Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
Major-General Messervy-Whiting CBE and Mr Nick Witney
5 JUNE 2008
Q40 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Just
to follow up on that, because I very much agree with what you
said about the risk that if you say too much about what I call
the Millennium Development Goal end of the spectrum, you do risk
giving the impression that it could all be done with soft power.
Do you not feel that the European Union and its Member States
should be looking at the soft power/hard power issue as a long
continuum basically in which you cannot predict in advance always
how far along that continuum you will have to go in dealing with
a particular risk or threat. It is not a question of alternatives,
of either soft power or hard power, it is a question of having
a realistic and credible continuum up which to move.
Mr Witney: Yes, I do agree with that
and I think that for an organisation whose self-image is its particular
value—added in combining the different tools of hard and
soft power, the European Union is remarkably ill-equipped to do
that.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: If I
could just add, not so much as part of the strategy but in relation
to each particular challenge that needs to deploy the European
Security and Defence Policy instrument, the EU does as a matter
of discipline, as part of its crisis management procedures, enter
a comprehensive global concept phase where they look at the overall
objectives using all instruments in relation to that problem,
of which the ESDP element—whether it is more civil in nature
or more military in nature—will be just a part.
Q41 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Just
as there are differences in the weight given to soft and hard
power in individual countries—at the one end I guess one
would have Canada and Norway emphasising soft power and ourselves
probably on the other side. Is there a danger that there would
be a differentiation from the European Union side because
the military end of the spectrum has been as yet undeveloped within
the European Union, and is there therefore a temptation to look
mainly at the soft power end? Perhaps part of our role is to put
a little more weight on the military and hard power side in the
formulation of the new policy.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: Solana
quotes 17 ESDP operations so far and the vast majority have been
civil rather than military in nature, but actually in terms of
the planning effort, the machinery and the institutional side
the military were very much first off the ground under the ESDP
and the civilian side, without being derogatory, were very much
playing catch-up. The first mission mounted was a police mission
but the planning for that was very much done quietly and informally
with a great deal of assistance from the military staff because
they were up and running and the police planning staff were not.
The non-military crisis management structures had very much been
looking at the military way of doing things to try and develop
how to do things.
Q42 Lord Anderson of Swansea: At
about the time this security strategy came out was it not also
the time when we had the Macedonia operation where although it
was trumpeted by the European Union their role was pretty minimal;
at the beginning it was a NATO-led operation. My point is, is
there a temptation, because of the weight within the European
Union, to overstress the civilian as opposed to the military dimensions?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I would
say from what I saw when I was there, which was up until 2003,
that that was not the case. To what extent that might have changed
I defer to Nick, but certainly by the time the strategy was agreed
there had been two military operations, one was using Berlin Plus
and NATO assets and capabilities—the Macedonia one—the
second one was Artemis in the Bunia region of the Democratic Republic
of Congo which was very much a so-called autonomous military operation
without recourse to NATO assets and capabilities, so they had
done one of each.
Q43 Lord Anderson of Swansea: But
that was essentially French, was it not?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: France
provided the framework nation, absolutely, but a large number
of Member States and non-Member States took part in that operation.
It was small in nature.
Q44 Lord Anderson of Swansea: We
had a general in Macedonia for what people were saying was essentially
a brigadier scale operation—that is the EU was trumpeting
this as a great operation, but it was pretty small.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: It was
modest in size but the operation commander was a four star general,
was DSACEUR, the German Admiral at that stage, Feist, based in
Mons and the force commander on the ground was a two star[1].
It was a modest operation.
Q45Lord Jones: Following on from Lord Hannay
and Lord Anderson's immediate question should the strategy place
greater emphasis on human security to balance the current focus
on state security and does the strategy sufficiently address the
complexities of the European security environment and inter-linkages
between different types of security threats and risks?
Mr Witney: It is a bit unfair to the
strategy to say that it is focused on state security; it seems
to me actually that it recognises that most situations of instability
and conflict are to do with regional conflicts and the failure
of states. There is quite a clear pair of statements about the
importance of governance, ensuring that the rule of law works,
that there is not excessive corruption, that there is accountability.
The understanding of the importance of human rights comes through
to me pretty clearly from this so my sense is that allowing for
the fact that this is very much a summary, headline document,
very much compressed in its terms, it is entirely sensitive to
the fact that what you mean by development and concern for human
rights is something that has to go absolutely hand in hand with
efforts to improve harder security, as we learn every day in Afghanistan
or anywhere that Europeans are engaged, no matter what flag they
are engaged under.
