Someone shouted, ‘Incoming’. We all fell on one knee and put our chins on our chests. But whatever it was didn’t explode. We ran to the last compound, which had much higher walls than the others. A rickety-looking ladder stood against one wall and a door led in to a field, beyond which were the trees from where we were being attacked. Everyone looked confused. No one wanted to be the first through the door, because they would be an easy target for the as-yet-unseen enemy.
Funke marched to the middle of the courtyard. ‘Gents, listen up. They are waiting for us to expose ourselves in front of this tree-line. I need a three-man position on the outside of this corner. I need a three-man position on the outside of that corner. I need two marines at the door and one person doing over-watch on this fucking ladder. It does you no good being inside. This is what you wanted. You fucking got it. Now go get it.’
Lance Corporal Gomez, a dark-skinned Ecuadorian, was ordered up the ladder first, because he was carrying a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), a bigger machine gun than everyone else’s. He climbed the ladder very slowly, fully expecting it to collapse under his weight. Carefully, he eased his head above the wall. I asked him if he could see anything.
‘I see weed, man.’ There was a huge field of marijuana on the other side of the wall. ‘I want to jump in. But I see nothing else.’
Suddenly, he did see something. He started firing, showering me with dozens of hot bullet cases. Three or four other marines started firing, although asked for an exact location, all they could say was ‘on the tree-line’, which we had known from the beginning.
Gomez fired a grenade. ‘Come on baby, hit, hit.’ He stared at the trees, so desperate to be on target that it looked like he’d be in physical pain him if he weren’t. I heard the grenade explode on the far side of the field. He fired another but the grenade launcher came away from his gun: ‘Motherfucker’. The marines around us kept firing. Funke ordered some through the door and into a ditch in the field. I ran after them, not realising until I jumped to the ground that it was just ploughed earth, not a ditch. A small bird could have pushed the furrows aside to get a worm. It certainly wouldn’t stop bullets. The mud was so hot it burnt my elbows. Either side of me, marines looked through their sights at the trees hiding our attackers. They couldn’t see any movement. Neither could I.
‘They’re in that tree line next to the building just in front of us?’ I asked the marine to my left.
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
‘Asking’, I said, startled that he might actually listen to what I had to say. I ran back inside.
Gomez, drinking water, wiped sweat from his face. ‘I love this shit, this is what I re-enlisted for. Four deployments now, you can’t keep me down.’
A few marines sheltered in the narrow slice of shade offered by the wall of the compound’s one room. ‘If I move I’m gonna pass out’, said Staff Sergeant Paz, wobbling. Some marines went inside and sat down. One, with a startled look on his face, started vomiting. It looked like his stomach was being pumped but nothing but pasty water came out. He vomited three times, took a deep breath, and jumped to his feet, strapping on his helmet. ‘Let’s go, y’all. Let’s go, Bravo, GET ON YOUR FEET, LET’S GO.’
‘You sure?’ his platoon commander asked.
‘I got it.’ The two men bumped fists and marched outside. ‘Let’s go, gentlemen. ON YOUR FEET. FUCK THESE BITCHES.’
But the battle was over. Our attackers had either been killed – at least three marines claimed to have hit them – or fired everything they had and vanished. The marines searched the trees but found neither blood nor bodies.
* * * * *
The marines continued to patrol daily but the Taliban remained invisible. ‘This is some Vietnam shit’, said Bunch. ‘Most of the time it’s like we’re getting shot at by bushes.’
In the middle of another patrol, everyone settled down for a quick nap in a house they had just cleared. On the walls, children’s drawings showed fighters firing AK47s.
‘A fucking little kid drew a picture of his dad shooting down a fucking helicopter. These people are amazing. This country never ceases to amaze me. I drew pictures of my dad driving his truck to work, not shooting a fucking helicopter’, said one marine.
‘This one got shot down’, said another, laughing. He’d found a drawing of a grounded helicopter lying on its side. ‘Sick bastards, man. Dude, have you even seen anyone that lives here? They’re like hippies, because of all the pot. Except they’re not liberalish, they’re like, extremist. But they smoke a lot of weed. They should relax and be like the hippies. No war! Just peace!’ He let his head drop, leaving his fingers in a V-sign in the air.
On another patrol, I was with PFC Janos Lutz when we found a huge field of weed. ‘Wow! That is by far the biggest pot field I’ve seen.’ Lutz was just twenty-one but already, he’d done a tour of Iraq and time in prison for assault. Lutz was downbeat when I spoke to him. He’d been allowed to use the company sat-phone to call home. During the pep talk before the operation, Echo Company had been told that ‘the world is watching’ but the people on the other end of the phone didn’t know there had been any fighting.
‘Our families know what’s going on. People in the military know, but the general population doesn’t. America’s not at war, America’s at the mall’, Lutz said, visibly angry. ‘No one fucking cares. It’s “what’s up with Paris Hilton now? Britney Spears fucking this ...” The average American doesn’t fucking know when people die over here.’
