A British soldier passes a poppy field in Helmand province, 2006 (©AP Photo/Omas Munita)
Maddox: Good morning. Thank you very much for coming here to discuss our proposition at Prospect that the Afghan conflict is worthy of a parliamentary inquiry and, more generally, the question “what went wrong,” if you agree with that, and “what might we learn from it?” The two things I want to get out of this morning are the questions you think should now be asked and your own sense, if you like, of which were the problematic decisions, looking back. Who wants to start? Rob Fry has written an excellent riposte, which we will publish in the next issue. In fact, I might start with you. What questions do you think now Britain should ask about the Afghan experience. Lieutenant General Robert Fry: I don’t think this merits an inquiry for a number of reasons. First of all, I don’t think they are issues of deep legality about this. Certainly there are issues about outcome and judgements. But where we’ve had as many inquiries as we’ve had, they’ve usually been about some form of corrupt process at some point during the genesis of events. Nothing that you said in your article, which is in the public domain, necessarily implies that. There may have been all sorts of bad judgments made; all sorts of misappreciations. Whether that justifies an inquiry I think is the nub of the issue. I expect not, not in the circumstances. BM: When you say you suspect not, is that your judgement? My argument in this is that the length of time, the number of casualties, the amount of money and the number of decisions which, in retrospect, look problematic is the kind of thing that it would help for someone to look at. RF: [Unclear] …of why you have enquiries after every form of conflict, we’d have an inquiry after every form of conflict. The length of time— these are open-ended things; the nature of contemporary warfare is not to admit to convenient definitions like “we lose”. There is no occupation of the enemy’s capital. These are insidious, ambiguous outcomes. I don’t think that casualties, however dreadful they are, however much they represent profound personal tragedies, the amount of money spent, the time spent on doing it all necessarily, of themselves, add up to an aggregate that says “we won”. BM: Thanks for your riposte. Sherard. Sherard Cowper-Coles: Well, I very much agree with Robert that I don’t this that this justifies an inquiry. I don’t see any particular point at which something done was illegal or an absolute, outrageous breach of process. But I disagree with him when he says that this doesn’t fit the definition of win / lose. I think this was a massive collective mistake and it still is. Many of us, including me, around this table are guilty of a combination of wishful thinking, of over-eagerness to please, ambition getting in the way of doing our professional duty and a whole chain of things, and I think any public inquiry would simply conclude that politicians are politicians, admirals and generals—particularly generals—are human and diplomats are diplomats; and I’m not sure it would do any good. But objectively we’ve wasted getting on for £40bn, more lives than in any conflict of this kind since the Boer War, and there ought objectively, given what the Public Accounts Committee was doing yesterday—looking at the wastage of £2m of the public’s money, in excess of contractual payments to BBC executives—of course there ought to be. But in the real world, I doubt if there is going to be, and I doubt that much good would come of it. But there are lessons in terms of officials offering honest advice, generals looking beyond the end of their own sectional interests and, perhaps, above all for politicians. I briefed successive politicians in Afghanistan and all objective visitors to Helmand could see that selectively garrisoning parts of Afghanistan for a short while wasn’t going to work. General McNeil himself said to me early on in the war to do this properly is going to take 500,000 men, and I was tempted to say 50 years, and privately the political leaders would agree. But as Bob Woodward points out, Obama never believed that General Petraeus’s surge would work, but he went along with it because it was easier in domestic political terms. And, without wanting to take words out of Bob Ainsworth’s mouth, he and his fellow cabinet ministers, of whom I had the pleasure of working. I was working for three cabinet ministers who were intelligent enough to see that a limited counterinsurgency campaign, however diligently and enthusiastically done by the British military, in small parts of Afghanistan, wasn’t going to work, but they were working for a prime minister, Gordon Brown, who didn’t really want to raise the wider strategic issue and so we just drifted along with what was really cumulative collective failure. The Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, when I said to him this isn’t working, said you mustn’t report this sort of thing, Sherard, it upsets the MoD and it damages the FCO’s relations with the MoD. His concern was the FCO’s relationship with the Ministry of Defence, not the wider national interest, and so it went on. The Chief of the General Staff said to me if I don’t send the battle groups coming free from Iraq into Afghanistan I’ll lose them in a defence review. Admiral West: In Northern Ireland that was actually stated to me by the Chief of General Staff. I didn’t use them, I’d lose them. It seemed a strange basis for a campaign. SC-C: But it’s accumulation of things, and I’m just not convinced that an inquiry will throw up anything more than that we’re all human and fallible. BM: We’ll come back to that because it seems to me that you were making a good case for the scale of collective failure and things that might be learned. Chris. Admiral Chris Parry: Well, I’m going to come in and say that we do need the inquiry because it’s a classic petri dish of where democracies can’t do strategy. It’s a classic failure here of identifying the ends of a campaign, supplying the means—the resources—and actually the military delivering the ways in which the two things can actually be balanced. It’s absolutely criminal and throughout this there’s a series of myths that have grown up that need to be laid to rest. The first of which is that the initial counterinsurgency campaign was not a counterinsurgency campaign, it was a blatant military campaign to occupy ground in Helmand, led by 16 Air Assault Brigade which had no real end in sight other than getting on the ground and playing to this army agenda, which was clearly seen as their Falklands moment, to secure their future. So these other agendas, which Sherard has mentioned, constantly come into play; and it’s the nature of our democracy, our inability to look beyond the next election, I’m afraid, that means we don’t do this very well. We almost saw it happening with Syria. In fact, the democratic process—the way it’s operating with regard to Syria—and may yet in the US, turn around the way in which we approach war. So I would say yes we do need an inquiry because we need this to actually say what lessons have we learnt and how can we as a political, military, diplomatic and economic unit do this better in the future, because it is a real cock-up, there’s no question about it. My final point is, after three failed Afghan wars in the past, we had an inquiry. Historically. So it justifies it this time. William Patey: What would be the whole point of an inquiry that examines what Britain was doing if it doesn’t look at what the Americans and Afghans were doing. I was always conscious when I was there that we were influencing at the margins. I was there at the time that there were 20,000 American troops in Helmand. It is what the Americans were doing that mattered. I think it is rather self-indulgent of us to think that we can get to the bottom of what went right and wrong in Afghanistan, and ignoring what the