A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (4 page)

Something had gone awry, though. The military were fighting in remote market towns far to the north of the development triangle, cut off from Helmand's centre by miles of enemy-controlled desert. This was not an inkspot so much as an ink splatter. Operation Herrick 4, furthermore, had begun as a programme of steady reconstruction, yet by the end of it large parts of the towns the British had garrisoned lay in spectacular ruins. How had that been allowed to happen?

Many of the soldiers I spoke to, even some of the senior officers, had only the haziest idea of what Herrick 4 was supposed to achieve. In this they were no different to most of the British public. Some of them thought the fighting was about poppies, and the need to curtail and control the world's biggest source of opium. Some thought it was about the War on Terror, and conflated the Taliban with al-Qaida in the most general way. Others were closer to the mark when they said it was about policing the world, and bringing democracy and governance to a benighted nation. Uncertainty of purpose was anticipated by Brigadier Butler, who was bothered enough by it to circulate an explanation of what he thought the mission was about to all his commanders at the start of the deployment. 'Everyone should be entirely clear as to why we are here,' he wrote. 'If we fail to deliver a pro-Western Islamic state in the post-9/11 era then I would suggest that the War on Terror will become untenable.' Towards the end of Herrick 4, however, the very phrase 'War on Terror' had been disavowed at the most senior British military levels, on the grounds that it didn't suit the supposedly benign nature of the Afghan mission.

Some within the military were ignorant not just of why they were fighting, but of whom. Even the official name for the enemy kept changing. To start with they were all 'Taliban'. Then they were called 'Anti-Coalition Militia', or ACM, a convenient catchall for everyone from al-Qaida hardliners and foreign jihadists to disgruntled poppy farmers, co-opted villagers and adventurers looking for a bit of fun. Intelligence officers later began to speak of 'Tier 1' and 'Tier 2' Taliban, in an attempt to distinguish between the committed ideologues who would probably never surrender, and the opportunists who might be persuaded of an alternative. To the soldiers on the ground, though, the distinction usually meant little. The squaddies' nickname for their opponents was 'flip-flops' – which in itself was a mark of the failure of the British plan. There was a discussion about this on arrse.co.uk, the unofficial but immensely popular Army Rumour Service website, and a reliable indicator of rank-and-file opinion. A contributor called 'Dilfor' got the point. 'I think we need to be very careful about how we characterize those we are purporting to help,' he wrote. 'I know this sounds like some God-awful PC nonsense, but in the battle for hearts and minds, the first thing to do is to recognize that these people have hearts and minds too, and not just amusingly silly clothing.'

It was over four years since my last visit to the country, soon after Karzai's election to the presidency, and I knew I was out of touch with what was going on in Pashtun hearts and minds. In February 2007, therefore, I decided to visit Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city and the Taliban's spiritual home.

1
In Kandahar

I flew to Kandahar from Kabul with the UN. My plan was to take advantage of the winter season, when snow prevents troop movements in the high passes and Afghanistan traditionally enjoys a cessation of hostilities. An uneasy calm had indeed returned to the south since the end of Herrick 4 in November 2006. In Kabul, however, there had been indications that the hiatus was coming to an early end this year. In the bar of the Gandamak Lodge, a default location for journalists, there had been rumours of a new Coalition offensive specifically designed to deny the Taliban the chance to regroup. Was I already too late to make this trip?

My plane, a white-painted, propeller-driven Dash-8, was essentially an expensive taxi-service for international aid workers for whom the roads were deemed too dangerous. The main Kabul–Kandahar highway, a distance of 500 kilometres, had recently been repaved at vast expense by the Americans, who judged the project essential to the economic development of the nation. The driving time between the cities had been cut from fifteen hours to four and a half, yet the highway was still little used. Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, it was considered foolhardy to travel on it past Ghazni, a mere 140 kilometres south of the capital. Beyond that was bandit country.

