Executive
Summary
718.
On 30 January,
elections for the Transitional National Assembly and
Provincial
Assemblies
took place across Iraq. Security arrangements involved 130,000
personnel
from the
Iraqi Security Forces, supported by 184,500 troops from the MNF‑I.
The JIC
assessed
that perhaps fewer than 10 percent of voters had turned out in the
Sunni
heartlands
and judged that “without Sunni engagement in the political process,
it will not
be possible
significantly to undermine the insurgency”.
719.
In April, the
JIC assessed that:
“A
significant Sunni insurgency will continue through 2005 and beyond,
but the
opportunities
for reducing it appear greater than we judged in early
February.”251
720.
In June 2004,
the UK had made a public commitment to deploy HQ ARRC
to
Afghanistan
in 2006, based on a recommendation from the Chiefs of Staff and
Mr Hoon,
and with
Mr Straw’s support. HQ ARRC was a NATO asset for which the UK
was the
lead nation
and provided 60 percent of its staff.
721.
It appears
that senior members of the Armed Forces reached the view,
throughout
2004 and
2005, that little more would be achieved in MND(SE) and that it
would
make more
sense to concentrate military effort on Afghanistan where it might
have
greater
effect.
722.
In February
2005, the UK announced that it would switch its existing military
effort
in
Afghanistan from the north to Helmand province in the
south.
723.
In
2002, A New
Chapter, an MOD
review of the 1998 Strategic
Defence Review
(SDR), had
reaffirmed that the UK’s Armed Forces would be unable to support
two
enduring
medium scale military operations at the same time:
“Since the
SDR we have assumed that we should plan to be able to undertake
either
a single
major operation (of a similar scale and duration to our
contribution to the
Gulf War in
1990‑91), or undertake a more extended overseas deployment on
a
lesser
scale (as in the mid‑1990s in Bosnia), while retaining the ability
to mount a
second
substantial deployment ... if this were made necessary by a second
crisis.
We would
not, however, expect both deployments to involve war‑fighting or
to
maintain
them simultaneously for longer than six months.”252
724.
As described
in Section 16.1, since 2002 the Armed Forces had been
consistently
operating
at or above the level of concurrency defined in the 1998 SDR, and
the
continuation
of Op TELIC had placed additional strain on military
personnel.
251
JIC
Assessment, 6 April 2005, ‘Iraq: The State of the
Insurgency’.
252
Ministry of
Defence, Strategic
Defence Review: A New Chapter, July
2002, page 14.
99