The Pathfinders arrived in Helmand in mid March with the task of establishing ‘ground truth’ – discovering the lie of the land for the benefit of the rest of the brigade. They started off in Gereshk. On 6 April they patrolled up to Now Zad in eight WMIKs and two Pinzgauer troop carriers. As they arrived in town they were attacked from several positions. They returned fire and withdrew. While they were falling back, one WMIK overturned. Despite their reliability and manoeuvrability the vehicles were often seriously overloaded, which could make them dangerously unstable. The Pathfinders managed to destroy the vehicle with an anti-tank missile to deny it to their attackers. In the meantime they called in an A-10 to batter the enemy positions, and were told to hold their fire. The gunmen were in fact ANP. A few hours later the Pathfinders and ANP held a mini-shura and the medics patched up some of the Afghan wounded. The British soldiers were somewhat bemused to find that the Afghans seemed to bear them no ill will. ‘They were all smiles and gave us tea and tangerines,’ said Sergeant Major Andy Newell. Demonstrating a chutzpah that the Pathfinders could only admire, they also asked for an ammunition resupply to replace the bullets they had fired at their allies. The reasons for the incident were never properly established – the ANP claimed they thought the new arrivals were Taliban – but it gave the Pathfinders vivid proof of the confusing and treacherous environment in which they were operating.
A few days later they had another bad experience. They were tasked to provide security for a Canadian convoy near Sangin. As they drove along in single file one of the WMIKs rolled over a land-mine left behind by the Russians. The vehicle was flung into the air and Lance Corporal Damien Manning and Sergeant Dave Burton, who were inside, were injured. Manning lost his leg.
The Pathfinders spent five days in Musa Qaleh late in May before handing over to an American force. The American deployment was only a temporary measure, however. Someone would have to take responsibility for the place. The question was, who? Early in June the Pathfinders were ordered to go there and hold the place for forty-eight to ninety-six hours, after which they would be relieved by ‘A’ Company of 3 Para. Wight-Boycott, who had just taken over command, thought it unlikely that their stay would be so brief and his scepticism was duly justified. As it turned out, ‘A’ Company got stuck in Sangin and the Pathfinders got stuck in Musa Qaleh.
Despite the supposedly limited deployment period the Pathfinders took no chances. Wight-Boycott loaded up with as many stores as his six WMIKs could carry, as well as sandbags and barbed wire to shore up the district centre’s rudimentary defences. He was careful to take an extra .50-cal machine gun and tripod mounts so they could be dismounted from the vehicle and used to defend the base. The Pathfinders were supposed to leave on 11 June. Before they set off, they rehearsed drills and test-fired their weapons. When it came to the .50-cals it was clear something was badly wrong. ‘They fired one round and then they would stop,’ Wight-Boycott said. The problem was passed up the line. The answer came back that the guns had probably not been properly cleaned. The Pathfinders insisted that this was not so. Then it emerged that machine-gunners in other units were experiencing the same trouble. Wight-Boycott, after consulting with Andy Newell, said he was not taking his men out until the problem was resolved. The .50-cal machine gun was probably the gun the Taliban feared most. It had a range of more than 1 mile and fired, at a blistering rate, a thumping shell that tore through walls and trees and made mincemeat of human flesh.
Tests revealed eventually that the ammunition was faulty. There was not enough propellant in the rounds, and therefore not enough gas to recock the weapon. The batch was junked and a new supply bought from the Canadians at a cost of £30,000.
The Pathfinders left for Musa Qaleh in the early hours of 14 June, travelling for six hours off-road. The last stretch was through the dense vegetation of the cultivated zone to the west of the town. This close country was dangerous. The Pathfinders preferred the open desert where they could see for miles. They drove with pistols in hand to guard against the Taliban bushwhacking them from the trees and bushes scraping the sides of the WMIKs.
