The Circuit (22 page)

I doubted the men spoke English, so I’d have to bring Hamid with me to interpret. He wasn’t keen on the idea. I didn’t want to push him beyond his comfort level but I really had no choice.

I left my pistol in my vehicle and instructed Hamid to do the same. My thinking was if the young men found weapons on us they’d immediately regard us as hostile. We wouldn’t be totally at their mercy, though, as our guards could cover us from the car park. I gave my big camera with the 400 mm lens to one of the guards so he could keep track of what was happening at all times. The camera lens is a terrific optic that can ID an individual from two miles away. Before heading down to the river, I grabbed my small camera. I figured if I carried it openly in my hand, it would make us appear even less intimidating.

As we walked, I scanned the riverbank beyond where the group was gathered. I spotted a man who appeared to be unconnected with them, leaning against a 125cc motorbike. The engine was cut and he was watching me and Hamid intently. As soon as the group saw us, they stopped wrestling. The nearer we got, the harder their expressions grew. At close range, they looked younger than I’d thought but no less fierce. I offered my hand in greeting and they refused it. As I withdrew my hand, a shadow of doubt crept over me. Had I got it wrong? Should I have kept my distance?

Hamid broke the silence, introducing us as international journalists. This appeared to relax the youths slightly. I offered my hand again. A few of them took it this time, but still no smiles.

A short man in his mid-twenties appeared to be the group’s leader. He refused to shake my hand and stared right through me. I thought, to hell with this, aimed my camera directly at him and snapped his picture before he could say anything. I showed him the digital image on the viewing screen. The young man’s stony expression gave way to a big smile. He thought the picture was great and invited his mates to take a look. I took photos of all of them and before I knew it, they were all relaxed.

After ten minutes or so of playing official photographer, I turned and waved to the guards back at the car park to let them know we were OK. Hamid chatted with the group casually. He found out that all of them lived in Lashkar Gah.

It was getting near prayer time and the group of young men started to disband; some washed in the river while others walked towards the mosque in town. The brief meeting reassured me that though they were Taliban they didn’t represent an immediate threat to us. At worst, they were gathering long-term intelligence for future offensives.

As Hamid and I started back to the hotel, the man who’d been observing us from the motorbike walked over to us. He was older than the group we’d just left and though his beard was untrimmed in the fundamentalist Islamic tradition, his turban was grey and blue – definitely not Taliban.

He introduced himself to Hamid in Pashto and then turned to me. ‘Hello. How are you?’ he said.

Speaking to me in English was definitely calculated on his part. I asked him who he was and what he wanted from us. He told us his name and described himself as ‘former Taliban’. What’s more, he claimed to have worked as a bodyguard for Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s spiritual leader who’d gone into hiding.

The man told us he had a lot of information about the Taliban if we were interested. I told him the person he needed to talk to was the correspondent and that he wasn’t available right now. I also told him that we didn’t pay for information, so if it was money he was after, he was wasting his time. He said that wasn’t the case and he’d wait for us on the riverbank the following day. I told him we’d be there at 7 a.m. He agreed and we shook hands.

Back at the hotel, I told Nic about the man on the motorbike, his claims about his former life in the Taliban and the offer to meet us the following morning with more information. Both Nic and I were suspicious of his motives. Worst case scenario, he was trying to lure us into an ambush, but it was more likely he was working some sort of angle. It wasn’t unheard of for Afghans to misrepresent themselves to the international press in an effort to extort money or help. After weighing up the pros and cons, Nic decided a meeting would be worthwhile.

CHAPTER 21

I rose the next morning at five after a terrible night’s sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about our circumstances: our hotel’s security was non-existent, Taliban were hanging around outside, and Mullah Omar’s bodyguard wanted to chat. No wonder my head was buzzing.

Though bleary-eyed, I was still ready to tackle what promised to be a very hectic day. I had to escort Nic and his crew south of Lashkar Gah to film the destruction of a poppy field; then back to the city to interview the Governor of Helmund province, and then move our entire convoy through the desert to Kandahar before nightfall.

