A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (21 page)

The Taliban's ultimate goal, she told me, had always been control of Kandahar – the movement's birthplace and the Pashtun spiritual home. Everything the enemy did had to be seen in this light. There were many lines of approach to the city. Helmand was only one of them, and not necessarily the most obvious, which was from the north through the valley of Arghandab rather than from the west. It was significant that the critical battle against the Taliban in 2006, Operation Medusa, was fought not in Helmand but at Panjwayi, barely twenty miles from Kandahar.

Chayes's point was that even before the British conceived the development triangle, they were guilty of 'Helmandcentricity'. The reason, she thought, was the way the south was divided up among the Coalition's willing nations. As a Western military organization, Nato naturally liked to use maps in its planning, and so assigned each of its member armies a neatly delineated province to control. The Taliban, however, neither thought nor fought in such basic cartographical terms – which was perhaps unsurprising, given that Afghanistan's provincial and indeed national boundaries had almost all been imposed by nineteenth-century colonialists in the first place, notably the British. From a strategic point of view, Chayes thought, ISAF would have done better from the outset to concentrate its operations along and to the east of the Helmand river valley, an area that crossed the boundaries of three provinces – Dutch Oruzgan, Canadian Kandahar and British Helmand – with the all-important Kajaki reservoir and hydro-electric dam at its centre.

The dam's significance was not missed by the inhabitants of Kandahar city, fifty miles to the south-east; they had depended on it for their power supply for more than thirty years. In early 2007, according to Chayes, a rumour that the workers responsible for maintaining the cable link had been threatened by the Taliban caused panic in the bazaars. Despite this, ISAF seemed, at least to the inhabitants of Kandahar, to give little military priority to protecting the dam. Instead, as reports of the fighting made increasingly clear, the British had committed themselves to fighting the Taliban in district centres further to the west, places of little immediate relevance to the worried inhabitants of the city. In truth, the British did understand the importance of the dam. In mid-June they succeeded in destroying two enemy mortar teams which had been attacking the area; they later established a permanent garrison. In the course of operations in the district, a British soldier was killed and six were seriously injured, several of them in one horrific incident when a patrol strayed into an unmarked minefield. But the fact remained that the battle group was never able to spare more than about forty personnel to protect the dam – the asset that Governor Daoud had called Afghanistan's 'national treasury' – let alone the vast area surrounding it. It was not until January 2007 that the Royal Marines made a concerted effort to control the district, fighting village by village and compound by compound to establish a two-mile security perimeter. By then, of course, the assaults on the other district centres had diminished with the deepening of winter; and the Marines had more troops and resources at their disposal than Stuart Tootal's battle group ever had.

If Britain's early strategists were guilty of 'Helmandcentricity', they were not the only ones. The fighting in the province was eventually so well publicized that the British public, too, tended to forget that it was only one province among many, in a country whose affairs were inextricably linked to those of its neighbours, particularly Pakistan. Helmand's leading role in the opium industry made the province look more important than, strategically, it really was. Back at home, the poppy question was constantly used to justify Britain's military sacrifices in Helmand, the source of up to half of the country's vast output of opium. This was unsurprising, given that the troops on the ground often did the same. 'I go back to England, I live in the city of Birmingham where the heroin problem is outrageous – and ninety per cent of it comes from here,' Fusilier Matt Seal told me. The truth, as General Richards explained, was that counter-narcotics was a highly emotive red herring. 'It was never on the Army's agenda. It isn't even within the Nato O-plan! All the nations signed up to this . . . Counter-narcotics is not a specified [ISAF] task. All it says is, "Within means and resources, as a secondary task, you can help." But in practice, given we're all so stretched, you don't. Now, we tried to do a bit, but . . . it was never even in our remit to do it.'