Q46 Lord Jones: Could you explain
how you perceive human security; could you pad that out a little
bit?
Mr Witney: I have had one or two conversations
with collaborators of Professor Kaldor and my understanding is
that it is very much focused on an understanding that you are
not going to get things right in the societies that you are possibly
intervening in, unless you look at the grass roots and do address
the problems of the individual human beings on the ground. As
I said, it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of lesson
that we are relearning again in Afghanistan, that you can do what
you like with the central government but unless you win the hearts
and minds of people on the ground and show them substantive development
and show them real security, you are not actually going to have
a successful outcome to what you are trying to do.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I agree
with Nick. I am not comfortable with the term "human security"
because I do not really understand it.
Q47 Lord Jones: I was hoping you
could explain it to me.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I run
fellowship courses on democracy, the rule of law and security
at Birmingham University and I think I know what she is getting
at. The EU, certainly in some of its smaller, more recent, good
governance-type operations—security sector reform and other
operations, mainly military in nature—is actually addressing
those sorts of issues directly on the ground.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I agree with
the difficulty of defining what you mean by this catchphrase "human
security" but the most obvious case where it has been defined
and has become an international norm but has not yet been properly
implemented is the responsibility to protect, which is of course
specifically directed towards human security and overriding state
security in certain circumstances where genocide or war crimes
or gross abuses of humanitarian law took place. The responsibility
to protect was of course agreed in 2005, after the European Security
Strategy was promulgated, and presumably one of the ways in which
the strategy may need to be updated is to indicate how the European
Union intends to move ahead with implementing its responsibilities
of its 27 Member States in the United Nations under the rubric
of responsibility to protect; that is about human security.
Chairman: We did have evidence from Dan
Smith last week and we are going to hear Mary Kaldor next week,
so we will have from them a good deal about human security. Can
I ask Lord Anderson if he would like to come in.
Q48 Lord Anderson of Swansea: Gentlemen,
when you mentioned the thin blue book my mind raced to Maoist
themes and I had a picture of the Brussels bureaucrats waving
a little blue book, but I guess the danger is that because it
is thin it is merely a statement of principles, broadly consensual;
is there a danger of just having a sort of Cook's tour of problems,
challenges, threats, without going beneath those to the implementation—I
took down your phrase, if I can repeat it, "get out there
and deal with them" on terrorism, looking at the causes and
what one can do there. Is that next stage, the implementation
and the understanding of the causes, in your judgment beyond the
remit of what such a strategy should contain?
Mr Witney: There is a great deal of material
that should be developed underneath the chapeau of this strategy.
For example, it is probably time that a more coherent doctrine
of stabilisation was developed with Europe. We all talk again
in headline terms about the need for the "comprehensive approach"
and we do not necessarily know exactly what we mean by that.
Q49 Lord Anderson of Swansea: But
that is under the chapeau, not contained within the document itself.
Mr Witney: Yes, I think that is right.
Of course, the neighbourhood policy moves on and in due course
the EU should develop more explicit and coherent regional strategies.
I find it striking that five of the 20 EU operations so far have
been in Congo—and why not, if ever there was a country that
needed external help ... But it is pretty opaque to me what the
EU thinks its strategy towards the Congo is apart from popping
into the Eastern Provinces or backing the UN over the short period
of an election or putting a few drops in the ocean of policing
and security sector reform. This does not actually look to me
like a strategy towards Congo. There is plenty that can be done
and should be done underneath the chapeau of this strategy to
fill out the sub-strategies or policies, but the document itself
I am rather attached to.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: There
might be real practical difficulties in trying to get something
more complicated through the EU system successfully in a short
space of time. The way the European Security Strategy was worked
through the EU Council system was in my view, standing back from
it and not having been involved directly, quite masterful in as
much as EU Member States were not allowed to get at it at too
early a stage and therefore it retained some of its elegance and
simplicities and succinctness before it hit the drafting wall.
As a former military adviser to the United Nations Secretary General
said recently at RUSI, "The important thing to do is know
who not to call at UN headquarters in New York if you want to
do something in practical terms as a commander in the field"
and that applies a little bit to that as well. There is a whole
raft of things underneath that; terrorism was mentioned and there
is a whole JHA construct which does terrorism, gives effect to
what happens, without necessarily needing to go back into here
to give more detail.
