I waited with the soldiers for ninety minutes, until a battered coach arrived to take us across the base to the huge warehouse, RSOI-5, where soldiers in transit slept. It looked like a factory farm. Hundreds of neatly-arranged and tightly-packed old metal bunk beds, holding two dirty mattresses each, were lined in rows under bright, naked lightbulbs. The bunks squeaked so loudly and disproportionately that calling it a ‘dormitory’ seemed a cruel joke. Soldiers arrived, left, or fidgeted in the heat, creating a constant chorus of frog-like croaks and squeaks that made it impossible to sleep unless you were exhausted, which most were.
The next day, as I queued for food outside one of the three huge ‘scoff tents’, a soldier told me that we were achieving nothing, it was not our fight, just Blair sucking up to Bush. He claimed this was the majority view. He said he spent every day and every night counting down the time until he went home. Most of the soldiers deployed to Afghanistan never leave the safety of bases like Camp Bastion.
It was my third stay in Bastion and I was beginning to understand how the soldiers felt. I needed a ride to Sangin, to rejoin the Grenadier Guards but there were so few transport helicopters that it took five days to complete a journey that could be driven in forty minutes. The road to Sangin couldn’t be used because it had been dotted with IEDs. It was no different for the soldiers, unless they were wounded. Even those going home on leave had to wait for days on end and those days weren’t added to their time.
There was nothing to do while I waited except try to avoid the heat. This was almost impossible, because the air-conditioning in the tents didn’t work. One Naafi, with a dry bar and a small supermarket, served the entire base. Its generator could only power half of the building so the bar never opened. In the supermarket, drinks didn’t stay in the fridge long enough to get cool. The only magazines on sale were lads’ mags, the gossip weekly Heat and for some reason, Bizarre, which is an odd mix of porn and gore, mostly real. There was lots of excitement when a double-decker Pizza Hut bus arrived one day. When it eventually opened, some soldiers came down with salmonella poisoning and it was immediately closed.
When I finally got a seat to Sangin, I found myself next to a military policeman, there to train the ANP. He had just sacked two men who had been caught smoking opium once too often and was on his way from a base he’d found being guarded by a twelve-year-old, in uniform, with a machine gun. I told him I was filming with the OMLT and he asked how long the soldiers thought it would take to train the ANA. Ten years, I replied. How long it would take to train the police, I asked? ‘Double that, at least’, he replied, seriously.
I was dropped at the Sangin District Centre, the base that had been used by the Paras and Royal Marines when they first arrived. They had suffered almost constant attack and had barely been able to leave the base. Instead, they had spent their time on the roof of the Centre’s highest building, firing everything they had. The view from that roof suggested that winning the people over would be impossible. Barely a single building stood. The few walls that remained upright were pocked with bullet-holes and bombed-out metal containers littered the floor of the wadi.
Destruction, I said to Major David, still seemed to be happening far more than reconstruction. ‘It’s a long process’, he replied. ‘It’s going to take years. But we’ve got the will and the locals seem to have the patience, so it should be a success.’ Everyone said the Taliban had been routed from Sangin. I asked if they could come back. ‘I don’t think so; they are reeling from the operations we’ve conducted against them and they’re low on morale.’
I followed Major David to a shura, where a young and nervous soldier from the Royal Engineers gave a presentation to a hundred or so local elders. She started by announcing that the rubbish had been cleared from the bazaar. To be fair, in her photograph, Sangin’s dusty bazaar did look to be free of litter. She then said that funds had been approved for a tractor to keep clearing the bazaar, that the Americans had put up street lights, that irrigation ditches had been dug, two electricity transformers had been provided, a school would soon be refurbished and funds had been approved for ten more wells, in addition to the ten that had already been dug. ‘All this in the last three months’, she said to the elders, expecting a reaction. They looked at her blankly, nonplussed. Even with the massively inflated prices the contractors would have charged for these projects, they were nowhere near the cost of a Javelin missile or two.
When the locals got their chance to speak one man said this was the eighteenth shura he’d been to. He’d heard it all before and nothing ever appeared. ‘The promises made by the government have not been met. First we need water, then schools, then clinics. The government needs to help us. We are hungry and our land is drying up.’ Others complained that their homes were being damaged during fighting, which the rich could flee but the poor couldn’t. They also said the reconstruction projects only benefited the few who heard about them. Ninety per cent of funds were spent in district centres, leaving the countryside, where eighty per cent of Afghans live, free for the Taliban. They found it easy to convince the local people that the Afghan Government and the foreign troops had done nothing for them.
A group raised their arms and complained that their opium had been seized. Major David stood up to speak. ‘The Governor of Helmand’s policy is that significantly large amounts of drugs will be confiscated by the counter-narcotics police. He understands that in some compounds there will be one or two bags. Those will probably be ignored. But in this case there was over half a tonne of opium in one compound.’ He looked at the men in front of him, naturally expecting to see some guilt on their faces. Instead, their expressions of outrage became more pronounced, as if to say, ‘Exactly – half a tonne! How dare you take so much?’ Major David continued: ‘All inquiries about this must be addressed to the counter-narcotics police in Lashkar Gar. We have the phone numbers for them. This is a subject that is completely beyond the control of any of the people here today.’ As Major David wrote down the number, the men leapt up and scrambled towards the front table. It was the first time I’d seen enthusiasm from the crowd and the first time I’d seen drug producers chasing the authorities they were supposed to be running from.