Despite its being only a twice-weekly service, the flight was only half full. There were two Bengalis, a Japanese man and a Filipino, all clutching laptops. There were two Americans, one of them nodding off over a copy of
The Fragmentation of Afghanistan
by Barnett Rubin. There was an Italian based in Sri Lanka who worked for Handicap International, and two German journalists from
Der Spiegel
. The mood among these displaced foreigners was sombre. Nobody talked much, apart from the pilot, who sounded South African, and the stewardess, whose name was Joyce, from Kenya. 'Have you been to Nairobi?' she beamed as she served fizzy drinks from a trolley, as though we were on a safari tourist flight up the Great Rift Valley. 'You should go some time. It's really a nice place.'

The landscape beneath us was Tolkienesque. Jagged, icingsugared peaks stretched to the western horizon. Giant, dirty glaciers meandered eastwards, to disgorge on the plains leading to Pakistan. The occasional road or an ice-bound river snaked in between. It took a bird's-eye view like this one to appreciate how truly insurmountable this country's terrain could be. Soon, however, the mountains receded and we were flying over desert, its dun-coloured folds familiar from countless television news bulletins. Out on the ground beyond the starboard wing, the plane's shadow grew larger as we dropped gently towards Kandahar.

Six people got off, three of whom were journalists – confirmation, of a kind, that international aid agency activity in the south was as negligible as the critics claimed. The other passengers were flying on to Herat in the far north-west of the country. A large barrack town had grown up around KAF, as the military called Kandahar Airfield. It covered 400 square kilometres and was home to some 12,000 foreign military personnel. The facilities here were legendary among the troops – they included a Pizza Hut, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Subway sandwich shop and a Green Bean Café – but none of this was visible as our little party made its way across the tarmac from the plane. The civilian part of the airport, clean and recently redecorated in pretty blues and yellows, was separate and almost deserted. Only the clatter of passing Black Hawk helicopters betrayed the foreign military presence.

I had arranged for an unmarked car to come out from the hotel to meet me as a precaution. The twenty-five-kilometre road between KAF and Kandahar proper was a well-known 'chokepoint', notorious for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suicide attacks on patrolling Coalition vehicles. KAF itself still came under attack about once every ten days. Indeed, the first thing I saw was a truck park which had been attacked the previous evening. Five long vehicles, once gaudily painted and tassled with chains of hammered tin in the regional fashion, had been subjected to tremendous and sudden heat. They lay alongside one another like the bag of a big game hunt, their articulated carcasses fused and twisted, their tyres reduced to skeletal strands of woven steel.

They were ex-fuel tankers whose loads had been destined for KAF, and a baleful reminder of the Coalition's vulnerability in this land-locked nation. Everything needed to supply ISAF's enormous military machine had to be brought up from Karachi, 750 kilometres away on the coast of the Arabian Sea. Sabotage was not the only problem. A million dollars' worth of fuel was said simply to have been stolen en route to KAF in the first six weeks of Herrick 4 alone. Now I learned that, for security reasons, fuel deliveries were permitted only between seven and eight o'clock in the morning. The mostly Pakistani truckers who missed this time slot were obliged to park where they could and wait until the following day, presenting an irresistibly soft target for the Taliban.

The drive into town was a quick one. Everyone drove fast on this stretch of road. We passed a lazily manned police checkpoint, and then a bombed-out mosque complex, its elegant dome shattered and open to the elements. This was where al-Qaida fighters had made a last stand late in 2001. Three camels ambled in the foreground. There was a crazily tilted Russian tank, burned out a quarter of a century ago, its gun barrel still pointing at the sky. Here and there on the horizon, weird saw-toothed mountains rose sheer out of the desert. We crested a hill and suddenly the city was spread before us – a low-rise, mud-coloured conurbation, semiobscured by a pall of pollution.

For a city with such a menacing reputation, Kandahar is not a big place. Its population in 2002 was put at a mere 316,000. Nor is it an ancient city, at least by Afghan standards: its modern foundations were laid only in the 1760s. But to the Durrani Pashtuns, the leading Pashtun group in Afghanistan, it is the centre of the world. This was the headquarters both of the Taliban and of al-Qaida before 2001. It was the last place to fall when the Americans invaded, as well as the prize the insurgents now sought to recapture most of all. At Kandahar's spiritual centre, just north of a series of bazaars once famous for their fruit, lies the octagonal mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the eighteenth-century ruler who made Kandahar the capital of Afghanistan. Next to it is the Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet, a relic invested with quasi-supernatural powers that is almost never put on public display. Shah Amanullah brought it out in 1929 in an attempt to rally the tribes. Mullah Omar did the same thing in 1996, when he declared himself the Supreme Prince of Islam and set himself on the present collision course with the West.

