A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (9 page)

Ten minutes later, two A10s at last arrived on station. Immediately after that, Sangar 6 reported that the Taliban had suddenly withdrawn from all their positions to the north-west. The A10s circled for an hour and a half, dropping a 500-pounder on the bombed-out building that had been hit the night before: it had been the renewed source of five RPGs. The A10s were joined later by two Dutch F16 fighter-bombers, which strafed another fire point in the wood line. But the Taliban, no doubt remembering the previous night, had had enough. It was just as well, for the Gurkhas' ammunition had run dangerously low. In some sangars, four-fifths of it had been spent.

The Taliban's frontal assaults continued off and on for another ten days. Of the Gurkhas I spoke to, only Rex, who dutifully logged each contact in his official war diary, retained any real sense of the period's chronology. For the rest of them the time passed in a hot and sleepless blur, one incident blending nightmarishly into another. The constant enemy pressure, the Gurkhas understood, was itself a tactic designed to demoralize and exhaust them, and perhaps to force a mistake.

Nobody moved about the compound except at a sprint or a crawl, and only when necessary. The men in the sangars were forced to lie down when they needed to urinate, which they did into empty plastic water bottles. They did this a lot, for the heat during the day regularly topped 45°C and they were drinking up to ten litres of water a day. When the bottles were full it was best to toss them over the parapet into the street below. On one occasion, in another sangar in another Helmand town, an officer doing the night round of the watchtowers snatched up a bottle half-seen in the darkness and had taken a swig before the chortling sentry could stop him. The days when goats from the bazaar were slaughtered and turned into curry were gone. Now the Gurkhas subsisted on ration packs, hot if they were lucky, but just as often cold – if cold was the word. In the afternoons, a passable mug of tea could be made just by leaving it out in the sun. The street beneath the sangars began to pile up with foul-smelling rubbish, flyblown heaps of human waste and discarded food packaging, all mixed up with hundreds and hundreds of empty shell casings. It was like the filth that accumulated at the base of the walls of castles in medieval times – the mark of a true siege.

The planned assaults on the compound seldom took the Gurkhas by complete surprise. The enemy tended to communicate with each other on cheap and insecure Motorola-style radios; in the 1990s, in northern Afghanistan, I had seen for myself how, for junior commanders, the possession of a simple Motorola conferred status and authority, which tended to rise in direct proportion to how much they used it. During lulls in the fighting they liked to tune in to their opposition's frequency in order to trade bloodcurdling insults and threats. Cat-calling over the airwaves was so common that it had become a kind of battlefield tradition; it served as light entertainment for the troops, who regarded it almost as an art form.

The National Directorate of Security's battle-hardened chief, Hazmat, knew how to play on the locals' fears. When his men succeeded in capturing a Taliban company commander, his idea of interrogation was to fire an empty-ish pistol at him, Russian-roulette style; the Gurkhas hurriedly dispatched this valuable prisoner to Lashkar Gah via Bastion for more orthodox questioning.

Hazmat and his NDS men had been impressed by the Gurkhas' goat-slaughtering methods, and especially by the tradition that a kukri, once unsheathed, could not be put away until it had tasted blood. So he described the goat-chopping luridly over the radio net in the hope that the eavesdropping Taliban would pick it up. The trick paid off. Much later, when a wounded Gurkha was brought in to the hospital at Bastion, a Taliban prisoner recuperating in the same ward was heard to jabber, 'Get that yellow man away from me! He'll cut me up!'

The flow of useful intelligence was not all one-way. The gunmen outside often seemed to know what the defenders were doing, where the weak points were, when and in which sangars ammunition was running low. As July progressed it became increasingly obvious that the Taliban were being tipped off from within. Suspicion quickly fell on the local policemen of the ANP, dozens of whom were based at the compound. 'The ANP found all sorts of ways to pass information,' said Rex. 'They'd click on their radios, or find an excuse to wander outside the gates just as a patrol was preparing to leave, where it was an easy thing for them to signal one of the dickers [an enemy spotter – a term coined in Northern Ireland] waiting outside.'

