Ross Kemp on Afghanistan

by Kemp Ross

  Our transport was one of the TriStar aircraft that ferry troops to and from Afghanistan. Some of them are suitable for carrying personnel only; others can also carry equipment; there aren't enough of them and they are all a good deal older than most of the men they fly to war. They are regularly delayed because of mechanical failure – on one of my trips we had to wait an extra twelve hours because our plane had suffered an oil leak on to the brakes. The RAF do an amazing job with the materials they have, but the honest truth is that these five TriStars are not suitable for what's being asked of them. I met a high-ranking officer whose role was to coordinate the movement of troops to and from the war zone. He told me that he would much prefer it if the men on the ground were not given their two weeks' rest and recuperation leave in the middle of their tour because it puts such a strain on his limited resources and screws up his schedule for getting essential supplies and ammunition out on to the ground. Try telling that to a squaddie who hasn't seen his wife and child in three months; but it didn't seem right to me that the RAF and the army shouldn't have the capability to perform their job efficiently. Nor would it be the first time that I was struck at how stretched we are as a land army.

  The flight time from Brize Norton to Kandahar is seven hours – a long haul when you're going on holiday, but it's amazing how the time flies when you're en route to a war zone, and it's impossible to forget that's what you're doing. Along one side of the aircraft were a number of beds. There are no first-class bunks on a military transport, however: these are for wounded soldiers being repatriated back to the UK. It's hard, on that solemn flight out, not to wonder whether you might be making use of one of these beds on the way back home. To take my mind off thoughts such as these, I joined the pilot in the cockpit. We had been told to ensure that we had our body armour and helmets with us in the cabin and I wanted to know what the dangers of landing at Kandahar actually were.

  Our pilot had the composed, reassuring intonation pilots seem to have the world over. I asked him – a bit nervously, I suppose – whether there had been incidences of his aircraft receiving enemy fire as it came into land in Kandahar. He shook his head. So far there had been no firing on the aircraft while it had actually been airborne. The most dangerous time, he said, was when the plane was on the ground. He'd had experiences both in Afghanistan and in Iraq when the aircraft had come under fire from rockets and mortars while troops were alighting and the aircraft was being refuelled.

  And I thought getting off an EasyJet flight was a scramble.

  The mood on the plane was sombre. The troops I was travelling with caught up on their sleep, listened to music or read their books. I tried to calm myself. There was a stillness in the atmosphere. A seriousness. I looked out of the aircraft window to watch the arrival of the magnificent, snow-capped peaks below us. From this height you could only be awestruck by such a sight, by the amazing vision of these mountains which have stood sentry over the turmoil with which this part of the world has become almost synonymous. Unaware of the history that has led so many of our young men and women to make the same journey I was now making. Had all those soldiers felt the same sense of unquiet apprehension as they looked out over those snowy peaks? I think they probably had. It was some comfort, I thought to myself as evening started to fall and Kandahar grew inexorably nearer. Some comfort, but not much.

  Historically, the British were not the only nation to sustain heavy losses as a result of their interest in Afghanistan. They handed back control of Afghan foreign affairs in 1919 as a result of the Third Anglo-Afghan War. For the next sixty years, Afghan politics were a picture of internal turmoil. In 1978 the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was formed. The new government – the PDPA – assassinated the deposed leader and was communist in its outlook. It discouraged men from wearing beards and women from wearing the burqa; and it was allied to the communist Soviet regime.

  These new policies were popular with some and unpopular with others. In the cities the new liberalism was welcomed, but conservative Afghans, who objected in particular to the eroding of traditional Islamic restrictions on the rights of women, formed anti-government groups. Some of these, who came to be known as the Mujahideen – a word meaning ‘those who fight in a jihad, or holy war’ – started a guerrilla insurgency against the new regime.

  The Afghan government was unable to control the violent Mujahideen rebellion. And so, on Christmas Eve 1979, the Russian tanks rolled in. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had begun. Happy effing Christmas. For nearly a decade, the Russians waged war on the Mujahideen. But in those days of the Cold War, the world of international politics was complicated and murky. The Americans were keen to see the Russians fail in Afghanistan and so they – along with the Pakistanis and the Saudi Arabians – started bankrolling the Mujahideen, helping them in their anti-Soviet crusade.

  The Soviets were well armed and determined. They were soon to find out, however, that taking on the Afghan people on their own turf is not a straightforward operation. Huge swathes of the country remained out of the control of the government; and although the Soviets inflicted a great deal of damage on the insurgent fighters, it was well reciprocated. Backed by American arms and CIA intelligence, the Mujahideen were a fragmented but effective fighting force and the Soviets sustained heavy losses.

