A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (2 page)

I was disquieted by this. I didn't necessarily agree with the fashionable opinion that the Afghan mission was doomed because history was bound to repeat itself. One heard this all the time in London: had Britain learned nothing from her adventures there in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, from the disastrous Soviet occupation in the 1980s? Pubs and dinner parties were full of armchair critics who spoke with scant knowledge of Afghanistan, and I thought I knew better. Our soldiers were surely more than mere hamsters in the wheel of history. This was not the 1840s. ISAF had a mandate from the United Nations, and was in no way comparable to the Soviet occupiers, whose counterinsurgency was based on a scorched-earth policy rather than winning hearts and minds. The Russians had condoned torture and murder in their time in the country. In the 1980s, 20,000 Afghans were said to have died in jail in Kabul alone. I felt patriotically certain that the British would never become involved in brutality like that.

Even so, the echoes of the past were impossible to ignore. In 1841, during the First Afghan War, a much bigger British force under William Elphinstone set itself up in isolated cantonments not unlike Bastion. Its nucleus was the 44th Regiment of Foot, which, like the 16th Air Assault Brigade from which Tom's battle group was drawn, was once headquartered at Colchester in Essex. The men of the 44th were suffused with the same irrepressible confidence, the same feeling of invincibility based on the certainty of technological superiority. They also tried and failed to persuade the locals to play cricket, just as Tom had. 'They looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players,' according to one contemporary account, 'but it does not appear that they were ever tempted to lay aside their flowing robes and huge turbans and enter the field as competitors.' Elphinstone's army was, of course, annihilated in one of the greatest defeats the British have ever known.

At the end of July there was a period of worrying silence from Bastion. It could mean only one thing: Tom's troop had been deployed forward. His family and his girlfriend Katie began listening to the news even more avidly than before. We told ourselves that he would be protected from the bullets by the armour of an eight-ton tank. But then, on 1 August, came the worst possible news: a British armoured vehicle had been destroyed at Musa Qala with the loss of three lives. In line with Ministry of Defence (MoD) protocol, the names of the dead were not officially released until the following day. It was two days before we heard from Tom himself. His email was short and businesslike; the jaunty tone of his earlier messages had vanished.

Dear All,

Just writing to let you all know that things here are absolutely fine. We obviously had a pretty terrible 24 hours but everyone has pulled together and worked tirelessly to ensure things run positively.

Much thanks must go to Dad and Katie who seemed to inform everyone and if the situation arises again the same channels of communication will probably be followed.

Lots of love to you all, can't wait to see you all soon, can't come too soon.

Tom

The family's relief at his escape was short-lived. Among those killed was the troop leader, 2nd Lieutenant Ralph Johnson, a twenty-four-year-old South African and a friend of Tom's, which was bad enough; worse was the news that Tom had been ordered to take over the troop. The relative safety of the liaison officer job was no more. Ten days later he was deployed to Sangin, and the sporadic emails from Bastion dried up altogether, for there were no soft email facilities in the outstations. We didn't hear from him again for fifty-two days.

We did, however, see him. On 20 September an ITN news crew was at last permitted to fly into Sangin. The landing site came under attack the moment their Chinook landed. The cameraman dived to the ground, cracking his lens. Dust swirled madly from the rotor blades. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) whooshed past at head height. Paratroopers stood or knelt in the open alongside soldiers of the ANA, the Afghan National Army, and blazed back with their own weapons, the deafening pop-pop-pop confounding the journalists' microphones, as it always did. And there unmistakably in the background was Tom, perched on the turret of a Scimitar, his tall physique bent as though huddling against rain rather than horizontal metal, directing cannon and machine-gun fire at the enemy-infested tree line.

His family were not the only ones who were shocked by the ferocity of the fighting. This, surely, was a war that was never supposed to happen. Operation Herrick 4,
^*2
as the Helmand deployment was called, was supposed to secure economic development and reconstruction in the region. It was, in the terminology of the planners, a 'hearts and minds' operation, not a search-and-destroy one. The intention was to spread the Karzai government's remit into the recalcitrant south of Afghanistan, the Pashtun heartlands and one-time spiritual home of the Taliban – a force that, barring a handful of hardliners, was confidently assessed to have been defeated in 2001.

