Kandahar will be next. We'll lose the
South before you've even started. What are you going to do about
it?"
We argued very strongly about all the tactical
issues, and why we couldn't do it—we didn't have enough
force levels in place. He [Daoud] was frustrated. When he was
elected or put in position, going back to the mis-alignment of
levers (principally by the Foreign Office in December), he was
under the impression that we were going to turn up with 3,000
soldiers—fighters—instead of 600 paratroopers, with
all the support elements. He thought he was going to have 3,000
warriors to help him establish new governance, so he was pretty
frustrated that, by May, we still weren't able to do so because
we'd delayed our deployment. He was not able to get out into his
constituency safely and securely, and make sure that effective
governance, rule of law and so on was brought in. But again they
said, "If the black flag flies, you may as well all go home."
We talked in rather doctrinal terms about trading
space for time—"Let us get in, we're going to establish
our force"—and we talked long and hard about the lozenge
building up the capability, concentrating on centres of mass and
population. They wouldn't have it. They wouldn't have it at Helmand
level, and Karzai again made it very clear; he was threatening,
and said, "Well, I'm going to talk to your Prime Minister.
I'm going to talk to NATO Command. I'm going to talk to the Americans
top commanders." They are very clever, the Afghans, saying,
"I'm going to talk to all these other people and say, 'You're
not doing what I'm asking you to do, and I asked you to come in
here.'"
We had many a discussion, very late at night,
because that is the Afghan way of doing business, well into the
small hours. General Wall was present at one of these meetings.
What we had seen in the run-up to this 'unplanned deployment'
was a whole gang—they were probably supported by Sher Muhammad
Akhunzada, which came into Musa Qala and start to kick out all
the locals and start to threaten people in Musa Qala. Whether
they killed or injured anyone, we never had specific intelligence,
but that is our assumption. We dispatched a force with a pathfinder
platoon and a lot of Afghan policemen—tribal militia—who
chased them all north. We thought that we had achieved something
and they had gone away. The people were very grateful and said,
"Thank you". Of course, very quickly we said, "But
we're not going to stay there". Very soon, the Taliban came
back and started to threaten Musa Qala again.
At the same time, we had a pretty horrific incident
in Sangin. This was probably as much about all the other dynamics
of tribalism, power politics and counter-narcotics. I cannot remember
his name—forgive me—but one of the Afghan politicians
was threatened and so were some of his family. They killed about
20 or 30 people in Sangin. Now, it could have been retribution.
Again, Governor Daoud said, "What are you going to do about
this? You're not protecting my people. We've got a major, on-going
human rights issue." He was a very clever man. He was a development
man not a warrior but he was honest and I think that he was a
real asset. So there he was, outlining all these issues.
Against that backdrop, we said, "Look,
we can't do it. We haven't got the force levels." So we had
this stand-off. Importantly, this decision was not taken in isolation.
Some people think that it was a stand-alone decision taken by
the commander of British Forces, Brigadier Butler. Not a bit of
it, because in terms of the command and control arrangements in
theatre we had the Helmand Executive Group and the Provincial
Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah. They were privy to all these
discussions. They were represented at the same meeting with myself,
Colonel Knaggs, Tom Tugendhat, who was Governor Daoud's adviser,
Department for International Development representatives and Foreign
Office representatives. We had the same representation at Kandahar,
but the Southern Afghanistan Group was not really established
at that stage. It spent more of its time in Helmand. We had the
Kabul Steering Group, chaired by the Ambassador, with cross-Government
representation. We then had the Afghan Steering Group in London.
And we had weekly tele-conferences with London.
So everyone was aware of the situation that
we were in, what the drivers were and the pressures that were
there. Of course, everyone had a slightly different interpretation
of what should be done, but the decision was not taken in isolation.
So, when we made the decision, from a military perspective, to
preserve the capability of Governor Daoud to govern and not allow
the Taliban flag to fly, that was an all-informed decision. Not
everyone may have agreed with it, but it was not taken in isolation
by the military alone and it was certainly agreed at the tactical
level in Helmand, and it was supported by the Ambassador, Stephen
Evans. I had a close relationship with him, because I spent two
days of my week in Kabul, with some days spent in Kandahar and
some in Lashkar Gah.
Q498 Mr Brazier: Brigadier, you
are painting a picture of an extraordinarily difficult situation,
with a tremendous overstretch. One can understand the pressure
that you were under. We heard the other side of it from John Reid,
because right up to the point where he left he was saying categorically,
"No". You made this decision, and you have set out the
reasons for it very clearly and lucidly. Can we just pursue it
a little bit up the specifically military chain of command? You
mentioned that Peter Wall was there at one of the key meetings.
He was there, was he not, as a deputy director of PJ—
Brigadier Butler: Deputy Chief
Joint Operations, Permanent Joint Headquarters, or PJHQ.
