A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (36 page)

The muezzins were calling the townspeople to evening prayer when Mohammed finally rang. Our conversation was cryptic. He was even more paranoid than I was about intercepts, and spoke throughout in a dramatic stage whisper. The tension in his voice was so infectious that I found myself speaking in exactly the same way back to him. I learned frustratingly little. The names of the Taliban we were supposed to meet could not be mentioned, obviously, and nor could the location or time of the meeting. However, I gathered that he was in Chaman (he called it 'the C place') just over the border in Pakistan – the natural entry point into this part of Afghanistan, which was at least promising. On the other hand it was clear that our rendezvous would be delayed, or might not happen at all.

'There's something going on over there,' he whispered. I assumed he meant Helmand. 'It's hard to get good information.

I am waiting to find out.'

'How long?'

'Soon, maybe. You must be ready.'

'Like, tomorrow?'

'Just be ready.'

I spent a sleepless night. My bag was already packed. At six o'clock the following morning I repacked it, just for something to do, and then began another day of waiting. I finished
Catch 22
and started a Victorian memoir called
Recollections of Four Years'
Service in the East with HM Fortieth Regiment
, by Captain J. Martin Bladen Neill. Finally, at around four in the afternoon, and without warning, Mohammed ambled into view. He was alone and looked very tired. I could tell just from his face that there was a problem with our plan, and that I wouldn't be checking out of the hotel just yet. At length we settled down in a quiet corner with a pot of green tea, and he began to talk.

Chaman, he said, had changed dramatically since his last visit there four months earlier. Along with many Afghan Taliban, the town was filled with Pashtun fighters from Pakistan's tribal areas to the north, spoiling for a fight with the infidel invaders across the border. I said it sounded like the 1980s and the Russians all over again. 'It's
exactly
like that,' Mohammed said. 'It's turning into an old-style jihad. It's a tribal thing: fighting for fighting's sake, or for ancestral honour. I saw a lot of lovely lads with pretty turbans and curly hair. They were Waziris. I asked them, "Why aren't you at home, at work on your farms?" And they said, "No, this is work. It's important to us. These foreigners are in our land, and they don't belong."'

History really was repeating itself. The Waziris fought the British as recently as the 1930s under their elusive leader, the Fakir of Ipi. In Peshawar in late 2002 I had met a Waziri tribesman with an immense peach-coloured turban whose family had fought with the Fakir. 'We killed a lot of your people in the 1930s,' he growled when he discovered that I was British. 'We are waiting for a sign from Allah and then we will launch a war that will
amaze
the Americans.'

It sounded as though the sign had finally arrived.

The atmosphere in Chaman was feverish, paranoid, breathless with the expectation of combat. Mohammed described a street market that was doing a brisk trade in trophies and kit looted from ISAF. Most of it seemed to be American, and included night vision goggles, body armour and ammunition, as well as, more chillingly, personal material, such as letters. Mohammed had bought himself a souvenir: the latest model of Sony PlayStation that its vendor claimed had just been looted from a destroyed American tank. It was certainly American in origin: its previous owner had loaded it with an NBA basketball game. 'It's totally different from the last time I was there,' Mohammed said. 'It's much more dangerous.' He was sure that Chaman was filled with spies – ISI men, CIA men, traitors and turncoats of every stripe – which explained the theatrical whispering on the phone. Even the border had been difficult to cross. 'I had to pay the guards a hundred and fifty dollars. Can you imagine?' Afghan nationals generally expected to be able to enter their country from Pakistan without so much as a passport. A bribe of $150 was a huge amount in this part of the world, and a real indicator of regional political tension.

The trip he had arranged sounded perfect. A senior Taliban field commander in northern Helmand, one Mullah Abdul Manan, had agreed to show us around all the recent battlefields there: the dam at Kajaki and the platoon-houses at Sangin, Musa Qala and Now Zad. I was purposefully being offered the equivalent of what the MoD's press department occasionally granted to British journalists visiting Camp Bastion: a five-day 'embed' with the troops. This was journalistic gold-dust. Mohammed had met Manan before, and trusted him not to kill or kidnap me. Better still, he had extracted a guarantee of safe passage from an even more senior member of the Taliban, Mullah Obaidullah, who was the movement's former Minister of Defence. He had done brilliantly.

