Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  3

  Mission Creep

  We landed under the cover of darkness, the lights of our C-17 transport aircraft switched off to assist in countering the surface-to-air missile threat as we descended into Kandahar Airfield (KAF). I sat with helmet and body armour on and pushed myself back into my seat, hoping that the C-17’s anti-aircraft missile system was as good as the RAF claimed it to be. The threat was brought home to me by the sudden lunge of the aircraft as it made a steep dive approach for an ear-popping tactical landing. I watched the stripped-down hulk of the Chinook we carried in the cargo hold sway and strain against its restraining chains as the C-17’s nose tipped violently forward. The Chinook was one of six helicopters that we would rely on to move around Helmand Province. Its arrival promised a busy few days and nights for the RAF engineers who would work flat out in the baking heat to refit its 60-foot rotor blades. The Chinooks would provide part of the resupply chain to our new desert base of Camp Bastion located 140 kilometres to the west of KAF. They would also provide the lifeline to the isolated FOBs from which my companies would patrol. The sudden bump of the C-1‘7’s landing gear and the slackening of the restraining chains indicated that we had arrived in Kandahar.

  The airfield was to the south of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city and the spiritual home of the Taliban, where the one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar had started his radical Islamic movement in 1994. His initial motivation had been to rid the city of brutal mujahideen warlords. Once loosely united against the common foe of the Soviets, the various guerrilla commanders had soon begun fighting each other during the civil war that followed the Russian withdrawal. Their methods were vicious and they extorted the local people for their own aims. Stringing up two feuding mujahideen commanders from the barrel of a tank for their part in the kidnapping and raping of a small child, Omar’s vigilante actions gained popular support from a Kandahari population sick of anarchy and lawlessness. With a growing basis of mass appeal and the aid of Pakistan’s intelligence services, the Taliban eventually swept to power capturing Kabul from the Northern Alliance two years later. The brief respite from the lawlessness of mujahideen infighting was soon replaced by the oppressive rule of Omar’s regime and the Taliban’s fanatical application of sharia law, which was to bring misery to millions of Afghans.

  But this was before 9/11 and America’s intervention in Afghanistan. The main hangar at KAF still bore the pockmarked bullet holes of the Taliban’s last desperate stand against the US-backed Northern Alliance forces in December 2001. The new occupants were now American servicemen in T-shirts and desert combat fatigues who sweated in the heat to service helicopters. The scattered remains of the wreckage of Soviet aircraft added to the feel of previous ownership of another age, as did the mines that remained in the more distant edges of the runway. There they remained as potential hazards to the unwary military jogger who ignored the small red triangular signs that warned of their presence.

  With the departure of its previous occupants, KAF had become a thriving military commune of multinational forces. Americans, British, Canadians, Dutch and Romanians all held tenancy. It was constructed with the single pursuit of preventing a return of the Taliban and had no real sense of permanence about it. Prefabricated buildings and the thousands of ISO shipping containers that lined dusty roads gave the place an air of an international Wild West gold-rush town. The plywood structures, vehicle parks and vast rows of tented accommodation were punctuated with the odd pizza outlet or Green Bean cafe. There was also a barber’s shop, where the tired-looking Ukrainian female hairdressers gave the impression of having travelled too far and seen too much. These snatches of home-like comfort seemed to be the single most important obsession for many of the thousands of allied rear-echelon support troops based there. To me KAF had little to commend it and I developed a loathing of the place as soon as we arrived. My abiding memory was of the dust and the pervasive smell of human shit. The latter was particularly powerful if the wind blew from the west where a vast pool of human excreta churned in an open sewage treatment plant. It was strong enough to make you gag even when some way away from it. Rumour had it that a Romanian soldier had swum the 50 metres across the pool for the sum of $500. Perhaps it was the result of spending too much time in KAF. We would be only too glad to get out of the place and deploy forward to our own camp in Helmand Province following several days of briefing and planning.

