No Worse Enemy (5 page)

‘The point is this, Mr Mayor. Forgive me, but you need to tell the director of the hospital that he needs to take control of this issue. He was at this meeting a week ago and he has done
nothing about it.

‘What size shoes does he take?’ the Colonel asked, gesturing towards the Mayor. There was confusion. ‘I’m going to give him a pair of these boots’ – he tapped
his army-issue boots a few times – ‘so he can go and kick the hospital director up the ass and tell him to start doing his job.’ Everyone laughed.

The Mayor suggested that he should get a shirt and tie, so he could do his job properly too.

‘You must not lose your character, your turban and your
shalwar shameez
(sic) you must not lose ...’, said the Colonel insistently, not realising that the Mayor had also been
joking.

There were other problems. There were far more police on the payroll than actually existed. Some of those that did exist had been found setting up unofficial checkpoints where they taxed locals
until they had enough money to get high. The British police officers (all six of them) who were training the ANP told me they had pulled up at one checkpoint to find a fifteen-year-old with an
AK-47 in charge, while the actual policeman lay nearby in an opium-induced coma. Stories of young boys being abducted and raped were common. ‘Ninety per cent of crime in Helmand is committed
by the police’, I was told by one of the British police mentors.

I followed Lieutenant Colonel Westley and the Mayor on a tour of Gereshk, the second-biggest town in Helmand. As our convoy pulled on to the main road, the top gunner put his hand in the air,
stopping all oncoming traffic. ‘Dominate, dominate, dominate’, said one of the soldiers in the vehicle, ‘don’t let these fuckers in.’ As we drove on, all oncoming
traffic was waved to the side of the road until we’d passed. The gunner waved furiously at every vehicle until it pulled off the road. ‘It’s just a measure against any
vehicle-borne IEDs’, he said. ‘Sometimes we have to use mini-flares, which we fire about ten feet in front of the vehicles. That generally does the trick.’

We pulled up to a two-storey, U-shaped structure that was going to be a police station. Lieutenant Colonel Westley was happy. ‘It looks like there’s some development going on here
already’, he said energetically. Other projects had stalled because contractors had been intimidated. At least one had been murdered.

‘We are building a new jail too and soon a court’, said the Mayor.

‘This is really important stuff for what we call security sector reform’, said Westley. ‘You’ll have the police, the NDS, the police checkpoints, the jail and the
courthouse in the same area. It means we can have a proper process of law.’

The NDS was established during the Russian occupation and modelled on the KGB. They had an awful reputation for torture and murder, often of tribal or drug-trafficking rivals. To describe them,
the police and their checkpoints as a proper process of law was astounding.

Lieutenant Colonel Westley kept on talking and asking questions enthusiastically, as if he were being conducted on a tour of the Mayor’s brilliant development projects. He offered the
Mayor a stage but the Mayor was not willing to take it and rarely even spoke. ‘And this fits in with our overall plan that we’re looking for in Gereshk, doesn’t it?’ asked
the Colonel.

‘We need a fark too’, said Lucky the terp, translating what the Mayor said.

‘A fark? What’s a fark?’ asked the Colonel, baffled.

‘A fark, with grass and trees.’

‘A park, Lucky, with a P.’

The police station stood alone on a barren patch of ground. Inside, the contractor complained that he hadn’t yet been paid. We looked at a cluster of compounds in the distance. Most were
hidden behind high grey walls but one seemed deliberately designed to ridicule the tradition of privacy. It rose high above its surrounding walls and was elaborately decorated, with
brightly-coloured tiles and roof slates. It looked like a Chinese restaurant designed by Liberace.

‘Who owns that rather grand building over there?’ asked the Colonel.

‘It’s government land that we handed over to the people’, said the Mayor, wearily. Garish palaces like this one, often owned by drug lords were usually referred to as
‘narco-tecture’.

The Mayor had to be asked three times who owned the building.

‘Haji Amidullah’, he eventually said.

‘And what does he do?’

‘He’s a shopkeeper’, said the Mayor.

‘A very wealthy shopkeeper’, said Lieutenant Colonel Westley, looking at him cynically. There was a long pause.

‘He has much poppy’, the Mayor finally conceded.

‘Much poppy, interesting’, said Westley. ‘Are you going to show me where the park’s going to be?’

The Mayor pointed to a row of houses that had been flattened. ‘These people made a protest and complaint against me to the Governor. He moved me to Lashkar Gar and I was there for three
months. When I came back, the people approached me and said they have no more problems.’ The obvious implication was that the houses had been demolished in retaliation for the protests but
Lieutenant Colonel Westley didn’t press the point, perhaps thinking that things like that would stop once ‘security sector reform’ was complete.

‘It’s a really exciting future that you are driving here for the people of Gereshk’, said Lieutenant Colonel Westley. ‘The time is just right, now, Mayor Ali Shah. You
have the people behind you. We’ll deal with the Taliban and keep them away. We can work with you but this is your vision. This is your ...’ He struggled to find the right word.
‘This is your thing that you are giving to Gereshk.’

We drove to the NDS headquarters, a row of rooms along the back wall of a yard that wasn’t fit for animals. Outside the gate – or rather the gap between two walls where there should
have been a gate – lay a large pile of used hypodermic needles. A short old man, in police trousers pulled up above his huge belly by braces, walked up and stared at us, as if he wasn’t
sure we were real. Even Lieutenant Colonel Westley’s enthusiasm was dimmed. It was, he said, ‘dire’. But he still believed it was possible to turn things around. ‘There is a
firm belief that Afghanistan can be won. It isn’t by any means a hopeless cause. The people believe in us being here. And most of my soldiers, if they were honest, would say they would rather
be in Afghanistan than Iraq. I think it has a future.’

