by David Loyn
May 29, 2006. Kabul erupted in rioting, unnerving in its intensity. It began with a traffic accident. A U.S. military truck with poorly maintained brakes ran out of control on a hill way up in the north of the city, hitting several Afghan vehicles late in the afternoon when the streets were full of people. An angry crowd quickly gathered to confront the American soldiers, who shot five civilians dead to disperse them. As if on a secret command, the whole city rose up in anger, dragging foreigners from cars and beating them. A USAID guesthouse was burned to the ground. Crowds gathered around embassies, foreign-run offices, and residential accommodation, firing random shots, and thousands massed near ISAF headquarters. Kabul had grown since the fall of the Taliban five years before. Maybe five million people were now crammed together in makeshift mud housing clinging to the sides of the high mountains that surrounded the city. It was poor, and in the teeming alleys, Kabulis were quick to anger.
Gunmen broke through roadblocks to reach the heavily protected Pashtunistan Square outside the Arg, taking random shots at the seat of Afghan power. Afghan police were outgunned and isolated when the mobile phone network, their only communication system, became overloaded. An uncounted number of civilians died in the chaos before order was restored by Afghan and NATO troops firing live rounds.
Besieged and lonely in the Arg, President Karzai repeatedly watched footage of the riots, fearing this was the beginning of a coup.1 But the mob were not acting on orders; they had risen spontaneously, sharing impatience with the pace of reform, the indignity of corruption, and a growing sense that international intervention had brought neither development nor security. And in the countryside, the Taliban were steadily gaining ground, exploiting the growing discontent.
Karzai was more rattled than at any time in his presidency. Frightened by the power of the mob, he told the U.S. ambassador Ron Neumann,2 in the evening gloom as the riots died down in the streets outside, “If the people don’t want me, maybe I should step down.” The CIA station chief with Neumann told the president in brisk and undiplomatic language that his place was in the palace, and walking away would let down those who had died to put him there.3
The large rooms of the Arg, draped in red damask and lined by the ornate gilded stuffed chairs favored by Afghan dignitaries, told a tale of fading splendor. Karzai liked to remind foreign visitors of the fate of leaders who had tried to change Afghan society too radically. Many had died violently in that building. He was particularly keen not to be likened to Shah Shuja, installed by British force in 1838 and deposed in a general uprising three years later. The knowledge that he owed his position to America gnawed at him, challenging his sense of authority, even after he won his first presidential election in 2004.
Karzai’s old-fashioned good manners disguised a deep sense of insecurity. Constantly needing reassurance, he held court daily in the Arg with tribal leaders from across the country. With his staff, he would test new policies by asking, “What would Haji Nazar Muhammad think of it?,” conjuring a mythical village elder whose consent would be needed for reform. He did not focus on policy detail, nor military briefings, but wanted to keep his finger on the pulse of the Afghan village. It was this preoccupation that led to his growing differences with America.
At the start, Karzai was strongly in favor of the international military presence. In the 1990s, he had visited Washington on behalf of the mujahideen faction he supported, and welcomed America’s reengagement in Afghanistan. He enthusiastically communicated the views of the many Haji Nazar Muhammads who wanted ISAF troops to go beyond Kabul. “People would visit me from all the provinces of the country and ask me to send them ISAF forces and to free them from militia forces, from warlords.”4 But this changed as he saw former Taliban fighters being arrested or killed when they were trying to make peace. “He felt embarrassed, as he could not give them protection,” according to Jawed Ludin, who worked closely with Karzai in a number of roles, including as chief of staff and deputy foreign minister.
After 2004, when the ISAF mission changed and did begin to spread beyond Kabul, the number of civilians killed by American bombs and intrusive night raids darkened Karzai’s mood. “The breeze of change began to blow: slowly, slowly,” he said, “because of some of the bombardments that the Americans did on civilians; because of the bursting into people’s homes at night; because of the disrespect of Afghan sovereignty that began to emerge.”5 The Afghan president’s consent could no longer be assumed.