  Afghanistan in the 1980s was a violent, dangerous place. As such, it attracted violent, dangerous people. And because of their pro-Islamic, anti-Soviet stance, the Mujahideen attracted help not only from the Americans but from other foreigners. One of these allies was a devout young Sunni Muslim, a Saudi-born man from a family of immense wealth. He started an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat, which existed to channel funds to the Afghan Mujahideen, to help train them and to aid their fight against the Soviets. In 1988 this young Saudi man split from the organization he had founded in order to form a new group that he wanted to have a more military role: he wanted to expand his fight against the Soviets into a bigger, more worldwide Islamic fundamentalist struggle.

  This new organization was called al-Qaida and the young man's name was Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's hostilities were about to morph into a sequence of events that no one in the West could ever have predicted.

  Night fell. The sound of the plane's engines changed and the nervous lurch of my stomach was compounded by the sensation of the aircraft starting to lose height. A voice came over the loudspeaker. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are just beginning our descent into Kandahar. To comply with the current procedures for this operational theatre, you are required to don your body armour and your helmet now. Those passengers seated next to a window must ensure that the blind is firmly closed. The cabin will remain in this blackout state until the aircraft is safely parked in a dispersal area.’

  Along with everyone else in the cabin, I started to follow my instructions.

  The body armour is like a heavy, sleeveless jacket. There is a pouch in the front that holds a thick, ceramic plate. This covers the area around your heart. Take a bullet there and you'll most surely know about it; but you might not die. The first time you don the body armour it feels impossibly heavy. It soon becomes like a second skin and you forget you're wearing it, but as I pulled it over my head on the approach to Kandahar before attaching my helmet, it felt alien. I strapped myself into my seat and waited for the lights to be switched off.

  Darkness surrounded us.

  The captain had told me that he had never been fired upon while coming into land and I kept that thought in my head to reassure myself. But I knew that there was a risk of small ground fire coming through the aircraft. If that happened, we were in for an unpleasant time. And if any large ground fire hit us, we'd drop from the sky like a stone.

  It was the longest landing of my life, but when I felt the wheels hit the ground I didn't know whether to be relieved or more scared, because I knew what that sound meant. It meant that we had arrived in Afghanistan. And if there was no going back before, there was certainly no going back now.
r />   4. Camp Bastion

  The exit lights flickered on. My eyes readjusted. The voice came over the loudspeaker once more. ‘Please leave the window blinds closed and remain in your seat with your seatbelt fastened until the aircraft comes to a halt in a dispersal area.’ The words were almost what you'd expect to hear at the end of a package flight to Spain. Almost, but not quite. They don't have ‘dispersal areas’ in Palma.

  We left the plane and were loaded on to an old-fashioned bus. This happened quickly – they wanted us off the aircraft so that it could get moving again, away from its position on the ground, where it was vulnerable to attack. The lights of Kandahar Airport glowed in the night. It was some comfort to have my body armour and helmet on, but I was relieved to get out of the dispersal area and into a place of greater safety. Quite unexpectedly, as we were arriving, we bumped into a group of the lads from B Company who were on their way back to England for their much-needed – and much anticipated – two-week rest and recuperation. It was a shock to see just how much they had changed after only six weeks in Afghanistan – none more so than Josh Hill, the eighteen-year-old private. Josh looked as if he had grown five years older. His skin was tanned and he had the air of an adult; but it was his eyes that had changed most of all. They had some quality that I could not put my finger on, but there was no doubt that whatever he had experienced in Helmand Province had aged him.

  The lads told me just what some of those experiences were, but not before they had given me some grave news about Sergeant Keith Nieves. Their platoon had been in contact with the enemy and needed to be extracted. A Royal Marine crew arrived in Viking personnel carriers. The Viking is an all-terrain, amphibious vehicle designed to be deployed in jungle, desert or arctic conditions. The lads told me what an amazing job the armoured Marines – who were performing gruelling tours of six months on and six months off because there was nobody else to drive the much-needed Vikings – did in Helmand Province, how vital they were to the infantry troops on the ground. ‘We were all pinned down,’ one of them explained, ‘and the Vikings rocked up. The Marines started malleting them for us and then we all jumped in the Vikings and bugged out. You haven't seen a smile on a bloke's face till you hear the powering of these Vikings and the Marines coming through to you.’

  The smiles didn't last long. Keith Nieves's Viking hit a landmine. The passenger door to the vehicle – Keith's only escape route – was dented and buckled by the force of the explosion and the interior was filled with flames. He tried to push the door open, but without success. He mustered the strength for one more push. The door inched open and he screamed for help.

  Three soldiers ran to his rescue. They pulled him from the burning Viking. As he was tugged from the vehicle, the skin peeled away from his arms on account of the blistering heat inside. But that wasn't the worst of his injuries. He took two steps, and then fell to the ground. It transpired that, in addition to terrible burns on his hands and face, his heel had been shattered by the explosion. He was airlifted back to Camp Bastion, where the medics set to work on him straight away, removing the shrapnel and tending to his awful burns. The following day he was repatriated. His heel needed rebuilding with the aid of nine pins and a metal plate. One of the tendons in his elbow needed to be reattached. He later admitted that for a desolate moment he had resigned himself to the fact that he was going to die in that burning oven of a vehicle.

