No sooner had we landed at Lashkar Gah than we heard the news about Osama bin Laden. It was the only topic of conversation, buzzing around the helipad. We walked through the heat and dust to the TFH office, where Colonel Lucas and his team were watching the news on Sky.
“So the witch is dead,” I said.
“Quite,” Colonel Lucas said.
I took a seat and watched the live footage from Times Square. Thousands of New Yorkers had come reeling out of their apartments in the early hours of a Monday morning, ready to celebrate. A lot of them bore an uncanny resemblance to drunken frat boys, pumping their fists and chanting “U – S – A” for the cameras. They’d taken to the streets at an incredible rate, their numbers growing all the time, presumably helped along by the naked triumphalism of the TV coverage.
“Do you think we need to issue a statement?” asked Meredyth, an unassuming captain who sat in the corner of the office. In charge of media planning, she was TFH’s equivalent to Harriet.
“Not really,” Colonel Lucas said. As the official spokesman for Task Force Helmand, he was required to issue statements about significant events in theatre (although this usually meant the latest British deaths). “I don’t think it’s for us to say anything. And I can hardly put out a statement before the Prime Minister has got out of bed.”
He wasn’t that excited about the news at all. None of us Brits were, really. Not as much as we should have been. The bastard who had triggered this entire blood-soaked adventure was dead – but to be honest, we all felt his time had passed. Most of us thought he had died years ago.
That said, some people thought he was still alive. Various rumours were already circulating around the base suggesting that bin Laden was holed up in a secret bunker on American soil, getting the full treatment from his interrogators. Some even suggested that he’d been captured more than a week ago, but the Americans had kept the news quiet so that it wouldn’t get buried in all the coverage about the Royal Wedding. It didn’t help that US authorities released conflicting accounts of his death in the days that followed, the White House backtracking on earlier assertions that bin Laden had died after engaging Navy Seals in a firefight.
“Bin Laden and his family were found on the second and third floor of the building,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters the following day. “There was concern that bin Laden would oppose the capture operation, and indeed he did resist. In the room with bin Laden, a woman – bin Laden’s wife – rushed the US assaulters and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.
“We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you… and obviously some of the information came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on.”
The news of bin Laden’s death had initially broken on Twitter, fuelling the potential for misreporting. A thirty-three-year-old IT consultant called Sohaib Athar – who lived near the terror leader’s compound in Abbottabad – had unwittingly told the world the first details of the Navy Seals raid. He was working late, writing code for a US company, when the noise of helicopters prompted his first tweets:
– Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event).
– Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter.
It turned out to be a long night for Sohaib. His initial irritation soon turned to genuine concern when he realized the noise might presage something serious:
– A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad. I hope its not the start of something nasty.
Meanwhile, in America, President Obama was making plans for a late-night announcement. Just before 10 p.m. the media were alerted by a tweet from the White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer:
– POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10.30 p.m. Eastern Time.
At this stage, reporters in Washington suspected the address would have something to do with bin Laden, but they did not know he’d been killed. That all changed at 10.25 p.m., when Keith Urbahn, an aide to former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the following announcement:
– So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.
With Obama running late on his address (CNN reported he was writing it himself), anonymous sources at the White House started to confirm the rumours of bin Laden’s death to the media. At 10.45 p.m., ABC, CBS and NBC all interrupted their schedules to break the news.
“We’re hearing absolute jubilation throughout government,” reported the ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz.
The traffic on Twitter was now peaking at more than 5,000 tweets per second, at the time the third-highest rate ever on the site.* Finally, at 11.35 p.m., Obama went live on air to deliver his address:
“Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
“For over two decades, bin Laden has been al-Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”
Regardless of what the US President said, everyone in the TFH office agreed that bin Laden was no longer the force he used to be. Ideology seemed to be slipping off the agenda.
“He’s irrelevant,” said Colonel Lucas. “This war is all about drugs now. We’re fighting a narco-insurgency.”
It depressed me to think bin Laden had already passed his sell-by date when the Navy Seals shot him up. We’d spent a decade trying to find him, scouring the caves and the foothills and the compounds, and now that he was dead, it didn’t make a great deal of difference anyway. He’d been hiding for years in his reinforced lair in Pakistan while the War on Terror – or the war in Afghanistan, at least – had moved on. We couldn’t just pack up and go home, leaving this country to its fate. We had to stay here and do the decent thing, carrying on the fight with the drug lords.
The other news of the day was that the poppy harvest was facing further delays – it would be another fortnight before the insurgents would be in a position to stash all their opium and pick up their weapons and explosives for the summer fighting season. This was a tiding that had a far greater influence on our battle rhythm than the death of bin Laden. We could expect a number of reprisal attacks in the coming weeks, but the real story was the drugs trade and its shifting calendar.
