A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (22 page)

Several among the Army felt let down by the civilians who were supposed to be responsible for the reconstruction effort, including General Richards, who repeatedly urged the need for 'more construction and less destruction'. On the ground, Leo Docherty felt that the Department for International Development in particular had failed to capitalize on the opportunity for QIPs (quick-impact projects) that the battle group's move into the north had bought at such a high cost. 'We've had a friendly response from the population so far, and now is the time to show them how their livelihoods might be improved,' he wrote in
Desert of Death
of the brief period when the British were still patrolling Sangin in soft hats. 'I cast my mind back to the glib jargon I heard from the DfID girl in Colchester before deployment. She needs to be here now with us, making it happen.'

As he pointed out, of the £390 million DfID had spent on development projects in Afghanistan since 2001, only £10 million had been spent in Helmand by the end of 2006. 'The whole approach was wrong – is wrong,' he told me. 'You don't win hearts and minds with soldiers; you need engineers, builders, the development people from DfID. We have embedded journalists; they risk their lives to do their jobs. Why can't we have embedded development officials? That's what we need.'

There was some truth in Docherty's criticism. The civilian side, Minna Jarvenpaa admitted, '
was
far too slow to be able to operate on the ground'. And never mind Docherty's complaints about Sangin; in May, Britain's full complement of civilian officialdom hadn't even arrived in Lashkar Gah yet. In October, Governor Daoud complained to the BBC that there had been no DfID representative in Helmand for two months. Part of the problem, according to Jarvenpaa, was the lack of secure accommodation. Lashkar Gah might be acceptable for soldiers, she said, but no British government official was going to be posted there without proper protection from rockets and mortars. The town was only relatively benign. Apart from anything else, their contracts would not allow it. 'There were only ever six hardened pods available in Lash – truck containers with sand and gravel on the roof,' said Jarvenpaa. 'The Foreign Office had outsourced to the military the buildings and infrastructure the civilians would need. But the military had other priorities and sub-contracted to some Afghans, and it all got delayed and delayed.' I had known Minna for a long time, since my own days in the Balkans, and knew she was no coward. Would the threat from the air have caused her to think twice about a posting to Lashkar Gah? 'Rocketing?' she replied. 'Without hard-cover accommodation? In tents? Yes, probably.'

Brigadier Butler, ever the soldier, had little time for such reticence. The lack of security in Lashkar Gah, he complained, was grossly exaggerated. Apart from two suicide bomb attacks on the first two Fridays in April, he insisted, there were no attacks on either Gereshk or Lashkar Gah. There were no mortars, and certainly no rocket attacks. From mid-April on, the security situation in the development triangle was 'more than sufficient' for preliminary development work to begin. 'I could quite happily walk through Lashkar Gah any day of the week, and feel more threatened in somewhere like Lagos, where I'm going to get mugged and robbed of my wallet and laptop . . . In terms of a terrorist threat it was a bit like walking through Antrim in the nineties in the Province: actually pretty safe, apart from the risk of meeting a hood, or a bad luck incident.'

Daoud was equally mystified. As he pointed out, from an Afghan perspective, security in the provincial capital was about as good as it ever got.

The problem, Butler realized, was that there were differing perceptions of the violence, which was being falsely portrayed. 'DfID and Foreign Office officials, especially those in Kabul, were reporting back to London saying that Helmand was on fire. But no: it was only on fire in half a dozen northern platoon-houses. The tinder may have been dry, but it wasn't happening! Nine people getting killed inside two weeks – that's a very alarming figure. But they painted that picture across all of Helmandshire.'

Although he accepted that the development agencies operated under different constraints, and that government ministries had a duty of care towards their civilian employees, he was still disappointed and frustrated by it. Those constraints, he pointed out, had certainly not been imposed by
him
. He later came to describe the northern platoon-houses as 'breakwaters' against which the Taliban destroyed themselves, creating a 'window of opportunity' for the civilian agencies to get to work in the province's centre. He admitted this was a
post facto
justification of the move northwards, but insisted that it didn't make it any less true. 'It's something we worried about over many a cup of coffee and a cheroot, but I'm certain that if we hadn't gone to the north, the front line would have been Highway 1. The Taliban were going to come south.