Our departure from Kandahar had originally been set for dawn that morning. The obstacle, Mohammed explained, was the new American head of ISAF, General Dan McNeill. A veteran of Vietnam, Korea and Iraq, McNeill was an unknown quantity, although the Taliban had certainly noted his nickname, which gave them a strong clue about what to expect: he was known as 'Bomber' McNeill.

'I was in the middle of evening prayers and my mobile started ringing,' Mohammed recalled. 'It was embarrassing. I was with a lot of Taliban people, and I didn't want to answer it, but it kept going so I had to in the end. It was Manan. He was telling me to wait.'

'Why?'

'He said, "You're still welcome to come, but there's something going on. The Americans are bombing everything. You'll be OK when you get here, but I can't guarantee your safety on the road." He wanted us to wait another week.'

This confirmation that Operation Achilles (as I later learned it was called) was already under way was bad news for me. Another week in the Hotel Continental was not an enticing prospect, and there was no guarantee that Helmand would be calmer by the end of it. Indeed, the opposite seemed more likely. Taliban High Command, according to Mohammed, thought the Americans were trying to force the whole province, and they had been taken completely by surprise. 'We liked the British,' one of Obaidullah's lieutenants had complained to Mohammed. 'They negotiated, but these damned Americans just drop bombs. This McNeill – he's bad luck for us.'

Civilian refugees were streaming out of the towns in the north. Mohammed had met people in Chaman who had relatives who had been injured around Gereshk, Kajaki, Sangin and Now Zad. Jets and helicopters were reportedly destroying every half-suspicious vehicle that moved. That represented a serious danger to anyone travelling in the war zone – and it was not the only one. In Mullah Manan's view, the Taliban units we would undoubtedly meet along the way to him represented a greater threat by far. Some of these units, angry at and traumatized by their recent losses in battle, might just decide to ignore the orders from headquarters and kill me in revenge.

'Really?' I said. 'Even if we had the order in writing?'

'That's what Mullah Manan said.' Mohammed nodded gravely. 'They could say that they thought you were a spy, and that you'd forged it.'

The Taliban's grip on its troops, I was beginning to understand, was more tenuous than they would ordinarily admit.

'If anyone doubted us, couldn't we just phone Quetta or Chaman to verify my identity?'

'Not a chance. Everyone is worried about intercepts, so when there's fighting going on they keep their phones switched off. It was hard enough just to talk to Manan from Chaman.'

The Americans, it was thought, had deployed sophisticated jamming devices. Even the Afghans' normally reliable satellite phones were not functioning, or repeatedly cut the caller off after a few seconds.

I thought hard about going anyway. The risk of travelling to northern Helmand just now was impossible to quantify. Mohammed and I talked it over for an hour but he kept insisting it was up to me. I reflected on the weeks of planning, the psychological preparation and all the money this trip had already cost me. And then I decided to cancel or at least postpone the Helmand visit. Discretion was the better part of valour. In the end, if a Taliban field commander reckoned it wasn't safe to join him, it seemed sensible to listen to that advice.

I was not ready to give up on meeting the Taliban, though. I knew that the movement's activities were not confined to Helmand. As the British had discovered, the Taliban were adept at rotating their troops through the front line, and I wondered if it might be possible to visit them in some rear area. Mohammed, Jeeves-like, had already thought of this, and after a carefully coded phone call he announced that I was welcome to visit Wardak, a province just south-west of Kabul. Mohammed said his family originated from there, which was reassuring. He would be known to the locals, and by travelling with him I could probably count on a measure of protection. The following morning, therefore, we hired a car and driver and set off on the long drive north.

I had spent just a week in the south, yet I was no longer worried about taking the Kandahar–Kabul highway. There was always a risk of bandits, but it seemed so much less than the one I had just contemplated taking in Helmand. Besides, I was travelling in a local car, a beaten-up Toyota Corolla, and I was in local dress, with two Afghans for company. It was the safest way. Indeed, the journey passed without major incident, although we were stopped three times by venal policemen as we left the environs of Kandahar. The driver handed them money, even though Mohammed insisted that he should not.

