A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (32 page)

When I saw Tom again at his barracks at Windsor in mid-2007, however, a stunning change had come over him. He was clearly a good and popular officer who had won the respect of his men in Helmand. A promising future with the Household Cavalry beckoned. Yet, eight months after Herrick 4, he had begun to talk about swapping his Army career for a new life in the City.

The catalyst for his apparent change of heart was his girlfriend, Katie. There were only so many times, he said, that he wanted to put her through an operational tour. General Dannatt's warning of 'a generation of conflict' had clearly resonated with him, too. I sensed that he also felt he had to a large extent 'proved himself' in combat now. In this he was like the young men described by the Fusilier doctor, David Baxter. The questions that lurk in every untried soldier's mind – How will I perform under fire? Am I brave enough to fight? – had been satisfactorily answered. It was natural if the lust for this kind of adventure was not as strong in him as it had been.

Small as it was, the part he had played in the celebrated operation to recover Bryan Budd's body had given him pause for thought. That mission had been an emergency; he readily accepted that Jamie Loden, the Para company commander, had no choice when he ordered a collection of mechanics, military policemen and Scimitar crews to step into the breach. What was disquieting was how common such desperate extemporizing had become during Herrick 4. Tom had heard countless examples of it, some of them amusing and harmless, such as nurses and chefs having to do sangar duty at Bastion, but others that were rather less so. At Sangin he had made friends with an engineer sergeant called 'Eddie' Edwards who, early on in the tour, had been ordered to guard the entire Kajaki dam area with a group of only a dozen men, who were then obliged to fend off an attack by thirty Taliban. Edwards had also taken part in the engagement near Forward Operating Base Robinson in June when Captain Jim Phillipson was killed.

'The team that Eddie went out with that night was a typical ensemble of anyone and everyone. It was a case of, "Who have we got? Do you want to go out?" "Yeah, OK, I'll do that . . ." Half an hour later Eddie was in a fighting withdrawal, fire-and-manoeuvring with a bloke he'd literally never met before, his life completely dependent on him . . . The next day in the dinner queue, after a night fighting their way back into camp, Eddie didn't even recognize him. This bloke goes, "Um, I think we worked together last night." And Eddie goes, "Oh, right! All right, mate? Do you want to go and have a cup of tea?"'

Tom loved that story. It perfectly illustrated the Army's famed 'can-do' spirit, of which he was proud and had often spoken. But the story was also troubling, because the sortie for which Edwards had volunteered could in no way be classified as an emergency. Its aim had been to recover one of the battle group's Desert Hawk surveillance drones which had crashed – a hand-launched, remote-controlled aircraft that was only three feet long. 'Phillipson died for one of those planes,' Tom said. 'They were always crashing. The battle group had sixty of them when we started but there were only four of them left by the time we finished.'

I had spoken to many soldiers who felt that Phillipson's death, the first of the tour, had been unnecessary. Some could not help but wonder what the point of so much sacrifice had been. For any officer in an armoured reconnaissance squadron, the carcasses of Soviet tanks and troop-carriers that dotted Helmand inspired a dreadful feeling of vulnerability. Parts of the destruction around the northern compounds were reminiscent of World War One photographs of Flanders. At Sangin, Tom's two battered Scimitars had fired over a thousand rounds of high explosive by mid- September alone. And for what?

During a lull in the fighting on 18 September, the Paras, accompanied by some Afghan National Army soldiers, felt confident enough to push a patrol across the Helmand river to the village of Do Ab. The usual promises of future peace and security made no impression on the elders they met there, who replied simply that their way of life was being wrecked. The elders attended a
shura
, a tribal council, at the compound the following day – the only one to be held in all of Tom's time at Sangin – where they begged the British not to return to Do Ab because they had been badly harassed by the Talibs overnight. Despite that, the Paras took encouragement from the meeting: at least the elders had turned up for it. But they were disabused later that day by two suspiciously accurate mortar and RPG attacks on the compound. The Taliban had infiltrated the
shura
in order to reconnoitre their target, just as they had at Now Zad.