Bunch agreed. ‘There’s no way people back home could understand what this country is like. It’s like every day, we get shot at. I finally got to make a phone call today, expecting it to be like “Oh, I miss you so much” and all kinds of stuff. No. I call home and it’s “everything’s fine, I’m partying, having a good life down here”. Doesn’t even ask me how I’m doing. That’s when I realised that people don’t give a shit about what we’re doing here. No one even really mentions 9/11 any more. To me, that’s the whole reason I’m over here, that’s why I went to Iraq, why I joined the Marine Corps. Now we’re here and I really don’t know why.’
A marine stroked a small bush with his gloved hand. ‘Look at this fucking thing, it’s nothing but thorns. It’s just angry. It literally has no function except to cause pain. Everything in this country is just so fucking angry.’
I asked if this still felt like the ‘War on Terror’, even though the phrase was no longer used. Some of the marines were just eleven or twelve years old on 9/11. Some said it did. ‘There are three thousand reasons why, three thousand names who aren’t with us any more. And the fucks who did that are here.’ But the younger they were, the less clear they became. One private, who had signed up exactly a year before, five days after his eighteenth birthday, said, ‘I guess ... I don’t know. Where I was, the economy wasn’t good, you couldn’t get a job, my stepdad was suffering, had a hard time finding a job. I knew this was a good organisation, regular pay check, they take care of you. Sitting here now, I’m helping my parents out a lot.’ His pay was just over twenty thousand dollars a year.
One of Echo Company’s captains, Eric Meador, believed he was still fighting Al-Qaeda but more important, ‘we abandoned these people after the Russians pulled out, just like we abandoned the Iraqis after we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait. So we owe it to them to help now.’ He told me about an Iraqi woman who had approached him a few tours ago, holding a child who had Down’s Syndrome. She screamed at him, saying he had let Saddam gas the Shiites after the uprising of 1991 and now her baby was like this. He said he’d never forget her; he’d never seen anyone so angry and he understood why.
There were marines who genuinely wanted to help the Afghans but even the strongest sense of moral obligation couldn’t make someone do more than they are capable of. I didn’t understand how the policy could succeed. Of the twenty-one thousand extra men Obama had sent into Afghanistan, only four thousand were actually fighting to provide security. The rest were in
secluded and isolated bases, in supporting roles. Even in Mian Poshteh, the latest focus for massive resources and manpower, control and reach was extremely limited. As one senior marine confided, ‘we only control as far as we see’.
Before I left Echo Company, I sat with the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss, and asked what he thought his marines could achieve.
Killing the Taliban, he said, was ‘almost irrelevant’. What I’d seen in Mian Poshteh may have been the ‘end of the beginning but it wasn’t actually that decisive’. What would be decisive was good counter-insurgency, which Cabaniss was evangelical about. While I was waiting for the convoy to Mian Poshteh, he’d gone out of his way to discuss it with me, before one of his men politely told him he had more important business to attend to. Counter-insurgency – COIN – as it was known in Helmand, had become a verb. ‘I’m gonna coin the shit out of these people’, said one engineer, heading out to work on an irrigation project.
Cabaniss thought that only now were there enough troops on the ground to apply it properly. ‘Some places here, they had seen brief periods where the British had come into their villages and left. Where we went, we were going to stay. And that’s where we start to gain some trust from the local population. They’ll start talking to us and telling us about things that are going on in their community. I think in the past they have not wanted to say anything to anybody, out of fear.
‘I don’t like the term “hearts and minds”, because most people don’t understand it but their heart is ... they have to believe it’s in their best interests to be on the side of the government of Afghanistan. Their mind is ... they know we’re going to win. They can’t sit on the fence any more. We’re not going to build Jacksonville, North Carolina in the next six months but I think we can expect to have sustainable progress. The people connected to the government, the government connected to the people, they work together in common cause to bring tangible progress. Not shove the Taliban out completely but marginalise them. Where most of the locals look at them as common criminals, people that are just disturbing the peace.’ During an earlier conversation, he had described this as ‘armed social work’.
I said that over two years ago British officials had said exactly the same things, and yet the Brits had just suffered their worst month so far and the Taliban were stronger than they had been since being overthrown.
‘The Brits had a good understanding of what was going on down here but they never had enough combat power to do what they would like to do and sustain it over time. My battalion taking over, we’re obviously just a little bit larger, we’ve been able to position forces all over the central Helmand river valley and really get out among the people. They just didn’t have the capability to do it right.’
I said that while it was obvious the Taliban couldn’t win a military victory, why couldn’t they keep laying ever-more-sophisticated IEDs and taking pot-shots for years to come, costing lives, billions of dollars and eventually bleeding all the foreign forces dry?
‘If we can take a deep hold, in the areas that we’re in, by wintertime the Taliban are going to be on their heels, sitting in Pakistan, wondering what to do next. And we’ll have the people.’ He smiled as if this had already been achieved. ‘Once the people decide they won’t tolerate the Taliban’s presence, there’s no way they can stay.’
I asked if this was the new way America fought wars.
‘Not tooting the Marine Corps horn but before General Petreaus went to Iraq, the Marine battalions in Al Anbar [a province in Iraq, where many marines believe COIN was first successfully applied] had already come to the conclusion that working closely with the local population, building relationships with them, had a greater impact on security than going street to street and shooting did. We learnt that the hard way in Iraq and we’re starting the right way in Afghanistan.’