Once out of city limits we bowled across the desert in an arrow-straight line at seventy miles per hour. There was little traffic on the road, as expected, and the tarmac was new. At Qalat and the few other small market towns along the way I kept my head down in the back, wrapping my face in a borrowed shawl. We stopped once for petrol, which prompted Mohammed to tell me how the Taliban had recently killed a pump attendant suspected of planting tracking devices on their vehicles on behalf of American intelligence. We passed wretched encampments of Kuchi nomads, and then two ISAF convoys of Humvees coming the other way, their goggled turret-gunners hunched against the wind. The road rose into a glittering flat snowfield, and fell again before Ghazni.

Finally, in a forbidding landscape of low rocky hills about thirty miles from Kabul, Mohammed signalled the driver to pull in. At the side of the road a car was waiting for us, its driver lounging against the door. This, I presumed, was our Taliban contact. Mohammed got out of the car and hugged him three times.

'My cousin,' he announced, grinning.

'Your cousin?' I said, startled. 'Is he Taliban?'

'No, no. But he knows them. And they know him. It's the way of things around here. It's the best kind of security.'

We switched cars and headed off towards a distant range of mountains along a muddy and steeply undulating track. The district's name was Chak.

'After five o'clock, all this territory belongs to the Taliban,' said the cousin.

It was an impressive claim. If Karzai's grip on the country was really so partial this close to his home base, it was no wonder that the Taliban felt the country was theirs for the taking.

We bumped along the road for almost two hours. It rose gradually, narrowing into a fertile valley hemmed in by immaculate white peaks up to 5,000 metres high. The valley, I learned, was an enormous cul-de-sac with a reservoir and hydroelectric dam at its head. It was a principal source of power for Kabul, and struck me as a very likely battleground of the future. British troops had died to defend the dam at Kajaki in Helmand, yet it was not nearly so important strategically as this one. If the Taliban ever gained full control of this valley, they would be able to hold the capital and the entire national programme of economic development to ransom. Unlike Kajaki, furthermore, this place seemed impregnable. The road we were on was the only practical means of access. The Russians had understood the valley's importance and fought fiercely for control of it, losing dozens of tanks and hundreds of men in the process. Wrecked Russian vehicles were still on view here and there. At one point we drove over the barely visible carcass of an eight-wheeled armoured personnel carrier, so deeply buried that in a few more years it would be completely subsumed by the road. The Pashtun community here looked and felt as though it had never been conquered or pacified.

We passed lush meadows, and houses of stone behind high mud walls. The villages were neater and better kept than anything I had seen in the south. The entire valley was more ordered, more sure of itself than the region we had left behind. I kept my head carefully wrapped up now, more anxious than before to conceal my foreign face from the villagers, who stood about in little knots and watched us pass with undisguised curiosity. I presumed that the Taliban were watching us, from up above or down below – a presumption that was confirmed when Mohammed's mobile rang.

'Is that you in that white vehicle?'

Mohammed said that it was.

'You're early. We told you not to come until after dark. What are you doing here now? Our people were about to shoot you.'

Mohammed apologized and said that we would wait at our driver's house until dark.

'And who is your driver?'

Mohammed's answer was obviously satisfactory. He had not been exaggerating: in this valley, a recognizable family name acted as a laissez-passer.

His cousin's house was a fortress, with iron entrance gates twelve feet high. Inside was a muddy farmyard. We stepped out into an icy wind and crunched our way through the frozen clods to the house. A kindly greybeard, the cousin's father-in-law and head of the household, fussed over us.
Malmastia
, the Pashtun code of hospitality, was strong here. We were ushered into the guest room, the usual carpeted, white-painted box with cushions ranged around the sides. Tea, home-baked bread and a huge bowl of sugared, newly churned butter was rapidly produced.

'Is the
feringhee
[foreigner] cold?' said the greybeard. 'Does he want a blanket?'