The Long War

by David Loyn

  The British move into Helmand was already delayed by the delay of Dutch troops into the mountainous region of Uruzgan to its northeast. The Netherlands, backed by Australia, finally arrived after much indecision caused by the increased intensity of the threat. They deployed only after Australia effectively agreed to provide security for their base. Afghanistan was an increasingly hot war, and Richards knew that many countries who had committed to the new NATO/ISAF mission had a very low threshold of risk. He said, “I’ve often speculated that if they had known in 2004 what they knew in 2006, whether those people would have said yes to George Bush’s request. I have an idea many more would have said no.”

  The delay in the British move to Helmand after Mountain Thrust meant the Taliban had more time to prepare. When British troops finally arrived in Helmand, three months late, the poppy harvest was about to begin, and more men would be available to fight once the harvest was in. What is extraordinary given the level of hostility encountered by 10th Mountain on their shaping operation is that British troops were still sent out into small forward bases—“platoon houses”—during the next few months. Richards was certainly opposed. “We are being bequeathed the proverbial dog’s dinner,” said Richards when he finally took command of the south, and so the whole country, in July, “a resurgent Taliban, a disillusioned population and corrupt, poppy-driven local administrations.”

  HELMANDSHIRE

  Before the troops arrived, Britain had already intervened by removing the governor of Helmand Province, Sher Muhammad Akhunzada—known by international troops as SMA, a significant power broker, and related by marriage to the president.20 He was replaced by Muhammad Daoud, “a technocrat, not from the south,” said Richards, “who didn’t really know much about Helmand.” Instead, pressure could have been put on SMA to be more moderate. “He did have the means through his own militias to have kept a lid on a lot of the problems that subsequently visited the British.” Daoud was the right man at the wrong time—a technocrat with none of the skills to take on the warlords.

  Removing SMA was done very crudely. Troops raided his office when they knew it would be full of sacks of raw opium resin. Like so much else in the country, defeating the narcotics trade lacked coordination. NATO was reluctant to make confronting this part of ISAF’s military mission, and Richards strongly agreed because of the sheer scale of the challenge and because it distracted from the aim of securing the population. Destroying poppy fields hurt only poor farmers. But the year before, the U.S. had unilaterally decided to engage in large-scale eradication, contracting out the work to DynCorp, who employed a fleet of tractors fitted with chains rigged to the back to destroy poppy fields. SMA made a show of supporting the eradication, which he was able to channel onto fields planted by his competitors. As part of his desire to please, he stored caches of opium resin seized in raids ahead of widely publicized public burnings. British troops raided his compound knowing it to be full of one of these stores, ignoring the governor’s protestations that he was holding it for the American eradicators. It was this “evidence” that enabled them to force Karzai to remove him from office, a decision he bitterly opposed.21

  The defining feature of Helmand Province is the river that runs down the center—the populated zone along it widened by a latticework of American-built canals from the 1950s. This narrow area would see the most intense fighting of the Afghan conflict, and the names of its towns and villages would become familiar to the mainly American and British troops who would fight there. From Kajaki Dam in the north, running through Now Zad, Musa Qala, and Sangin, to the hamlets of Garmser in the south. Between north and south lies a wider populated zone around the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and smaller towns Gereshk and Nad Ali, where the canals provide irrigation to a far larger area. The original British plan had been not to move out of this main populated zone in central Helmand. But when the Taliban began to attack this settled area, Butler believed British forces needed to take the fight to the enemy. His first objective was Sangin—up the valley north, since it was the main launchpad for Taliban attacks. This move came despite a failed attempt by a British unit to establish a base in Sangin during Operation Mountain Thrust. The troops needed to be extracted again by helicopter without even staying one night, so intense was the firefight.

  Despite this setback, British troops moved into platoon houses in a string of isolated Afghan towns after Freakley’s shaping force withdrew to the east. These were set up in Afghan district centers, typically a large meeting room, with light perimeter defenses, in the string of towns up and down the Helmand River from Musa Qala in the north to Garmser in the south. In the months to come, Butler watched as they came under constant attack, unprecedented for the modern British Army, an “extraordinarily high-intensity period of 24/7 fighting not seen since the Korean War.”

  Richards knew that Lieutenant Colonel Tootal, the commander of the main British infantry unit 3 Para, was not keen on extending beyond the main town, Lashkar Gah, because Britain did not have enough force. But Richards had no say in this, because he did not have command of the south until July. He watched, frustrated, as British soldiers were thinly spread across a wide landscape and began to take casualties. They had even gone as far as Kajaki in the northeast of the province, where the hydroelectric scheme needed urgent repair work.

  The most optimistic reading of the plan was that the troops would stabilize a town and provide security for development and government to return, spreading good governance across the landscape like ink on blotting paper to join with similar ink spots elsewhere. It was classic counterinsurgency strategy, based on the ultimately successful British operation in Malaya in the 1950s.22 But rather than spreading the writ of the government in Helmand, in each small base, a few dozen men were pinned down in the suffocating heat of the summer, fighting for their lives. To Richards, it seemed “an arid strategy in that we weren’t achieving any of the psychological enhancements—the security, the development, the slight whiff of growing prosperity that was so vital to the long term campaign. They were just fighting themselves to a standstill.” Richards felt that his own government had a “little England” approach, that could not see Afghanistan beyond “Helmandshire,” an Afghan province coopted as if a British possession.

