He was further sickened when he was told to take off the tiny American flag he’d attached to his truck; it ‘sent the wrong message’. He told me that just before I’d come back, a local imam, who had been given more than $65,000 for repairs to his mosque, had helped a Taliban commander avoid arrest. The marines had reliable intelligence that the commander was in the imam’s village; they searched every building except the imam’s house. The imam agreed his house could be searched but asked if he could first usher the women into a separate room. The commander, the marines later found, was amongst them, wearing a burqua.
‘This is nothing against the people of Afghanistan’, Hillis told me, ‘but I fucking hate the people of Marjah.’
* * * * *
The people of Marjah, four months after they had been liberated, also had plenty to say. Away from the marines, in front of large crowds who neither disagreed nor showed signs of disapproval, a succession of men, including some I’d filmed re-opening their stores, selling cigarettes to the marines and the ANA, smiling and shaking their hands, took turns to complain about life since the intervention.
‘We are Afghans, we won’t accept anybody else’s rule’, said one, summing up the entire problem in nine words. They kept coming, each more eager to speak than the one before.
‘The situation is getting worse day by day. We are afraid. Our women and children are being martyred. Americans are entering houses. When they see someone with a beard they accuse him of being Taliban. America should pull out its military and leave us with our elders and with our Muslim way of life. We don’t want them to be slapping this man or that man. Afghanistan is not going to be built this way. Where does the Taliban come from? The Taliban are the sons of this land, they don’t come from outside. The situation in the bazaar is better but as soon as I leave there is no security. The Americans were driving their tanks, someone’s stall was knocked over and dragged along the road. His money and his phone cards went everywhere. The marines drove on and didn’t care.’
‘When the Taliban were here it was fully secure. No one was allowed to steal or commit robbery. If anyone was caught stealing they would pour used engine oil on his head and parade him in the bazaar, so no one would dare commit robbery. I had a shop in this market, selling melon. I would leave them out at night and nobody would dare steal them.’
‘If someone comes out of the house to use the toilet [a field] they are shot. Two people are not able to sit together at night.’
‘I don’t think it will be of any use if they build a bridge or a school. I think it will be very good if they pack up and leave.’
No one had anything good to say, no one suggested any of the speakers had gone too far or shown ingratitude. No one seemed surprised by what was being said. One man said there would be peace if Marjah were left to the Afghans.
‘The solution is that the Americans leave us with the Afghan forces and the government enforces Islamic sharia. We would totally support it, co-operate and work together.’ His reasoning was simple: ‘I will say jihad is an obligation against the infidels but jihad is not permissible against Muslims. The Taliban would realise this and not fight against them [the ANA].’ My translator laughed when he heard this; he said the man well knew that if the marines left, the ANA would be defeated, or flee, within hours and Marjah would once again be under the control of the Taliban.
It is an old cliché, often used by those who know very little about Afghanistan and one that I have often argued against, that the Afghans will first fight foreigners, then each other, and nothing will persuade them otherwise. Although every Afghan friend has proved to me, again and again, that a foreign guest is offered levels of hospitality and generosity that can be embarrassing, it is also true that as soon as a foreign soldier lands, especially in the south, the local men will reach for their guns. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that after all that has happened since we first arrived, even after we had re-defined our good intentions, we stood any chance of changing that.
Two months after Bravo Company 1/6 Marines left Marjah, their replacements found Mohammad, the dwarf, dead. He had been beheaded. No one knew why, nor who had done it.
US MARINE CORPS
DECEMBER 2010 TO JANUARY 2011
3RD BATTALION
5TH MARINES
Every few days during the summer of 2010, the same sentence kept appearing in the British newspapers: ‘A soldier has died as the result of an explosion. His next of kin have been informed.’ Taliban ‘shadow governors’ operated in all but one of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. The Taliban still conducted hit and run attacks but their most effective weapon, by far, was the IED.
In September 2010, the British forces quietly handed Sangin, the most dangerous district of Afghanistan’s most violent province, over to the US Marines. The ceremony was described as a ‘relatively private affair’ by a British military spokesman. It was not a retreat or a withdrawal, we were told, it was a ‘tactical realignment and rebalancing’. Several other problem districts were also taken over by the US Marines. The Brits moved to less volatile (but still far from secure) districts of central Helmand. US Marines now outnumbered British forces by almost three to one.
In late 2010, the Wikileaks site published previously secret communications that revealed that the American commander who had led NATO forces in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2008, and even President Karzai himself, didn’t think the British were ‘up to’ securing Helmand. The official response from the UK Ministry of Defence was to say that UK forces had done ‘a terrific job [in] an area which has always been and continues to be, uniquely challenging’. The bazaar in Sangin had been ‘transformed ... more than eight hundred and fifty shops are trading, twice as many as the year before’. It was an impossible number either to calculate or confirm; it was the best they could do.
