Operations in Afghanistan - Defence Committee Contents


Examination of Witness (Questions 504-547)

  Q504 Chair: Welcome to the Committee. The way we are doing these particular sessions is that we're asking you to give evidence in private. A note will be taken of all you say. That will be given to you, and you will then negotiate with Karen as to anything you want cut out. It may be that there is nothing you particularly want cut out, but that negotiation comes up and if there is a disagreement it can come back to the Committee. Is that okay?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Understood.

  Q505 Chair: May I begin by asking about the background to the deployment of UK Forces into Southern Afghanistan in 2006? What do you think was the intent of that deployment, and what was the desired or expected end state?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: The context of that deployment was, of course, not a unilateral national decision. It was Britain taking its part in the determination by NATO to take on a presence throughout the country of Afghanistan. If you recall, it all began with a small force in and around Kabul, and a number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams—PRTs—in certain places such as Mazar-e-Sharif, for example. My memory is getting a bit murky now, but the NATO move, I think, began sometime in 2004. The intent, I recall, was for it to be done in a counter-clockwise manner—I am sure you have heard evidence about that. Various nations were allocated this or that Province. I tried to think before coming, but I cannot for the life of me remember how it was that the United Kingdom finished up with Helmand. I honestly can't remember what went on, and I don't think that was an MoD decision anyway.

  Q506 Chair: Would you have been involved in it?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: No, not in the sense of, "These are the options—which one?" My memory says that it was more a fait accompli when it came to the Chiefs. I suspect it was partly—there must be a connection, how strong it is I don't know, but there must be a connection with the then Prime Minister's enthusiasm to take on counter-narcotics. If you recall, contributing nations were given a primary responsibility for this or that function.

  Chair: Indeed.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I think the Italians got law and order, for example, or justice, and I make no comment there. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, took up the gauntlet on counter-narcotics and, of course, Helmand is the focus for that particular function geographically. It came about in a way that I do not fully understand. None the less, I have a vague notion that Kandahar was a possible option—it was either Helmand or Kandahar Provinces. I don't think I can usefully add any more. What emerged was a NATO plan; a counter-clockwise move with this or that Province being allocated to this or that country or countries. In some cases more than one country was involved in a single province.

  That is how it came about. Planning for that continued in 2005. I can't quite remember what the proper title for it was—it was the preliminary ops group, or something of that nature, and that started to set up in Helmand. Does that answer your question sufficiently well?

  Q507 Chair: Well, that helps. Do you remember what the designated UK mission was?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: We began with a concept. Perhaps I should say something about force levels as a preface. There was an assumption in 2004-05 that by the time the expansion of the NATO effort in Afghanistan began in earnest, we would have drawn down in Iraq, perhaps completely or very substantially. As we know, that time line did not work out so neatly. The initial deployment, which concerned me because of its size, was basically a single battle group. It had a lot of additions, but it was, at the end of the day, in its manoeuvre capability, a single battle group. That being so—quite sensibly, it seemed to me—the plan devised was to start in and around Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. The so-called "ink spot theory" was brought into play, with references to Templer and Malaya, and that seemed to me to be a sensible balance between the force available and the task. You will no doubt have heard Ed Butler's narrative of what then happened to change that strategic concept.

  Chair: We will come to that.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: The original plan was to start in Lashkar Gah and bring a security envelope into a relatively small area within which other agencies could then start to improve the lives of the Afghans living within that security envelope, and then look to expansion.

  Q508 Chair: So the original mission was to bring in that security envelope and then perhaps to consider establishing a different mission once that security had been established?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I don't recall it in that sense. I don't recall that. It was to start in Lashkar Gah and, hopefully, as conditions improved and a greater force level became available with Iraq coming down, to expand that concept beyond the starting point of Lashkar Gah.

  Q509 John Glen: To some extent, General, you have explained that you have limited recollection of the decision-making process to deploy. Could you describe your specific role at the time in that, and also indicate the interaction that you can recall with the FCO and DFID? Also, in order to take all the questions together, could you discuss the MoD's responsibility, and how long it had to make decisions in the run-up to deployment in 2006?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Perhaps I could give a little homily on the decision-making structure and constitutional position.

  Chair: That would be helpful.

