General Tommy Franks, Commander in Chief of the US Central Command, visited London on 26 April for discussions with Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff, and his fellow Chiefs of Staff. Afterwards, General Franks, accompanied by CDS and Rear Admiral Quigley USN, gave a brief press conference at the Old War Office, Ministry of Defence.
Boyce: Welcome ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to have General Franks visiting us here in London. He has a schedule that is obviously incredibly tight, and huge reponsibilities. The reason I am particularly delighted to see him today is that we have a very long history in our armed forces of working very closely alongside our American friends. And this has been exemplified by what has been going on in the Afghanistan theatre over the last four or five months or so. And on the land and in the air and on the sea, everything that I have experienced in my forty years in the Navy and in the Armed Forces has been brought out there: we are working very closely together and we have had people also in General Frank's headquarters, and the various headquarters associated with this campaign, where again we have had the most effective liaison. We know each other anyway, we have seen each other from time to time, speak frequently, and so to have General Franks come here giving the opportunity to give some of my staff the opportunity to talk to him and get some of his views, has been enormously helpful today, but I guess there haven't been any great surprises because we do talk very regularly, we are in each other's minds, but its always good to come face to face. [Inaudible] General?
Franks: [Inaudible] I have had the chance this morning to be with Admiral Sir Michael Boyce. I was thinking as we came down the hall, I mentioned to him that it was a bit of a lesson for me, because I have on behalf of my country responsibility for only 25 nations, and he has responsibility for forces around the world. And I started thinking about the relationship that we have had since the Afghanistan operation started to be sure, but then I also thought about other occasions where we have met and had the chance to serve together in our Armed Forces over my time in the Service. So I am right now on the last day of about six or seven day visit through the region, came back through London in order to have the chance to meet with Sir Michael and his staff. It's been a very good session, very frank, free, open dialogue. I am honoured to be here and I appreciate Sir very much that you take the time to see me and with that we'll take the questions.
Q: Could I ask you, although there's no political decision, are you making contingency plans for any possible military action in Iraq?
Franks: I will tell you at this point that I don't think decisions have been made, certainly in my own country, about future operations in Iraq. What we have done is we have started to talk together, to think about where we are today with Saddam Hussein's regime and I think policy level discussions will continue both in Washington and in London, and we will wait to see what decisions may be made ats ome point in the future.
Q: On Afghanistan, General, it looks increasingly clear that many of the people that you want are probably located in Pakistan, rather than actually in Afghanistan itself. [Inaudible] Do you really see a reasonable chance of getting to grips with senior Al Qaida and Taliban figures who are widely reported to be based in that country?
Franks: I think without doubt that at some point in the future, the leadership of the terror networks with global reach, Al Qaida among them, will be brought to justice. I think, as I remind myself every day, that we have more than thirty nations represented at my headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, with liaison cells, and Pakistan is one of those nations, interestingly, that is represented there. I met with President Musharraf and a good many Pakistani officials very early in this operation, and I have met with him several times since. Their cooperation is terrific. I think what we recognise is the situation that President Musharraf sees himself inside his own country and what we are going to do is to continue to cooperate. I think we have not seen a suggestion of unilateral operations being conducted inside Pakistan by any nation member of our coalition. The secret for us is to continue to cooperate and surely the problems that we find in Pakistan will be rooted out.
Q: Is there any sense in which you are likely soon to reach a point of diminishing return in the operation in Afghanistan? There seems to be a very fine line between tribesmen who may or may not have supported the Taliban in the past, and just local people who don't like the intrusion of foreign military presence and more and more we get the sense of the sporadic nature of some of the military action levelled against the coalition forces. There does seem to be this local disgruntlement or criminal activities or whatever. Can you see any end point to the operation; the phase of the operation in Afghanistan?
Franks: I think what we see in Afghanistan is the character of Afghanistan as it has been for a great many years. We continue to operate with the Interim Administration in Afghanistan of Chairman Karzai. We are going to continue those operations through the Loya Jirga process and then with the transitional government. And so if you ask do we see fractious behaviour inside Afghanistan, the answer is of course we do. If you ask do we sense that we've reached a point of diminishing return, I don't think so at all. I think that the Afghan people remain very committed to get out from under the foot of these terrorist organisations that have in fact been running Afghanistan for quite a number of years. And that has not made the Afghan people all too happy. So we'll continue to see the difficulties that we have seen in the past in Afghanistan, and in fact I think it's been said that we would expect to have the remnants of Al Qaida, will try to regroup themselves, we would expect to see some difficulty in that country. But I think the vision for the future in terms of providing the people of Afghanistan an opportunity to run their own lives and to run their own country, is something that's desirable, and we'll continue to work for that.
Q: General Franks, if I could follow that question by asking you to describe the nature of the kind of encounter, the kind of fighting that's going on now; have these moved away from large-scale encounters, is air power less necessary now, are we seeing the kind of sporadic episode that's just been alluded to, sometimes in civilian areas?. Can you describe what is going on?