The handover from the Americans lasted a few days. Even once they left, the American forces would not be far away. They had established an FLE (Forward Logistic Element) about ten miles to the north, which was equipped with a battery of 105mm guns that could be called in to support the base if it came under attack.
Musa Qaleh lay at the confluence of two wadis running north– south and east–west. The district centre was bang in the middle of town, in between two bazaars. The compound contained a police headquarters, a prison and a clinic, built by the Americans. There were thirteen prisoners languishing in the lock-up, awaiting trial on charges ranging from rape and murder to failure to pay their debts. Some had been on remand for a year. They were likely to have to wait a long time for justice. The local judge and magistrates had fled to Lashkar Gah to escape the Taliban. Many of the inmates had malaria, as did many of the police. But the ten warders who guarded the prisoners treated them humanely and fed them well.
There were about eighty police in the compound. Only a quarter of them had uniforms, which they were not inclined to wear, preferring their dishdashas and flip-flops. They looked little different from the Taliban. On any night about ten ANP would put in desultory stag duty on the corners of the compound. Wight-Boycott noted that they tended to go to sleep.
The compound was like all the other district centres in Helmand, a cluster of low buildings, coated with cement and mud. It was surrounded by a 10-foot wall, topped here and there with razor wire. The buildings were widely spread out. The Pathfinders took over one in the centre of the compound. It had five rooms on the ground floor. They became the ops room, a clinic, a signals post and two small dormitories. There was more accommodation in the clinic. One of the Pathfinders, Corporal Tom Blakey, set up a makeshift café with the cheery slogan ‘come in for a brew, stay for the slagging.’ It was ‘morale central’ according to Andy Newell. On the roof was Sangar Two. Sangar One was at the north-west corner of the compound, on a two-storey building known as the Outpost which lay just outside the compound walls and was reached by a rickety, twenty-foot-high walkway. Sangar Three pointed out towards the rat-infested bazaar, which stretched westwards out of the town and led to the cultivated area and the wadi.
The prison complex was nicknamed the Alamo. It dominated the compound and the area around it, and was a good place to mount machine guns, whose arcs of fire could sweep in all directions. There were doubts about how much weight the roof could take, so for the time being only one .50-cal was mounted there. At the south end of the complex just outside the walls was a multi-domed mosque.
There was a big front gate made of haphazardly welded sheets of rusty steel, hanging off its hinges, which opened on to the bazaar to the west. Directly in front of it was a minaret-like tower which the troops called the ‘obelisk’. The ANP’s policing of the gate was inconsistent, and it was often left ajar. The town beyond the walls was a drab jumble of mud walls and unfinished concrete dwellings, with skeins of power and phone lines straggling overhead. It reeked of poverty and privation. What money there was in the town came from drugs and smuggling.
From the Pathfinders’ point of view, the outstanding fact about the Musa Qaleh base was that it was completely surrounded by streets, alleyways, houses and compounds. Sangin had broad open spaces on three sides. Here the buildings lapped at the walls of the compound, providing excellent cover for attackers.
The town had considerable strategic importance. It lay along the main north–south route linking Baghran to the Sangin valley. As the attacks in May had shown, the town was high on the Taliban target list. They had already successfully created a climate of fear among the civilians. Anyone who cooperated with the foreigners could expect to be murdered. The school had been closed for four months after all the teachers fled to Lashkar Gah. There were signs, though, that the Taliban were reluctant to launch another major attack on the place a
s they had in May unless they could be sure of success. The damage that attack had caused had won them no new friends in Musa Qaleh. Most of the population had little reason to love the Taliban. But as in Sangin, they doubted the value of foreigners’ promises. Wight-Boycott’s first meeting with the locals was not encouraging. The leaders were looking for tangible proof of goodwill. One obvious way of demonstrating it was to replace an electricity transformer that had been destroyed in the Taliban attack. It would cost about £5,000. The money, and the transformer, eventually arrived.
The Pathfinders started off patrolling the town. ‘[We were] trying to build up a rapport, which was pretty difficult,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘You were walking along saying, “Hi, salaam aleikum,” and they would just blank you.’
