No Worse Enemy (2 page)

Pharmacy Road (Sangin)

You knew that this was going to happen one day. And now you’re going to die in the cold wet mud of a ditch in Afghanistan because you chose to join a bunch of
American marines as they were dropped like kittens into the middle of a perfect ambush.

You deserve to die for just floating along again. Not thinking, not making a decision, just stumbling slowly forwards until you couldn’t turn back.

It was so bad I imagined a tiny black-eyed dormouse, frozen with terror in the corner of a glass tank half-filled with a huge, languid, grey and black snake, its tongue and eyes gradually moving
closer; so slow and arrogant it was repellent.

I had other strange visions: nothing peaceful, no floating towards a white light, just a quick flash of me and the Marines, curled into foetal positions, pressing ourselves as far as we could
into the cold, dark mud. Above, a huge cartoon Taliban face, hundreds of feet tall, turbaned, dirty, brown and sweaty with a wiry beard and a wart, grinning maniacally down at us, growling with
joy.

Even the fucking ditch was America’s fault. They had built it over fifty years ago to make the desert bloom, win hearts and minds and counter Russian influence. But being American, they
had to build it in a perfectly straight line, in a land where nothing is straight. So as I dived into the ditch and slid towards the putrid water at the bottom, I was still an easy target for the
Taliban fighters who did the same.

I wanted to wrap my arms around something but there was only freezing mud and a few dehydrated reeds. I went limp, resigned to the fact that metal was about to enter my body. Cus
D’Amato’s old saying about how no boxer ever got knocked out who didn’t want to get knocked out suddenly made sense.
OK, I lose, there’s no way out, just put me to sleep
so that this ordeal can end.

A rocket whooshed over my shoulder and exploded against the wall behind me.

‘AW FUCK, I’M HIT, I’M HIT’, screamed the marine next to me. As he rolled on to his side I could see his right leg was covered in bright red blood that gushed from
beneath his knee.

‘WHAT THA FUCK’, he moaned.

‘I’m hit too’, screamed the marine on my other side, holding the back of his left leg. ‘Am I bleeding?’ he asked, moving his hand away briefly.

‘No, you’re good’, I told him, sounding calm for a second. I rolled on to my back, expecting to feel pain, or a warm wet patch, somewhere.
Please don’t let it be
between my legs. Please let me keep my legs.
But there was nothing, except knuckles bloodied from the scramble into the ditch. The bullets clattered above us in murderous clouds and the screams
and the faces around me all said the same thing: we don’t know where it’s coming from and we’re all going to die.

Everyone who has covered the wars in Afghanistan over the last thirty years has a few – possibly apocryphal – stories that perfectly sum up the struggles of
foreign forces. One of my favourites came from a chance discussion with two American soldiers, whose home for twelve months – a dingy concrete arch – I was sleeping in.

I was in the Arghandab Valley, just outside Kandahar City, in October 2010. There hadn’t been any fighting for a few weeks, so I was reading a book, written by a Russian journalist, about
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The author described a foot patrol with a wily old Russian commander when suddenly they had found themselves surrounded by a passing flock of sheep, guarded by
their shepherd. Why, the reporter asked, had the sheep not been sheared? It was the middle of summer, when temperatures often top fifty degrees. The commander told him to grab a sheep and feel its
belly. He did – and found several rifles, strapped underneath the animal, totally hidden from view. The commander grabbed another and found more. I was so amused by this story that I read it
out loud to the two American soldiers. ‘MOTHERFUCKER!’ one of them screamed. ‘We saw shitloads of sheep not too long ago and I remember thinking the exact same thing – why
haven’t they been sheared?’ The likely answer to that question kept him angry for hours. We never seem to learn from history.

I’ve been travelling to Afghanistan, and in particular Helmand – the country’s most violent province and the focus of first Britain’s, then America’s, military
effort – for five years. When I was first there, what I saw raised continuous and obvious questions that I thought were too stupid to ask out loud. All those bombs are for five guys in
sandals, with AKs? And they escaped? Those roofless old jeeps are all you have? Those junkies and thieves are the good guys? If the Taliban have been routed, why do all these IEDs keep popping up
around us like mushrooms? If the people are so happy to have been liberated, why do they look so angry?