  I thought of his wife Angie and the two children. I remembered how she had cried at the prospect of Keith going to Afghanistan. No doubt there would be a lot more tears in the future. Perhaps, in a weird kind of way, she would be pleased to have him back; and no doubt they would both realize how lucky Keith was not to have died in the landmine strike. But their lives would be very different from now on. Keith's eagerness to get out to Afghanistan and do the job for which he had been trained took on a very different hue now.

  I wanted to know how the lads at Kandahar had reacted in a contact situation like this, not least because I knew it wouldn't be too long before I would be in their shoes. Josh Hill spoke his mind. ‘I didn't even have to think. You don't get scared – well, I personally didn't get scared… I knew my job. I knew what I had to do.’

  As I say, a big difference from the kid who had had trouble climbing a ladder back on Salisbury Plain. The others appeared to agree with him; indeed they went further. Their first contact, one told me, was ‘the most exciting moment of any of our lives. On my section we sat there and we looked at each other and we giggled.’

  I guess in somewhere as unwelcoming as Afghanistan, you take your laughs wherever you can get them.

  These lads were on their way home, but just for two weeks. When the R and R was over, they'd be on a plane back to Kandahar and then on to Helmand Province. How did they think they would manage the transition, going from Disneyland back to hell? The answer surprised me.

  ‘I'm going to find it much easier. I don't think it can get much worse than this – we've had casualties and losses, and we've been in some very serious contacts. I need to make sure I've left everything at home squared. I wish I'd not tried to be such a big man about coming out here. Now I can go back and have a nice teary one with my mum and say, “Let's get it all off our chest now.” Then I can come out here and fight for the last four months, rather than always being worried about back home.’

  Not for the first time, I was struck by the very adult sentiments coming from the lips of these young men. Some of them weren't even twenty years old and yet already they'd had friends injured, colleagues killed. They'd been involved in numerous contacts and each one of them had a look in their eyes to prove it. I'd been in Afghanistan for less than fifteen minutes, but already I'd heard stories that both scared me and made me proud of the way our boys were handling themselves.

  B Company quite freely referred to this place as ‘hell’. If that's what it was, then I was only at the gates. The following day, after a night at Kandahar air base, we were to be taken by Hercules transporter to Camp Bastion, the British Army base in the heart of Helmand Province. And it was there that our story would really begin.

  The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. As a result of their occupation, 14,500 Soviet soldiers had been killed. A substantial number, but nothing compared to the havoc wreaked on the Afghan population, of whom 1 million were killed and 5 million fled across the border to Pakistan.

  Despite the fact that they had left, the Soviets continued to lend support to the government, while the Americans continued to bankroll the Mujahideen. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the political landscape altered dramatically. The Afghan government fell and the Mujahideen entered Kabul to seize power. But now that their common enemy had disappeared, the differences among the various Mujahideen factions came bubbling to the surface. The civil war that had rocked Afghanistan for years continued.

  The Province of Kandahar was home to one of these Mujahideen factions. They considered themselves to be religious scholars and their vision was to revert Afghanistan to a fundamentalist Islamic society. This group called itself the Taliban – a word meaning ‘students’ or ‘seekers of truth’ – and in the years that followed they were to take control of most of Afghanistan.

  The Taliban's aim was to implement the strictest interpretation of sharia law the Muslim world had ever known. With their rise to power, life for ordinary Afghan citizens became brutal and unrelenting. Many of the luxuries that you or I would take for granted were banned: one list of prohibited items included ‘anything made from human hair, satellite dishes, equipment that makes music, pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, television, anything that propagates sex, wine, lobster, nail polish, firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogues…’ The list goes on – you name it, the Taliban probably banned it. Men were obliged to have a beard longer than the length of their fist and anyone who broke this – or any of the many other rules – was hunted down by the Taliban's religious police and beaten with long sticks. Those con
victed of stealing could expect punishments ranging from having one hand cut off to public execution; adulterers were stoned to death.

  Men living under the Taliban regime had it bad; but women had it worse. They were expected to wear the burqa, of course, but that was just the start. Women were banned from having an education; and because they were also banned from working, many of the schools in the country were shut down because such a large number of the teachers were female. More abhorrently, they were banned from attending hospitals, with the exception of one all-women hospital in Kabul. For women under the Taliban, childbirth became a kind of medieval health risk. And any woman suspected of breaking the Taliban's laws risked at the very least being beaten in the street by the religious police.

  The full extent of the atrocities that the Taliban carried out on the people of Afghanistan belongs to another book. Suffice to say that they were barbarous and extreme. Western governments refused to give the Taliban diplomatic recognition and it is perhaps to their shame that, aside from providing funds to a small resistance movement in northern Afghanistan, they did nothing more to stop the Taliban's treatment of its people.

  But then, in 2001, the world changed. The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al-Qaida changed things for ever.