ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: We’ve got Lord Stirrup here, Former Chief of the Defence Staff, listening intently to Douglas Alexander and there are lots of questions about resourcing and what kind of counter insurgency operations may need to be carried out in this region, presumably for years to come. Lord Stirrup, on the issue of the operation that has been carried out by the Algerian forces, we hear from the Foreign Secretary that 22 Britons have now been flown home and reunited with their loved ones, what do you think as a military man about what we’ve heard about the way they’ve carried this out? They went in hard.

LORD STIRRUP: Well it’s a very sad story and of course one feels desperately for the families and loved ones of those who’ve been lost but I think we have to be clear that any hostage rescue operation is an extremely hazardous undertaking and you only launch such an operation when you’re clear that the risks involved are less than the risks of not undertaking that operation. When you have hostages taken by a group such as we saw in Algeria and when you have governments such as the British government and the Algerian government which does not negotiate, rightly in my view, with terrorists, then we have to understand that sadly those hostages were at enormous risk from the moment they were taken so I think the Prime Minister is quite right, we must lay the blame fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the hostage takers. With regard to the actual operation itself, of course there are questions that arise from that and that we should ask and for which we should seek the answers but I think we should wait for the answers because whenever hostages sadly are killed in such an operation there is always a tendency to describe it as a botched rescue operation. Well there may have been mistakes but there may not, we need to be clear that these are always very hazardous operations and when you launch them it’s always done in the clear knowledge that there’s a high risk that you will lose people in the rescuers and amongst those you are seeking to rescue. I’m afraid that’s always the case.

DM: Okay, what about the future, the points I was raising with Douglas Alexander there? We were looking at that clear threat, military conflict is already taking place, has already taken place in Mali, should we and could we get more deeply involved there with the French?

LORD STIRRUP: Well I think we have to be very careful how we tread in this particular area. First of all there’s a tendency to characterise this as some kind of global Jihadist campaign when in fact in many circumstances, in many of these areas, they are regional disputes that have been going on for years, if not decades. Now it’s clear that extremists take the opportunities that are presented by these circumstances to pursue their own ends but in Mali for example, it’s easy to say we’ll go in there and push back the terrorists but the schism between the north and the south of Mali, between the Tuaregs and others and those who are in the south and who form the government, are long standing and those sorts of conflicts have been going on for a long time without Islamic extremists being involved. It’s also the case that in many circumstances and in many areas, the Tuaregs themselves are resistant to the Islamic Jihadists so going in there without understanding these particular tensions and these conflicts and without some idea of how they are to be resolved would be a mistake. I think the second point is that we’re not the ones who are going to be able to resolve these. We can of course help but I think we must be careful also not to pin too much faith on the ECOWAS forces. They’re necessary, they’re a necessary ingredient but I really don’t think the West African military forces are going to solve the long running schism between north and south.

DM: Necessary as you are probably saying for political and diplomatic cover but what happens – and the French are saying they’re going forward with this, if they say two weeks, two months down the line, right, look, UK we need your help, we need your personnel, we need some of your kit. Given that we’re staying in Afghanistan for the next year and a bit, are we able to, would we be able operationally to help them out?

LORD STIRRUP: Well it depends what the request is for. Personally I don't think that a significant British involvement in Mali would be helpful. Certainly I think boots on the ground other than perhaps in some training capacity, some specialist advice capacity, is likely to do more harm than good. Do we have the resources? Well of course we are extremely stretched and it is the case that in the Strategic Defence Review we were not able to increase those particular areas of defence capability that all of us wanted to increase quite simply because of the resource constraints and these are much more in the specialist areas of intelligence and surveillance and so on. Those are areas where we might be able to help but we would need to think extremely carefully and again, as I say, given the complexity of the political situation and the economic situation in Mali and in these other countries, we need to tread extremely carefully, extremely cautiously.

DM: It’s interesting, isn’t it, with one eye I suppose on the second inauguration of President Obama this week, the United States in these conflicts, if you think back ten years under the Bush years, we had Afghanistan of course, we had Iraq but the Americans seem to be sitting back, don’t they? In Libya it was over to the Europeans, in Syria it’s non-intervention and in this, which presumably would have got George W. Bush’s ears pricking up and readying American forces, it seems to be at the moment we’re staying out.

LORD STIRRUP: It is at the moment. There are of course voices within the beltway in Washington who argue the opposite but at the moment that certainly seems to be the administration’s policy.

DM: But could you see them getting drawn in?

LORD STIRRUP: I think that they would take a similar view to the one that I suspect we will take which is to be very cautious because the situation is so complex and it’s not amenable to a purely military solution even by ECOWAS let alone by Western forces and I think that they too will want to look at this in a wider context. The issues are very much regional but they are in a great many regions and so you do have to take a broader, a more global view. For example, if you do something in Libya, you need to reflect on what the implications might be in other parts of that region.

DM: Indeed, I see what you’re driving at and we’ll be putting some of those points to the Foreign Secretary after eleven o’clock. Lord Stirrup, thank you very much indeed.