Afghans did and what the Americans did, the two biggest players. BM: I think it is entirely right, of course it is; but surely that is part of the point. That it’s how Britain decided to take on very big commitments both in Helmand and the narcotics as part of the conflict in which it had a small part, and that came after Iraq. Iraq, of course, had not just an inquiry, a review into the weapons, but also into lessons learned. Of course you can’t do it without the American part of the picture, which is the bigger part, but Britain made a decision to put in fairly small numbers of troops, compared to the overall size of the conflict, and arguably bit off more than it could chew. On Helmand and the narcotics. CP: Just a point of information on that—I think our influence was actually more than you might think and that we could have levered the Americans a bit more, particularly on the military side. There’s a classic myth which we need to lay to rest, which is that the Petraeus plan is the Petraeus plan. That plan for Iraq originated in the UK. It just couldn’t be forced up through the system here so it was pushed out to the Americans. So that influenced the way they did things. I think we have more influence than we give ourselves credit for. Bob Ainsworth: The reluctance to have an inquiry is understandable, because, there is a fear that it would simply become a Brit-centred mind game and would achieve nothing at the end of the day. However, I don’t know how you say, to take words out of Sherard’s mouth that this was a massive collective mistake and then say that we shouldn’t have an inquiry. I don’t see how you square that off, and so therefore, I don’t see how you can argue against one. Frankly I do not see how you can argue against one. If an inquiry doesn’t embrace the international aspects, how you operate within a coalition, then it will achieve nothing. Most conflicts and recent wars have been fought in coalitions, they probably will be in the future, and our inability to leverage—and I think this is an issue—it’s alright saying around the table that we had great ability to leverage. If we did, we didn’t do it, or we didn’t get the leverage that we deserved as the second largest contributor. So how you effectively operate within a coalition has got to be a big part of it. We may have been the second largest contributor, but we were massively smaller than the main contributor, and one of the questions about operating in a coalition that applies to Iraq and Afghanistan is how do you say to America not “yes” or “no”, but “yes… if”, or “yes… but”, or “yes… however” without the “but” being completely lost and meaning nothing and the only thing that is heard is “yes”? That international aspect is absolutely necessary. But despite the pain that might come out of it. The not “should we have gone to Helmand?” which is the shorthand for what is perceived to be the central error, but “what was said to who about what going to Helmand meant?” is enormously important as well. By the time I became Armed Forces Minister, and Secretary of State, this had a big impact on military and political relations. The fact that people felt that that decision hadn’t been properly analysed and exposed to the politicians and our ability to take decisions thereafter about the need for troop density in a smaller area of operation was impacted upon by that original decision. What are you going to Helmand to do? Was that properly explained to politicians at the time and did they understand what we were getting into. That will become enormously problematic, in the short term it will be a blame game, but in the longer term if we get into those international aspects of how do you operate within a coalition, what agreements do you demand at the start in order for your participation, then there will be some lessons that will be enormously worth learning I believe. Gisela Stuart: Can I just add to what Bob just said because I think that an inquiry in some form or another will become inevitable. You’ve got to look back. But you’ve got to see that within the context of the next strategic defence review, because the last one was neither strategic nor facing much insecurity. If we’re not careful we’re going to get into a position where we’re not going to do anything anywhere, under any circumstances because everybody will quote the events of the last 15 years and therefore it demands the context how do we work with allies, but also what do we see as our role in the world? And that requires certain military essentials because my biggest fear is that we are going to end up withdrawing from Afghanistan and then say from now on we do nothing. The key sentence which haunts me is the Secretary of State for Defense saying that we have now right-sized the army in line with budgetary requirements. That’s the current way of looking at things. Admiral West: I have to say the things I don’t like about the thought of a parliamentary inquiry are that they always end up looking at and targeting individuals. CINC Land for example, saying we need to do some proper soldiering just before going into Helmand and then complaining constantly to the government that they hadn’t got the right kit. And they’ll say why on earth did he do that? Maybe that’s not the right way to go ahead, But I do agree with what [Admiral] Chris [Parry] said, and a couple of others touched on—we’ve got a real problem now in this country in terms of formulating what I always term grand strategy, but that’s probably too grand: our strategic concept. If one looks back a little bit historically, we’ve got chiefs of committees committees that did actually do that before discussing it with the Foreign Office. I think somehow we’ve lost the ability to do that. I disagree about winning or losing. I think some of these things we can. Winning is defined differently but we can actually succeed, but we are not very good at formulating, and I felt very frustrated by that. When I was C in C during the invasion of Afghanistan and I was absolutely convinced that that was the right thing to do. Then by June 2002—I was still C in C— I wrote to the First Sea Lord because it was quite clear to me—I don’t know who told me and no-one asked me at Chilcot so I don’t care—that we were going to invade Iraq and I was told the army and the marines needed to be ready for war in the northern Gulf by December 31st that year. I wrote to the First Sea Lord and said are we really going to remain in Afghanistan while we are doing this? Why don’t we get out of there, cobble together a coalition; I don’t know if the First Sea Lord was able to talk to anyone about that. All I will say is that when I became First Sea Lord, and John Reid [Secretary of State for Defence, 2005-6] mentioned the business of counter-narcotics at a meeting with him and the chiefs, I said this is madness to do the narcotics thing and I quoted Colombia. That got not traction whatsoever. Similarly when we were going to go into Helmand, down at Fort Monckton where the chiefs went, we didn’t have any ministers there admittedly, John Scarlett [Director General MI6, 2004-9] started by saying, right Alan you’re the one who thinks this is a terrible mistake. I talked about it. That again got no traction. Indeed, all I got within the MoD was, the First Sea Lord doesn’t want to do this because the Navy’s not involved and he’s just a Naval officer. Now admittedly the generals are the ons that know about land warfare in detail, although I have to say I don’t think they were very impressive in some things they handled in Afghanistan. There was a disconnect, there was not an inability somehow to actually formulate a proper strategy. Yes, that has to be done in conjunction with the US, a coalition and everything else, and yes I think we do have a lot of leverage, but we don’t seem to be able to do it, and I have to say I think the Syrian thing shows that again. I couldn’t believe it Tuesday last week, we were