Oral evidence: Decision making in Defence Policy, HC 682Tuesday 16 December 2014

Oral evidence, 16 December 2014.

Witness

Brigadier (Retd) Ed Butler gave evidence.

Mr Havard

Good morning. It is down to me to start the proceedings. Under the first general heading of what the aims of the missions were, there is this business of whether there was a conflict of aims. As you know, we are looking at decision making rather than all the details. Clearly, there was a counter-insurgency mission; there was also a counter-narcotics mission, mixed in with a nation-building, comprehensive approach and all that sort of stuff. You have previously made comments about the tensions between the compulsory eradication of poppies and stabilisation. Do you think there was a conflict of aims? How do we go about prioritising what needs to be done in that sort of context? Which was the priority? What was the aim?

Brigadier Butler

Good morning. As some of you know, I have sat in front of this Committee twice, and I have covered a lot of your points already, Dai. In short, there were multiple conflicting and competing missions, there was no clarity about what our strategic objectives were and there was no real definition of what success or failure might look like. There was, at best, a collection of various different objectives, none of which in 2005 or 2006 were ever really clarified and defined to us on the ground.

Mr Havard

You’ve said before that there was a weekly conference. It seems that the priorities shifted around and you sequenced them on the basis of the pressures that came out of the overall discussions week by week.

Brigadier Butler

I don’t think there was a switching from one objective to the other. There was constant questioning of what we were doing about counter-narcotics, of what our engagement or not should be in the US counter-terrorism operation, of what the nation-building objective really meant and of what our level of support to Regional Command South should be. There was constant questioning, which I began from the very start of my engagement in the middle of 2005, right the way through to the end of my time there in September 2006.

Mr Havard

Is it fair to say that there was a structure for all of that debate to take place, but that the structure was largely inadequate? Would a better structure have taken your concerns higher up?

Brigadier Butler

Was there a structure in theatre? I do not think so. We certainly met regularly across government, both at the Helmand executive group, which as you know was established down in Lashkar Gah, and the Kabul steering group in Kabul, which had myself as the commander of British Forces, the ambassador of the security services, and the DFID representative. We debated long and hard what we were being asked to do and we sought clarity across government, because everyone reported up to their various line managers and Ministers to find and request answers to our pressing questions.

Mr Havard

Okay. On the general heading of intelligence and this business of deciding what is strategic, operational, tactical and so on and how that is informed, you made some comments about what you thought were the military’s capabilities and basing yourself out of Kandahar rather than any other previous process. I remember visiting you a couple of weeks before you went and then about three weeks after you had been there. I remember Charlie, your chief of staff—

Brigadier Butler

Charlie Williams.

Mr Havard

Yes. He was looking at his Toughbook and you had created a whole set of intelligence on who was who, where they were and all the rest of it. The intelligence that you had before you went on which you based your decision making about how to deploy was presumably not very good. You just heard Rory’s questions to Sherard about how you get quality information so that you can make quality decisions. Have you got any comments about that?

Brigadier Butler

I think it is generally recognised by all that, before we deployed into Helmand in 2006, there was a dearth of intelligence, which there should not have been because throughout 2004 and 2005 there was very detailed special forces-gathered intelligence and security services intelligence, and very detailed reports were being written on that for their various organisations about the nature and structure of the Taliban and what the leadership was. We knew very clearly from the Quetta Shura that they were going to react and respond very vigorously to the arrival of British forces into Helmand. What happened to that intelligence, and why it did not feed into the various Government Departments, I am not sure and I find that is a major shortcoming. The intelligence was there. Was it shared with us? We knew that there were Talib there—I say we as in 16 Brigade—and we knew that we were going to generate a pretty angry reaction. We were surprised by quite how violent that was—we made not a wrong assumption but a not substantial assumption on that. We knew full well and made very clear to PGHQ and others in 2005 and to every visitor who came into theatre that we had underestimated both the nature of the enemy, their response and their capabilities and the nature of the terrain, which was going to make it very hard to operate there.

Mr Havard

You have said that to us previously: you said that you had underestimated the environment and the reaction of the Taliban. What was interesting from the previous evidence was that presumably the pre-assessment team had a lot of that information and were making recommendations on that. I think that evidence said that it would take 10 years to do it, but politically it was expected to be done in three years. What did you know of that?

Brigadier Butler

The shortcomings or where the fault lies for lack of accountability—both the preliminary operations teams, the special forces teams, who had been out in theatre, the individuals who pulled together the joint UK campaign plan for Helmand, all came up with the same sort of recommendations. They said that we were underestimating how long it was going to take; we did not have sufficient resources or know what was the actual mission going to be. All these points were very clearly made by December 2005. The question you would be right to ask was why were they not responded to, to say that this is something far greater than we thought and will require more resources or take more time or money? I asked and I certainly never got those questions answered.

Mr Havard

I was worried about whether there was a process to collect this information in the first place. You seem to be suggesting that there was a process to collect this information, so there was an assembly of a ground truth, but conveniently parts of it seem to have been ignored, rather than anything else. Was there a way of challenging this through the process you talk about—dissenters, if you like? How are you going to accommodate the bastards who are not on the plan, because they might be saying something very useful? Are you saying that these sorts of things are being ignored?

Brigadier Butler

Whether they were ignored or not fully understood, I think are two different points. I think the main repository for this and whether they got all of it from all Government sources was in the PGHQ. Did they have the time? Remember, in 2005 Iraq was not going to plan. There were a lot of other issues about their mental and physical capacity to start planning a very significant operation while another one was having the challenges it was. There were some human failings, which were not necessarily deliberate, but this information was there. The ground truth was very clearly laid out and those of us who had been in Afghanistan, either on reconnaissance trips or, in my case, having been there twice before, knew exactly what we were going to get into and made it very clear. I have notes from two reports I wrote as early as October 2005 which raise these issues.

Mr Havard

John Reid said to us when he came to give evidence last time that what we saw effectively were operational decisions—this is about moving north in Helmand, and so on—which had strategic consequences. The question is what is operational and what is tactical and what has a strategic consequence, if you like. Ultimately a fundamental change in the mission was taking place, because an operational decision now effectively affected the strategic decision in the first place and amended it. It therefore was not amended at the top deliberately, but had to be amended as a consequence of operational decisions. Is that fair? Is that what happened?