Heroin had an impact on everything, including the timetable by which we measured our successes. Senior officers didn’t like to talk to the media about “winter gains” until all the poppy had been harvested. It was risky trying to describe the progress of the previous twelve months if the fighting season hadn’t even started yet. Until you knew how hard the insurgents would come back at you, you didn’t really know anything.
The death of bin Laden may have made all the headlines, but as a yardstick for success, it was a throwback to a bygone era. We’d long since given up measuring our progress by the amount of damage we inflicted upon the enemy: these days it was all about the number of our own troops getting killed. We could’ve done body counts on the Taliban – in fact, we did – but what message would that have sent to the media back home? Hey, we’re doing really well out here, wasting loads of Afghans. The insurgents were getting killed all the time – it was like a turkey shoot. A far more persuasive figure could be derived from our own body count. If the rate at which we were dying was on the way d
own, then we must’ve been making progress.
Meanwhile, the injuries kept on coming. The number of British troops being flown into the hospital at Bastion was falling, but that didn’t necessarily mean that things were getting better. Later that week the hospital released its monthly figures for April. Faulkner gave us the news at his evening brief.
“Three hundred and ninety-four casualties were treated for trauma,” he said. “One hundred and fifty-two of those were Americans, and seventy-nine were Brits. Afghan Security Forces were fifty-five. Local civilians and other nationals made up the rest.”
The British injury figure was low in comparison to previous Aprils, so we took some comfort from that, even though we all knew it was misleading. The Americans had replaced us in one of our most dangerous areas of operations – Sangin – where they were now starting to take casualties instead of us.
Faulkner also told us about the latest intelligence reports, suggesting that big splits were appearing in the Taliban’s hierarchy. Fault lines were opening up between higher-level insurgents and the lower ranks, and also between young and old.
“Apparently the elders don’t command the respect that they used to,” he said. “A lot of the younger Taliban – when given orders – are saying, ‘Why are we listening to these old guys?’”
If Taliban recruitment was still founded upon idealism – as it seemed to be back in 2001 – then I couldn’t believe these youngsters would’ve answered back to their elders. Taliban was supposed to mean “religious student”, but now they were also running a multi-billion-dollar narcotics business. A decade ago, the country made almost no money from heroin – now it was turning over around three billion dollars a year. In the midst of such a profitable narco-insurgency, was it any wonder if the latest recruits to the Taliban were less concerned about religious enlightenment and more interested in becoming drug lords?
A month after bin Laden’s death, the Global Commission on Drug Policy branded the international war on drugs “a failure”. The nineteen-strong panel, most of them former heads of state, argued that counter-narcotics strategies had cost hundreds of millions of dollars and caused thousands of deaths, with no evidence of any progress. They cited UN estimates that worldwide opiate use had risen by 35 per cent from 1998 to 2008.
The Global Commission’s report made grim reading for those politicians who’d pitched the invasion of Afghanistan as a chance to fight not just terrorism, but also the drugs trade. In October 2001, three weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair told his Labour Party Conference the Taliban was exporting heroin to finance their military activities.
“The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets,” he said. “This is another part of their regime we should destroy.”
Although this statement was true – 90 per cent of heroin being sold on Britain’s streets at that time had come out of Afghanistan – the actual quantities involved were dwindling. In July 2000 the Taliban’s leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – in collaboration with the United Nations – had banned Afghan farmers from cultivating opium, calling it un-Islamic. This had resulted in a massive drop-off in heroin production. Only 7,606 hectares of land in Afghanistan was used for growing poppy in 2001, a 91 per cent reduction from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares. In Helmand Province itself, a traditional hotbed for opium, no poppy cultivation was recorded for the 2001 season.*
*
The highest rate of tweets at that time had occurred at four seconds past midnight on New Year’s Day 2011 in Japan, when users around the world sent 6,939 tweets, most of them wishing their friends “Happy New Year!” in Japanese. In comparison, traffic peaked at 3,996 tweets per second at 4 p.m. UK time during the Royal Wedding – NBC News (online), 3rd May 2011.
*
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2012.
Dogs of War
Jumping onto a helicopter at Bastion sometimes felt like catching a bus, but really it was much more complicated than that. You couldn’t pick and choose your flight time – it was randomly assigned and published in the daily flying programme the night before. That meant, in the planning stages for any given task, you had to set aside a day just to get to your destination, in case you were booked on an evening flight. The same applied for the journey back to Bastion, knocking another day out of the timetable. Thus it was that we spent a lot of our time in Afghanistan just sitting on our backsides.
We’d flown to Lashkar Gah on the morning of 2nd May for a job at the ANP training centre that wasn’t due to take place until 4th May. Because the scheduling for road moves could also be unpredictable, 3rd May was given over to the twenty-minute drive between the two locations.