There would have been fighting on the doorsteps of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk.' In short, he argued, a large part of the blame for the comprehensive approach going off track lay with the development agencies which failed properly to exploit the window of opportunity created by his troops.

On the other hand, Jarvenpaa thought that it probably wouldn't have made much difference even if development officials had been available when the Army wanted them. QIPs of the sort Docherty was thinking of in May were fine – a new well sunk here or a road patched there could indeed buy local good will – but the effect, in her experience, was usually temporary. If public opinion is genuinely going to change, she explained, development projects have to be sustained; their dispersal had to be logical and fair, and they had to have the consent of the people. There was little point, for instance, in building a school for girls if the Taliban were going to burn it down again. 'Communities are perfectly capable of both accepting your presence and withholding consent. There were instances of the military going into a community to deliver a QIP and then walking out and being ambushed . . . the correlation is not always clear.'

Besides, she added, what Helmandis most wanted was not development projects but proper governance – an end to the corruption, at every level of officialdom, that had so constantly blighted their lives. The British plan encompassed the development of government institutions, the reform of the police, the governor's office, the line ministries. This was the whole point of centring the development zone on Lashkar Gah, the seat of the provincial government; outlying communities such as Sangin were for much later on. The West's entire civilian reconstruction effort was geared, as it routinely is in post-conflict countries, to a long-term solution that would take years, not weeks, to implement. There was, Jarvenpaa thought, a fundamental lack of understanding within the Army about how, and how fast, the development community operated.

'A lot of military people like to talk about the comprehensive approach as though it were a military-led doctrine,' she said, 'but by definition it is not . . . if we're saying that counter-insurgency and stabilization should be eighty per cent led by the political and development side – because there
is
no military solution – then, logically, the lead needs to be taken by civilian actors, and the military aspect needs to be de-emphasized.' The Army's expectations of the Foreign Office and DfID were 'totally and wholly unrealistic', and not only because of the danger. 'The point is,' she said, 'I'm not sure that anyone can deliver on the soft end of things if you are in a war-fighting situation. For instance, who are we supposed to talk to in the community? Which elders are going to talk to you while it's unclear if you or the Taliban are going to win? For the work that comprises those non-military, non-kinetic aspects of the comprehensive approach, you do need a relatively benign environment.'

Jarvenpaa's principal assertion was that the Task Force had never properly committed themselves to the British plan, and was too quick to depart from it when conditions changed. Part of the reason, she thought, was that Butler's brigade staff had taken no formal part in the process under which the plan was first drawn up. Well into Herrick 4, it became dispiritingly apparent to her that several brigade officers had never even read it. During the key six-week consultation with the civilian planners in Kandahar in 2005, the Army had been represented by a 'prelim-ops' team from the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) in Essex. 'We were quite naive on the civilian side,' she said. 'We thought that the tactical HQ coming into theatre would do what PJHQ had previously agreed – obviously – because they were a lower-order HQ. But that wasn't what happened. The brigade chose instead to do their own planning and their own thinking.'

Mark Etherington, her superior, remembered looking forward to seeing the Paras when they came to Kandahar. As a young officer he had once lived with Ed Butler, and he anticipated a sense of 'kinship' with the battle group staff, even though he did not know Lieutenant Colonel Tootal personally. 'I remember being surprised at the apparent disconnection between our planning HQ and this incoming group. I had thought they had come to be briefed – basically to execute the joint plan, with the necessary adjustments; so I was discomfited to see the Paras gather in a corner of the tent and draw elaborate pincer movements on a whiteboard. We had to request a meeting in the end. I got the early impression that they had arrived with their own plan. Of course no one expected slavish adherence to what we had, but the fact that it was a genuinely joint product was very important. Military operations are designed to have tremendous momentum. They are resource-rich and they just tend to subsume everything else – which is dangerous, because there is very rarely any such thing as a purely military solution to these problems.'

Jarvenpaa was not unsympathetic. 'I very much understand the military. They put a lot of effort into training leaders, and when they see a vacuum of leadership they tend to jump into it. But I'm not sure the military mindset of "going in and getting things done" works in this kind of war. You build up to stabilization. You need years of patience – and that's where development actors with lower timelines might actually be more appropriate. You don't necessarily achieve much in the first six months or even the first year. That's where the thinking is very different. We've got a lot of work to do on the relationship between the military and civilian agencies.'

