A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (39 page)

And yet, for all its strength and purity, I was not seduced but saddened by the Taliban's belief, and the destructive, uncompromising way in which it displaced everything else in the world. Faith came before everything, even love of family, as I discovered later when I asked Abdullah if he had children. The Mullah and the lieutenants had left by then, and apart from Mohammed we were alone.

'I have two sons, aged two and four,' he replied.

'I have a daughter aged two,' I responded with a smile. 'How often do you get to see them?'

'Sometimes. Not often. I don't give them the father's love that I could because when I am killed it will be much harder for them.'

'But that's one of the saddest things I've ever heard! How do you know you will be killed?'

His expression didn't even flicker.

'Listen,' he said. 'My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all died by the bullet. I will die in the same way, and no doubt my sons too. It is not so sad.'

'But . . . do you actually wish to die by the bullet?'

'Of course! It is glorious to be martyred. To die in the service of jihad is the ambition of all of us here.'

The chasm between our cultures yawned again. In the West we are taught to put love of family before everything. It is our most cherished value, the bedrock of our civilization, a shared assumption that underpins the plots and endings of a million Hollywood movies.

'Allah gives us children, so it is our duty to give to Allah before we give to our family,' Abdullah went on patiently. 'Life has no taste without faith, no matter how much you eat of it. But dying in jihad is like having a full stomach without eating. It is peace and perfection.'

The meeting had not broken up until three. The Taliban left as they had arrived, shuffling out into the cold night in ones and twos, their weapons across their shoulders. Abdullah warned that he would wake us at first light, when we would have to move on.

'James,' Mohammed whispered as we crawled into our sleeping bags. 'There's something I must tell you. You know that phone call I got?'

'Yes – what about it?'

A couple of hours earlier, Mohammed's mobile had rung and he had answered it, interrupting a particularly complicated exchange with the Mullah. I had shot him an irritated look, for I had asked him to ensure that his phone was switched off during the meeting.

When the call was finished he carried on translating for me as if it had never happened.

'It was a friend in Helmand. He was confirming some news.

Mullah Manan was killed last night.'

I sat up in my sleeping bag, wide awake again.

'They dropped a laser-guided bomb through his compound roof near Kajaki. Ten or eleven Talibs were killed. Some civilians also.'

'But – how did they know where he was?'

'I don't know. Spies, probably. What does it matter now?'

He had a point. Had we gone ahead with the visit to Manan we would have been in the compound with him when the bomb struck – most probably in the very same room. His warning to Mohammed that he couldn't guarantee our safe passage across Helmand, together with my decision to heed it, had probably saved our lives.

'Does Abdullah know?'

'He knows. He told me about it the moment I got here. He also told me not to tell you. Manan was his friend from Soviet times. All of the people here knew him. We were praying earlier for Allah to accept his martyred soul into Paradise.'

This detail explained a lot about the mood of the evening's meeting: the earnest talk about martyrdom, the flashes of bitterness about Coalition air power. Abdullah and his men were still in shock. It was extraordinary, the strangest Pashtun paradox, that they were able to separate the blame for Manan's death from their guest of the evening, an emissary of a country whose air force might well have been responsible.

And then I fell asleep, confident that among these people my vulnerability would protect me better than any gun or body armour. Apart from the threat of another Coalition bomb, I could not have been safer.

Footnotes

*1
A sangar, the Persian word for 'barricade', is a small temporary fortified position usually built of sandbags. The term was first appropriated by the British Indian Army in the nineteenth century and is still in use. There is a town called Sangar in Ghazni province in central Afghanistan.

*2
Like most major British Army operations, the name was computer-generated, and nothing to do with the seventeenth-century English poet and cleric Robert Herrick.

†
The difficulty of collating accurate figures in Afghanistan is notorious. Brigadier John Lorimer, commander during Operation Herrick 6, remarked that trying to extract meaningful statistics from Afghans was 'like speaking one of those African languages that only has three numbers: one, two, and "lots"'.