  The arguments between the American headquarters and senior British soldiers, and between national governments and their own troops on the ground, made Helmand feel dysfunctional in 2006—a series of private wars conducted by officers seemingly with their own agenda, strategy, tactics, and internal chains of command. Why was Freakley so keen to send an operation to disrupt the Taliban in Helmand? How could Butler have allowed British troops to be stretched out so thinly? Why did the government in London have such a slender grasp of the reality in Helmand that they thought they might leave “with not a shot fired”? Some of the answers lie in how little attention Afghanistan was receiving outside on the world stage in 2006, and the natural confusion of alliance warfare. When casualties increased in 2006, and it was clear that troops were not “policing aid,” the response of the British Ministry of Defence was to restrict media access, apart from short, carefully shepherded trips, further obscuring the picture, and delaying rational decision-making. The military concentration on Helmand would continue in later years, when the deployment of U.S. Marines there formed a large part of the surge of troops ordered by President Obama in 2009.

  Mike Martin, a British soldier who learned the Pashto language and worked as a political adviser, said that the battle in Helmand should not be seen in simple terms as between “the Taliban” and “the Afghan government.” Instead, it was a series of interlocking tribal disputes, where foreign forces were unwittingly being used to settle old scores. “Taliban” was a badge of convenience against foreign invaders, but nothing more. On one occasion, he explained this to an incoming commanding officer but was told to keep quiet, since that was not how London saw it. The British Ministry of Defence tried to ban Martin’s book explaining the comp
lex terrain, preferring their simplistic analysis rather than facing the truth.

  A British captain, Leo Docherty, resigned from the army at the end of the mission in protest at the move of British troops beyond the populated zone around the provincial capital. He watched as soldiers were scattered across Helmand “in a shallow, meaningless way … where the only way for troops to survive is to increase the level of violence so more people get killed. It’s not something I want to be part of.”23

  OPERATION MEDUSA: THE “MAIN SET-PIECE BATTLE”

  September 2006. Richards’s focus moved from Helmand to neighboring Kandahar Province, where Canadian troops faced the first major battle of what would become quite a different war in Afghanistan. The need to take on a major Taliban command center in Panjwayi, south of Kandahar, became a pressing priority, since it was believed that the Taliban were now massing to attempt to retake the provincial capital, the spiritual heartland of both the Taliban themselves and the Durrani Pashtun tribes. There had already been one battle at Panjwayi on the Arghandab River, during the shaping and disrupting operations of the summer, but the Taliban were back in force. Their strength there went back to the decision to reinstate Gul Agha Sherzai in 2001, who directed major bombing operations against Mullah Naqib’s supporters in the Arghandab Valley, turning the area into a hotbed of Taliban sympathizers.

  Richards saw the operation, code-named Medusa, as the “main set-piece battle” of his time in Afghanistan. But during the planning phase, in contacts with his political masters in Europe, he did not mention the assault, fearing that political nervousness would get in the way of what he saw as clear military necessity—“Don’t ask, don’t tell, just do it.” He was already being criticized by his superior officers in London for writing memos demanding extra troops and hinting at the risk of additional casualties if another battalion was not sent. “I felt I was being criticized for telling the truth, for fear of it upsetting our political masters.”

  He reported up a number of command chains in NATO, the U.S., and the UK. Most immediately, there was Brunssum, NATO’s operational command center in the Netherlands. But there was also the NATO political center in Brussels. And he kept in contact with the Supreme Allied Commander Europe at the SHAPE headquarters in Mons, Belgium, as well as CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida, and the layers of military decision-making at his own Ministry of Defence and at the Northwood headquarters in the UK. The arguments he had on his way out to Afghanistan, about a reserve in particular, led him to believe that none of the bodies above him in the military hierarchy were really behind him. “I suppose in my mind it reinforced this determination of, bloody well just do as I felt was right, and sod those back up the chain of command … they thought it was a walk in the park.”24

  He had to cajole nations to contribute troops to what he knew would be a tough fight. “The fact is that ultimately the nations decided, as opposed to the military commander. You had to construct a plan around that.” Britain could not spare any troops for Medusa, pinned down as they were in Helmand, nor did the French offer troops.

  The planning process for Operation Medusa forecast a bloody battle, with a cost that would be unacceptable in the capitals of most troop-contributing nations. According to Richards, “there was no guarantee that it would go that way, but the calculations were pretty well done.” It was a situation that tested his judgment. “It’s a command decision, not a medical decision, as to whether you accept the risk of casualties that are being predicted.”

  He succeeded in improving that grim calculus by employing more airpower and artillery, but even then, the strict requirements of the doctrinal template, analyzing the correlation of forces and determining the minimum size of an attacking force, were never met. The Taliban had a superiority of six to one, in a well-defended position, and even with airpower, that was not a comfortable ratio. Richards had to make the decision to go ahead without meeting the basic requirements of military doctrine. He owned the risk himself. This sense of planning for life or death set apart military command from any other executive office. It defined the difference between a CEO and a general.