Brigadier Butler

I think the first point, and I am very happy to discuss it, is probably the nub of why you would like to hear my thoughts on this. The UK mission, which we finally got clarified and stated to us in 2006, was to conduct security and stabilisation operations within Helmand and wider Regional Command South, jointly with Afghan partners, other Government departments and multinational partners, in order to support the Government of Afghanistan, governance and development objectives. The mission was not changed by moving north. It was very clear and the very hard decisions we took on an hourly and daily basis with the Governor of Helmand, Governor Daoud, and with quite a lot of long screwdriver from President Karzai, were that we were there to support the Government of Afghanistan and deliver development and security in governance. So the mission never changed. The second point you raised is how was this decision taken and—I am going on your previous discussions—were politicians, ministers and senior military involved in this decision-making process? The answer is yes. Dr John Reid came out and visited me on 23 April. He had inherited this from his predecessor not that long before. For five days I stayed with him shoulder to shoulder, briefing him on what the issues were, what the challenges were, the lack of intelligence, the lack of a very clear mission, these competing missions. We also started discussing at that stage the whole issue of northern Helmand, delivering what became known as the Sangin effect. We always knew that Sangin was going to be an issue we were going to have to grapple with, even though it was outside the Afghan development zone—the triangle, as people referred to it. He was in no doubt when he left of the seriousness of the situation we had got into and what we were going to have to do about it. I would challenge those who would say that the Secretary of State at the time was not aware of what we were likely to have to do in order to fulfil our mission.

Mr Havard

Right, but then a new Secretary of State comes in.

Brigadier Butler

Yes.

Mr Havard

So you now have a different personality.

Brigadier Butler

I think an interesting point here is that I wonder how much, when one Secretary of State hands over the other, they actually discuss a very serious strategic national issue, how they have got there, what the plan is and what their views are. From my own observations and personal experience of politics, I think that you are out the door and into your new Department, or you are collecting your pension. I suggest that there might be something in this wider debate of political-military decision making that there isn’t that handover of experience and knowledge and how we have got it—all the nuances and subtleties that have probably taken place outside Committee. When Des Browne arrived—I briefed him on 6 May when he came out—he had very little understanding of what Afghanistan was about, so over the five days I repeated with him the whole process that I had gone through with his predecessor—the nature of the problem and so on.

Mr Havard

But they are saying that they were making strategic decisions and you were making operational decisions that then affected the strategy. Is that right?

Brigadier Butler

No, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, because pretty well every single visitor—certainly those visiting for the first time—had a very minimal understanding of what Afghanistan was, what we were trying to do, the resources that we had and the huge complexity of what we were dealing with: Afghan politics, tribal politics, a resurgent Taliban that some had underestimated, the sheer size of the geography and everything else. They came with a very basic level and went away much richer and wiser from the collective briefings that they had from not only the British but the Americans and the Afghan politicians in Kabul and down in Helmand.

Mr Havard

Do you think that there is a need for a new or changed process in terms of intelligence, or did the problem lie not there but in the decision making that came from the intelligence and who was involved in seeing it all?

Brigadier Butler

Well, like any investment decision, you need to have very good intelligence about the environment, the product and your competitors in order to feed and inform the right decisions that you can then resource to ensure that you can deliver both in time and within a casualty threshold, which is something that is never liked. We could have been, and need to be, much more businesslike in how we get into some of these significant strategic operations and campaigns and actually cost it for the likelihood. If you had said to us, 12 years and some £30 billion to £40 billion later, that that was how long it was going to take us to get out, disregarding whether we had achieved what we wanted to, I think that, in December 2005, people would have said, “We’re not going to do it.”

Mr Havard

So intelligence is the place to invest.

Brigadier Butler

It is one of the places to invest.

Chair

Before we move on, I want to pick you up on that final point. You just said that it is possible that if people in December 2005 had looked at the cost of it and known that they would have to deploy 32,000 international troops and 32,000 Afghans, and that by 2014 Sangin would be where it is, then they might have decided not to do it. Is it actually realistic to expect that John Reid or his successor would have been able to say in December 2005 or early 2006, “Hey, I don’t think this is going to work—we are not going to go into Helmand at all,” or, in fact, is the momentum of these kinds of wars so unstoppable that the Secretary of State can barely conceive of doing anything other than what he is doing?

Brigadier Butler

That is a very good point. By December 2005, the train had left the station, and it was then a question of how we could manage it. Our American colleagues, the Government Department and the military all had ambitions that were not necessarily focused on what the task, the requirement and the resource bill were going to be.

Mrs Moon

You have not mentioned the media in all this.

Brigadier Butler

No.

Mrs Moon

I wonder how much you feel that the media is also a driver behind the difficulties of actually saying, “No, this is wrong.” Is it actually too difficult to say “Stop!” and alter your decisions because of the push, push, push for different movements from within the media?

Brigadier Butler

I think we certainly got the media communications plan wrong. It should have started a lot earlier. I do not remember much noise in the media in 2005 and early 2006 about the whys and wherefores, whether this was the right thing and how long it was going to take, because I think we were still all-consumed by a frenetic 2005. It was politically frenetic, with what was happening with the Prime Minister, cash for honours, David Kelly’s suicide and Basra falling apart. Those were the stories that sold. I am speaking from memory so I may be wrong, but we did not have that media scrutiny in early 2006 to question what we were getting into. Public support, I seem to remember, was about 30% in favour of this mission, and it then slid down to the low teens after a couple of years. Where we failed, which I think was wrong, was with the strategy of not engaging the media. This was a conscious decision taken by the Government and, I think, the Ministry of Defence: we would not deal with the media using a more proactive engagement strategy when the challenges, the contacts, the body bags and everything else started coming home from the end of April through until the end of my time there. The media were prohibited from going forward and from talking to people, so we had a whole series of leakages coming through soldiers’ mobile phones, calls home and letters, which the media then just fed on in a very febrile manner. We failed there to really engage the media early on. Certainly we collectively could have done more to present to the more sophisticated media why we were there and what we were doing. There was a concern that, because at senior political and military level we did not really know what we were going to do, we could not clearly state what the mission was about or talk about this new aim of nation building without being prepared to answer very awkward questions about how long, how much and what cost in casualties. There was a real reticence, which I think was a mistake.

Richard Benyon

Can I ask you first to address the view held in some quarters that military people are from Venus and politicians are from Mars, and it is very hard to get a sensible decision made? As a platoon commander I would say to my company commander, “I think we should do this,” and he would take a strategic military view and apply politics to it and then tell me not to be so stupid, and we would all get on with our lives. Would you agree that it is simplistic to try to distinguish two groups of people? Politicians, if they are intelligent and they understand and are able to talk to military people, are able to make a military decision with a political overlay. I will come on to ask you about the Sangin issue but, in the same way, you had to make a very political decision and were very influenced by a minute by minute emerging political situation in the Sangin area.