*3
The press predictably made much of this proposal (see, e.g.,
Mail on Sunday
, 1 April 2007, 'Race uproar over Army troop quota'), but missed its real point. This was not about protecting the Army's 'Britishness' so much as finding a way to reduce the ability of foreign governments to influence British security interests. In 2006, for instance, the South African government was considering legislation that would ban its citizens from serving in foreign armies. If such legislation were passed, up to 1,200 South Africans now serving in the British Army could be forced to leave suddenly.

*4
A Sisu is a six-wheeled, Russian-built armoured car used by ISAF's contigent of Estonians; it looks nothing like a Scimitar, which is tracked.

*5
For a full account of this tragic episode, see Sarah Chayes's excellent
The
Punishment of Virtue
(Portobello Books, 2006).

*6
by the HALO Trust, the British mine clearance organization. Since starting operations in 1988 in Afghanistan, HALO (Hazardous Areas Life-Support Organization) have cleared more than 570,000 mines and disposed of 43.7 million bullets.

*7
Mullah Naqib died – of natural causes – in October 2007. Within weeks, Taliban forces exploited the resulting power vacuum by sweeping into Arghandab and occupying several villages; they headquartered themselves in Naqib's house for maximum psychological effect. It took a concerted effort by Canadian forces to push the Taliban back again.

*8
For the pilot's account of this incident, see chapter 6, page 224.

*9
In the autumn of 2006 the Conservatives supported a Scots and Welsh Nationalist motion for an inquiry into the Iraq War.

*10
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate is the equivalent of Britain's MI6, with responsibility for covert operations abroad. There have long been suspicions that the ISI, or at least elements of it, are sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism. After 9/11, Pakistan's military leader, General Pervez Musharraf, tried to rein in the ISI by purging Islamic hardliners from senior positions, including the head of the organization, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, in October 2001.

*11
So many, indeed, that Camp Bastion was named after them. The HESCO 'Concertainer', to give this icon of modern war its proper name, has been manufactured by the Leeds-based company HESCO Bastion Ltd since 1989. HESCOs are squat, typically hexagonal tubes prefabricated from steel mesh and polypropylene. They are light, strong and easily delivered into theatre in flat-pack form. Once filled with earth and rocks and pinned together – a quick and simple operation, given enough manpower – they form highly effective bullet-and-blast-proof walls. According to its manufacturers, the HESCO is 'one of the UK's most successful defence exports' and has been used in 'every major conflict area since the First Gulf War'.

*12
On 17 November 2007, Tootal made headlines when he resigned from the Army, reportedly in disgust at the 'shoddy' care his injured men had received at the Selly Oak military hospital in Birmingham, as well as their poor pay, standard of equipment and housing. 'My beloved paratroopers are exceptional,' he said in a statement. 'As a nation we are very lucky to have them. I will miss them all dreadfully.'

*13
In January 2008, a US-backed attempt to appoint not just a Paddy Ashdown-type figure but Paddy Ashdown himself as a United Nations 'super envoy' to Kabul foundered at the last minute after President Karzai objected. He was reportedly worried by Ashdown's previous role as the international community's High Representative in Bosnia, where he wielded viceroy-like powers including the ability to overrule the Bosnian government. See, e.g., Julian Borger in the
Guardian
, 28 January 2008.

*14
The reasons for this unpromising start to Herrick 4 remain murky. It is clear that the ANP fired on the Pathfinders first; they later claimed that they thought the British were Taliban. The British, for their part, suspected that the ANP were engaged in some form of criminal activity, probably related to narcotics. They were certainly in a location where they were not supposed to be.

*15
the
nom de guerre
of the notorious Serb paramilitary leader Željko Ražnatović, who was assassinated in 2000.

*16
A WMIK (weapons-mounted installation kit) is a combat patrol variant of the Land Rover.

*17
sometimes known as 'Isotainers'. International Standards Organization containers are a very common sight in Afghanistan, where many market streets are made up of little else.

*18
A
jezail
is a crude but highly effective long-barrelled sniper's rifle of the nineteenth century, celebrated in Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Arithmetic on the Frontier' (1886): 'A scrimmage in a Border Station / A canter down some dark defile / Two thousand pounds of education / Drops to a ten-rupee jezail'.