The Gurkhas had distrusted the ANP from the start. Although they answered in theory to the provincial government in Lashkar Gah, their chief, Hajji Muhammadzai, was a swaggering bully of a man who, despite the religious probity implied by his title, regarded extortion as a perk of the job. His undisciplined men, whose loyalty like that of many Afghans was based on tribal patronage, were every bit as venal as their boss. They were supposed to have been the beneficiaries of a Western-funded training programme, yet few of them even owned a full blue uniform. They were armed with ancient AK-47s and the odd sticker-clad machine-gun, but none of them knew anything of gun safety, even when they were not smoking opium, or
chars
, the powerful local marijuana. The qualities looked for in a Western police force – professionalism, a sense of public duty – meant nothing at all to them. They were evidently worse by far than the ANP I had met in Kandahar. 'The city police were corrupt, duplicitous and universally loathed by the locals,' said Rex. 'It would be hard to imagine a worse ally in a situation like Now Zad.'

Soon after he arrived, Rex noticed a young boy among the ANP's number wandering around the corner of the compound that Muhammadzai's gang called home. 'He carried a gun and wore webbing like the others, but he was too young to be a proper policeman. He was quite effeminate-looking and had no beard. I couldn't work out who he was.' He turned out to be Muhammadzai's teenage catamite. Rex described him as a 'butterfly', a term he had taken from Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel
The Kite Runner
. The prevalence in Afghan society of homosexual intercourse, or
liwat
, is well documented – the inevitable result, perhaps, of living in a culture that proscribes all heterosexual activity outside marriage. Pederasty is common too, particularly among the soldiery, for whom a catamite is a status symbol as well as a prized sexual partner – the crudest possible expression of masculine power and domination. But, however common in Afghanistan,
liwat
is also specifically forbidden by Islam. 'When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes,' according to one of the Hadiths (the sayings of the earliest interpreters of the Koran that carry almost as much authority among Muslims as the word of the Prophet Muhammad himself).

Hajji Muhammadzai's sleeping arrangements were no secret in Now Zad and naturally outraged many locals. The promotion of virtue over vice was so important to the Taliban that when they were in power they dedicated a whole ministry to it. In those days they occasionally put homosexuals to death by toppling a wall over them. Muhammadzai was thus playing straight into their hands with his immoral behaviour – and it did no good to the British garrison's reputation to be seen to be tolerating it, either. The conclusion was inescapable: Muhammadzai had to go. Rex reported his shortcomings up the chain of command with a recommendation that he be replaced as soon as possible. The request was turned down. For all his failings, Muhammadzai was still the senior representative of the Karzai government in Now Zad and as such was politically crucial to the British, who could not be seen to be occupying the town alone. It was emphatically the Afghan flag, not the British one, that flew in tatters above the compound walls. Rex had no choice but to put up with the ANP.

Even during Operation Mutay, Paul Hollingshead had been ordered to 'fix' the police chief to prevent him from tipping anyone off about the Chinooks approaching with their load bays full of Paras. A single mobile phone call was all it would have taken to put the mission in jeopardy. At other times, Hollingshead ordered his men to pretend to prepare for a sortie to the helicopter landing site with as much noise and bustle as possible. They would gear up, check and re-check their weapons, and line up their vehicles in order of departure, gunning the engines with mock impatience. Then, just as the gates swung open to allow them to leave, they would all roar with laughter and pile back out of their vehicles. The police thought this was funny, too. They didn't care if the Gurkhas suspected them. It was all a great big game. The timings of genuine sorties to the landing site were always kept secret. When Chinooks really were coming in, Rex's men got very good at lounging about with their shirts off, dozing or playing cards, before dropping everything and being ready to leave in two minutes flat.

Rex once caught Muhammadzai making a discreet mobile phone call in the corner of a room, and crossly demanded to know who he was speaking to.

'To the governor!' Muhammadzai protested.

A few minutes later, when his back was turned, Rex pressed the last-number-dialled button on Muhammadzai's mobile – and was amazed to discover that he really had been speaking to the governor's office.

