No Worse Enemy (29 page)

Two months after Bravo Company 1/6 Marines left Marjah, their replacements found Mohammad, the dwarf, dead. He had been beheaded. No one knew why, nor who had done it.

In September 2010, the British forces quietly handed Sangin, the most dangerous district of Afghanistan’s most violent province, over to the US Marines. The ceremony was described as a
‘relatively private affair’ by a British military spokesman. It was not a retreat or a withdrawal, we were told, it was a ‘tactical realignment and rebalancing’. Several
other problem districts were also taken over by the US Marines. The Brits moved to less volatile (but still far from secure) districts of central Helmand. US Marines now outnumbered British forces
by almost three to one.

In late 2010, the Wikileaks site published previously secret communications that revealed that the American commander who had led NATO forces in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2008, and even
President Karzai himself, didn’t think the British were ‘up to’ securing Helmand. The official response from the UK Ministry of Defence was to say that UK forces had done ‘a
terrific job [in] an area which has always been and continues to be, uniquely challenging’. The bazaar in Sangin had been ‘transformed ... more than eight hundred and fifty shops are
trading, twice as many as the year before’. It was an impossible number either to calculate or confirm; it was the best they could do.

By summer 2010, the thirty-three thousand American ‘surge’ troops had arrived. General McChrystal had been sacked, after making inappropriate comments to
Rolling Stone
magazine. His replacement, ‘King David’ Petraeus, loosened the rules of engagement, giving the troops more freedom to fire what they wanted when they wanted, and to defend themselves
more aggressively. Between July and November 2010, there were approximately 3,500 air strikes, the highest number since the war had begun and the number of night raids by Special Forces tripled.
There were also 711 NATO casualties over the whole year, almost two hundred more than any other year so far. It was apt that the US forces taking over in Sangin, 3/5 Marines, were nicknamed
‘the Butchers of Fallujah’, because of the way they had fought there.

In Sangin, I was repeatedly told not to ask about the ‘Wikileaks bullshit’ regarding the Americans ‘disrespecting’ the British. ‘Whatever we do here, we’re
building on what the British did’, was a line I often heard. I also heard stories from the few Brits who remained in Sangin, who were absolutely sure they were being disrespected. Since my
first visit, the British had established a team of ‘stabilisation advisors’ who had developed a rare and comprehensive knowledge of Sangin’s tribal politics and built
relationships with local elders, even with Taliban commanders, with whom they were negotiating peace deals. But their opinions weren’t sought and their existence was barely acknowledged. A
district-wide peace deal was possible, I was told by an aide to the district governor, who worked with the stabilisation team. However, the arrival of the US Marines had led to more civilian deaths
and an increase in support for the local Taliban, who wanted to keep fighting. There had been a recruitment surge, as young men joined the Taliban to get their revenge. The increase in Special
Forces’ kill-or-capture raids exacerbated the problem: if the moderate and reasonable local leaders were killed, they would be replaced by ‘crazies from
madrassahs
in
Pakistan’. The Marines thought a peace deal was only possible if the Taliban were beaten into submission.

Before arriving in Sangin, I’d spent some time in Kandahar with the 101st Airborne Division, US Army. In three weeks, I didn’t see a single shot being fired but the list of dead and
wounded from IED explosions was horrendous. Casualties, simply described as double, triple and even quadruple amps (amputations), had become common. My own colleague, Joao Silva, a much-loved and
respected photographer, had stepped on an IED and lost both his legs, just days after we’d spent a few days stuck together at an airbase.

I’d also caught a glimpse of how the Afghan National Army was likely to operate after NATO forces left. A small ANA unit had charged ahead of the American soldiers and found all the IEDs
in a small village in less than an hour. ‘How did you do it?’ asked the American captain, astounded. ‘Did you offer the locals $50 for each IED they revealed, like we trained
you?’ ‘No’, said the ANA captain, excitedly, ‘we told them “show us the IEDs or start digging your own grave”.’

When I’d returned home, a colleague asked, with concern, why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I told him that Helmand no longer revealed anything new and it was time to cover something
else. But within days, I was given the chance to return to Sangin to film with the US Marines and I couldn’t say no. A hundred and six British soldiers had been killed there, almost a third
of all British deaths and I wanted to see how the Marines, especially a battalion with such a fearsome reputation, would cope.

The BBC manager who’d stopped me going to Marjah also tried to stop me going to Sangin because I hadn’t completed the ‘hostile environments refresher course’ within the
last three years. The course was an idiot’s guide to coping in a war zone. One section involved watching clips from my own films. On a previous course, I’d been made to run in zigzags
while someone fired blanks at me. Eventually I was told I could go back to Sangin, as long as I completed the course when I returned.

One of the first things I saw when I arrived at FOB Jackson, Sangin’s District Centre and 3/5’s Combat Operations Centre (COC), was the legless body of a marine
carried into the medical tent on a stretcher. He was alive but unconscious. His legs had been blown off right up to the hips; his shortened body seemed more like a child’s than a fighting
man’s. This kind of injury was becoming more common in Helmand as the Taliban worked out ways to get their IEDs to send the explosion straight up. Minutes later, another stretcher was carried
in, but this time, the marine was dead. His body was intact but the way his head flopped around between his shoulders had an unmistakable lifelessness.