Few were more impatient with the development officials than the energetic Tootal. It wasn't just that their approach was unmilitary; there were times when their slowness looked suspiciously like unwillingness. Tootal was in great demand as a lecturer on his return to the UK, and in his talks he was apt to illustrate his complaint with the saga of the Gereshk hospital washing machine. This had been donated months earlier by USAID, the US Agency for International Development, which reckoned there was room for improvement in the cleanliness of the hospital's sheets. The machine was still sitting there when the Paras arrived, swathed in plastic and unconnected – understandably, since there was no water supply to plumb it in to. The Paras thought they had spotted a likely-looking QIP, and informed DfID that they intended to order their engineers to sink a well. But DfID, to their amazement, told them not to – apparently on the grounds that the hospital was part of the national healthcare system and the contract to run it belonged to an Afghan NGO.

To Tootal and his 'Toms', as the Paras are known, a commendable attempt at pro-activity seemed to have been blocked by needless bureaucracy. But to Jarvenpaa the episode illustrated not civilian obstructionism but an irksome example of military shortsightedness. It wasn't just a question of water supply. The hospital, she explained, had no electricity for most of the time. The local NGO running the hospital was worried that accepting help from the British might compromise its neutrality in the eyes of locals. A washing machine, moreover, would put a number of local women out of work who depended on washing the sheets by hand for a living. Hygiene was atrocious by Western standards, but by Afghan ones it was actually pretty good. For all these reasons the NGO had refused USAID's kind offer when it was first made – though evidently too late to halt the machine's delivery. 'Tootal's criticism isn't fair,' Jarvenpaa insisted. 'But that isn't a reflection of my view of the Army. Tootal was a very good and brave field commander, and all his units performed incredibly well at the company level. The question is whether all that bravery and competence is being properly directed.'

Military attempts at peace-making, it was true, had an awful habit of going wrong in Afghanistan. The Americans were particularly bad at it. In 2001, hundreds of bright yellow MRE (meals ready to eat) ration packs were airdropped in a bid to show the people that the US came in peace. Unfortunately the ration packs were the same colour as BLU-97/B cluster bombs that had been dropped in significant numbers a few weeks earlier. According to one worried UN official, hungry children were particularly drawn to the deadly sub-munitions. The US Air Force insisted that no MREs were dropped in the same locations as the cluster bombs, but that hardly mitigated the public relations disaster. In 2007, another attempt to curry favour with children back-fired when an American helicopter bombed villages in Khost with footballs decorated with the flags of nations, including the green one of Saudi Arabia. As every good Muslim knows, the Saudi flag incorporates the words of the
shahada
, the Islamic declaration of faith. Kicking such a ball was unlikely to amuse the local mullahs, and there were demonstrations in Khost. 'To have a verse of the Koran on something you kick with your foot would be an insult in any Muslim country,' the Afghan MP Mirwais Yasini told the BBC. Even FIFA, the international football federation, had learned to avoid this trap during the World Cup in 2002.

The British approach to public relations in theatre is considered – at least by the British – to be more sensitive. The Task Force therefore spent a lot of time trying to establish a distinction in local minds between the allies. The effort was not always worth it. In early 2006, a number of British reconnaissance units reported that they had been mistaken for Russians. On Chicken Street in Kabul, the centre of the capital's tourist trade, carpet-makers have long profited from a line of rugs depicting blown-up MiGs and BTRs, the eight-wheeled armoured personnel carriers used during the Soviet invasion. These diverting souvenirs are still popular, although the design on the rugs has changed: these days they depict twin-rotored Chinooks instead of MiGs, and American Humvees instead of BTRs. One infidel invader looks very much like another to an Afghan, regardless of the equipment they use or the justification of their presence. Besides, how conversant were the British troops, actually, in the subtle art of counter-insurgency? Not very, if the experience of one newly commissioned (and worried) young officer was anything to go by. The fourteen months he had spent in officer training included fifteen weeks of field exercises but 'just one two-week COIN exercise at Sandhurst and, more staggeringly, a two-hour refresher lecture in COIN on Platoon Commander's Division'.