galloping into position to fire missiles on Sunday morning. And that, I think does merit looking at this because I think we have got to resolve that. And of course there was a parliamentary committee that looked at this and said we were incapable of doing it. A cross part committee that said exactly this. I do think we should look at it, but I am very nervous because I do not think there is any merit in finding people and saying he did this and that is one of the things we always try and do in this country and that’s bad news I think. Jeffrey Donaldson: Of course it’s important to focus on the defence and the military issue but there is a trend here. If we look at Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, for me, the thing we need to inquire into more than how we did militarily is the politics. Because we left Iraq in a mess and Libya is going nowhere fast, and Afghanistan, when we withdraw next year—how long will it be stable post-Karzai if he doesn’t seek to find another way of renewing his presidency? We go into these conflicts for political reasons, but the difficulty is, when we withdraw, we withdraw for military reasons and we leave the politics in a mess. I think that if we’re going to learn lessons, we’ve got to learn lessons about the politics. BM: Do you mean by this our politics or the politics in Afghanistan? JD: I mean the politics in the country we’re going into. This is one of the concerns I had about Syria—we were going to launch missiles into the most unstable region in the world with no sense whatsoever of the political consequences for the region and I feel that in respect of Afghanistan, when we come back next year, I have no sense of what the management plan is for ensuring political stability, what that would look like, and it’s the same for Iraq and frankly for Libya at the moment, we’re just struggling on. So I think that if we’re going to inquire, we should be looking not just at the military issues, we should be looking at how we and our coalition partners manage the politics, because in the end the stability of Afghanistan and the region will be determined not so much by the capacity of the Afghan state forces to defend the country. They need political direction. They need political leadership. Is there the capacity in Afghanistan to do that post-2014? That’s what concerns me. The army’s report on Operation Banner—the longest-running operation in the history of the army—have a read of it. It covers a span of thirty years of military operations in Northern Ireland. There are massive lessons that were learned during that period and I don’t see those lessons necessarily being drawn out and applied. Having served in the army in Northern Ireland and been a politician there are massive lessons that politicians can learn from that military experience. Julian Brazier: Can I just pick up Gisela’s point. I’m completely with Bob and with everyone who thinks we need an inquiry here; but we do face a crisis of confidence as a country in the use of our armed forces. Two massive failures, we’ve now got a popular opinion which is against military action of all sorts, and that’s the reality. I sat round a table of a Conservative fundraising event in which, by sheer chance, every single person had a connection with the military. In fact, one was widow of someone who jumped at Suez with my father, and yet the general chat was that the one good thing about the defence cuts was that at least we won’t be sending any more boys off to places like Afghanistan to have their legs blown off. So we are in a very bad place. I’d like to just look for a second at the other side and pick up on Sherard’s point on institutional failure in the Foreign Office. It seems to me that we have institutional failure in the armed forces too. [Lord] Wolseley, the great nineteenth century military reformer who to some extent is echoed in Frank Kitson’s work said that if you have a structure which is composed of people who make their careers in the army, you will have a structure which actually isn’t capable of taking on really large operations and is inward looking. He was the first person with his Ashanti campaign to get the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the War Office, all Secretaries of State together to agree a limited temporary objective, something that could be done in a few weeks and get out again. He then made the two really large changes of getting most people going through the army for only short periods and then going onto the reserve and then expanding volunteer reserves. Frank Kitson wrote a very similar book, his very last work, he looks at the question do we really want people making careers all the way through the armed forces which means that we have a military that gets more and more culturally isolated from the civilian population. We won’t actually have armed forces which gel with the public, which carry the public, which understand the public’s concern—Frank Ledgwick’s book Losing Small Wars brings this out in a big way—which understands what’s going on the ground, unless we have armed forces which are much closer to the people. This isn’t a left-wing point; it isn’t a right-wing point. It seems to me that as well as asking how do we do this and we do we formulate grand structure, we have to ask how do we have institutions which are closer to the people and more likely to learn the answers. BM: It’s a very important point – where this has left public support for military action in general. John Kerr: I’m not crazy about inquiries. I think Chilcot is an awful lesson. I think that if one had an inquiry, it would be very important to be quite limited in the terms of reference. We need to be clear what it is we would be wanting people to inquire into and how we would do it. I think when we want to inquire into systems. I have to admit that my direct personal knowledge of the Afghan War is limited to the first one. I wrote the aims which the cabinet approved for the first war, the one we won and that lasted six weeks and paragraph one said that the enemy was al-Qaeda and we had no quarrel with the Taliban; provided the Taliban assisted us in throwing out al-Qaeda we would not be interested in throwing out the Taliban. That’s why we went to war originally. The mistake we made then was allowing the Americans to persuade us that we should turn down the offer of assistance that we got from Tehran, that was the October 2001 mistake. But the September, October, November war was won—I admit I’m still in government for another three months, while we started getting new aims that weren’t in the original aims: liberal society, Western society, unitary society. We won the first war by empowering—bribing—the Northern Alliance. We were at the time against the idea of a unitary Afghanistan, let alone a democratic, liberal values, non-narcotic Afghanistan. We of course made a mistake in picking Karzai, but I don’t think anybody could have achieved the creation of a unitary Afghanistan. There never has been. I think the idea of building up an Afghan army was bound to be opposed by the very warlords who had delivered the first success for us. There never has been a central, strong unitary state and the interests of all the warlords were to make sure it didn’t happen. So of course there would defections. People would join our training camps in order to get a gun and uniform and then they would be off again. All that had started by the time I left government in January 2002. I was struck by the point made here which I hadn’t thought of in your excellent piece Bronwen, about the change of the attitude of the people in Afghanistan to us and later forces generally when the Iraq War started. That seems to me very plausible but it’s not a point that I thought of. The one area where I do think there may be a case for an inquiry is the Helmand mistake and I was interested in this discussion already people are honing in on that one. How come we