  John Glen: That would be excellent, thank you.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That will, I hope, go at least some way to answering your first point. I have described the structure of the Ministry of Defence as byzantine and I will stick with that adjective, but when forces are committed to operations, the chain of command is pretty clear. Obviously, it starts with the Prime Minister—aided and abetted by whatever Cabinet arrangements, either permanent or ad hoc, are put together for this or that operation—and then goes to the Defence Secretary, to the Chief of the Defence Staff, to Permanent Joint Headquarters and down to the theatre commander. That is the operational chain of command. I don't know how best to describe the position of the single service chiefs. It's an awkward one, because you play your part with the other single service chiefs in the Chiefs of Staff Committee under the CDS's chairmanship, but it is the CDS who renders the military advice and the others do not go with him. Certainly, in my experience they never went.

  I say it's awkward because you are of course chewing over the problem, but you don't have the Executive responsibility. You have an assumed accountability; people say, "Well, the Chief of the General Staff is the head of the Army, so what happens in the Army is his affair." Would that it were quite so simple, because regarding many of the Executive functions—for example, pay and conditions, the quality and condition of the estate or who buys which kit—you are in a position at best of influence, not of authority.

  Q510 John Glen: But with respect to this particular decision, did you as the CGS hold a view different from that taken by the CDS in these discussions?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: To some extent.

  Q511 John Glen: Do you account for the difference by the different perspective you had in terms of wider responsibility; or do you conflict given what you know he knew about other things, too?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Just as an aside, the relationship between any of the single service chiefs and the CDS is slightly different when you are of the same colour. Perhaps a purist would say it shouldn't be, but reality is reality. I niggled away at the amount of combat power we were putting in at the beginning.

  Q512 John Glen: It was insufficient?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: The force generators—such as Land Command in this case—were, as I recall, able to generate certainly the force we put in, because it happened. I have just a recollection of talking and asking whether we could do more, and being told, "Yes, but it would be pretty painful and we are not confident that we could sustain it until Iraq comes down." Of course, the detailed planning is done at PJHQ with the commitment staff—or, as I think they are now called, the operational staff, which makes a bit more sense—in the MoD. Reconnaissances were carried out and the preliminary operations team was put in, and so on. Had we stayed with the original concept, in my judgment, we would not have had the very rough fighting that went on in the summer of 2006—and indeed afterwards, but particularly that first summer. We did not stick with the original concept, as I know, ladies and gentlemen, you will be only too well aware.

  Q513 Chair: What lessons would you learn from that? Would you abolish PJHQ? Would you send the chiefs of staff to PJHQ to do their jobs? What would you do?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That is a very good question. We have a number of layers of command, which may be excessive for the amount of force we actually deploy. That said, prior to the establishment of PJHQ one of the front-line commands would be designated on an "as and when" basis. For example, Bosnia was delegated to Land Command to be the operational headquarters, and additional personnel were posted in order to give that operational staff. It was an ad-hoc system, and if you go back to the Falklands, inevitably, of course, it was fleet headquarters that were given operational command for perfectly sound reasons. I think that as the operational tempo after the end of the Cold War ratcheted up, people were looking to see whether this was the most sensible way of establishing the operational level of command. We know what the outcome was: it was decided to establish on a permanent basis a joint headquarters.

  The strategic and operational space is not as well delineated, in my view, as perhaps it should be. The Ministry of Defence is institutionally incapable of not using, as the phrase has it, the 6,000-mile screwdriver. It is institutionally incapable of standing back and letting those whose job it is turn the screw with a rather shorter screwdriver. Equally, PJHQ inevitably gets drawn in to the political-military interface, because of the nature of current operations, which are almost by definition of great political interest, shall we say? So, there is a blurring. I would need to think long and hard before I gave you a judgment that PJHQ should be abolished, however, because that would only inevitably result in the Ministry of Defence being yet more absorbed in tactical detail, which is not its place.

  Q514 Mr Havard: I want to ask you about intelligence and whether we had sufficient intelligence about what we were doing. It is interesting that you mentioned the preliminary ops group and so on, and Ed mentioned them as well.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I remember visiting them very clearly before.

