Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan Patrick Bishop Afghanistan, 2008. After their eighteen-month epic tour of Helmand Province, the troops of 3 Para are back. This time, the weight of experience weighs heavily on their shoulders.In April 2006 the elite 3 Para Battle Group was despatched to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on a tour that has become a legend. All that summer the Paras were subjected to relentless Taliban attacks in one of the most gruelling campaigns fought by British troops in modern times.Two years later the Paras are back in the pounding heat of the Afghanistan front lines. The conflict has changed. The enemy has been forced to adopt new weaponry and tactics. But how much progress are we really making in the war against the insurgents? And is there an end in sight?In this searing account of 3 Para’s return, bestselling author Patrick Bishop combines gripping, first-person accounts of front line action with an unflinching look at the hard realities of our involvement in Afghanistan. Writing from a position of exclusive access alongside the Paras, he reveals the ‘ground truth’ of the mission our soldiers have been given. It’s a sombre picture. But shining out from it are stories of courage, comradeship and humour, as well as a gripping account of an epic humanitarian operation through Taliban-infested country to deliver a vitally needed turbine to the Kajaki Dam.Frank, action-packed and absorbing, “Ground Truth” is a timely and important book that will set the agenda for discussion of the Afghan conflict for years to come. GROUND TRUTH 3 Para: Return to Afghanistan PATRICK BISHOP To Douglas and Richenda Contents List of Illustrations (#u76d2de45-7ab0-5344-8b5e-b194e8c60f16) Maps (#u74fb49bb-1920-587e-a887-e99bf0f42e55) Introduction: A Big Ask (#u64b38552-2e86-5a38-8c7f-e2c18ad0542a) 1 Going Back (#u531d8c42-ebf9-53cf-a682-d9df2515ceeb) 2 Through the Looking Glass (#uf5d20307-c16a-58a5-89ea-f074dcb3187e) 3 KAF (#u9f5669f5-3060-58c3-9779-df725b940200) 4 Hearts and Minds (#u52e56d45-5231-5b93-ad86-a48b4f4d67dc) 5 Hunting the Hobbit (#u3a48b9df-95ba-50c6-9d46-3766654110a6) 6 Green Zone (#litres_trial_promo) 7 IED (#litres_trial_promo) 8 The Stadium (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Facing the Dragon (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Sangin Revisited (#litres_trial_promo) 11 The White Cliffs of Helmand (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Convoy (#litres_trial_promo) 13 The Enemy (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Close Quarters (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Fields of Fire (#litres_trial_promo) 16 ‘Something our Parents will Understand’ (#litres_trial_promo) 17 Homecoming (#litres_trial_promo) Abbreviations, Acronyms and Military Terms (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) The following account is based on interviews with the soldiers of 16 Air Assault Brigade. The author has made his best endeavour to report events accurately and truthfully and any insult or injury to any of the parties described or quoted herein or to their families is unintentional. The publishers will be happy to correct any inaccuracies in later editions. Some names have been changed or omitted to protect operational security. List of Illustrations (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith © Sergeant Anthony Boocock, 16 Air Assault Brigade photographer/Crown Copyright Major Stuart McDonald © Tina Hager Sangin schoolroom © Patrick Bishop A Para leads women to safety © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics ‘A’ Company patrols a poppy field © Captain Ian McLeish Paras patrolling in Hutal © Tina Hager Colour Sergeant Mark Kennedy with children in Qal-e-Gaz © Captain Ian McLeish ‘A’ Company at a Maywand Base © Marco di Lauro/Getty Images Paras navigating Maywand ditches © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics 6 Platoon, ‘B’ Company patrol outside Hutal © Tina Hager ‘Gungy Third’ aboard a Chinook to Inkerman © Patrick Bishop FOB Inkerman sangar sentry © Patrick Bishop Privates Ben Biddulph and Andy Shawcross at Inkerman © Patrick Bishop End of patrol at FOB Inkerman © Patrick Bishop Sergeant Major Stu Bell © Patrick Bishop Captain Ben Harrop © Patrick Bishop Paras tabbing along a Mizan route © Christopher Pledger Sergeant Chris Prosser at Inkerman © Patrick Bishop Paras run to board a Chinook © Christopher Pledger ‘A’ Company prepare to assault © Captain Ian McLeish Tabbing back to base in Zabul © Sergeant Ian Harding, 16 Air Assault Brigade Photographer/Crown Copyright ‘B’ Company patrol in Mizan © Christopher Pledger Corporal Marc Stott © Patrick Bishop Lieutenant Fraser Smith in Band-e-Timor © Patrick Bishop Arrival at Kadahar Stadium © Marco di Lauro/Getty Images Lance Corporal Andy Lanaghan with an ANA soldier Paras patrol Kandahar City © Sergeant Craig Allen, Parachute Regiment Photographer/Crown Copyright Bathing in the Sangin irrigation channel © Patrick Bishop Sangin civilian © Patrick Bishop Taking a breather in the Sangin Green Zone © Patrick Bishop Corporal Mike French © Patrick Bishop Corporal Bev Cornell © Corporal Bev Baljit Kaur Cornell Corporal Marianne Hay with her dog Deanna © Patrick Bishop HET tractor and trailer rig © Patrick Bishop Satellite image of Kajaki dam by kind permission of Regional Command South Major Stuart McDonald and Brigadier Huw Williams in Kajaki Sofia © Sergeant Anthony Boocock, 16 Air Assault Brigade photographer/Crown Copyright Kajaki District Leader Abdul Razzak announces the ceasefire is off© Patrick Bishop Major John Boyd © Patrick Bishop A 500-pound bomb at Kajaki Sofia © Patrick Bishop Corporal Stu Hale © Patrick Bishop Flying the 3 Para flag © Christopher Pledger Endpapers ‘A’ Company regroup after an air assault in Maywand © Jason P. Howe/ConflictPics While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgments in future editions. List of Maps (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) Introduction: A Big Ask (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) When 3 Para arrived back in Colchester in the autumn of 2008 after their second tour of Afghanistan in three years, their commanding officer, Huw Williams, pointed out the difference between his generation of soldiers and the very young men he was leading. ‘When I joined the army we thought we would have to go Northern Ireland and might possibly have to go somewhere else to fight,’ he said. ‘But these guys knew when they joined that they would be expected to go off, more or less straight away, to a full-on war.’ A British soldier’s job today is much more difficult and dangerous than it was in the last decades of the twentieth century. Then it was easily possible to go through an entire career without hearing a shot fired in anger. Now, a new recruit to a combat unit is virtually certain to see action. Thanks to Afghanistan, before long almost everyone will have a war story to tell. Since the British Army went there in force in 2006, about 40,000 servicemen and women have come and gone. That represents more than a third of the country’s ground troops. Some of them have now been twice. Force levels are rising steadily. There is no end in sight to the conflict and no obvious short cut that would allow an early but honourable exit. A spell in ‘Afghan’, as the soldiers call it, is becoming as routine as an Ulster roulement was thirty years ago. There are some similarities. The skills and drills honed on the terraced streets of Belfast and Londonderry and the fields of Fermanagh and Tyrone have proved surprisingly useful in the river valleys of Helmand. The differences, though, are far bigger. Ulster was grim, but Afghanistan is harrowing. The violence is deeper, darker and more disturbing. There were no suicide bombers in Northern Ireland. Life in Afghanistan’s front-line forts is harsh, squalid, exhausting and dangerous. Soldiers know that once they step through the gates they are facing six months of knackering patrols, regular fire-fights and the constant nerve-fraying fear that the next step they take may trigger a buried bomb. They are operating in an extreme climate in wild country among people whose culture, try as the soldiers might to understand it, remains baffling and opaque. There’s nothing in the recent memory of the British Army to draw on for help. You have to go back more than a hundred years to match the experience. Any soldier reading Winston Churchill’s account of his time with the Malakand Field Force fighting Pathan (Pashtun) tribesmen in the North West Frontier in 1897 would feel a buzz of recognition at his tales of Tommies and their native allies battling with heat, thirst, slippery local leaders and opponents steeped in a culture of violence. ‘The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has… been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour,’ he wrote. ‘That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.’ (#ulink_82e6466f-3736-54db-abd3-71e4ab8f70a2) The strain of a tour is enormous, reflected in the number of soldiers diagnosed with mental disorders. (#ulink_96778f4a-c44b-5d3b-bfd4-6c81f637134a) But the burden also lies heavy on the folk they leave behind. For those with families, Afghan duty means being absent from hearth and home not just for the six months of the deployment but also for lengthy pre-operational training exercises. By the end of 2010, some members of 3 Para will have done three Afghan stints in five years. It is, as the soldiers say, ‘a big ask’. It is not as if they are going to fight in a popular cause. British public opinion remains resolutely sceptical about the value of the campaign. Most people seem unwilling to accept the government’s assertion that by fighting in Afghanistan we are defending the home front against a threat as great as that posed by the Nazis. The scepticism shows no sign of eroding. Progress, military and political, is deemed to be non-existent or far too slow to merit the cost in blood, money and effort. At the same time, the public are full of admiration for the soldiers. The standing of the services in civilian eyes is probably higher than at any time since the Second World War. It is not difficult to see why. Their culture of stoicism and comradeship are points of light in a world of blighted materialism and egocentricity They remind us, perhaps, of the way we like to think we once were. The soldiers are pleased to be appreciated. But they, who pay the price of Britain’s policy, do not share the civilians’ pessimism. From what I have seen and heard, there is no significant reluctance to serve in Afghanistan and if necessary to do so again and again. ‘Are we prepared to do it?’ asked 3 Para’s former regimental sergeant major John Hardy. ‘Yes we are. Every time.’ The soldiers are driven back by a number of impulses. One is professional satisfaction. Almost every soldier in a volunteer army welcomes the prospect of action. Another is their sense of duty which has stood up well to the climate of self-interest prevalent in civilian life. But there is more to it than that. Soldiers have a refreshingly clear-cut sense of right and wrong. They sympathise with the Afghan people, caught between the cruelty of the insurgents and the venality of the authorities, and want to help them. The job is tough and dangerous and brimming with frustrations and disillusionment, but the prizes of safety at home and a better Afghanistan are considered, if they can be won, to be worth it. The soldiers’ enthusiasm, though, is finite. A military stalemate will eventually lower morale and degrade performance. If there are no signs that the Afghan government is serious about governing, that process will accelerate. The phrase ‘ground truth’ is a military expression, meaning how things are compared with how they are imagined to be. Soldiers know the ground truth better than anyone; yet, it seems to me, their voices have not been given the attention they deserve. They have some extraordinary tales to tell. This book reveals some of their stories as well as their thoughts, fears and anxieties about a conflict that, for good or for bad, is shaping both them and us. * (#ulink_29902772-68a9-58b3-8983-ff29345e161e) Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, Project Gutenberg, E-Book #9404. * (#ulink_d67bf342-e943-5f6c-92e0-9ffb4735e217) In 2007, according to the Ministry of Defence, 375 Armed Forces personnel who had previously served in Afghanistan were assessed as having a mental disorder. 1 Going Back (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) He had imagined this moment often during the last two years. Now, after an hour-long climb along a rocky, sun-baked ridge line, it had arrived. Corporal Stuart Hale shielded his eyes from the mid-morning glare and looked down at the corrugated hillside. The slope was the colour of khaki, bare apart from a scattering of rocks. It was just like a thousand others that undulated across Helmand. There was nothing to show that it was here that his life, and the lives of several of his comrades, had been swept so traumatically off course. His mates left him alone to enjoy the satisfaction of having made it up unaided. It was cool up here after the baking heat of the valley, quiet too, the silence disturbed only by the occasional boom of mortars in Kajaki camp and the rustling noise the bombs made as they flew past. Eventually he spoke. ‘I was up there when I spotted them,’ he said, pointing to a crag above. ‘They looked like Taliban, and they seemed to be setting up a checkpoint to stop people on the road down there.’ That morning, 6 September 2006, he had grabbed his rifle and bounded down the hill to get a better look. When he reached a dried-up stream bed he hopped across without thinking. ‘Normally I jump with a two-footed landing’ cause that’s how you’re supposed to do it. A good paratrooper lands feet and knees together. But this time I got a bit lazy and just jumped with one foot.’ The lapse was a stroke of luck. It meant that only his right foot was blown off when he landed on the mine. The detonation was the start of a long ordeal for him and the men who went to his rescue. Four more soldiers were injured and two lost limbs. Corporal Mark Wright was killed. Hale was rescued after hours of muddle and delay. Back in hospital in Britain he was plunged into a new trauma. Recovering from surgery, he suffered vivid paranoid hallucinations. He believed the doctors were plotting to kill him and that his girlfriend was so horrified by his injuries that she was frozen with fear on the other side of the ward door, unable to face him. Eventually the nightmares passed. Hale did everything the doctors and physiotherapists asked, determined to regain as much as he could of the fitness he had been so proud of. Now, two years later, he was standing on the peaks above Kajaki, a welcome breeze drying the sweat on his face, after climbing 300 metres up a goat track on one real leg and one artificial one. In the summer of 2006, Stuart Hale was a private soldier, serving as a sniper in Support Company of the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. 3 Para had formed the core of the battle-group tasked with bringing stability to the province of Helmand, which until then had been virtually ignored by the international force occupying Afghanistan. Helmand was a peripheral province, a pitifully backward corner of a very poor country. No one knew precisely what would happen when British troops got there. Certainly no one anticipated the storm of violence that blew up after the Paras’ arrival. From June onwards, all over the province, the soldiers were pitched into exhausting battles with bands of Taliban who fought with suicidal ferocity to drive them out. The British were soon stretched to snapping point. They found themselves stranded in remote outposts, dependent almost entirely on helicopters to get food and ammunition in and to take casualties out. At times it seemed they might be overrun. But, showing a bravery and determination that have hardened into legend, they clung on. Their courage was reflected in the medals that followed, a haul that included a VC, awarded to Corporal Bryan Budd, who died winning it. Another thirteen men from the battlegroup were killed. Forty more were seriously wounded. Now the Paras were back. Since they had bid a thankful farewell to Helmand in the autumn of 2006, three more British expeditionary forces had arrived, fought for six months, and gone home. In that time another fifty-four soldiers had been killed and scores more seriously wounded. The arrival of 16 Air Assault Brigade in the spring of 2008 put more troops than ever on the ground. They lived in fortresses planted near the main settlements and the rough roads that joined them together. They were squalid places, unsanitary, cramped and uncomfortable. But despite their gimcrack construction they looked as if they were going to be there for a long time. There was no end in sight to Britain’s Afghan adventure. Even the politicians who had launched the deployment into southern Afghanistan in a cloud of optimism admitted that. In the summer of 2006 the 3 Para Battlegroup had won virtually every encounter they had fought and killed many insurgents. No one knew an exact number but a figure of up to a thousand was mentioned. These were heavy losses for a small guerrilla force, living off the land and among the people. The beatings had forced them to change their tactics of reckless, head-on attacks. But they seemed as determined as ever to keep on fighting. As long as they did so there was little chance that progress would be made with the activity that the government said was the real point of the British deployment. The soldiers were there to make Helmand a better place, by building roads and schools and hospitals, but more importantly by creating an atmosphere free of fear within which Afghans could begin to take charge of their lives. Looking down from the ridge line towards Route 611, the potholed, rocky track that links the mud villages strung along the Sangin Valley, it seemed to Stuart Hale that morning that, if anything, things had gone backwards since he was last there. On the day he was wounded, he had decided to descend from the OP and engage the Taliban himself with his sniper rifle, rather than calling in a mortar strike on them. ‘I didn’t want there to be any risk of collateral damage because there were women shopping, kids playing,’ he said. ‘The place was really thriving.’ Now he looked down at the silent compounds, the empty road and the deserted fields. ‘No one wants to live here any more,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s a ghost town.’ The area is called Kajaki Olya. It lies a few kilometres from the Kajaki dam, a giant earthwork that holds back the Helmand river. British troops had been sent to Kajaki in June 2006 to help protect it from attacks by the Taliban. The insurgents saw it as an important prize. Its capture would be a propaganda triumph that would also give them control of the most important piece of infrastructure in the region. The chances of them succeeding were tiny. In the regular squalls of violence that swept Kajaki it was the civilians who suffered most. The number of innocents killed so far in this Afghan war is not known, but it is many more than the combined total of the combatant dead. Soon, living close to Kajaki became too dangerous, even for the farming families whose customary blithe fatalism always impresses Westerners. But now it seemed that life was about to get better, not only for the people around Kajaki but in towns and villages all over southern Afghanistan. We were waiting for the start of a big operation, the high point of the British Army’s 2008 summer deployment. If it succeeded it would give much-needed support to the claims of the foreign soldiers that they were in Afghanistan to build and not to destroy. 16 Air Assault Brigade was about to attempt to realise a project that had been under consideration for two years. It had been postponed several times on the grounds that it was too dangerous, and probably physically impossible. The plan was to deliver the components for a turbine which, when installed in the dam’s powerhouse, would light up Helmand and carry electricity down to Kandahar to turn the wheels of a hundred new projects. It involved carting the parts on a huge convoy across desert and mountain and through densely planted areas of the ‘Green Zone’ where the Taliban would be lying in wait. The Paras, together with a host of other British and Afghan soldiers, were now gathering in the last days of August, to protect the convoy as it reached Route 611 and the last and most dangerous phase of its epic journey. Now, as we toiled along the ridgeway that switchbacked up and down the three peaks dominating Kajaki, we could hear the sounds of fighting drifting up from the Green Zone. Our destination was Sparrowhawk West, on top of the most southerly crag. Stu Hale led the way in. The OP gave an eagle’s-eye view of the whole valley, from the desert to the east to the green strip of cultivation, watered by the canals that run off the Helmand river, across to the wall of mountains that rears up on the far bank. A team of watchers has sat there night and day, winter and summer, since the spring of 2006. The operation to clear the way had already begun. Down at the foot of the hill we could see sleeping bags spread out like giant chrysalises in a compound at the side of the 611, which 3 Para’s ‘A’ Company had taken over the night before. Through the oversized binoculars mounted in the sangars we watched a patrol moving southwards along the road. They were from 2 Para, which manned the Kajaki camp, pushing down towards a line of bunkers known as ‘Flagstaff and Vantage’—the Taliban’s first line of defence. A thin burst of fire drifted up from the valley. ‘That’s coming from Vantage,’ said one of the observers. It was answered immediately by the bass throb of a heavy machine gun, followed by a swishing noise, like the sound of waves lapping the seashore, as .50-cal bullets flowed through the air. 2 Para’s Patrols Platoon, lying up on the high ground overlooking the road to provide protection, were shooting back. The firing died away. For a while, peace returned to the valley. On the far side of the river there were people in the fields. The bright blue burkas of the women stood out from the grey-green foliage like patches of wild flowers. Then, noiselessly, there was an eruption of white smoke at the foot of the hill, followed by a flat bang. ‘Mortar,’ said someone, and the binoculars turned to the west. We strained our eyes towards a stretch of broken ground on the far side of the river, scattered with patches of dried-up crops and dotted with abandoned-looking compounds. Somewhere in the middle appeared a spurt of flame and a puff of smoke. This time the mortar appeared to be heading in our direction. We ducked into a dugout and it exploded harmlessly a couple of hundred metres away. The Taliban had given themselves away. The trajectory was picked up on a radar scanner and the firing point pinpointed, a compound just under a kilometre off. Then we heard a noise like a giant door slamming coming from the battery of 105mm guns on the far side of the Kajaki dam and the slither of the shells spinning above our heads. There was a brief silence followed by a flash and a deep, dull bang, and a pillar of white smoke stained with pulverised earth climbed out of the fields. The exhanges went on intermittently for the rest of the morning, settling into a sort of routine in which each hopeful prod by the Taliban rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and machine guns was met by a great retaliatory thump from the British mortars and artillery. The silence rolled in quickly to fill the spaces between the explosions. In the middle of the quiet, from high overhead, another sound drifted down, distant and familiar. Miles above, a faint white line was crawling eastwards across the cloudless sky. There were no high-flying bombers on station. The condensation trail came from an airliner, one of the dozens that pass to and fro every day and night, carrying tourists and business people from London and Paris and Rome to Delhi and Singapore and Sydney. It was noon now. The trolleys would be passing along the aisle while the cabin crew offered passengers the choice of beef or chicken. Perhaps, eight kilometres up, someone was looking out of the window at the pinprick flashes and scraps of smoke and wondering what was going on. Down below, in a medieval landscape of mud houses and dirt roads, the violence was petering out. For ten minutes there was no shooting from the Taliban. 3 Para’s Regimental Sergeant Major Morgan ‘Moggy’ Bridge had decided it was a good time to head back down the mountain. Stu Hale took the lead, bounding over the first boulders. The distant drone of the airliner faded away. The only sound was our breathing. It seemed to be all over. Then, after 100 metres, we heard behind us the throb of the Sparrow Hawk .50-cal machine gun opening up and the sound of violence rolled once more over the harsh and beautiful landscape. 2 Through the Looking Glass (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) On the morning of Monday 3 March 2008, a cold, blustery day on which spring seemed far away, the headquarters party of the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment arrived at Brize Norton airbase to await the RAF flight that would take them to Kandahar and a new Afghan adventure. The departure lounge was crowded with men and women from all branches of the British services. They sat hunched in what little pockets of privacy they could find, making a last call on their mobiles or stretched out on the carpet catching up on sleep. Brize was where they passed through the looking glass. On one side lay the muddy pastures and bare trees of Oxfordshire. On the other, the mountains, deserts and poppy fields of Helmand. The physical journey was nothing compared to the psychological distance they were about to travel. Here there was security and comfort. Beyond lay a realm of fear, danger and hardship. Many of the Paras who flew out during the following days had taken part in the great events of the summer of 2006. In the eighteen months they had been away, though, much had changed. The 3 Para Battlegroup had written the opening chapter of Britain’s latest Afghan war. But the plot had moved on and the shape of the action had altered. The battalion looked different too. The Paras had a new colonel and a changed cast of characters. Four out of ten of the veterans of the last tour had left, having quit the army or transferred to other units. They also had a new role that would require skills other than the sheer fighting ability that had sustained them last time. The battalion was now led by Huw Williams, a lean, relaxed Welshman. He inherited a unit that was still preoccupied with its recent history. The 2006 tour had already entered military folklore, and if some of the prominent original players had departed, their ghosts still lingered on. Williams had taken over from Stuart Tootal, a complex figure who had sublimated himself in the drama of the campaign, reacting emotionally to its triumphs, crises and setbacks and taking each death and injury as a personal tragedy. His demanding personality had made him a few enemies among his senior officers. There were many more, though, who admired and respected him. Tootal’s two-year command period ended in November 2007. Early in 2008 he announced he was leaving the army. The news came as a surprise. His bosses thought highly of him and he was assumed to be on a rising path that could take him to the upper reaches of of the army. Tootal was close to several influential journalists. He used his departure to publicise what he said were serious failings in the way the government equipped the men they sent to war and the shameful treatment the wounded received when they returned home. Out of uniform he continued to speak out as a part-time media commentator, which he combined with a top job at Barclays Bank. To some, his decision to leave was easy to understand. Nothing could ever match the prestige of commanding an elite unit like 3 Para on the most intense operation it had faced since the Falk-lands War. Tootal told friends that if he had continued his army career, subsequent postings were unlikely to come close to matching the excitement and satisfaction he found in Helmand, no matter how far up the ladder he climbed. Tootal was still commanding 3 Para when it was announced that the battalion would be returning to Afghanistan in the spring of 2008 for Operation Herrick 8. The Paras would be playing a multiple role. Their main function was to act as the rapid reaction force for the NATO commander of southern Afghanistan, going wherever he thought they were needed. But they were also expected to work with 16 Air Assault Brigade, their parent formation, which was deploying at the same time in Helmand. During early planning meetings for Herrick 8, the brigade got used to the battalion harking back to the experiences in Herrick 4. ‘There was a feeling in 16 Brigade that…3 Para were a backward-looking organisation who only wanted to talk about Herrick 4 and didn’t want to look forward,’ said an officer. ‘Everything [the Brigade] tried to do or talk about was greeted with “well, on Herrick 4 it was like this” and “of course, you don’t understand what it’s like”. The battalion wasn’t overly popular and there was a feeling that they were pulling in a different direction.’ Huw Williams knew as much as anyone about Herrick 4. He had been 3 Para’s second-in-command during the tour, carrying the unglamorous responsibility of keeping the battalion machine running while the colonel got on with the exhausting but exhilarating job of command. But he felt it was time to let the experience go. He was determined that the shadows cast by the legends of 2006 would not obscure the new tasks and changed circumstances facing him and his men. After taking over in November 2007 he told his men that Herrick 4 belonged to the glorious past. Everyone was to look ahead and prepare for a different situation and different role. The British Army had gone to Helmand in 2006 with only the sketchiest plan, which had been erased by the first contact with reality. They had been sent to a place which most soldiers regarded as being of only peripheral strategic importance. Once there, they were soon stuck with it, enmeshed in a process whose direction they were unable to control. 3 Para Battlegroup was supposed to create a climate of stability in a small area around Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in which development and reconstruction work could begin. Instead they found themselves riding to the rescue of the Afghan government whose thinly spread forces were under attack from the Taliban. Their area of operations expanded out of the original triangle bounded by Lashkar Gah, the town of Gereshk and the Camp Bastion logistics base to the northern settlements of Sangin, Musa Qaleh and Now Zad. In the process they became the main targets of the Taliban and sank into an intense attritional slog that lasted throughout the summer. The conflict was later presented officially as the ‘break in battle’, the fighting that has to be done to establish a force in-theatre. But the term was a post facto justification and no such exercise had been envisaged when the soldiers set out. The break in battle decided nothing. The Paras, in the judgement of one of their senior officers, were intent on ‘just surviving’. It was exhaustion which eventually brought the fighting to a close, and the welcome onset of winter. When spring came the Taliban re-emerged to face a new British force. The Paras had been succeeded by 3 Commando Brigade. They were relieved in turn six months later by 12 Mechanised Brigade. Then in October 2007 their place was taken by 52 Infantry Brigade. By the spring of 2008 there was an established pattern to the annual fighting cycle. The Taliban remained relatively inactive during the winter. The conditions were against them. Life in the open was harsh and miserable. The fields in the fertile valley floors were bare and provided no cover from which to launch attacks. They used the time to stay in their home villages and rest, or travel to their hinterland across the border in Pakistan to recruit and resupply and confer with their high command sitting safely in the border town of Quetta. By late spring they were busy again, not fighting but farming. The most important task was to harvest the poppies that dance in the breeze in the opium fields covering southern Helmand. The milky sap that oozed from the bulbs was the main source of wealth in the local economy. It was the fuel that powered the insurgency. Some of the fighters grew poppies themselves. The others earned the approval of the peasants by working alongside them in the fields. Once the crop was gathered in, the Taliban took their cut of the profits, using the revenue to pay wages and buy weapons. Then, rested and invigorated, their armouries and ranks replenished, they were ready to begin another summer of fighting. The Taliban were slow learners. It had taken them two fighting seasons to refine their tactics. They had started out in the summer of 2006 trying to drive out the British by weight of numbers, throwing themselves against the bases at Sangin, Now Zad and Musa Qaleh in frontal attacks that lost them many men but failed to dislodge the defenders. They seemed able to suffer remarkably high casualties without losing their will to keep fighting. The weight of the losses that they suffered in 2006, though, was unsupportable. Gradually the Taliban developed new approaches which reduced their own casualties while increasing the damage they could inflict on their enemies. By the start of Herrick 8 both sides were engaged in what looked like a classic ‘asymmetric’ conflict. Wars with insurgents were always unbalanced. One side had modern conventional weapons. The other fought with what was cheap, portable and easily improvised. But in Afghanistan the scale of asymmetry at times seemed blackly absurd. Supported by the Americans, the British had an ever more sophisticated armoury of jets and helicopters, missiles and artillery, operated by men but controlled by computers. The Taliban’s basic weapon was an AK-47 rifle of Second World War design, augmented by machine guns, RPGs and latterly home-made roadside bombs. The Allies’ satellites and spy planes and unmanned drones roamed the skies like hawks, sensitive to the slightest scurrying creature on the ground. The insurgents relied on their own eyes or those of their spies, the teenaged ‘dickers’ who appeared on rooftops or loitered at roadsides as soon as the soldiers arrived. The NATO soldiers were encased like armadillos in body armour and stomped across the fields and ditches in boots, laden with half their own body weight in kit. The Taliban wore cotton shifts and sandals. But the Allies’ lavish assets were failing to alter the direction of the war. The Taliban showed no sign of losing heart. The level of attacks had been mounting steadily since 2006 and their methods were growing more skilful and effective. The main change on the battlefield when the Paras arrived in 2008 was the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), home-made bombs, packed with powder from old shells or chemical fertiliser and set off by simple electric triggers. They also had to deal with the increased threat from suicide bombers. Anti-American rebels had made great use of IEDs and suicide bombs in Iraq but they had been late arriving in Afghanistan. Together, they now kept the troops in a constant state of alertness and anxiety. The insurgents’ new methods carried less risk to themselves than did their previous confrontational tactics. Even when they suffered losses, though, there seemed to be no shortage of replacements. Since the first deployment there had been a progressive lowering of expectations about what the British could achieve on the military front in Helmand. One of the articles of faith of the counter-insurgency catechism was that you could not defeat an uprising by military means alone. Twentieth-century armies had shown themselves to be remarkably inefficient when it came to dealing with insurgencies. Guerrilla forces had defeated the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam and, most recently, the Russians in Afghanistan. Victories, when they were achieved, took a long time, far longer than victories in conventional wars. In the British experience, the struggle to defeat the communist rebels in Malaya lasted from 1948 to 1960. The campaign against the Mau Mau rebels who rose against British rule in Kenya in 1952 took eight years to suppress. The British Army’s active involvement in Northern Ireland stretched for thirty-eight years. As became clear in the spring of 2009, the embers of rebellion still glowed. Nonetheless, the high casualties that the Allies were inflicting on the Taliban encouraged initial hopes that, in a relatively short time, the insurgents might be worn down to the point where they were ready to give up or start negotiating. Brigadier Ed Butler, the senior British officer in Helmand during the Paras’ 2006 tour, declared as they left for home in mid-October that ‘the Taliban [are] on the back foot and we are in the ascendancy’. He claimed the insurgents were ‘having trouble with their resupply lines, getting resources and ammunition through’ and that ‘the morale of the foot soldier has lowered’. He was speaking after the fighting in Musa Qaleh had been halted by a deal brokered by the tribal elders of the town. They promised to raise a local militia to police the area if the Taliban and British withdrew. The ceasefire that followed lasted until early February 2007, when the Taliban took over the town following the killing of one of their leaders in an American airstrike. They murdered the elder who inspired the plan and terrorised the inhabitants. It was not until December that the Alliance retook the town. The Alliance commanders tended to be cautious in their military assessments, avoiding talk of ‘winning’ and ‘victory’. Instead they emphasised the holistic nature of the operation. The fighting was unfortunate. But it was necessary to establish the climate of security that would allow southern Afghanistan to be healed, physically and morally. Throughout the summer of 2007, 12 Mechanised Brigade maintained pressure on the Taliban, mounting vigorous sweeps through the Sangin Valley and driving them out of Sangin town. Whenever they encountered the insurgents they defeated them. But, as their commander, Brigadier John Lorimer, acknowledged, this, on its own, achieved little. ‘When we close with the Taliban we beat them,’ he said. ‘But the critical part is what happens after that…we need to make sure that we can clear the Taliban from those areas so that the government can extend its influence and authority to help the local people.’ His successor, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, who led 52 Infantry Brigade into Helmand in October 2007, shared Lorimer’s analysis. He said as he took over, ‘we are concentrating our efforts towards a balance between offensive operations we know are required to counter the Taliban…against those operations we know will make a difference in the medium to long term, such as the reconstruction and development, bringing on the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police’. He concluded: ‘What I’d like to be able to do is a lot more of the latter than the former.’ But that was not how things worked out. Measured by the volume of shooting, the level of violence in Helmand showed a steady upward curve in the eighteen months after the British arrived in 2006. In the course of the ‘break in battle’, the 3 Para Battlegroup fired 470,000 rifle and machine-gun bullets. In Herrick 5, a roulement that covered the supposedly quiet winter months, the number more than doubled to 1.225 million. In Herrick 6 it doubled again to 2.485 million. In Herrick 7, despite Brigadier Mackay’s intentions, it dipped only slightly to 2.209 million. These figures are only for bullets fired by rifles and medium and heavy machine guns on the ground. They do not include tens of thousands of 105mm and 88mm rounds fired by the artillery and mortars, and the thousands of cannon shells, rockets and bombs showered down by the British and NATO helicopters and jets. There was little to show for all the spent ammunition. Following the ousting of the Taliban from Musa Qaleh and Sangin, some but not all refugees from the fighting returned home. The bazaars stirred back into life and farmers resumed their weekly trek to the markets to sell their crops, sheep and goats. This was progress, but only if the situation was being compared with the dark days of the summer of 2006. No one would claim that the civilians’ existence was better now than it had been before the British arrived. The high hopes at the start of the mission had encouraged visions of grand construction projects that would help pluck Helmandis from medieval squalor and ease them into the twenty-first century. By the spring of 2008 there were few improvements to report. The task of supervising the rebuilding programme lay with the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, drawn from the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Ministry of Defence. The dangers of life in Helmand had severely restricted their activities. Their work was limited to funding and managing at arm’s length small schemes such as refurbishing schools, cleaning the streets and improving small stretches of road. Like the military, the civilian players in Helmand had learned to dampen optimism about what their presence could achieve. They discouraged attempts to measure progress in terms of new hospitals, schools and colleges. They downplayed their own role in the great enterprise. They were there to aid a metamorphosis called ‘Afghanisation’, a transformation by which the government and people of the country turned away from factionalism and alienation and took charge of their own affairs. The soldier leading 16 Air Assault Brigade to Helmand was finely attuned to the realities he was facing. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith impressed almost everyone who came across him. He was short and slight with blue eyes, fair hair and light skin. Despite a traditional upper-class military background he was a very modern British warrior. He was educated at Eton and Durham University and was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1986. He spent the following years alternating sharp-end soldiering in dangerous places with high-powered staff appointments. Much of his active service had been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. When appointed to lead 16 Air Assault Brigade he was forty-two, the youngest one-star general in the British Army, and he was being given charge of its newest and largest brigade. Carleton-Smith was charming and intelligent. He had a winning ability to translate his thoughts into pithy, inspirational language. In the pre-deployment preparations he devoted time to going around his units, explaining what he thought they should be doing and how they were going to do it. He talked to everyone, from majors down to privates fresh out of the depot. ‘He made a real point of articulating what he saw as the strategic direction,’ said Huw Williams. ‘He talked to all of us, the soldiers as well. Where we were going, not just in Herrick 8 but where we were on the path and where that path ultimately led. We didn’t have any of that last time. Then it was really a case of “well, let’s go out and see what happens.”’ Carleton-Smith started his talks by stating that violence was not a measure of success. ‘He said that we actually wanted to be coming back saying we hadn’t fired that many bullets or had that many contacts and we didn’t kill that many people,’ Huw Williams remembered. ‘His line very much was that we were not going out to fight at every opportunity and should consider sometimes withdrawing from a battle which we could win but which would have no strategic effect. We hadn’t got that sort of direction before.’ Among those sitting in the planning meetings was Major Ben Howell, of 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, who would be commanding the batteries providing fire support to the Paras. Howell was clever, well read and had a sceptical and enquiring mind. He thought he recognised the source of some of Carleton-Smith’s ideas. ‘He talked in Rupert Smith terms,’ he said, a reference to a recently retired and famously intellectual senior officer who had produced a mammoth study of modern warfare entitled The Utility of Force. ‘The people were the prize, the battleground was not the fields of the Green Zone. It was actually the minds of the Afghans. So that’s where we should be focusing our attention, and that pouring blood and treasure down the Helmand river really wasn’t the way forward.’ In his first statement after taking over Carleton-Smith made barely any mention of fighting. The task was, he said, ‘continuing to improve the sense of security for the people—not just physical security but their human security in the round. It’s all about effective governance, rule of law and the provision of the basic necessities of life.’ If he made no mention of war, it was because in his mind the army was not engaged in one. ‘What I wanted to avoid was this sense of 2006,’ he said later. The intensity of the fighting in Helmand, he felt, had caused people to lose sight of the nature of the campaign they were there to prosecute. There was an inevitable tendency among the soldiers to reason that ‘if it looked and smelt and sounded like war fighting, then for God’s sake, we must be fighting a war’. In his view, however, ‘we’re not fighting a war. We’re supporting a democratically elected government to prosecute a counter-insurgency campaign, the nature [of which] is much more political than it is military.’ From this perspective, the ‘core of the matter was not the Taliban’. It was ‘the Afghan people and what they thought was happening’. The prize was ‘the human security of the people. The Taliban were to be marginalised and isolated, not made the absolute focus of the operation.’ Carleton-Smith had more resources than any of his predecessors with which to carry out his plans. There had been about 3600 soldiers in the 3 Para Battlegroup. 16 Air Assault Brigade, with all its attachments and additions, numbered around 8,000. Nonetheless, this was still nowhere near enough to exert control over more than a fraction of Helmand. He decided to ‘recognise the relative limits of our resources on the locals, and [that] there was no point getting ahead of ourselves’. Rather than extend their area of operations beyond what they were able to hold, the intention was to ‘try and deepen the government’s control and influence and authority in those areas where we actually have the capacity to bloody well hold the ring, and not find ourselves stretched further’. The British were now effectively fixed in four places, Lashkar Gah, Sangin, Musa Qaleh and Kajaki, with a presence in the outposts of Now Zad in the north and Garmsir in the south. Carleton-Smith had no intention of expanding out of these places or trying to join them up. To do so would simply mean displacing the Taliban to another location and spreading their contagion to a previously benign area. The intention was to deepen the mission in Helmand, not to broaden it. Carleton-Smith also had a civilian plan to work to which laid out in fairly concrete terms what the British presence was hoping to achieve in Helmand. The overall framework for the UK’s efforts was set out in the ‘Helmand Roadmap’, which pledged support to programmes in seven ‘core’ fields: politics and reconciliation, governance, security, rule of law, economic development, counter-narcotics and strategic communications. The plan began with the idea that attention should focus on the few areas where there was some fragmentary infrastructure and the ghost of governance and laid down some milestones to mark progress over a two-year period. In that time, it was hoped, Lashkar Gah would develop into a centre of sound government and administration. Gereshk, 80 kilometres to the east, would be promoted as a financial centre. The focus would then switch northwards to Sangin and Musa Qaleh. If possible a fifth centre would be developed, either at Kajaki or Garmsir in the south. None of this thinking was new. The 3 Para Battlegroup had arrived in Helmand in 2006 with much the same ideas. But now these had solidified into a design for action. Coordinating the activities of the army, the Foreign Office and the DfID was to turn out to be complicated, however. Huw Williams reinforced Carleton-Smith’s message as he prepared his men psychologically for the new deployment. He found that most of them were receptive to the constructive mood abroad in the brigade. The response may have surprised some observers of the regiment. The Paras’ reputation is based on their fighting prowess. It was won during the Second World War in Normandy and Arnhem, then reinforced at Suez and in the Falk-lands. The Paras genuinely believed themselves to be the best soldiers in the British Army, by which they meant the best in the world. Their exploits in Helmand appeared to justify that claim. About four hundred of the six hundred men in the battalion had been in Afghanistan in 2006. The new members had arrived from other units or were raw young Toms’ straight out of training. Many of these eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds had been inspired to join up by what they had heard about the last operation and were, in their commander’s words, ‘keen to prove they were the same as the guys last time, that they matched their stature’. But among the older men and the young veterans of 2006 the attitude was more considered. They knew the reality of combat. Many of them had relished the chance to test their skill and courage. But the thrill of fighting had faded. It was something you endured rather than enjoyed. Jamie Loden had taken over command of ‘A’ Company during the defence of Sangin in June 2006, one of the most intense passages of fighting of the tour. Now he was taking the company back again, supported by another veteran, Sergeant Major Steve Tidmarsh. Their attitude, according to Loden, was that although they were ‘more than happy to deal with whatever we came across, at the same time we weren’t going to go out of our way looking for trouble’. It was shared by the ‘corporals and lance corporals and senior private soldiers who had been there before, who were very content with doing their job. They knew what they had to do, they had the right resources and equipment to do it, but equally there was an element of be careful what you wish for.’ The mixture of cautious veterans and newcomers determined to get their share of action, in Loden’s opinion, made for ‘a very balanced company group’. Those who had served in the 2006 tour were pleased that this one would be different. It was not only because they did not relish the thought of another six months spent in static positions slogging it out with the Taliban. The Paras are more thoughtful than their public image, and the picture painted of them by their army rivals, might suggest. At every level of the unit there were those who felt that the concept of excellence embraced more than just fighting prowess. It meant demonstrating the ability to carry out the non-kinetic, ‘influence’ operations aimed at persuading local people of the soldiers’ good intentions that were vital for the ultimate success of the campaign. ‘I’m sure’, said Huw Williams, ‘that there were some people who thought, “Oh, 3 Para. They’re just going out there to see how many bullets they can fire. It’s all going to be kinetic.” But a lot of us wanted to prove we could do all sides of it…We were very keen to show we could do “influence,” we could do reconstruction, stabilisation, anything we were asked to do. We could bring security without wielding the big stick.’ Even so, it was clear to everyone that ‘at some stage during the six months we would still have to show that we carried the big stick’. The Paras were setting off to war in a domestic political climate that was much altered from the one that existed at the start of 2006. Then, Iraq was the dominant issue in British foreign policy. Few Britons knew much about events in Afghanistan. Two years of conflict had changed that. Afghanistan replaced Iraq as a staple of the news bulletins and almost all the stories emerging from there were depressing. A perception was growing that going to Afghanistan was a bigger mistake than going to Iraq. The government’s faith in the mission, though, remained, outwardly at least, unshaken. Ministers continued to claim progress was being made and was worth the cost in effort, expenditure and lives. On the death of the 100th British soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002, they reached for old-fashioned words to justify the losses. The soldiers, claimed the then Defence Secretary, Des Browne, were engaged in ‘the noble cause of the twenty-first century’. As the Paras began boarding the buses at their barracks in Colchester for the drive to Brize Norton for the eight-hour flight to Kandahar their mood was very different from the excitement and anticipation that had gripped the battalion when they had set off two years previously. They were on their way to fight an unpopular war in a faraway place where progress was measured in centimetres, to face death, injury and constant discomfort. It seemed to some of them that the campaign had reached a point where real progress would have to be made or the enterprise would sink into a pointless and demoralising test of endurance. The next six months would answer the question that was echoing in many heads. Was it all worth it? 3 KAF (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) Kandahar airfield was the NATO capital of southern Afghanistan, a gigantic logistical hub that seemed to radiate both might and hubris. It was built by American contractors in the late 1950s, then taken over by the Soviet Air Force in 1989 soon after Russia invaded Afghanistan to go to the rescue of the communist government in Kabul. From the 3-kilometre-long runway Russian jets took off to pound the mujahedin fighters who harried the invaders on the ground. The disembodied tailplanes of two burnt-out transport aircraft lay in an unused corner of the camp, all that remained of the Soviet air fleet after the rebels captured the base. ‘KAF’, as everyone called it, lay 16 kilometres south-east of Kandahar city. The town was invisible, blocked from view by a range of mountains. The only signs of the local inhabitants were the gangs of labourers who arrived each morning and the merchants who turned up on Saturdays to sell carpets, knick-knacks and fake Rolex watches at a ramshackle bazaar. Visiting the base was a risky business. The Taliban regarded any commercial dealings with the foreigners as collaboration, a charge that could bring a sentence of death. A story went round that the insurgents had presented a stallholder with the severed head of one of his children, wrapped in a sack. The base was scattered over bare desert, the flatness broken here and there by stands of spindly, grey-green pines. The accommodation blocks, workshops, warehouses, offices and compounds had grown with the mission, spreading out along a grid of gravel roads. A stream of heavy trucks, armoured vehicles, buses and four-by-fours trundled continuously along them, churning up a fog of fine dust that never settled. The base was under British control. There were 14,000 people at KAF, from about forty different