These levels of faith in COIN were new in Afghanistan. Many Americans had become converts in Iraq, where they thought it had worked. One of the COIN bibles was David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, which I read at FOB Delhi, frequently interrupted by officers telling me what an amazing book it was. The rise to prominence of the ‘COINistas’ – now shaping Afghan policy – was no less momentous than the rise of the neo-cons ten years earlier.
I waited two days for a helicopter ride to Camp Bastion, which had expanded to include Bastion 2 and Camp Leatherneck, the Marine Corps base. One soldier had been told the camp would eventually include Bastions 15 and 16. I had another three-day wait before I could fly to Kabul and I bumped into some Afghan interpreters I’d met on the way out. Many had become American citizens when their families had fled either the Russian invasion or the Taliban. When I told one Hazara man, paid just $700 a month, what I’d seen, he said: ‘Man, the Americans are being too soft down there. They need to go into the villages and say “if we see one Taliban here or if you help them once, we’ll flatten every building”. The problems would end that day.’
US MARINE CORPS
FEBRUARY TO MARCH, 2010
1ST BATTALION
6TH MARINES
The operation by four thousand US Marines in southern Helmand had proved that a small area can be made relatively secure when flooded with troops. The numbers needed to apply the same tactics across the country were far beyond what was available.
Things continued to get worse; October 2009 was the deadliest month of the war yet. Even General McChrystal said that there would be complete failure unless the ‘serious and deteriorating’ conditions were not changed. He referred to the current policy as ‘Chaos-istan’, which would leave the country as a ‘Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from the outside’.
His solution was more troops. President Obama was lobbied hard to approve a ‘surge’, to replicate what had happened in Iraq. After a lengthy review, the President agreed on a new policy, and thirty-three thousand additional troops, for Afghanistan.
Talk of liberating the women of Afghanistan and creating a democracy had evaporated. The new policy had three, far more modest, objectives: deny Al-Qaeda a safe haven; reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government; and strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government, so that they could take the responsibility for the country’s future.
I learned that when the first of the new troops arrived, ‘the big one’ was going to happen. ‘The big one’ was a long-rumoured assault on Marjah, a farming district in Helmand that had become a Taliban stronghold. The assault would be led by the US Marines, the first of the additional troops to arrive. The world – and America’s enemies – were to be shown that the new policy could work; the Taliban could be removed, the population could be won over, the Afghans could secure their country themselves and we could leave.
Because I worked alone, was able to keep up, stuck around for longer than a day or two and carried everything I needed on my back, the Marines asked if I wanted to join them. This was the biggest military operation since the war had begun; one of the biggest stories of my career. I thought I’d be rewarded for my persistence and bombarded with offers. I contacted all the BBC executives I knew but was completely ignored. BBC America showed some interest but at the last minute, someone I’d never heard of went out of his way to prevent me from going. No one was willing to tell me why or even to talk to me. I simply heard a rumour that my trip had been ‘red-carded’ and that was that.
During my best friend’s stag weekend in Copenhagen, I got a phone call from the Marines: the invasion of Marjah had been brought forward. I needed to get there immediately. I had no chance of getting a commission at such short notice. I either had to pass up this chance, wasting months of work, or go out there on my own, without backing, insurance or funding.
I might have been making the biggest mistake of my life but I couldn’t say no. I said an awful goodbye to my friends, got the next plane back to London, borrowed or hired everything I needed and headed back to Afghanistan.
There was every chance I could come back in debt, without a film, without legs, or worse. But I had to see America’s latest – and probably last – attempt to win the war in Afghanistan.
For me, Operation Mushtaraq began with a bus ride to a giant sandpit. A model of Marjah had been created, with little piles of bricks for the landmarks. Marines moved around the model holding flags representing the different companies that would soon be invading. This was an ROC (Rehearsal of Concept) drill.
We began with recitations of verses from the Qur’an by Lieutenant Colonel Awal Abdul Salaam, of the Afghan National Army. Salaam, we were told, was a former Mujahadeen; ‘our secret weapon’, according to General Larry Nicholson, the Marines’ commander in Helmand. Salaam had a magnificent (dyed) black beard that reached almost to his belly button and his eyes were rimmed with thick black kohl eyeliner. ‘Trust me’, said General Nicholson. ‘You don’t wanna mess with this guy.’ Later that night, in the tent we shared, I caught him going through someone’s backpack. I didn’t tell anyone about his pilfering but he soon vanished. He’d either been exposed as a fraud or fled as soon as he heard what was happening. Several marines said he’d begged them for a seat on the next helicopter out as soon as the ROC drill was finished. That ought to have been a sign.
The recital finished, General Nicholson took over. His boxer’s face was craggy and lived-in; he’d been badly injured in a rocket attack in Iraq in 2004, losing a large chunk of muscle from his back. A marine sitting at his desk, to repair his computer, had been killed. I didn’t know whether the general had been happy since surviving that attack, whether he was always happy or if he was just happy leading marines into battle. But on that day he looked ecstatically happy. The certainty with which he spoke clearly delighted him.