thought it would be a walkover? This seems to me to be some kind of a serious system failure; it may be simply saying what people want to hear, the point that Sherard was addressing. But I think if there is an inquiry, it should be into the interface between the military, the intelligence, the diplomatic communities and ministers— how did we get ourselves into making such a very big mistake? So I would define the terms of reference, if we have one, and in general I’m not sure we should have one. I’d define it very narrowly; I’d look at 2004, 2005, 2006 – why did we think it would be so easy and discover it was extremely difficult, in fact impossible. What sort of inquiry? If you go for narrow terms of reference of the kind I have in mind, you’re going straight into a Franks [Falklands War inquiry] Butler [Review of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD] pattern rather than a Chilcot pattern [Iraq war inquiry], if possible keeping the lawyers out of it. The object of the exercise is not to identify guilty men so that people don’t need to have a lawyer. We don’t get into the stupid situation which we have with Chilcot now where they presumably know what it is they want to say but clearly bits of it is taking forever. I would say you want somebody doing it who is extremely familiar with the military, extremely familiar with the interface between intelligence and the Foreign Office and so on and the military and who has understood the interface between uniformed and non-uniformed public servants and politicians. Someone like David Omand [former Director, GCHQ], I would do it on Privy Council terms and I would do it on very narrow terms of reference. James Gray: It’s been very interesting for me watching the great experts in these matters talking so far in this conversation. It seems to me that they break down into two broad groups: The professionals—whether they be generals, admirals or ambassadors—are all broadly of the view that it’s all too complicated and really this isn’t an awfully good idea and it’s the British ruling classes in denial. And the politicians are all saying, “oh yes, goodness me, we certainly must look into this.” I don’t think we’re being very clear about defining what we’re looking into. It seems to me that no one argues that the conduct of warfare in Afghanistan was anything other than brilliant—therefore there’s no purpose in examining that. Broadly speaking, I think, it was done pretty well. But what nobody understands… Let me tell you an anecdote which may illustrate it. On one of my visits to Afghanistan, the brigade commander had us all around the table for a nice demonstration and said it was all going fantastically well. At the end of it he brought up a picture of two girls going to school. And he said “That, ladies and gentleman, that’s what it’s all about.” And I said, “Very sorry, Brigadier, but could you just remind me which aspect of international law it is that enables us to invade a country to improve the educational standards for girls?” And he said, “Well I don’t know. Isn’t that for you chaps to sort out?” And the fact of the matter is that we don’t know why we’re there. This question of poppies is absolutely ridiculous. Absurd. Surely what we have to have is a very limited examination about how it is that we decide what we wish to do—the same applies to Syria, incidentally—how it is we decide what we’re going to do when we decide to go to war. Or indeed, should we go to war. A little PS: is it right, for example, that the House of Commons should be the low-grade, ignorant organisation that decides whether or not we go to war, or should it be others who know about these things? But I think this talk of wider inquiries is bonkers. We’ll get bogged down in it. But we do need to know why it is that we landed up… I stood in the streets on 150 occasions welcoming bodies home… Why is it that we had to do all that stuff and we don’t quite know why we did it? BM: That’s an excellent way of putting it. It seems to me to come down, in particular, to a couple of decisions. One was Helmand and one was the drugs, which we’ll come back to. Tom Coghlan: I think there is a generation of soldiers, perhaps not at the strategic level—certainly not at the strategic level in 2006—who are deeply desirous of some sort of inquest into what happened and how they ended up in the position that they did. I think it’s interesting that there’s been some sort of an attempt, informally and independently, to do this. There’s a book, TheBlair War Generals book that came out a couple of months ago, is about Iraq and Afghanistan. But there are some really honest attempts in there from people slightly lower down the chain of command, some real self-searching attempts to look particularly at the operations in Basra but also to some degree to look at Afghanistan as well. But I think it tells you all you all need to know that the MoD sought to ban every single serving officer from contributing to that book. So we had the incoming CDS [Chief of the Defence Staff] who was going to contribute his chapter who was told that he couldn’t, and six other generals who were told that they couldn’t and I think that unless you have an institution that’s prepared to really look at itself then what hope is there? Deborah Haynes: From the perspective of someone who’s reported on the wars over the last 10 years, the thing that I’ve really noticed is this massive erosion of trust. Trust from the public of what our government is doing, trust from the government of what they’re being told by the military, and within the military itself there is, as Tom was saying, there is this lack of trust of what you’re being told to do. In Afghanistan lessons haven’t been learnt. We saw the outcome of all that erosion of trust in what’s going on in Syria today. And also lack of trust in the media too because we’ve also failed to an extent. We’re failing at the moment to report on Afghanistan because people aren’t interested. That’s a big failure that we hold responsibility for. There’s also a lack of trust in inquiries, too. As a journalist you really want an inquiry into something. But when the inquiry happens, it’s either a whitewash, or Chilcot—where is it? It should have been reported months ago and it still hasn’t. That feeds the erosion of trust. The MoD is its own worst enemy. It tries to suppress anyone who speaks the truth—that’s a slight exaggeration—fails to learn lessons. Any investigative journalist who tries to highlight things that have gone wrong is immediately treated as enemy no. 1. That’s just a really immature way of doing business in this day and age. And with the SDSR [Strategic Defence and Security Review] coming up in 2015, I think the MoD is going to feel the real pain because of this. People don’t have any trust in the military, so what is our future? What is our place in the world? That all feeds into it. So if there is an inquiry, ultimately, it needs to be a genuine one that actually helps to mend that lack of trust. BM: I want to come back to some of these points, particularly in relation to the Americans. Pauline Neville-Jones: On the question of inquiries, I think that you need to be careful how often you hold inquiries. Too often and you cheapen the currency, because they should be very serious affairs. And secondly, on the whole, they should be reserved for instances where there are grounds for believing there’s been real malfeasance. I don’t think Afghanistan falls in that category. It certainly falls in the category of why do things go so badly wrong, were there mistakes and where and why? And I think we do need to know the answers to those questions. But I wouldn’t want to deliver them via an official inquiry. Secondly, it’s important who delivers these verdicts. One of the conclusions any investigation of Afghanistan will reveal is that coalition warfare—as run at present by the Americans—doesn’t work. There are failures in their