  After a night of getting used to the sights and sounds of KM and breathing its unpleasant air, my planning team linked up with the UKTF headquarters for an initial briefing. In line with the plan already drawn up by the PJHQ team sent forward to Afghanistan before our arrival, UKTF envisaged that our operations would be restricted to a limited geographical area of Helmand. Extending from Camp Bastion in the west to the town of Gereshk, 40 kilometres to its east, and to Lashkar Gah, another 40 kilometres to the south, this area formed a triangular shape on a map. The ‘Triangle’ represented less than a sixth of the total area of Helmand, but included the province’s major population centres. It was also where the limited authority of the provincial Afghan government was most established. Consequently, it was decided that the reconstruction efforts should be concentrated there. Limiting operations to the Triangle also reflected the fact that 3 PARA currently had only one company group in Afghanistan. The other two companies were not due to arrive until the end of June and the rest of the Battle Group’s artillery and light armour would not arrive until early July. It was decided that my one available company would occupy an FOB near Gereshk (FOB Price) and concentrate on patrolling into the town. Once again I voiced my concern about the delayed arrival of the rest of the Battle Group which meant that we would lack the means to reinforce any troops that ran into trouble with the Taliban. But PJHQ were adamant that the full deployment would remain spread over the coming months.

  PJHQ were also still wedded to the view that Helmand was relatively quiet. This optimism ignored the fact that the province was an unknown quantity of ungoverned space. The authority of the provincial government did not extend beyond Lashkar Gah. Consequently, there had been no one to challenge the Taliban and the tribal warlords who exploited the drugs trade. The province had a nominal Afghan National Police force, but the majority of ANP were actually a corrupt ragtag collection of tribal militiamen who owed their allegiance to their clan chiefs. A small American PRT had worked out of Lashkar Gah. Driving around in Humvees, it had come under sporadic attack on at least one occasion, but it was not charged with establishing a permanent presence of authority to challenge those who ruled by the gun.

  This uneasy status quo was fundamentally altered by the appointment of a new provincial governor called Mohammed Daud. An engineer by trade and lacking any influence with the local tribes, he became increasingly frustrated by the slow arrival of the UK troops. After the murder of four of his district administrators in the north of the province, he was determined to flex his muscles. A month before we landed in KAF he established an ANA FOB in the heart of the Sangin Valley 90 kilometres to the north of Highway One. It was located just to the south of the town of Sangin. The town was the urban centre of the opium trade in Helmand and the base threatened the autonomy of those involved in the production and distribution of the drug. A coalition of the Taliban and hostile local tribes had threatened to overrun the base. On two occasions they had massed to attack and the situation had only been restored by the timely reinforcement by an infantry company from a Canadian armoured infantry unit based in Kandahar. The establishment of the base was part of a sequence of events that was to lead inextricably to drawing the British out of the Triangle into the more dangerous north.

  Even though we had only arrived in limited numbers, there was increasing pressure for us to take over command of the base. My problem was that I had insufficient troops to relieve the Canadians and meet my commitments in Gereshk. I also wanted to avoid having to guard another location where 50 per cent of the allotted troops would find themselves being tied up in sta
tic force protection duties. Additionally, I was concerned as to whether we had the necessary helicopters or flying hours to keep the base properly supplied. I discussed this with the UKTF staff who agreed with the need to get the deployment of my complete Battle Group brought forward. They also left me with the task of working out how I could provide a security effect in the Sangin Valley without getting fixed into guarding and supplying another base. Our mission was already becoming increasingly ambiguous. PJHQ clung stubbornly to the view that we should be restricted to conducting peace support-type operations in the Triangle, while the prevailing geopolitical situation suggested otherwise. The majority of my Battle Group was still sitting in the UK and the lure of Sangin was a potentially dangerous prospect. Although I didn’t have the necessary troops to do much about it, Sangin was intimately connected with the security of the rest of the province and I knew that we could not ignore it. Uncertainty and resource scarcity were becoming constant themes of the operation. It was something that we were getting used to and I consoled myself that at least we would be getting away from the ever-present stench of KAF’s sewage works.

