No Worse Enemy (11 page)

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.’

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.

Barack Obama had been the only presidential candidate to say that Afghanistan was in danger of being lost because essential resources had been diverted to the wrong war, in Iraq. Now, he’d
been elected President and seemed determined to turn things around. He’d authorised seventeen thousand additional troops, most of which would go to Helmand. He also began a major policy
review.

Most of those troops were to be US Marines. I’d once spent time with the Marines: three weeks with the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, in the Persian Gulf. Despite being stuck on an aircraft
carrier, they ran six miles a day wearing heavy backpacks, regularly practised hand-to-hand combat in large groups and spent hours playing Iraq War games on X-boxes, actively encouraged by their
commanding officers. In a refreshing contrast to the uptight sailors I’d filmed, the Marines were instantly and completely honest and didn’t seem to care what I, or anyone else, thought
of them.

They talked about Fallujah, where they had been involved in the most brutal fighting of the Iraq War, in the same way that I talk about Rio; that is, they loved and missed it. They appeared to
be a guerrilla army within the American military, whose lack of restraint no one dared criticise. When I asked what part of the navy they were – and they are part of the navy, although they
operate autonomously – I received a disdainful snigger: ‘We’re the
men’s
department.’ I instantly warmed to them and knew that if I got the chance to film them
in action, I’d jump at it.

In the early hours of July 2nd, 2009, approximately four thousand US Marines, the first of the seventeen thousand additional troops, landed in southern Helmand province. They were there for
Operation Khanjar, ‘Sword strike’, a dress rehearsal for the policy that Obama would later decide on. Finally, it was thought, there was enough manpower, equipment and will to defeat
the Taliban, offer good governance and win over the war-weary Afghans. Finally, somewhere would be cleared, held and developed. This would be replicated elsewhere and the war could be won.

The British Army had shown incredible bravery and suffered horrendous losses, yet it was impossible not to see the US Marines, with their billions of dollars’ worth of new equipment,
unlimited support, aggressive ambition and unapologetic bluster, as the big boys coming to take charge. Roger Moore was charming but the fighting had spiralled out of control and John Wayne, Ted
Nugent and Ice-T had been sent in to finish things off.

‘It’s time to change the game in Afghanistan’, said the Marines’ commanding officer before they took off. ‘To force the Taliban to react to us, instead of us
reacting to them. We are attacking to seize control of the population from the Taliban, because once we’ve secured the population, they no longer have a sea to swim in. The insurgents are
going to die on the vine. We are experts in the application of violence. The world will remember what we do here and believe me, Echo Company is going to change history.’

The first convoy I joined was hit by an IED. I heard the boom and looked through one of the tiny bullet-proof windows to see the lead vehicle crumpled forwards, as if beaten
to its knees. The front left tyre had been blown about eighty metres into a nearby field but the main body of the truck, like the seven marines inside, survived intact. Even Blue, the
explosives-sniffing dog, jumped out wagging his tail.

If British soldiers, in roofless old Land Rovers, had driven over the same bomb, everyone would have been killed. The US soldiers already had about twelve thousand bomb-proof trucks but would
soon order over four thousand more, because the design had been improved. The Americans, and certainly the Marines, seemed to take war much more seriously than the British.

The crippled MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) was dragged to a nearby base. I followed the marines on their foot patrol to recover parts of the IED and truck from the site. We passed one
crater (‘No, this is the one from three days ago’) and came to two craters, one right in the middle of the road, the second a little beyond it, at exactly the spot a vehicle would pass
to avoid the first. Barely thirty minutes had passed since the explosion but every scrap of metal had been cleared.

‘There are fresh motorcycle tracks here’, said a marine on the other side of the crater.

‘Motherfuckers’, said another.

A canal ran parallel to the road. On the far side, two men on a motorcycle rode past, staring at us coldly. Another motorbike, carrying a man and his wife, came towards us on our side. The
marines studied the couple through their rifle sights before ordering them to stop and get off the bike. The man looked only mildly inconvenienced as he lifted up his shirt and walked toward the
marines. They kept their sights trained on him. He said didn’t have any information about the Taliban.

‘If you’ve finished with him, let him go’, shouted someone behind us. ‘Just because we have to get blown up doesn’t mean he has to as well.’

‘You think he’d be standing there if there were more explosives, you fucking idiot?’ shouted Lance Corporal Gomez, crouched next to me. ‘He knows where everything is.
They all know.’

