it's just gone 2:30am. now on bbc news, it is time for political thinking with nick robinson. hello, welcome to political thinking, the programme in which i have a conversation with, not an interrogation of, someone who shapes our political thinking. my guest is the chief of the defence staff, britain's top soldier, and the prime minister's top adviser, general sir nick carter. the cry has gone out to call in the army to help deliver fuel, to deal with the fact the nhs in some places is running out of ambulances. call in the army to help deliver the vaccines. we believe in the value of our armed forces, and yet all this comes at a time when there are real question marks about what has gone wrong over the past 20 years. wrong in iraq, wrong in afghanistan. welcome to political thinking. thank you very much. it's a great privilege. you only have a few weeks left after four decades in the army. do you approach the end of this time with trauma, with relief, with excitement? gosh, it's mixed emotions. as you say, i've been institutionalised from between 43 and 44 years, and it's going to be quite a wrench. but i think there are all sorts of opportunities. and i have to confess the last eight years have been relentless, and i'm actually looking forward to spending a bit more time with my wife and my family — and my golf. and the last eight weeks have been pretty relentless as well. we'll talk about the afghan withdrawal later on, but it has led to personal criticism of you and other leaders. at a personal level, is that a frustrating thing? yes, you are not necessarily in a position to answer back, and of course criticism is painful. but one has to realise you're communicating in modern media to multiple audiences and you can't please everybody. i think what you have to do is be true to yourself, to the advice you're giving, and then i think you can probably find a way through it. is it also the case that people who do my sort ofjob, people do politics, in this era, have very rarely had any service? i think that's very fair. i think particularly my generation which has served in the campaign since 9/11, we've lost a lot of people killed under our command, and that has a marked effect on you. i often say that not a day goes by when i don't think of the people who died under my command and wonder whether my plan could have been a better plan. so i think responsibility that comes with the job that i do is something a lot of opinion formers don't understand. i want to reflect on the times you've had. let's begin with how on earth you ended up where you are. was it always going to be the army for nick carter? definitely not, no. it wasn't until i ploughed oxbridge, and my father was clear that red—brieck universities weren't on his sheet... oh, really? "why would i send you to winchester rather than oxford?" on the basis of that, it was, i suggest you go in the army and then maybe a professional qualification. you were born in kenya, where he was serving. he did half his life in the army, and then he worked in the city. he thought the army was a good career. i think he was surprised that i stayed and profited from it, but he thought it was a good thing to do for three years. it almost went horribly wrong when you were kicked out of winchester college cadets. i wasn't terribly successful, i was drawn to the golf course. i got caught out, so i reverted to private soldier. because you went to play golf? absent without leave, they weren't impressed. the theory was that you would join the army, leave and do what? i think my father thought accountancy. i wasn't terribly successful, i was drawn to the golf course. i got caught out, so i reverted to private soldier. because you went to play golf? absent without leave, they weren't impressed. the theory was that you would join the army, leave and do what? i think my father thought accountancy. and he had a good mate, and the answer was i was going to work for smith and williamson. three years in, i was enjoying it, i wrote to him and said i'm going to stay. what kept you in? people, first and foremost. responsibility, interesting places and tasks, northern irelans, un tours in cyprus, and the opportunity to do more things like that. you look back to those of you who served in the troubles. huge responsibility at a young age. was that a traumatic thing to live through? yes and no. i mean, i don't... i only did six months at sandhurst — mowadays, they do a year. in those days, i was commanding my platoon in northern ireland two weeks after sandhurst. i was just 18 years old, and i remember arriving in londonderry, having driven from the overnight ferry in belfast, got it wrong, drove my way up the falls road, miraculously found my way. not the ideal place for a soldier to be found. no, all my kit piled up in my mini. we were a bit naive in those days. i was just 18 years old, and i remember arriving in londonderry, having driven from the overnight ferry in belfast, got it wrong, drove my way up the falls road, miraculously found my way. not the ideal place for a soldier to be found. no, all my kit piled up in my mini. we were a bit naive in those days. but i remember arriving and being told to get my uniform on, and i'd be commanding my platoon. you knew you would have been the target of the ira. for sure, yes. we were going to an ambush on the road towards the pass, which was very notable, veterans will know very well. it was an extraordinary thing to do, and my company commander listened to the orders i gave. my platoon sergeant was very much there to make sure they were decent orders. but you were thrown in at the deep end, and it was one of those circumstances where you sink or swim. but i think the system around you wanted to to succeed. but you did succeed as what