leadership. Do we want to deliver that as an official outcome of an inquiry in the UK? We do have very large equities, to use an American term, in the relationship with them, so we do have to be careful. That doesn’t mean to say we don’t need to get to the bottom of things, but I do think it matters how we come to conclusions. So I would be much more in favour of going down the route which is much more like John Kerr’s. Giving one or two or three rather trusted people whose judgement is shown to be good, who are actually given access, and who talk to people. It may well be that one would want to ask certain specific questions. But within a timescale please and not this business of Chilcot. It does mean that the government does have to honour the promise to allow access, both to people talked to and the documentation. I think part of the problem with Chilcot is this row about papers. So that we do have some way of establishing where key errors were. It is important we know that. The second thing is on the question of strategy, the methodology in government is quite important and I don’t think it’s a question of us having lost the ability to do strategy, I don’t think we ever had the ability to do strategy. I think it is one of our national personality failures. One of my objectives in trying to the get the government to set up a national security council was actually to get us more strategic. It’s not happening. They’re not using it the way they should, not using it the way I wanted them to, not using it the way I tried to persuade David to use it. It is better than what we had but it’s not yet achieving its objective. There is a systemic governmental issue here about the way policy is made in this country, particularly in this area. That deserves to be the object of some study. I wouldn’t say necessarily part of something which is Afghanistan where I think we need to limit the number of questions we ask people so that actually we get a verdict in reasonable time. But I do think there are certain issues about how government policy is made which do deserve some study, taking a concrete example, and drawing some conclusions for how you can make policy better. BM: Thanks. Sherard. SC-C: I want to support by two former bosses. I’m very sceptical about an inquiry precisely because I think it would conclude that probably hundreds of individuals over many years took decisions that probably probably deep inside them they knew weren’t quite right but they did them for a variety of motives: to please the Americans, to please politicians, to please the generals. I was guilty of it myself. In January 2008 I had been accused by David Richards [British Lieutenant General, commander of Coalition forces, southern Afghanistan, 2006-8]. The Embassy, he said, had lost the plot because we were reporting that security in Afghanistan was getting worse and this was very depressing for my able young diplomats and intelligence officers who were doing their duty and telling the truth. And the defence intelligence service, under pressure from the top of the MoD was saying the opposite—security was improving in Afghanistan, it was just perceptions that were getting worse. Because I was ambitious and because I wanted to go to the to of the Foreign Office and wanted to please the people back in London, I wrote a letter—this was 2008—we’ve got 16 Air Assault Brigade coming, we’ve got a new upgraded provincial reconstruction team, we’ve got the US Marines. I put it all together in a great letter, which I wanted to impress. I knew in my heart of hearts I was being dishonest—and I very much hope that my successor, I hope he knew he was being dishonest, but perhaps he didn’t, perhaps he just didn’t understand it. But I’m not sure the systems were wrong. We have independent joint intelligence machinery, we have cabinet machinery, we have an embassy whose job was to report honestly. It was a whole series of weak individuals. Before we went into Helmand, a team went out and reported back to the Prime Minister’s national security adviser that this would take ten years and the man in question who went on to a very senior job said I’m afraid the Prime Minister can’t except that, we’ve got to pacify Helmand in three years. I’m not sure the system was wrong, it was an ambitious individual wanting to please his political master. The real systemic failure, as Pauline said, is in Washington where Washington is quite incapable of managing this sort of campaign—the war, inside Afghanistan, between the embassy and CIA station, the Generals, the war back in Washington, the failure of Hilary Clinton to back Richard Holbrooke, the games the Pentagon played with the White House. This was obvious to all of us, but one of our objectives in this was to please the Americans and show that we were good allies albeit in a cause that many of us knew was a losing cause. I just want to take up Gisela’s point which might not have been aimed at me. But I made a point and was criticised for this by my bosses back in London of when briefing politicians of briefing them as honestly as I could and of telling them the truth, which wasn’t always welcome. But I had the privilege of working for David Miliband as Foreign Secretary who said to me and my team that he wanted us always to tell the truth as we saw it, and we tried to do so and we made ourselves very unpopular with lots of people in the MoD. What I find so surprising is that no one now despite the upbeat briefings that Brigadier Rupert Jones is giving when the latest group go through Helmand, no one in the British establishment actually seems to believe that this has been a success, no one in Washington no one in London. And yet we’re still getting the powerpoint presentations. The Foreign Secretary still stands up in the House of Commons and says progress is being made but challenges remain. I wonder if he privately believes that. I just don’t know. BM: I entirely understand your recoiling from an inquiry and yet the account that you’ve given and the kind of way in which decisions are made and the relationship with America seem to me to argue in the opposite direction. We do have a rough division between those who were involved in the war, in the military who say a lot of mistakes were made by individuals, we don’t want a witch-hunt; and a lot of MPs comparing the two million misspent in BBC pay-offs, with the £40bn that will have been spent on this over 12 years, saying should we not look at this. SC-C: An inquiry can do one of two things—either conclude that the systems are wrong, or it would conclude that hundreds of individuals over ten years distorted their advice, didn’t do their jobs as professionally and objectively as they should have done. Maybe we should name all the names, go through all the telegrams I sent trying to please back home, maybe we should go through the deceitful tweets and press briefings that officials put out, but I’m not sure that it really serves much purpose. Pompously in my book I quote Thucydides he sets out all the lessons of the Peleponesian war and then concludes that, human nature being human nature, man will make the same mistakes again and again and again. Admiral West: Having been the only person since Field Marshal Alexander to have been a minister and to have been a chief of service, I’m aware of Gisela’s point of telling the truth to visiting MPs. And actually they don’t see visiting MPs as someone they should be open and honest with, they see them as someone who could cause a great deal of trouble. Maybe they’re right of course. It’s a tricky balance when you’re in a very sensitive situation and things are happening in real time. Bob Ainsworth: I think we can see the dilemma from the debate we’re having, I think it encapsulates the other issues that are being talked about as John says. There’s a temptation to try and do that and limit it to the Helmand decision and what Pauline says and then understandably shies away