countries. The majority were not soldiers but civilians, working for international companies that supplied many of the base services. The managerial jobs were taken mostly by Britons. The next level down was filled by workers from Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other upwardly mobile European nations. At the lower levels, washing dishes, cleaning floors and emptying the Portaloos, were small, unobtrusive men from southern India, the Philippines and Bangladesh. Great efforts had been made to make KAF comfortable. The inhabitants ate in big food halls which served pasta, curry, steak and vegetarian specials. There was a hamburger bar, ice cream and espresso machines and plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables and salad. The social life of the base centred on a square stretch of raised decking known as the boardwalk, which was lined with caf?s and shops. At one corner sat a branch of Tim Hortons, a Canadian coffee house chain founded by an ice-hockey star, where you queued for iced cappuccino, the house speciality. Near by were the Dutch and American PX stores selling electronic goods, paramilitary clothing and tobacco and confectionery. There was a chintzy Dutch caf?, the Green Bean, a Starbucks-style hangout which stayed open all night, and a NAAFI. Coffee was the strongest drink available in KAF. The base, like everywhere in-theatre, was dry. Newcomers were surprised to find an establishment advertising itself as a massage parlour, staffed by ladies from former Soviet republics. But the sign over the door described accurately what went on inside. A story was told about a gullible British soldier who had been tipped off by his company sergeant major that extra services were available. He was shown into one of the cubicles by a masseuse. After stripping off and lying down he listed his requirements. The masseuse told him to wait a moment and slipped away. The next person through the cubicle door was a military policeman and the poor dupe was sent home on the next plane. The enforced abstemiousness did not seem to dampen spirits. In the evenings, when the day’s work was done, the caf?s filled up with men and women, soldiers and civilians who chatted, laughed, flirted and smoked. They were there because of a war, but for much of the time there was no charge of anxiety in the air. Occasionally the Taliban fired a rocket into the base, which usually exploded harmlessly in the wide open spaces between the buildings. The Paras had mixed feelings about KAF. The normality of the place was unsettling. It should have been a relief to go back there after a spell ‘on the ground’. Instead, it could seem artificial and irritating, an affront to the sensitivities of those doing the fighting. Most of the inhabitants, soldier and civilian, never left the camp and had little idea of what life was like in the FOBs, the forward operating bases on the front line. The cushy existence of the KAF-dwellers could easily provoke feelings of contempt. ‘Have you noticed there are an awful lot of fat people around here?’ remarked a Para company commander as, returning from the helicopter landing site after a spell in the field, our Land Rover passed two stout Canadian female soldiers trundling along, each holding a supersized milkshake. Kandahar airfield did at times seem to exemplify flabbiness and waste. Modern armies inevitably trail long logistical tails behind them, but the ratio of ‘enablers’ to fighting soldiers in Afghanistan seemed absurdly high. Now and again, however, the realities of the conflict intruded. During the summer came regular announcements that ‘Operation Minimise’ was now in force. This was the communications blackout imposed whenever a soldier was killed, shutting down Internet and phone cabins to prevent news of the death reaching the outside world until the victim’s next of kin had been informed. Some evenings, a ‘ramp ceremony’ was held on the runway before the body of a soldier was flown home. Hundreds of soldiers from dozens of nationalities would troop through the dusk to the aircraft carrying the dead man or woman home, and for a while everyone was touched by the gravity of the mission. The Paras were quartered in Camp Roberts, named after Alexis Roberts, a major in the Gurkhas and mentor of Prince William during his Sandhurst days who had been blown up by an IED in October 2007. Officers and men lived in rows of air-conditioned tents. It was noisy, right next to the runway, and a twenty-minute walk away from the boardwalk and canteens. The location had one major advantage. It seemed to be blessedly sheltered from the stench of shit that drifted from the inefficient sewage farm in the south-west corner, polluting much of the base. The battalion is the basic social block in the army edifice. It numbers about six hundred men, which is big enough for it to have a real identity in the wider organisation but small enough for everyone inside it to know everyone else. A battalion’s mood is to some extent set by its commanding officer. A change in leadership can alter the unit atmospherics. Officers and men agreed that under Huw Williams, 3 Para was more relaxed than it had been in the Tootal era. That did not mean that the essential character of 3 Para had changed. Williams had no intention of trying to alter it. Each of the three regular Para battalions liked to think they had their own clearly marked identity. 3 Para’s nickname was ‘Gungy Third’. ‘I would say we are more laid back, more relaxed, slightly scruffy, not too worried about army-bullshit-type stuff,’ said Williams. ‘The blokes take a genuine pride in being a little bit off the wall. Yet no matter what happens, they perform to the highest standards and because they do that the whole hierarchy of 3 Para and certainly myself give them a lot of leeway’ Williams was breezy, good natured and straightforward. He carried his authority lightly. A stranger watching him chatting with a bunch of fellow officers in the dining hall would not automatically assume that he was the boss. But when he spoke everyone listened. There was wisdom and shrewdness beneath the easy surface manner. He was born and brought up in Cardiff and joined the army at eighteen straight from school. He had been a soldier now for twenty-two years. He first heard of the Paras through a book on his father’s bookshelves on the 1942 Bruneval raid, an operation full of all the dash and daring that the regiment relished. A small airborne force had parachuted on to a clifftop near Le Havre, attacked a strongly defended German radar base, captured a top-secret new electronic detection device and escaped by boat. During his career Williams had served in 3 Para as a platoon commander, intelligence officer, commander of ‘B’ Company and as the battalion’s second-in-command. Commanding a battalion on operations is regarded as the most challenging and stimulating job an officer can do. He is out with his men on the ground, putting his and their capabilities to the test. It is the peak of active soldiering and the promotions, if they come thereafter, will take him farther and farther away from the real action. Having served as number two was no guarantee that he would eventually take over as boss. Williams regarded his promotion as ‘a dream job…not just being made CO but the fact that I was going to get to spend another two years in the battalion’. His deputy was Major John Boyd, a tall, thoughtful Ulsterman, who uncomplainingly accepted the role of enabler. ‘I’m the oil that makes the machine work,’ he said. ‘I take the burden off the CO and let him go out and command.’ He had grown up on a reading diet of ‘Commando magazine, War Picture Library, the Victor. I used to wait every Friday for the comics to come in. At the age of five I just knew I was going to join the army one day’ Many in 3 Para talk about a feeling of vocation when they examine their reasons for joining up. The army seemed to offer an identity and a sense of community that the civilian world could not provide. Boyd had grown up on the Loyalist streets of East Belfast. The Troubles were at their height and many of those around him had served with the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. ‘My first platoon sergeant was a Catholic from Belfast and in those days we would never have socialised,’ he said. ‘But we’ve gone on to become very firm, good friends. I thought it was amazing that one of the few places where Irishmen could sit together without trying to stab each other or shoot each other was the British Army. I love the army and I love the regiment.’ Boyd had been posted away from the battalion during Herrick 4 but there were many senior figures among the officers and NCOs to provide continuity. Two of the 2006 company commanders remained, though they were to move before the end of the tour. Major Jamie Loden, who had taken over ‘A’ Company when it was under constant attack from the Taliban in the district centre at Sangin, was still in-post. So too was Major Adam Jowett, who commanded the hard-pressed defenders of the outpost at Musa Qaleh. Paul ‘Paddy’ Blair, who had commanded ‘C’ Company, had gone off to lead the Red Devils, the Parachute Regiment skydiving team, and Giles Timms, who commanded ‘B’ Company, had moved on to another role outside the regiment. Timms was replaced by Major Stuart McDonald, a pale, shaven-headed Scotsman, whose aggressive tactical approach was to make him stand out even within the Paras. He was to win a Military Cross for his courage and leadership. Stu McDonald had light blue eyes that sparkled with what some interpreted as a quasi-mystical light. They had inspired a visiting German journalist to compare him to Jesus Christ, which provided the battalion with many laughs. He had become a soldier, almost on a whim, at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. ‘My friend and I were sat on the train one day and had this great romantic notion that we would join the Territorial Army and be sent out to the Gulf to fight,’ he remembered. ‘At the time I was incredibly ignorant. I knew nothing about the army…’ The idea took hold. He did some basic training with the TA. Then his parents showed him a newspaper ad seeking recruits for the Paras’ territorial battalion. He had seen a documentary describing the rigours of ‘P’ Company, the brutal physical and mental selection process through which all Parachute Regiment recruits have to pass, and decided that this was for him. He joined the Para reserves before going to Edinburgh University to study commerce. ‘I had asked originally to join as an officer and was advised to spend a year as a private,’ he said. ‘At the end of that year I was offered promotion to lance corporal, which I took, and spent the next three years as a junior NCO. I absolutely loved it.’ At the end of the course he decided against a business career and that it was ‘definitely army all the way, or rather more specifically the Parachute Regiment’. He went through Sandhurst then joined 1 Para. Over the next dozen years he moved around the regiment, serving in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Iraq. There had been moments of excitement and satisfaction but no real exposure to full-on fighting. He regarded his command of ‘B’ Company as the high point of his career and the opportunity to get his ‘first experience of the sharp end’. The battalion started the tour with the same regimental sergeant major who had shepherded it through some of its darkest hours in 2006. John Hardy was everything an RSM was supposed to be. He was tough but just, and the sternness that went with the job overlaid a paternal temperament. Hardy had the unusual distinction of serving in two successive operational tours with 3 Para in the post but was commissioned halfway through the tour, which obliged him to return home. He was replaced by Morgan ‘Moggy’ Bridge, who was good-natured, shrewd and funny. The old and bold of 2006 were well represented throughout the battalion. Several of the senior NCOs had added a stripe to their sleeves and were now staff and colour sergeants and company sergeant majors, and the Toms of Herrick 4 had also moved up the ladder to become lance corporals and corporals. There were many new faces among the CO’s staff. Williams was lucky in having as his operations officer one of the stars of the last show, Captain Mark Swann, who had led the Patrols Platoon through many alarms and adventures with skill and good humour. Among the staff officers was a man who had been a background presence in the ops room in 2006. In this tour, though, he was to play a far more significant role, and his opinion would be sought on virtually everything the battalion was engaged in. Captain Steve Boardman did not fit the popular image of a soldier. He wore glasses, seemed shy and spoke with a soft Northern accent. At forty-nine years of age he was, in military terms, almost a geriatric. Boardman had been involved in civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) affairs in 2006, charged with coordinating reconstruction efforts. As it had turned out, there was very little of this work for him to do. The Paras were more engaged in smashing things down than building them up, and after the first few weeks there was no call for his expertise. Instead Boardman took the drudge job of head watchkeeper, spending long hours on duty in the ops room, overseeing all the incoming and outgoing communications. He had begun his military career in the Royal Artillery, then left the army but maintained strong links by joining 4 Para, the regiment’s territorial unit. He founded a business specialising in print, design and reprographics. His work had taken him to India and the Far East and he had set up a joint venture in Sri Lanka. Visiting these places, he felt, ‘gave me a good insight into the process of how people operate in this part of the world, how they think, what their values are. It exposed me to massive cultural differences from what we are used to in the UK.’ Boardman managed to keep his business running while spending long periods in Iraq and Afghanistan attached to 3 Para. Stuart Tootal had asked him to stay on after the previous Afghan tour. His CIMIC background and his regional knowledge made him the obvious candidate for the role of ‘influence officer’ when the Paras went back. It was, he said with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘better for me to be doing the job than forcing a young captain in his mid to late twenties to do it, who would rather be out on the front line’. In fact Boardman spent as much time on the front line as anyone, taking part in almost every operation of the tour and tabbing out on scores of tense, dangerous and exhausting patrols, alongside men who were less than half his age. Steve and his assistants formed the NKET, the non-kinetic effects team, or ‘Team Pink’ as they were known. They acted essentially as diplomats, representing the Paras to the tricky tribal leaders and mistrustful peasants of Helmand, explaining their mission and reassuring them of their good intentions. It was a task that required patience, fortitude and an underlying faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings. The last quality was hard to sustain in Afghanistan, especially when dealing with those who were supposed to represent authority. Boardman’s belief, however, never seemed to corrode in the ground mist of nihilism that sometimes appeared to hang over the place. The essential purpose of the Paras’ existence, though, was fighting, and at all levels of the battalion there were men who were among the most experienced soldiers in the British Army. Their knowledge and skills would be passed on to the new boys, the young, green Toms who had been in training when the battles of 2006 were being fought. The tales that they heard from the veterans had only increased their thirst for action. Darren Little, from Lockerbie in Scotland, was only sixteen during Herrick 4. He had turned down a place in his father’s building company to enlist in the Paras and was now a private soldier in 4 Platoon, ‘B’ Company. Like all the newcomers he was going to southern Afghanistan ‘with big expectations because what the lads did last time was tremendous’. As they settled in to Camp Roberts in the first weeks of March, it was unclear whether those high hopes would be fulfilled. It had taken some time for 3 Para’s precise role in the new deployment to be defined. Initially it appeared the battalion was going to be split in two. One half would go to Kabul for the unglamorous and boring job of guarding the airport while the other went to Kandahar to provide a rapid reaction force. By the end of 2007 their mission had been changed. They were designated the Regional Battlegroup for southern Afghanistan. The task would give them many opportunities to demonstrate their versatility. Their duties meant they would be expected to roam all the provinces that fell under the control of Regional Command South of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF was the multinational military coalition that had evolved following the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The ‘assistance’ part of its name was a diplomatic nicety. ISAF troops in the spring of 2008 were doing most of the fighting, though Afghan units that had passed through training camps set up by the Allies increasingly accompanied them on operations. In the seven years since they had invaded, America and its allies had talked much about the need to create Afghan forces that were capable of guaranteeing their own nation’s security. Progress had been made but it was slow, and the Afghan army was still a long way from being able to plan and conduct major operations on its own. ISAF had been set up under a UN Security Council mandate in December 2001 following a meeting with Afghan opposition leaders under UN auspices in Bonn which began the process of reconstituting the country post-Taliban. Britain led the negotiations to create the force, which initially operated with soldiers and assets from the UK and eighteen other countries, under the command of a British lieutenant general, John McColl. The coalition of nations willing to commit assets to the mission was to expand over the years so that by 2008 there were forty-one countries contributing about 50,000 troops. In August 2003 NATO took over the command and coordination of ISAF, and two months later the UN authorised it to operate everywhere in Afghanistan. The initial task had been to provide security in and around Kabul. There was a gradual expansion outwards into the more benign and pacified regions of Afghanistan where Taliban support had been lightest. In