We walked back to the base. The convoy was ordered back to FOB Delhi, the marines’ main base, close to the Helmand Green Zone but far south of anywhere I’d been with the British.
We’d been trying to get to Echo Company, who had pushed further south than anybody so far, into the small village of Mian Poshteh.

Soon, so many convoys had been hit that the two roads from FOB Delhi to Mian Poshteh were closed. The second convoy I joined had to drive through the desert. Two of the massive MRAP trucks,
which weigh over thirty tonnes, sank into the thin, powdery sand. We had to wait for lorries to come and tow them out; a journey of sixteen kilometres took us thirteen hours.

I was ordered to switch vehicles. When I climbed into the back of the second truck I was surprised to see two Special Forces soldiers. There was an awkward moment as they eyed my camera and I
looked at their elaborate weapons and long beards. They eventually spoke but batted away my questions about what they were on their way to do.

The driver, excited to have such exalted company in his truck, told them a house in front of us had been used by a sniper a few days earlier. ‘I hope he shoots at us again, then we can set
you guys on him.’ He turned around and smiled hopefully. The Special Forces soldiers looked away.

I was later told that the sniper was a sixteen-year-old Chechen girl. I remembered I’d been told exactly the same thing by the British, two years earlier. They had described her as if she
were an evil super-hero from a comic. I had no idea she was so good she didn’t age.

It was dusk on July 4
^th
when I finally made it to Mian Poshteh. Echo Company had already been involved in a seven-hour gunfight. One marine had been killed, the first American to die
on an operation approved by President Obama.

Described by Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss, the commanding officer of 2/8 Marines, the mission sounded simple. As the sun rose, the Taliban would ‘wake up to find marines
everywhere’. They would call for reinforcements, only to be told that they too, saw marines everywhere. The Taliban would have ‘no stomach to stand and fight, and would
disappear’, enabling the marines to ‘target the population, not the enemy’. Sadly, it’s necessary to point out that in this case ‘targeting’ means ‘winning
over’. The thinking, based on the counter-insurgency books that are the bibles of ambitious American officers, was that if you won over the local population they would reject the enemy, who
would then become ‘irrelevant’. It sounded remarkably similar to the comprehensive approach the Brits had been trying for the last two years. I lost count of how many times I was told
that the Taliban were about to become irrelevant. In that time, the Taliban, rather than becoming irrelevant, had become increasingly successful and audacious in their attacks against foreign and
Afghan forces.

Main Poshteh is a small market town straddling a canal. Its two rows of shops, merely tiny storage rooms with mud walls and small, shaded, outside trading areas, had been abandoned hastily.
Goods were on the shelves, scales and weights were neatly piled on the floor and vegetables were on display outside, rotting in the sun. The marines helped themselves to cigarettes and sweets,
leaving behind generous amounts of dollar bills.

The marines slept on the concrete floor of a long, thin building that was once a school. I was told to sleep with the medics, who had one room to treat casualties, one room for the doctor and a
mud courtyard that I shared with about fifteen others. My bed was a stretcher, unless the medics needed it.

‘Have you seen what’s next door?’ said a marine. ‘A gynaecologist’s bench with a dustbin at the end. How apt for this country.’

There was one casualty at the medical centre. He was a local boy, a paraplegic who, despite being ‘somewhere between sixteen and thirty’, couldn’t have weighed more than six
stone. He’d been discovered in a nearby house, on fire after being hit by a Hellfire missile. His family had fled, together with everyone else, when the marines landed. Unable to move and
barely able to talk, the boy had almost starved to death. He told the interpreter that he’d been injured in a farming accident, which none of the marines believed. They assumed anyone with
such injuries had sustained them fighting or making IEDs.

I couldn’t sleep that night. When I heard the medics asking for a fourth man to help carry the boy out to a chopper that would take him to the hospital in Kandahar City, I got up and
grabbed one corner of the stretcher. After my delay in getting there, I was anxious to see as much as possible.

We jogged to the end of the government building, treading on marines trying to sleep on the dusty ground. ‘Is that the cripple?’ ‘Is he even alive?’ ‘Is it true his
family just fucking left him there?’ ‘He probably crippled himself making bombs.’ Dust and dirt blown by the chopper’s blades whipped our faces as we carried the boy into
the helicopter’s huge belly. The staff at Kandahar hospital would have to try and locate his family.