from—you can’t look at the Helmand decision without looking at the international aspects of it. I think the decision to go to Helmand flowed from the desire to modernise Nato, to give it a new raison d’etre, all of these international debates that were taking place and inevitably flowed through to yes we can do deployable counterinsurgency operations. The kind of inquiry that John envisages, zooming in on Helmand, what did we think we were going to achieve there, how did we think we were going gto do it with the amount of troops that we sent, would get to one of the key issues. But it you limit it to that and the 2005/2006 period, you won’t have much of the coalition context, the Nato context that had such an impact. It wasn’t just generals thinking they could do something, it wasn’t just politicians being inadequately briefed, there was a whole agenda about changing the Cold War mentality in Nato, developing deployment capability, that we had led on—we, Britain—and saw ourselves as a modernising force in European defence that fed through to the decision to turn Helmand—to turn Afghanistan—into a counterinsurgency operation. I think we’ve got to try and capture that if any kind of good is to come of it at all. John Kerr: Bob’s point of course I should have said the international background and reasoning for the Helmand mistake would need to be gone in to. Absolutely, that’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to an insider now outsider as the inquirer—someone like Omand who is extremely well-respected in Washington would have as good a chance as any person of being able to look at the transatlantic dimension from both sides: our side and the other side. What Sherard’s just said so eloquently seems to me to be a very clear description of a systems failure. It isn’t a system that’s working if hundreds of decent public servants are not telling the truth, feeling they’re under pressure not to tell the tell the truth. That is a system that has failed. I’m not sure whether there should be an inquiry, but if we have one, the aim should definitely not be to line up the guilty parties, to read Sherard’s telegrams and say oh look he was stretching it a bit on that one. That’s not the point. The point is why? I was one of the last of Permanent Secretaries who believed that the principal job of the Permanent Secretary was to say no to the Minister—I’m a genuine Sir Humphrey. I thought that was the job. If the Minister was getting it right, the Permanent Secretary shouldn’t be in the room. The boys and girls would naturally, for all the reasons Sherard gives, would want to say “yes minister,” But if you thought the Minister was getting it wrong then you threw out the boys and girls and you explained in private to the Minister why he was getting it wrong, in your view. And at the end of the day, you threatened to resign, which I did once or twice. Never had to do it, but once I thought I might have to do it. What’s gone wrong in our system where the machine is expected to deliver; it’s about delivery, it’s not about policy formation. Policy formation is made in a political circle with special advisers around, but not the people who actually know the background and are going to have to implement the policy. That’s a system failure right across Whitehall, not just inside the MoD. In the MoD it’s much more complicated because you have various hierarchies, including the defense intelligence staff—I was struck by Sherard’s reference to them. There was a trahison des clercs among the defense intelligence staff. There were also a number of previous episodes—that’s not news to me. But is it curable. The continual conflict between the defence intelligence staff and the wider Whitehall intelligence machine—is it curable? Tricky position for the Secretary of State for Defence, who at all the big moments when very big decisions are taken is the chap who writes down what the Prime Minister wants to do. The access to the Prime Minister—where do these decisions actually get taken? Sherard is describing a situation where Gordon Brown didn’t want to hear bad news, therefore people round Gordon Brown didn’t give him bad news. Presumably that affected Defence Secretaries as well. Presumably there was a temptation to say, let’s keep the show on the road. That’s a system’s failure if so, because the purpose of the Defence Secretary is to be the link between the military machine and the prime minister, and the prime minister needs to be told if what he wants to do, say for transatlantic reasons, won’t work. To that extent the Defense Secretary has to be on the side of the chiefs and the chiefs have to be honest with him and tell him—who told the Defence Secretary that we could get out of Helmand without firing a shot? Who told him?—now I don’t want to know who told him, I don’t want him to name names, but I do think that Sherard is wrong to say this isn’t about systems, in a wider sense, it’s all about systems. SC-C: I think it’s about culture, not about systems. I think it’s about a culture of public servants. I think you’re entirely right John, I salute you because you did say no to ministers. I think your successors, without naming names, there was a different culture, of wanting to please ministers, of Blairite delivery that infected the whole system and it came from No. 10 downwards, but I don’t actually see how one would physically change the structure of the system. It’s moral weakness. I was part of it, I plead guilty to having said things to plead my masters. I remember saying to Chris Patten when he was governor of Hong Kong that we needed a strategy, and his reply to me was, you don’t understand Sherard, I’m a politician, my strategy is to get through to lunch. But I had a permanent secretary, John Coles, who whatever you may think of his views on Europe, went to the foreign secretary and said the Hong Kong department disagrees with the government, do you want to receive independent, objective advise from your officials here in London. And Douglas Hurd squirmed and said yes eventually. That was a permanent secretary doing his job, in a rather minor case. I would stick by my point—there may be more minor adjustments by more independent defence intelligence staff, but the structure—professional advisers, politicians taking decisions on the basis of independent, objective advice—Mrs Thatcher, people were prepared to say no to her. She welcomed it. But I think the infection started with Tony Blair and spread from the top down. Gordon Brown was obsessed with the next election, with keeping the Mail and Telegraph on his side, understandably enough, and people round him were terrified. Julian Brazier: Can I support John Kerr in saying that if we can have an inquiry it must be limited in scope, focused specifically on the Helmand decision. We can always make a case of doing other things, we can’t fix Washington, we can do something about our own systems. From the small inquiry which Gisela, Geoffrey and I served on in the defense select committee, there seems to have been a breakdown between the military and the politicians. An example of something that can be solved systematically is the unbelievable muddle that four or five critical figures all changed jobs within three or four weeks of each other. In fact the secretary of state changed from John Reid to Desmond Browne, the same weekend as the chief of defence staff. There should be a rule—if the Secretary of State changes and clearly the Secretary of State changing over may happen with no notice at all and in fact usually does, the Chief of Defence Staff should have to stay on for a few weeks to see the man in The fact that the head of GCHQ had changed just two weeks earlier, further compounded that. It has to be a limited inquiry with a limited aim. If you bring the lawyers in it’ll be a failure, with a clear timeframe. We can’t fix personal integrity but we can do something about some really dysfunctional