December 2005, a few months after the country held its first parliamentary elections in thirty years, the Afghan government and its foreign supporters agreed to extend ISAF’s operations to six provinces in the troublesome south. Despite the terminology emphasising the collective nature of the international military presence in Afghanistan, it was the Americans who dominated. They contributed nearly half the ISAF troops spread around the country, leaving Britain trailing a distant second. In the spring of 2008, ISAF was under the command of one American general who a few months later handed over to another. Apart from dominating ISAF, America was conducting its own separate war in Afghanistan under the aegis of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the anti-terrorism campaign established after the 2001 attacks in America to hunt down and kill or capture Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. But the apparent separation of structures did not greatly simplify operations for ISAF and the British. America was the senior partner in NATO and insisted on following its own instincts and methods, even when these clashed with the approach that the British were trying to pursue. The lines of command inside ISAF itself were complex, an inevitable result, apologists would say, of the number of nations involved in the alliance. There would be occasions on 3 Para’s tour when they suffered as a result of the friction caused by the machine’s numerous moving parts. A bigger problem was the differing degrees of commitment that the participants brought to the mission. Most countries were anxious to keep their troops out of the firing line, and all operations were subject to ‘national caveats’, which meant that governments held a veto on the use of their troops in missions that they regarded as unsound or too risky. The fighting was essentially done by the Americans, the British and the Canadians, with gallant support from small nations including Denmark, Holland, Romania and Estonia and special-forces contributions from the likes of Australia and Poland. In the spring of 2008, ISAF’s Regional Command South (RCS) was under the command of a Canadian, Major General Marc Lessard, who arrived at his post in February. Lessard had more bureaucratic than operational experience. He had seen no combat, unless you counted a spell commanding a UN Protection Force battalion in the comparatively quiet arena of Croatia in 1993 and 1994. He was regarded by the Paras as pleasant and capable with a managerial approach to leadership. He had responsibility for an enormous swathe of Afghanistan, made up of the four provinces stretching from Zabul in the east on the Pakistan frontier, across Oruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand to Nimruz on the Iranian border in the west. He had only 12,000 troops at his disposal. As the RCS Reserve Battlegroup, 3 Para were to provide an emergency force that could be helicoptered in anywhere to do anything. Their task was described as ‘full-spectrum’. It involved, according to John Boyd, ‘addressing the threat as it matured, going wherever the enemy decides to raise its profile’. They would also be used to try to stretch the thinly spread ISAF presence more widely across the RCS domain. ‘If there was an area that we hadn’t managed to influence because troops had not been there for some time,’ said Stu McDonald, ‘we were all clear that that’s where we were likely to be sent.’ Given the scale of the military task in southern Afghanistan, it was clear that the battalion was going to be kept very busy. 4 Hearts and Minds (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d) Towards the end of March, the Paras set off on their first mission. They were going to a place that carried dark historical associations for the British Army. Maywand, in the far west of Kandahar province, was the site of an ignominious defeat. On 27 July 1880, on a sun-baked desert plain during the second Anglo-Afghan war, a British and Indian force was smashed by an army of Afghans. Nearly a thousand of the 2500 troops were killed. The battle was still remembered locally. According to legend, among the victorious fighters was a woman called Malalai, who was killed in the battle. The Taliban, overcoming their habitual, murderous misogyny, revered her as a heroine. Now the British were back and little had changed, physically or culturally, since their last visit. Maywand was a good place to expand ISAF’s area of operations in Kandahar province. Until now, the Canadians, who made up most of Major General Lessard’s combat troops, had concentrated on Panjwaii, a densely cultivated area west of Kandahar city. It had been infiltrated by the Taliban, whom successive operations had failed to dislodge. The arrival of a substantial British force would allow Lessard to broaden his horizons. The insurgents were believed to have a presence in the Maywand area. But the operation was less concerned with fighting than ‘influence’, persuading the local population that their best chance for a secure and prosperous future was to lend their support to the government of Afghanistan. It was a perfect opportunity for the Paras to show that, contrary to the assertions of their critics, they were comfortable with the ‘warm and fuzzy stuff.’ Their efforts would be centred on Hutal, the administrative centre of Maywand district. Maywand lay on the border with Helmand. Afghanistan’s main east-west road, Highway One, ran through it, connecting Kandahar with the important southern Helmand towns of Gereshk and Lashkar Gah. Until now ISAF troops had paid only fleeting visits. The idea was to establish a strong presence in Maywand that would act as a link in the chain of ‘development zones’, the bubbles of relative safety that the alliance was trying to form around Kandahar, Gereshk and Lashkar Gah. Hutal was a town by the standards of the region. It had a few run-down public buildings, a school, a number of mosques and a population of several thousand—no one knew exactly how many—living in a cluster of mud and breeze-block compounds. It was close to the Arghandab river system, which irrigated a wide swathe of cultivated land. The main crop in the springtime was opium poppies. To the south-west of the town was the district of Band-e-Timor. This lay across an important route used by the Taliban to get men and supplies from safe areas in Pakistan to the south to the Sangin Valley in the north, where they had been fighting since 2006. They used the same route to take out opium to Pakistan. It was thought that the absence of foreign troops made Band-e-Timor a potential haven for fighters recuperating from their battles in neighbouring Helmand. Hutal, which appeared on some maps as Maywand town, occupied a strategic location on Highway One, which ran through the middle of the town. This was a vital social and economic artery, but driving on it required strong nerves. Travellers ran a high risk of running into Taliban checkpoints where they would be forced to pay a ‘tax’, or bandits who simply robbed them. The road was also studded with IEDs, planted by the insurgents to menace the convoys that supplied Camp Bastion, the large British base in the desert north of Lashkar Gah. The mission was code-named Sohil Laram III. All designations were in Pashto now, to give a more ‘local’ feel. The Paras approached the task with enthusiasm. Most of the soldiers who had been there in 2006 felt sympathy and concern for the people they were fighting among. They were moved by the harshness and poverty they saw in the villages and fields. They were contemptuous of the indifference and cynicism of those who supposedly ruled them, and the cruelty of the Taliban, who wanted to take their place. Their experience in Hutal was to teach them that anyone going to Afghanistan with good intentions should expect to be disappointed, not least by Afghans who were supposed to be on your side. 3 Para had two tasks. They were to secure Hutal so engineers could build a forward operating base (FOB) there. The base would then be taken over by the Afghan National Army (ANA), which would secure the town and the neighbouring stretches of Highway One. The Paras were also to roam the neighbouring district of Bande-Timor, disrupting Taliban operations, fighting them wherever they found them, and preventing them from launching attacks on Hutal. Initially ‘A’ Company were to take charge of the town while ‘B’ Company dealt with the countryside. Later they would swap roles. If the operation succeeded it would establish a centre of stability and security and lay the foundations for growth. The long-term intention was to make the local people friends of the government and their foreign backers, and enemies of the insurgents. Sohil Laram was, said Williams, ‘very much an influence operation’. But influencing the people of Hutal and the surrounding countryside was going to be a delicate task. Afghans had grown to mistrust foreigners and their extravagant promises. They had been listening to propaganda prophesying good times ever since 2001. In many places little had happened. In large parts of southern Afghanistan things had got drastically worse. The Paras began deploying on 26 March. At first light, ‘B’ Company were dropped by helicopter in Band-e-Timor. ‘A’ Company had set off by road shortly before. It was less than a hundred kilometres from KAF, but the journey took twelve hours. There were ninety vehicles all told, a mixture of Viking and Vector troop carriers, Canadian Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) from the Kandahar Task Force and low-loader lorries carrying the stores. There was also a detachment of ANA troops mounted on Ford Ranger pick-up trucks, the advance party for the force that would eventually man the FOB that was to be built in town. They travelled with a Canadian mentoring team. The convoy moved without headlights. The Afghans had no night vision goggles, which made initial progress painfully slow. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before they arrived. They stayed a few miles to the south-east of the town, setting up a camp in the desert on the far side of the highway, a ‘leaguer’ in army parlance, which would be the logistical base for the operation. They spent the night there, and the following afternoon ‘A’ Company, the ANA and their Canadian mentors moved into town, travelling along a back route and making many detours to avoid damage to the poppy crop, which was flowering nicely in the surrounding fields. The company commander, Jamie Loden, together with the colonel in charge of the Afghan force, went straight to the town’s ramshackle administration centre to meet Haji Zaifullah, the leader of Maywand district, and his chief of police. Zaifullah had a residence in the town but spent only part of his time there, preferring to return to the more civilised surroundings of Kandahar city at weekends. He appeared to be in his late thirties, wore a sleek black beard and seemed friendly and hospitable. ‘He was very charming and he was always very welcoming,’ said Loden. But it was clear from the beginning that behind his smiling manner he was determined to resist any challenge to his authority from the newcomers, British, Canadian or Afghan. Governor Zaifullah was to give the Paras a masterclass in the complexities of local power politics and teach them that dealing with their supposed friends could be as demanding as tackling their enemies. The first item to discuss was the site of the proposed ANA strongpoint. The ANA colonel overrode the translator’s efforts to keep up and began talking directly to the district leader, to the bafflement of the non-Pashto speakers. ‘Inside the District Centre there was quite a high tower,’ Loden remembered. ‘We went up there, myself, the district leader, the chief of police, the Afghan colonel and his Canadian mentor. And we got into this sort of pissing contest about where we were going to locate this place.’ Zaifullah bristled at any perceived slight to his authority. ‘The district leader was trying to say you can go there and the Afghan army guy was saying [no] we want to go over there.’ The point at issue was ‘who was the most important’. As the argument ground on Loden’s anxiety mounted. Dusk was falling and his men had nowhere to stay. Eventually they agreed to suspend the debate until the following day. Everyone dossed down that night in a partially built police station located on some waste ground directly opposite the District Centre on the northern side of the town. The police compound, after being properly reinforced, was to end up being the Paras’ base for the duration of their stay. The following day the discussion resumed. This time the party made a tour of the town while the colonel and Zaifullah ‘argued the toss about what could and couldn’t go where’. Finally agreement was reached that the FOB would be centred on a series of compounds that lay below an old fort, behind the main bazaar, 250 metres to the west of the District Centre. The colonel departed a contented man. The following day Zaifullah announced that he had changed his mind again. It was only after a further wearying round of talks that he allowed the decision to stand. When detailed discussions got under way to award the labour contracts for the project there was more trouble. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams’ standard procedure was to give work to locals wherever possible. But the district leader began by insisting that the contracts would go to his nominees. Once again there was a further bout of wrangling before the matter was settled. The Paras began patrolling as soon as they arrived. The locals seemed friendly. There had been no trouble in the town itself for eighteen months. The Taliban’s interest lay in Highway One. Mainly the reaction was one of curiosity. The inhabitants had seen ISAF soldiers from time to time but in small numbers and not for very long. Now there were several hundred troops in town and they were eager to know what they were planning. Huw Williams was determined that the Paras would leave Maywand better than they found it. He had tasked Steve Board-man, the head of the NKET team, whose raison d’?tre was ‘influence’, with identifying some projects that could be completed in the four weeks the battalion was scheduled to be there. Williams ‘said to him I want to have an immediate impact because I’m going to be standing in front of locals and they’re going to say “what can you do for us?’” Working on information gleaned from previous ISAF visits, Team Pink decided the school would be a good place to start. ‘We’d been told that the structure of the building wasn’t too bad,’ said Boardman. ‘But they were in dire need of desks and chairs and pupils’ The story of the school would be dispiriting for anyone going to southern Afghanistan expecting quick and lasting results. The building was almost new. It had been built only four years before by a Japanese charity, which had arrived in Hutal while the Taliban was still recovering from its 2001 defeat, done its good deed and moved on. Now, when Jamie Loden saw it for the first time, ‘the windows were broken and the paint was peeling’. There were, as reported, no chairs, no desks and few pupils. The school building could accommodate nearly a thousand children, but no more than a hundred were turning up, and then only intermittently. The teachers’ attendance was equally haphazard. Their absence was partly due to Taliban intimidation, and partly because most of them lived in Kandahar which, although not far away, was still a difficult and dangerous commute. The reasons why the building had fallen into such disrepair were never explained. Within a few days of the Paras’ arrival life began to return to the school. ‘It didn’t need very much work from us to freshen it up,’ said Loden. ‘We arranged for it to be repainted and for a whole load of new desks and tables to be brought in as well as exercise books and Afghan flags’ They also distributed footballs and found, as British soldiers did everywhere they went, that the game was ‘a universal language. We went in and through an interpreter talked about football and had all the kids cheering.’ At the end of the Paras’ time in Hutal there were 450 children and adolescents going to classes, drawn from the town, the surrounding villages and nearby nomadic settlements. They were being taught Pashto, some maths and the Koran. All the pupils were male. Local custom did not allow boys and girls to be taught together, and to extend education to females would require building a separate school. The builders and suppliers all came from round about, paid by Williams from funds put at his disposal to help the influence effort. One source of money was the Post Operational Relief Fund, which had been established to soothe local feelings if fighting had destroyed buildings or killed humans or livestock. In total, Williams had ?20,000 a month to spend, which went quite a long way in Afghanistan. ‘A’ Company had not anticipated much trouble during its deployment in Hutal. ‘B’ Company under Stu McDonald, along with Huw Williams and his Tactical HQ group, landed in the countryside to the south-east of the town in the expectation of a fight. Intelligence reported that it was home to a number of low-level Taliban leaders who lived in compounds in the fertile strip along the Arghandab river. The company had been supplied with a list of likely targets. They were also expecting to encounter Taliban fighters on their way to and from the Sangin valley from Pakistan, whose border lay about 200 kilometres to the south. At the same time the Canadians were conducting another operation to push the Taliban out of Panjwaii, which lay east, along the river. The hope was that the insurgents would flee into the guns of the waiting Paras. ‘As it transpired,’ said McDonald ruefully later, ‘nothing happened.’ He led raids on several compounds that were supposed to be occupied by insurgents to find empty beds and blank faces. The Paras soon suspected that the intelligence they were working on was old, and if the Taliban had ever been in the locations they were targeting they had now moved on. The exercise did at least have the merit of familiarising the newcomers to the battalion with the sights and sounds of rural Afghanistan. The scenes they witnessed in the fields and compounds of Maywand seemed strikingly rough and primitive. To Lieutenant Tosh Suzuki, a twenty-five-year-old who had chosen the Paras over a banking career, ‘it was really like going back in time. They were using the same irrigation methods almost as in the Middle Ages. The way they were channelling their water, building their mud huts, the tools they used…It’s pretty impressive that they have such a hard life but they’re still very determined to carry on with that livelihood’. The cultural gulf between soldiers and peasants was brought home to him the first time he went out on patrol. Suzuki and his platoon had been tasked with searching a compound. It had attracted attention because of its size and the apparent affluence of its owner, whose tractor and two trucks made him a man of substance in Maywand. This wealth pointed to a connection with the drugs trade, and the drugs trade was enmeshed tightly with the Taliban. Suzuki took a six-man section through the front door, leaving another section of ANA soldiers to wait outside. It was a mistake. They were surrounded instantly by ‘screaming, banshee women, hysterical essentially’. There was no man present to act as an intermediary as the males of the household had apparently fled at the first sight of the soldiers. Suzuki and his men beat a retreat. He then sent the ANA in to try to calm the situation. Eventually the women agreed to gather together in one room and the search went ahead. The lesson was that Afghan faces should front such operations and that, if things were to go smoothly, you needed a male in the compound who could usher the women out of sight. On subsequent searches, Suzuki was always careful to push the ANA to the fore. Ten days into the deployment a similar search turned up an interesting discovery. The Paras stumbled on two large shipping containers lying in a corner of a compound. They broke open the doors and found five new electricity generators, which, it turned out, had been trucked in for use in UN offices in Kabul but had been hijacked somewhere along Highway One. McDonald, frustrated at the lack of action, consoled himself that the discovery was ‘worth something’. The generators had cost ?2 million new and if they had made it across the border to Pakistan could have been sold to buy weapons or hire gunmen. The Paras now had to decide what to do with the loot. It seemed easiest to regard it as Afghan government property, and the generators were moved to Hutal for disposal. District Leader Zaifullah decided that the prizes were his to distribute and had to be persuaded to release one for use in the local clinic and another to power the new FOB. He was given one for his compound where, it was reckoned, it would at least have some valid use, providing electricity for the room set aside for shuras, meetings with representatives of the local communities. The ANA decided that they were taking the other two. ‘They said they were taking them off to their general to show him, because they had seized them,’ said McDonald. ‘When we pointed out to them that we had seized them and they had no part in the operation they said don’t worry, we’ll bring them back. We told them they couldn’t [take them]. We woke up one morning, they were on the back of their truck and they were driving through camp.’ McDonald was told not to worry about it and to regard it as a heartening display of initiative. There was a simple explanation for the calm in Band-e-Timor. The Paras had arrived just at the start of the poppy harvest. It was a laborious business involving every able-bodied member of every farming family from the ages of eight to eighty. They moved through the fields, making incisions in the bulb below the delicate pink and white petals with a multi-bladed knife. The plants were left for a few days for a milky sap to ooze out, which was then scraped off with a wooden spatula. The process was repeated two or three times until all the resin had been collected. The arrival of a patrol in the fields was the signal for work to stop and suspicious and hostile eyes to turn towards the interlopers. ‘Their initial concern was that we were there to eradicate the poppies,’ said McDonald. ‘As soon as it became clear that we weren’t, they were quite happy’ The message was reinforced at the impromptu shuras the Paras held in every village they visited. ‘The elders would come out and want to speak to you,’ McDonald said. ‘And in order to get our message across as to why we were there and to reassure them, we sat down and had a chat with them at every opportunity and said, listen, we’re not here for the poppy…we understand that it’s your only means of support for your family and until an alternative livelihood is found you can continue this.’ As long as the harvesting went on the calm was likely to continue. The insurgents were as keen as anyone to get the crop in. Some of the men toiling in the field belonged to local Taliban groups or were tied to them by blood or sympathy. The organisation as a whole depended on the profits from opium, through their own processing or marketing of it or the ‘taxes’ they raised from farmers, to fund their operations. In the words of Mark Carleton-Smith, opium ‘supercharged’ the insurgency. When in power, the Taliban had been fierce opponents of the opium trade. Now they relied on it to finance their comeback. The ideological difficulties this turnaround presented were easily overcome on the grounds that it was Western unbelievers who would suffer most from the flood of heroin pouring out of southern Afghanistan. The Taliban’s intimate connection with the trade was brought home to McDonald a little later, after the company moved into Hutal. He was called up on to the roof of the base to witness an alarming sight. A huge convoy of pick-up trucks was trundling down the wadi, a dried riverbed that ran through the town, heading for Highway One. ‘It was about two hundred vehicles,’ he said. ‘I counted about eight hundred fighting-age males coming down the road, which clearly alarmed us.’ A team from the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence bureau which worked closely with the soldiers, raced out to question them. The men replied innocently that they were just transient workers on their way to help with the poppy harvest. It was clear to McDonald, though, that ‘they were the same [men] we would be fighting in months to come’. The harvesters climbed back into their pick-ups and ‘drove down the wadi. They waved at us and we waved at them.’ ‘B’ Company’s stint in the countryside settled down into a routine of daily patrols during which they tried to make friends with the farmers, holding shuras and setting up a clinic where the medics could treat minor aches and pains. The willingness of the local people to talk was an encouraging sign. The patrols came across leaflets produced by the Taliban, warning locals that the penalty for fraternising with the occupiers was death. But it seemed to the Paras that the population felt they had more to fear from the Afghan National Police who were supposed to protect them than they did from the insurgents. The police were under the control of District Leader Zaifullah and appeared to be concerned only with their own interests and his. The conduct of the police came up at every shura. ‘Every village we went into, they complained to us,’ said McDonald. The locals pleaded with him ‘to stop the ANP coming here, saying they beat us up and they steal our money’. The police were not only corrupt but potentially hostile. Early on the morning of 10 April, a patrol in the vicinity of the desert leaguer came under small-arms and mortar fire from what seemed to be an ANP position. The Paras refrained from shooting back. The police chief later claimed that the shooters were not his men but Taliban masquerading in stolen uniforms. The identification of friend and foe was a constant preoccupation, whether in town or country. Soldiers were always alert to the presence of dickers, bystanders who passed on information to the unseen Taliban about their movements. Even the most innocent-looking activity might well turn out to be a hidden signal. It was noticed that whenever a patrol set off from the base in Hutal, smoke from a nearby chimney turned from white to black, and one of the children who hung around a taxi rank in the centre of town would run away and talk into a mobile phone when a helicopter came in to land. The combination of stretched nerves and erratic Afghan driving resulted in some tragic blunders which damaged the soldiers’ attempts to portray their presence as benign. Just after 7 a.m. on 1 April, a Toyota was seen driving erratically near a Para position. Almost daily, the intelligence briefings were warning of the likelihood of suicide bombers, whether in cars, motorbikes or on foot. Often the information was quite specific, detailing the location of the likely attack and the make and year of the car involved. The soldiers all knew the drill for dealing with a suspicious approaching vehicle. First they fired a few rounds over its roof. If it kept coming they shot at the engine block. If that failed to deter the driver they aimed at the occupants. In this episode, as was by no means uncommon, the driver seemed oblivious to the rounds flying around him and continued driving towards the soldiers. They opened up, wounding him and his passenger. There was a similar incident two weeks later when two men on a motorbike were shot after they failed, after repeated warnings, to stop at a checkpoint. In both cases the casualties were evacuated by helicopter to KAF for emergency treatment in the base hospital. They recovered, apologies were issued and compensation paid. But the incidents reinforced the feeling in the fields and the bazaars that the arrival of foreign soldiers brought more harm than good. McDonald had found on his travels around the villages of Band-e-Timor that for all their antipathy to the police and ambivalence towards foreign troops, people welcomed the presence of the Afghan army. ANA soldiers usually came from outside the immediate area and had no ties to corrupt local officials or to tribal leaders. The news that a fort was being built in Hutal which would establish a permanent army presence was welcomed. When Huw Williams arrived back from Kandahar on 4 April, however, he found that progress on the FOB’s construction was being held up. Once again, the district leader was at the root of the problem. Haji Zaifullah had showed little sign of bending to the new wind blowing through his fiefdom. His response to the arrival of construction workers had been to try to divert them away from their task of building the FOB in favour of carrying out improvements to his official residence. When Williams vetoed the project he tried another ruse to wring some advantage from the situation. It came to light that when truck drivers tried to load sand from a local wadi to fill up the Hesco Bastion containers that formed the walls of the fort, they were stopped by Zaifullah’s men, who demanded a tax for trucking the ballast away. When Williams heard about the new scam he decided to adopt an emollient approach. The politics of the situation left him no other choice. The British were in Afghanistan to reinforce the authority of the government. That meant doing nothing to erode the standing of its local representatives, no matter how venal and corrupt they might be. The CO trod carefully when he called on the district leader to broach the subject: ‘I said that he was obviously a powerful man with much influence in the area and I needed his help.’ Williams explained what had happened at the wadi, without letting on that he knew who was behind the extortion attempts, and warned that if the situation was not sorted out the FOB could not be built. There was ‘a lot of sucking of teeth’ before Zaifullah admitted that it was he who was taxing the trucks. He claimed that the revenue raised would be used on local services and that the system was ‘good for the people’. Williams countered deftly by saying that in that case he would pay the money himself, directly to the government in Kabul. ‘He said, oh no, you can’t do that, it has to be paid here. I said, well, maybe we can pay it in Kandahar.’ After accepting finally that his bluff had been called, Zaifullah issued a letter exempting the truck drivers from the sand tax. These encounters were wearing and frustrating but Williams understood the necessity of keeping cool and playing the game. ‘I couldn’t go in there and say “stop taxing me” because I would have been undermining him. I knew that I was dealing with someone who is corrupt but I was conscious of the difference between the person and the office he represented. Sooner or later he would be moved on. But the office would still stand and I couldn’t be seen to be weakening it.’ From the outset, Williams had also done what he could to communicate directly with the local notables, calling a shura soon after his arrival to introduce himself. The meeting took place in the open in the district leader’s compound. About seventy elders turned up, men who owed their authority to their relative wealth or membership of a prominent family. Williams and his team explained their mission and asked their guests for their reactions. The response was sceptical. ‘We got the normal accusations,’ said Williams. ‘That you always come and offer but you never deliver.’ He had decided that the best hope of winning any degree of confidence was to ‘humanise myself so I appeared not just as a Western soldier there on a task. I said I was a family man. [I told them that] we didn’t need to come to Afghanistan but the government that you elected has asked us to.’ Williams had reported his difficulties with Zaifullah to his superiors in Kandahar, who passed the information up the political chain. The district leader’s behaviour was annoying and frustrating. It started to become alarming when it became clear that, contrary to the assurances the Paras had given the farmers, he was determined to mount a poppy eradication programme in the area. On 3 April ANP vehicles that had been escorting a convoy of tractors on their way to destroy some crops came under fire from what were said to be Taliban gunmen in fields about eight kilometres north of Hutal. Jamie Loden received an urgent request from the district leader to help his men. Loden was determined not to embroil his troops in a shoot-out over opium and replied that he would assist in extracting casualties but there would be no question of sending reinforcements. By the end of the day no casualties had been reported. The incident, though, had opened a new and dangerous front in the Brits’ dealings with the local authorities. Zaifullah’s eagerness to wipe out the poppy crop aroused immediate suspicions. For one thing, he was under no compulsion to do anything about opium cultivation in his district. The government eradication programme was selective. It was only in force in areas where there was a viable alternative cash crop available to growers. That was not the case in Maywand, where, as Huw Williams put it, ‘they grow poppy and get money for it or they starve’. When Zaifullah was challenged he maintained that he was under specific orders from the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, to mount an eradication effort. Enquiries uncovered an alternative explanation for the district leader’s unusual zeal. Zaifullah, it turned out, had extensive poppy fields of his own. His intention, the Paras suspected, was to wipe out his rivals’ crops in order to increase the value of his own. Rumours were later picked up on the ground that farmers could exempt their produce from the attentions of the police by paying a hefty bribe. In the absence of any intervention from outside Afghan authorities, Williams had little choice but to appear to cooperate. On the evening of 8 April, Zaifullah visited him and told him that an eradication operation was taking place the following day. By now the distict leader had managed to obtain reinforcements from the provincial ANP to support the local police, who, it was increasingly clear, functioned when needed as his personal militia. Williams agreed to position vehicles from his Patrols Platoon near the fields scheduled for eradication but said they would intervene only if the ANP got into trouble. There would also be air support available if needed. As it was, 9 April passed without incident. The dangers of coalition forces being seen to support the nefarious activities of a notoriously corrupt official were obvious. But still nothing was done by the provincial or national authorities to restrain their man in Maywand. On 11 April the Paras were told that the police would be carrying out a week-long eradication mission in the area of Now-Khar-Khayl, which lay on a bend of the Arghandab river about sixteen kilometres south-east of Hutal. Williams agreed that Patrols Platoon would watch over Afghan policemen involved in the operation but go to their aid only if they were in serious difficulties. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts reported that the Taliban were aware of the operation and were prepared to attack the police once the work got under way. The operation began the following day. Around noon, Patrols Platoon heard gunfire coming from the fields. Williams ordered it to stay put and await instructions. The district leader, however, radioed his men to tell them to stand and fight, shoring their morale with the news that the British would shortly be coming to their rescue. When it became clear that no reinforcements were on the way he contacted Williams with ever more alarming reports from the battlefield. Just after 1 p.m. he claimed that fifteen to twenty of his men were dead and those remaining were running out of ammunition. Williams was sceptical. He requested an overflight by a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with an on-board camera. The images it beamed back told a less dramatic story. There was no sign of any major clash and the Paras stayed put. The district leader’s appeals had also been relayed back to Kandahar via the ANP. The Americans responded by sending two attack helicopters. They hovered over the supposed battlefield but found nothing to report and returned without engaging. The true story of what happened in the fields of Now-Khar-Khayl never emerged. It seemed probable that any shooting directed at the ANP was as likely to have come from farmers defending their livelihood as from the Taliban. In this instance, the two groups could have been one and the same thing. Zaifullah’s failure to inveigle British forces into backing him rankled and he complained to the governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khalid, to whom he was closely allied. The governor backed his prot?g? in Maywand, issuing a media statement claiming that a senior British officer in the district was encouraging local farmers to grow poppies. The row bubbled up the political chain until it reached Kabul and the British envoy Sherard Cowper-Coles. The ambassador dismissed the accusation and declared that the Paras were obeying the government’s own instructions, which stated that the eradication programme did not apply to Maywand. The row subsided, but in the Paras’ eyes the district leader had forfeited all respect. Zaifullah’s standing with the people he governed was made clear a few days after the eradication debacle. At mid-morning on 14 April, four men turned up at the base at Hutal asking to see the senior British officer. They were representing a group of forty elders from Band-e-Timor who had come with them to the town. Williams was away at a meeting in KAF and they were welcomed by Stuart McDonald, who had moved with his men to the town to change places with ‘A’ Company. The visitors were angry and agitated, complaining about a raid that had taken place in their area the previous night. Men had been arrested, compounds had been damaged and vehicles set on fire. McDonald replied truthfully that it had nothing to do with the British. Later it transpired that it was an American operation that the British had not been informed of, a regular occurrence in southern Afghanistan. McDonald was backed up by an Afghan army mullah, who was as vociferous as the elders. ‘[He] spent about five minutes angrily shouting them down, saying I’ve been with these people for a number of weeks and they’re genuinely here to help you.’ He also emphasised the common religious ground between them, claiming that the soldiers were ‘good Christians’. He assured them that ‘whereas we believe in different gods they do have our respect for religion [and] this isn’t part of some crusade’. The mullah was a valuable ally in the struggle to win trust. ‘His presence was probably the single greatest factor in creating a very amiable atmosphere right from the outset,’ said McDonald. ‘They seemed to be quite reassured by virtue of the fact that he was there.’ As they talked it became clear that anger over the raid was just the catalyst for the visit. They wanted to talk of many things, and most of all about the behaviour of the district leader. McDonald invited them to return with the rest of the group later in the day when the CO would be back. The initial plan was to hold a shura in the schoolhouse, but an intelligence tip warned that there was a threat that the meeting would be attacked. They gathered instead, at five o’clock, out of the sun in a large room inside the Paras’ compound. Williams sat with McDonald, Steve Boardman and the ANA mullah at the front, facing the visitors. The first ranks were filled with the most venerable of the elders. Behind them came the younger men, who would move forward to whisper their contributions in the ears of their seniors. The spokesmen started off by spelling out to Williams the simple facts of their harsh life. ‘They said they were just farmers,’ he recalled. ‘They had families and they simply wanted security for them and their children. They didn’t want to fight us and they didn’t want to fight the Taliban. They just wanted to get on with farming.’ They were disarmingly frank about the source of their livelihood. ‘They told me they did grow poppy but they didn’t care what they grew. It made no difference to them whether it was poppy or wheat—but no one was buying wheat. People were buying poppy. So what choice did they have?’ The men seemed to be between about thirty and eighty, though it was hard to tell precisely. The harshness of life and the scorching sun dried skin and ironed in wrinkles, ageing adults far beyond their actual years. Only a few dominant males spoke. Occasionally, when they made a forceful point, others would jump to their feet in passionate agreement. They told Williams that the Taliban had been active in their area but insisted that none of them was a Taliban supporter, though Williams was disinclined to take this at face value. They certainly seemed to have no reason to have any warm feeling towards the Taliban. ‘They said they take our food and don’t give us any money move into our compounds, beat us.’ The local police, however, treated them just as badly. An old man got to his feet to show off a large bruise, the result of a beating at the hands of the ANP the previous week. Then the elders came to the point. They had come to ask for the Paras’ help. They hated and feared the police. Only the British could provide real security. What they wanted was an army base in Band-e-Timor like the one that was being built in Hutal. Williams was impressed by what he had heard. ‘I was convinced that they were genuine because it wasn’t all good news. They weren’t saying we don’t grow poppy and we don’t let the Taliban in. They were saying, yes we do, because it’s the only thing we can sell. And we let the Taliban in because we’re scared and how can we not? If we don’t put them up for the night they’ll kill us.’ At the close, Williams promised to hold another shura to which every elder in the district would be invited. He promised to try to secure the attendance of a senior government official from the province as well as a general from the Canadian-led Task Force Kandahar. Local and national media would be invited to make sure that their concerns were given the widest possible airing. If all went well there would be more than a hundred people coming, so to accommodate everyone they would have to meet at the school and a security plan was drawn up to protect against suicide bombers. The great shura never took place. The meeting would mean little without the presence of the main power broker in the area, Governor Asadullah Khalid. But when the Canadians at the head of Regional Command South approached him to request his presence he flatly refused to attend. A few days before, the Canadian Foreign Minister, Maxime Bernier, had visited Afghanistan and received briefings from NATO officers, diplomats and Canadian soldiers on the ground in southern Afghanistan. By the time he met Afghan President Hamid Karzai he had formed a low opinion of the president’s representative in Kandahar. He accused Asadullah of corruption and of holding up Canadian humanitarian aid donations to the area. At a press conference after the encounter he effectively called on Karzai to sack him. Bernier’s intervention was presented as a diplomatic faux pas and nothing happened. Asadullah ceased cooperating with the Canadians in protest and the elders of Hutal lost their chance to vent their feelings. It fell to Stuart McDonald to break the news. He found it ‘professionally embarrassing. You tell these people in good faith that you’ll do your utmost to try and help them and then it didn’t happen. There were a few disappointed looks coming across the table.’ After the shura with the elders of Band-e-Timor, McDonald had come to the conclusion that any further operations in their area would ‘do more damage than good given that it [affected] the same people who had come to us and asked for our help’. Williams agreed and a plan for ‘A’ Company to raid some suspected insurgent compounds was called off. Instead they were sent on another mission, in line with the Paras’ role as Regional Command South’s mailed fist. Williams passed a report of his meeting with local elders up the line. The truth was there was nothing he could do then and there to meet the elders’ concerns. No matter how cautious Williams had been with his promises, the Paras’ presence had raised expectations that, owing to the dearth of men and resources, they could not fulfil. ‘We weren’t about to expand down there and I wasn’t going to build a base,’ he said. There were many other places that demanded ISAF’s attention before they reached Band-e-Timor. It would be another four months before the Paras returned to the region. Nonetheless, as they prepared for their withdrawal on 25 April, they could feel some sense of achievement. The FOB was finished and ready for the arrival of a company of ANA soldiers, who would patrol the town and secure the neighbouring stretch of Highway One. More than $200,000 had been spent on reconstruction. School attendance figures had gone up fourfold. The reactions of the local people suggested they could be persuaded to see the British as potential friends rather than aggressive interlopers. The Paras could also claim that their stay in the area had hastened the end of Haji Zaifullah’s colourful political career. At one of the shuras organised by McDonald, the district leader had been left in no doubt about how people felt about his rule. They made some pretty strong accusations’, said McDonald. They were pointing at him, saying, “You’ve done nothing for your people. You’re here to line your own pockets.”’ The police present carefully noted the names of anyone who spoke out against their boss. Zaifullah, though, seemed unconcerned by the criticism. He told McDonald afterwards that his accusers were ‘all Taliban’. Jamie Loden had had plenty of time to study Zaifullah. He felt that he had learned something important from their encounters about the subtleties of local power structures and the fluidity of interests and allegiances. ‘He wasn’t noticeably anti-government and he wasn’t pro-Taliban. He was just concerned with improving his own lot in life. In many ways what that operation illustrated for those who hadn’t appreciated it was the complexity of the Afghan problem.’ Anyone involved in development had to understand that ‘individuals in power will be corrupt to varying degrees, and their interests will be dictated by furthering their own influence or power’. There was a lesson there for everyone. ‘Perhaps some of the people and particularly the young soldiers thought that when you get to Afghanistan [the people you come across] are either good people or enemy. This made them appreciate that it is actually far more complex than that.’ Nonetheless, the Paras’ reporting of Zaifullah’s activities and attitudes had emphasised his unsuitability in the brave new world of good governance and accountability that they were there to promote. The stories also added evidence to the dossier piling up against his patron, Asadullah Khalid. Although the Canadian Foreign Minister’s candour concerning the Kandahar governor was interpreted in the media as a blunder, his remarks could not be ignored. Four months after the Paras left, Khalid was sacked and Zaifullah was fired with him. The Paras got back to KAF to a warm welcome from Major General Lessard. For a while Sohil Laram III was talked of as a model influence mission. But long-term success required continuity of commitment and energy. The British were replaced in Hutal by soldiers drawn from Portugal’s contribution to the ISAF force. There had been some uncertainty about the date of their arrival following discussions about the terms and conditions of their deployment. The Portuguese had requested the same standards of comfort that they were used to in KAF. They included canteen-quality food and an ice-cream machine. They also wanted air-conditioning units for their accommodation and a cash dispensing machine. The requests were all rejected. On 24 April the Portuguese arrived in Hutal. ‘B’ Company under Stu McDonald were there to conduct the handover. The new arrivals went to the now almost completed FOB. The Portuguese commander announced that he and his men belonged to a crack unit, a claim that was met with some surprise by the Paras. ‘They were overweight, sweaty and wore very tight uniforms,’ said one. ‘They did not look like serious soldiers.’ The commander sought confirmation from McDonald that the Paras patrolled in vehicles. McDonald replied that they patrolled on foot. The commander said that they would be operating mounted patrols as they were ‘only a company strong’. McDonald pointed out that the Paras were only in Hutal in company strength themselves. Later that day a convoy arrived bearing the Portuguese stores. The Paras watched them unloading the containers. ‘When they cracked the first one open it was full of booze,’ said one surprised onlooker. That night the newcomers strung up lights and held a party. In the morning the Paras waited at their base to formally hand over to their replacements. At the appointed hour no one had appeared. After twenty minutes, a platoon commander arrived who seemed the worse for wear from the previous night’s revelry. McDonald left ‘with a twinge of sadness…we genuinely felt we were making a difference in the latter stages’. At least some of the local people would agree with that assessment. As always in southern Afghanistan, the question was: how long would it last? 5 Hunting the Hobbit (#ulink_655c2420-8e4c-5012-ac15-c2d01fe0f1a2) A successful influence operation brought its own satisfaction, but so too did a good fight. It was a prospect that the soldiers looked forward to. No one joined the Parachute Regiment who did not relish the chance of combat. The news that they were to be sent on a risky daylight mission to grab a Taliban commander who had so far eluded the grasp of special forces snatch squads was very welcome. The operation required exhaustive planning and crisp timing and coordination if it was going to come off. The target was Haji Sultan Agha, code name ‘the Hobbit’. The ID mugshot issued to the troops revealed that, unlike his Tolkien namesake, he had a glossy black moustache and grey beard, thick eyebrows and warm brown eyes. His guru-like appearance belied his reputation as the number-one bomb-maker in the Zari district, a bucolic stretch of vineyards and poppy fields that lay along the Arghandab river near Highway One. His activities had placed him on Regional Command South’s wanted list. The task was given to ‘A’ Company, who had finished their tour of duty in Hutal and were in a holding pattern following the decision to suspend search operations in Band-e-Timor. The RCS planners were hoping that their luck would change with Operation ‘Sur Kor’ (‘Red House’). Specialist teams had launched several missions to collar the Hobbit and his men, who were believed to build the IEDs that were found constantly along Route Fosters, a track that led south off Highway One into the Green Zone. The raiders had been dropped at a distance from their targets and tabbed in on foot, hoping to surprise them. Instead, when they reached the target compounds their quarry had disappeared. Once they found a group of males of fighting age still in their beds. But there was nothing to link them to any insurgency activities and the conclusion was the men had received a tip-off in time to clean up any evidence. The Paras’ plan was based on boldness rather than stealth. According to Jamie Loden, ‘the idea was that we were going to go in in daylight and instead of putting down some way off to give them loads of warning time, we were going to land right on top of them and give them no chance of getting away’. The hope was that they would be able to catch the Hobbit in the act of making his bombs. Intelligence reports said his IED factory was in a compound, one of a cluster that lay by a fast-flowing irrigation canal in the middle of some vineyards not far from Route Fosters. The location was named ‘Gold’. Three hundred and fifty metres to the west lay compound ‘Silver’, which was also believed to be connected to the Hobbit’s operation. Beyond that was ‘Bronze’, home to the band’s wives and children. The site presented many practical difficulties. Landing on top of the target sounded like a good, if potentially dangerous, idea. The Taliban had so far managed to shoot down only one helicopter in southern Afghanistan, but it seemed only a matter of time before their luck improved. The immediate difficulty, though, was the terrain, which made landing a Chinook very difficult. The land to the south of the compound was more promising, but it was bounded by a canal. It was 6 feet deep and 5 wide and there was no question of even the most athletic soldier being able to jump across it burdened with body armour, weapon and the usual mountain of kit. The only way across was via three footbridges which it was prudent to assume were mined. Clearing the route would take time, giving the Hobbit and his men the chance to escape. The pathways leading away from the compound were sheltered by trees which gave good cover. The problem facing Loden and his men was ‘how were we going to isolate these three compounds simultaneously to prevent anyone getting away and also land relatively close, given the limitations we had on landing zones?’ Finding a solution was complicated by the restrictions that the different elements taking part in the action placed on their men. Like almost every major operation in Afghanistan, Sur Kor was a multinational effort. The political benefits of having many nations engaged in the coalition to stabilise Afghanistan were often cancelled out by the military disadvantages as each contributing country imposed its own caveats on what its troops would and would not do. In this case it was the British who were causing difficulties. The policy of the joint force command that controlled the RAF, army and navy helicopters was different to that of the pilots, who Loden had always found to be ‘fantastically willing and wanted to do everything we wanted’. British helicopters, though, were providing only part of the lift. Another two Chinooks were being supplied by the Dutch. Their commanders were willing to let their pilots land as close as physically possible to the compound walls. The British imposed another condition on daylight assault operations. They insisted on especially thorough surveillance. These preparations took time, delaying the start. In the leaky atmosphere of KAF this was plenty of time for news of the operation to trickle out. The operation was eventually slated for the morning of 16 April. Loden had 150 men in his group. As well as his own company platoons he could call on the heavy machine guns of the Fire Support Group (FSG) and a mortar team carrying three barrels. They were supported by explosives experts from the Royal Engineers, a Royal Military Police team, and an Afghan anti-drugs team. The force also included Corporal Sainaina Wailutu, a twenty-nine-year-old Fijian company clerk who had joined the British Army seven years before, to search any women they detained. Loden planned to fly one of his platoons in Sea King helicopters to the west of the compounds to cut off anyone fleeing in that direction. The others would put down in the Dutch helicopters next to objective ‘Gold’, where, it was hoped, they would find the Hobbit at work. Loden, his headquarters team and the mortar men would land in the British Chinooks in an open field several hundred metres to the north-east of the target, to mop up any fugitives and give indirect fire if needed. A reserve platoon of Canadians would be waiting to the south of the canal, providing a blocking force. The Canadians had a special interest in the operation. Route Fosters was one of their main access roads to the fighting area and they had suffered several casualties as a result of the Hobbit and his IEDs. They took off from KAF at 7.30 a.m. Half an hour later the Chinook carrying the headquarters group settled on what looked like a firm, dry poppy field. The Paras scrambled down the ramp, high on adrenaline and excitement, and immediately sank up to their knees in mud. Next off was a quad bike, used to carry ammunition around the battlefield and extract casualties, which stuck fast in the glutinous soil. At the same time, the Dutch helicopters were touching down inside Gold compound only 33 metres from the main building. 