As late as March 2006, during a visit to a squadron of RAF Harriers stationed at Kandahar, the then Defence Secretary, John Reid, told a reporter that 'if we came for three years here to accomplish our mission and had not fired one shot at the end of it, we would be very happy indeed'. By October, however, the Para-based battle group whose lot it was to launch the campaign had fired more than 480,000 shots. They had also expended 31,000 cannon rounds, 8,600 artillery shells, 7,500 mortars, 1,000 hand grenades and 85 anti-tank missiles – and sixteen British soldiers had been killed as a direct result of enemy action. Given the intensity of the fighting it was astonishing that more had not died. The toll on the other side was unknown but was undoubtedly much higher. The Taliban naturally disputed it, but the British estimated they had killed as many as 700 of their number even by mid-July.
^†

Reid's remark was not quite the hostage to fortune it was later made out to be. What he also said during that notorious interview, on a crackling uplink between Kandahar and a London BBC studio, was that he expected the mission to be 'complex and dangerous' because 'the terrorists will want to destroy the economy and the legitimate trade and the government that we are helping to build up'. He added that 'if this didn't involve the necessity to use force, we wouldn't send soldiers'. But the media weren't interested in this context. Six months later the MoD's Director of News, James Clark, was still issuing angry clarifications, although by then it was too late: John 'not one shot fired' Reid was already entrenched in the public mind as the man responsible for leading Britain into its fourth Afghan War since the mid-nineteenth century.

The British, officers on the ground conceded, were facing a 'major and highly organized insurgency'. An extra 960 troops were hastily announced on 6 July, amid accusations that the initial deployment of 3,300 – a Task Force that included a battle group of only 650 fighting troops – had never been enough for the job in hand. For the first time in decades, Britain's Armed Forces were now fighting on two fronts at once, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the signs were that they were struggling to cope. Even General Sir Richard Dannatt thought so, and he was the Chief of the General Staff, the most senior officer in the Army. 'We are running hot, certainly running hot,' he told one newspaper, before adding, 'Can we cope? I pause. I say "just".' In a later interview with the BBC he confirmed his belief that the tempo of current operations was not sustainable. 'I am not a maverick,' he said, 'I am a soldier speaking up for his army. I am just saying, come on, we can't be here for ever at this level . . . I have got an army to look after which is going to be successful in current operations, but I want an army in five years' time and ten years' time. Don't let's break it on this one.'

The theme of military 'overstretch' had been bubbling in the media for some time, and now it boiled over. One by one, a gaggle of ex-generals and other senior figures came forward in the press to agree with the CGS. The whole question of military funding rose to the top of the agenda. The Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, pointed out that only 2.2 per cent of the national income was being spent on defence – the lowest proportion since 1930. The Helmand Task Force, it was said, was not just undermanned as a consequence of operations in Iraq, but also scandalously under-equipped after decades of under-investment. There were not enough helicopters, ammunition, body armour, radios or night vision goggles, while the troops' vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers were desperately inappropriate for the job, and their rifle grips were melting in the heat.

It was hard to discern the truth of all this from London. The media, initially denied access to the fighting by the MoD, had relied all summer long on unverified evidence gathered from the soldiers at the front, often at second hand via blogs or private emails. Squaddies are famous whingers, which made me suspect that the reports were exaggerated or distorted, a convenient stick for the press to beat the government with. It seemed inconceivable to me that the modern Armed Forces were fighting with equipment that was actually sub-standard. I was wrong, though. As I was to discover, there were many instances in Helmand when they had to do exactly that.

