Combat Camera

by Christian Hill

  “Not a problem,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

  The timings were extremely civilized, and had there been more than ten cans of Heineken in the fridge, we would’ve almost certainly got drunk. The three of us stayed on the couch and drank for another hour, before retiring to our rooms – double beds, fresh sheets – for eight hours of untroubled sleep.

  The absence of a hangover made it much easier to cope with the Kabul traffic the next morning. It was the usual crawl, although this time through a part of the city I hadn’t seen before. Our route to the Staff College took us past the dusty windows of the famous Shah M Book Co., which inspired the 2003 bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul.

  “I’d love to have a look inside,” Scott said. “I go past it three or four times a week.”

  “Why don’t you?” I asked.

  “You don’t just pop out to the shops in Kabul,” he said. “I could go inside, but why take the risk?”

  The Staff College was hidden from the main road by a wire-mesh security fence screened with tarpaulin and topped with razor wire. Inside the front gates the manicured grounds came as a pleasant surprise, dotted with cedar trees and gazebos. We parked outside a set of office buildings to the back of the compound and walked into the main headquarters. The Afghan police officers had just sat down for their first lesson in one of the air-conditioned classrooms on the top floor. An officer from Northumbria Police was taking them very slowly through the principles of the course, giving the interpreter alongside him a chance to unravel his Geordie accent.

  “There are some big challenges in this country,” he told them. “Corruption is one of the biggest problems you’re going to face. But we’re going to make sure you’ve got the best chance of success out there.”

  We interviewed him afterwards. He was one of the most suntanned Geordies I’d ever met.

  “I love it out here,” he said. “The sun is always shining, and the money is fantastic.”

  “How long is your contract?” I asked.

  “Two years. But I’m extending.”

  All the other British officers wanted to extend as well. We interviewed three of his colleagues, two from Kent and one from Hampshire. None of them wanted to go home. None of them wanted to return to the lower pay and the indifferent weather.

  We stuck around for lunch, waiting to catch the Afghan officers during their break. Scott brought us crisps and sandwiches, and gave us some bad news.

  “The Afghan colonel that runs this place won’t let you interview anyone on the course.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.”

  It took him twenty minutes to come back with an answer.

  “He wants a colour printer,” he said. “Absolutely unbelievable.”

  “Does he need a colour printer?” I asked.

  “No, not really. But I’ll have to get him one anyway.”

  Eventually I was allowed to interview four of the Afghan officers. They were all in their mid-thirties, but each of them looked about fifty. Like a lot of Afghan men, their faces alone could’ve told any number of stories. They had brown eyes that seemed to be full of dark wisdom, as though they’d seen the most terrible things. Ali took dozens of shots as they answered my questions about the value of the training and the importance of the Afghan police. They spoke slowly and carefully, with a gravity that felt like it had been earned through years of suffering.

  With all our interviews done, we returned to the Embassy. It was Saturday night, and the diplomats in the villa next to us were throwing a party. Classical music drifted out of the French doors that had been opened up to the garden. The first guests were starting to arrive: bright young things carrying bottles of wine, laughing and joking as they walked across the grass in the twilight.

  We wandered over to the Embassy bar. It was a bit farther away, next to the outdoor swimming pool. Ali lit a cigarette and sat with Russ at a table near the water’s edge. I went into the bar and came back with two beers and a gin-and-tonic.

  “I didn’t know you smoked, Ali,” I said.

  “I’m trying to give up.”

  “Is it the stress of Afghanistan?”

  “That’s right, boss,” she smiled. “It’s very stressful here.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, each of us lost in our thoughts. I started to think about home, walking Monty and Trudie at dusk. It was my favourite time of year for dog-walking: the wheat would’ve just been cut, opening up all the fields, letting the dogs run wild under a harvest moon.

  Suddenly the evening call to prayer cranked up from the mosque next door. It was a tremendous wailing, emanating from the minaret which overlooked the Embassy compound.

  “Perfect,” said Russ.

