A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (5 page)

I was later to meet a member of the Household Cavalry Regiment (HCR) who described how, early in Herrick 4, his patrol of Scimitars had come across an ANP checkpoint not far from Camp Bastion. The policemen manning it were wearing civilian clothes, but on the HCR's approach they were spotted hurriedly putting their uniforms on again; they had been stopping vehicles and extorting money from the drivers while pretending to be bandits. The bitter symbolism of the return to lawlessness was not lost on any Afghan. It was a propaganda coup for the Taliban and a dreadful case of
plus ça change
, while the damage by association to the British Army's reputation was another blow to the campaign for hearts and minds.

We were picked up by three open-backed trucks packed with gun-toting policemen, and we lurched off to a large roundabout on the west side of town, the main entry point into Kandahar from the Helmand badlands beyond. The men all leapt out, forming a ring around the junction to secure it, while others set about stopping and searching incoming vehicles for illicit weapons. The air grew heavy with diesel fumes as a long tail-back built up. Cars and rickshaws hooted impatiently, trying to queue-jump the idling trucks and buses. Bays and his crew began to film the tumult, while I picked my way across the squelching ground to chat to the policemen on the perimeter.

The bored young men I found there were evidently not local. Most of them had the high cheekbones and clean-shaven features of Tajiks and Uzbeks from the north. They wore uniform, which was something: blue fatigues, a white shoulder-cord that looped to the right breast-pocket, grubby white puttees over muddy black boots. They were pleased to be photographed – the presence of a clutch of Western journalists provided welcome relief from a normal dull day – and I detected at least some
esprit de corps
in the way they posed for my camera, legs apart and shoulders back, a studiedly mean expression on their faces as they brandished their weapons.

Yet there was no hiding their lack of discipline. They were the beneficiaries of a German-run training programme, but there was nothing Teutonic about their perfunctory search technique. Their guns were festooned with stickers. Some of their Western-supplied uniforms were so ill-fitting that they looked borrowed. The future security of the country depended on such people, but it looked to me as though they were really only playing at being policemen. I sensed that it would be an easy thing for them to shed their new clothes and return to the distant villages they had come from. Dozens of uniformed police had been killed by the Taliban the previous year. Just by mounting a routine checkpoint at the edge of the city the police were undoubtedly making targets of themselves. President Bush had recently requested an extra $8 billion from Congress to fund Afghanistan's new security forces, but for now these men were paid a pittance, even on the irregular occasions when their pay-packets arrived: about $70 a month for a job that involved both hardship and great personal danger. Was it any surprise if some of their number were guilty of bribe-taking and extortion?

About halfway through the day's patrol, which moved to another roundabout when the tail-back at the first one became unmanageable, the big boss himself, the Chief of Police, General Ismatullah Alizai, turned up to see how things were going. He was a portly man of about fifty, taller than the average Afghan, who exuded confidence and authority in his neat grey serge uniform and military-style webbing. Unlike most of his officers he was a local Pashtun. He was clean-shaven apart from a neat moustache – the mark of a functionary trained by the Communists in the 1980s. His men obviously liked him, and I could see why. He stood in the middle of the roundabout like a proud, benevolent uncle, his belly out and his hands on his hips, surveying his men with twinkling eyes. The courage his sortie from headquarters required was not in question. As a prominent emissary of central government, Kandahar's Chief of Police was a prize target for the insurgency. Indeed, Alizai's predecessor, Akrem Khakrezwal, was killed by a suicide bomb in June 2005.
^*5
Alizai was new in his job – unsurprisingly, it had taken some time to find a replacement for Khakrezwal – and he looked terribly vulnerable out on the street.

'Dangerous?' he said, shouting above the noise of the traffic, his black eyebrows beetling. 'Yes, this is dangerous. But I couldn't do my job if I didn't have courage.'

'Rather you than me,' I said.

'But you're here too, aren't you?' He smiled.