The bazaars looked busy and normal as we inched our way to the hotel through the city's milling and flowing – the usual urban Afghan scene of beggars and hawkers, mud and rubbish and rickety traffic. This was not, however, a good time for tourism. Most Westerners here were Canadian soldiers, and even they were seldom seen. Their heavily fortified base on the edge of town was a former fruit-canning factory – the perfect symbol of how the priorities of war had overtaken those of development and peace. When they did venture out on patrol they did so in armoured vehicles with all the hatches down, as sealed off from the populace they had been sent to safeguard as it was possible to be. The urge to protect themselves was understandable. Even in my few days in Kandahar there were six assassination attempts, some of them successful, on local politicians and mullahs in and around the city. There were also two suicide attacks, one against the Canadians, the other against some local security guards hired to accompany a supply convoy bound for Bastion. The Canadians were unscathed, but six Afghans died in the second attack, in which explosives were hidden in a motorcycle. The insurgents were here all right, hidden among the population. The normality of the bazaars was an illusion. Kandahar was living in constant expectation of sudden and disastrous violence.

I was glad to reach the Hotel Continental. The veranda-fronted rooms were arranged around a patch of lawn bounded by rose-beds and a pair of swing seats, although it was too early in the year to enjoy these things: the lawn was mostly mud, and the flowerless rose bushes stank heavily of manure, which I suspected was human in origin. It was cold when I arrived, and it grew colder the following day when heavy rain set in.

I was not alone at the hotel. The Germans from
Der Spiegel
had checked in, as had James Bays, the Kabul-based correspondent for al-Jazeera television, along with his fixer from Kabul and a Turkmen cameraman. It seemed a certainty that we were all being closely watched. I was asked more than once what I was doing in Kandahar by the under-employed hotel staff. There seemed to be dozens of these retainers, lounging around in the lobby, watching lurid Bollywood videos or playing raucous games of cards on the dining-room floor. The card-players scattered unnervingly at my approach, sweeping up their cards and melting silently into the interior of the hotel, deferentially switching the Bollywood channel over to BBC World as they went.

Bays was an energetic and experienced newsman, and kind enough to let me tag along with his crew as they went about their work in the city. I was grateful for the sense of security in numbers, however illusory this might have been. We made quite a party in the evenings, downing plates of chicken and rice in the diningroom, swapping notes and the news. Things were beginning to heat up in Helmand. Assadullah Wafa, the new governor, had announced that 800 fighters had crossed the border from Pakistan, although the report could not be verified. Bays was considering a trip to Helmand to try to establish what was really going on. In the meantime he was working on a story about Kandahar's newly recruited police force, a part of the ANP, the Afghan National Police. He had arranged to go out on a routine patrol with them, and I went along for the ride.

The ANP story was an important one for the future of Afghanistan. Across the south they had an unsavoury reputation for extorting money from road users at unofficial vehicle checkpoints. So endemic was the problem that in early 2007, following the assassination in his home of a local import-export magnate, the region's trucking companies briefly went on strike. This mattered. Never mind that the Coalition's military effort was scarily dependent on the trucking trade to bring in heavy supplies from Karachi; banditry by uniformed men represented a public relations catastrophe that threatened to wreck ISAF's mission altogether.

Public 'security' was at the heart of the myth about the Taliban's creation. The reappearance of highwaymen between Kandahar and the Pakistani border was particularly disastrous, for this was the exact stretch of road on which the Taliban had first appeared in 1994, pledging to rid the province of the freelance bandits then blighting ordinary farmers' lives. In those days it was hardly possible to drive a mile without encountering a chain across the road, manned by some Kalashnikov-toting militiaman demanding money. Farmers were unable to get their crops to market, ordinary trade was paralysed and the local economy was stalled. The Taliban put a stop to the thievery by the swift and sometimes instantaneous application of sharia law. However harsh, hanging or amputation was also popular with many people. And now, banditry was creeping back, and being practised by the very policemen responsible for preventing it – policemen, moreover, who were supported, trained and equipped by the international community.