Q50 Lord Swinfen: From where is the
intelligence obtained that shows you that there is a security
threat developing and what the causes of that threat are? As far
as I understand the EU itself does not have an intelligence service
of any kind.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: It does
not, and I do not think there is any serious ambition by anybody
that it should. What it does have is quite an efficient intelligence-handling
machinery, both on the military side inside the military staff
in Brussels and on the non-military side inside the situation
centre in Brussels and they work very closely together. What Member
States are signed up to do is provide intelligence product to
the European Union and the military side of it is handled in one
way and the non-military side of it is handled in another way,
but then they come together. The EU is receiving sensitive classified
intelligence which is releasable to the Member States from, I
think, each and every Member State. What happens then is that
there is a synthesis—in my time there it started off being
called a hotspots thing, but it then became a global overview
which was presented to the Political and Security Committee, looked
at and updated, in my time on a monthly basis. That was the document
that gave rise if you like to what we would call threat analysis
and eventually to risk assessment if the EU decided to do something
in the field.
Q51 Lord Swinfen: Is updating on
a monthly basis satisfactory or should it be more often?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: What
we are talking about being updated on a monthly basis, and I may
be out of date here, was the end product of all these considerations.
The actual intelligence was flowing in 24 hours a day on an as
and when needed basis.
Q52 Chairman: And OSINT would generate
material for the Member States on a more regular basis than monthly.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: Yes,
there would be intelligence summaries which would be periodic
and there would be specific intelligence reports if there was
a specific intelligence event that needed reporting.
Q53 Lord Swinfen: Although the Member
States are passing intelligence to this organisation, is the organisation
passing intelligence back to the individual Member States?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: Absolutely.
That is one of the fundamental conditions of all the memoranda
of understanding between the EU bodies and the intelligence services
of the Member States; that everybody gets all product back from
what the EU produces.
Q54 Lord Swinfen: Have there been
any instances of a Member State withholding intelligence because
it thought it was to its political or other advantage?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: I cannot
answer that but certainly Member States would not release everything
that they had to the European Union, they would be making decisions
as to what was releasable to the 27 Member States and certainly
countries like the United Kingdom and France would not be releasing
everything they had, some of it would not be releasable to the
27.
Q55 Lord Chidgey: On this point,
My Lord Chairman, of paying greater attention to the causes and
sources of security threats, which we have been chuntering on
about quite happily, can I just use an example here which is rather
puzzling me in a way? One of the key threats set out in the overview
of the ESS is the proliferation of WMDs. There is a fact sheet
from the European Union, a pro forma of what the EU should set
out to do in terms of facing up to the threat of WMDs—this
was in 2004. I first of all feel it is probably a bit ambitious
for the structures within the EU that we are talking about to
actually tackle the issue of rogue states or whatever using WMDs
as an international threat, but that is my view and I would like
to hear from the witnesses as to what has been achieved in the
last four years with regard specifically to the ESS being able
to address and progress the ambitions that are set out here in
dealing with this as a key threat to the EU.
Mr Witney: Proliferation is a difficult
subject to deal with on an essentially inter-governmental basis,
where, as Graham has just described, the intelligence is contributed
by Member States according to what they feel comfortable contributing.
In the area of proliferation of course intelligence is critically
important and I imagine that it is rather difficult for Member
States to provide their best assessments and consequently rather
difficult for the EU collectively to form particularly up to date
or incisive views on the proliferation threat. The obvious area
where the EU has been engaged is with Iran and the not definitively
successful, if I can express it that way, dialogue that Mr Solana
has been having with the Iranians.
Q56 Lord Chidgey: Was that not the
initiative of Germany, France and the UK?
Mr Witney: They are the particular partners
in that enterprise but it now has the weight of the EU behind
it. Of course it seems that Iran carries on enriching uranium,
which is scarcely a measure of success, but on the other hand
they have not been bombed, which I suppose is another measure
of the success of the policy, a more positive measure. It is an
intractable problem, proliferation, but I do not think the EU
is particularly well-placed to deal with it except at second hand
by trying, as per the strategy, to see what it can do to enforce
the broader sense of the rules-governed world and the rule of
law and deal with instabilities and regional conflict where they
arise.
Lord Chidgey: Particularly on WMD there
is a set of actions that have been set forth as a framework for
the EU WMD strategy 2004. I was just interested to know whether
there is some assessment of the progress that has been made with
the actions that were set out there in 2004 at the US/EU summit
in Dublin in 2004.
Chairman: Lord Chidgey, this is probably
something we could pursue more usefully when we are in Brussels
with EU officials. General Whiting would have left the organisation
by the time that went through and Mr Witney's responsibilities
in EDA were not directly related to it; it might be easier to
take this up there.