Later, when the patrol was over, the stop-and-search operation having drawn a total blank, I followed Alizai back to police headquarters to speak to him alone. The walls by the sandbagged entrance were gouged by shrapnel splash – the result, according to the guards there, of another recent suicide bomb. His office, deep inside the compound, was lined with sofas in the usual way, although these ones were made of leather. There were rich red carpets, a neat row of glitzy glass coffee-tables, a big map of Kandahar, a framed picture of Hamid Karzai, huge sprays of plastic roses arranged in vases the size of standard lamps, and a fake miniature apple tree. The smell of chemical air-freshener was almost overpowering. I spied the spray-can responsible later on, a product called
Lotion Anity
that claimed to come from Paris. The other oddity was the pile of books on the General's enormous desk. Sandwiched between two hefty treatises on global drugs policy was a copy, in English, of
Revolt in the Desert
, T. E. Lawrence's 1927 abridgement of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
.

'Are you reading that?' I asked, surprised.

The General had not so far revealed any ability to speak English; until now we had communicated entirely through the al-Jazeera crew's interpreter.

'With some help . . . I am trying,' he replied, shyly.

He threw himself down in the armchair next to me, the overstuffed cushions exhaling in protest, and examined me over a pair of half-moon spectacles which made him look more avuncular than ever.

His biggest problem, he confirmed, was corruption within his force. 'Bribery and extortion are habitual to the people here, and policemen are no different.' He sighed. 'It is in their bones. There are people who would extort their own mothers for money.' He was cracking down on it, though. His conviction that the matter was too important to be allowed to fester sounded genuine. 'The police are vital to the health of the nation. They are like the soul of the body: they must be clean, or the country will go to hell. I've told my men that if I catch them taking bribes, I'll expose them.' He slapped the arm of his chair for emphasis and added, 'I'll put them on TV.'

'Why don't you just pay them better? Wouldn't that remove the temptation to abuse their positions?'

'It would. And they will get more money soon, insha'allah. Reform is in progress. We are waiting for orders from Kabul.'

His other problem was the lack of training. Things were slowly getting better, he said, but as things stood, some of his men had received as little as four weeks' instruction before being let loose on Kandahar's streets. 'Keeping the peace here is complicated,' he told me quietly. 'Four weeks' training isn't really enough.'

That was an understatement. Kandahar was probably the most unstable city in one of the most over-armed nations in the world. Decades of war had left Afghanistan flooded with guns and ammunition – according to one estimate
^*6
there were more than 720 million rounds at large in the country for Kalashnikovs alone – and suicide bombs had been going off in Kandahar province at the rate of five a week for the last four months.

General Alizai's courage and quiet dedication to duty were impressive, yet I left his office feeling dismayed by the West's lacklustre support for what he was trying to do. The foreigners had had five years to set Afghanistan on the right path, and spent billions. Yet legislation designed to bolster law and order was still pending in Kabul, and police training programmes had clearly been done on the cheap. It was baffling how such an opportunity could have been so badly squandered. The reforms now in progress seemed too little, too late, the Taliban come-back perhaps no more than our just deserts.

The following day I telephoned the local offices of the Senlis Council, a new non-governmental organization (NGO) which operated outside the established aid community in Afghanistan. Perhaps as a consequence they were not much liked in Kabul; 'amateur' and 'maverick' were two of the more polite terms I had heard used to describe them. Their solution to the opium problem was certainly unorthodox. They were lobbying, vigorously and quite effectively, for the entire poppy harvest to be channelled into the licit manufacture of medical morphine, of which, they claimed, there was a global shortage.

Senlis had agreed to take me to a poppy farm. I was picked up from the hotel by Akhtar, the mild-mannered station chief, and his driver, Izzatullah, who turned out to be the nephew of Akrem Khakrezwal, the assassinated Chief of Police. Akhtar wore a shiny black and blue leather motorcycle jacket with the word 'Technoiogy', deliciously misspelled, picked out in bold white letters across its back. Both men, I couldn't help noticing, were packing a Makarov – the small, heavy, standard-issue service pistol used by the Soviets for more than forty years.

'I get scared when I leave Kandahar,' Akhtar said simply.

