RT HON DES BROWNE MP, MR ANDREW MATHEWSON AND MR HUGH POWELL

8 JANUARY 2008

  Q215 Chairman: Secretary of State, welcome and a happy new year.

  Des Browne: Thank you and a happy new year to you, Chairman, and to members of the Committee.

  Q216  Chairman: Now, this is our final session in our inquiry into the future of NATO and European defence and the purpose of the inquiry has been to consider the role of NATO, to ask whether NATO has a long-term future, what its relationship with the European Security and Defence Policy should be and the relationship between NATO and the EU. We expect to produce our report at the beginning of March, so it will be in time for the Summit in Bucharest in April. We have lots of questions to ask you, so, to members of the Committee, I would ask you to ask brief, snappy questions and, Secretary of State, I would ask you to give brief, snappy answers please. Perhaps I could ask you then to introduce your team first.

  Des Browne: Well, thank you very much indeed, Chairman. If I may introduce those who are present with me at the table here, Andrew Mathewson is on my right, who is the Director of Policy for International Organisations in the MoD, and I am also supported by Hugh Powell, who is the Head of the Security Policy Department in the FCO, who is to my left.

  Q217  Chairman: The Bucharest Summit in April, what do you expect to come out of that and how will we be able to tell whether it has been a success?

  Des Browne: As far as we are concerned, success for the UK will involve the Alliance at Bucharest re-endorsing its collective commitment to Afghanistan, building, I believe, on the success that the Alliance has already achieved to date and agreeing a plan for the future. Bucharest will be successful too if it maintains momentum and capabilities in force-generation both for Afghanistan and more widely too if we recognise KFOR's role in managing the transition in Kosovo and look to develop further the partnerships NATO has with others, and we may come on to discuss some of those in detail. Finally, we hope that at Bucharest the Heads of State will invite to join the Alliance those Membership Action Plan countries who meet NATO's performance base and those that are able and willing to contribute to the Euro-Atlantic security. [1]

  Q218 Chairman: You started there with the commitment to Afghanistan. Last month in his statement, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to see an improvement in burden-sharing and that it would be on the agenda at the Summit. What decisions do you expect to see made about an improvement in burden-sharing at the Summit?

  Des Browne: Well, I think that burden-sharing ought to be the proper expression of the collective defence agreement of NATO. I think we have to accept in operations, such as the operation in Afghanistan, where we are talking about the deployment of forces by sovereign nations, that the ultimate decision over how, when and where their forces will be deployed will lie with those sovereign nations, and I think Afghanistan has shown that that is the case, and certainly I have learnt to recognise that politics exists in other countries as well as in the United Kingdom. Clearly what we are seeking to do is to continue along the route of encouraging a more equitable sharing of those burdens and the risks, which is a point that I stress at every meeting of NATO and every EU Defence Ministers meeting, but I think it is important not to discount the contributions and what has been achieved in that regard, the contributions made by other nations simply because they are not deployed alongside UK forces. I think there is a tendency for us to discount the contributions of other nations, and we have discussed this in the past in the context of Afghanistan, just because they are not deployed alongside other UK forces. I think it is unrealistic to expect every NATO member to be able to conduct every military task at the same tempo and certainly not with the tempo that we can generate in the United Kingdom. I am conscious that I am not precisely answering the question that you have asked and I would like to precisely answer it, but I think that, if we continue to make progress with regard to our burden-sharing, the Bucharest Summit will be a success, but I am not in a position, I think, to give you specific measures. [2]

  Q219 Chairman: Did you regard Riga as a success?

  Des Browne: Yes, I thought Riga was a success. I thought in a number of regards that Riga was a success. I think sometimes that, given the nature of this Alliance, the complexity of it and the fact that it moves by consensus, which effectively means unanimity, its achievements are sometimes diminished. I think we have, first of all, to bear in mind that ten years ago it would have been unthinkable for NATO to have collectively made the contribution that it has to Afghanistan and I thought that Riga was a success, in particular, in the commitment to the Comprehensive Report and I thought also the way in which the Alliance, in recognition of the global environment that we all operate in, the way in which countries recognise the importance of these relationships beyond the geographical area of NATO. [3]

2   See Ev 161 Back

3   See Ev 161 Back