No Worse Enemy (4 page)

An official, the head of the anti-crime department of the Gereshk district police, stood up to speak. A small man, with a neatly-cropped beard that had started to turn grey, he was as emotional
as the men he addressed and struggled not to break down. ‘The ISAF operations are not useful’, he said. ‘They leave and the Taliban come back, so we will always have these
problems. Local commanders, ex-Mujahadeen, can establish security, not outsiders. They are indiscriminate. They see no difference between women and children and the Taliban.’ His finger
trembled as he raised it in emphasis. I thought he was going over the top, trying to let everyone know that he empathised with them. But then I realised that he too had lost several family members
to an air strike. ‘You can ask anyone about how honestly I have served the government and if I have any links with the Taliban’, he said, almost in tears. ‘But they have hit me so
hard that I am stunned. What can I do? I have lost four of my brothers. How can I look after their families now?’

Neither the other officials nor the farmers reacted. The fact that this had happened to a senior government official surprised no one. ‘After the bombing, no ground troops came out at all.
They could have come but no one did. I don’t have anything else to say, my only request is that in future operations, civilian casualties should be prevented’, he said, although the
only two people in the room with any connection to air strikes were fast asleep.

The elders raged about the bombings, saying that the Taliban were often far away by the time the bombs were dropped, that security was getting worse and that people would soon start joining the
Taliban. ‘Life has no meaning for me any more’, said one man, ‘I have lost twenty-seven members of my family. My house has been destroyed. Everything I’ve built for seventy
years is gone.’

Metal containers were brought in, placed on tables and opened. The elders were given bricks of five hundred Afghani notes, signing for them by dipping their right thumbs in ink and making
fingerprints. Captain Hennessey thought that millions of dollars were being handed over: $100,000 per person killed. The actual amount was closer to $2000. The men were told the money had come from
the president himself. As he handed it out, the ANA commander said, ‘May God give you the fortitude to bear this and protect you from such sorrows in the future.’

The money, a huge amount in Helmand, was handed out in front of the Afghan National Police. I worried that the men (who carried the money wrapped in sheets and would bury it somewhere in their
compounds) might soon be receiving another unwelcome visit.

Afterwards, I spoke to some of the men who had received compensation.

‘I lost twenty people and I was given two million Afghanis [about $46,000]’ said one man, explaining what had happened. ‘It was before 12.30 at night when your forces came to
our area. They were involved in a fight but the Taliban retreated. I had put everyone, all the family and the children, into one room but after the fighting was over we brought them outside to
their beds. Later, a jet came and dropped bombs on our house. Two rooms were destroyed. In one of the rooms, my two nephews and my son were there. My son survived. I rescued him from the debris. In
the other room were six of my uncle’s family. All became martyrs. They were buried under the soil. I moved the children away and came back to rescue those under the debris. While we were
trying to do that, the children were so frightened they started running away. The plane shot them one by one.

‘All we want is security, whether you bring it or the Taliban. We are not supporting war. We support peace and security. If you bring peace and security you are my king. If they bring
security they are our kings. I want nothing. I don’t want a post in the government. All I want is to be able to move around.

‘I was given this money for the martyrs but it means nothing to me. I wouldn’t give one person for all the money I’ve been given. I’m grateful that the president has paid
attention to us but if you gave someone the whole world it wouldn’t bring a person back.’

He was in tears by the time he’d finished speaking. I couldn’t ask him any more questions.

A week later, I awoke at 5.30 a.m. to go on a reconnaissance patrol with the Grenadier Guards into the upper Gereshk valley. The valley is part of what’s called the
Green Zone, a narrow strip of some of the most fertile land in Afghanistan. It follows the Helmand River from the Hindu Kush all the way to Iran. In contrast to its fortified Baghdad namesake, the
Helmand Green Zone is where most of the fighting takes place. Its irrigation ditches, hedgerows and high-walled compounds are perfect for guerrilla warfare and the Taliban had created a network of
trenches, tunnels, booby traps and weapons caches. The American Special Forces called it the ‘Heart of Darkness’ but its neatly arranged green fields, thick bushes and hedgerows make it
look oddly like the English countryside.

The patrol was to a village, Zumbelay, from where six families had recently fled, saying they’d been forced out by fifteen Taliban fighters. After walking less than a kilometre, we saw
other villagers running away. This usually means they know there are Taliban close by and there will soon be fighting. Suddenly, a single shot ripped the air around us. Then came dozens more, so
loud and so fast that it felt as if we were being attacked from every tree and bush in sight. I lay down in the grass next to Glenn Snazle, whose bulk, tattoos and cleanly-shaved head made him look
like a classic sergeant major. An awful burst of popping filled the air above our heads. That isn’t the sound of guns being fired. It’s the noise of bullets breaking the sound barrier.
It’s a sound you’re never supposed to hear, because it means you’re far too close. I gripped the earth with both hands as if it that might lessen the impact of being shot.

Four or five RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) whooshed over our heads, sometimes exploding, sometimes sinking into the wet mud around us. We ran to one side and crouched next to a wall. An RPG
exploded on the exact spot where we had been lying. Some of the Afghan and British soldiers charged towards the direction of the gunfire and soon there was so much noise it was impossible to tell
who was firing what and at who. Two bullets hit the wall next to us with such velocity that we instinctively flinched. I heard someone report a casualty over the radio; an Afghan soldier, with a
three-inch hole in the back of his neck, staggered past supported by two of his colleagues.