  Q515 Mr Havard: But there did seem to be more than one of them, in the sense that you had an assessment being undertaken on a cross-governmental basis, and you also had a military assessment. What intelligence did we have? We seem to have had some SAS; Americans wandering about—only 100 of them. Can you speak to whether we had the right intelligence and what that meant?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That's a very good question, Mr Havard. My recollection of the preliminary operations and the run-up to that deployment tells me with hindsight—and I would stress that—that there was an assumption too favourable to a benign environment. Why was that? First, as you just mentioned, the United States had a special forces contingent in and around Lashkar Gah and had been there for some time, perhaps all the time since the fall of the Taliban—I can't remember. It appeared to be quite benign. I have only a sketchy knowledge of what they were actually doing. What they were not doing, it seems to me, was taking al-Qaeda on in battle, because that would have had the same effect as the stick in the ant hill, when the ants start running around. I remember visiting the preliminary ops team, who were pretty bullish about the thought of the British deployment to Helmand.

  Q516 Mr Havard: Was that the cross-governmental team?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: May I come on to that? On the intelligence side, certainly, I have no recollection of dire warnings that if you do this, you are going to get a violent reaction from al-Qaeda/Taliban. I say, with hindsight, perhaps there was a degree of optimism that underpinned the planning and thinking. As for the inter-departmental piece, I am a bit of cracked long-playing record on that, I'm afraid. In my experience—that goes back to Bosnia, Kosovo and our other interventions in Sierra Leone and the two big ones of Iraq and Afghanistan—the cross-governmental piece is not very well engineered machinery. The cogwheels don't mesh that well. Obviously, a particular concern, because it has the money, is DFID. I don't think it's any secret that I have had my differences with the way DFID thinks about operations that the British Government have invested huge political capital in. It sometimes seems to take a rather autonomous view of its role, in a way that I would certainly wish otherwise.

  Q517 Mr Havard: John Reid said to Parliament when the deployment was made that it was all done on the basis of a careful assessment of tasks, needs and so on, and everything was structured on the basis of this information that had come from the various bodies and was decided through these various processes. In some senses, you seem to be saying that some people perhaps saw what they wanted to see, or perhaps there wasn't a deeper assessment—

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That may be a harsh judgment.

  Mr Havard: Okay.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I'm not saying that it's outwith the range of possibilities.

  Q518 Mr Havard: We had intelligence from the SAS and others that Quetta Shura was very active and these were the areas where surely the insurgents were making their base, on the basis that NATO was coming with the anti-clockwise revolution of the plan.

  Chair: Do you remember that we had that intelligence?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I cannot be specific on that. My sense is that no intelligence was put in front of the Ministry of Defence which said, "What you're about to do will result in mayhem." Had that been so, I think there would have then been a very serious discussion as to whether that plan was viable or not.

  Q519 Mr Havard: Right. So the mission was set on the basis of this three-year thing going into an environment that was relatively benign. We would be there, and things would inevitably move on.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: John Reid's famous, or infamous, remark—I think it is misquoted—in a way summarises or focuses on how the thinking was that this was a nation-building exercise to remove the ungoverned space which Helmand and Kandahar Provinces certainly represented, and we know what happened with that ungoverned space before. That was the conceptual thinking behind it all. We will never know, because it didn't happen, how it would have panned out had we stuck to the original concept. We very rapidly did something quite different.

  Q520 Penny Mordaunt: On troop numbers, when General Messenger gave evidence to us last year, he told us that we didn't have enough UK Forces personnel to do all the tasks that were being asked of them in Helmand from 2006.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: May I ask whether he was referring to the concept, or to what happened?

  Q521 Penny Mordaunt: He was referring to what happened. So my question is, do you agree? We are also particularly interested in how the decisions were made about troop numbers both before and after deployment.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I think I've taken you through the decision making over the initial size of the contingent, predicated upon the original concept of commencing in Lashkar Gah and then taking it from there, but I can't answer your question now without going into the complete change of concept.

  Chair: We'll come on to the complete change of concept.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: It is quite difficult to answer that question

  Chair: Okay, go ahead on the complete change of concept.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: It is my understanding that you have heard from a far better witness than myself this afternoon. It is also my understanding that, almost immediately, internal Afghan political pressure—both from Kabul and from the provincial Governor—resulted in a dispersal of the small force. Therefore it was not concentrated in Lashkar Gah but penny-packeted into the so-called platoon houses. That really was a very big stick to put into the Taliban anthill, and the ants did run around. If you were going to do that, that initial force level was not enough. We got away with it, not least through the fighting quality of the soldiers involved, but there were some close-run occasions, and I dare say that you have heard evidence to that effect. I am content to say that the original plan and original force level were just about in balance. I would have wanted more myself, but when the plan changed in the way that it did, it was asking an awful lot of four rifle companies.

