UK military operations in Syria and Iraq Contents

6Changing the way we intervene

The effectiveness of past UK interventions

151.Both the purpose of intervention and how those interventions were carried out featured in evidence given to this inquiry. Issues about the importance of a political plan, an agreed end-state and how that was to be achieved were repeatedly raised, regarding the current intervention and also previous interventions in Iraq, in Libya and in Afghanistan.

The purpose of intervention

152.Major General Shaw suggested that in several cases an expectation that countries conformed to the ideals of Western liberalism and morality had been the underlying assumption of interventions which had resulted in failure. He warned that:

Morality is a dangerous tool through which to see the world, if that is the only tool through which you see the world. The purity of one’s intent is not the same as the purity of one’s outcome, and I think the outcomes can sometimes outweigh the purity of one’s intent.222

Dr Ashraf also cautioned against ethical interventions but highlighted successful ones in Sierra Leone and Kosovo as proof that intervention can sometimes yield positive results. In response to this point, Major General Shaw told us that a military solution to a military threat was vital, but that issues arose when a military solution was used to try and resolve a difficult political situation, rather than a political process and political resolution.223

153.Michael Eisenstadt believed that a military solution could be used only to contain rather than solve these problems. Thus, the use of force should be judged on the merits of managing the situation rather than achieving a particular outcome.224 Lieutenant General Mayall was also clear that the Government should not adopt the attitude that intervention is invariably too difficult, but rather that intervention needs to be done differently. He suggested that lessons were not necessarily being learned in Whitehall from previous interventions.225

154.Asked about the Government’s approach, the Secretary of State told us that lessons had indeed been learnt, such as: the importance of tackling corruption; the need to invest time and money in trying to change the political culture of countries and regions where freedom of speech and democracy had not been the norm; and the need to assist local forces in trying to change that landscape rather than using Western forces to do so.226

155.Lieutenant General Carleton-Smith also highlighted the duration of military campaigns as being one of the lessons learnt from previous interventions. He emphasised the importance of achieving the best practicable outcome before a campaign eventually runs out of political and public support:

From the military perspective, we have learnt that a campaign is of finite duration, even if the problem endures, and there is therefore a limit to political tolerance for that duration. We need to use the time that we do have to best effect. I think we might reflect that on Afghanistan, we spent a near decade organising our inputs rather than being very clear about what our outputs are and ruthlessly focusing on those.227

156.He agreed with the Secretary of State on the question of local forces, again relating his experience in Afghanistan:

If there were reservations locally about one’s very presence, one was not necessarily a net contributor. We deduced from that that we needed an indigenous proxy—a legitimate element—with which to engage. It is easier in the countries where that exists, and it is that much more difficult in countries where one has to create it.228

157.Dominic Wilson also suggested that interventions had changed from being a purely military tool to being a whole-of-Government effort. He thought that both the National Security Council and the civil service recognised that interventions were “truly inter-agency problems and we approach them in exactly that way. That is a necessary lesson that we have learnt over the years”.229

158.It is clear that recent interventions have required much more than mere military campaigns. There have been criticisms of levels of engagement in the political sphere in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria too. It is also clear that there is no single formula for success but that understanding the local political and cultural context, as well as the nature of the situation on the ground, is absolutely essential. We welcome the emergence of a new doctrine that extends thinking about intervention to include other actors such as aid agencies, NGOs and the private sector. The ‘whole-of-Government’ approach, epitomised by the National Security Council, is clearly an improvement on the management of previous interventions. However, despite that innovation, a number of concerns have been raised about interventions that have taken place since the National Security Council was created. This indicates that there are still flaws and weaknesses in the system. Some of these were identified in our predecessor Committee’s Report (HC 682) on ‘Decision-making in Defence Policy’, published in March 2015.

Committing to reconstruction and stabilisation

159.As well as the need for a strategy for the region, the Committee were told in Iraq that stabilisation and reconstruction were central to ensuring that the threat of DAESH was countered. Lise Grande of the UN Development Programme told the Committee that, without the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) to the areas which had been retaken from DAESH, military successes would be hollow. However, the UNDP was underfunded despite its proven successes in using minimal amounts of funding to stabilise areas. The importance of stabilisation and the return of IDPs was also asserted by a number of witnesses in evidence to the Committee. Major General Shaw told us that the use of IEDs by DAESH to mine areas under its control was specifically designed to make land uninhabitable for those IDPs who wished to return. He emphasised that the prospect of that return, the prospect of life returning to normal after DAESH, was a necessary motivating factor in persuading local forces and people to fight against them. He underlined how important it was to have planning and financing in place for stabilisation and reconstruction.230

160.Colonel de Bretton Gordon agreed that humanitarian support such as reconstruction in areas retaken from DAESH was vital to give people hope and a chance for the future.231 He also discussed the importance of a post-war strategy and described some of the other ways in which reconstruction could be achieved:

It has to be part of a comprehensive strategy. Hopefully what you are saying will come to fruition, but unless it is a comprehensive strategy in military, political, diplomatic and humanitarian terms, we are just going to repeat some of the mistakes that we have made elsewhere. When it comes to creating that peaceful coexistence within Syria, we need somebody to do it. I think there is a role for the UN. For the West or NATO to get involved—I would hope that those countries will be involved, and I hope the UK would lead and support UN-type action. Militarily, to bring about that sort of de-escalation—collecting weapons and everything else—I think the United Nations has a role to play, and I hope that the UK would front up and do the sort of things that we do incredibly well.232

