The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
“whether the
continued deployment of PRT personnel to … Basra … makes
operational
sense at
this time”.
417.
More widely,
the report stated that, because of the US Government’s difficulties
in
recruiting
civilians to serve in PRTs, a majority of positions were initially
filled by military
civil
affairs personnel. In September 2006, of 128 positions allocated to
civilians, 77 had
been
filled; of the 163 allocated to the military, just two were
vacant.
418.
The Inquiry
has seen no evidence that the SIGIR audit was seen or
considered
by UK
officials.
419.
In a review of
the first eight months of the Basra PRT commissioned by
the
PCRU and
produced in March 2007, Mr Etherington made a number
of
recommendations,
including:
“•
Key staff
should be held to a minimum of one year tours, with the
requisite
adjustments
for welfare and travel. The repeated
and cyclical loss of experience
in
south‑east Iraq [in] 2006 was damaging.
•
Where
integrated bodies such as the PRT are raised in future, they should
be
recruited
or sub‑contracted by a single authority and to a single
contractual
template, with
clear procedures established for grievance and
misconduct.
Ideally
such groups would train together … and move to theatre as a
formed
body. That
single authority would also be financially and
administratively
responsible
for the operating requirements of the group.” 288
420.
Mr Etherington
added:
“The lack
of clarity regarding ownership of the PRT caused substantial
administrative
difficulty,
for the PRT disposed of no assets of its own and no single
department
believed
itself responsible for it …
“Unlike
other PRTs in Iraq, the UK‑led team was assembled in large measure
from
existing
effort … While this conferred valuable operational momentum and
expertise
on a new
team it significantly complicated administration, because the team
had
to merge a
wide array of existing contracts, leave schemes, equipment,
security
procedures
and cultures while lacking any defined mandate to do
so.
“The
administrative world which the PRT was forced to inhabit was always
difficult,
and verged
in the early months on Kafka‑esque. An FCO car in the Iraq
support
team at
Kuwait airport would not pick up the inbound PCRU‑contracted PRT
office
manager –
or book her hotel – because she was ‘not an FCO
responsibility’.”
288
Paper
[unattributed], 26 March 2007, ‘The Establishment and Operation of
the Basra Provincial
Reconstruction
Team (PRT), April 2006 – January 2007: Lessons
Identified’.
316