Combat Camera (13 page)

“What happened?”

Dougie laughed. “They were all chasing a sheep. It had escaped from the kitchens. It was their dinner.”

He sat down and went through his pictures. He’d clearly enjoyed the whole experience, but within a few hours he looked bored and tired again, stuck behind his desk. He wanted something else to happen, something new to lift him, but his other work commitments wouldn’t allow it. Phone calls had to be made, and emails had to be sent. It was the office experience, transferred into Bastion, and it didn’t appear to suit him one little bit. He’d volunteered for this tour hoping for some sort of profound experience, and all he was getting – with the exception of the sheep incident – was the boredom of everyday life.

Dougie had another five months to look forward to, sitting behind that desk. It wasn’t going to get any more exciting for him, not any time soon. He was going to have to start “managing his expectations”, as Faulkner liked to say. Otherwise things were going to get much worse – not “bad day in Helmand” worse, of course: just “pointless, meaningless, what the hell am I doing here” worse.

OBL Dead

On the morning of Monday 2nd May, we took a Merlin to Lashkar Gah for a short tasking at the nearby ANP training centre. The pilot threw it around like a lunatic, as though he was bored shitless with the whole Afghan experience. Coming into town, he took us incredibly low over the rooftops, then soared upwards and almost barrel-rolled, before dropping us straight down into the base, throwing up a huge cloud of dust. Ordinarily I would’ve hated it, but since getting to Afghanistan I’d learnt to love flying in helicopters, no matter how reckless the pilots. Compared to life on the ground, it was like being up with the angels.

No sooner had we landed at Lashkar Gah than we heard the news about Osama bin Laden. It was the only topic of conversation, buzzing around the helipad. We walked through the heat and dust to the TFH office, where Colonel Lucas and his team were watching the news on Sky.

“So the witch is dead,” I said.

“Quite,” Colonel Lucas said.

I took a seat and watched the live footage from Times Square. Thousands of New Yorkers had come reeling out of their apartments in the early hours of a Monday morning, ready to celebrate. A lot of them bore an uncanny resemblance to drunken frat boys, pumping their fists and chanting “U – S – A” for the cameras. They’d taken to the streets at an incredible rate, their numbers growing
all the time, presumably helped along by the naked triumphalism of the TV coverage.

“Do you think we need to issue a statement?” asked Meredyth, an unassuming captain who sat in the corner of the office. In charge of media planning, she was TFH’s equivalent to Harriet.

“Not really,” Colonel Lucas said. As the official spokesman for Task Force Helmand, he was required to issue statements about significant events in theatre (although this usually meant the latest British deaths). “I don’t think it’s for us to say anything. And I can hardly put out a statement before the Prime Minister has got out of bed.”

He wasn’t that excited about the news at all. None of us Brits were, really. Not as much as we should have been. The bastard who had triggered this entire blood-soaked adventure was dead – but to be honest, we all felt his time had passed. Most of us thought he had died years ago.

That said, some people thought he was still alive. Various rumours were already circulating around the base suggesting that bin Laden was holed up in a secret bunker on American soil, getting the full treatment from his interrogators. Some even suggested that he’d been captured more than a week ago, but the Americans had kept the news quiet so that it wouldn’t get buried in all the coverage about the Royal Wedding. It didn’t help that US authorities released conflicting accounts of his death in the days that followed, the White House backtracking on earlier assertions that bin Laden had died after engaging Navy Seals in a firefight.

“Bin Laden and his family were found on the second and third floor of the building,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters the following day. “There was concern that bin Laden would oppose the capture operation, and indeed he did resist. In
the room with bin Laden, a woman – bin Laden’s wife – rushed the US assaulters and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.

“We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you… and obviously some of the information came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on.”

The news of bin Laden’s death had initially broken on Twitter, fuelling the potential for misreporting. A thirty-three-year-old IT consultant called Sohaib Athar – who lived near the terror leader’s compound in Abbottabad – had unwittingly told the world the first details of the Navy Seals raid. He was working late, writing code for a US company, when the noise of helicopters prompted his first tweets:

– Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 a.m. (is a rare event).

– Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter.

It turned out to be a long night for Sohaib. His initial irritation soon turned to genuine concern when he realized the noise might presage something serious:

– A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad. I hope its not the start of something nasty.

Meanwhile, in America, President Obama was making plans for a late-night announcement. Just before 10 p.m. the media were alerted by a tweet from the White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer:

– POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10.30 p.m. Eastern Time.

At this stage, reporters in Washington suspected the address would have something to do with bin Laden, but they did not know he’d been killed. That all changed at 10.25 p.m., when Keith Urbahn, an aide to former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the following announcement:

– So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.

With Obama running late on his address (CNN reported he was writing it himself), anonymous sources at the White House started to confirm the rumours of bin Laden’s death to the media. At 10.45 p.m., ABC, CBS and NBC all interrupted their schedules to break the news.

“We’re hearing absolute jubilation throughout government,” reported the ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz.