Wrecking the lives of villagers was never what the mission to Helmand was supposed to be about. 'It's hard to say for sure, but it looks to me like the war between Islamic fundamentalism and the West is being fought in Afghanistan now, and it will be the local farmers and villagers who suffer the consequences,' said Tom. Herrick 4, he had found, was no longer spoken of very highly in Army circles, however bravely the Paras had fought. He had met soldiers from other regiments who shook their heads and muttered about the 'mess' left behind in Helmand that would take years to clean up. The fault, these critics said, was the lack of a clear strategy in the northern platoon-houses. Tom had passionately disagreed at first, but now grudgingly conceded the point. 'We were simply reacting to events on the ground,' he said.

His thinking appeared to have been influenced by a military history lesson about the SAS, picked up on a recent training course. Since their inception, and especially during counter-insurgency operations in Oman in the late 1950s and early 1970s, the SAS had developed a behind-the-lines modus operandi that seemed very pertinent now. Travelling in small units, they made a point of dropping in on elders, offering advice and support, making friends and building networks. On their patrols they tended to take along a doctor who would set up a free, snap health clinic for any local who was ill. The effect was dramatic: every parent of every cured child became an ally. The grateful villagers could also provide huge amounts of useful intelligence. A 'light footprint', the SAS had always insisted, was a far better counter-insurgency technique than the blunderbuss approach adopted during Herrick 4. But the clock could not be turned back; the days of light-footprint patrols were decisively over in Helmand. Instead, the British were apparently committed to escalating the war, and begging their unwilling Nato partners for support.

'I was shocked by the British troop number projections for 2008,' said Tom. 'Where are they all going to come from? Iraq, probably – battle weary, and not having had enough time to relax and get back to their families. Remember that the six months before a tour are just as busy as being out there . . . it can't be much fun banging out two on the trot.'

Like every regiment I had been to see, with the exception of the Gurkhas, the Household Cavalry were struggling to retain their talent. The Royal Armoured Corps was worryingly short of future squadron leaders. In normal times there was fierce competition for the twenty-eight training places available each year; by the end of 2007 only seventeen officers had applied for 2009. The outcome seemed inevitable: officers without the necessary experience or competence would be promoted too soon, and the HCR's usual high standards of leadership would drop. Officers like Tom were desperately torn between their loyalty to the regiment and the lure of a career outside the Army – a safer and less glorious life, perhaps, but one that offered more time for important things like girlfriends, as well as better prospects and pay.

Within weeks of his return from Helmand, Tom was learning to ride a horse. That autumn he found himself dressed as a nineteenth- century cuirassier for the state visit of Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia. The visit was controversial. The acting Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable boycotted the ceremony on the grounds of Saudi Arabia's 'appalling human rights record'; he also cited the Saudis' multi-billion-pound arms deal with the British firm BAe, and the row over alleged corruption surrounding it. Meanwhile, the King told an interviewer that his country had warned Britain about the '7/7' bombings in London in 2005, but that MI5 had failed to act on the intelligence (an accusation that was naturally denied).

Tom later showed me a photograph of himself peering out at London SW1 from under his magnificent red-plumed helmet, the sunshine glinting off his breast-plate and drawn sword as he clopped up the Mall, thirty yards ahead of Abdullah's carriage. A year earlier he had been fighting for his life against the co-religionists of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Britain's money-driven relationship with Saudi Arabia, it seemed to me, was every bit as confused and ambiguous as the international policy in Afghanistan.

8
The Royal Irish and the
Musa Qala Deal

By September 2006 it was clear that the battle group was reaching the end of its endurance, and that the platoon-house strategy could not be sustained. The Paras and all their reinforcing units were fixed in position across a large swathe of the province, and there was little sign of any let-up in the violence. The enemy seemed Hydra-headed. The garrisons had killed dozens and dozens of them, but they were always replaced and never seemed to give up. From intelligence gathered at Sangin and elsewhere, it was evident that few of the fighters now ranged against the British were from Helmand. The great majority were incomers from Pakistan. The infidel British were what worried senior officers had begun to describe as 'tethered goats' for any Muslim wishing to have a go at them, and the legions responding to the bait came from across a border where the battle group could not touch them. To many in the garrisons, the platoon-house strategy was now looking like a recipe for a long and perhaps unwinnable war.