The soldier standing next to me whispered in my ear: ‘They’ll probably get it all back too, we can’t piss the drug lords off; they aren’t against us yet.’ Others told me they were under orders to ignore opium finds of fewer than sixty kilograms; some said all opium finds. There were many stories about people with government connections being left well alone.
The Taliban had successfully banned opium-farming when they were in power, yet now earned significant amounts from it. They curried favour with the local people by protecting their crops, helping smugglers and offering poor farmers loans against the following year’s harvest; thus establishing exactly the kind of long-term relationship the British sought.
Helmand’s 2006 harvest was forty-nine per cent up on the previous year. That had beaten the previous year’s record, making Helmand the world’s biggest single producer of illicit drugs, outdoing entire countries like Colombia and Burma. There was supposed to be an alternative crops policy but other than a lone mint farmer who lived just outside Lashkar Gar – journalists were often taken to see him – fields of opium and stacks of harvested poppy were everywhere.
As the shura ended an Afghan policeman handed out leaflets with pictures of a dirty-looking Taliban fighter on one side and a handsome Afghan soldier on the other. ‘I’m telling them to help these guys’, he said, pointing to the soldier, ‘and FUCK these guys.’ He pointed to the Taliban and burst out laughing.
After the shura, I caught up with Jack Mizon and Ryan Lloyd and followed them to Tangiers, a patrol base that used to be a madrasah. There, they discovered the ANA had been through their rooms, stealing nine dollars and their favourite porn magazine. They’d also pulled all their favourite porn pictures off the ‘morale wall’ and put them in the bin. After a blazing row, the ANA apologised pr
ofusely, promising it would never happen again. They spent the next hour building a pathetic wire gate across the corridor that separated their sleeping quarters from the Brits.
That night, as we finished some Afghan bread and a can of fizzy orange drink that an Afghan soldier had bought for us from the bazaar, an RPG exploded against the outside wall of the room we were sitting in, knocking us off our seats. It was followed by two or three more, then long bursts of gunfire from several different positions.
I ran outside behind Jack Mizon as he sprinted to one side of the base with a mortar. No enemy firing positions had been identified – it still seemed to be coming from all round – but Jack fired a few mortars over the wall anyway. Then he was ordered to get up on the roof and fire in exactly the opposite direction. The Taliban were firing from a hill-top house, which allowed them to shoot over the base’s high walls. Jack ran up on to the roof and was soon angrily firing an over-sized machine gun, pausing only to scream, ‘FUCK OFF’, at the house. By then, there didn’t seem to be much incoming fire. Whoever had fired had emptied whatever they had and disappeared. I could tell the ANA were also firing, because much of the tracer fire was going high into the air, over the top of the house. But the Brits also fired an awful lot, often not at a specific target.
I was left with the feeling I’d had in the Green Zone; much of Helmand was being used as a giant sports field, on which two groups of consenting adults fought. It was football hooliganism with guns. What everyone seemed to forget, despite the talk, was that Sangin was home to thousands of families.
* * * * *
After Sangin, I spent ten days in Lashkar Gar, with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) whose mission was to ‘facilitate reconstruction and development’. Their work was supposed to be a major plank of British policy but spending time with the PRT had also been a condition of my getting access to British troops.
After Sangin, it was surreal. Soldiers were allowed to wear flip-flops to ‘air their feet’ if they had been ‘in theatre’ but not otherwise. Certainly never in the scoff tent; a sign inside declared footwear offenders would be removed. Three more signs were stuck above three sinks, with eleven separate instructions on how to wash our hands. A special toilet was set aside for vomit and diarrhoea. Even when you found an ordinary cubicle and sat down for some peace and quiet, an entire page from Kellog, Brown and Root told you how to pull the chain and make sure it went all the way back up, to avoid flooding. Any civil servants leaving the base went under the protection of heavily-muscled private security guards from Armor-Group, whose weapons and armoured jeeps put the British Army’s wrecks to shame.
A big operation started the next night. British forces suffered an attack that went on into the following day. I was supposed to be going with the head of the PRT to a meeting with the provincial council but it was cancelled; the medical evacuation helicopters were too busy to collect us if we got blown up. A trip to a shura in Rahim Khalay, the first since the town had been taken from the Taliban, was cancelled because the helicopter had broken down. More than five hundred local elders had turned up for it. There was a chance the chopper could be repaired and we’d only be a few hours late but the shura was mortared and everyone told to go back to their offices.