  Two Embassy staff were sitting at the table next to us. “It used to be much worse than this,” said one of them. “They used to have a really screechy PA system, with loads of feedback. So we bought them a new one.”

  “Have you tried asking them to turn it down?” asked Russ.

  “We did, actually. That’s when they turned it up.”

  The call to prayer soon passed. We drank a few more beers and a few more gin-and-tonics, but we didn’t get drunk. We didn’t want to spoil the weekend with a hangover. We wanted to enjoy our little holiday while it lasted. By 10.30 p.m. we were back in our villa, making the most of our temporary comforts.

  We returned to the pool the following morning. The transport for our next tasking – a trip to nearby Camp Blackhorse to film a training exercise with the ANA’s Route Clearance Company – wasn’t due to leave the Embassy until midday, giving us a few hours to live the high life in the sunshine.

  I swam ten lengths of the pool, then lay out on one of the dozen vacant sun loungers. Ordinarily the idea of sunbathing in Afghanistan struck me as ridiculous, but now it made perfect sense. What else were we going to do? Stay in the villa and watch TV? I stared up at the brilliant blue sky, allowing my skin to brown slowly in the gentle mid-morning heat, my trance only broken by the occasional helicopters – mostly Black Hawks – buzzing overhead.

  The time passed by very quickly that morning. Soon we had to leave the pool and the villa and make our way over to Camp Blackhorse. Scott said goodbye to us outside the Embassy’s front gate. “You owe me some Heinekens,” he half-joked – and then we were gone, sucked back into the Kabul traffic in our faithful Land Cruisers.

  Camp Blackhorse was off the Jalalabad Road, a few kilometres to the east of Alamo. It was home to an ANA recruit centre, birthing new units at an incredible rate. Like the training centre at Shorabak, it turned infantrymen around in eight weeks. One of the Blackhorse officers – a chubby, forthright British major called Danica – led us into the camp’s prefabricated offices and gave us a comprehensive brief on the training programme.

  “We are not deploying op-ready units,” he said. “We do not have the time. They have ‘defensive survivability’. We do our best, but if we wanted to prepare them for offensive operations, we’d need to hold them here for at least twice as long. But that ain’t gonna happen, for a whole heap of reasons, mainly political.”

  The ambitious schedule for ANA recruitment did not lend itself to a rigorous selection process. The latest green-on-blue attack had taken place just a week earlier at a patrol base in Urozgan Province. An Australian – Lance Corporal Andrew Gordon Jones – was shot dead by an Afghan soldier who was a recent arrival at the base. He’d fled after the shooting and had not been seen since. Within hours of the murder, the Taliban had claimed him as one of their own, planted months earlier – but this was dismissed by the Australian Defence Minister Stephen Smith.

  “We are aware the Taliban will use whatever propaganda they can to try and undermine the international community’s efforts in Afghanistan,” Smith had told Sky News. “Our starting point is that this soldier was subject to all of the usual biometric identification tests. We don’t know whether there’s been a dispute or disagreement betwee
n the two or what the motivation is.”

  Despite the apparent lack of evidence supporting the Taliban’s claims, the Guardian published a story on “blue-on-green”* attacks the following day, quoting the Taliban spokesman (presumably Zabiullah Mujahid), but not including the comments made by Stephen Smith. It ran under the headline “Taliban Behind Surge in Attacks on Western Troops and Advisers”.†

  Regardless of whether the insider attacks were the result of sleeper agents or just disgruntled recruits, there were a growing number of articles in the media about the ANA’s shortcomings ahead of the withdrawal of ISAF combat troops by the 2014 deadline. The Guardian subsequently ran an interview with a doctor called Abdul Baseer, who worked at a 100-bed military hospital in Kandahar:

  [Abdul Baseer] says he has seen clear progress in the war… but ask if he thinks the ANA is anywhere near ready to go it alone, without the help of American troops, and he lets out a panicked shout: “No! These improvements can’t be sustained without their help.”

