Later that day, a shura was held in the desert west of Musa Qaleh. Butler flew in with the Foreign Office representative, Nick Kay. 3 Para’s Patrols Platoon and the Household Cavalry set up a security perimeter. They put up a tent and waited. An hour later, a cloud of dust appeared to the east and a convoy of pick-up trucks emerged from the murk. The elders had arrived. They were seated and given cold drinks and water. Butler started with a spiel he had by now delivered many times. He told them, ‘We are not here as occupiers, we are here as your guests. We’re here to make a difference. When the job is done and you want us to go home, we will go back home. I have a family like you back in England and I want to go back to them when the job is done.’ The elders were ‘very respectable, very well spoken, very proud’. In the background sat men in black scarves, the Taliban or their representatives, who took no direct part in the talking. ‘You could tell them by their features, their dress and everything else,’ Butler said.
The first business was the terms on which the ceasefire would continue. David Richards in Kabul was clear that it would have to hold for a period of up to a month before a withdrawal could begin, leaving security in the hands of the elders. Butler wanted to ensure they would be able to get access to the base, in the event soldiers needed evacuation. The elders promised to provide Easy Company with food and water.
They kept their word. Soon after the meeting, civilians began to appear again on the the streets of Musa Qaleh. Some of the shops and stalls reopened for business. ‘We got some potatoes and cooking oil so we could have some chips and – whoosh! Morale went sky high,’ said Freddie Kruyer. This was just as well because two days after the start of the ceasefire, Adam Jowett broke the news that they would be staying put for up to two more weeks. That night, Captain Mark Johnson, the senior Royal Irish officer, who had been in Musa Qaleh since the beginning, talked to his men. He emphasised the need to see the mission through. If they left now the base would almost certainly fall into the hands of the Taliban. It would not be fair to their dead and injured comrades. Staying on was ‘the right and proper thing to do’.
The message was that if some sort of normality was established and Afghan forces took control of security then their mission was accomplished. Over the next days and weeks, the ceasefire took hold. Governor Daoud had drawn up a fourteen-point plan, which was put into effect gradually. Among the protocols were that the flag of Afghanistan would always fly over the district centre and the chief of police would be chosen by the governor. The Taliban would withdraw from town, leaving the elders with responsibility for security. The elders promised to provide sixty men from their own families to provide the core of a new police force.
Adam Jowett was a natural diplomat. He held regular meetings with the elders, sipping sweet tea and eating flat bread. They talked about their Christian and Muslim faiths. ‘We discussed the differences, and more often than not the similarities,’ he said. ‘The subject came up readily and was important in helping them realise how normal we were and how much we had in common.’ They also talked about repairing the town’s damaged and destroyed buildings, including the bombed mosque. Initially, there had been plans to send in outside contractors but the community insisted they would do the work themselves. The elders included some returnees from the diaspora who had worked in America and Germany and spoke good English. ‘They were professionals,’ said Butler. ‘They just wanted to return home, to get their lives in order, rebuild their villages, restore their country and keep the Taliban out.’ They proposed that the Coalition provide the cash and they would find the labour. The work would provide a constructive alternative to the sort of employment the Taliban could offer.
The soldiers of Easy Company were used to fighting by now. They woke each morning doubting that the ceasefire would survive the day. They used the downtime to build up the base defences. But the remaining weeks they spent there passed with no noise louder than the honking of the traffic in the streets outside.
Easy Company did not leave Musa Qaleh until the middle of October. Jowett and Mark Johnson walked the commander of the newly raised Afghan militia around the base, pointing out where things were and the kit they had left behind for their use. It was, he said, an experience he knew well from his army service, ‘as if you were handing over to another unit’.
There was a last duty to be done before they climbed into jingly trucks and drove out into the desert where the helicopters were waiting. Someone had drawn a memorial to Easy Company on one of the walls. It bore the Royal Irish crest and their motto, Faugh a Ballagh (Clear the Way), the battle cry of the fighting clans of the west of Ireland. It carried the names of everyone who had served in Musa Qaleh and those who had died there. Now it was painted over. For better or worse, Musa Qaleh belonged to the Afghans now.
18
Going Home
With the new arrangements in place in Musa Qaleh, the tempo of violence in Helmand slackened for a while. ‘A relatively quiet day,’ wrote Stuart Tootal in his diary on 14 September. ‘The level of activity across the area of operations seems to have reduced over the last few days.’ The next day was also ‘unusually quiet’, with ‘no attacks against Now Zad or Musa Qaleh and only one attack against the ANA at FOB Robinson and against our own troops in Sangin’. So it went on. The 18th was ‘probably the quietest day we have had since June’. There were ‘no contacts anywhere until after 17.00 hours and then only two brief attacks, one against Kajaki and one against Sangin’.
Across the battle group, everyone wondered about the possible causes of the lull. It could reflect the Taliban’s battle weariness, after four months of fighting and heavy casualties that had failed to win substantial gains. There was evidence that the insurgents were finding it difficult to recruit locally and were having to draft in more foreign fighters. Seven Pakistani men of fighting age had been arrested in the Sangin area in the second week of September.