something people call of political soldier. you get drafted in to makie plans for politicians. when it comes to the gulf war in 1990, you were involved in the planning of that. i was working for the land deputy joint commander, mike wilkes, who had been a former sas officer. he was the first general officer officer to travel to saudi arabia to talk to general schwarzkopf abourt britain could do. storming norman? indeed, and he wasn't really quite a storming norman. we arrived in his offce at half past midnight, and it was very clear in the conversation, he looked at mike wilkes�*s arms and said "mike, i didn't want any...special forces, i've got plenty of those — i want tanks." i remember writing "tanks" in my notebook. in what became a series of mass mobilisations and major conflicts in which britain and america were fighting side by side, you must be aware that people look back at those — not the gulf war, but what some call the second gulf war in iraq, syria — they say they all failed. jeremy corbyn came to office partly because people said he was right about that, wasn't he? i think failure is a powerful term, and it's interesting to reflect on whether we failed to win battles, probably didn't succeed in many wars, we probably didn't fail to win the battles. and i also think, in the case of afghanistan, it's too early to say whether it was a failure. but i would observe that 60% of afghans have been born since 2001 and they will want a very different afghanistan. we'll come onto the detail of the afghan withdrawal in a second. i just wonder what, if any, conclusions you can draw from the fact that not one, but a whole series of military interventions have not succeeded. was it that we perhaps got overcocky? that the political class had seen success in kosovo, sierra leone, seen some success dealing with saddam hussein, and thought they could make the world a better place? i think if you look back, you'll recall that was the era was about benign interventions. tony blair had a view on how we could make the world a better place. but i think it's deeper than that, and a lot has been written about the interaction between senior military leadership and policy makers. and i think how that relationship works is pretty fundamental to the lessons that we learned from the campaigns of the first 20 years of this century. the military has a very important responsibility to make sure they receive the right political guidance, and policymakers have a very important responsibility to give the right political guidance. is there a difficulty that you're hinting at in the way the military talk? you are by definition can—do people. some people describe it as happy talk. "no, we can do this, it's going well!" because you're asking people to risk their lives. and politicians, particularly with no experience in the armed forces, can mistake that and think it's going to be fine, can't go wrong. there's definitely something about leadership and the importance of leadership, because if you ask people to do difficult things, and often things where they could lose their life, you're hardly likely to do it if you're not positive in your approach. but of course you have to be realistic and pragmatic. i'm fundamentally not political in my approach. behind closed doors, i'm very clear with policy makers about we can and cannot achieve. in public, i don't necessarily reveal my advice, because it's not my position. i'm going to try to be positive when it's appropriate to be. you said it's too early to know whether our withdrawal from afghanistan marks a moment of failure. why so? how could it ever be anything other than a failure, given that the people who are running it are the people we turhed out 20 years ago and they haven't changed very much? i think afghanistan has really only been governed inclusively... last time was probably the early 19705. what you now see is one gang coming in with a different view, and they are not going to succeed in the way they will govern, because they are governing in an exclusive way. i'm afraid we are likely to see some more blood—letting, and that is something that many of us predicted. and that blood—letting perhaps will lead, in a few more years, to a recognition that they've got to form, amongst afghans, a government that can govern all afghans. and i think because 60% of afghans have been born since 2001, they don't want to return to the middle ages, i think they perhaps will encourage their country to think of more inclusively about how it should be governed, and that's where i have hope. let's go back to some things that did seem to go wrong. did british politicians not pay enough attention to the fact that, in the united states, they'd made a really cross—party decision to get out and to get out quickly? no, i think the national security council understood all of that. knew that biden might set a very early date to get out? it looked as if people were taken by surprise. i don't think anybody was surprised by the decision of president biden. i'm on the record of saying it wasn't the decision we hoped for, but i think the die was cast in february of 2020, when president trump signed that deal. the deal with the taliban. the deal was extended, but the die was cast. so the people who argued that we could've just carried on as we were, that there were no casualties at the hands of the taliban, and therefore why didn't we just stick with the status quo, was that a delusion? i personally think so, because i think the taliban would have gone on the offensive against us. i think we'd have had to markedly reinforce our i personally think so, because i think the taliban would have gone on the offensive against us. i think we'd have had to markedly reinforce our presence on the ground. let's go back to your own service. yes, you are in charge as chief of the defence staff, but you served for many years before that. if you go way back to the invasion of iraq in 2003, you were not there, but you were doing a fascinating job in government. in 2002, i did my first tour in afghanistan and got very involved in nation building, if we could put it like that. i got a bit of a reputation for understanding how one might rebuild states after they had collapsed, so i was brought into a joint team in the foreign office about aftermath planning. 