systems. William Patey: I want to pick up on the point that Sherard made, and I certainly agree with John Kerr that an inquiry needs to be very limited. I think there are messages here that we won’t want to give to the Americans. My direct experience of Iraq and Afghanistan is that the only clear instructions I ever got from the top was stay close to the Americans. And that is an inhibiting factor if you’re part of a bigger alliance. It’s something about being part of a coalition with the Americans. To stay close to the Americans, you have to trim your sails. Sherard was a victim of this. The American system is completely dysfunctional—Sherard’s absolutely right. There’s a coalition within a coalition. The American system is a coalition with competing factions and the Brits are one of those factions and if you end up being overly critical, overly-negative, overly-honest, you get cut out, and if you get cut out you lose your value to your own system: your own Prime Minister, your own Foreign Secretary, your own Defence Secretary. That’s true, whether you’re a General or whether you’re a diplomat. You go there and you’ve got a big ball and chain behind you—Sherard was a victim of that. Sherard disagreed with the Americans with the extent to which they should be pushing the political. There was a dysfunctionality—if you get on the wrong side of the Americans, you get on the wrong side of your own system. There is an inbuilt weakness there and I think it’s unrealistic to expect diplomats or generals to expose to visiting MPs the flaws, that’s not what the government wants. Part of the other problem is the time frame. Most politicians, governments, most Prime Ministers, have a much shorter time frame and telling them this is going to take ten years isn’t going to wash. I remember in Iraq having to revamp the police system in Basra. And we got a new plan Ronnie Flanagan [former Chief Inspector of Constabulary], came out and Nigel Sheinwald [former British Ambassador to the US] is on the phone the next week asking how it’s going? And I said, oh it’s brilliant and it’s fully implemented and there’s been a complete transformation in the police. He said, really? And I said, don’t be stupid, this is going to take longer. There is a kind of pressure. P N-J: I think one of the key issues is how it’s told and delivering each verdict right. BM: One of the questions coming out of this is the relationship with the Americans. One of the obvious questions about Helmand is what can Britain realistically do with the armed forces and what does that mean for the relationship with the Americans, because clearly in Helmand, in Iraq, Britain either thought or implied to the Americans it could do more with the forces it was putting in than it actually could. Rob. Robert Fry: I think there’s a danger of some of the conversations being oversimplified and people around the time that these key decisions were made, were involved in things that have not been mentioned here, lots of them sitting round the table at the present time. The British Army was undoubtedly in search of a redemptive mission after the failures of Iraq. To however imply that all this is the result of the ambition of the British army is to trivialise the debates that went on at the time. BM: People haven’t said that, they’ve simply repeated the “use it or lose it”. RF: But to imply that that was somehow the supervening argument at the time simply isn’t true. That would never be a strong enough argument. That was something uttered sotto voce rather than brought up in the Chiefs of Staff committee or wherever else it would be. Admiral West: Rob, those words were used in the Chiefs of Staff committee. That’s where I quoted them from. The CGS [Chief of the General Staff] said about using them or losing them in the context of the Treasury view of things. So it was actually said by the Chiefs of Staff committee. RF: But the same chiefs of staff committee chose to proceed with Helmand. But some of the reasons that were discussed at the time… First of all there was the whole idea of forward defence, which from 1999 and the Chicago speech through to what David Cameron said earlier this year about a generational war. Forward defence as the prime political strategic plank against terrorism has never ever changed. How do you develop a military strategy in support of that? We have created a government in Afghanistan that we would have abandoned and left flapping in the wind. We would have left Nato looking extremely stupid. We would have also partitioned Afghanistan, leaving a Pashtunistan as a semi-autonomous region providing the strategic depth which Pakistan had always sought. Those were strong compelling reasons at the time. No mention at all has been made at the table this morning about whether they were significant and remain significant. Moving to the issue of strategy. I do disagree with what Pauline has said on this. I actually think that we have a national vocation for the development of strategy that has been sadly absent over the last decade or so. We did not outfight Germany twice in the 20th century but we did make far better use of intelligence, we were far better at industrial production and above all, we made far better alliances. What do those things add up to? A cohesive grand strategy. For some reason we lost that at a given point. I’m unable to identify that point. Because during the period 2004-06 we actually had to create… a methodology, the comprehensive approach. Previous generations might have recognised that as the head of the executive and grand strategy. We actually had to create a new methodology and a new language to discuss this. At no point did the head of the political executive take control of either the campaign in Iraq or Afghanistan. And to that extent, I do think that the National Security Council, perhaps as originally conceived in Pauline’s mind, represents a big change, insofar as it places at the head of the process of strategic formulation the head of the political executive, without whose power none of this can happen, because if it resides in departments it becomes fissiparous and centrifugal and just dissipates in the ether. Chris Parry: I simply wanted to say that if you have hundreds of individuals doing things against the national interest, essentially, then your system and your strategy must be totally flawed, in its implementation if not in its formulation. As Clausewitz said, formulation in strategy is actually quite easy. Putting it into practice is the problem. What seems to be lacking in all this is what we have in the military which is the first principal of war: an unambiguous single aim. I’ve totted up 28 aims people have quoted that we were doing in Afghanistan. What was the national interest in Afghanistan? Our relationship with the Americans, getting rid of poppy fields, all that sort of thing are simply objectives within what aim? What was the national interest in being involved? If we were sticking alongside the Americans, all we had to do was what the Americans wanted. BM: The question is whether it was John Kerr’s six week war that became 12 years. CP: If that was the national interest and aim, we should have stuck to it. We should not have been diverted. The only way to stop misbehaviour at the strategic level is to have a coherent strategy which says this is the policy from the politicians, this is what we have to deliver in outcomes, here are the means, the resources we’re allocating to you. And the military has to come up with a plan. And it has to be a constant discussion between those three things. SC-C: We had all that. I went out to Afghanistan with a pile of strategies. CP: When you say “strategies” that’s part of the problem. You had a pile of plans that should have actually subscribed to a single over-arching… SCC: I agree with William [Patey] on this—though he doesn’t know about my time—I totally agree with him. I just don’t think that there’s a systemic