Lord Chidgey: Just one final small point,
I would just like to make a distinction between the work that
was done by our Foreign Secretary in Teheran with our colleagues
in Germany and France as an initiative to try and make some progress
with the Iranians. I do not think we really should see the ESS
absorbing that as part of its achievement, because it was not;
I happened to be in Teheran at the time when Jack Straw arrived
and one has to be careful about what one assumes has been achieved
when it has not been achieved and then recognise what has to be
done.
Q57 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Returning
to the question of sharing intelligence, is it not true that the
nations contributing the intelligence have to basically work to
the lowest common denominator in that you have to think of the
roughest and most unreliable member of the EU, as to what they
will do with that intelligence, before you contribute it. You
say that this intelligence is sensitive; I just wonder how sensitive
it is at all. I suspect that sensitive information is switched
between the intelligence communities in each country, probably
on a bi-partisan basis, so the real intelligence is not actually
going through the EU at all.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: Certainly
during my time as a practitioner it was much easier working with
15 than I suspect it is for my successors working with 27.
Q58 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: I would
imagine that is so.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: Having
said that, there was and is a multi-layering to it, so there were
things for example that Member States would agree to release to
key decision-makers within the EU machinery that might not necessarily
go out in a report to the 27 to inform their negotiations or the
actions they were taking, demarches they were making, in overseas
countries. There was and is, therefore, a sort of layering system
which the UK as well as other countries, as well as France, were
actively involved in setting up.
Mr Witney: Perhaps I could just add a
footnote. It is also worth recording that intelligence and particularly
secret intelligence of the kind you are referring to is only a
means to an end and the end is to have a decently robust assessment
which can be shared, particularly the business of sending it out
again, using it to inform 27 Member States. Many of the new Member
States have not traditionally been particularly closely interested
or involved with distant parts of the world, so I do not know
how well informed the Poles were on Chad before they took part
in the Chad operation. To provide assessments with the necessary
degree of robustness to inform that sort of debate—open
source intelligence is increasingly widely used actually.
Chairman: We did have a meeting when
we were in Brussels on the last occasion with Mr Shapcott and
we had a very interesting discussion with him, really coming to
the conclusion that you really do need to have among Member States
common analysis if you are going to get common reactions, and
you will not have common action unless you have common reaction,
so this is all the preparation of the process for decision-making.
I have the feeling that OSINT has been a rather useful development
over recent years.
Lord Anderson of Swansea: I would share
that.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: Does
that not beg the question of common politics and a common policy
over different issues of foreign policy? It was not entirely straightforward
sharing intelligence even at 15.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom: It certainly
was not.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: This
sounds, if I may say, terrific in theory, but for those of us
who have had to practise it and control to a degree the intelligence
passing, even between close allies, I cannot help agreeing with
a lot of the analysis that Lord Hamilton made, that actually this
becomes so bland in what one is prepared to share in the end that
the effort involved sometimes does not seem worth the candle.
That is a very bleak view, but it is one borne of experience.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: In contrast
to that I just want to pick up what Mr Witney said, which I believe
to be correct, that a higher and higher proportion of the input
to making analyses and risk assessments is open source now and
that is, of course, entirely available and depends only on the
resources that Brussels has to absorb it, to analyse it and work
it, so I do think that is a pretty important point. The other
one which you also commented on is if you wish to get common action
out of 27 countries on a matter on which an understanding of the
underlying threat is absolutely critical, then of course withholding
intelligence is one way to not get it.
Chairman: We ought to revert to questioning
mode.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lord
Chairman, there is the opportunity for an internal discussion
amongst members of the Committee about this. I always see Lord
Hannay's brilliant breadth of knowledge; military intelligence
however is a very different matter from human intelligence.
Chairman: With respect to the Committee,
our witnesses are only with us for another 45 minutes and we can
have these discussions on another occasion, so if we can revert
to the questioning mode it would be useful.
Q59 Lord Jones: Looking at General
Whiting's distinguished CV, in the context of the strategy and
following on Lord Hamilton's references to intelligence, how do
you establish a rating in terms of human intelligence as opposed
to signal, which is the most valuable have you found?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: In general
they each have their particular merits depending on the situation
that you are trying to address; in some cases human intelligence
might be more valuable and more available, in other cases where
it is difficult to penetrate a particular area or target technical
intelligence might be more useful than human intelligence. I would
agree with the thrust of the comments made that open source intelligence
is becoming more and more interesting.
1 Note from witness: Brigadier-General Maral
(one-star) handed over as force commander to Major-General Ferreira
(two-star) on 1 October 2003. Back
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