In early September General Dannatt paid a visit to Afghanistan where he was warned that the threat to the Chinooks was becoming unacceptable. In Brigadier Butler's view, an 'immeasurable strategic shock to the overall campaign' was now likely every time a man had to be casevac'd. The notoriously exposed drop zones at Musa Qala presented the greatest risk. Chinooks had managed to land there only six times in ten weeks. It was here, on 6 September, that Major Mark 'Sweetcorn' Hammond was forced to abort a landing after his Chinook was narrowly missed by a pair of RPGs, and small-arms fire damaged a wing blade root – just one of the incidents that prompted Butler seriously to consider a unilateral pull-out from Musa Qala.

That option was fiercely resisted by Butler's superior, General David Richards in Kabul. Richards had never approved of the platoon-house policy, which by the time he took over ISAF command at the end of July had already led to what he described as a 'dog's dinner' in Helmand. But neither did he now favour a headlong retreat from it. 'London was worried that we'd lose domestic support if a Chinook went down. But what they didn't see was that if we simply abandoned Musa Qala, they were going to lose the whole bloody war. Because as soon as the Taliban were able to say in Afghan society, "Look what we told you – we just defeated them," the British were going to lose all support in that area and much more widely. We'd have been a laughing stock.'

Something had to give, however – and at Musa Qala on 12 September, the British were fortunate to be offered a way out of the impasse. It came from an unexpected quarter. Musa Qala's tribal elders, led by one Hajji Shah Agha, approached Governor Daoud with a proposal. The elders were dismayed at so much killing and the destruction of their town, and desperate for it to stop. The local Taliban, they said, were prepared to stop fighting and withdraw if the British would do the same. They themselves would take responsibility for security once the two sides had disengaged; they even promised to put forward sixty of their own sons as the nucleus of a new police force.

Not everyone was in favour of the 'Musa Qala deal', as it came to be known, least of all the Americans, who suspected the Taliban would retake the town the moment the Coalition withdrew. To them the proposal seemed little more than a clever Taliban trick. The Taliban leadership in Quetta, for its part, was equally suspicious. A mutually agreed ceasefire looked to them like a needless concession to the British. At first, therefore, Quetta ordered its commanders to fight on, arguing that they had the British on the run – an assessment, General Richards observed, that was 'not far from the mark'.

The Musa Qala elders were not the only locals exhausted by the fighting, however. There were intelligence reports that a senior commander's son had been killed by a British mortar, and rumours of a mass grave containing the bodies of 200 dead fighters. With the approach of autumn and the accompanying obligations of harvest time, it was getting harder for the Taliban to find replacements. Morale was low, they were short of ammunition and they were unable to get their casualties to field hospitals. In short, the forces besieging the British had fought themselves almost to a standstill. At the very least they needed a pause in the fighting to reorganize. At Musa Qala it suited them to comply with the elders' initiative; so Quetta, no doubt wary of the dangers of further alienating local opinion, reluctantly gave the go-ahead.

Despite the misgivings of the Americans, the elders' proposal suited British strategy, too. 'I had to create the means by which we could regain the tactical initiative,' said Richards, 'and the only way we could do it, given our level of commitment in Helmand, was to get out of one of the platoon-houses . . . Throughout this midautumn period, Britain in the eyes of the people of Afghanistan had achieved nothing. We genuinely needed to start reconstructing, let alone constructing, and [the elders' initiative] gave us an opportunity to demonstrate, in an area where we had done nothing but damage, that things could be better with a bit of common sense on both sides.' More to the point, a mutual withdrawal from the town offered Richards a chance to free up badly needed troops without losing face, which in propaganda terms was essential. It was, as everyone involved with the deal said, 'an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem'.