Brigadier Butler

I am not sure which is Venus and which is Mars in this example of politicians being from one and military from the other, because we are all intelligent human beings. I think there was a tendency which we saw—a previous speaker touched on this—of the military having become very sophisticated during its time in the Balkans and then Iraq and in the early stages in Afghanistan. I sense that there was probably some behaviour by some who would say that they knew better than their political masters. More importantly, touching on your point, one was always told to give politically aware military advice. That was a sort of saying. There was probably a shift, certainly at the senior level, that they were giving advice that was more political with less military awareness underneath it. That was starting to influence some of the decisions. If people in these sorts of military situations could say, “You have asked me to look at a problem”—whether a Libya or a Syria—“and this is physically what we can do about it, this is how long it will take and this is what we will need,” and be very clear on it then, to me, that would be a very simple and straightforward relationship. I think the politics, the tribalism, the agendas and the “Can we get a particular resource in through the back door of a UOR process?” probably influence some senior military officers more than others.

Richard Benyon

Let’s turn to the situation in Sangin. Governor Daoud, whom you had a regard for—you thought he was clever—was on the phone to you, or coming to see you, and pleading with you that the situation was deteriorating there. It was very personal for him. You were being faced with a decision that you probably would not otherwise have wanted to take, but you were dealing with the realities on the ground, on the basis of good information. Is this right? You then made a decision, or a decision was made, and we would really like to understand more of the detail about how that decision was made—whether it had full buy-in, right up to the top, and whether the pressures that you were feeling on the ground were manageable in making the correct decision at the time.

Brigadier Butler

I think Governor Daoud was the right man, but at the wrong time. He was a clever, intelligent and very development-focused individual. He was probably brought in too early. We needed someone who really understood and had some form of power base and ability to control all the tribal issues, the warlordism and everything else. Secondly, we replaced him too early, as you know. We built up his expectations and then he felt badly let down that between January and April, no British troops were there to support what he was trying to do. Then the reality was that from April to July, we were still flowing the force into theatre, so he didn’t have the security support that had been promised to him by the other Government Departments. In terms of the decision as to why we went into northern Helmand, who was informed and whether it went all the way to the top, I arrived in the first week of April. In the discussions I had with the embassy, the security services and the ambassador, we were very clear that we recognised that the Taliban, as we had already seen from January, had had time to re-equip and resource themselves and were going to take the fight to us. We knew we were going to be very vulnerable between April and July, when we had the full forces in place. We knew what all these issues were, and the reality, I think, started to hit people, certainly in theatre. Governor Daoud was making it very clear when some of the northern towns fell—first of all when Baghran fell to the Taliban at the end of April—that we had to do something about it. He asked us to do it; we couldn’t, so he sent a militia force up there, but we supported it with the Pathfinder Platoon. Then a couple of weeks later, Now Zad and Musa Qala—Musa Qala was first—were attacked by the Taliban. People were fleeing; people were being killed. This is where the constant demand on the taskforce to prevent the black flag of Mullah Omar from flying—that well used phrase—and to support Governor Daoud’s governance and the mission came from. If we weren’t here—going back to what our stated mission was by that stage—we may as well go home. There was support to the Government and the Governor himself. There was provision of security. We had people being killed and men, women and children being displaced. We had the humanitarian issues of people having to leave their homes, and these were pretty impoverished towns and villages. They were being thrown out, so they were going to be suffering water and food shortages. We had medical cases where we had to go in and were requested to go in. We were seen to be failing on every single one of the objectives within our mission—development, governance and security—and this pressure was every day from Governor Daoud. I would be going down to his office, in the Bost hotel, or one of my colleagues would be down there, trying to negotiate with him and explain that we didn’t have the forces to do this—we couldn’t go up north; we were still flowing the forces into theatre. His impression was that we had 3,000 bayonets—3,000 fighting men. In fact, we only had 600, but it had been explained as a force of 3,000. He assumed that that was 3,000 Afghans with muskets, but actually it was not. All these things were compounded and the taskforce had to do something. In the discussions we had in the first Kabul steering group, one of the main conclusions was that doing nothing was not an option. We had to support the Government of Afghanistan; we had to start delivering our mission. An important factor in this which I could see, as a tactical commander, was that if we just sat in our bases in Lashkar Gah, Gereshk and Bastion, the Talib would come and attack us there, which they already had done on two occasions. On the two first Fridays in April, they bombed Lashkar Gah PRT. So there was a cause and effect by going north. We had to do it, from a mission perspective, but it also kept us free from attacks and gave us the ability to let the force flow into theatre.

Chair

This is fascinating, but we really have to focus on the way that decisions are made. You have given very good and comprehensive testimony on the details of the decisions, but can we bring it back to the question of how these decisions were made rather than what was wrong with them?

Richard Benyon

I am keen to know if there was a dissenting view when you went back to your colleagues or up the chain of command.

Brigadier Butler

No. These decisions were discussed in Lashkar Gah at the Helmand executive group, which was cross-Government—albeit there were only one or two from the FCO and DFID there. They were discussed on a weekly basis in the Kabul steering group, which was the ambassador, myself, the head of the security services and the head of DFID. We constantly discussed what we were going to be doing. The Kabul steering group linked up, when technology allowed, with the Afghan steering group, which was here in London and was, again, a cross-party committee. The chain of command, which is the term you use, was pretty free-flowing. It was going upwards and coming downwards on a daily basis. I wrote weekly reports and spoke pretty well every other day to PJHQ at two-star general level. I sat in on the weekly conferences. We were very clear at every stage of this period from mid to late April, when Baghran fell, that if we were going to fulfil our mission, we were going to have to deploy north. Anyone who says that they were not aware either military or politically is, I would say, incorrect.

Bob Stewart

Ed, talking about the chain of command precisely, which is what we are very interested in, as I understand it, the pre-operational deployment teams on which you briefed us before suggested that it was not a good idea to go into Helmand. A special force report suggested that there would be a firestorm if we did. The diplomatic channels, as expressed by Sherard earlier, were saying, “It’s a kibosh, the whole thing.” Your feeling, from October 2005, was that this could be extremely difficult indeed. Those were all the signals going back up the chain of command. What I am particularly interested in is who it was, where it was and at what level. Did it go right to the Prime Minister’s office? Was Prime Minister Blair really impressed by the shiny buttons of the generals coming in? The advice was, “Be very careful about an operation of deployment into Helmand,” so at what level was it changed? Forgive me for going on, but you have already stated that you briefed John Reid and he was fully aware of it, yet we had the comment about hoping to get out “without a shot being fired”. I know that you probably cannot be definitive, but where was that advice turned around and where were you told to get on with it?