  The article then focused on Barack Obama’s plans to cut the number of US troops in Afghanistan over the next twelve months. The US President was due to make an announcement about a big reduction in numbers, meaning “a larger share of the burden… to be taken up by the ANA”.

  To that end the army has been going through breakneck growth in the last 18 months, although western officials argue that the real leap in capability is yet to come as the huge influx of fresh recruits undergo more training and pick up battlefield experience.*

  Major Danica wasn’t about to disagree with the above sentiments: he knew all about the required leap in capability. He took us through a number of slides at Blackhorse, describing the comprehensive goals of the training programme.

  “As you probably know, we’re trying to get the ANA up to 195,000 before 2013,”† he said. “It’s all about boots on the ground. At the very least we’ll try to get units up to 85 per cent strength before deploying them. Sometimes we’ll get engineer units that are just filled with infantry. It’s unfortunate, but we need to keep things moving.

  “When they leave here, if they’re going to Helmand, they’ll be taking casualties within days. That is the sad reality of the situation.”

  *

  The correct wording is “green-on-blue”, derived from the phrase “blue-on-blue”, which traditionally refers to friendly-fire incidents. For Afghanistan, “blue” refers to ISAF, while “green” refers to Afghan forces.

  †

  The Guardian (online), 31st May 2011.

  *

  The Guardian (online), 21st June 2011: ‘Afghan Army Successes Cannot Mask Fear of What Happens when US Goes’.

  †

  The ANA hit its target by April 2012, six months ahead of schedule.

  Theatre Realities

  Three British servicemen were killed in Helmand during our week in Kabul. Faulkner told us at the start of his brief on our first night back at Bastion. Corporal Michael John Pike from the Highlanders died after his patrol came under fire along Highway 601 in Pupalzay, Lance Corporal Martin Joseph Gill from 42 Commando died after his patrol came under fire in Nahr-e Saraj and Rifleman Martin Jon Lamb from 1 Rifles died after his patrol struck an IED, also in Nahr-e Saraj.

  Faulkner had also started to announce the daily number of “significant acts” across theatre. These generally referred to all the deaths and serious injuries, along with the odd weapons and drugs find.

  “Sixty significant acts across the whole of Afghanistan today,” he told us that evening. “It was a hundred a few days ago, so it’s dropped.”

  This was progress, apparently. The loss of the three British troops notwithstanding, the fighting season was failing to live up to its reputation. You could always find bad news in Afghanistan, but this at least was something positive.

  Even Ross Kemp had failed to see any action. He’d spent three weeks with 45 Commando and the US Marines, but hadn’t been shot at once. He and his team were due in at midnight, theoretically with all their kit.

  “They’ve had some dramas with the flight programme again,” Faulkner said. “They took so much kit it had to be taken off a Merlin and put on a Chinook.”

  I imagined Ross would’ve been pleased with that, but apparently it had caused all sorts of ructions with the flight planners.

  “We are the dog,” Faulkner said, “and these guys are the tail. They do not wag us.”

  Ross came into the office the following morning. His kit was spread out all over the place, a lot of it still at the flight line. He stood in the doorway and looked menacing, very much like his old character from EastEnders.

  “We need to sort out this mess with the kit,” he said.

  Nobody said anything. Nobody leapt up to help.

  Ross looked menacing for a moment longer and then walked out.

  “What’s his problem?” said Harriet. “He had to carry his own bags? Who gives a shit?”

  “He needs a big hug,” said Dougie. “Well, his ego needs a big hug.”

  I saw Ross again before lunch. He’d finally managed to get all his kit together and was drinking a coffee outside the office.

  “Have we done something wrong?” he asked. “I walked in there earlier, and it was very frosty.”

  Sometimes he really did talk like a thespian, rather than a war reporter.

  “Oh, you know what it’s like,” I mumbled. “Office environment. People get a bit scratchy.”

  Even with the kit issue sorted, Ross continued to dominate the conversation in the office. The focus now shifted onto his lack of “bang-bang” footage. He was due to return to the UK in two days, but was already making plans to return as soon as possible.

  “He’s a broken man,” said Dougie. “He never heard so much as a shot fired.”