It was, however, within the Foreign Office's remit, and it was on this issue that the hollowness of the comprehensive approach was most starkly revealed. Britain was the G8 leader on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. Policy was implemented through the embassy in Kabul by ADIDU, the government's Afghan Drugs Inter-Departmental Unit, which was set up 'very much in response to Tony Blair's personal interest in the Afghan drugs issue', according to Minna Jarvenpaa. But despite this prime ministerial influence, the Coalition partners were never able to agree on a counter-narcotics policy in Helmand. The US advocated an aggressive policy of forced eradication, using aerial crop-sprays if necessary; ADIDU preferred the slower approach of providing farmers with alternative livelihoods. Compensation schemes of various types had been tried in the past, though with very mixed success, and remained another source of controversy. Buzzing on the sidelines was the mysteriously well-funded NGO Senlis which wanted, apparently with the support of General Richards himself, to convert Afghanistan into the world's premier supplier of licit opium for the manufacture of medicinal morphine.

Karzai dithered between all these options, understandably uncertain whom to listen to. Meanwhile, the British military warned that any assault on the crop that underpinned Helmand's economy would inevitably set back the campaign for hearts and minds. The Taliban, adeptly presenting themselves as the doughty defenders of poor farmers' interests against the treacherous infidel, were already far ahead of the Coalition in the propaganda race. In 2007 a row developed when it emerged that British troops had handed out leaflets in Pashto designed to assure the disbelieving locals (most of whom couldn't read them anyway) that poppy eradication formed no part of British plans. Confusion ruled.

'During the planning the military were aware that the counter-narcotics issue would be really difficult to handle, and were trying to get away from it being one of its mainstream tasks,' said Jarvenpaa. 'What didn't happen, but should have, was a policy discussion at ministerial level at Whitehall, about what it means to be trying to do counter-narcotics and COIN [counter-insurgency] at the same time; and I'm not sure it's good enough for generals to say, "Well, the Foreign Office is doing something" when it was agreed by all ministers that counter-narcotics was part of a
joint
UK strategy.'

'It's tragic, I agree,' Richards said. 'It wasn't joined up at all. What Whitehall doesn't realize is that you can be as joined up at home as you like, but if you're not joined up in theatre, you count for nothing. If you're only playing with yourself, no one's interested.'

'I am not sure we were that joined up at home,' said Mark Etherington, the leader of the PCRU planning team. 'Tensions often exist in any cross-departmental planning process, and not all can be resolved. Things get left out or left over because they don't "fit", don't match departmental tasks. Important questions for Helmand remained. How, exactly, were we to satisfy the twin imperatives of a counter-drug strategy and economic regeneration, when opium was the province's major industry? What was our communications strategy to be? How were we to disseminate our core message in a province half the size of the UK, where seventy per cent of the population is illiterate? These questions were asked at the time, but there was no obvious address for them, no door marked "over-arching UK interests". I am not sure they were ever tackled. Damaging gaps were left where the roof should have been. I have always felt we ought to be able to do better than that. You have to wonder whether we are properly configured for this kind of broad effort. I was concerned at the time that we had fudged some of these issues. It reminded me of that Walpole quote about eighteenth-century public enthusiasm for the war with Spain – "They now ring the bells, but they will soon wring their hands." We just seem to drift into these wars with such insouciance.'

It wasn't only the British who were at fault. The UK Plan for Helmand was only one plan among many that were hatched for the region. The Americans, the Canadians and the Dutch all had their own ideas about how to proceed. As Brigadier Butler pointed out, the real problem was that there was no single, unifying campaign plan that all those involved were prepared to sign up to, 'no unity of command, and little unity of effort', as he put it. 'Most importantly, the Afghans themselves had no plan to resolve their own insurgency . . . Too many stakeholders failed to recognize that this was an Afghan problem that would require an Afghan solution, delivered with an Afghan face and at an Afghan pace.'

Why were the British military assigned Helmand in the first place? The process by which this decision was made was a mystery even to General Richards. Britain's anti-narcotics role within the G8, he said, 'probably' had much to do with it. 'They thought, "What a good idea, we'll deal with the province with the biggest narcotics problem." ' Minna Jarvenpaa thought that 'a lot of British foreign policy was set around domestic consumption: heroin ending up on British streets' – although she wasn't sure, either. 'My sense is that the decision to go to the south wasn't because of drugs and therefore Helmand. It was more to do with Nato's needing to take on the south, and then which nation should do it – and there were only a few nations volunteering.'