Brigadier Butler

There are two parts to that, if I understand you correctly. One is: how high up did it go? I certainly reported directly to PJHQ. PJHQ received my weekly briefs and monthly reports in the run-up to the deployment. From my knowledge, it certainly went into PJHQ. It would have then been briefed up into commitment staff in the MOD, so that they had full visibility of it. I would imagine, though I was never there, that it was briefed to the chiefs. So from a military perspective, in 2005, from my knowledge and understanding of the system, it certainly went right up into the MOD. You would have to ask more senior officers at the time what was then done with that information and those concerns about resources and everything else we have covered. I also briefed a number of other tri-service senior officers down in Colchester at the end of 2005 and in 2006, and I still have on record who I spoke to. I never had to make up any new issues, because they were always the same from the word go. To me, within the military chain of command, there was total visibility. I can only comment on the politicians who came and saw us, whether it was Dr Reid, Des Browne, Hilary Benn or a plethora of other visitors; they had the same, consistent message from us. So politically, everyone was aware of it. Everyone in the formal briefing chain, up through the various steering groups, from Helmand into Kabul and into London, was aware of it. I think your bigger question is, if everyone was aware of it, why was nothing done about it?

Bob Stewart

That is exactly it.

Brigadier Butler

Some of that has been discussed. We wanted to be supporting our American colleagues. The 9/11 reasons—that we wanted to be there, shoulder to shoulder—were still paramount. People you have talked to have said that yes, some saw a requirement that the military had to be engaged in an operation. There were concerns about further defence cuts. You don’t have standing armies doing nothing in peacetime; they are very expensive. I think there was a collection and a series of influences that were fuelling the train and made it unstoppable. No one ever said to me, “Ed, we are not going to do this”. There was never any question. The closest that came was when John Reid said we were going to pause the operation from a start date in January until April to ensure—I think this was absolutely right—that the Dutch came in to Uruzgun, because if we had had a split in the coalition, we would have been vulnerable from a tactical perspective, but also politically. If the Dutch had held up a red card and not gone in, would we have still gone in? I don’t know. That would be something we would have to guess about.

Bob Stewart

You haven’t mentioned President Karzai. Did he have big influence on you on the ground? Was he, through Governor Daoud, saying, “For goodness’ sake, get on with it”?

Brigadier Butler

Yes, in terms of mobile phone communications and the decision-making process, Daoud would have regular conversations and we would get feed-out from that. Karzai was very clever at briefing across the coalition about who was doing what and who wasn’t doing what. He was a very clever man at that. I met him probably six or seven times, and he was pretty clear what he wanted the British to do. The train leaving the station was part of it, because we’d made it very clear in 2001 and 2002 that we were going to support President Karzai. We could have delayed it, but in all reality I don’t think that would have had an impact. We could have delayed it by a year to understand more what was going on and what we had to do, and to make a proper investment appraisal. However, even delaying it by a year, the arrival of the ARRC and General Richards’ headquarters was probably driving the UK decision that we had to be in, with boots on the ground, to underpin the first NATO operation outside Europe post-9/11. There was a collection of all these strategic drivers. That is what may have clouded people’s judgments, decisions and analysis of what was being said at a tactical level.

Dr Lewis

You mentioned that visitors coming out to theatre had very little grasp of the complexities involved. In particular, when a new Defence Secretary came out, you realised, having briefed the previous one, that there had been no handover briefing and that you had to start all over again. It was back to square one. I appreciate that when theatre commanders hand over to their successors, they do brief each other. But given that this was such a complex situation and given that theatre commanders have a great deal of power over what goes on in the area for which they have responsibility, do you think it was sensible that theatre commanders were themselves being changed, I believe, every six months? Was that a reasonable way of doing it, and did it provide sufficient continuity?

Brigadier Butler

I think I will caveat my comment by saying that I didn’t get the impression that Des Browne had been briefed by his predecessor; there might have been a short conversation, but it was pretty clear to me that his understanding—or lack of understanding—of what we were campaigning about, the complexities and everything else was at a low level. On your point about six-month tours and the short tour-ism approach that the British military had, we were commenting at the time that we should do longer. Our American colleagues always looked at us, saying, “Look, you’re not taking this seriously, because you’re only here for six months; how can you understand it?” In September I posed, although not in a particularly serious manner—as in serious staffing—“Actually, you know what? I should probably be staying on here; I am just starting to really understand the personalities, the issues and everything else.” There is a tendency within the military that a commander can’t command someone else’s brigade, but I commanded 3 Commando Brigade for over a week while their commander came in and it was a pretty seamless thing. They would come in and replace my staff on a rolling basis, and it worked fine. But the tribalism that Sherard talked about before is probably not going to be allowed. On a wider point, which I made very clear at the end of 2005 and in early 2006, I was surprised about, and made the case against, the fact that I wouldn’t be commanding my brigade; a Joint Force Headquarters or permanent headquarters should have gone in and carried on from its planning for preliminary operations, which was made up of the Joint Force Headquarters. That should have carried on further, throughout 2006.

Dr Lewis

I just want to cut back to the main point. I appreciate that in what are arguably described as “wars of choice”, it is probably necessary that the majority of front-line troops are out there for a more limited period—and six months is quite a long time—than in a war of national survival. But does it make sense for the theatre commander in such a complex environment to be rotated every six months in the way that happened? I get the impression from your answer that you think, given the powers that theatre commanders have, that continuity would require them to stay on longer even though the front-line troops were being rotated.

Brigadier Butler

Yes, I will be clear. You are absolutely right. To ask soldiers to stay on the front line for pretty well an unbroken six months, in those conditions—well, they’d fall apart. You’re absolutely right; I would still hold now that to have a six-month tour at the command level—at a senior or more tactical level—is too short.

Derek Twigg

Brigadier, one of the advantages of visiting the operational theatre and the front line is obviously to get information. If we go back to the Clemenceau analogy, clearly we do not expect Ministers to go out every week and spend time sitting there overnight in front of machine guns and so forth, but I have two quick questions. Often, when I went out to theatre, I was told that I couldn’t go to certain places because it was too dangerous—which obviously is a clue. But when I got there, a number of commanders on the ground said, “Oh no, we could have facilitated that.” So it is the Cabinet Office that seems to be stopping this. Have you got any comments on the importance of Ministers being able to go out and get information at first hand? Linking in with that, were you as the commander ever told that you couldn’t speak or give certain information to Ministers? Was pressure ever put on you not to say certain things to Ministers when they visited you in theatre?

Brigadier Butler

No, I would actively encourage the ultimate decision-makers who are co-ordinating, planning and making decisions about a significant campaign to be out there and actually taste the front line; to be able not just to talk to the troops but to experience the conditions and talk to the people we are trying to look after. The further forward you can get, the better. The duty of care and health and safety issues are a different matter, and that is probably the cloak that gets put around it.

