Iraq Inquiry Report — House of Commons, 2016-04-14
Topic: Defense
Adam James Harold Holloway (Conservative, Centre-right): I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman in the sense that the original invasion of Afghanistan was highly effective and that the Afghan people essentially removed al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but unfortunately it was the disastrous NATO deployment to Afghanistan that whipped up the insurgency. I shall come on to that point in a minute if I may As I was saying, people do not get promoted for telling the truth. I sent my first draft of this speech to a friend who is a well-known and courageous BBC foreign correspondent. He emailed me, saying, "Reminds me of being attacked for negative coverage that I put out in Iraq and Afghanistan by officials who later admitted, either privately or in memoirs, that things were actually worse than I was saying in my news reports." With some hugely honourable exceptions, the same is true of senior military officers. After a recce of Helmand in 2004, a military officer reported back to his boss, a general at Permanent Joint Headquarters. The general asked him, "So, what’s the insurgency like in Helmand?" The officer replied, "Well, there isn’t one, but I can give you one if you want one." At the time, the mission statement at PJHQ actually stated that the military were to give "politically aware" advice. The top brass volunteered the UK for Helmand and, as in Iraq, assured Ministers that it was doable with the original force numbers We experienced exactly the same with the lack of equipment. Military people in Afghanistan constantly reminded us that we had enough helicopters to do the job. A few weeks before Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond were killed by an improvised explosive device, Rupert wrote that he and his men were making "unnecessary...road moves" because of the lack of helicopters. He went on to say: "This increases the IED threat and our exposure to it." A senior British general briefed the Defence Committee at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, and basically tore my head off for being a naysayer. When I was back in Kabul a few weeks later, again on a private trip, I went to see him at the end of the day. As I rather nervously walked into his office, I said, "Well, general, are we still winning?" He said, "If we damn well are, I’ll be dead by the time we do." I was hearing one thing in public and another in private As a soldier, I was in Iraq before the war in 1991, and in 2003 I found myself back on the ground. As I have said before, I will never forget driving into Mosul after the regime dissolved and the city collapsing into anarchy before our eyes. It was the first time as a journalist that I had kept a sub-machine gun close to me. There were bodies on the streets. There was chaos, and a really nasty, threatening environment. American jets were coming down low, fast and noisily to intimidate people. I went to a police station to find out where the American troops were in the city. Saddam Hussein lookalikes were standing around, and the police brigadier general told us where the Americans were. Just before we left he said, "When you find the Americans, can you please get them to come up here and give us our instructions?" I hope you will agree that it was pretty astounding that, as their regime was falling, they were taking instructions from the Americans. I found the American colonel, and when I had done my business with him I said, "By the way, the Iraqi police brigadier general up the hill wants his instructions." The American colonel said, "You can tell him to go **** himself." It was quite extraordinary We ignored other experts who could have helped us. Of all the people who knew anything about Iraq, who suggested it was a good idea to dismantle Ba’athists like those police officers from the various structures of government? Would any expert have thought that that was a good idea, if asked? I do not know of anyone, apart from General Tim Cross, who thought about our responsibility to the people of Basra after the invasion In Afghanistan, too, the experts were consistently ignored. I was there in 1984—for part of my gap year before I went to university—when the mujahedeen were fighting the Russians. No one listened to our officials who had run the training programme for the Afghan resistance. No one listened to the senior ex-mujahedeen commanders living in north London or in the suburbs of Kabul. No one heard the concerns being expressed by the expert contractors to our foreign intelligence services, who knew many of the Taliban leadership personally. No one spoke to the agronomists who had been working for decades in the Pashtun belt.