A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (3 page)

'We owe [our soldiers] a great debt of gratitude,' said the new Defence Secretary Des Browne in an address at Camp Bastion in October 2006, 'and we need to make sure they get all the support they need . . . from those at home.' But what could Browne really do to ensure support among a public who, in Surrey at least, proved to be unprepared even to allow a military hospital some new visitor accommodation? His rhetoric was empty, and many soldiers knew it.

Browne himself did not exactly inspire confidence on his many subsequent visits to the troops in the field. On one occasion at Bastion he was rumoured to have fallen asleep during a briefing. On another he was introduced to a unit fresh back from the front, and who had been specially assembled to meet him, yet he was unable to find anything to say to them. An officer who witnessed it thought it was appalling. 'He didn't ask a question. He was looking down at the floor, kicking stones. It was left to one of the boys to go, "So, er, did you have a good trip out here then, sir?"'

The troops made some allowances for Browne. He was, after all, newly appointed to his role and still coming to terms with the demands of the job. Nevertheless, it was clear how little of his new brief he had really mastered; and with Britain effectively at war on two fronts for the first time in more than half a century, it was unsurprising if many soldiers felt that this was unacceptable in a Secretary of Defence. At Bastion he refused to engage with their questions about equipment, steering them instead towards one of the 'procurement expert' officials accompanying him. Introduced to some Scimitar crews, the minister jabbed a thumb at a pair of 'Sisus' that happened to be parked nearby and asked, 'Are those yours?'
^*4
Such stories reflected a widespread perception in the Army that here was a leader who lacked the necessary stardust, the force of personality required to motivate tired troops engaged in the fight of their lives. A former solicitor from Glasgow with a thick Scots accent and a bureaucrat's manner, Browne's previous government roles had included Work and Pensions, Citizenship and Immigration, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. His was the curriculum vitae of a box-ticking apparatchik – ambitious and clever, no doubt, but a man nevertheless who had risen to power on the coat-tails of New Labour since becoming an MP only nine years before. No wonder soldiers felt that he was not up to the unique and exacting task of representing an army at war. Could such a man possibly understand the importance and fragility of the 'military covenant'?

If Browne seemed over-promoted, he was also under-supported. At the Labour Party conference at Bournemouth in September 2007, much was made of the fact that he was placed in the back row of ministers seated behind the new Prime Minister, who then proceeded to devote just 126 words to the Armed Forces in his main conference speech – 'one word', as Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox observed, 'for every two servicemen or women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan'. Three months earlier, Gordon Brown had actually increased his Defence Secretary's burden by adding Scottish affairs to his ministerial portfolio, allowing the Opposition plausibly to claim that fighting the Taliban was no more important to the Labour leader than battling Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party.

Soldiers often pointed out that not one member of Brown's Cabinet – or, for that matter, of David Cameron's shadow cabinet – had any first-hand military experience, and that this state of affairs was unprecedented in the 800-year history of Parliament. I asked Peter Merriman, a lieutenant colonel in The Fusiliers, whether he thought that Blair, Brown or anyone in government really understood the meaning of military sacrifice.

'That's a highly political point, isn't it?' he said, after a pause. 'Do you think politicians have ever understood it?'

'Winston Churchill?'

'But that's a generational issue, isn't it? Although I do think there's a very good case to be made for a wider understanding of what the military, particularly now, is actually doing. The nature of the military commitment has changed.'

Dannatt was right: these were the symptoms of a very serious military crisis indeed. If things went on in this vein it seemed perfectly possible that the Army could eventually 'break'. Thanks to Tony Blair's belief in interventionism, Helmand was the fifth time the Armed Forces had been sent to war in a decade. 'It's the man who is the first weapon of war,' warned the retired brigadier and historian Allan Mallinson. 'He can be worn out by misuse and even quicker by overuse.'

I was becoming deeply curious about the personnel who had been ordered to deploy on Herrick 4. What mood were they really in? The answer had vital implications for the future of the British military and, by extension, for the successful prosecution of the War on Terror itself.