  Canadian troops were untested in a complex battle, although in the weeks before Medusa was launched, they faced a number of fierce Taliban assaults. Their commanding officer, Brigadier General David Fraser, wanted to delay the operation until October, when they would have Leopard tanks available, but both Richards and Freakley insisted they could not wait; there was a genuine fear that Kandahar could fall to the Taliban, and the presence of a Taliban stronghold so close to a major city had to be confronted. There were several hundred, possibly thousands of Taliban in well-defended positions on ground they knew well, and they could reinforce with fresh recruits with ease.

  Zero hour for the ground offensive in Operation Medusa was Sunday, September 3, after two days of artillery and airstrikes, including a confirmed hit on a group of senior Taliban leaders at a meeting. It was brought forward at the last minute by Freakley, after intelligence revealed that Taliban were seen to be leaving because of the intensity of the bombardment. He called to say, “They’re leaving, you’re letting them out of the bag.”25 Richards watched initially from Kabul as a battle began that would determine so much and was in the end “a very close-run thing.”

  The Taliban were confident of the strength of their position, but that, according to Richards, “was their undoing,” giving them a false sense of security. They were dug into “an old-fashioned defensive position with three lines of trenches, and underground shelters straight out of a military manual.” There was even a fully equipped field hospital in the complex of trenches and tunnels dug through the tight-packed mud walls of vineyards. Dotted among the tunnels were hardened bunkers with steel joists for blast protection. Thick fields of marijuana up to eight feet high hampered thermal imaging capability because of the heat-absorbing capacity of the plant. The Taliban converted raised sheds, built for drying grapes, into firing platforms, shooting through the ventilation holes, while protected behind thick mud walls that were as good as modern armor. They had sown substantial numbers of pressure-triggered IEDs in the ground ahead of them and widened a canal to make it harder for vehicles to cross the steep sides.

  The assault began with virtually the whole Canadian battle group attacking across a wide riverbed. The Canadians made good ground but took significant casualties, four dead and eight wounded. Richards worried when they stopped at nightfall and returned across the riverbed, impatient that they might lose momentum. “It was for resupply, but normally you wouldn’t give up ground.” He had a virtually sleepless night.

  Next morning, eating breakfast in the half-light of dawn before making a fresh assault, Canadian troops were targeted by an A-10 Warthog—whose Gatling gun tore through the unit, killing a former Olympic athlete, Private Mark Graham, and wounding thirty-five others, including the commanding officer of the assault company.26 The American plane had mistaken which side of the river they were on and mistook their burning garbage for a Taliban campfire. Another A-10, hard on the heels of the first, was called off the raid just in time. It was a bitter irony that it was the heavier airpower Richards had demanded that caused this disaster.

  The assault took the main infantry capacity out of the center of the Canadian front line. A sergeant who survived the attack, Brent Crellin, said of the blasts hitting the ground around him, “There were sparks in the dust, like the sparklers you wave on Canada Day.” The front lines were so close, and the smoke in the air so confusing, that a Chinook called in to carry out the wounded landed for a few seconds among Taliban fighters and amazingly was not shot at. The incident led to a significant loss of nerve on the part of Canadian officers—one was threatened with being removed from command if he did not get a grip.

  Richards wanted to be on the spot and arrived in Kandahar on Wednesday, two days after the A-10 strike, to find the Canadian commander, Brigadier General Fraser, close to calling off the whole operation. He had sent a somber and gloomy assessment h
ome to Ottawa, which Richards thought “hugely magnified concerns about further casualties”27 and led to the brakes being put on. Richards tried to put some steel back into the battle and, severely worried about the loss of momentum, returned to another almost sleepless night in Kabul, calling Ottawa himself. “I was very worried that NATO was about to be defeated on its first major challenge and I was going to be remembered as the general that lost NATO’s first war and first big battle.”

  In the event, the fighting restarted virtually spontaneously, backed by a determined U.S. assault into the defensive trench system from the south of the Taliban stronghold, where an attack was least expected. The ad hoc force included troops from 10th Mountain, who had just returned to their posts in the east after fighting the intense battles to shape Helmand ahead of the arrival of British forces. They turned round again to head back to the fight when they got the call and, as the situation was so precarious, fought with no sleep after driving all night.

  After the new U.S. force entered the trench system from the south, the Canadians’ fresh assault in the middle broke Taliban resistance. It was a rough-hewn improvised operation. Canadian engineers had to clear safe routes through the IED-strewn ground and deploy a bulldozer to cut through thick mud farm walls. The Taliban were so confident of victory that they continued to bring in reserves after the start of the battle and took very heavy casualties, possibly as high as one thousand—although the lack of supporting troops beyond those engaged in the operation meant there was no effective cordon, and hundreds of Taliban fighters escaped. The fighting took a week, and civilian casualties were reduced to a minimum by warnings of the impending assault. Before the offensive began NATO forces saw streams of thousands of old men, women and children leaving the battle zone.