After almost an hour, I heard an F16 fighter jet roaring towards us. ‘That is the sweetest sound in the world’, said the heavily-sweating soldier next to me. I saw the underside of the plane, white like a shark’s, as it passed overhead and fired missiles into a building a hundred metres or so ahead. Everyone went quiet as they waited to see if the missile strike had been accurate. The Taliban were also quiet, either because they were desperately trying to find a ditch to dive into or because they’d been killed. Air strikes were called for with few restrictions, so the mere presence of planes or helicopters in the air – a show of force, as it was called – was often enough to scare the Taliban into retreating.
Everyone was ordered to start moving back, believing that eighteen Taliban had been killed, mostly by the air strike. Lance Corporal Jack Mizon and Lance Sergeant Jason McDonald, who had charged forwards with the ANA, re-appeared, soaked in sweat and bouncing with adrenaline. ‘It was a bit too close with the RPGs whizzing over the wall’, said McDonald, with a humble, gap-toothed smile. The ANA also re-appeared, some sprinting in all directions and others standing still, in plain sight of the remaining enemy fighters who had tried to flank us. ‘Get them shaken out into a defensive posture, get a grip of these fucking idiots’, screamed Major Martin David.
‘One of them was stood up’, said McDonald, ‘when there was RPGs winging straight over our heads. I was on my belt buckle and he was stood up, eating an apple and laughing at us.’
‘Very good soldier, my soldier very good’, said the ANA’s commanding officer, almost singing with laughter as we pulled back. I hadn’t seen him since, on the way in, he’d made one of his soldiers carry him over a stream so that he didn’t get his boots wet.
When we got back to the patrol base, the ANA found the Taliban’s frequency on their radios and listened to them talk (this is called ‘i-comm chatter’). Anyone with a normal CB radio could listen in as they were doing. I heard such ridiculous things – four hundred fighters are about to storm the base! We have taken forty casualties in the ditch! Thirty suicide bombers are about to detonate themselves! – that I assumed the Taliban knew they were being listened to and were being deliberately misleading. But i-comm chatter was treated as if it were the most sophisticated covert surveillance, so secret and so valuable that if I ever mentioned it I’d be aiding the enemy. The ANA either hadn’t got that message or were ignoring it, as they immediately started talking back, taunting the Taliban about the battle they had just lost.
‘Come back to the same place tomorrow without the planes and helicopters and we’ll show you a fight!’ replied the Taliban.
‘We’ll kick your ass the same way’, said one ANA soldier, causing the others to roar with laughter. ‘And fuck your mother.’
The Brits weren’t so jubilant. They carried the heavy equipment back to the base. They knew that the ground they’d just cleared would have to be fought for again.
* * * * *
The fighting in Zumbelay was part of an effort to expand a relatively secure area, optimistically designated the ‘Afghan Development Zone’. It formed a triangle between Gereshk, Lashkar Gar (the provincial capital), and Camp Bastion, the huge and rapidly-expanding British base, complete with landing strip, safely positioned in the Helmand desert. As part of a wider policy, the ‘comprehensive approach’, this area was supposed to be the focus of an intense nation-building and reconstruction (or construction, as some soldiers were quick to point out) effort. It was hoped this effort would quickly convince the local population that the Afghan government, with the ‘support’ (no one was allowed to say the effort was British- or American-led) of the international community, could provide a much better way of life than the Taliban. The local people would then side with the central government and reject the Taliban, making it impossible for them to operate. It was classic counter-insurgency, called ‘draining the swamp’, or ‘hearts and minds’ in past campaigns, although to find an example that actually worked, you had to go back over sixty years.
The comprehensive approach looked perfectly feasible in a PowerPoint presentation, when the beneficiaries, who weren’t consulted, were viewed as automata. When applied to an actual society, especially one as fragmented, traumatised and complicated as Helmand’s, it rarely lasted longer than the first ten minutes of a shura. An anthropologist would struggle to understand the competing interests of local power-brokers, often motivated by long-running tribal, political and drug-trafficking rivalries. A few seemed to understand but the security situation meant that they were rarely, if ever, there when they were needed. Instead, soldiers had to do what they could.