Derek Twigg

On balance, you would say that it is more important for Ministers to go out there,

Brigadier Butler

I would do, yes. The challenge that DFID and the FCO had, as you know, was they couldn’t leave Lashkar Gah. On whether I was ever told not to brief certain things to Ministers, the answer is no. I think that I probably had a reputation for being fairly outspoken, and I always used to tell it how it was. I think that was based on the privileged position I had as a special forces commander. Certainly, commanding the SAS I was able to talk and brief the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Secretary of State in person about missions we were going to take. They always wanted a frank opinion about success and failure: could we do it? How could we do it? What did we need to have? I was never told not to say something. I am aware of other situations where in-theatre commanders were told not to bring other things up.

Derek Twigg

You look like you have an example.

Brigadier Butler

During certain operations where a theatre commander would have wanted more troops, he was requested not to bring it up with the Minister because it was being dealt with by the MOD in a different way.

John Woodcock

To be clear, you think that the suggestion we were given in the evidence earlier from Sir Sherard, that we were all indulging in mass self-deception, is wrong?

Brigadier Butler

There was certainly no self-deception for those of us who had been there before and those who had been engaged in the planning process at a tactical level—16 Brigade and the people engaged in the joint campaign plan for Helmand prelim ops. I think there probably was—it was an interesting term—some self-denial and self-deception that we could still see this thing through and we could deliver some form of success. The military were probably more pragmatic. DFID, if I may say so, had some utopian ideals of what they thought Afghanistan could be turned into, certainly with the time and resources available. From a governance perspective, we could have really understood and read our history books, and recognised that, with the complete dearth of any human capacity and capability at the national and local level, it was going to take a very long time to deliver governance. Governor Daoud had one official to support him, for example.

Chair

Thank you very much for your time, but I am afraid we now need to move on to our final session.

Brigadier Butler

Thank you. Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses

Lieutenant General (Retd) Sir Robert Fry KCB CBE and Mr Desmond Bowen, former Director General of Policy, Ministry of Defence, gave evidence.

Chair

Welcome to our witnesses. Sir Bob Russell is going to lead the questioning.

Sir Bob Russell

Gentlemen, you have sat in and heard a fair amount. My first question is going to focus on the decision to deploy to Helmand province. The questions after that will relate to the decision to move to northern Helmand, but at the moment the focus is just on the principle of going into Helmand. General Fry, you have previously commented that in early 2004, the NATO campaign looked moribund. How did that impact the decision to move into northern Helmand, and what had been the British strategy for Afghanistan?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Maybe I can go back to 2001—I really think I have to if we are to have any sense of the wholeness of not only the Afghan campaign but the concurrency between Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2001, immediately after 9/11, the situation was, in many ways, clearer than it has ever been since. There was something going on in Afghanistan that, arguably, required an almost non-discretionary intervention. NATO article 5 was invoked and the Americans got involved on the ground, and we did pretty soon after that. I think it was in December of 2001 that the Bonn conference was convened. That put Karzai in an interim position, which was subsequently confirmed by an electoral process. I guess that in early 2002, we probably had Afghanistan in as good a position as we were ever going to have it, in so far as there were three things in place that have never been in place subsequently. First, it had the undivided attention of the international community. Secondly, the Taliban was scattered, either back to its villages or into Pakistan. Thirdly, the Pakistanis were being helpful. Had we chosen at that stage determinedly to prosecute a campaign throughout the whole of Afghanistan, I suspect that we would probably have been successful in reasonably short order. We chose not to do that. We became distracted by the siren call of Iraq. In addition to that, we had created—this was highly invidious—two separate campaigns inside Afghanistan. There was a NATO campaign, which was essentially about building the institutions of the state and creating the mechanisms of Government, and there was an American campaign that was about killing terrorists. Those two things were fundamentally antithetical. If you drop a bomb on a village as part of the American campaign, that is hardly conducive to gaining political support. So we were creating tensions already. We then put ourselves in the worst of all possible positions; we did not renounce a responsibility to Afghanistan but we only devoted a relatively trifling level of resources to it. We set up the PRT in Mazar-e-Sharif. We then got involved with the invasion of Iraq for reasons that seemed compelling at the time. Pretty soon, those reasons looked significantly less compelling when it became obvious that there were no weapons of mass destruction and there were no obvious links with terrorism.

Chair

General, I am so sorry to interrupt, but we have 35 minutes to get both of you in. We really cannot go all the way back to that history, I am afraid.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Okay. Let me just try to outline the situation immediately after that. We are in Iraq and we realise that the strategic reasons why we went there are fallacious, and therefore the primary function of being in Iraq is to return a functioning polity back to the Iraqi people. At the same time, we had left Afghanistan in a position where Karzai’s position was tenuous; a NATO mission was going to be highly problematic and quite possibly could fail; we had the NATO mission and the American mission not running in any way in a complementary manner; and we had divided Afghanistan into two—in the north, the Northern Alliance, and in the south what amounted to Pashtunistan. At that time, it became clear that we had to make a decision about which of the two theatres we should place our main effort in. The main effort went into Afghanistan, mainly into Helmand. As far as Helmand is concerned, we could have gone to only two provinces: either Helmand or Kandahar. The Americans had the south-eastern part of the country, and all the other provinces were insignificant in size and the responsibility that they represented. The Canadians had already been to Kandahar in 2001 and knew the area. The Canadians also had been out of international military deployments for some time and felt that they wanted to rehabilitate themselves.

Chair

General, I am so sorry to keep interrupting. Just to step back for one second, we are really keen to look at how decisions were made, not the rationale for the decisions. Primarily the Committee today is not interested in why you went to Helmand and whether that was the right decision. What we are interested in is who made those decisions and to what extent information was shared in the system.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

On the basis of all the factors that I have just enumerated, a paper called “Why Helmand?” was written in the Ministry of Defence and was taken by the Chiefs of Staff committee. On the basis of that—Desmond will put me straight on this—a recommendation was made to the Prime Minister’s office that said that Helmand was the place that we needed to go.

Sir Bob Russell

Mr Bowen, is there any aspect of what we have heard that you fundamentally disagree with, or is that how you see it as well?

Desmond Bowen

I would say two things. One is that this was not Britain alone; it was NATO. If we were going to diminish our contribution, there were 27 other allies to play their part. There was very much a notion that this was a NATO operation, and I think it is unwise to forget that. On the other point about the decision making—the Chairman talked about decision making—my recollection, and I have not tried to refresh my memory, is that there was quite a long drawn-out process that was based in the Cabinet Office, with the Secretary of State for Defence being the Minister in charge of this process. In the Cabinet Office, there was a series of meetings organised by somebody who would now be called the Deputy National Security Adviser, involving all the different Departments, which was running through all the different angles in order to come to a conclusion on whether this was the right thing to do and whether it was going to succeed. It is just not the case that it was a kind of “on the back of a fag packet” decision. There was a process and it was a very deliberate process.