The marines had been struck by an IED; worse, one of them had been carrying a rocket on his back, which had also exploded. The marines who had carried them in stood outside the tent in shock,
hugging each other, crying or simply looking down into the dust, unable to believe what had just happened. An ambush had followed the IED strike; the fighting still raged. After a relatively quiet
trip to Kandahar, the sound of so much fire, coming from dozens of men summoning up every ounce of viciousness they had, in the effort to kill each other, was suddenly as disturbing as if I were
hearing it for the first time.

Even before these casualties, 3/5 had learned what a deadly and defiant place Sangin was to those who were unwelcome. By the time I arrived, they had lost twenty-five men and more than 140 had
been seriously injured. These were astounding numbers, worse than any other battalion’s, anywhere in Afghanistan. They had been there just three months.

After landing, I’d been dumped in a long concrete and steel shed that somehow managed to be colder inside than it was out (and outside was already freezing) and ignored
for days. The only contact I had was with a chubby civil affairs worker, who dressed to make everyone think he was Special Forces. ‘BBC?’ he said in disgust, ‘you’re like
CNN – the Communist News Network. We don’t like reporters out here.’

I walked to the COC every afternoon to find out if anyone had any plans for me. But the Public Affairs Officer, who had a sign behind his desk that read, ‘Fighting the war on terror, one
cake at a time’, never had any news, despite helicopters and convoys coming and going every day. After a few days being almost hypnotised by the boredom, cold and loneliness of Sangin DC, I
was eventually allowed to join a convoy to Lima Company, who were quartered in a dilapidated house on the edge of the Green Zone.

The convoy took the main north–south road through Sangin, right through the ‘transformed’ bazaar, which I was eager to see again. I’d walked through it more than three
years earlier. Now I was in a million-dollar, twenty-tonne bomb-proof truck, looking through a tiny, bullet-proof window. The buildings on either side of the road were still crumbling shells, still
sealed by warped metal shutters. The Afghans still sold what they could; a few piles of basic foods, old shoes, or bicycle and engine parts. Nothing seemed to have been brought in. It was as if the
outside world didn’t exist. I could expect that in a remote village in the middle of the Helmand desert but it was shocking to see it here, in a town that had been the focus of a
multi-billion-dollar security, development, and governance effort. The eyes that followed us through the bazaar were hostile, just as they had been three and a half years earlier, when Major Martin
David told me that the Taliban had been expelled from Sangin and were, ‘reeling from the operations we’ve conducted against them, [and] low on morale.’

I was dropped off at Patrol Base Jamil, a skeleton of a three-storey house featuring pillars and a balcony. Once, it had been on its way to becoming something of a palace. Such buildings are
assumed to be owned by narco-barons, so nobody felt bad about occupying them.

Lima Company had recently suffered three casualties from IEDs. One marine had lost both legs and an arm, one had lost both legs, and the third was considered extremely lucky to have escaped with
just a fractured ankle. ‘We had a guy that lost a foot. We considered him to be lucky.’ I was told, ‘Just losing a foot is a million-dollar injury out here.’

A
shura
was taking place in a large white tent. There were about sixty men attending, with about as many boys running around in the background making mischief and playing with the
marines. Captain Matthew Peterson, the Commanding Officer of Lima Company, led the
shura
. Peterson, with fair hair, light green eyes and soft, boyish face that probably didn’t need
much shaving, looked more like his name than his title. That is, he looked like a friendly Scandinavian, rather than the leader of a company of marines in a battalion with a fearsome
reputation.

Peterson welcomed everybody and told them he was there to be honest and help solve their problems. He came across as understanding and compassionate; he didn’t try to look tough or
intimidating. An old man complained that cars were being told to pull off the road or turn around when an ISAF convoy was approaching and even when they complied, as he had done recently, they were
shot at or smashed into. Peterson started to speak but was interrupted by an angry man in a black turban, who spoke loudly and with enough venom to guarantee no one interrupted him. Six days
earlier, the man’s uncle had been shot, at ten o’clock in the morning, as he carried a bag of potatoes. No one had been allowed to go and help him until three o’clock that
afternoon. Soon, the men around him were nodding in agreement. The terp translated for Captain Peterson; he nodded too.

‘It’s better to not be shot than it is to be helped when you are shot’, said Peterson, summing up the man’s point. ‘Thank you for telling me that’, he said.
‘These are things that I need to know about.’ He asked if the man’s ankle had been treated. The man said they taken his uncle to Lashkar Gar by themselves; they had been held at a
checkpoint and questioned about why he had been shot.

‘I’m glad to hear he’s doing better’, said Peterson, understanding that the man had been talking about the uncle, not his ankle, even though the terp hadn’t said
anything about how the uncle was, ‘but you’re right, he shouldn’t have been shot in the first place. As we continue to work together to make the community safer that’s the
kind of problem that we can avoid. But I’m afraid the truth is that people will still continue to get hurt, as long as the enemy is here. It’s because of the enemy, not because of the
ANA and the marines.’