“THREE YEARS AND WITHOUT FIRING A SHOT”
May 4, 2006. General David Richards, from the UK, took command at ISAF in a decisive year when it would move out to take on the whole country. He would be the first non-American officer to command U.S. troops in combat in NATO’s first Article 5 operation, a mission he knew came with high political stakes. Embroiled in Iraq, President Bush quickly accepted Tony Blair’s offer for Britain to take the lead. Richards came to Kabul with a headquarters staff who had been training for the task for a year,6 far better prepared than any command group that came previously. But the improvised nature of the growth of the operation meant there was a lack of clarity of command as the war moved into a new phase.
When he arrived in May, there were four distinct regional theaters of operation. The west, where Italian troops were centered in Herat, and the north, with the Germans in Mazar-e-Sharif, were both relatively stable and under full ISAF command. The east, which would be last to come under ISAF in October 2006, was the main effort for the U.S. military and again had been relatively quiet until now, with patrols taking few casualties and attempting to win hearts and minds by operating mobile clinics in remote mountain villages. The fighting here intensified in the spring of 2006 as more Taliban fighters came across the porous mountain frontier with Pakistan—sending a grim message for the 2006 fighting season. The south was also still outside ISAF and under Operating Enduring Freedom until 2006, answerable to a U.S. major general, Ben Freakley, at Bagram. So when the first three thousand British troops of 16 Air Assault Brigade arrived in Helmand Province in the southwest in the spring, they were not under the command of Richards, the most senior British officer, at ISAF. These tangled command lines would lead to confusion over priorities and tactics—adding to the hazards when the shooting really started that spring.
The essential contradiction at the heart of the Afghan war—between the U.S. counterterrorism mission, and NATO’s plan for nation-building and reconstruction—was now laid bare. Brigadier Ed Butler, a former commander of the SAS, wrote simply, “The ends, ways and means of the two missions were diametrically opposed.”7 He thought the British mission to Helmand under-resourced from the start. Politicians never clearly articulated what the war was about and clearly had different views of it across NATO and within governments.
Butler commanded the incoming British brigade in the lead-up to Afghanistan, but was now moved up to overall command of the UK contingent in Afghanistan because it was decided he could not serve under a Canadian brigadier general commanding the south as they were the same rank. He had been of the small number of British Special Forces troops fighting alongside the U.S. against the Taliban in the first days of the war after 9/11. He had spent a year planning the Helmand operation, and contemplated resigning when he lost direct field command, a decision he felt “went against sound military judgement and previous good practice.”8 This lack of coherence in command felt designed for confusion and misunderstanding, and so it proved, just at a time when the Afghan war became far more violent, with rising casualties on all sides—among international forces, insurgent fighters, and, in far larger numbers, the Afghan people wretchedly caught in between.
Britain’s initial plan had been to send troops to Kandahar, not Helmand, and NATO had hoped that Canada would send its three thousand troops to a multinational mission in the west alongside Italy. But Canada was intent on running its own war in the south. This was where its troops had been for a year during the far more peaceful days of 2002. Now that NATO was gearing up for
a very different type of conflict, the Canadian Army wanted to show it could fight. Moreover General Rick Hillier, the ISAF commander in Kabul at the time the decision was taken in 2005, was now Canada’s chief of defence staff and had a personal interest in the deployment. He had a forceful personality. Canadian forces “had rediscovered their mojo under Rick,” said Richards. Britain stepped aside and took on Helmand.
The British government made this look like a coherent policy. Tony Blair had volunteered to take the international lead in combating opium poppy growing in the carve-up of roles at the 2001 Tokyo summit, and Helmand was the hotbed of the opium industry. So far, there had been little fighting in the south.