Even so, it was never a done deal. In fact, when Richards was ordered to start the military planning for southern Afghanistan in 2005, he secured an agreement – or so he thought – by which the British would take charge of Kandahar. His rationale was threefold. First, like Sarah Chayes, he understood the political and symbolic significance of the Pashtun capital. Second, the British already had an armed presence in Kandahar, a squadron of Harriers at the military airfield. Deploying there would ensure 'a strong fulcrum' between him in Kabul and the British command in Kandahar. Third, compared to Canada and the Netherlands – the only other two nations offering to send significant numbers of troops to southern Afghanistan – Britain's Task Force was always going to be the strongest. Canada's armed forces, according to Richards, were geared more to peace-keeping than to war-fighting. 'They're fine, and I've huge respect for them, but they haven't got any helicopters . . . at that stage they were still coming to terms with what you need to fight quite an intense conflict and run the region.'

Despite this, it was Canada and not Britain that ended up with Kandahar. 'After a meeting held by MoD officials in Ottawa with their Canadian counterparts, we were told the Canadians had asked to do Kandahar, and that we would go to a place called Helmand. And I thought, "Where's Helmand? That's not very important. Kandahar is what matters." And I've never yet had a good reason given me why that decision was taken.' Richards was convinced that if the Canadians had been assigned Helmand instead of the British, everything could have been different. 'They [the Canadians] would have gone slower at it than the somewhat over-energetic, rather macho approach the British took – partly with little alternative, given their troop numbers – and then you could have had a calmer and perhaps healthier situation. The British, with superior numbers and more development cash available, would have been in the province that mattered the most, and which was not so complicated by the opium issue. And you would have avoided the Maiwand thing.'

His reference was to the Battle of Maiwand of 1880, when a brigade under General George Burrows was driven back from the banks of the Helmand river by a force under Ayub Khan, resulting in almost a thousand British killed. The victory was Pyrrhic, since Khan lost even more dead, although the fact was conveniently forgotten by Afghans. Maiwand was still remembered as a famous win, and remained deeply entrenched in local folklore. According to the journalist Christina Lamb, when the Paras moved into Camp Price outside Gereshk in May 2006 and their commander held his first
shura
, it took the elders only ten minutes to bring up 'the Maiwand thing'.

It was typical of Afghans to talk about 'the time of the British' as though it were yesterday. A strong oral tradition meant that the nation's sense of history was often strangely compacted. Fact was routinely intertwined with myth. Also, the physical legacy of wars long ago had a unique tendency to linger in the Afghan landscape, serving as a constant reminder of past martial glories that could only encourage the story-telling habit. The country is dotted with the wrecks of Russian tanks and the poignant remains of nineteenth- century British forts. In 1998, in the Panjshir Valley, I once came across a teenager out shooting ducks with a huge muzzle-loading musket. On inspection the gun turned out to be a relic of the First Afghan War. The polished steel side-plate was even engraved with the British royal crest and the legend 'VR 1840'.

The British knew that their deployment to Helmand risked provoking the locals. Every Pashtun in the province claimed that his forefather had fought for Ayub Khan. The Task Force even contained elements of the same regiments that had fought in the 1880 campaign, such as the Royal Horse Artillery, which was at Maiwand, and the Gurkhas, who marched from Kabul to avenge them. In view of Helmand's history, a task force from almost any other nation in the world would have been a more appropriate choice for a mission intended to conquer hearts and minds. Instead, to the Afghan mind, the return of the Brits looked like an Allahdriven invitation to a punch-up, round four of a conflict between two nations that had been at it intermittently for 170 years. Even some British soldiers were susceptible to the romantic notion of carrying on the business begun by their forefathers – Leo Docherty, for instance, who freely acknowledged that he was re-enacting the spirit of the Raj with his horseback journey to Khiva. ('That's the general idea,' he said. 'That's my thing.') Concerns about the legacy of Maiwand were raised by Richards at the early planning stage, but the decision to send the British to Helmand had already been taken, and it was out of his hands.