From a pure soldiering point of view, the military were understandably proud of their performance in Helmand. Brigadier Ed Butler, the Task Force commander, wrote afterwards of his men's 'unsurpassed achievements that will go down in history as one of the most intense periods of combat for a generation'. Older soldiers who had worried that the 'i-Pod generation' of recruits was not up to the danger and hardship of all-out combat were emphatically silenced. Butler declared himself humbled. In the Queen's New Year's honours list at the end of 2006, seventy-seven people received awards for gallantry and other outstanding service in Afghanistan, including one Victoria Cross.

The majority of the main gallantry awards went to members of the 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment – unsurprisingly, given that 3 Para formed the nucleus of the battle group – but men from many other units were honoured as well, and I found myself more drawn to their stories. The Paras are the attack dogs of the British Army. They are tougher and more rigorously trained by far than the average squaddie, and they join up in the frank anticipation of a fight. In the exceptional circumstances of Helmand in 2006, however, there simply weren't enough Paras. The shortage of manpower meant that, over and over again, soldiers who had deployed in the expectation of little more exciting than training ANA recruits, guarding Camp Bastion or repairing a vehicle, were thrust into the front line. Artillery men, mechanics, military policemen, a Chinook loadmaster – and, yes, my wife's cousin Tom – were all forced at times to take up a rifle and fight as infantrymen.

Herrick 4 was extraordinary, too, for the reinforcements hastily flown in from the beginning of July 2006. Unlike the Paras, who had months to train for Afghanistan, some of these units were deployed at a few days' notice; in some cases they were given only a few hours. This, it seemed to me, was the true meaning of 'overstretch'.

It was also an example of what Brigadier Butler later described as 'ordinary people doing extraordinary things'. Who were these 'ordinary' people, and what was Herrick 4 like for them? What did it mean for them in psychological terms – and, by extension, for the future of the military? And was this the kind of thing that Dannatt was talking about when he warned that the tempo of current operations could break his beloved British Army?

In the spring of 2007 I began the first of dozens of interviews with the men and women involved, from the earliest planning stages of Herrick 4 to its controversial conclusion, a fragile truce in the district of Musa Qala. Sixteen Air Assault Brigade headquarters in Colchester did not smile on my project to begin with. The Paras, it seemed, had already commissioned their own account of Operation Herrick 4. There was therefore no need for another book on the subject – or so I was told. I countered that my book, by focusing on the non-Para elements of the battle group, would be quite different to theirs. Eventually the MoD agreed, on the strict understanding that I was not to speak to any Para, with the exception of the battle-group commander Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal. The battle group and all its constituent parts and supporting units had finished their six-month tour in October 2006. It took more than three months to obtain permission to talk to anyone, and by then the relevant troops were scattered. The Gurkhas were mostly in their barracks in Kent, but some were in Brunei. The Fusiliers were mostly in Cyprus, although some were on a training exercise in Jordan. Still others, astonishingly, had already been sent on a second tour to Afghanistan. The Royal Irish were in Inverness, the Household Cavalry in Windsor, the Royal Air Force at Odiham in Hampshire. It took months to track them all down. I met them singly, in pubs, restaurants, railway stations and hospitals across the country, or else in groups on officially sanctioned visits to their barracks at home and abroad.

They were keen to talk, on the whole. Most of them were frankly anxious that their stories should be told. The feeling that the public did not properly appreciate their efforts was a potent one. That, indeed, had been the principal motivation for many of those soldiers who filmed themselves in action and passed their helmet-cam footage to the media. For others, the Helmand experience was still recent enough for talking about it to be cathartic. A few even described to me the most intensely personal act in any fighting man's career: the moment when he is first called upon to take the life of another human being.