It might also be a sign that, as in Musa Qaleh, local people were turning against the Taliban. In Sangin there were indications that prominent figures were also exploring an initiative to exclude both the insurgents and the British from the town and take charge of security themselves. Or it might simply be that winter was coming and the gunmen were calling a seasonal halt to allow the poppy fields to be planted for next spring’s harvest. No one believed that the Taliban had given up, and their caution was justified. There were to be another seventy-six shooting incidents between 18 September, the ‘quietest day’, and the end of the battle group’s tour on 6 October.
Soon, though, the fighting would no longer be the responsibility of the Paras and their comrades. New faces were appearing in Bastion. The first elements of 3 Commando Brigade, who were taking over, were trickling, then flooding, in. On 29 September, ‘L’ Company of 42 Commando, The Royal Marines, flew to Sangin to relieve the Paras’ ‘C’ Company, who had been there for a month. The base was still under regular attack. The day before it had been hit by small-arms fire and RPGs, one of which struck the roof of the FSG building.
The Marines landed just before first light. ‘B’ Company of the Paras went with them to protect them during the transition. They spent the morning alongside ‘C’ Company fighting running battles with the Taliban through the dusty cornfields and muddy irrigation ditches south of the district centre, supported by Apaches and A-10s. At least four insurgents were killed. But in the process of clearing the ruins of the JDAM building, two ‘B’ Company officers, Captain Guy Lock and Captain Jim Berry, were hit by grenade fragments, and Berry was badly hurt. The Household Cavalry were leaving too. Shepherded by the Paras’ Patrols Platoon, they forded the Helmand river in their armoured vehicles and headed south to Bastion.
As the last soldiers boarded the helicopters they were seen off with a final salvo of small-arms fire from the Taliban. Despite the danger there was an end-of-term feeling in the air. The Paras and their battle group companions had been in Sangin for ninety-one days. In that time they had clashed with the Taliban 138 times.
Sometimes these encounters were brief and lasted only a few minutes. Sometimes they went on for hours. What was constant was the knowledge that violence could erupt at any second. Behind the stoical joking and the wind-ups, a low buzz of anxiety was always present.
And now, for 3 Para, it was over, or nearly so. At the beginning of September, ‘A’ Company had been sent to Gereshk, back where they started, five very long months before. They had arrived first and set the standard for the battle group. They had also suffered more casualties than the other two rifle companies. By now, though, no one was making any distinctions. Helmand had been equally hard on everyone. ‘A’ Company started to move out on 2 October, with ‘C’ Company following them. ‘B’ Company and Easy Company, which stayed on to observe the cessation of hostilities in Musa Qaleh, were the last Paras to go.
Tootal handed over responsibility for the British battle group to the Marines at twelve noon on 6 October. Before that, there had been one last helicopter mission to fly. The base at Now Zad, which was defended by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, had come under attack and two men had been hit by shrapnel from RPGs. Both would recover but both needed surgery. The Fusiliers would have to wait until November, when rain and mist settled on Now Zad and the trenches on ANP Hill filled with mud, before they left.
Hanging around in Kabul, waiting for a flight to Cyprus where the battalion was to enjoy a short break for relaxation and decompression before continuing the journey home, there was plenty of time for reflection. The Paras were returning from a very different mission to the one they had embarked on. Before the British arrived in Helmand there had been virtually no Coalition presence apart from a hundred American soldiers who were concerned only with hunting down Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. The Paras had gone there to bring stability. Their presence had provoked a reaction. That had been expected, but not on the scale that developed. The battle group had been forced by the Taliban to fight what was known as a ‘break-in battle’. That meant establishing the British presence in Helmand and creating the conditions in which they would be able to stay.
This had taken up all their resources and energies. As a result, little progress had been made on reconstruction, the underlying purpose of the deployment. No ‘quick-impact projects’ had been realised. With nothing to do, the Department for International Development had pulled out of Helmand in August. The inactivity was summed up by the story of the washing machine in Gereshk hospital. The unplumbed appliance had first caught the eye of the Paras back in April. Fixing it seemed a simple way of declaring their good intentions to the local people. When they left, it was still swaddled in its plastic wrapping.
Instead of construction there had been destruction. Any buildings that the Taliban used as firing points were liable to be bombed flat and the areas around the district centres of Musa Qaleh, Now Zad and Sangin were scarred and battered by the continuous battles. The people of these places had no reason to love the British. All the violence had failed to break the Taliban’s grip on the inhabitants. They were still able to carry on intimidating, threatening and extorting.
‘What was it all about?’ asked an officer who spent nearly two months in a platoon house. ‘Well, I flattened the town and I killed a lot of Taliban … did that achieve a good effect? I don’t know.’ He comforted himself with the thought that ‘what you could say is that we held the Taliban in Now Zad, Musa Qaleh and Sangin in order that they didn’t get Lashkar Gah and Gereshk’.