  Q522 Mr Brazier: General, can I ask about the Whitehall oversight? As you pointed out, you had influence but you were not directly part of it. We heard very clear testimony last month from John Reid that his view, right up to the moment that he went, was "No, no, no" to a change of plan. Suddenly, five weeks later, the plan changes. We have just heard from Brigadier Butler that PJHQ was intimately involved in that plan. Indeed, he had the Deputy Chief Joint Operations of PJHQ there with him when the change of plan took place. We have the outgoing Secretary of State saying no, and PJHQ saying yes. Where did the MoD come into that? Clearly, the new Secretary of State must have signed it off, but as a brand new man in the job, he must have been getting advice from various sources, and not only from PJHQ. What is your reading of what actually happened?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I wish I could give you a clear and concise narrative of that time. Again, anticipating this question, I have tried to give this some thought. I can only almost repeat what I have just said: almost immediately, this internal Afghan political pressure was brought to bear to show that Kabul's writ ran in a wider part of Helmand than just Lashkar Gah. I suppose the question is: why did we go along with that?

  Mr Brazier: Yes, that is the question.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: And I'm not sure that I can give you a clear answer.

  Q523 Mr Brazier: May I just narrow the question down slightly? We have established that the commander on the ground, with all these pressures on him, did not make the decision alone. Clearly, he had it cleared through PJHQ. My question is really about a quite narrow point. Presumably, PJHQ must have come back to the MoD. Who discussed it there, and what was the process?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Do you have access to the Chiefs of Staff's minutes?

  Chair: No.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Well, that seems to me to be a lacuna. I am sorry; I am not trying to slope shoulders on this, but I cannot remember whether that fundamental change was brought formally to the Chiefs of Staff or not. All I know is that it appeared to have the imprimatur certainly of PJHQ and, I suspect, of the Foreign Office. I think that I am right to say that, although that ought to be checked as well. Again, it is without doubt a proud tradition of the British Army—one which perhaps may have gone too far this time—that you take a very deep breath before you start disagreeing with the commander on the ground.

  Q524 Chair: Can you remember thinking at that stage, when things were clearly changing, "This is madness"?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: You are putting words into my mouth, Chairman.

  Chair: You can always answer no.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: No, I didn't think it was madness. It was worrying.

  Mr Havard: It wasn't correctly resourced.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: No. I hope that I have made the point that—

  Q525 Mr Havard: I think what Julian is after is this: who was advising on what you would need in terms of resources if you were going to make the change? Did PJHQ agree that it had the right resources on the ground, or was this just the boys on the ground saying, "We will make do. It's a crap decision, but we'll just get on with it"?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I wish I could do better for you. I just do not now fully understand—perhaps I never did at the time—what had gone on to go from Lashkar Gah to penny-packeting. You must have heard better evidence than I can give you on this.

  Q526 Mr Brazier: The difficulty is who we ask next. We have established the train as far up as PJHQ. Clearly, we must talk to the people who were in PJHQ then.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Have you had CJO in?

  Chair: No. Not yet.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Or indeed the CDS. There is your chain of command.

  Q527 Ms Stuart: First, we are trying to establish when the change happened. We have got as far as we can on how it came about, but then there must be a form of process whereby once you have the change, you assess the means to support it. Where ideally should that have taken place?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: There is no template there, I think. I will reiterate my point, because it is important: it is a great tradition of the British Army that the commander in the field is best placed to make decisions about his own dispositions, and that the 6,000-mile screwdriver should not be used to second-guess. You may be feeling, ladies and gentlemen, that that tradition was not helpful on this occasion; I don't know.

  Q528 Ms Stuart: I'm trying to get to the bottom of whether they should have gone back to PJHQ to check, or whether there was a level of assumption on the ground that "This is the new mission; we've just got to get on with it; this is as good as it's going to get, so let's try."

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Without a doubt it was open to the British Government to say to President Karzai and Governor Daoud, "We hear your requests. We understand them, but we are not willing to comply with them." That was an option.