To begin to understand how hard it was for the British to attempt to carry out this policy, imagine an Indian dropped into Chicago, or a Brazilian dropped into Islamabad. Imagine asking them, without speaking the language or having any idea who to trust, to create, staff and monitor an entirely new system of government. What’s more, imagine asking them to do this within six months, while fighting a war and after having killed several hundred civilians by mistake.
And this task had fallen to soldiers, untrained for many of the roles they were asked to perform, because so few people from the Department For International Development (DFID) or the Foreign Office ever set foot in Helmand. This surely guaranteed it could never succeed. It could only have had any chance of succeeding if it was truly Afghan-led. And led by the right Afghans, which it certainly was not.
When I asked soldiers about the comprehensive approach, I often had to start by explaining what it was. I never got an answer that wasn’t full of scorn or sarcasm. One lieutenant colonel said that if I saw any of the Foreign Office or DFID individuals in charge of all this reconstruction, would I please point them out to him, because he hadn’t seen any.
I joined Lieutenant Colonel Westley a few days later for another shura. Among the many problems being addressed was a hospital whose generators had stopped because they had run out of diesel fuel, even though the director had been given the authority to order more whenever he needed it.
‘The point is this, Mr Mayor. Forgive me, but you need to tell the director of the hospital that he needs to take control of this issue. He was at this meeting a week ago and he has done nothing about it.
‘What size shoes does he take?’ the Colonel asked, gesturing towards the Mayor. There was confusion. ‘I’m going to give him a pair of these boots’ – he tapped his army-issue boots a few times – ‘so he can go and kick the hospital director up the ass and tell him to start doing his job.’ Everyone laughed.
The Mayor suggested that he should get a shirt and tie, so he could do his job properly too.
‘You must not lose your character, your turban and your shalwar shameez (sic) you must not lose ...’, said the Colonel insistently, not realising that the Mayor had also been joking.
There were other problems. There were far more police on the payroll than actually existed. Some of those that did exist had been found setting up unofficial checkpoints where they taxed locals until they had enough money to get high. The British police officers (all six of them) who were training the ANP told me they had pulled up at one checkpoint to find a fifteen-year-old with an AK-47 in charge, while the actual policeman lay nearby in an opium-induced coma. Stories of young boys being abducted and raped were common. ‘Ninety per cent of crime in Helmand is committed by the police’, I was told by one of the British police mentors.
I followed Lieutenant Colonel Westley and the Mayor on a tour of Gereshk, the second-biggest town in Helmand. As our convoy pulled on to the main road, the top gunner put his hand in the air, stopping all oncoming traffic. ‘Dominate, dominate, dominate’, said one of the soldiers in the vehicle, ‘don’t let these fuckers in.’ As we drove on, all oncoming traffic was waved to the side of the road until we’d passed. The gunner waved furiously at every vehicle until it pulled off the road. ‘It’s just a measure against any vehicle-borne IEDs’, he said. ‘Sometimes we have to use mini-flares, which we fire a
bout ten feet in front of the vehicles. That generally does the trick.’
We pulled up to a two-storey, U-shaped structure that was going to be a police station. Lieutenant Colonel Westley was happy. ‘It looks like there’s some development going on here already’, he said energetically. Other projects had stalled because contractors had been intimidated. At least one had been murdered.
‘We are building a new jail too and soon a court’, said the Mayor.
‘This is really important stuff for what we call security sector reform’, said Westley. ‘You’ll have the police, the NDS, the police checkpoints, the jail and the courthouse in the same area. It means we can have a proper process of law.’
The NDS was established during the Russian occupation and modelled on the KGB. They had an awful reputation for torture and murder, often of tribal or drug-trafficking rivals. To describe them, the police and their checkpoints as a proper process of law was astounding.