Butler saw it differently. In his pre-deployment report, he wrote, “The nature of the fight is likely to become a classic insurgency with a number of players, all with very different agendas.”9 There was no understanding of this in London, where he thought the government naive and their campaign plan “at best, a collection of essays, with no reference to theater.”10 An official told another senior officer in that first British brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, that he “didn’t anticipate there being any trouble from the Taliban in Helmand.” Butler and Tootal had talked to the SAS soldiers who had been into Helmand in 2005 to see the lay of the land ahead of the arrival of a larger force. Tribal elders pleaded with the British soldiers not to send more force. One SAS officer told the British author James Fergusson there would be a reaction from people who the SAS described as not necessarily Taliban, but “the community’s warrior class who always defended their community against outsiders … The Taliban, in that sense were an enemy of our own creation.” The SAS officer sent a memo to John Reid, the defence secretary, saying, in effect, “If you want an insurgency here you can have one.”11
Reid ignored the advice, and the divergence between the expectations of the soldiers who would lead the mission from those who sent them, led to the most ill-judged comment by any foreign politician during the Afghan war. Reid, on his first visit to the region in 2006, made the remarkable observation that British troops “would be happy to leave in three years and without firing a shot.” He meant they were there to back up development efforts—to police aid.
The comment followed a breakfast briefing in Kandahar. Reid told Butler he had been told in London this was a development support mission; no one in London talked about counterterrorism or counterinsurgency. Butler said that “three years and without firing a shot” was the sort of thing Reid must have been told by London officials.12 Reid missed Butler’s mocking contempt for the view. Wanting to promote nation-building, he seized the line for himself, taking it out to the press immediately after their meeting. Far from not firing a shot, by the end of their first tour, British soldiers had fired more than a million bullets.13
Butler, the plain-speaking ex–Special Forces fighter, put it simply: “The Task Force entered Helmand in April 2006 within a policy vacuum, which further undermined the ability of the ground commanders to provide clear direction to their troops.” A later British commander in Helmand, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, said British troops first arrived in the province “with their eyes closed and fingers crossed.”14
“CLOUT, DON’T DRIBBLE”
David Richards is a short, charismatic man with a ready smile, who likes to bend the rules, calling the bluff of authority. He earned a green beret after completing the UK Royal Marine commando course precociously young after leaving school. Before leaving for Afghanistan, he lost two arguments. He did not have his own aircraft to move around the vast terrain of Afghanistan, and more importantly, he failed to get a reserve force. Fighting any military campaign without a reserve broke the most fundamental rules of warfare; it was such basic military doctrine that he was surprised he had to make the case, telling his superiors that “if you come up with a plan as a cadet at Sandhurst and you haven’t got a reserve, you will fail the course.” The problem with fighting without a reserve is that it assumes the best-case scenario all the time, which is unrealistic. At NATO, he reported to General Back, the Cold War throwback whom Rick Hillier had crossed when he was in Kabul. NATO headquarters at Brunssum still did not see this as a war-fighting operation. Back rejected all of Richards’s demands.
To Richards, neither the military nor political leadership grasped the nature of the operation he was undertaking. In London, when he went for a pre-tour briefing, he was given a plan by a senior civil servant. He told her that it was different from the NATO plan he had been working on. She said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. You’re a British officer.” To which Richards replied, “No, you’ve got it wrong. I’m a NATO officer. I happen to be British and I will be implementing the NATO plan and you need to know what that plan is, because that’s what we’ve signed up to as a nation.”
Apart from the late decision as to where to send the troops, there were also questions about what equipment they should have. Richards was very sure that they needed to be able to demonstrate significant strength. The “biggest lesson coming out of Afghanistan” was the need to commit enough troops to deliver effect. A saying he liked to use was “Clout, don’t dribble.” Mass matters. He argued for artillery and Apache attack helicopters after Defence Secretary Reid approached him, with no officials present, to ask if they were needed. “We ended up having a clandestine breakfast meeting in Berlin when Reid was there for a NATO summit.”15 The lack of clear policy direction, a confused command structure, allies unwilling to take risks, misunderstandings about what was the UK and what was NATO, the separate U.S. mission, the late decision to go to Helmand, and secret meetings between ministers and generals—it felt like a very dangerous way to run a war. And what made this lack of understanding tragic was that the Afghan conflict was about to enter its bloodiest phase: casualties among international troops were relatively light until the end of 2005 but would rise steeply in the years after that.