  Q529 Chair: John Reid did that.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Well, quite shortly afterwards, we complied with their requests. It is this political-military interface; you are absolutely on it here. I cannot dissect that one for you, I am afraid.

  Q530 Ms Stuart: Madeleine and I were whispering to each other, "Would Des Browne have known?"

  Mrs Moon: Would this decision have gone up to Des Browne to be signed off?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I'm absolutely certain of it.

  Q531 Mrs Moon: John Reid was saying, "No, no, no." Then suddenly, we had a change.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I cannot imagine that a decision that had such great political overtones, domestically in this country and in our relationship with the Karzai Government, did not go to ministerial level. I don't know that, but I cannot believe that it wasn't so.

  Q532 Chair: But it would have gone on the basis of military advice, wouldn't it?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes, without a doubt.

  Q533 Mr Havard: So some of the military advice could have been, "Well, okay. We can maybe do a bit of it. Maybe we can do it, but at a different pace to what President Karzai wanted"?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: The request was very specific, in terms of this and that location. Again, it was open for us to have said, "None at all," or "We will do Sangin" or whatever, or "We will do everything that you ask us to do." We seem to have gone towards the latter. I understand the politics behind that; we were there—and are there—among other things, to get better governance in Afghanistan. To some extent that implies being co-operative with the Afghan Government.

  Q534 Chair: Were you aware at the time, getting back to Penny's question about troop numbers, that on a regular basis Ed Butler had been staffing requests for more resources to PJHQ? Was that something that had come past the chiefs?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I have that sense that there was a request for more. The difficulty is that the original concept was matched reasonably well to the force available. With the dispersion to quite a number of small bases, your logistic problem increases exponentially, because you have to deliver matériel over distance. You have to do that either on the ground or in the air, which gets us into the helicopter problem and all of that. Not only was it tactically very different from the original concept, but it brought with it—I am looking at Tim Cross, a logistician of some renown—huge logistic complications.

  Q535 Chair: The reason I asked the question is that if Ed Butler was saying that even before the change of tactics—the change in what was happening on the ground—we didn't have enough people here, where does this great tradition in the British Army of supporting the commander on the ground come in?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Indeed. I am trying to remember whether there was any occasion on which PJHQ came up with a clear, distinct proposal for another battalion, or whatever it might have been. I don't recall that. I had a sense at the time that there was nervousness because the Iraq commitment was considerably higher at this time—the summer of 2006—than had been planned for. There was real concern that we would get right out of kilter. I don't think I can do any better for you than that, sorry.

  Chair: Okay. I am going to invite people to catch my eye if there are further questions that they would like to ask. I think we have pretty much abandoned the structure that was set out.

  Q536 Mrs Moon: I would like to ask about the level of support that was provided. We have got the impression that almost as command changed, so the matériel needed to pursue their direction also changed. At one point it was helicopters that were short; another time, we needed tanks. It is almost as though everybody had a different shopping list. Is that your perception?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That is interesting. There is no doubt that from the summer of 2003 the campaign developed. If you recall, in the first two summers the Taliban took us on, basically using fire and manoeuvre—small arms, basically—and each and every time, they were defeated tactically. We can discuss whether any operational-level progress had been made, but they were defeated tactically. It took them rather longer, looking back, than one might have expected, but they obviously thought very hard, particularly after the second summer, 2007, and said, "We're not going to get anywhere taking on the British soldiers at what they do best; ergo we will find another way." That brings us to the IED. That changes priorities on our side. Armoured vehicles suddenly go right up in terms of priority, because that is the way you protect the force. As I've already touched on, the dispersion put a greater premium on helicopters. Tactics and equipment will vary according to the operational circumstances. One has to respond. Ideally, you need to be one foot ahead, but that's not always possible. Does that help?

  Q537 Mrs Moon: One of the things that have been suggested to me is that there was also an element of the Armed Forces using Afghanistan as a reason to modernise and equip—that there was an element of using the operational requirement to restock and get the latest level of equipment. How much of that is natural?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Mrs Moon, I think I detect two strands. You can tell me I'm wrong when I've answered. *** Let's not forget, I haven't used the two words "Northern Ireland" in all this either. Part of the time scale of this is, of course, the British Armed Forces going non-operational in Northern Ireland on, I think, 31 July 2007. That had another bearing on 2006. We still had a commitment in Northern Ireland. It was predicated—indeed, the reduction in the size of the Army that took place over 2005-06 was predicated—on that run-down in Northern Ireland.