The game was less amusing now. The ANP's signalling did not stop when the fighting became serious. At the start of one attack, one of the NDS men thought he heard Muhammadzai's second-in-command, a man called Nek Mohammed, whispering into his radio that 'the Gurkha commander [was] moving to the roof'. A sudden blast of gunfire at the Control Tower and then a narrow miss from an RPG confirmed that the NDS man hadn't misheard. The Gurkhas had been grumbling about the ANP for days, but when they heard of their
washi
's near miss the mood suddenly turned nasty. For Angus Mathers, handling it was one of the worst moments of the entire siege. 'The boys had reached a point where they weren't putting up with this any longer. The Gurkhas are easy-going people, but even they have a temper eventually. It was quite clear that something bad was going to happen in the compound if we didn't act.'

The fig-leaf of the alliance was briefly stripped away. Rex was forced to confiscate Nek Mohammed's radio, and placed him under arrest. He was released again once the Gurkhas had calmed down, however, and was allowed to remain in the compound. Rex reasoned that it was better to have him inside than out. At least Muhammadzai himself was soon no longer a problem. One day, he simply vanished. The garrison later learned that he had absconded to Lashkar Gah along with his policeman son and a hoard of money – 350,000 Afghanis, or about £3,500 – he had stolen from the public he was supposed to protect.

Surprisingly, given that they had helped the Taliban's efforts to kill him, Rex privately sympathized with the ANP's disloyalty. 'They were in a very difficult position. They must have asked themselves, "How long are these foreigners going to stay?" They reckoned, and I'm sure they were right, that they'd still be living in Now Zad long after we'd gone – and who would protect them then? They were hedging their bets, and I can't say I blame them. Under the circumstances it was a perfectly understandable thing to do.'

The ANP might not have shared the Taliban's ideology, but the difference was certainly not something they were prepared to die for. For most Pashtuns, ideology counted for far less than traditional tribal ties and the ancient code of Pashtunwali that governs all social intercourse. One of the pillars of that code is
badal
, the obligation to exact vengeance, which has no temporal limit. To kill a member of another tribe is to invite a vendetta that can last for generations. So the local police saw the dispute between the Taliban and the Karzai government not as a struggle for the soul of the nation but as a blip in history, a little local storm to be ridden out in the usual Afghan way by playing both sides as convincingly as possible.

When Muhammadzai left, Rex charitably worried about the catamite. Abandoned by his patron, the teenager was now fearfully vulnerable. The remaining policemen were disinclined to accept him as one of their own. Disarming and releasing him into the town was not an option: if the Taliban identified him there seemed a good chance that he would be killed. Just before the next helicopter resupply drop, therefore, Rex went looking for the teenager with the intention of putting him aboard. It was his only safe way out of Now Zad. He was nowhere to be found, though, and there wasn't time to mount a more thorough search. The Chinook set off again without him. The boy had in fact disappeared, never to be seen again in the compound or the town.

The Taliban's tactics evolved. They constantly varied the speed, direction and timing of their assaults, and in mid-July there was a new focus on sniping and mortar attacks. These had been going on intermittently for days, but now there was a marked improvement in the accuracy of the incoming rounds. Mortars landed inside the compound on several occasions, sometimes as close as fifteen metres from the Control Tower. The Taliban, it seemed, had brought in some specialists. The snipers were just as dangerous, for no matter how carefully the Gurkhas watched for a tell-tale muzzle flash or a puff of dust or smoke, the marksmen never revealed themselves.

It was some time before the defenders understood why they were so invisible: they were shooting from the interiors of buildings, sometimes from two rooms back, through small, carefully excavated holes that allowed a good field of fire. The Gurkhas eventually identified three such positions, although there were probably more. The enemy snipers were also adept at moving from one to another, never following a pattern, always retaining the element of surprise. The Gurkhas were already cautious when they moved around the compound; now, all sentry changeovers and other essential work were restricted by Rex's order to the hours of darkness. One of the Land Rovers was reversed up to the front door of the central building to provide extra cover. Plastic sheeting, soon riddled with bullet holes, was spread out along the tops of the compound walls on poles to spoil the snipers' view. Sometimes, the Gurkhas would put a helmet on a stick and bounce it about above a parapet, waiting for the shot while a hidden spotter scanned the town through binoculars.