Q499 Mr Brazier: So your immediate
chain of command had completely signed up to and was part of this
decision, then?
Brigadier Butler: Yes, absolutely.
I did not have the authority to make it in isolation. We had weekly
conference calls—video teleconferences, or VTCs—with
PJHQ. We would discuss, write daily reports, write our weekly
assessment and we would sit down on the VTC every week to discuss
the issues.
Q500 Mr Brazier: And your immediate
point of contact there would have been Peter Wall?
Brigadier Butler: Peter Wall and
the Chief of Joint Operations, General Houghton.
Q501 Bob Stewart: Can I ask if
different Brigadiers had different missions, or did they change
their mission as they went through, Brigadier? I know that it
is a bit unfair to ask you, because you are just one. But take
your successor, for example: did he get the same sort of deal
as you got, which is a pretty rough hand, frankly?
Brigadier Butler: I think that
the military should stick its hand up on this occasion. The mission
was the same. How they saw it being delivered was interpreted
differently by the subsequent Brigade Commanders. There were a
number of reasons for that. We were an air assault brigade. Having
seen what happened in Northern Ireland and then what happened
in Iraq in terms of the IED threat, we knew that we would be heavily
reliant on helicopters. We pushed very hard for a helicopter solution,
which was maintained. The Marines wanted to do it slightly differently.
***
The next Brigade Commander, who came from a mechanised
background, said, "Ah, what we need here is tanks and APCs."
I made this point during and after because I went to the PJHQ
to command the Joint Force Headquarters,—was that part of
this could be resolved by having an operational headquarters deployed
from the PJHQ into theatre. That would make sure that there was
campaign continuity, which we have now. So, you would be told
as Brigade HQ; you take responsibility for the tactical operation
at a particular time and place, and you join the process here
and you get off here and these are the parameters of what needs
to be achieved. I think—having retired—that we gave
people too much latitude in interpreting the ways of doing it.
I remember Des Browne turning to me, about two years after, and
saying, "Ed, I tried to give you all the support I could."
He said, "I supported you when you wanted more helicopters,
but then I had Brigadier John Lorimer [Commander 12 Mech Brigade]
asking for tanks and so and so asking for something else."
He said that he was only taking the best military advice. My judgement
is that in some parts of the military, we had, taken to the extreme,
this "politically aware, military advice" approach rather
than having someone say, "This is the military reason why
we need this capability." That was confusing sometimes to
our political masters.
Bob Stewart: So, the mission was the
same but the application of that mission changed from Brigadier
to Brigadier.
Chair: I want to draw this to a close
with Dai asking the last questions.
Q502 Mr Havard: On the Daoud thing
and who we were supporting, we have had people say to us that
it was felt by the Afghans—the very people we were trying
to win over—that we were supporting the Taliban. In other
words, they were saying that you supported the wrong bandits as
far as they were concerned, and so you actually turned people
away. Did you have any sense of that as a consequence of what
we were doing—that we made a problem for ourselves by the
Afghans initially perceiving what we were doing as being counter
to their interests, and us supporting various interests within
Afghanistan rather than supporting them?
Brigadier Butler: That is the
first time I have heard that. The wider piece was that there was
huge expectation by the Afghans in 2002 and 2004. That started
to fade because things were not happening. In 2006, I thought
that at best we might have the tolerance of the Afghan but certainly
not his consent. We found that as we came in—we arrived
years late on what they were expecting—we were not delivering
the economic benefits that we had promised. They were at best
tolerant and on the fence—
Q503 Mr Havard: It was to do with
that rather than us supporting the wrong people by mistake?
Chair: We have had this stuff about us
supporting the Taliban and we did not understand it either.
Brigadier Butler: No. It was probably
too progressive. What we achieved—and it was an unintended
consequence of going into the platoon houses—was that we
kept "the lozenge" relatively free of violence. We did
not have any of the violence that we had seen in the last two
years in Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, and the very reason was that
they focused round the northern platoon houses. But the unintended
consequence, when both sides were close to exhaustion—this
was late August and early September—was that they [the Taliban]
blinked first. Governor Daoud and I sat down with tribal elders
in the last week of August and the first 10 days of September
to negotiate a conditional ceasefire—there were 14 parts
to that—and that tribal elders' solution was start of fledgling
Afghan self-autonomy. Governor Daoud and I used to talk long and
hard about this, and we recognised that the solution was a tribal
solution. But at that stage, we weren't backing the tribes, because
we had been fighting local Afghan hired guns as well as hard core
Taliban fighters, and we'd got into this very destructive attritional
battle with them. But the Musa Qala solution, which lasted for
150-odd days before the Taliban saw that it was starting to encroach
on their freedoms and power, was part of a tribal solution and
Afghan self-autonomy, which people now recognise.
Mr Havard: And now we've gone back to
it.
Chair: I'm afraid we're going to have
to move on now. Thanks very much indeed for helping us out with
this. We're most grateful.
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