Sir Bob Russell

Before I move on to the next question, I would observe that although you refer to 20-plus countries on this NATO mission, not all of them deployed troops to Helmand province.

Desmond Bowen

No, I agree, absolutely, but that is an important point to understand. The number of countries that were prepared to go to the south was very limited. When the NATO decision was made to have this backward clock deployment from the north round to the west and then to the south, there was a question as to who was going to, as it were, invigorate or populate it. It was very clear that the French weren’t going to do it, the Italians weren’t going to do it and the Spanish weren’t going to do it. There were a few people, like the Danes and the Estonians, who were up for it with the British, but you are absolutely right that the number of countries that are prepared to put their troops in harm’s way, in the interests of delivering the policy that has been agreed on, is quite small. We could decide to do it differently. I agree.

Sir Bob Russell

Was the British mission in Helmand predominantly counter-narcotics, counter-insurgency or to give a boost to the wider alliance effort?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

There was confusion about it. There was confusion as it went through the campaign. Fundamentally this was a counter-insurgency campaign. There were other elements of this which were adjacent to that. I need to explain this in a tiny bit of detail. The great gap at that time, which I think has subsequently been addressed, was that, at the heart of Government, there was nothing which joined various Departments together. Various Departments would meet in ad hoc groups. There would be one institution—the Chiefs of Staff Committee—which would meet weekly and would be attended by other Departments, but it had no executive function. It has become clear to me subsequently—and it was becoming increasingly clear to me at the time—that unless national strategy is supervised by the head of the executive function of Government, it won’t work. Government Departments will simply plough their own furrows and there is nothing to bring all the dimensions of national power together in a unified strategic purpose. If you don’t bring all those things together, you don’t actually have grand strategy

Sir Bob Russell

So, very briefly, the objective was not clear.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Very briefly, the objective was conflicting. For the Ministry of Defence it was clearly a counter-insurgency campaign; for the Home Office it might have had counter-narcotic overtones; for DFID it might have been the rights of women, but all of these were involved in a dialogue across Whitehall which didn’t have any fundamental discipline or structure about it.

Sir Bob Russell

Mr Bowen, do you have any thoughts beyond what we just heard?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Well, I think that the creation of the National Security Council was highly timely and was the necessary reform to address the issues that I have just been speaking about.

Sir Bob Russell

Sorry, I was asking Mr Bowen; do you have any thoughts beyond that?

Desmond Bowen

Somebody has referred to the famous infamous comment—and has misquoted it, as ever—that Dr Reid made, about hoping to be able to leave Helmand without firing a shot. I think the object of what he was trying to say—and he has tried to correct this on the Floor of the House—is that there is a difference between a counter-terrorism campaign, which the Americans are running, and a counter-insurgency campaign. We were in the business of counter-insurgency. In that counter-insurgency campaign you have to bring others along with you from the Home Departments, which is why there was a process in Whitehall to do just that. I think it is fair to say—and this is already public—that the Secretary of State for Defence at the time made it plain that he wanted to be absolutely clear that DFID was going to play fully in this process, that the Treasury was supportive of it and that the Foreign Office was likewise alongside. This was not going to be the Ministry of Defence being hung out to dry.

Sir Bob Russell

That answer leads neatly into my next question, which I think gets rights to the nub of what our inquiry is all about. Lord Reid, the former Secretary of State, expressed surprise that the military had moved into northern Helmand when he had been briefed that Governor Daoud’s request for unsustainable operations should be resisted. Lord Browne, the Secretary of State who followed him, appears not to have been consulted on that decision. Why, in your opinion, were Ministers not consulted about the decision to move into northern Helmand?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

To be entirely honest, I cannot tell you. I was in Baghdad at the time and had my hands full with other things. It is inconceivable that a subject of that significance was not briefed to Ministers.

Sir Bob Russell

Thank you. Mr Bowen?

Desmond Bowen

I don’t know. I wasn’t holding the dossier for operations at that time; someone else was doing that. My view is that the decision to move and effectively change the task to create platoon houses was taken at a tactical level but was actually a strategic decision. Whether that was briefed up the line and at some stage someone cut it off or whether, actually, it was not briefed up the line because it seemed like a decision for mission command and the local commander, I do not know. It is a really difficult question. It is the Rumsfeld point about, “Stuff happens”. It is a question of someone actually clocking that the stuff happening is of strategic importance and is not just about tactical decisions.

John Woodcock

I want to briefly clarify this before Julian comes in. You say, General Fry, that it was inconceivable, but Lord Browne has been clear before this Committee that he was not briefed in advance. He has said that it was an operational decision. You said that that was inconceivable, and Mr Bowen talked about not being sure where this effectively got blocked in the system. Clearly, for both of you, it was the wrong call because this had strategic implications that Lord Browne was not told of in advance.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I cannot begin to say what Lord Browne said; I would not dream of doing that for one second.

John Woodcock

He is on the record here saying that he was not briefed in advance.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

That is fine; that is his experience of it. As I said, I cannot speak from the record. I cannot speak as a participant in the events. I had nothing to do with it. My judgment—that is all I can give you in this case—is that something of that significance would most likely have been briefed to Ministers.

John Woodcock

I am not being clear in my questions. It has been established that it was not briefed, so I am not asking you to verify the facts. By you saying that it was inconceivable—your view, looking in from the outside but nevertheless having had very close experience of this, is that it would have been the wrong call if that was what happened.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

If they were not briefed, that was certainly the wrong call.

Mr Havard

So the NSC would have made it all different, would it? Is that the organisational change that would have made this different—that we now have the NSC? We need greater clarity now.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

The NSC would have made a big difference in the whole of the campaign planning. It would have drawn these various dimensions together in a way that would have had a much more compound effect than we had. But I do not think that that is necessarily germane to the question that I have just been asked.

Desmond Bowen

This is about judgment. When Governor Daoud says to Brigadier Butler, “My God. I’ve got Government offices that are going to be overrun. Aren’t you here to help the Afghan Government reassert itself in the south? I need some help,” that is a moment where one needs to understand what the local commander is confronted with, what his thinking is, whom he consults and how far up it goes. Someone somewhere, I would suggest, should have said, “This is going to have serious implications in how we deploy our troops and whether we’ve got enough. We’re going to lose flexibility and manoeuvre because we’re going to be fixed. Do we have the right composition of force to do a task which is actually different from what was originally conceived?” For someone, somewhere, some time in the chain, that judgment has to click in. Who is it? Is it someone looking at a television programme who says, “We need to understand this”? Is it someone on the ground either in Helmand or in Kandahar? These situations are actually arising quite a lot of the time in less dramatic fashion. Most of the time these things get caught and someone says, “We need to flag this up. We need to understand this”. All I would say is that there was a moment when there should have been briefing to Ministers and Ministers should have been asked to endorse or decide otherwise.