As elsewhere in Helmand, the local population were continuously being forced to decide between the lesser of two evils. They had been happy at the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. The tribal elders warned the local Taliban not to start a guerrilla war against President Karzai’s forces and their foreign backers and told them to leave the area if they did not want to live in peace. But reports that Karzai’s regime was also seeking to destroy their livelihood reduced their enthusiasm for the new order. They were now ruled by people who seemed as brutal as the Taliban. In one incident in 2003, the then governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, sent forces into the village of Akhtak to chase out Taliban fighters. About eighty people were killed in the raid, most of them civilians. When the villagers demanded compensation a price was agreed but the governor never paid. There were other broken promises. The aid that was meant to pour into the region failed to arrive. Sher Mohammed had since been ousted from office, at NATO’s demand. But there was no reason to believe that Governor Daoud would be any better. In the meantime, the Taliban had an opportunity to present themselves as patriots and protectors who would defend the local people against an alien force that brought fire and explosions in its wake.
It was unfortunate for the newcomers that they were visibly on the same side as the ANP. In Musa Qaleh, the police were as loathed by ordinary civilians as they were everywhere else in the province. The Pathfinders tried to teach the ANP some low-level skills. Despite their name, the ANP saw themselves as more of a militia than a police force, and the mundane business of operating vehicle checkpoints, searching cars and conducting arrests did not come easily. Their mentors also attempted to instil some basic drills. Muster parades were held in the mornings when their chief would inspect their kit and check that their weapons were clean.
The police chief for the Musa Qaleh district was Abdul Wulley, a smiling, bearded joker in his late forties who had at one time or another allied himself with virtually all Afghanistan’s scrapping factions. Everyone, Afghan and Brit, called him Coco. Wight-Boycott was nearly twenty years his junior, but despite the age gap they hit it off. Neither could speak the other’s language but they made each other laugh. ‘He was a menace and he was a great guy,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘He was funny. I used to have lots of great chats with him every afternoon when we drank tea together. He had fought the Soviets and the mujahedin. He had fought for the Taliban and now he was the chief of police.’ As a result, his former friends in the Taliban now hated him. ‘They used to sing songs about Coco. One of the famous quotes was “the Taliban would forget God before they forgot Coco”.’ The enemies kept in close touch with each other. The Taliban would ‘phone him up and say, “Hey, hey, Coco, what are you doing?” and start slagging him off. Likewise he would phone them and start slagging them off. Just like children. It was a very, very interesting dynamic.’
The behaviour of Coco and his men was a reliable source of amusement. The other policemen’s gay proclivities were the object of horrified fascination. On Thursday nights the ANP had a social evening dubbed ‘man love night’ by the Pathfinders, when they walked around wearing mascara and holding hands. In one of his chats with Coco, Wight-Boycott explained that things were different in Britain. ‘[Coco] replied, “I hear in your country that you love your women and that is very strange. I have been married for twenty, twenty-five years and my wife and I meet in the night and fuck like strangers.”’
Apart from his entertainment value, Coco was extremely useful. He seemed to have inside knowledge of all the Taliban moves and gave regular, accurate tip-offs about the insurgents’ dispositions, impending attacks and state of morale.
The information was passed on to the other allied elements operating in Helmand, but was not necessarily absorbed. Two weeks after their arrival the Pathfinders were told that an American convoy would be passing through their area.
They warned the operational base at Kandahar to which the Pathfinders reported that the Americans should not be routed through Musa Qaleh as they would certainly be ambushed. As the Americans approached, the Pathfinders picked up intelligence that the Taliban had spotted them and were preparing to attack. They tried to radio the convoy but were unable to get through.