The Taliban were attacking from three positions and trying to get another group to move west, to surround us. (‘They draw you in, then the horns of the bull come down on either side of
you’, is how one soldier described the tactic.) We heard a series of howls, followed by deep thudding booms. I was told these were Chinese 107 rockets, being fired from yet another position.
There was an awful wait as the rockets arched through the air, then landed hundreds of metres beyond where we crouched.

After almost an hour, I heard an F16 fighter jet roaring towards us. ‘That is the sweetest sound in the world’, said the heavily-sweating soldier next to me. I saw the underside of
the plane, white like a shark’s, as it passed overhead and fired missiles into a building a hundred metres or so ahead. Everyone went quiet as they waited to see if the missile strike had
been accurate. The Taliban were also quiet, either because they were desperately trying to find a ditch to dive into or because they’d been killed. Air strikes were called for with few
restrictions, so the mere presence of planes or helicopters in the air – a show of force, as it was called – was often enough to scare the Taliban into retreating.

Everyone was ordered to start moving back, believing that eighteen Taliban had been killed, mostly by the air strike. Lance Corporal Jack Mizon and Lance Sergeant Jason McDonald, who had charged
forwards with the ANA, re-appeared, soaked in sweat and bouncing with adrenaline. ‘It was a bit too close with the RPGs whizzing over the wall’, said McDonald, with a humble,
gap-toothed smile. The ANA also re-appeared, some sprinting in all directions and others standing still, in plain sight of the remaining enemy fighters who had tried to flank us. ‘Get them
shaken out into a defensive posture, get a grip of these fucking idiots’, screamed Major Martin David.

‘One of them was stood up’, said McDonald, ‘when there was RPGs winging straight over our heads. I was on my belt buckle and he was stood up, eating an apple and laughing at
us.’

‘Very good soldier, my soldier very good’, said the ANA’s commanding officer, almost singing with laughter as we pulled back. I hadn’t seen him since, on the way in,
he’d made one of his soldiers carry him over a stream so that he didn’t get his boots wet.

When we got back to the patrol base, the ANA found the Taliban’s frequency on their radios and listened to them talk (this is called ‘i-comm chatter’). Anyone with a normal CB
radio could listen in as they were doing. I heard such ridiculous things – four hundred fighters are about to storm the base! We have taken forty casualties in the ditch! Thirty suicide
bombers are about to detonate themselves! – that I assumed the Taliban knew they were being listened to and were being deliberately misleading. But i-comm chatter was treated as if it were
the most sophisticated covert surveillance, so secret and so valuable that if I ever mentioned it I’d be aiding the enemy. The ANA either hadn’t got that message or were ignoring it, as
they immediately started talking back, taunting the Taliban about the battle they had just lost.

‘Come back to the same place tomorrow without the planes and helicopters and we’ll show you a fight!’ replied the Taliban.

‘We’ll kick your ass the same way’, said one ANA soldier, causing the others to roar with laughter. ‘And fuck your mother.’

The Brits weren’t so jubilant. They carried the heavy equipment back to the base. They knew that the ground they’d just cleared would have to be fought for again.

The fighting in Zumbelay was part of an effort to expand a relatively secure area, optimistically designated the ‘Afghan Development Zone’. It formed a triangle
between Gereshk, Lashkar Gar (the provincial capital), and Camp Bastion, the huge and rapidly-expanding British base, complete with landing strip, safely positioned in the Helmand desert. As part
of a wider policy, the ‘comprehensive approach’, this area was supposed to be the focus of an intense nation-building and reconstruction (or construction, as some soldiers were quick to
point out) effort. It was hoped this effort would quickly convince the local population that the Afghan government, with the ‘support’ (no one was allowed to say the effort was British-
or American-led) of the international community, could provide a much better way of life than the Taliban. The local people would then side with the central government and reject the Taliban,
making it impossible for them to operate. It was classic counter-insurgency, called ‘draining the swamp’, or ‘hearts and minds’ in past campaigns, although to find an
example that actually worked, you had to go back over sixty years.

The comprehensive approach looked perfectly feasible in a PowerPoint presentation, when the beneficiaries, who weren’t consulted, were viewed as automata. When applied to an actual
society, especially one as fragmented, traumatised and complicated as Helmand’s, it rarely lasted longer than the first ten minutes of a
shura.
An anthropologist would struggle to
understand the competing interests of local power-brokers, often motivated by long-running tribal, political and drug-trafficking rivalries. A few seemed to understand but the security situation
meant that they were rarely, if ever, there when they were needed. Instead, soldiers had to do what they could.

To begin to understand how hard it was for the British to attempt to carry out this policy, imagine an Indian dropped into Chicago, or a Brazilian dropped into Islamabad. Imagine asking them,
without speaking the language or having any idea who to trust, to create, staff and monitor an entirely new system of government. What’s more, imagine asking them to do this within six
months, while fighting a war and after having killed several hundred civilians by mistake.

And this task had fallen to soldiers, untrained for many of the roles they were asked to perform, because so few people from the Department For International Development (DFID) or the Foreign
Office ever set foot in Helmand. This surely guaranteed it could never succeed. It could only have had any chance of succeeding if it was truly Afghan-led. And led by the right Afghans, which it
certainly was not.

When I asked soldiers about the comprehensive approach, I often had to start by explaining what it was. I never got an answer that wasn’t full of scorn or sarcasm. One lieutenant colonel
said that if I saw any of the Foreign Office or DFID individuals in charge of all this reconstruction, would I please point them out to him, because he hadn’t seen any.

I joined Lieutenant Colonel Westley a few days later for another
shura.
Among the many problems being addressed was a hospital whose generators had stopped because they had run out of
diesel fuel, even though the director had been given the authority to order more whenever he needed it.