  The first strand, which is reflected in some of the evidence I've read, is that somehow the British Army was looking for a new operation. Northern Ireland was finished, and in Iraq one could see the horizon, so we wanted to go and do something else. I don't see that myself. That is not to say that you don't have an Army that is operationally hungry, because that's what it is. You will have detected that, I suspect, on visits for yourselves; I hope you have. That's a far cry from actually pushing to go and up the ante. That is a strand that I can't see, myself.

  Q538 Mrs Moon: I wasn't suggesting that.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I beg your pardon. But it's probably just as well I've said what I've said, because I've seen reflections to the contrary.

  Q539 Mr Havard: So would you say that when each commander goes out there—depending on whether they're Marines or whatever—the mission's clear? Their intent on how they prosecute might be slightly different. Some will say, "I'm going to take the fight to them"; others will say, "I'll do things this way and emphasise it differently", and so on. That's just the way the thing works. Do you think, however, there was a lack of clarity and understanding? At the time when all this was happening, you then had an overlay of political decisions to say, effectively, "No, no. You will go and do it this way. The mission has changed. You will go and take the fight to them, but at the locations that we are choosing for you, rather than you choosing as a commander to do it the way you want to do it." So no matter how much discretion there was for individuals, that was the big change. At that time, the Americans were still on Operation Enduring Freedom, so there were two very conflicting processes running at the same time. Was that more important than tactical nuance or changes of individual commanders, and what support they would need to do those things differently, as well as the political imperative that then meant they couldn't do it because they didn't have the support? Which is it? What is the mixture?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: May I deal with the chain of command issue first? There is no doubt that the Coalition and NATO chains of command—because there were two, in 2005-06, and you would not have got many marks at the staff college for coming up with that as a solution to your command and control. The counter-terrorist operation—Operation Enduring Freedom, I think—was clearly under American guidance, direction and command, and then there was the NATO operation, which was more about nation building, if I can use that shorthand. There were blurred lines. It got better because, at least in theory, the two chains of command merged, I think, in late 2006. David Richards had to push that one very hard. So, that was not ideal.

  Am I right that the first part of your question was about the degree to which British commanders in the field take individual and somewhat different views on the task in front of them?

  Q540 Mr Havard: And you said, "Trust the commander." When they are making different decisions, that might have different implications.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That criticism has also been levelled at command in Southern Iraq, and there is substance in the criticism. Again, it goes back to part of our doctrine, in that it is for the commander on the ground to handle his force. Of course, he doesn't have complete freedom, and nor should he. I think your question goes to a much deeper point. Clausewitz said that the use of force is politics by another means—ergo, what is the political end which is sought? That has not always been clear, although Ministers and Cabinet of whichever Government may be of the view that it is perfectly clear. To be fair, it is a criticism I get from the lay public as well, who don't quite understand what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. What is the political objective required? That takes you down a way of thinking that ought to be common.

  In Afghanistan, perhaps it was not clear, with Enduring Freedom running. Is the political objective to remove al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters from the ungoverned space of Southern Iraq—and that is it? Or, is it broader: to help Afghanistan out of its miserable past into a more stable future, where governance, rule of law—if I can say "rule of law" and "Afghanistan" in the same sentence? It seems to me, however, that it is all part of that. There is the balance that the commander must strike between, obviously, protecting his own force—but that may not be enough in terms of the opponents—but doing that in a manner that does not result in the civil population, not the Taliban, becoming more sympathetic or indeed turning to the Taliban. This can be a fine line—

  Q541 Mr Havard: So, it is not a case of not giving the commander sufficient support to make the tactical difference that he wants to on the ground. It is a case of not having supported properly the political intent that you are expecting the commander to carry out. If Ed Butler is on the ground saying, "I need more resources, on a weekly basis. If you now want me to move and do a different thing in a different way, I need extra resources to do this work", and they're not arriving, it's because additional support is not being given to the political intent change, which was to agree with Daoud and Karzai to do it differently. Whether or not the commander is acting differently on the ground is not the issue, is that what you are saying?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Although commanders are of course individuals and will bring their own characters, beside anything else and despite all of the training, it seems to me that the crucial point here is that—sorry, I'm going to repeat myself—we will never know whether the original concept was sound because it didn't happen. I judged that it was just about okay in terms of task and force levels. However, when the dispersal happened, and it happened very quickly, it was almost self-evident that you were asking too much of four rifle companies and the limited logistics. My logistician has—

  Chair: He's gone.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: He got rather bored with listening to Jackson banging on. Anyway, that is why you get the mismatch between those new tasks and doing it from the same force level for a rather different task.