  After a week of constant re-planning in KAF, it was good to leave the place eventually and head to our base at Bastion. Our new home was not yet complete, but I saw it as preferable to KAF. The airfield had come under a number of night-time rocket attacks while we were there. They were largely ineffective, but did nothing for a decent night’s sleep, which was fast becoming a premium. If the rocket impacted somewhere within the perimeter the explosion would wake you up. The attack siren and overexcited people thumping on your door to tell you to get to the shelters would then keep you from getting back to sleep. Lack of rest bred a fatalistic streak in me and I always elected to stay in the `safety’ of my lightweight sleeping bag. Although lacking blast protection, it provided a brief respite from the interminable planning and briefings that extended late into the night.

  We flew west over dramatic sand dunes that were painted an ochreous red by the early morning rays of the sun. Each dune cast a shadow that made the terrain seem like a shifting sea of sand that had become frozen in time. As the desert slipped past beneath us Afghanistan’s history of foreign intervention weighed on my mind. While still at school, I remembered the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1979 and their ignominious withdrawal ten years later. As an undergraduate I had attended lectures given by ITN’s correspondent Sandy Gall about reporting and living with the mujahideen in the 1980s. He had also briefed the officers’ mess in Colchester before we left for Helmand. Although our mission was very different, it was strange to think that we were now where the Russians had failed. In turn I thought about the British Army’s own history of involvement in Afghanistan. I conjured up an image of the 44th Regiment’s last stand on an isolated icy rocky outcrop at Gandamak during the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1842, so dramatically captured in oil by William Barnes Wollen’s famous painting which hangs in the museum of the Essex Regiment. I thought of Wollen’s canvas depicting doomed British redcoats huddled together as the last remnants of the Army’s inglorious retreat from Kabul. In their midst an officer with the Queen’s Colour wrapped inside his tunic steadies his men, as knife-wielding, black-robed Afghans surge up the slopes to hack them to pieces amid the snow and haze of musket powder smoke.

  Our route out to Helmand also took us over the former battlefield of Maiwand, where a British force under General George Burrows had been annihilated by an Afghan army during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880. The final leg of our flight took us over the town of Gereshk, where the Battle Group’s A Company was now based having deployed forward from KAF a few days before. Through one of the Perspex portholes of our helicopter I caught a brief glimpse of the large mud-walled structure of the fort where a small British garrison had been besieged for sixty-three days in the same year. It was finally relieved by Lord Roberts’s epic march through the summer’s scorching heat to avenge Burrows’s defeat at Maiwand.

  The Soviet invasion demonstrated Afghanistan’s continuing geopolitical importance, but now the Afghans’ jezails and Martini-Henry rifles had been replaced by AK-47s. This Russian-designed automatic weapon was the ubiquitous weapon of choice of the Taliban and the rugged Pashtun tribes that make up the majority of Afghans in southern Afghanistan. War against the Soviets had also supplied and taught them to use other modern weapons of war: mines, RPG launchers that could propel a rocket grenade several hundred metres and could destroy a tank, as well as mortars and roadside bombs. The tradition of Afghan fighting prowess and access to these weapon systems made me wonder what our own future held for us.