Our first order of business, however, was the early morning meeting with an Afghan who claimed to have once guarded the Taliban’s spiritual leader. I had a strong feeling the man wasn’t lying to us about his past, but I wasn’t going to risk Nic’s safety, or mine for that matter, on a hunch. I assigned a handful of our guards to keep an eye on the designated meeting area from 6.30 a.m. onwards. If the meeting turned out to be a trap, the man couldn’t overpower us alone. He’d need to send at least one accomplice ahead to lay in wait.

At 6.55 a.m., the man turned up alone on his motorbike. I watched him through the long lens of my big camera as he cut the engine, walked down the riverbank and took a seat on some rocks near the grassy embankment. Using the lens, I scanned upstream, across the far side of the river, and along the fields. I couldn’t see anyone lingering about or hiding. I told Nic everything looked fine and we could go ahead with the meeting as planned. Before heading out I tucked my pistol into the back of my trouser waistband along with a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The man smiled and greeted us cordially. I introduced Nic, who offered a few pleasantries before getting down to business.

‘What did you want to tell us?’ Nic asked.

The man said he could tell us exactly where Mullah Omar was hiding. However, in exchange for the information, he wanted one hundred thousand US dollars and a flight to the United States. My initial thought was ‘Yes, we can get you a flight . . . to Guantanamo Bay!’ I didn’t say it out loud of course.

Nic shook his head. ‘As Bob told you yesterday, we’re journalists and we don’t pay for information,’ he said.

The man’s pleasant attitude dissolved immediately. He said if we weren’t willing to pay him, then he had nothing to say.

Nic reiterated firmly that he wouldn’t pay for information.

At that point, the man eased up a bit and started discussing general issues. We didn’t have time to engage in idle chitchat, so I pulled out my map, unfolded it on the ground and pointed to it.

‘There’s the border with Pakistan,’ I said. ‘Now, where’s Mullah Omar?’

The man kneeled down. Instead of pointing to the map with his finger or a blade of grass he clenched his fist and slammed it down on Afghanistan. He ended the meeting by saying he’d be willing to come to Kabul at a later date and talk to us – if we paid him. He then bade us farewell, walked back to his motorbike and drove off.

Nic and I later spoke about the meeting at length. We both felt that the man had told us the truth about his past and that he wasn’t a Walter Mitty-type character. I doubt he knew exactly where Mullah Omar was hiding but he probably could have told us whether he was in Afghanistan or Pakistan. But the real story in my mind wasn’t Mullah Omar’s whereabouts; it was that one of his former followers was keen to sell out his old leadership and jump to the winning side. That showed me that the Taliban wasn’t a single unified force of hardcore fundamentalists. Like any organization, it had opportunists who supported the movement when it suited them. It made me wonder how many Afghans had latched onto the US-led coalition for convenience.

The morning meeting came to nothing but that hadn’t dampened Nic’s enthusiasm or mine for the rest of the day’s events. Next on our agenda was the poppy eradication shoot.

After breakfast, a group of counter-narcotics officers and Afghan National Police arrived at our hotel to escort us to a poppy field thirty kilometres south of Lashkar Gah. The Afghans were travelling in a convoy of four pickup trucks and kitted out with AKs, RPGs and machine guns. It would have been a good show of force if their weapons hadn’t been in such poor condition. One look and I knew there was no way I could entrust our security to that lot. I insisted on taking all of our guards with us.

We left our hotel around 8.15 a.m. with our five-vehicle convoy sandwiched between the Afghan pickups. We were extremely overt, which I found very unnerving. I would have preferred to travel to the location without the police, but this was their operation and their call. I was lucky to have got permission to bring our guards along.

When it came to destroying poppy fields in Helmund, the counter-narcotics officials were spoilt for choice. We must have passed at least three dozen on the way to our shoot. I had read that Afghan poppy farmers had produced 3,600,000 kilograms of opium the previous year, but it wasn’t until I saw mile after mile of poppy fields that I fully appreciated the scale of the problem. From where I sat, the government’s goal of wiping out 25 per cent of the nation’s poppy production by the end of 2004 seemed a pipe-dream.