Dr Lewis

I don’t know where to start with the shambles of what should be a fairly clear chain of command from the Prime Minister at the top to the theatre commander, not at the bottom, but at the bottom of this particular chain. Anyone who looks at the way campaigns were conducted in the Second World War would be impressed by the fact that this was a huge series of operations overseen by a tiny organisation, the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Embedded within was the Prime Minister’s permanent representative—in that case, Sir Hastings Ismay. Where necessary the Prime Minister would meet with the Chiefs of Staff in a staff conference. There is nothing like that in this arrangement, is there?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

That is one of the points I have already made to the Committee. I think that unless the head of the Executive is directly involved in these things— There is a qualitative difference. The Second World War was a war of national survival. You have already used the phrase. Afghanistan and Iraq are arguably discretionary operations. It certainly didn’t occupy every minute of every day of the Prime Minister, so perhaps those comparisons are not entirely appropriate. However, there was a military chain of command that went from the Prime Minister to the Chief of the Defence Staff to the Chief of Joint Operations and into the deployed forces in the field. That was entirely clear and it worked well within the military dimension. What I think failed, and failed signally, was the ability to combine that with all the other instruments of national power which should have been part of a co-ordinated strategy.

Dr Lewis

And what would have been the vehicle for combining those things?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Something that was built around the Prime Minister’s Office—what has subsequently become the National Security Council. Now, that has had some perhaps ambiguous outings in Iraq and Syria, but I think that both Afghanistan and Iraq were far larger enterprises involving other elements of Government that simply weren’t brought together in the proper way.

Dr Lewis

Let me then move to the existing National Security Council. If, as Dai said in his brief intervention, the National Security Council had been in place in this scenario or were to be in place in a similar scenario in the future, is it sufficiently constituted to keep a tight grip at the appropriate strategic level, or does it only engage in general view assessments of a given theatre?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I have not had enough first-hand experience to know. I will give you a judgment. If the authority of the Prime Minister is communicated to a Secretary of State—that he or she should do a certain thing in support of an overall strategy—it has much more chance of getting done than if that leverage did not exist. At the time these things were occurring, there was no direct mechanism or structure in place to permit that to happen.

Dr Lewis

Let us just look at a couple of different levels of decision and see where you think they were taken and where you think they should have been taken. Let us start at a fairly low level and imagine that you are in the theatre and a suggestion has been made, from whatever source, that our forces ought to engage in poppy eradication. On the other hand, there might be a school of thought that says, if you engage in poppy eradication, you are going to upset an awful lot of poppy farmers, some of whom will either join or, at the very least, support the insurgents as a result. It is completely irrelevant which side of that argument is correct; as the Chairman keeps pointing out, we are not here to make judgments about who was right and wrong in this campaign. But in the event that a decision had to be taken—shall we have a poppy eradication campaign in our theatre or not?—who would have taken that decision then and whom do you think would or should take it now?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I think both then and now the person who would finally take that decision was probably the local military commander. However, then he would only have done that had he taken the advice of the DFID representative and the other people who were there. What I think probably worked quite well at a theatre level did not, I think, work terribly well at a Government level. So I don’t think there was necessarily a mechanism for that to be done quickly and efficiently within the mechanism of Government at the time.

Dr Lewis

Judging by the example of the Second World War campaigns, where theatre commanders had much bigger theatres but they were allowed a tremendous amount of authority in-theatre—and you are basically saying that the same would and should apply in these smaller theatres—it was possible to wage a strategic war with a chain of command to the top, and yet with the theatre commander allowed to take major decisions with the best advice. So you would say that the parallel has held up quite well in this mini-campaign in Afghanistan, compared with what happened in the war of survival?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

With one major proviso—who was the theatre commander in Afghanistan? It was invariably an American, with the one exception of General Richards. Therefore, what you had was an American campaign within which you had a British implant. This created all sorts of complications. What you just described is absolutely truthful, but it was a much clearer and more elegant command solution than the one we have been operating in for the last few years.

Dr Lewis

That is very helpful. Mr Bowen, would you like to come in?

Desmond Bowen

There are two points worth making. It is part of the raw complexity. This wasn’t just the Brits playing; it wasn’t even just NATO playing. The Afghans had a say in this. The Afghans were conducting poppy eradication. One of the links that is broken and has been broken is between the international force operating in the interests of counter-insurgency—which needs to be linked directly to the domestic Government: the Karzai Government or successor Governments. Bringing those two bits together is extremely difficult. So, my point is that a lot of the poppy eradication stuff was being done by local people with tractors. Now, maybe there was influence that could be brought to bear to say, “Desist, and let’s not do this this week”, or maybe, “Put it off to somewhere else.” There is another point, of course. I remember being involved in some of the debate about narcotics. The actual eradication was probably not a sensible focus. It was much more important—and this is a decision that needed to be made—that the focus needed to be on the people at the top end of the chain who were financing and trafficking, not on the farmers at the bottom end. It took too long to get to the point of understanding the difference between those two.

Dr Lewis

I must let others come in, but I just wanted to go one step further, because I think we really are quite close to the heart of this problem. Here were the British, in a theatre with their own commanders who were rotating every six months; I think we heard from Ed Butler that that was too short a period and I would be interested if you had a view on that. However, you have now introduced the key point: that we were junior partners in the theatre with a senior ally. Surely the way the system should have worked was that if people, from our commander downward in the theatre, felt that the strategy was wrong, they should have been able to report up a clear chain of command to the Defence Secretary and to the Prime Minister, who would then talk to his opposite number in America and argue the case at that top level that the strategy should be changed. Because otherwise we find ourselves in this situation, do we not, where our people on the ground are pursuing a strategy in which they do not believe but which they feel they cannot report up the chain to the only people who might be able to get it changed by negotiation with our allies?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I completely disagree with the last point that you made. I don’t think that there was a large body of people who fundamentally disagreed with the strategy that they were being asked to enact. I must not get too semantic about this whole thing, but it is what command is really about. Command is about the authorship and execution of a plan within a campaign. That always fell to the Americans, with the one exception of David’s, which I have said. Command, in the more formal sense of who sends the rations and who ensures that all the things happen, was retained here. Command is a fundamental conundrum for us in coalition operations. We created this man called the Chief of Joint Operations, who is supposed do exactly what the title says. This is a man who becomes habituated to command and, as a result of some of the things we were involved in, over the years we felt that that was the appropriate solution, but it only works if he is exercising command within the theatre. The minute that that is given to somebody else, you create this disjunction. I think there is still a reporting line for anyone with a grouse on the ground to put that through to the Chief of Joint Operations. He can pursue that, if he thinks it is appropriate, but he is not the man on a day-to-day basis who is guiding the fate of the campaign. That was the American commander.