That, ultimately, was the justification for the platoon house policy. Almost from the beginning, Governor Daoud had warned Brigadier Butler that if Now Zad and Musa Qaleh went, then Sangin and the hydroelectric dam at Kajaki would follow within a month. Then, the front line would be Highway One, the strategic road that loops through southern Afghanistan, and the Taliban would be inside Helmand’s capital Lashkar Gah and neighbouring Gereshk ‘before you can blink’. Butler believed him. By answering Daoud’s call, the British ‘kept the front line deep in northern Helmand and the enemy chose to attack us there and that’s where the battles were fought’.
In the course of the fighting the Taliban suffered heavy losses. In all there were 498 engagements. It was impossible to establish exactly how many insurgents were killed but the figure was in the high hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand. The attrition reduced the Taliban’s capacity to expand. It also punctured their claims to have the strength and skill to topple the government and sweep the British out of Afghanistan, as their ancestors had done before them. Their inability to do this damaged their prestige in the eyes of the local people. This was a major setback in what was essentially a struggle for the approval, or at least the acquiescence, of the population of Helmand.
With the insurgents’ advance stemmed, the south stayed calm for almost all the time the 3 Para battle group were present. There may have been little reconstruction, but that was not the fault of the military. There was, at least, stability.
In early February 2007, five months after the Paras left, the front line edged a little closer when the Taliban broke the agreement they had made with the elders of Musa Qaleh and stormed in to take over the town. They set about imposing their own brand of authority on the inhabitants. They murdered the leader of the elders, Haji Shah Agha, who had initiated the plan for the Taliban and British withdrawal. There have been reports of public hangings. The reoccupation followed an American air strike that killed a local Taliban leader, his brother and other fighters. The Taliban claimed they were inside the ‘exclusion’ zone where, under the terms of the agreement, they should have been exempt from attack, though this was disputed. The collapse of the agreement suited the Americans, who had opposed any accommodation with the Taliban all along.
But the fall of Musa Qaleh did not signal the start of a domino conquest southwards. By the summer of 2007, British troops of 12 Mechanised Brigade and their Afghan allies had cleared the Taliban out of large areas of the Sangin Valley. Discussions about security in Now Zad, Kajaki and Sangin did not evolve into formal arrangements but the soldiers were on good terms with large sections of the local people and their leaders, and work had begun on building and rebuilding in Lashkar Gah, Gereshk and Sangin. The engineer presence had been tripled and a full regiment of engineers was at work with local contractors on projects costing more than £3 million.
All progress in Helmand was slow. Daoud, who was recalled to Kabul at the end of 2006, said once that ‘pessimists don’t realise the amount of time needed’ for things to begin to work. The 3 Para battle group had fought and won the vital break in battle that would allow a start to be made.
They had done so with extraordinary courage, resolve and good humour. In the end, the greatest achievement of the deployment lay in the conduct of the soldiers themselves. Everyone in the battle group could feel proud. They had fought a gruelling war bravely and cleanly and stopped the Taliban encroachment. Their achievement was reflected in the haul of medals announced later that year
*
. Among them were the Victoria Cross awarded to Bryan Budd and the George Cross won by Mark Wright. It was telling that both medals were earned not for killing the enemy but for actions aimed at saving the lives of friends. In the middle of the swirling political and military uncertainties of Helmand, as solid and enduring as the mountains that overlooked the battlefields, stood the ideals that motivated every proper soldier. These were nothing to do with queen or country, religion or political ideology. What sustained them was the determination not to let themselves down, and above all, not to let down their friends.
Pride in the awards was tempered by sadness at the lives that had been lost and damaged. Fourteen members of the battle group, along with one gallant interpreter, had been killed. Then there were the forty-six who suffered serious wounds. Visiting those who had been drastically injured during the Kajaki mine strike, Stuart Tootal noted in his diary that ‘long after this tour has ended, the war will go on for them’. Many men would have to spend the rest
of their lives struggling to achieve a fraction of the fitness and mobility they once rejoiced in.
The fighting had been hard on minds as well as bodies. The damage was not obvious in the euphoria of survival and homecoming. But over the months, a number of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder were diagnosed among battle group soldiers. Though this number was in single figures, no one was immune. Almost a year after the events, one of the bravest and most opimistic of the senior NCOs could not bear to fall asleep for fear of the flashbacks and the faces of his dead friends that haunted his dreams.
Homecoming was weird for everyone. The ordinariness of Colchester life was startling and unsettling after what the men had been through. ‘It was off the scale, what we were seeing and doing in Afghanistan,’ said Zac Leong, ‘A’ Company’s sergeant major. ‘It was very hard to be in the thick of it one day and having a beer in a beer garden the next.’ For a while he found it difficult to readjust to family life. There had been changes while he was away. When he left his daughter had been a ‘blonde-haired, blue-eyed, gorgeous little thing. When I came back she was a Goth!’
He found himself ‘really short tempered with anything and anyone … Before I went to Afghanistan I was a really nice, chilled guy. I came back and I couldn’t tolerate anything being wrong, and I think that was due to the op.’ Leong soon reverted to his genial, chilled self.
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