  “And the story is progress,” Faulkner said. “It might not be what he wants, but it’s the facts.”

  I picked up the TV remote control and switched on BFBS.* I was tired of hearing about Ross Kemp. BFBS was showing a new series called Our War, based on helmet-cam footage taken by British soldiers in Afghanistan. The first episode showed members of 1 Royal Anglians on patrol in Now Zad back in 2007. They passed a series of deserted buildings, all bomb-damaged and crumbling, and then came under fire.

  “This isn’t good,” said Ali, as the soldiers screamed orders and returned fire. “Where are the key messages in this?”

  “We have thought about this,” said Dougie. “We’re going to do a ‘Then and Now’ piece. In the next few days, we’ll put out a story about how much Now Zad has improved.”

  The Our War footage had been cleared by the MoD back in the UK, but they now wanted the JMOC to highlight “modern-day” Now Zad. Dougie had volunteered to go over there and write an article for the British press. He was going to take some pictures of the town centre and interview a few of the locals.

  Unfortunately a NATO jet had dropped a number of bombs into the centre of Now Zad only two weeks earlier, killing at least nine civilians.

  “Dougie, I think talking to the locals might not be the best plan,” Faulkner said. “They’re still clearing the rubble.”

  On the plus side, the number of significant acts continued to fall. By Sunday night it was down to forty-five. A Royal Marine had been caught by an IED blast during a vehicle move in Nahr-e Saraj, but had escaped with relatively minor injuries (if a damaged airway can be considered “minor”). The base at Lashkar Gah had been on the receiving end of an attempted IDF attack, but the projectile had missed by some 600 metres.

  Ross Kemp and his team left us the following morning. He had been very quiet since his return from the field, spending a lot of time in his tent. He wasn’t a “broken man”, of course, but he was seriously disappointed. Progress or no progress, he wanted some “bang-bang” footage, and he hadn’t got it. He was now looking to return to Helmand as soon as possible, before the fighting season was over completely. Faulkner raised the issue in his weekly report, summarizing the JMO
C’s tasks and priorities:

  A “heads-up” that the Tiger Aspect team (spurred by Kemp in particular) are looking for a return to theatre in July. It is clear that despite three weeks here without any noticeable kinetic incidents, Kemp is still trying to be involved in some “action” as per his previous embeds and create interest in his musings via this angle, despite the changes in Afghan life he has seen.

  No sooner was Ross on his way back to the UK than things started to pick up. The US Marines took more casualties, triggering a large IED during a foot patrol in Sangin. Five of them were flown into Bastion, one without his legs. Another four US Marines were flown into Bastion – also from Sangin – after their foot patrol triggered two IEDs: one died from his wounds, the other three lost various limbs. Meanwhile – still in Sangin – a US Marine had died after insurgents had engaged his patrol with an RPG.

  “Sounds like it’s kicking off again,” Faulkner said at the brief the following evening. “Sixty significant events across theatre today, which doesn’t sound too bad, but quite a few are coming out of Sangin.”

  He went through the latest incidents. Three US Marines had come into Bastion with gunshot wounds following two separate engagements in Sangin. During one of the engagements, a US jet had dropped a 500-lb bomb over the insurgents’ firing point, forcing them to withdraw. An Afghan child from the same area was later brought into Bastion with multiple gunshot and shrapnel wounds. The cause of the injuries was not known. An investigation had been launched.

  The following day – 15th June – the hospital at Bastion went “black”. That meant they were temporarily unable to take any more admissions. Eighteen casualties were brought in during a four-hour period. For several hours afterwards, casualties normally bound for Bastion had to be redirected to other ISAF hospitals across theatre.

  The JMOC had more pressing concerns, however. PJHQ were upset because we’d just released a story about Ross Kemp to the Daily Star. His presence in Afghanistan was supposed to remain a secret from the British media for another two days. Sky was due to make a big announcement on the 17th about the third series of Ross Kemp in Afghanistan. Apparently PJHQ had promised them media silence until then.