With each trip, the war became less recognisable as the one being described from podiums in Kabul, Washington and London. A positive spin could be expected but there was often such a gulf
between what we were told was happening and what I was seeing with my own eyes that I sometimes questioned my recollections. Only when I watched the hundreds of hours of footage I’d gathered
did I realise the situation was even more calamitous and our ambitions more fantastic than I had at first thought. And my shock only increased when I got accurate translations of what the Afghans
I’d filmed were actually saying.

Each time I returned, there were new policies, new forces, new ambassadors, generals, planes, drones and even tanks. And there was a surge, because a surge, we were told, had turned things
around in Iraq. On each visit, I was told that the Taliban were on their last legs, the Afghans were almost ready to provide security for themselves and the government was almost ready to govern.
Mistakes were made in the past but now we’re doing it right. Even the increasingly audacious attacks by the Taliban were seen as proof of their desperation. The tipping point was close.

I was deeply sceptical. I had to keep going back to see if I was wrong. Billions of dollars were being spent. Brilliant minds were dedicated to the project. The credibility of a superpower and
NATO hung in the balance. Such an effort, with such high stakes, couldn’t result in so little.

This is a simple book, written chronologically, about what I’ve seen: an honest account of what the war looks like on the ground. As it drags on and public interest evaporates, I
don’t think I have anything more important to offer than that. Apart from a tiny handful of quotes taken from my notebooks, every word spoken here was transcribed directly from my many video
tapes.

In the months following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration thought they had bombed their way to a swift and brilliant victory in Afghanistan. Some even thought they’d invented a new
way of fighting wars, from twenty thousand feet, where none of their blood need be shed.

The Taliban, we now know, hadn’t been defeated. They had merely stepped off the stage, to watch what happened next. Many had been willing to play a part in the new reality, which would
have been entirely consistent with the history of conflict resolution in Afghanistan. But they were snubbed. What happened next, after vital resources had been diverted to Iraq, was simply a return
to predatory power politics and the rule of the warlords. To a place where the corrupt and vicious thrived and the most able and honest were sidelined. The state of affairs that had allowed the
Taliban to sweep to power in the first place. The 2005 elections, which might have led to a truly representative government, were a sham, with some observers claiming that fraudulent votes
outnumbered the genuine.

So the Taliban gradually returned, slipping back over the border from Pakistan as easily as they had left. As fighters, they were surprised to discover that beyond Kabul, there was no one around
to stop them. Soon they were operating in every province of Afghanistan. In the countryside, where most Afghans live, they began to provide better security, justice and employment (often through
participation in, or the protection of, the opium trade) than the government itself. Sadly, this wasn’t difficult.

This eventually led to the deployment of NATO forces beyond Kabul. In the summer of 2006, just over three thousand British troops (of which only six hundred or so would actually be out on patrol
and in contact with Afghans) were sent to Helmand province. Helmand, together with neighbouring Kandahar, was the Taliban’s historical power base. At first, the Brits didn’t wear
helmets, handed out toys to children and were only tasked with ‘facilitating reconstruction and development’. The defence secretary even hoped they could complete their mission without
firing a single bullet. Our good intentions, it was thought, would mean that we would be welcomed. Soon afterwards, the war in Afghanistan really began. The Brits found themselves fighting off
waves of attacks against their tiny and isolated patrol bases.

Figure 1
Helmand Province (© David Berger)

I have travelled elsewhere in Afghanistan but I have chosen to focus on Helmand province, where the war has always been fiercest. Helmand also offers the benefit of seeing how the two largest
contributing forces – British and American – coped in such unforgiving terrain. The Brits eventually had eight thousand troops there but it was nowhere near enough. The Americans ended
up sending thirty-three thousand and even then, their small gains were described as ‘fragile and reversible’. I was able to directly compare the two in Sangin, where a third of British
casualties occurred, which was taken over by the US Marines in 2010. It was no coincidence that I came closer to being killed with almost every visit. Apart from a few square kilometres of land
– and it was never more than that – being cleared and secured here and there, the only thing I ever saw happen was an increase in troop numbers and a corresponding increase in
casualties, military and civilian. This, I was told, was further evidence of the Taliban’s desperation and proof that the insurgency was in its last throes.