  Discerning the Taliban from simple armed tribesmen and pro-government militia would be an incredibly difficult task. The Taliban wore no uniforms and were made up of a complex potpourri of guerrilla fighters whose motivations and groupings varied. There is a popular misconception’ that the Taliban wear distinctive black turbans, but this ignores the fact that it is also the chosen headdress of many of the policemen and tribal militiamen with whom we were to work. Additionally, some of the Taliban’s younger foot soldiers wore no turbans at all. The Taliban’s ranks undoubtedly included ideologically committed fighters who took their orders from the movement’s senior commanders based across the border in the Pakistani city of Quetta. But this hardcore element was indistinguishable from the local fighters made up of poor rural farmers. In essence these farmers provided part-time fighters, or what we came to refer to as the ‘$10 Taliban’. They might attack for reasons of money, intimidation or a fear that their culture of independence and their reliance on opium production were under threat. Additionally, tribal affiliations and feuds emanating from the Pashtunwali code of blood debt and martial honour, so deeply ingrained in the Afghan psyche, might also provide the motivation to fight us. I put these thoughts to the back of my mind as our helicopter bled altitude and dropped to 50 feet for a ‘nap of the earth’ approach into Camp Bastion that had begun to loom as a hazy smudge on the horizon.

  4

  Hearts and Minds

  Our helicopter kicked up a cloud of brown swirling grit as we skirted Bastion’s perimeter of high-banked sand and an outer fence of razor-wire coils. It was obvious that the camp was still in the process of construction and represented a 2-square-kilometre building site. The place was a hive of building activity and the unloading of stores and equipment. Some arrived by C-T 30 Hercules on a rough desert strip by the side of the camp. The heavily laden transport aircraft gouged deep furrows in its crushed stone gravel surface when they landed, often shredding the tyres of their undercarriage in the process. The less valuable commodities, such as food, bottled water and the heaviest equipment, were brought in overland by Afghan haulage contractors in their ‘Jinglie’ trucks. Each truck was adorned with brightly painted symbols and garish charms which jingled and shone in the desert sun as they made their tortuous journey along Highway One from Kandahar. The road was prone to ambush but, despite the risks, the contractors were paid good money and kept on coming.

  I toured the camp with Bish and visited the field surgical hospital. As we looked round the tented wards we were impressed by the facilities and the professionalism of the medical staff, although I hoped that we would not be putting much business their way. It was late morning as we left to head back to our headquarters tent, known as the JOC, which stood for Joint Operations Centre, and was located at the other end of the camp. Although still only April, the heat was oppressive and the rising temperature summoned up what the Afghans called the 100-Day Wind from the surrounding Dashte Margo, which in Pashtu means the Desert of Death. It would blow incessantly from the south-east for the next twelve weeks. Gathering speed, it would cast up rising dust devils high into the sky. These swirling columns of sand could knock a man over and the wind covered everything in a thin layer of talcum-powder-fine sand. It matted hair with grit and clogged air-conditioning units which struggled to remain operational in the scorching heat.

  The JOC would become the c
ontrol centre for all 3 PARA’s operations. Consisting of two long tents, it became increasingly more crowded as new members of the headquarters staff turned up to fight for space among the long folding tables, collapsible canvas chairs, computer systems and map boards that lined its sides. At one end of the tent a large rough-hewn wooden ‘bird table’ had been constructed by the Engineers. Situated close to the various radio nets, it was spread with maps and constituted the central hub of the headquarters from which operations were planned and coordinated. The air conditioning groaned and failed in the first few days and the heat became unbearable, especially when the tents were crammed with nearly a hundred people who attended daily briefings, planned, organized logistics and manned the communications systems. Apart from the mist of sand that blew in from every pore in the canvas sides, the air was filled with the sound of crackling radio nets and the thump of generators.

  The sand and the heat were to become a factor in every aspect of living in Bastion. But, as the camp began to grow, its occupants could benefit from living in a secure environment with freshly cooked meals, access to the internet, phones, makeshift gyms and regular showers. All these facilities could be used when people were not on guard duty, manning operation centres, servicing vehicles or conducting operations beyond the confines of the perimeter. However, with the exception of the logistic support troops, the vast majority of the Battle Group would soon find themselves spending little time at Bastion. Instead they would live in Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), in Afghan district centres or from the vehicles in which they patrolled the desert. The relative creature comforts of Bastion would rarely be available to these soldiers. Instead austere conditions and constant danger would become the daily fare of the environment in which they lived.