MOUNTAIN THRUST
When Richards arrived in May, a major U.S. military operation was underway in Helmand to shape the area before British troops moved out into the province. The decision to carry out Operation Mountain Thrust was taken by Major General Freakley at Bagram, an old-school conventional warfare infantry officer. He called Butler in to inform him of the decision. With British troops already moving into Helmand, Butler opposed the war-fighting plan, preferring more of a counterinsurgency approach, engaging with the population. He was concerned that a full-scale assault would only make things worse, alienating local people and stirring up the Taliban. And he knew that the UK force did not have the manpower to hold the areas that would be cleared.
Butler thought Freakley did not understand his role as commander of a national contingent, instead interpreting his reluctance to commit British troops to the clearance operation as “both insubordination and lack of commitment to the task force.” Butler wanted talks with the Taliban, which Freakley thought “worse than dealing with the devil.”16 Tempers rose when Butler talked of British superiority in past counterinsurgency conflicts. According to Freakley, although Butler later denied it, Butler said that Britain did not need to learn any lessons from the U.S. “We fought in Northern Ireland. You did Vietnam. We’ve got this.” Freakley was “as mad as hell at that arrogant bastard.”17
In practice, although he had been cut out of field command, Butler was part of a complex command loop for British forces in Helmand, guided by the British permanent joint headquarters in a James Bond–style underground complex set among redbrick suburban streets at Northwood, by Heathrow Airport in northwest London. But Butler was not in direct command of British troops, Freakley was. It was a recipe for confusion, misdirection, and resentment. Butler crisply described it as a “misalignment of the strategic levers of power.”18
The American 10th Mountain Division troops, sent by Freakley from the east with the intent to disrupt the Taliban in advance of the UK troops arriving, were on the road for fifty-two days, covering more than five hundred miles, much on dirt roads or desert.
They had almost no notice for the operation and withdrew from frontline positions in the east under cover of night so they would not signal any reduction in troop levels to the Taliban. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Toner, said that from the moment they arrived in the south, they encountered a very different atmosphere from the east. Although fighting had been more intense in 2006 in the east than before, they felt they were still operating with consent. They continued to do medical clinics in remote villages to win confidence and received good intelligence in return. In the south, it was very different. From the moment they turned right from Highway 1 into the desert to head up to northern Helmand, everyone they met was hostile. Toner said that once they reached the town of Sangin, “There were just men, no women, no children. We should have realized we were going to have a fight.”19
They set up base in the desert north of Musa Qala, the name meaning “Fortress of Moses,” a town that would acquire totemic significance well beyond its size or local importance in the months and years to come. The Taliban were onto the Americans every time they moved. If a vehicle broke down, an ambush would be staged within twenty minutes. Toner said it was the weirdest place he had ever been. Lone Afghans on motorbikes emptied their weapons in the direction of the Americans and their Afghan army allies with no warning. It made them suspicious of everyone, corroding their relations with local people.
When they first arrived in the area, the Taliban did not attack; they were waiting. On the second day, Freakley came to see progress, and Toner took him to a meeting with local Afghans in the district center to talk about reconstruction, road building, and so on. The streets were teeming with men. “What I did not realize at the time was that I drove him through about three hundred Taliban fighters. I don’t know why they didn’t do anything. Maybe they were as surprised as we were.” It changed the next day. In the fifty-two days of the operation, Toner’s team fought twenty-two major firefights. The Taliban would lose men but still fight on. Toner remembers a fight where he had more than twenty U.S. vehicles firing heavy machine guns, but they were still put under pressure. “Nobody had ever seen that boldness or ability to maneuver or act from the enemy.”