John Woodcock

Can I just take us back to the decision to go into northern Helmand? Between you, you have described a scenario where the most likely driver by far was a sort of benign failure, if I can characterise it as that. The information should have been passed on, but in the heat of decision making it did not happen. It was not quite clear who ought to have done it, and perhaps that has now been clarified. That was an oversight, but it was no more than that. Can I ask you for your views on the possibility, which is at least implied by some of Lord Reid’s past evidence to the Committee, that this was not a benign oversight but a deliberate omission—not to put the decision to Lord Browne when he came in? In my mind the reasons for questioning that are, first, that it seems to be Lord Reid’s view and, secondly, that he is clear that he was briefed on whether to go into northern Helmand. This is not something that suddenly arose as a possibility. It had been in the system as a possibility for some time. Added into that was the pressure, as it was described, from Governor Daoud wanting this to happen and threatening to go up the political chain of command in the UK, bypassing the military, if it did not happen. Is that an unrealistic scenario?

Desmond Bowen

Just to be clear, are you saying that it was in the mind of the military always to go to northern Helmand and that that was obscured from Ministers?

John Woodcock

I am not saying that; I am asking what you think of it as a possible scenario. I am not saying it was always in mind; I am entirely unable to make a judgment as to when that could have been formulated as the right thing to do. I am saying that it had been a possibility for some time. It was not a snap decision that simply was not escalated up to the Secretary of State.

Desmond Bowen

First, you say it was an oversight; I would say it was a failure. Let’s be clear: things should have happened that did not happen. In terms of whether it was a deliberate omission, I find that an incredible allegation. I do not think that civil servants or military people behave like that. It would be culpable behaviour by those on the ground deliberately to omit to pass it up the chain because that was convenient or whatever. As to whether the hypothesis that you set out is conceivable, I do not think it is. It only took a matter of hours and days before these luckless people in Musa Qala, Sangin and elsewhere were being besieged. The idea that the military would have wanted to bring that on without adequate resources and without being sure about their resupply—there are all sorts of issues about ammunition, CASEVAC and that sort of stuff that arose very quickly. It would have been a singularly inept piece of skulduggery to bring this upon yourself, when you knew that you had a force of only 3,000, of which only about a battalion’s worth were bayonet troops.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I don’t think that military adventurism played a role in this, but it might have done. However, even if it did, all those decisions were reversible. This was the deployment of a relatively small number of people in the first instance. I suspect that the Secretary of State would have noticed that at some stage, and certainly others around him would have noticed as well. If he felt that this was fundamentally the wrong decision, he could at that stage have reversed it.

John Woodcock

Really?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Yes.

John Woodcock

Yes, in terms of direct theoretical levers that could be pulled; but surely not in terms of everything that we have described so far about the pressure to be seen to be team players, or of the very strong political message—or indeed military message—sent by withdrawing from an area into which you had just gone. I am not disputing most of what you said, but surely that part, that in effect it could be reversed—

Desmond Bowen

But that is exactly what happened.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Exactly. If we are team players, there is a team captain. I, as a service officer, and Desmond, as an official, are part of a process that reports to elected representatives, and they make the decisions. Not everyone has an equal vote in this. If the Secretary of State or any Minister wants to make an intervention, that is decisive. It is the role of me or of Desmond to say, “These are the things that you need to think about”, but the choice is theirs and only theirs. He could have reversed that decision if he had thought it was the wrong one.

Derek Twigg

I assume that neither of you believe that the military or civil servants were blameless and without any errors or faults during the whole of that decision-making process. What do you feel could have been, and could be, improved to ensure that we get better decision making?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I have already given you one, which is part of the changing of the deckchairs in Whitehall—

Derek Twigg

We understand that, but that is going to happen anyway.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

The second fundamental thing is never to put yourself in a situation of strategic overreach. Why was all this so difficult—

Derek Twigg

I am talking about the military and the civil service.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Indeed.

Derek Twigg

So are you saying that the military overreached themselves deliberately, or unknowingly?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Collectively, the military, the civil service and the Government decisively overreached themselves. We had a campaign in Afghanistan that we gave up on; we went to Iraq and found that we had released energies that we could neither comprehend nor control; and all of a sudden we had more—

Derek Twigg

Do you feel anything else could have been done better?

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

No, but I think that that is a pretty significant issue.

Derek Twigg

I am just trying to get to the issue. So we’ve got the two things that you feel could have been done much better.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

Yes, and from those two things lots of the other complications arose. Those two things together created an awful lot of friction within the system.

Derek Twigg

Mr Bowen, what about the civil service?

Desmond Bowen

Clearly, lots of things could have been done better.

Derek Twigg

This is about decision making, so give us a couple of examples of where you think things could have been improved.

Desmond Bowen

I suppose the thing that still perplexes me, which I have mentioned before, is the enormous difficulty of harmonising what an intervention force were doing with what the political—

Derek Twigg

I am talking about the civil service. What could the civil service have done better?

Desmond Bowen

There is always more bringing together and directing that can be done. Robert has talked about this, but what you need when you get Departments with their own budgets under the constitutional settlement is cohesion between those Departments in order to achieve an outcome. Actually, you need ministerial clout to do that. At the beginning of this Helmand business, the idea was to bring Ministers together to do just that, but I guess you need more consistent engagement throughout the campaign, not just in the run-up to a decision.

Chair

All the way through this session there has been a disagreement between people who said, “There has been bad briefing to Ministers. Ministers didn’t know what they were doing”, and other people who said, “Good briefing to Ministers, but Ministers made the wrong call.” Is there not an underlying possibility that Britain deluded itself into believing that it could make an independent strategic decision? Really, this was an American decision. The momentum was unstoppable—we were going to go along with the United States anyway. Even if Ministers and generals had been perfectly informed and even if you had all concluded that the whole thing was a disaster, by January 2006 it was going to happen anyway, independent of the information that you received, because of your obligations to the United States.

Lt General Sir Robert Fry

I fundamentally disagree with what you have just said. I do not think that this was going to happen under any circumstances. The Americans were entirely uninterested in Afghanistan at that time. I think it was the British who made this happen and it was the British who dragged the Americans in. To that extent, we seem to have displayed an autonomous and independent capacity to make up our own minds.

Chair

With that great, provocative statement, we draw the session to a close, with many thanks for your time and to the Committee. Oral evidence: Decision making in Defence Policy, HC 682 21