It was then that I found out where we were going: Arghandab. I knew of this fertile valley region, a few miles north of the city. It took its name from the river that ran through it, a tributary of the Helmand. It was the home territory of the powerful Alokozai tribe, led by Mullah Naqib, to whom the Taliban had handed control of Kandahar when they retreated in 2001 – although he subsequently lost it again to an American-backed rival.

Despite his earlier accommodation with the Taliban, Naqib was no great believer in their cause but a professed supporter of Hamid Karzai and the central government, a rare moderate who advocated reconciliation with the insurgents instead of military suppression. He was still a political force in the province, and it was significant that our driver was related to the murdered police chief Khakrezwal, who had been one of Naqib's allies. It meant that I was effectively travelling under Alokozai patronage, which in Arghandab was better than any life insurance policy. I was beginning to appreciate the encompassing nature of the Pashtun tribal system. Its reach extended even to the breakfast table in my hotel, which was adorned each morning by a yellow box of teabags labelled 'Alokozai Tea', a product manufactured in Dubai by an enterprising tribesman under the slogan 'Celebrate the Winning Taste!'.

The road to Arghandab traversed an enormous cemetery. It was a bleak and alien spot, devoid of the tranquil greenery of a country churchyard at home. Many of the graves were marked by tattered scraps of black or green cloth on poles of cane which bent and quivered like aerials in the sharp wind. In Afghanistan, such flags are reserved for those who have died violently in the name of Islam. Here and there a widow hunkered by the remains of a loved one, living blobs of pleated blue who pulled their burkas closer against the cold. I watched a gust throw up a mini-tornado of dirt and rubbish – a
djinn
, as the superstitious locals called it. Off to the right was a concentration of flags and rough white stones with more mourners around them than elsewhere: the last resting place, Akhtar said, of several dozen Arab al-Qaida fighters who died in 2001. To the embarrassment of the authorities, who tried to prevent it, the spot had become a popular shrine. Whatever the locals thought of bin Laden's politics, the magic of holy martyrdom was not to be denied. The people were credulous, and tended the Arab graves with loving care. They even licked salt scraped from the earth above the corpses, seeking proximity to Allah by primitive osmosis.

The road rose gently towards a narrow pass between two steep outcrops of rock. Just before the pass was another famous landmark of the old regime: the former compound of Mullah Omar himself. Omar had survived a direct hit from an American bomb here by covering his roof with seven metres of earth, rubble and tyres. With exquisite irony the ex-
Führerbunker
was now in use as the southern headquarters of the US Special Forces, and just as offlimits to the public as it ever was. The construction workers who reinforced it for Omar were said to have been diverted from a giant new mosque, the size of a city block, which he had once ordered for the centre of Kandahar. That project was never finished; I had seen the building site the day before, with its cranes standing idle, and ugly clumps of rusting reinforcing rods protruding from its naked concrete arches. No one knew what to do with this eyesore. To pull it down would be just as provocative as finishing it. Kandahar was full of such uneasy symbols of transition.

There was yet more symbolism around the corner as we topped the pass and the Arghandab valley came into view. On 12 January 1842, a British force of 3,500 met an Afghan one of perhaps 20,000 in this place, and routed them. The regiment who led the attack, the 40th Queen's Lancashires, was led by Major General William Nott (an ancestor of John Nott, Britain's Secretary of Defence at the time of the Falklands War), who marched out from Kandahar to meet the enemy along this very road. 'As we cleared the pass,' wrote Captain John Martin Bladen Neill of the 40th, 'a most beautiful spectacle presented itself. The sun gleamed brightly on a forest of sabres, and the whole valley glittered with the pomp of war.'

The battle was not a long one. The enemy, led by a Ghilzai chief called Akhtar Mohammed Khan, took up a position beyond a swamp, which the British assaulted frontally. 'The infantry columns were directed to advance, and proceeding slowly and steadily through the swamp up to our knees in mud, we neared the enemy's position, who welcomed us with a heavy, but fortunately for us exceedingly ineffectual fire. Their line began to waver as we approached, and when at length the bayonets were brought to the charge, and the British cheer struck upon their astonished ears, they fell back, broke, and retreated in complete disorder across the plain.'