change that you can make that would ensure there is a coherent strategy and that the human beings in the system have the guts to implement. CP: Don’t confuse strategy with policy. Policy is what the politicians and the public want you to do. Strategy should be that 3-cornered conversation. And in Afghanistan there was no policy, no national interest and single aim. The means weren’t provided in terms of resources, and sure as hell there wasn’t a military plan to deliver anything because they didn’t know what to deliver. Julian Brazier: Back to Rob’s point, I disagreed with the first half of what he said but the National Security Council must by any standards represent a real step forward. What we want, in fact, is the limited inquiry in the context of how can we make the National Security Council take care of this and make it work better. James Gray: A little constitutional postscript. If we round this table can’t decide what went wrong, whether it’s systemic or anything else, how much less likely is it that had we had a vote, for example, on going into Helmand in the first place in the House of Commons, how much less likely is it that 650 worthy burghers would actually have the ability to take that decision at all? The answer we saw last Thursday is that no matter what all the very great people round this table think and say, no matter what the system is doing, if it is close to a general election and if half our seats are marginal, and if the House of Commons is hung, as it is at the moment, there is no possibility at all that we will take part in any military action of any kind, no matter how limited, ever again in the future. Lord West: I absolutely don’t accept that. JG: The vote on Iraq was the day before we went in. It wasn’t really a vote at all. Syria was the first time that a decision by the House of Commons affected what we did. If that were to be applied in the future, we would not do any of the things we’ve done in the last 100 years. I think all this democratisation of war has gone a great deal too far. Leaving it to the PM and the Security Council and the experts we have around the table here, has a huge amount to recommend it, with them then coming back to Parliament to explain what they’ve done, rather than to ask for Parliament’s approval in advance. CP: If you identify the national interest, the House of Commons, dull as they are, as you say… BM: He didn’t say that. CP: Sorry—I said it. The national interest was not identified in that debate. And even as an ordinary citizen, I could not see what the national interest in going into Syria was. James: You’re right about Syria. Would the House of Commons voted to go into Helmand? CP: That was an operational decision. Sorry to be technical here, but there is a difference between strategy, operational level and tactical. What you’re talking about with Helmand is an operational decision within a campaign. The issue is that if you have a strategy in Afghanistan that says here is the national interest, all the misbehaviour and misjudgements by individuals get mitigated by the fact that they have this single view, the national interest is to do this. How does going into Helmand contribute to our national interest? Answer: it doesn’t. We don’t do it. Admiral West: In terms of what James [Gray] said about the military being hugely successful, I think we need to be very careful of this. I believe we had an abject failure at the strategic and operational level. Tactically our boys and girls did brilliantly. But at the operational and strategic level there was an abject failure, which again does make one think, should this be looked at. I’m worried about a full parliamentary inquiry, I quite like John’s idea of going for something much narrower, but I think there was a real failure. BM: We’re drawing to the end of this. The drugs decision has got off very lightly in this discussion. It was an early decision dating back to 2002. How did it happen and are there questions that should be asked about it? John Kerr: I think in both London and Washington it arose in public and then officials were asked to think about how to deliver. By the spring 2002, people were on female education, people were on elected local government, all sorts of wonderful new aims had been attached to what to begin with was a very straightforward Article 51 operation of self-defence against al Qaeda. I’m proud that I was associated with the only war that was won in Afghanistan—in fact I think in British history it’s the only was won in Afghanistan. The six week war. Drugs was an early 2002 addition. There were people throughout who, as far as I can recall Holbrooke was one of them, who thought this was quite unrealistic, but he never dared say that. Bob Ainsworth: I was a juion minister at the Home office at the time of the Government’s drug strategy. And we had four aims in the Home Office drug strategy. Without even talking to anybody in the Home Office as far as I’m aware, a fifth aim was added by No 10—the halving of poppy production in Afghanistan by 2013. I was told this was not a problem because it was tasked to the Foreign Office. How was the Foreign Office going to do this? How many helicopters does the Foreign Office have? But there was a fifth target added to the drugs strategy. It just came out of the blue. It came out of No 10. William Patey: But why does that surprise you that we would do that? I bet you we’d make that same decision again—98 per cent of the heroin on the streets in Britain comes from Afghanistan. You’ve got 10,000 troops on the ground. You’re putting in hundreds of millions of pounds in reconstruction. What government would not want to tackle the drugs? BM: It’s an even bigger threat because then you’re then enraging the locals you have to work with from the minute you go there. WP: It’s a politically unavoidable decision in my view. [Loud, overlapping exchanges] John Kerr: The last five minutes have demonstrated why you have to have, if you have an inquiry, very narrow terms of reference. What should the aim be on drugs? Should we be legalising drugs? Trying to raise the price? Lower the price? What should we be trying to do? You need to decide those questions before you can address the question of whether the way we went about it in Afghanistan made sense. Whether what we were trying to do in Afghanistan was achievable—in my view it never was. I would say you don’t want anything about drugs in this. You don’t want anything about these ludicrous additional aims that were attached. I’m afraid women’s education will go backwards once we’ve left, but it hasn’t gone very far. But I don’t think that has anything to do with an inquiry of the kind I’m on about, which is—what can we learn from systems failures, particularly of the Helmand decision. BM: Thank you for that, and thank you everyone. Present:The Rt. Hon. Bob Ainsworth, Labour MP for Coventry North EastJulian Brazier, Conservative MP for CanterburyTom Coghlan, Defence Correspondent, The Times and former Afghanistan correspondentSir Sherard Cowper-Coles, former Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and PakistanJonathan Derbyshire, Managing Editor, ProspectThe Rt. Hon. Jeffrey Donaldson, DUP MP for Lagan ValleyJay Elwes, Deputy Editor, ProspectLt. Gen. Sir Robert Fry, ex-Senior British Military Representative, Multinational Force, IraqJames Gray, Conservative MP for North WiltshireDeborah Haynes, Defence Correspondent, The TimesSir Simon Jenkins, columnist, author and Chairman of the National TrustLord Kerr of Kinlochard, former diplomatThe Rt. Hon. Baroness Neville-Jones, ex-Minister of State for Security and Counter TerrorismRear Admiral Christopher Parry, ex-Chair of the Government's Marine Management OrganisationSir William Patey, former British Ambassador to AfghanistanGisela Stuart, Labour MP for Birmingham EdgbastonAdmiral the Rt. Hon Lord West of Spithead, former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office