The Taliban struck about a mile to the south of the Musa Qaleh base. Wight-Boycott had only twenty-five men with him. If they sallied out to the rescue there was a big risk that if the insurgents chose to attack they would overrun the Afghan defenders at the base, so the Pathfinders were forced to stay put. The firefight went on for more than three hours, during which the compound also came under attack. Eventually an American B-1 bomber was called in and dropped a bomb on the attackers, allowing the convoy to extricate. One of the Americans was wounded in the firefight and a casevac helicopter was called in. The now battered convoy moved to an area next to the ‘green zone’, to wait. This was the area of trees, ditches and high-standing crops to the west of the town that the Pathfinders had driven through on the way in. The foliage and irrigation channels provided excellent cover, which the Taliban were to make full use of.
Before the convoy got there the American quick reaction force that had arrived from the FLE to rescue their comrades conducted a ‘clearance by fire’ – drenching the area with heavy machine guns and grenades from rapid-fire Mark 19 launchers. ‘It was like a scene from Apocalypse Now,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘The green zone just erupted in flames.’ To everyone’s astonishment green tracer flowed out from the trees and orchards where the Taliban crouched. The insurgents were still there and firing back. Wight-Boycott conceded that this was ‘all credit to them. You have got this amazing scene. There was a Chinook and an Apache coming in firing from its thirty-mil [cannon] trying to clear the zone, and rounds coming back towards the Chinook as well.’ The casevac helicopter eventually abandoned its mission and the casualty was removed only when the Americans shifted to another landing site and a Black Hawk managed to get in safely.
When the Americans returned the following day to destroy their abandoned vehicles they were ambushed again and a few more potshots were aimed at the Brits in the base. The violence had a profound effect on the town. ‘The next day all the Afghans in Musa Qaleh fled,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘You could see people running over the hills.’ The soldiers were trained to look out for ‘combat indicators’ – signs that fighting was imminent. Musa Qaleh was now a living example of one of them – the ‘absence of the normal and presence of the abnormal’. Intelligence suggested that the Taliban were closing in and had thrown a 500-yard-deep ring around the base. They were, it seemed, preparing to attack, and had warned the townspeople to move out.
But, for the time being at least, apart from the odd burst of misdirected fire, the assault did not materialise. It seemed that the insurgents were still getting the measure of the defenders. To reinforce any Taliban doubts about the wisdom of attacking the base, aircraft flew ear-splitting, low-level runs over the town. The Pathfinders believed that these had an effect in dampening the Taliban’s enthusiasm. When reinforcements arrived in the form of twenty men of 6 Platoon, ‘B’ Company, 3 Para – the Guards Parachute Platoon – it freed the Pathfinders up to increase the strength of their patrols, while the Guards secured the base.
The sig
ht of the patrols seemed to both deter the Taliban and reassure the departed civilians. By 1 July, many had drifted back and business was starting up again in the shops and bazaars. By day, the Pathfinders walked through the streets trying to create an atmosphere of security. By night they patrolled around the base searching for likely launching points for Taliban operations.
Wight-Boycott believed in a vigorous, confident approach. During the American convoy episode, fire had been seen coming from a building about four hundred yards away, from where it was possible to see into the compound. Men had been seen apparently observing the base from the roof. He decided to mount a cordon-and-search operation to check it out. He took a chance with the Afghan police by including them in the planning and giving them the main role in the mission. The Pathfinders would provide the outer cordon. The Afghans would set up the inner cordon and carry out the search, accompanied by a British mentor. ‘Coco and I drove out with his boys,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘They had done a good job for the inner cordon and I said, “Right, you are going to go in there and search the building.” They said, “We are not …” I thought, “Great.”’ It was left to Wight-Boycott and another Brit to kick in the doors. They discovered three Pakistanis behind one of them. Their story was that they had come to Musa Qaleh because they couldn’t find work at home. No one believed them. But in the absence of any incriminating weapons or communications equipment, nothing could be done.
Coco and his Musa Qaleh cops seemed bemused by the whole episode. ‘He thought we were crazy,’ said Wight-Boycott. ‘So they had no understanding really.’
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