By summer 2010, the thirty-three thousand American ‘surge’ troops had arrived. General McChrystal had been sacked, after making inappropriate comments to Rolling Stone magazine. His replacement, ‘King David’ Petraeus, loosened the rules of engagement, giving the troops more freedom to fire what they wanted when they wanted, and to defend themselves more aggressively. Between July and November 2010, there were approximately 3,500 air strikes, the highest number since the war had begun and the number of night raids by Special Forces tripled. There were also 711 NATO casualties over the whole year, almost two hundred more than any other year so far. It was apt that the US forces taking over in Sangin, 3/5 Marines, were nicknamed ‘the Butchers of Fallujah’, because of the way they had fought there.
In Sangin, I was repeatedly told not to ask about the ‘Wikileaks bullshit’ regarding the Americans ‘disrespecting’ the British. ‘Whatever we do here, we’re building on what the British did’, was a line I often heard. I also heard stories from the few Brits who remained in Sangin, who were absolutely sure they were being disrespected. Since my first visit, the British had established a team of ‘stabilisation advisors’ who had developed a rare and comprehensive knowledge of Sangin’s tribal politics and built relationships with local elders, even with Taliban commanders, with whom they were negotiating peace deals. But their opinions weren’t sought and their existence was barely acknowledged. A district-wide peace deal was possible, I was told by an aide to the district governor, who worked with the stabilisation team. However, the arrival of the US Marines had led to more civilian deaths and an increase in support for the local Taliban, who wanted to keep fighting. There had been a recruitment surge, as young men joined the Taliban to get their revenge. The increase in Special Forces’ kill-or-capture raids exacerbated the problem: if the moderate and reasonable local leaders were killed, they would be replaced by ‘crazies from madrassahs in Pakistan’. The Marines thought a peace deal was only possible if the Taliban were beaten into submission.
Before arriving in Sangin, I’d spent some time in Kandahar with the 101st Airborne Division, US Army. In three weeks, I didn’t see a single shot being fired but the list
of dead and wounded from IED explosions was horrendous. Casualties, simply described as double, triple and even quadruple amps (amputations), had become common. My own colleague, Joao Silva, a much-loved and respected photographer, had stepped on an IED and lost both his legs, just days after we’d spent a few days stuck together at an airbase.
I’d also caught a glimpse of how the Afghan National Army was likely to operate after NATO forces left. A small ANA unit had charged ahead of the American soldiers and found all the IEDs in a small village in less than an hour. ‘How did you do it?’ asked the American captain, astounded. ‘Did you offer the locals $50 for each IED they revealed, like we trained you?’ ‘No’, said the ANA captain, excitedly, ‘we told them “show us the IEDs or start digging your own grave”.’
When I’d returned home, a colleague asked, with concern, why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I told him that Helmand no longer revealed anything new and it was time to cover something else. But within days, I was given the chance to return to Sangin to film with the US Marines and I couldn’t say no. A hundred and six British soldiers had been killed there, almost a third of all British deaths and I wanted to see how the Marines, especially a battalion with such a fearsome reputation, would cope.
The BBC manager who’d stopped me going to Marjah also tried to stop me going to Sangin because I hadn’t completed the ‘hostile environments refresher course’ within the last three years. The course was an idiot’s guide to coping in a war zone. One section involved watching clips from my own films. On a previous course, I’d been made to run in zigzags while someone fired blanks at me. Eventually I was told I could go back to Sangin, as long as I completed the course when I returned.
One of the first things I saw when I arrived at FOB Jackson, Sangin’s District Centre and 3/5’s Combat Operations Centre (COC), was the legless body of a marine carried into the medical tent on a stretcher. He was alive but unconscious. His legs had been blown off right up to the hips; his shortened body seemed more like a child’s than a fighting man’s. This kind of injury was becoming more common in Helmand as the Taliban worked out ways to get their IEDs to send the explosion straight up. Minutes later, another stretcher was carried in, but this time, the marine was dead. His body was intact but the way his head flopped around between his shoulders had an unmistakable lifelessness.
The marines had been struck by an IED; worse, one of them had been carrying a rocket on his back, which had also exploded. The marines who had carried them in stood outside the tent in shock, hugging each other, crying or simply looking down into the dust, unable to believe what had just happened. An ambush had followed the IED strike; the fighting still raged. After a relatively quiet trip to Kandahar, the sound of so much fire, coming from dozens of men summoning up every ounce of viciousness they had, in the effort to kill each other, was suddenly as disturbing as if I were hearing it for the first time.
Even before these casualties, 3/5 had learned what a deadly and defiant place Sangin was to those who were unwelcome. By the time I arrived, they had lost twenty-five men and more than 140 had been seriously injured. These were astounding numbers, worse than any other battalion’s, anywhere in Afghanistan. They had been there just three months.
* * * * *
After landing, I’d been dumped in a long concrete and steel shed that somehow managed to be colder inside than it was out (and outside was already freezing) and ignored for days. The only contact I had was with a chubby civil affairs worker, who dressed to make everyone think he was Special Forces. ‘BBC?’ he said in disgust, ‘you’re like CNN – the Communist News Network. We don’t like reporters out here.’