But even in 2006 it was clear that not all was well with the military. Alongside the reports about inadequate equipment were others about low levels of pay, scrofulous housing for soldiers' families, soaring insurance premiums, and inadequate compensation and healthcare for the wounded. On top of all that, the chances of getting killed or seriously injured were now higher than at any time in half a century. No wonder the military had a recruitment and retention problem. In November 2007 the Army was 3,600 short of its required strength of 101,800. Some older soldiers also blamed the Army's reorganization in the late 1990s, when dozens of historic regiments were abolished or amalgamated into faceless new 'super-regiments'. The move had been intended to improve efficiency but it also greatly weakened the traditional recruiting system, with its dependence on local and family ties.

In his comments to the press, Dannatt had launched a critical debate. Who or what was the British Army? What values did it represent, and what was it really fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan? This crisis of identity clearly troubled the CGS – as well it might, since 'knowing yourself' is one of the foundations of a successful army, a precept laid out by Sun Tzu in
The Art of War
, the oldest and best-known military treatise in the world. Dannatt, a church-going Christian, spoke of the spiritual dimension to soldiering and worried that Britain's moral compass was spinning. 'I am responsible for the Army, to make sure that its moral compass is well aligned and that we live by what we believe in,' he told the
Daily Mail
on 13 October 2006. 'It is said that we live in a post- Christian society. I think that is a great shame. The broader Judaic-Christian tradition has underpinned British society. It underpins the British Army.'

But did it do that? The General's remark must have surprised the family of Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, twenty-four, a Royal Signalman from Bordesley Green, Birmingham, who was killed at Sangin on 1 July. Hashmi, who was born in Peshawar in Pakistan, was the first British Muslim to die in the prosecution of the War on Terror. According to his devastated family, he had wanted to be a military commander 'ever since he was a little child' and had seen the Afghan posting as 'a chance to build bridges between the East and the West'. Within hours of his death, an extremist British group called Al Ghurabaa' posted a photograph on their website of Hashmi surrounded by flames, labelling him a 'home-grown terrorist'. 'I don't see how any Muslim can be in the British army, not with all the shit that's happening in Muslim countries,' a twenty-five-year-old Muslim in Bordesley Green told one reporter. 'It doesn't make sense. It's not right. Of course it's a tragedy and I feel for his family, but what was he doing over there? He was an Asian dude fighting a white man's war. Basically, we can't be like the
goreh
[white people] and they can't be like us.'

The British Army is neither as Christian nor even as British as it used to be. Hashmi was one of about 330 Muslims serving in the Armed Forces. Of Britain's 99,000 ground troops, 6,600 are now recruited from Commonwealth countries – up from 300 a decade ago. Almost 2,000 of them come from Fiji; there is a particularly high proportion of Fijians in the new Scottish super-regiment, the Royal Regiment of Scotland. The change worried Dannatt so much that he was later reported to be considering limiting the intake of Commonwealth recruits to 10 per cent of the total.
^*3

Meanwhile, there was a suspicion throughout the military that neither the British government nor the public fully appreciated the sacrifices that soldiers were being asked to make in Helmand. Dannatt spoke eloquently of a 'military covenant', the compact of trust between the country and its armed forces that he evidently felt was at risk of being breached. Most of the public seemed to know little and to care less about why young Britons were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. The most dismaying example of this came in 2007 when the military hospital at Headley Court, near Epsom in Surrey, applied for planning permission to convert a nearby house into badly needed lodgings for visiting family members. Local residents objected, eighty-three of them, claiming the conversion would 'adversely impact the quiet, peaceful nature of the existing area', and the application was turned down. The objectors' self-interest was widely condemned, and planning permission was eventually granted; but the episode still revealed an unsettling public indifference towards the suffering of the modern military. To the patients across the road, it felt like damning proof of how disconnected the civilian world had become from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Headley Court's history underlined the extent to which times had changed. The former home of Walter Cunliffe, the Governor of the Bank of England during World War One, it was bought for the nation in the 1940s with donations by the public in grateful tribute to the injured pilots of the RAF. An Elizabethan mansion set deep in London's commuter belt, and surrounded by eighty-four acres of prime parkland, it was what the MoD liked to call a 'legacy asset' – shorthand, perhaps, for the kind of facility that nowadays they could only dream of acquiring.