Lashkar Gah wasn’t the worst place in the world to sit on your backside. It had one of the best canteens in Helmand, a NAAFI selling magazines, ice creams and cold drinks, and a well-stocked library in the welfare tent. Bizarrely, it also had a garden.
While Russ and Ali killed that first afternoon on their laptops in one of TFH’s spare offices, I went over to the welfare tent to find something to read. The library consisted of hundreds of secondhand paperbacks, donated to the military by the British public. They’d been stacked chaotically on a series of uneven bookshelves that ran around the inside of the tent. Lee Child seemed to be the most popular author, the spines of his numerous bestsellers all faded and broken. His all-action hero Jack Reacher was obviously a big hit with the boys, despite being an ex-military policeman who’d spent most of his career banging up soldiers.
Clearly there was no accounting for literary taste. Fancying myself above all of that, I picked out a pristine copy of Hangover Square – apparently it was a modern classic – and walked over to the garden.
It was a curious parcel of land, crowded with flowers and greenery, looking very much like an allotment flown over from some English backwater. Surrounded by concrete walls, it felt entirely cut off from the rest of the base. A trio of Afghan gardeners normally tended to the beds, but right now I had the place to myself. I sat on a bench in the shade at the end of the garden and started to read my book.
I couldn’t get into Hangover Square at all. Perhaps I’d only chosen it because I liked the title. The protagonist was apparently some sort of lunatic. I gave up after twenty minutes and took it back to the library, swapping it for The Hard Way by Lee Child.
I didn’t go back to the garden, but returned instead to the office to check my emails. A frighteningly gaunt reporter from Agence France-Presse was walking out just as I arrived, called away on an impromptu job. She’d left her laptop in the office, her desktop showing a photograph of a burnt-out car on a desert highway with a dead dog in the foreground.
“Who would have a desktop like that?” I asked.
“A war reporter,” said Ali.
I switched on my laptop. My desktop showed a picture of Monty – very much alive – sitting in my parents’ kitchen, waiting for a biscuit.
I checked through my emails, then started on some research for the upcoming job at the ANP training centre. Recruits graduated from the centre every three weeks, but TFH was keen for us to record the latest passing-out ceremony ahead of the UK coroner’s inquest into the notorious shootings at Checkpoint Blue 25. Our job was to capture footage and stills of newly trained Afghan police officers looking normal and non-psychotic, before distributing it to the British media in time for the opening of the inquest on 6th May.
I read through the media coverage of the Checkpoint Blue 25 killings, dating back to the incident itself on 3rd November 2009. The checkpoint had been built alongside a small crossroads just four hundred metres to the east of Shin Kalay, one of the most volatile parts of Nad-e Ali. Fourteen Afghan policemen lived and worked in the high-walled compound, theoretically enforcing the rule of law. They were supposed to control the road from Shin Kalay to the town of Nad-e Ali itself, but thei
r presence had inspired a surge in violence. The Taliban had taken to attacking the compound almost every day, peppering its walls with small-arms fire, forcing the policemen to abandon many of their patrols.
At the height of the attacks in October 2009, the commanding officer of 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Walker, had met with village elders in Shin Kalay to discuss the violence. This shura led to the establishment of a British mentoring team at the checkpoint, consisting of a dozen Grenadier Guards and two corporals from the Royal Military Police (RMP). They moved into the compound in the last week of October under the command of Regimental Sergeant Major Darren Chant, a former instructor at Sandhurst who’d previously served with the Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder Platoon. Noted for his height and build – a colleague had described him as a “man mountain” – he’d already distinguished himself on a previous tour of Afghanistan in 2007, carrying a young guardsman who’d just lost his leg in a bomb blast for more than a mile to a MERT landing site.
Most of the team at Blue 25 had been plucked from Lieutenant Colonel Walker’s tactical group – police mentoring was not their area of expertise – but the soldierly discipline imposed by Sergeant Major Chant, along with the input from Corporals Nic Webster-Smith and Steven Boote from the RMP, produced immediate results. Within days of their arrival, attacks on the checkpoint had tailed off, and the Afghan policemen had returned to their duties.
One of the guardsmen, Lance Sergeant Peter Baily, told the Daily Telegraph:
“Even for the ANP, they were a pretty shoddy bunch. We turned up and were confronted with this bullet-riddled compound. The ANP were lounging around drinking tea. Not all of them wore uniform: they didn’t seem to have any regular patrolling programme. Some slept in the compound, others in the village, and they seemed to come and go as they wanted.
“But the sergeant major got among them, imposed some discipline and began to work and nurture them, and they really responded. After a few days they were back in uniform and were patrolling with us every day. We were making real progress.”*
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