I walked to the COC every afternoon to find out if anyone had any plans for me. But the Public Affairs Officer, who had a sign behind his desk that read, ‘Fighting the war on terror, one cake at a time’, never had any news, despite helicopters and convoys coming and going every day. After a few days being almost hypnotised by the boredom, cold and loneliness of Sangin DC, I was eventually allowed to join a convoy to Lima Company, who were quartered in a dilapidated house on the edge of the Green Zone.
The convoy took the main north–south road through Sangin, right through the ‘transformed’ bazaar, which I was eager to see again. I’d walked through it more than three years earlier. Now I was in a million-dollar, twenty-tonne bomb-proof truck, looking through a tiny, bullet-proof window. The buildings on either side of the road were still crumbling shells, still sealed by warped metal shutters. The Afghans still sold what they could; a few piles of basic foods, old shoes, or bicycle and engine parts. Nothing seemed to have been brought in. It was as if the outside world didn’t exist. I could expect that in a remote village in the middle of the Helmand desert but it was shocking to see it here, in a town that had been the focus of a multi-billion-dollar security, development, and governance effort. The eyes that followed us through the bazaar were hostile, just as they had been three and a half years earlier, when Major Martin David told me that the Taliban had been expelled from Sangin and were, ‘reeling from the operations we’ve conducted against them, [and] low on morale.’
I was dropped off at Patrol Base Jamil, a skeleton of a three-storey house featuring pillars and a balcony. Once, it had been on its way to becoming something of a palace. Such buildings are assumed to be owned by narco-barons, so nobody felt bad about occupying them.
Lima Company had recently suffered three casualties from IEDs. One marine had lost both legs and an arm, one had lost both legs, and the third was considered extremely lucky to have escaped with just a fractured ankle. ‘We had a guy that lost a foot. We considered him to be lucky.’ I was told, ‘Just losing a foot is a million-dollar injury out here.’
A shura was taking place in a large white tent. There were about sixty men attending, with about as many boys running around in the background making mischief and playing with the marines. Captain Matthew Peterson, the Commanding Officer of Lima Company, led the shura. Peterson, with fair hair, light green eyes and soft, boyish face that probably didn’t need much shaving, looked more like his name than his title. That is, he looked like a friendly Scandinavian, rather than the leader of a company of marines in a battalion with a fearsome reputation.
Peterson welcomed everybody and told them he was there to be honest and help solve their problems. He came across as understanding and compassionate; he didn’t try to look tough or intimidating. An old man complained that cars were being told to pull off the road or turn around when an ISAF convoy was approaching and even when they complied, as he had done recently, they were shot at or smashed into. Peterson started to speak but was interrupted by an angry man in a black turban, who spoke loudly and with enough venom to guarantee no one interrupted him. Six days earlier, the man’s uncle had been shot, at ten o’clock in the morning, as he carried a bag of potatoes. No one had been allowed to go and help him until three o’clock that afternoon. Soon, the men around him were nodding in agreement. The terp translated for Captain Peterson; he nodded too.
‘It’s better to not be shot than it is to be helped when you are shot’, said Peterson, summing up the man’s point. ‘Thank you for telling me that’, he said. ‘These are things that I need to know about.’ He asked if the man’s ankle had been treated. The man said they taken his uncle to Lashkar Gar by themselves; they had been held at a checkpoint and questioned about why he had been shot.
‘I’m glad to hear he’s doing better’, said Peterson, understanding that the man had been talking about the uncle, not his ankle, even though the terp hadn’t said anything about how the uncle was, ‘but you’re right, he shouldn’t have been shot in the first place. As we continue to work together to make the community safer that’s the kind of problem that we can avoid. But I’m afraid the truth is that people will still continue to get hurt, as long as the enemy is here. It’s because of the enemy, not because of the ANA and the marines.’
The men at the shura disagreed. ‘When there is a firefight, if someone gets
shot, that’s something that happens naturally’, said an old man sitting in the front row, ‘but when there is no firefight or when the firefight is finished and two or three hours later someone gets shot, that’s you.’
‘These are excellent points and I thank you for sharing them with me’, said Peterson. ‘But I want to tell you that there is a solution. If we wanted to get rid of the enemy in this area, we could drop enough bombs and use enough weapons to kill everybody and that would solve it. That would get rid of the enemy. But there’s a reason we don’t do that and the reason is because we care about the people here, so we’re very careful. Sometimes people still get hurt but we do the best we can. We’ll continue to try hard and it’s important that you keep telling me these things.’
They eventually broke into small groups. People whose property had been damaged were given compensation forms. Captain Peterson sought out the old man who had spoken; he seemed to have authority. The old man told him there were lots of people in the area who didn’t want peace and were giving false information, to prolong the conflict. He said Sangin had ‘seen thirty years of war; tribal war, party war and governmental war’ and that people had agendas that the captain didn’t know about. ‘People have tribal issues so they will use you to try and harm their enemies.’