0urjob was to try and encourage the coalition, led by the americans, to think through to the finish and to think hard about what might happen once iraq was defeated militarily. it was a very interesting job. fascinating in particular because the one thing everything thought failed, failure to plan for the aftermath. indeed, and these were things that i think some of us had some questions to ask about. we know this was comprehensively covered by the inquiry... but you would say you did foresee? i think we were very worried about how this would work out. and all of that was revealed during the experience. later on, you are serving on the ground as a commander in basra. you will be familiar with this charge. i suspect it's one that frustrates you, but there's a joke and the american army, how many brits does it take to clear basra? none, they couldn't hold it except for the marines. i do remember that. that happened... it happened three or four years after i served there. the answer is i think the people involved at the time, they thought they came to an accommodation with the forces of the iraqi military on the ground, and they thought it would prevail. it became a target of the insurgency and outside influences and that took the forces of the coalition as a whole to resolve it. in a sense, we see the exact mirror in helmand and heroic efforts made to. i think ithinki i think i first met you when i travelled there with david cameron and i walked around places where i would not dare walk around now but it collapsed and the americans came in again. i think if you look at afghanistan as a whole, kandahar was the centre of gravity. it's where the taliban emerged from in the �*90s. if you're going to adopt what became described as a population centric approach, you will need a lot of troops. i think people were not trying to do that and the mission began to change over time. by the time i was there in 2009, president 0bama signed up to the so—called surge and that's why so many troops arrived. 0urjob was a very different job to the one that people had at the beginning. there was never going to be a solution, was another view. we had to sue for peace. and there were people even as the surge was taking place, this is the moment to say to the taliban, we need to do a deal. when we met with david cameron, the day before, i gave an interview to the guardian newspaper. i had said that we should speak to the taliban in that interview. david cameron was not impressed with this. it was against policy, but also stole the headlines. you will also recall that we went back up to kabul, where we were given an audience with the president. he david cameron that he should promote this general because he said what they have been saying since 2002. you are never going to solve this problem unless you bring anybody into the tent. if you look at the mission, it was not a mission at the beginning. the bush administration did not do nation—building, it was about bear hunting. it was appropriate for them to work with these characters. warlords and those sort of people. bear hunting, looking for bin laden? and al-qaeda more generally. but it was very difficult to start nation—building when you needed to work from the ground up words. —— upwards. i think people can see the campaign evolved, but by then, we made a mistake. there has been a big debate about how our armed forces should be configured in the future. a big review came out, lots of talks of concepts we barely understand. the grey zone and fighting wars without actually fighting, the importance of cyber and so on. does what's happened in afghanistan make us think, hold on, before we abandon all that stuff about mass mobilisation, let's remember we still need an army? yes, and of course, some of the challenges we're having at the moment would explain why we need a force of national resilience. but the bottom line is that we've already learned a lot of lessons from the afghan campaign, and we know very well that if you are going to get involved in these sorts of environments again, you need to have the basic insight to have an effect. if you go in there without that, you are going to fail. we've already begun to get the army in particular to be reconfigured to be better able to be engaged with indigenous forces in areas that potentially have become failed states in order to help build the capacity of those local forces to take the problems on their selves. is it also a question of what public opinion will tolerate? you referred to your generations as the post—9/11 generation. is it possible that public opinion here and the us will say after afghanistan, after syria, no thank you, we don't want any more of that. not for a long long time. they may say that, but it depends on what sort of world they want to live in. we've never had a more interconnected world. if we are not prepared to compete, it might not be a world we want to live in. why so? we will end up in a world with totalitarian surveillance. we will end up in a world where the sorts of values the we despise will be imposed upon us with that technology. if we want to stand up for the life we have, we cannot put ourselves back. we have to become part of the global enterprise, and that's why we