Lieutenant Colonel Westley kept on talking and asking questions enthusiastically, as if he were being conducted on a tour of the Mayor’s brilliant development projects. He offered the Mayor a stage but the Mayor was not willing to take it and rarely even spoke. ‘And this fits in with our overall plan that we’re looking for in Gereshk, doesn’t it?’ asked the Colonel.
‘We need a fark too’, said Lucky the terp, translating what the Mayor said.
‘A fark? What’s a fark?’ asked the Colonel, baffled.
‘A fark, with grass and trees.’
‘A park, Lucky, with a P.’
The police station stood alone on a barren patch of ground. Inside, the contractor complained that he hadn’t yet been paid. We looked at a cluster of compounds in the distance. Most were hidden behind high grey walls but one seemed deliberately designed to ridicule the tradition of privacy. It rose high above its surrounding walls and was elaborately decorated, with brightly-coloured tiles and roof slates. It looked like a Chinese restaurant designed by Liberace.
‘Who owns that rather grand building over there?’ asked the Colonel.
‘It’s government land that we handed over to the people’, said the Mayor, wearily. Garish palaces like this one, often owned by drug lords were usually referred to as ‘narco-tecture’.
The Mayor had to be asked three times who owned the building.
‘Haji Amidullah’, he eventually said.
‘And what does he do?’
‘He’s a shopkeeper’, said the Mayor.
‘A very wealthy shopkeeper’, said Lieutenant Colonel Westley, looking at him cynically. There was a long pause.
‘He has much poppy’, the Mayor finally conceded.
‘Much poppy, interesting’, said Westley. ‘Are you going to show me where the park’s going to be?’
The Mayor pointed to a row of houses that had been flattened. ‘These people made a protest and complaint against me to the Governor. He moved me to Lashkar Gar and I was there for three months. When I came back, the people approached me and said they have no more problems.’ The obvious implication was that the houses had been demolished in retaliation for the protests but Lieutenant Colonel Westley didn’t press the point, perhaps thinking that things like that would stop once ‘security sector reform’ was complete.
‘It’s a really exciting future that you are driving here for the people of Gereshk’, said Lieutenant Colonel Westley. ‘The time is just right, now, Mayor Ali Shah. You have the people behind you. We’ll deal with the Taliban and keep them away. We can work with you but this is your vision. This is your ...’ He struggled to find the right word. ‘This is your thing that you are giving to Gereshk.’
We drove to the NDS headquarters, a row of rooms along the back wall of a yard that wasn’t fit for animals. Outside the gate – or rather the gap between two walls where there should have been a gate – lay a large pile of used hypodermic needles. A short old man, in police trousers pulled up above his huge belly by braces, walked up and stared at us, as if he wasn’t sure we were real. Even Lieutenant Colonel Westley’s enthusiasm was dimmed. It was, he said, ‘dire’. But he still believed it was possible to turn things around. ‘There is a firm belief that Afghanistan can be won. It isn’t by any means a hopeless cause. The people believe in us being here. And most of my soldiers, if they were honest, would say they would rather be in Afghanistan than Iraq. I think it has a future.’
* * * * *
Just north of Gereshk, the Brits had established a row of three small patrol bases on top of a Russian-built trench system that straddled the Green Zone, forming the only visible front line I’d seen in Afghanistan. Three days before I arrived, a car bomb had been detonated close to the patrol bases. When a motorcyclist got too close to the burning vehicle, he’d been shot dead. One of the soldiers admitted the man hadn’t been a suicide bomber and hadn’t been carrying weapons but he also said that he was probably up to no good anyway and may have been a dicker: a spotter for the Taliban. Anyone who stood and watched, especially someone with a mobile phone, was suspected of being a dicker. Most people stood and watched when convoys passed and many had mobile phones.