8 Platoon, the company point men, bundled out of the back door, crouching and levelling their rifles as soon as they hit the ground, bracing for the first gust of AK47 rounds. But if anyone was inside the house they were holding their fire. As the Chinooks lifted off, they advanced cautiously towards the silent, mud-walled building. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Lev Wood, approached the door with an Afghan anti-drugs officer and peered into the dark and stuffy interior. ‘The place was completely bare,’ said Wood later. ‘It was as if it had been stripped of everything.’ They moved on to the outhouses. Several of them were piled to the roof with bundles of dried marijuana, which in an area awash with opium was considered hardly worth mentioning. The Paras pushed on rapidly to Silver compound, leaving the engineers and military police team to go through the house. At the second location they found about twenty women and children but no fighting-age males. It was the same at Bronze. The adrenaline fizz subsided. The soldiers resigned themselves to a day of combing through the grape storage sheds and numerous mud-wall enclosures that dotted the fields and vineyards, searching for weapons and stores. It was a delicate task. The Canadians, who had been operating in the area since 2006, warned them of the risk of booby traps in the grape houses. They were also on the alert for IEDs laid along the pathways, covered by innocuous-looking cooking pots. The insurgents had developed a technique by which they waited for a patrol to approach then buried a small plastic anti-personnel mine just below the track surface and near the hidden bomb. The pressure of a footfall would set off the mine and detonate the bigger charge. But just as they were about to begin the search, the Taliban announced their presence. Back at the helicopter landing site (HLS), Company Sergeant Major Andy Schofield was supervising the effort to extract the quad bike from the mud. At 8.45 a.m. their work was abandoned as bullets began to buzz around them. The fire was coming from the fields to the north but no one could see the gunmen. The HQ group and mortar team who had set up near by began shooting back. Corporal Wailutu was caught in the open next to the quad bike when the firefight began. Normally her duties kept her behind a computer in the company administration office in Colchester. She had been sent to Afghanistan for a one-month tour; now she was flat on her stomach in the middle of a soggy poppy field with only the stranded quad for cover while rounds whipped over her head. ‘I’d never been in a contact before,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t help feeling that one of the rounds was going to get me. I didn’t want to risk putting my head up to see what was going on. I just lay there with my face down in the mud waiting for it to stop.’ Eventually, when the firing faded, she ran over to the treeline to join the others. Loden had moved down to Gold compound. He was on the roof of the main building when the shooting started. Amid the flat crack of rifle fire he heard a sound he remembered only too well. The Taliban were engaging with RPGs. ‘It reminded me immediately of Sangin,’ he said. ‘There was the old pop and whizz and this thing went flying over the top. Everyone ducked. We heard the bang behind us and that was that.’ Loden’s initial thought was that the Taliban were preparing to attack. Something was hidden in their base that was so valuable to them they were prepared to launch a full-on assault to recapture it. The pilot of an Apache attack helicopter that had been on station overhead since the start of the operation reported seeing men entering and leaving what appeared to be a bunker system. It was some distance away, however, 1500 metres to the north of Gold compound, and too far to pose an immediate threat. The shooting began to fade but Loden was concerned that the HQ group and mortar team, who had not yet had time to set up their barrels, might come under attack again. He ordered Lev Wood to stop searching the compounds and to take his men over to the HLS. More reports were coming in from the Apache. At 9.04, nearly twenty minutes after the initial contact, the pilot picked up further activity around the bunker. Eight men were moving around outside. He described seeing ‘a guy walking away from it, going a certain distance out, putting something in the dirt, coming back’. Loden surmised that he was laying a mine and that the inhabitants of the bunker ‘were preparing themselves for a fight’. Eight minutes later the pilot spotted six men entering the bunker through a hole in the wall. The pilot was eager to engage. Instead of requesting permission from the company commander on the ground, however, he asked for clearance from Kandahar. The killing of innocent civilians by Coalition forces had soured relations between President Karzai, America and ISAF, and the president was insisting greater care be taken, particularly in air attacks. The helicopter had to wait while the request was passed up the chain of command. Eventually the message came back that the pilot was not to engage. As Loden absorbed this, Kandahar passed on an intelligence alert, stating that the Hobbit was still in the area and was holed up at a location 800 metres to the north. The report gave a rough location. British troops operated with maps taken from aerial photographs on which all the features were numbered. The trouble with the map in Loden’s hands was that the imagery had been captured eighteen months before at the start of the Afghan winter. In the meantime foliage had grown, compounds had been built up and knocked down and the reality in front of him sometimes differed markedly from the representation. Eventually he matched the reference to the landscape and made his next move. It seemed clear that if the Apache was not going to take out the bunker they would have to do so themselves. By pushing forward they were also moving towards where the Hobbit was said to be lying up. Loden decided to order an ‘advance to contact’. He would need all his men. He called the Canadians and asked them to cross the canal and secure the compounds, freeing up his two platoons to come forward. They gathered for a conference at the HLS. The bunker would have to be dealt with before they could move on to the Hobbit’s supposed location. To reach the bunker meant passing through a straggle of compounds connected by a long alleyway. The lead section had gone only a few dozen metres when a gunman popped up from behind a compound wall ten metres away and sprayed AK47 fire in their direction. ‘How the hell he missed I have no idea,’ said Loden. ‘He was that close that he really should have hit someone.’ The Paras hit the ground. After a few minutes, Sergeant Shaun Sexton from 2 Platoon took one of his men, raced forward to the door of the compound and flung in a grenade. When the smoke cleared they peered in. The only thing visible was a tethered goat, which looked up calmly from its feed to check out the intruders. The advance continued. The Paras came to an irrigation canal, part of the web of arteries and capillaries that channelled the waters of the Arghandab into the vineyards and poppy fields. It was too wide to jump. As they waded across, someone noticed a plastic disc glinting on the stream bed. It looked like an antipersonnel mine. Everybody hopped rapidly on to the opposite bank. The landscape was empty now. The workers who had been dotted about the fields when the helicopters first arrived had all disappeared. Occasionally a head would pop up on a distant rooftop as a Taliban dicker tried to spot the Paras’ movements. Each time he would be scared away by a volley of rifle fire. The Apache had gone back to KAF to refuel, taking its devastating Hellfire missiles with it. Loden halted the company 400 metres south-west of the bunker. He told Lev Wood to take his platoon forward while the rest provided covering fire. They set off across the fields until they came to a wall and ditch. One section ‘went firm’ behind the cover while the other, led by Corporal Shane Coyne, set off on a crouching run straight towards the low, humped structure that merged almost invisibly with the surrounding earth and mud. They hurled grenades at the firing slits and doorways and threw themselves down to avoid the blast. When they raised their heads there was no returning fire. Coyne closed on the bunker and ducked inside. The place stank of cordite from the explosion. As the smoke and dust subsided they could see that the place was empty. ‘They were obviously very good at guessing what we were going to do and bugging out,’ said Captain Mike Thwaite, the company second-in-command. The bunker was impressive, just like the ones they came across when training on the mock battlefields of the Brecon Beacons. It was well dug in with overhead cover, small firing slits that gave the occupiers good fields of fire and tunnels that led out the back into zigzag trenches allowing them to escape from it unseen, as they appeared to have just done. The Paras set off again, towards the Hobbit’s last known location, about 450 metres to the west. By now there was little expectation of finding him, however. When they reached the target compound it too was empty. There were a few old men near by who watched them carry out a search. Loden went over with an interpreter and started talking to them. They were dignified and courteous, as the soldiers found the Afghans usually to be, but had no information they were willing or able to pass on. It was nearly 1 p.m. The sun was high and the Paras were hot and thirsty. The silence was heavy and, Loden thought, eerie. Abruptly it was split by a deafening cry of ‘Allahu Akhbar’ as the loudspeaker on the minaret of a tiny mud-walled mosque burst into life with the call to prayer. The recorded voice of the muezzin was immediately overlaid by the ripple of automatic fire coming from behind. Loden had left the Fire Support Group to his south to provide cover, and they now joined in, firing at the flashes lighting up the foliage with their General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMGs). Eventually the exchange died out and Loden took stock of the situation. It appeared that, contrary to early indications, the Taliban were not interested in a stand-up fight and did not feel that anything they may have hidden in the area was worth the losses involved in trying to force the Paras out. The search of the initial compounds had turned up some bomb-making components, such as car batteries and circuit boards. On their journey north the Paras had recovered an RPG launcher and destroyed it with a plastic explosive bar mine. All this was easily replaceable. The real object of value in the area was the Hobbit, and it looked as if he had got away. The Taliban seemed content to harass the Paras while minimising their own exposure to danger. It was now getting on for 2 p.m. Time was running out. The helicopters were due to extract everyone at 4 p.m. from a new landing site on the far side of the canal from Gold compound. That was nearly a kilometre away, a fair distance when you had to cover it on foot, carrying a ton of kit, over soggy, obstacle-cluttered ground, manoeuvring to protect yourself as you went. Any further delay now meant they would have to stay the night. They had enough rations to last them, and if they ran out of water they could drink canal water treated with purification tablets. Loden’s main concern was radio batteries. They were heavy and used up power fast. If he decided to stay they would have to switch the radios off to save electricity, turning them on only when, as seemed likely, the Taliban launched a night-time attack. As he was deliberating there was another burst of fire from behind as another gunman popped up, sprayed bullets in their general direction and disappeared. The search continued a little while longer before Loden decided they were going to try to make the rendezvous. He led the two platoons with him back to the mortar position, just by the field where they had landed six hours previously. The quad bikes were useless in the boggy ground; all hands would be needed to carry the unused mortar bombs, packed in plastic ‘greenies’, to the new HLS. As Loden and his HQ team reached the mortars it seemed that the end was in sight. ‘I think we were slightly lulled into a false sense of security’ he said. ‘We’d had these fleeting glimpses of the enemy that hadn’t really materialised into anything.’ The Taliban, however, were saving their best effort for last. ‘They had looked at where we were, seen where we’d gone, worked out where we were going to have to come back to and set up an ambush.’ The insurgents opened up just as the last element of the company arrived at the mortar position. It was a fortunate mistake on the insurgents’ part. If they had attacked early the company would have been split in two, with 8 Platoon bringing up the rear. The soldiers dived flat as bullets whipped in low, shredding the poppies a few inches above their heads and kicking up mud. The fire was coming from a compound 200 metres to the north. Instead of another ‘shoot and scoot’ this contact was a determined, sustained attack with machine guns and rifles. 8 Platoon were belly down in the mud with little scope for returning fire. Lev Wood was in the middle of the line. He raised his head to see a ruined storehouse in the middle of the field and made for it. ‘It was quite convenient for me but not so convenient for the rear section,’ he said. The rear was being brought up by the platoon sergeant, Danny Leitch. He brought his men forward in a crouching run while his comrades battered the firing point with rifle fire and underslung grenades. Among them was Private Ollie Schofield, who had volunteered for 3 Para after hearing about their previous exploits while in training. Now he was ‘living the dream’. He found the experience ‘kind of scary’, but at the same time he was feeling ‘the biggest buzz you will ever get. You can’t match it anywhere.’ The Paras paused for a few minutes then scrambled forward again another 33 metres, heading for a drainage ditch at the edge of the field. They tumbled in, gasping for breath, while the rounds continued to crack and buzz overhead. There was fire coming the other way now from the sniper team left to protect the mortars, who were also engaging the compound, and the fields echoed with the thump of heavy 8.6mm Lapua Magnum rounds. Loden had run forward with his mortar fire controller, Corporal Pete Preece, to get better ‘eyes on’ the Taliban position. They took cover in a ditch, but for a while the weight of fire was too heavy for Preece to get his head up long enough to obtain a precise fix on the location. Eventually he was able to work out the coordinates and brought in smoke rounds on the compound, which covered the Paras’ withdrawal. Corporal Wailutu watched the contact from the mortar line. She had learned a lot during the day. At one point she had been ordered to fire warning shots over people approaching their position. As the latest fighting flared up, her first instinct was to join in. ‘It was very exciting,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to use my weapon.’ With so many friendly forces spread around there was less chance of hitting an insurgent than one of her own side, however, and she held her fire. Loden now asked Wood whether he thought it was possible to assault the compound head on. It was, undoubtedly, ‘a big ask’. It meant charging over more than two hundred metres of open ground through thick, slippery mud in full sight of the enemy. ‘As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t [on],’ said Wood. He told Loden it was ‘pretty suicidal’ to go straight at the compound but suggested approaching it with a right flanking movement instead. Loden accepted his judgement, declined the offer and told 8 Platoon to stay put, ‘watch and shoot’. As they waited, the firing from the compound stopped. It was replaced by shooting from the south. The Canadians had come under fire and were replying with everything they had. Loden had an hour and a quarter until the rendevous with the helicopters. The aircraft would soon be taking off and if they weren’t going to make it he should tell Kandahar immediately. By now there was air cover overhead to suppress any further attempt to slow their withdrawal. He decided to go for it. They picked up the ‘greenies’ mortar round containers and began hobbling back across the fields, covered by the snipers, who were the last to ‘collapse’. The helicopters arrived at 4 p.m., putting down in a wadi south of the canal. It had been a day of mixed results. They had missed the Hobbit and failed to uncover his cache of materiel. The Taliban had avoided the temptation to come out and fight, as they would certainly have done a few years before. To the veterans of 2006 it was becoming clear that the days of pitched battles were probably over. On the other hand, the Paras had performed skilfully and professionally and, most importantly of all, had come through without a single casualty. It was a good feeling. ‘The company got back to Kandahar that night on a real high because they’d finally done something,’ said Loden. ‘The previous two weeks had been patrolling around Hutal with nothing much happening. I think for the first time everyone realised that the role we were in could offer significant variety.’ For his deputy it was ‘a good run out’. Now the rest of the battalion were about to get theirs. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/patrick-bishop/ground-truth-3-para-return-to-afghanistan/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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