Franks: I will. I don't think I would predict what we may see in the future in terms of large groupings of enemy forces. I will say right now we do not see that. What we see are smaller groups, we see groups of enemy soldiers trying to blend in with communities if you will, we find ourselves dealing with community leaders all over Afghanistan every day. And the smaller contacts that we see are frequently brought about by the Afghans telling us, well yes there are foreigners here, and in fact providing us the intelligence information that we use to go after them. So that is the character of what we see right now, and I think we are not sure whether we will see additional Anaconda-like operations in the future. We certainly, along with the United Kingdom, maintain the capability to respond in that way if we need to in future.
Q: Do you see a specific role for the Royal Marines, or are they going to work in coodination with the Americans and the Canadians on the border. Is there something specifc you have in mind for them?
Franks: 45 Commando and what we call Task Force Jacana has in fact been engaged in, I think we might say, "Sweep and Clear" operations in south-eastern Afghanistan. I would not see a change to that in future. They are very much a part of the coalition force that we see on the ground in Afghanistan. What I wouldn't want to do is say where you may see them employed in the future, because I don't think you'd want to telegraph that sort of information to the terrorists. They have played a role in our operations there and I believe they will continue to play a role in the future.
Q: Uniquely perhaps, Britain has not just played a role in the military phase of the operation in Afghanistan; it has also been playing a leading part in the peacekeeping side of the operation as well. There's a lot of talk now in Washington about needing to help the reconstruction of Afghanistan; nation-building is rather more on the agenda than perhaps it has been before. Do you foresee the American military perhaps taking on some of the peacekeeping duties as well, or do you see American forces being restricted solely to warfighting tasks?
Franks: A good question. Difficult to say at this point. I think... we know what we have seen in the past, and I think... you mentioned the point, the International Security Assistance Force with the lead nation the UK, tremendously effective in setting a stable condition, a relatively stable condition, around Kabul. By the way, one of the other things that we don't see mentioned a great deal is the work that was done in the Bonn Conference that permitted the people of Afghanistan to identify an Interim Administration and I think that gave us a very powerful front end to some of the success that we've seen there. So if you take the Bonn Conference and you take the International Security Assistance Force, and then if you look at [inaudible] and you think about the Tokyo conference, you think about Geneva, you think about these international organisations, I guess what we will see is continued commitment by international organisations and by the international community to assisting the people of Afghanistan as they try to work their way forward. Now the specific military pieces of that, I'm not sure I know right now. I think what we are going to do with the Enduring Freedom task force is we are going to continue to work with our coalition partners to rout out and do away with these terrorist networks and pockets of small numbers that I described a minute ago. So I won't predict exactly who will be involved in assisting in Afghanistan, humanitarian assistance, rebuilding infrastructure, that sort of thing. But I will say I think the international community will remain committed to it for the future.
Rear Admiral Quigley: A couple more please?
Q: If there is a decision to mount an operation in Iraq, can America cope with what could be a large-scale operation as well as continue on a relatively large scale in Afghanistan?
Franks: I think that we, both from a US perspective and from a coalition perspective, we have the capability to do what our leadership, whether it's UK or whether it's in the United States of America, may ask us to do. Perhaps an indirect answer to your question, because I won't tie that to any particular piece of geography or any particular country. But I will say that I think the military capacities of our countries remain up to the tasks that we are likely to receive.
Q: Turning if I may to the lessons that can be drawn from the operations in Afghanistan so far, we've seen this extraordinarily high-tech American [inaudible]; more spending planned in the future; even more fascinating and extraordinary technologies coming on line. And yet it seems what you really need - perhaps to some extent what you lack - is, you know, very highly trained infantry soldiers, of whatever kind they may be, to literally scout around, piece by piece. Now clearly technology has a role, but has your faith in technology, in a sense, lessened any in the wake of the Afghan operation?
Franks: Actually, it has not. I think technology has been a great enabler for us over there. And with respect to the other part of your question, I know military people, whether it's in my own country or in a country of one of our coalition members, will think always, as we decide what a military operation will look like, we are going to consider several factors. One will be the mission that we are asked to perform; another will be the configuration and the size of the enemy force; another will be the terrain in which we are going to operate; another will be the time we have available to conduct the operation. And if we look back at the case in Afghanistan, what we see is that each of the operations, whether it's the operation in Mazar-e-Sharif, or Taloqan, or Kandahar, or in Operation Anaconda, we'll see different variables as they relate to what I've just described: mission, enemy, troops available, and so forth. And so each of those operations has been a bit different, because the variables have been a bit different. And so if we ask for overarching lessons learnt, I would say that we have found technologies that we believe do work very, very well for us. We have seen the most accurate guidance systems employment that I think we may have ever seen. We have seen the power of having the air-ground teams, the air and ground team working together, and we have seen what that produced. We have seen the efficacy of certain forms of organisation being used to accomplish certain missions, given the variables I have just described. I think we are right now in our infancy in appreciating the real enduring lessons from Afghanistan. Everything that a military force ever does in the future is not going to be Afghanistan. But what we do want to do, coming out of Afghanistan, is learn the lessons that give us insight into enduring principles that may reach forward into the future. Thanks very much.
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