David Slynn, the head of the PRT, managed to get to a provincial council meeting where elected local councillors told him the Taliban were hated and it was the perfect time to hit them. But, they said, local institutions were so corrupt that people still chose to side with the Taliban. They complained that development, human rights and democracy remained a dream. Beyond Gereshk, Lashkar Gar and Sangin, they said, nothing was done. There was no communication with local people and no aid had arrived. The provisional council, which was supposed to include at least one woman, appeared to be all-male. In fact, there was a woman member, who sat at the far end of a long table and wasn’t acknowledged. When she saw the surprise on my face when I spotted her, she smiled knowingly and nodded, as if to thank me for noticing but also to tell me there was nothing anyone could do.
Back at the base, as we sat down to dinner, news spread of a double suicide bombing in Gereshk. The bombers’ target was a high-ranking local official, probably the Mayor, but instead they had killed twenty people: six policemen and fourteen civilians.
Nine of the eleven PRT events I should have covered were cancelled for security reasons. The only other trip out of the Lashkar Gar base was a helicopter ride to the Sangin base, for a meeting with Major Martin David, another British officer, and the district governor, who soon left.
I walked across a small footbridge to the house occupied by the Grenadier Guards. A few men were washing in the river. They seemed glum, which surprised me, because their six-month tour had just a week to run. They asked me if I’d heard about Goolie, Lance Sergeant Adam Ball, a soldier I’d met briefly during my first trip. The Taliban had placed two IEDs behind a wall, then ambushed a patrol at the perfect point where they’d use the wall for cover. Goolie lost a leg, an ANA soldier lost both legs and an interpreter was killed, probably because he was crouching when the IEDs went off.
The soldiers were already more nervous than usual, so close to the end of their tour. Some were annoyed they had to go out at all. I asked Major David why they weren’t allowed to relax and see out their last few days in Helmand in safety. He said if he allowed them to do that, the enemy would take advantage of the freedom of movement that gave, and make life much more difficult for the soldiers who were about to take over. In the event, the last seven days of their tour passed without incident. But the Grenadier Guards paid a high price overall: two of Queen’s Company were killed and fifteen seriously injured.
I walked back across the bridge. The PRT meeting was still going on. Even without the security situation limiting their movement so much, I wondered how successful they could really be. Few members engaged with Afghans, spoke Pashtu or ever left the base. Their budget was about £25 million for the whole year, an amount the military often got through in a day. And they numbered just thirty people, including administrative staff, compared with almost eight thousand soldiers. There were rumours that Foreign Office staff had threatened not to renew their contracts in protest over the inadequate funding.
After the meeting, we visited a building site next to the Sangin District Centre, which would one day be a school. I asked if it would be mixed or just for boys. ‘There are small girls coming to this school’, said one of the Afghan officials. ‘But the older girls are scared of the Taliban ... when there is security every girl will come to this school.’ Inside, he explained why progress had been slow: ‘The Taliban threaten to kill contractors. When the security improves the contractors will be back.’
Despite everything, the British mission was still officially described as facilitating development and reconstruction, extending the authority of the Afghan Government and building security. It should have been described as struggling to stay alive. In 2007, the UN reported there had been a thirty per cent increase in violent incidents over the last year; averaging 550 a month. Suicide attacks had risen sevenfold. So it was no surprise that many local contractors were too scared to work on the few building projects that were under way. The Taliban permitted local NGOs to work if it was in ‘the national interest’, which begged the question of why the British soldiers were there at all. There hadn’t been an insurgency until they arrived. I asked Major David why there were foreign fighters in Helmand. ‘To fight us’, he said. So what would they do if you left? ‘They would probably leave too’, he replied.
For the soldiers, a six-month tour was hard enough, without wondering what impact they had had on the country. ‘There are parts of it that have been exhilarating in the extreme’, said Major David, who was later to receive the Military Cross. ‘There have been parts of it that have been terrifying. I think everyone has grown up. I’ve seen a lot of the lads mature out here.’ I asked what the tour had cost him personally. ‘The strains on our families have been extreme and
I’m grateful to my wife, to my children ...’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. His cheeks tightened above the corners of his mouth. After months of juggling too many responsibilities and emotions, he couldn’t do it any more. His head fell forward into his hands and he wept.
A few years later, I was able to ask him what he thought the British had achieved in Helmand. ‘We increased the secure zones in which the Afghan government could operate’, he told me. ‘We set the conditions for the spread of governance and redevelopment.’ But everything that was supposed to happen next hadn’t. The Afghan Government weren’t willing, able or even there to govern. And with the few experts and civil servants holed up in Lashkar Gar, governance and reconstruction was left to already over-stretched soldiers. ‘While the military forces achieved commendable results, it was all very amateur and slow. Too slow. As a result, we started not to garner support from the population. The local communities were pragmatic; they weren’t going to blindly back the new horse. They needed convincing but our words spoke louder than our actions.’ He was nervous about the future. ‘For the sake of those who have sacrificed life and limb I pray that the international community have the perseverance and courage to see it through to an appropriate conclusion. But time and the global financial crisis will not allow this to sit comfortably.’
US MARINE CORPS
JULY TO AUGUST, 2009
2ND BATTALION
8TH MARINES
Since the British had first entered Helmand in 2006, every year had been bloodier, and by every available indicator worse, than the previous. The British Army was at breaking point, regularly describing its experience in Helmand as being the most intense fighting it had seen since the Korean War.