Just north of Gereshk, the Brits had established a row of three small patrol bases on top of a Russian-built trench system that straddled the Green Zone, forming the only
visible front line I’d seen in Afghanistan. Three days before I arrived, a car bomb had been detonated close to the patrol bases. When a motorcyclist got too close to the burning vehicle,
he’d been shot dead. One of the soldiers admitted the man hadn’t been a suicide bomber and hadn’t been carrying weapons but he also said that he was probably up to no good anyway
and may have been a dicker: a spotter for the Taliban. Anyone who stood and watched, especially someone with a mobile phone, was suspected of being a dicker. Most people stood and watched when
convoys passed and many had mobile phones.

A few hours before I arrived, the ANA had seen a man creeping around in some nearby abandoned houses. They were well on the way to beating him to death when a British soldier intervened and told
them to arrest the man and take him to the main base for questioning. They agreed. But then they dragged him a bit further away and, I was told, ‘no one was quite sure what happened after
that’. The sentence was delivered with such an intentional lack of conviction that it was clear everyone knew exactly what had happened. I climbed up into a watchtower and asked the ANA
soldier on guard what they had done with the man. He drew his finger across his throat and laughed.

Later, one British soldier told me that the man had been executed but another said he’d been taken to the nearest base and arrested. The soldiers were in an awkward position, eager to tell
you what they knew but nervous about getting into trouble. The Ministry of Defence had a huge ‘Media Ops’ team who schooled soldiers in what to say. They issued ‘LTTs’:
lines to take when speaking to journalists. You can soon recognise the LTTs within few words, especially on big issues like equipment, morale and civilian casualties. They are predictable and banal
and most soldiers visibly flinched when they said them. Often, when the camera is off and the notepad is packed away, they’ll say: ‘and now I’ll tell you the truth’.

Jacko, a platoon sergeant from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, led me along the top of the old trenches. We looked into the green zone and its many hiding places. ‘It
hasn’t been touched for twenty-five years’, he said. ‘The Paras and Marines didn’t push into it. No one’s been in there since the Russians.’ Jacko was typical of
the Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) I met in Helmand province. Brave and honest, he couldn’t take himself too seriously even when he described the night he was shot in the back and was saved
by a radio battery he was carrying.

I noticed a bayonet strapped to his body armour and asked, half jokingly, if he’d ever had to attach it. ‘It’s come to the point once or twice where we’ve had to fix
bayonets’, he said, smiling, ‘because it’s been that close with the enemy.’

I sat down next to young private, Paserelli, who’d been keeping watch while Jacko and I spoke. He told me he’d lost two friends already, one nearby and another in Lashkar Gar. I
asked if he thought the mission was worth dying for. ‘I don’t think it is, personally. Being out here is just a job. It doesn’t really feel right losing a mate to a country that,
to be honest with you, I don’t really care about. It’s never had any effect on my life.’ His attitude had only changed when his friend was killed. ‘It gave me a bit of a
boost, thinking “right, the fucking bastards have shot my mate, so we’re gonna go and get stuck in so he didn’t die for nothing”.’

In the few weeks I’d been in Helmand there had been increasing talk among the soldiers about a big operation that was coming up. Most of the battle group was about to
enter the Green Zone or block escape routes from it. Then, they had to not only clear it but to hold a large section, including several villages north of Gereshk.

Jacko and his men had a brief morale boost when four Mastiffs – huge bomb-proof trucks – arrived. The Mastiffs were as big, safe and expensive as the trucks the Americans drove. But
when they realised the trucks only carried eight men, that only four (of the sixteen ordered) had arrived and that anyway, they were too big and heavy to be taken into the Green Zone, their spirits
sank back. One of the soldiers whose tent I shared nicknamed the mission ‘Operation Certain Death’. My legs and genitals felt hopelessly fragile as I constantly imagined how easily they
could be separated from my body if I stepped on an IED.

Simon Butt was the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Company Commander; a bear of a man who looked like he’d just played a series of particularly tough rugby matches. Simon told me
that RPGs, mortars and bullets weren’t a major worry, because you can do something about them. But everyone feared the IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which were scattered over the Green
Zone. He’d also had intelligence reports about five suicide bombers – two Afghans and three Pakistanis – thought to be walking around Gereshk wearing explosive belts.

Simon had already lost a few men but as Company Commander, couldn’t be seen to grieve. He said that had to wait until he got home. And when he did, the first thing he had to do was meet
the families of his men who had been killed. When Simon spoke, his eyes didn’t leave mine for a second and I don’t remember seeing him blink. He said there were teenage soldiers in his
company, on their first tour of duty, who had already killed twenty men. That, he said, is called ‘growing up fast’.

Before the big operation, I managed to meet a unit of twelve men from the Queen’s Company, the Grenadier Guards. The Guards, who had the reputation of being one of the
last relics of the British class system, were sometimes unfairly dismissed as being better suited to performing ceremonial duties outside Buckingham Palace in their red tunics and bearskin caps,
rather than fighting. These Guards were living with the ANA, sleeping in cots under mosquito nets, in a small and decrepit base built by the Russians in the 1980s. They formed an OMLT (Omelette
– Operational Mentor and Liaison Team), tasked with training a unit of Afghan soldiers, whom they described as ‘below average students’. Sitting on a wooden bench and encouraged
by each other’s laughter, they talked on, until they had left me with an image of the ANA as a heavily-armed, badly-dressed version of the Keystone Kops. On drugs.

The ANA were exceptionally brave, said the Guards, often sprinting towards the Taliban when they attacked but showing no interest in any other aspect of soldiering, sleeping through their shifts
on watch, and often stoned. The national desertion rate was around twenty per cent but according to Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British Ambassador to Afghanistan, was as high as sixty per cent
in those deployed to Helmand. New recruits were put on buses before they were told where they were going.