161.The Secretary of State has recognised the importance of stabilisation as part of the counter-DAESH effort. In a quarterly update on the campaign against DAESH, he told the House on 24 May that:

Stabilisation is the key: after liberating a town or city, it is essential to offer the local population the security and stability they need to be able to return. We are co-operating with our partners, and a huge amount of work is being done on the stabilisation effort, which will be offered to each city and town as it is liberated. …We have had some success in populations returning, particularly in Tikrit, to which the vast majority of the population has now returned. That is more difficult in Ramadi, simply because so many improvised explosive devices have been seeded right across the city. There are different circumstances in each of the particular areas.233

Earlier in his statement, the Secretary of State gave examples of how the UK was supporting stabilisation efforts:

We are helping to stabilise areas liberated from DAESH so that people can return to a safe environment. We have contributed to UN-led efforts to remove IEDs, to increase water availability to above pre-conflict levels in Tikrit, and to rebuild schools, police stations and electricity generators across Anbar and Nineveh provinces.234

162.The Secretary of State further discussed some of the challenges to stabilisation when he gave evidence to us on 26 May:

the key challenge [is] not just that they become peaceful, but that the population have the confidence to return—they largely flee, of course, when these towns are being liberated—that the essentials of life will be provided and, above all, that there will be security and local policing. We do that stabilisation work in conjunction with our colleagues in DFID. Of course, it also requires continuing political reform in Iraq, and we have continued to encourage the Iraqi Government to crack on with the reforms that are needed in terms of the National Guard, local policing and giving governors the devolved powers they need to be able to organise the essentials of life for their people.

Dominic Wilson agreed, emphasising that stabilisation was reliant on people having trust in the political system and that the services they need, including security, will be provided at both a local and national level.235 He told us that the UK could assist with this to a certain extent but echoed the importance of political reform in order to realise an acceptable end-state:

Clearly, the politics has to be solved by the Iraqis themselves and by the Iraqi Government. Local security has to be provided by local security forces that people can buy into, but some services can be provided externally. We are putting money into that ourselves, and DFID and the stabilisation unit that we have here in the UK are working very closely on that. As the Secretary of State says, the difficulty is the pace. The military campaign is being successful, but arguably the politics and the stabilisation effort more generally are lagging some way behind.236

163.The fact that witnesses repeatedly identified reactionary politics as a drag on overall outcomes, points to a pessimistic conclusion—that countries riven by intense tribal and religious divisions may take a very long time indeed to accept the basic principles of democracy and equal rights. If so, no amount of injected international aid will significantly accelerate the adoption of democratic norms and values as the basis of their political systems.

164.According to DFID figures published on 1 December 2015, since 2012 the UK has spent £20.6 million on stabilisation in Syria in the form of governance and service delivery support.237 This is out of a total of over £500 million spent on aid in Syria.238 £79.5 million has been spent on aid to Iraq. In a February 2016 response to a Parliamentary Question, DFID highlighted that £10 million allocated by the Conflict, Stabilisation and Security Fund to Iraq had been used to stabilise re-liberated areas.239 The Government’s Development Tracker website also contains details of a £40 million project in Iraq which is aimed at responding to “urgent humanitarian needs in Iraq and build the capacity of the Iraqi and international system to respond to the humanitarian crisis, and support the development of recovery and stabilisation activities”.240 It can therefore be assumed that a proportion of this has been allocated to stabilisation. In contrast, the Ministry of Defence has estimated that the net additional cost of counter-DAESH operations between August 2014 and March 2016 is around £250 million.241 At the most, the Government had (as of July) spent on stabilisation a fifth of the total it has spent on military action.

165.Stabilisation and reconstruction are central in the fight to counter DAESH, particularly in Iraq. We were impressed by both the calibre and the (relatively low) cost of the work carried out by the UNDP when we were in Iraq.

166.The disparity between military effort and that on stabilisation is concerning. Whilst stabilisation does not carry the same cost as a military operation, the low priority placed on stabilisation does not reassure us about Iraq’s long-term future. We recommend that the Government ensures that the diplomatic and development effort relates more closely to the size of the military effort, whilst recognising that not all societies have reached a stage of development for fully-fledged democratic institutions to command general assent.

Conclusion

167.The majority of the questions in this chapter are significant and wide-ranging. They could not be easily answered, especially in an inquiry that was looking at two specific interventions. However, they are questions that have repeatedly arisen during several inquiries carried out by us and our predecessor Committees. We shall, therefore consider holding a further inquiry, especially in the light of the Chilcot Report, which will look at the way the UK intervenes—the decision-making process, the preparation and planning both for the military campaign and its aftermath, and the way that the UK Government ensures that it can maintain a solid commitment to a strategy which is comprehensive and achievable. Only in this way can we be confident that lessons learnt from previous interventions are understood before any future ones are contemplated.

222 Q70

223 Q87

224 Q237

225 Q189

226 Q441

227 Q441

228 Q441

229 Q441

230 Q74

231 Q313

232 Q287

233 HC Deb, 24 May 2016, col. 419