What impressed me first and most was how shockingly young they were – not the privates so much, whom I expected to be twenty or so, but the officers in charge of them. Even the company majors were generally in their early thirties. My civilian preconception of a major was of an older, fustier figure, like the fictional Major Gowen, perhaps, the character played by the actor Ballard Berkeley in the comedy series
Fawlty Towers
. Gowen, a xenophobic old buffer who was forever enquiring if the bar was open or the newspapers had arrived yet, was about as different as it was possible to be from the dynamic men in charge of the besieged garrisons. Each of these thirty-somethings was responsible for the lives of about a hundred men. The decisions they took were routinely a matter of life or death, and they took them for months on end, using equipment and munitions worth millions of pounds. I could think of few other professions that involved such fearful pressure at so early a stage in life.

Gradually, however, my admiration gave way to something else. Part of it was straightforward anguish at the terrible human cost of so much violence. Mental trauma was often visible beneath the surface bravado, though never so obviously as on a visit to Headley Court military hospital. Ten years ago this establishment contained a mere handful of patients, most of them the victims of sporting accidents. Now the wards are full to bursting with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; a new ward has just been completed, increasing the number of beds to 200. I saw young men and even one or two women with one arm, with one leg, with limbs hanging scarred and useless at their sides. There were fretful teenagers with protuberances on their heads the size of croquet balls, or monstrous scars where their bodies had been unzipped by mortars, mines and rockets. he corridors were clogged with their wheelchairs. They shuttled up and down them, bored and petulant, to a flat-roofed fire escape where they were allowed to smoke. Here, some of them showed off their wounds like trophies; others stared out across the parkland, brooding in silence upon their truncated bodies and careers. It was a hellish vision of a generation of soldiers newly blooded, a throwback to Dunkirk, to Flanders, to Florence Nightingale and the Crimea. It is a side of Blair's wars the public are seldom permitted to see.

The more I spoke to the troops, the more convinced I became that the fight in Helmand could and perhaps should have been avoided. I was to become more than a little familiar with the maxim of the nineteenth-century Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke that 'no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy'. For apologists for the conflagration it was often their first line of defence. No doubt there was some truth in it, yet I couldn't help wondering quite how we had managed to deviate so far, so fast, from the plan.

The move into southern Afghanistan was no ad hoc decision, but part of a carefully phased international strategy to extend the remit of Nato's ISAF to areas of the country it had yet to reach.

Afghanistan's Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly, had overwhelmingly voted for Hamid Karzai as head of state in June 2002, but three years on, his authority beyond the capital was so limited that he was nicknamed 'the Mayor of Kabul'. The south and east of the country were particularly lawless. ISAF's mission was clear. Without security in the outlying regions there could be no economic development, no law and order, no proper governance. Unless something was done, the entire democratization project in Afghanistan could fail.

The British plan resembled the 'inkspot' strategy devised in the Malaya campaign of the 1950s, the last truly successful counter-insurgency operation conducted by the British. Back then, some 600,000 peasant Chinese were brought in from the countryside and rehoused in heavily defended 'New Villages' complete with schools, clinics and all the other trappings of development. The strategy was designed to drain the swamp of poverty that formed the insurgency's main recruiting ground. The policy had its critics – it was expensive and difficult to implement, and the forced relocation programme had uncomfortable human rights implications – but it did work. The surrender of the guerrilla leader Chin Peng followed, and then independence for Malaya on British rather than Chinese Communist terms.

The idea now was for the military to establish a secure zone in the centre of Helmand between Lashkar Gah (the provincial capital), Gereshk (the second biggest town) and Camp Bastion in the west. The northern limit of the Area of Operations was supposed to be delineated by Highway One, the vital national ring road that crossed the province from west to east. Civilian agencies, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) would then pour into this 'development triangle', as it was later called, bringing money for infrastructure projects, opening schools and supporting small businesses. Lashkar Gah, in particular, would provide what one planner described as a 'gentle beacon' of peace. Once established, the triangle could be slowly pushed out across the region, spreading like an inkspot as neighbouring communities got to hear about the possibilities of a better economic future, and embraced the Karzai government and the foreigners supporting it out of choice rather than coercion.