Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles The OTS President, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (PS 68-73), with a career of more than 30 years in the British diplomatic service, spoke to current student Patrick Thompson (Sc5), about his views on international politics and advice about entering work in the Foreign Office. Sherard was also Principal Private Secretary to the UK Foreign Secretary and Head of the Foreign Office Hong Kong Department from 1994 until the handover to China in 1997. After leaving the Foreign Office, he worked for BAE Systems as international business development director. He left BAE Systems in 2013 and is now the Group Head of Government Affairs at HSBC Bank.
PATRICK THOMPSON (SC5) Q: What do you do as an international Ambassador? I was ambassador in three countries: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Essentially you do two things; first you represent the interests of your own country, specifically the government, but also the people, the business, and the culture of your country - to the foreign country in which you are operating. Second, in my view almost equally important, is within the British system, you represent the interests of and explain the country to which you are accredited, to British ministers, British officials, British parliamentarians, and British media. In each of the three countries where I was ambassador part of my job was to make sure the country was understood through the British system, and to people who have a high degree of ignorance and prejudice about it. In Afghanistan, my role was slightly different in that we had a rather serious war going on at the time, with tens of thousands of British troops taking part. Part of my job there was to try and encourage ministers (not so much the Foreign Secretary who understood) but other ministers, to see that this wasn’t just a military problem. The issues were part of a much wider political, economic, and social problem, which couldn’t be solved by pouring in
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more troops. In Israel, the interesting dimension there was dealing with the British Jewish community, making sure they understood that I was in Israel for them, as well as for Britain more generally. Q: Speaking of the conflict in Afghanistan, why do you think the Western coalition (if I can call it that) failed? Well, because we took on far too much without any real understanding of what it was, and because the United States is constitutionally ill-equipped to pursue this kind of venture. If you are going to stabilise a country in the state Afghanistan was in when we went in the year 2000, you need something called strategic patience. The American republic has a very short attention span, it’s very dysfunctional, it’s divided against itself, not only between parties, not only between the administration and the Congress, but within the administration. So when I was ambassador there, I saw what I had seen as a much younger diplomat in Washington, different parts of the administration fighting each other. The CIA Chief of Station in Afghanistan would go and see President Karzai without telling the American Ambassador. The American General in command, supposedly of all troops in
Afghanistan, would complain that the U.S. Marines would not take orders from him because they took orders only from the U.S. Navy. The National Security Council was at war with the Pentagon, the Pentagon was at war with the State Department, it was absolute chaos. America had a lot of money and a lot of troops and a lot of fire power, but no real strategic sense. We went along with it because the British Army wanted to please the Americans, particularly after our performance in Basra, Iraq. Also because the Army in particular wanted resources to prove itself against future expenditure cuts. I’m afraid it was all rather cynical and short term and not thought through, nothing approaching a comprehensive or realistic strategy. Q: China runs a relatively authoritarian system of government. Do you think that this type of system will eventually collapse, as happened with the Soviet Union and plenty of other authoritarian regimes throughout history. Chinese people have suffered terribly, a century and a half of being humiliated at the hands of the West and Japan. What they fear above all is chaos. They like order, they like discipline, they are very hard-working, and they like control by their elite who have been chosen on merit. When they