  Q542 Ms Stuart: This is another attempt to get the picture, because I have been checking a few date lines as to where we were. You're sitting out in Afghanistan and looking at a British Government where the Prime Minister has not yet said he is going, but everybody knows he will soon. He has a Chancellor of the Exchequer champing at his heels who is known to dislike military intervention, so the military doesn't have much confidence in him, either. There was yet another Secretary of State for Defence, and a Foreign Secretary who, when told she was going to be Foreign Secretary, came out with an "expletive deleted". Iraq wasn't working out the way we thought, so the departing Prime Minister's political legacy was getting pretty shaky. You guys were still out there in Afghanistan and being asked to do yet another thing. Would the troops on the ground have said, "These guys don't know what they're really up to and won't be around for much longer, so we might as well just make the best of a bad job"? Is that theoretically an interpretation of what may have gone through some minds?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Ms Stuart, you are putting it in quite partisan terms. As a recently retired Crown servant, I don't want to get into partisanship—unlike one or two others, I might say. I will answer the question in this way. Soldiers in the British Army understand perfectly well that they are all volunteers, and the vast majority—not necessarily every man jack, but the vast majority—are operationally hungry, to use that phrase again. Throughout British military history the soldier has cursed the politicians who sent him there, but that does not mean to say that they do not understand perfectly well that in a mature democracy such as ours it is the bounden duty of soldiers to follow the direction of the elected Government of the day. They do it with more cheerfulness than is perhaps sometimes warranted, but they do it pretty cheerfully. I don't know if that helps at all, but I do not want to go down your partisan lane, if you don't mind.

  Q543 Bob Stewart: General, I totally understand the short chain of command: theatre to PJHQ to CDS, Chiefs of Staff Committee—

  Chair: The Chiefs of Staff Committee is not involved as such, is it?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Well, it is involved, in that the CDS will chew things over, but then he trots off.

  Bob Stewart: So the Chiefs of Staff Committee sits, Chairman, and CDS actually answers for it. My question to General Sir Mike is: what, in your view, is the mission of the brigade on the ground as the operational Head of the Army? What did you think Butler was supposed to be doing, as a member of the chiefs of staff committee?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Again, I have to put it in the greater context of the overall NATO operation. We weren't doing this as a single nation doing its own thing.

  Q544 Bob Stewart: But you would have visited him and asked him about his mission.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Would I have visited whom?

  Bob Stewart: Butler.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes. I visited him a lot.

  The overall NATO mission, as it spread out, was to put a Coalition/NATO presence throughout the country and to assist the recovery of Afghanistan towards stability. Those are my words, but that was roughly what it was about, and Britain was to play its part doing that in Helmand. It was therefore a mixture—I have already of covered that point—and that balance between improving governance, improving the economy and so on, and providing a secure environment within which that could happen. It is that balance. So far as I am concerned, that is what we set out to do in Helmand. It turned out differently, for reasons that we have now—

  Chair: Discussed.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Well, I have exhausted my knowledge of it. It is not so very satisfactory.

  Q545 Chair: Thank you very much indeed. It has been extremely helpful, and we are most grateful to you. I am sorry that because of my own inefficiency we had to change your time, as well as keeping you here late.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: No problem. If I can help, that's all I ask. I would just say that it seems to me—no doubt the MoD will have its own reasons—that the Committee would be much better informed if you had better access to contemporary documentation.

  Q546 Bob Stewart: To the chiefs of staff document?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Among others.

  Q547 Chair: We have not asked for those minutes, and it would be quite interesting to see what would happen if we did.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes, it would be quite interesting. I would be intrigued to see the outcome of such a request.

  Chair: We shall need to consider that. Thank you.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Not at all. My pleasure.

  Mr Havard: We'll tell them it was your idea.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: That means you won't get them at all. I am not the favourite retired general up in that place, but there we are.



 
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