What little credibility the eradication programme had in my eyes was lost as soon as we reached the poppy field earmarked for destruction; it was no bigger than a football pitch; insignificant in terms of acreage. The field was dotted with dozens of bearded, turbaned heads bobbing in a sea of pink and white petals. Some of the men had gathered around a tractor hooked up to a plough. The counter-narcotics team told us they were local farmers who’d come out to protest. It was the Afghan version of a sit-in.

In addition to the protestors, there was a small group of men – some wearing black turbans, others white – observing from the edge of the field. I later found out they were drugs traffickers who’d come to make sure that their poppies were left alone. Finally, there was the poor farmer who owned the field, sat on a mound of earth, surrounded by crying children.

Nic and his cameraman got to work quickly conducting interviews with the protestors, the farmer and the counter-narcotics officials. I stuck by them the whole time, carrying my big camera so I’d look like part of the crew. After the interviews, the main event began. The tractor spluttered to life and started rolling. Row after row of poppies disappeared under the blades of the plough as it circled the field. The process was marked by fits and starts; the farmers had flooded the field the night before and the tractor kept getting bogged down in the mud. Each time it got stuck, the protestors would cheer wildly.

The whole exercise was a farce from start to finish. Moreover, the method used, ploughing the plants under, would only intensify Afghanistan’s drugs problem. Any amateur gardener can tell you that once poppies are turned over in the ground they spring back the next harvest at double the yield. The farmer who owned the field could look forward to a bumper crop the next year, courtesy of Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics programme.

If the farmer was aware of that fact he seemed to take little comfort in it. I observed him from a distance through my camera lens. The eradication programme was supposed to compensate him for his destroyed crops, but he and his children looked as if they’d lost everything. Zooming in on their tear-streaked faces was like looking into a crystal ball; so much for winning over the next generation of Afghans.

I swung my lens over to the drugs traffickers on the edge of the field. They were still observing passively. I wasn’t too worried about them. What did concern me was the prospect of lunatic fringe elements screaming in to take on the authorities. The Afghan police weren’t exactly battle-ready. Many of them were sitting down drinking tea with their weapons lying on the grass beside them.

It was a strange affair to say the least. The entire exercise had obviously been staged for the press but I still sensed an undercurrent of very real emotions: anger, defiance, hate and resentment. What was the point of destroying the livelihood of a few small farmers when Afghanistan’s drugs lords continued to operate without restraint? This charade played out over two more fields; the tractor getting stuck in the mud, the cheering protestors, the distraught farmers, the drugs traffickers drawing their lines in the sand. Tackling Afghanistan’s drugs problem field by field was a fool’s errand if ever I saw one.

CHAPTER 22

In the Regiment, training and exercises are treated as importantly as operations; you don’t fail either. The key to not failing is to plan everything to the letter. When I was Staff Sergeant of the amphibious troop in the Regiment, I was sent on an exercise in the Far East to Borneo Island. The exercise called for me and another member of the troop to parachute into the sea off Borneo with a two-man collapsible canoe, paddle to the mainland, navigate fifteen miles up an estuary, cache the canoe and move in light order to recce an enemy camp.

My planning of this exercise was meticulous. I consulted tidal charts to plot our recce of the camp at low tide allowing plenty of time to get back to the canoe before high tide hit. When we actually did do the exercise, however, my plans fell apart.

We paddled up the estuary but when we reached the cache area, the river was so high we were paddling between the trees. It didn’t make sense to me because the water level exceeded any recorded high tides on the charts. Mind you, the exercise was still a success. Instead of caching the canoe, we lived, recced, slept, ate and did everything else we needed to from it. We achieved our aim, not on foot but by paddling everywhere.

When we returned to base, I spoke to a local fisherman about the high-water level. He told me that due to the interaction of certain moon phases with the broken coastline and offlying islands in that region, once every four years for four days they experience what are known as ‘king tides’. These tides can rise twenty feet above normal tide levels. The king tide phenomenon was not recorded in the tide tables or charts, so I had no way of knowing they existed when planning the exercise.