need to be involved. you mention another role that the army are playing in the moment, the force of national resilience. when the politicians ring you up and say, "can you help us with the vaccines" or now this week, "we need fuel delivered?" are you pleased or do you think, why don't you get your act together on your own? it's complicated. i often used to say that the armed forces have probably never been more popular emerging from the campaigns, but the popularity has been based upon sympathy and not empathy. so the opportunities to do the olympics or support the government or drive tankers in a fuel crisis, these are opportunities to show ourselves off and show the qualities and values that we stand for. the answer is, i'm clearly think this is a positive opportunity. it is what we do and that is why we want an uplift in funding in november last year. —— we got an uplift. but equally, we have to recognise our proper role, to deter who we're up against from fighting us. you have been in the room where it happens. you advised prime ministers cameron, may, johnson. what you make of the quality of the national leadership that we have, and whether we have people who really understand the world in the way you would want them to? i think i have found sitting around the council table that the system isn't bad. i think the people who sit around that table come from different perspectives. not least recognising the different departments that they front up to. i think they're very well advised and we still produce very good national security experts and professionals. i think our intelligence services are world—class. so the answer is i think providing politicians who are prepared to listen and apply the politics to the advice, i think we'll be fine. not the highest form of praise it sounds. you're doing what you have to do, make do with the people you're offered. at the end of the day, i serve the prime minister and we live in a democracy, and i wouldn't have it any other way. what's fascinating, you're preparing as if you were your own obituary. you are going to get some pretty bruising obituaries. not so much because of what you've done, but you've been around when people perceive the military force has failed. do you have moments late at night or elsewhere where you look in the mirror and think, is the basis of what of what you believe in wrong? have we just not been able to do what i spent my entire life and career hoping we could do? i think you have to look back at what our principal function is. we have avoided war throughout my lifetime, and i think that is what we are here to do. and i often say to chiefs of staff, we need to think really hard about how we prepare to fight the war, because that will prevent from that happening. that is our principal task. yes, when you get involved with the complexities of these very complicated campaigns like iraq and afghanistan and the other things we've seen, they are incredibly complicated, but the brutal reality is that i will look at myself in the mirror and believe i did the best i possibly could given the circumstances i lived through. i do hope when people think about this, they recognise that from the day i became the chief of defence staff, a week later, i was in front of prime minister may to make the case, and the fact that we achieved that of affect last year, it's something i shall look back on with pride. general sir nick carter, thank you very much forjoining in on political thinking. thanks. there is no doubt that politicians want a can—do attitude from those who run the armed forces. they come to believe they can offer something that mere mortals in the civil service or in private corporations can't actually offer. yet, general sir nick carter and others now find they're being criticised for not stressing enough what can't be done. that's it from this edition of political thinking. thank you for watching. hello. a chance of showers on monday before another spell of wet and windy weather hits overnight monday into tuesday. we start monday into tuesday. we start monday with heavy and possibly sundry showers across south—east england and anglia, clearing away for much of the day, the eastern side of the uk is dry with the odd hit and miss showers. showers to the west, sunny spells and highs around 13— 17 degrees, wheezy and light winds in scotland and northern ireland. rain pushes into south—west england and wales on monday evening, heavy and pushing across england overnight into tuesday with showers following along behind. a slow—moving band of wet weather will sit on tuesday close to parts of northern england, perhaps running into southern and eastern areas of scotland. 0ne southern and eastern areas of scotland. one is one to watch, something to plan for indie detail and around this area of high pressure, strong wind with a risk of gales and places. 0n a risk of gales and places. on tuesday could be north—west scotland could mist the rain from the weather system, saying largely dry was sunny spells. very warm welcome to bbc news. our top stories: the secret wealth of dozens of world leaders, from the king ofjordan to the president of russia, exposed in one of the biggest ever leaks of financial documents dubbed the pandora papers. bbc panorama in a year—long investigation involving more than 650 journalists has had access to 12 million documents, sparking allegations of corruption, money—laundering and global tax avoidance. the us says it's very concerned about the rising tensions between and taiwan, with chinese militaryjets flying into taiwan's air defence zone over the last three days. beaches i closed in southern california is a large oil spill washes ashore, leaving dead wildlife on the sand.

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