A few hours before I arrived, the ANA had seen a man creeping around in some nearby abandoned houses. They were well on the way to beating him to death when a British soldier intervened and told them to arrest the man and take him to the main base for questioning. They agreed. But then they dragged him a bit further away and, I was told, ‘no one was quite sure what happened after that’. The sentence was delivered with such an intentional lack of conviction that it was clear everyone knew exactly what had happened. I climbed up into a watchtower and asked the ANA soldier on guard what they had done with the man. He drew his finger across his throat and laughed.
Later, one British soldier told me that the man had been executed but another said he’d been taken to the nearest base and arrested. The soldiers were in an awkward position, eager to tell you what they knew but nervous about getting into trouble. The Ministry of Defence had a huge ‘Media Ops’ team who schooled soldiers in what to say. They issued ‘LTTs’: lines to take when speaking to journalists. You can soon recognise the LTTs within few words, especially on big issues like equipment, morale and civilian casualties. They are predictable and banal and most soldiers visibly flinched when they said them. Often, when the camera is off and the notepad is packed away, they’ll say: ‘and now I’ll tell you the truth’.
Jacko, a platoon sergeant from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, led me along the top of the old trenches. We looked into the green zone and its many hiding places. ‘It hasn’t been touched for twenty-five years’, he said. ‘The Paras and Marines didn’t push into it. No one’s been in there since the Russians.’ Jacko was typical of the Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) I met in Helmand province. Brave and honest, he couldn’t take himself too seriously even when he described the night he was shot in the back and was saved by a radio battery he was carrying.
I noticed a bayonet strapped to his body armour and asked, half jokingly, if he’d ever had to attach it. ‘It’s come to the point once or twice where we’ve had to fix bayonets’, he said, smiling, ‘because it’s been that close with the enemy.’
I sat down next to young private, Paserelli, who’d been keeping watch while Jacko and I spoke. He told me he’d lost two friends already, one nearby and another in Lashkar Gar. I asked if he thought the mission was worth dying for. ‘I don’t think it is, personally. Being out here is just a job. It doesn’t really feel right losing a mate to a country that, to be honest with you, I don’t really care about. It’s never had any effect on my life.’ His attitude had only changed when his friend was killed. ‘It gave me a bit of a boost, thinking “right, the fucking bastards have shot my mate, so we’re gonna go and get stuck in so he didn’t die for nothing”.’
In the few weeks I’d been in Helmand there had been increasing talk among the soldiers about a big operation that was coming up. Most of the battle group was about to enter the Green Zo
ne or block escape routes from it. Then, they had to not only clear it but to hold a large section, including several villages north of Gereshk.
Jacko and his men had a brief morale boost when four Mastiffs – huge bomb-proof trucks – arrived. The Mastiffs were as big, safe and expensive as the trucks the Americans drove. But when they realised the trucks only carried eight men, that only four (of the sixteen ordered) had arrived and that anyway, they were too big and heavy to be taken into the Green Zone, their spirits sank back. One of the soldiers whose tent I shared nicknamed the mission ‘Operation Certain Death’. My legs and genitals felt hopelessly fragile as I constantly imagined how easily they could be separated from my body if I stepped on an IED.
Simon Butt was the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Company Commander; a bear of a man who looked like he’d just played a series of particularly tough rugby matches. Simon told me that RPGs, mortars and bullets weren’t a major worry, because you can do something about them. But everyone feared the IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which were scattered over the Green Zone. He’d also had intelligence reports about five suicide bombers – two Afghans and three Pakistanis – thought to be walking around Gereshk wearing explosive belts.
Simon had already lost a few men but as Company Commander, couldn’t be seen to grieve. He said that had to wait until he got home. And when he did, the first thing he had to do was meet the families of his men who had been killed. When Simon spoke, his eyes didn’t leave mine for a second and I don’t remember seeing him blink. He said there were teenage soldiers in his company, on their first tour of duty, who had already killed twenty men. That, he said, is called ‘growing up fast’.