The traffic on Twitter was now peaking at more than 5,000 tweets per second, at the time the third-highest rate ever on the site.
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Finally, at 11.35 p.m., Obama went live on air to deliver his address:

“Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and
a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

“For over two decades, bin Laden has been al-Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”

Regardless of what the US President said, everyone in the TFH office agreed that bin Laden was no longer the force he used to be. Ideology seemed to be slipping off the agenda.

“He’s irrelevant,” said Colonel Lucas. “This war is all about drugs now. We’re fighting a narco-insurgency.”

It depressed me to think bin Laden had already passed his sell-by date when the Navy Seals shot him up. We’d spent a decade trying to find him, scouring the caves and the foothills and the compounds, and now that he was dead, it didn’t make a great deal of difference anyway. He’d been hiding for years in his reinforced lair in Pakistan while the War on Terror – or the war in Afghanistan, at least – had moved on. We couldn’t just pack up and go home, leaving this country to its fate. We had to stay here and do the decent thing, carrying on the fight with the drug lords.

The other news of the day was that the poppy harvest was facing further delays – it would be another fortnight before the insurgents
would be in a position to stash all their opium and pick up their weapons and explosives for the summer fighting season. This was a tiding that had a far greater influence on our battle rhythm than the death of bin Laden. We could expect a number of reprisal attacks in the coming weeks, but the real story was the drugs trade and its shifting calendar.

Heroin had an impact on everything, including the timetable by which we measured our successes. Senior officers didn’t like to talk to the media about “winter gains” until all the poppy had been harvested. It was risky trying to describe the progress of the previous twelve months if the fighting season hadn’t even started yet. Until you knew how hard the insurgents would come back at you, you didn’t really know anything.

The death of bin Laden may have made all the headlines, but as a yardstick for success, it was a throwback to a bygone era. We’d long since given up measuring our progress by the amount of damage we inflicted upon the enemy: these days it was all about the number of our own troops getting killed. We could’ve done body counts on the Taliban – in fact, we did – but what message would that have sent to the media back home?
Hey, we’re doing really well out here, wasting loads of Afghans
. The insurgents were getting killed all the time – it was like a turkey shoot. A far more persuasive figure could be derived from our own body count. If the rate at which we were dying was on the way down, then we must’ve been making progress.

Meanwhile, the injuries kept on coming. The number of British troops being flown into the hospital at Bastion was falling, but that didn’t necessarily mean that things were getting better. Later that week the hospital released its monthly figures for April. Faulkner gave us the news at his evening brief.

“Three hundred and ninety-four casualties were treated for trauma,” he said. “One hundred and fifty-two of those were Americans, and seventy-nine were Brits. Afghan Security Forces were fifty-five. Local civilians and other nationals made up the rest.”

The British injury figure was low in comparison to previous Aprils, so we took some comfort from that, even though we all knew it was misleading. The Americans had replaced us in one of our most dangerous areas of operations – Sangin – where they were now starting to take casualties instead of us.

Faulkner also told us about the latest intelligence reports, suggesting that big splits were appearing in the Taliban’s hierarchy. Fault lines were opening up between higher-level insurgents and the lower ranks, and also between young and old.

“Apparently the elders don’t command the respect that they used to,” he said. “A lot of the younger Taliban – when given orders – are saying, ‘Why are we listening to these old guys?’”

If Taliban recruitment was still founded upon idealism – as it seemed to be back in 2001 – then I couldn’t believe these youngsters would’ve answered back to their elders. Taliban was supposed to mean “religious student”, but now they were also running a multi-billion-dollar narcotics business. A decade ago, the country made almost no money from heroin – now it was turning over around three billion dollars a year. In the midst of such a profitable narco-insurgency, was it any wonder if the latest recruits to the Taliban were less concerned about religious enlightenment and more interested in becoming drug lords?

A month after bin Laden’s death, the Global Commission on Drug Policy branded the international war on drugs “a failure”. The nineteen-strong panel, most of them former heads of state, argued that counter-narcotics strategies had cost hundreds of millions of
dollars and caused thousands of deaths, with no evidence of any progress. They cited UN estimates that worldwide opiate use had risen by 35 per cent from 1998 to 2008.

The Global Commission’s report made grim reading for those politicians who’d pitched the invasion of Afghanistan as a chance to fight not just terrorism, but also the drugs trade. In October 2001, three weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair told his Labour Party Conference the Taliban was exporting heroin to finance their military activities.

“The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets,” he said. “This is another part of their regime we should destroy.”

Although this statement was true – 90 per cent of heroin being sold on Britain’s streets at that time had come out of Afghanistan – the actual quantities involved were dwindling. In July 2000 the Taliban’s leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – in collaboration with the United Nations – had banned Afghan farmers from cultivating opium, calling it un-Islamic. This had resulted in a massive drop-off in heroin production. Only 7,606 hectares of land in Afghanistan was used for growing poppy in 2001, a 91 per cent reduction from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares. In Helmand Province itself, a traditional hotbed for opium, no poppy cultivation was recorded for the 2001 season.
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