*19
According to the Senlis Council, which conducted a survey of 17,000 Afghans in March 2007, when 26 per cent of respondents said they 'openly supported the Taliban'. Spokeswoman Norinne MacDonald commented, 'A couple of years back, such support was just three per cent.'

Postscript

Eighteen months have passed since I began this book project. The title,
A Million Bullets
, was the idea of my publisher, Doug Young at Transworld. I liked it – it seemed to strike the right sardonic note in the wake of John Reid's expressed hope for a bullet-free campaign – but felt bound to point out that, actually, only half that number of bullets had been fired during the Herrick 4 period I was writing about. Doug immediately replied that
Half a Million
Bullets
didn't sound catchy enough. 'Besides,' he added, 'I bet we've fired a million since then. Why don't you find out?'

This was more easily said than done. In late 2006 the MoD abruptly stopped advertising the amount of ordnance being expended in Afghanistan. The generals themselves now agreed that the firing of hundreds of thousands of bullets was probably not an indicator of a successful hearts and minds campaign. I asked Adam Holloway, the ex-Army MP, who offered to try to extract the figures via a written parliamentary question. A fortnight later, rather to his amazement, he received the answers he had asked for.

My worry that my title was an exaggeration was splendidly misplaced. The British, led by the Marines, fired more than a million bullets during the six months (October 2006 to March 2007) of Operation Herrick 5 alone – 1,295,795 of them; in the course of Herrick 6 (April to September 2007) 12 Mechanized Brigade, led by the Royal Anglians, fired 2,474,560. Those figures excluded bombs, artillery rounds and 30mm cannon shells, and of course all the bullets, rockets and RPGs fired at the British by the enemy (for which no statistics will ever exist). Results for Herrick 7, which began in October 2007, had yet to be collated.

What next? At the time of writing, Operation Herrick 8, the first 'roulement' of 2008, is about to begin – and it is a Para-led operation once again. This time, however, 16 Air Assault Brigade will be spearheaded not by a small battle group but by two whole battalions of Paras, along with elements of a third – the first time that so many Paras have fought together since World War Two. Firepower has been stepped up, with more armoured vehicles and new Merlin troop-carrying helicopters at the troops' disposal. The RAF is also expected to deploy its new Eurofighter ground attack aircraft for the first time. There are now almost 8,000 British troops operating in Afghanistan – the biggest deployment there since 1880.

International attention was once again drawn to Musa Qala at the end of 2007. The Taliban – 2,000 of them, according to their own figures – had been dug in for ten months since the collapse of the controversial deal there. It was their last significant urban base in the region, and now a large Coalition force succeeded in throwing them out again. The operation was led by the Afghan National Army, and much was made of the symbolism of their victory. Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, called Musa Qala 'iconic'. But the ANA could not have succeeded without the close support of 300 US Special Forces and fully 2,000 regular British ones – itself the largest single British operation in years. The Taliban occupiers did not defend the town but slipped away as usual, regrouping in the mountains to the north in order to fight another day. The British military, anxious to impress upon the locals how different this occupation would be from the last one, quickly announced plans to build a new mosque, road, clinic and school. 'Securing Musa Qala is a major blow to the Taliban,' Brigadier Andrew Mackay told reporters as he rode on the back of an ANA truck through the town. 'The most important part of this operation is the reconstruction and development . . . that is how the operation should be judged.'

But will new roads and buildings be enough to convince the people? In the course of their house-to-house clearance operation, troops of 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment, discovered an estimated £150 million worth of opium piled in eighty-five sacks against a wall, along with a pile of white powder, suggestive of a makeshift heroin factory. However intolerant towards the drugs business the Taliban might have been in the past, their attitude here was evidently quite different. A trade of such immense value will not be given up lightly, either by the farmers, heroin manufacturers, smugglers and associated workers who depend upon it for their livelihoods, or by the Taliban who tax them to fund their insurgency. The challenge now for the ANA is to hold the town against counter-attacks. The world is watching. If they fail, the prognosis for an early British exit from Helmand looks poor indeed.