The 9/11 Wars (55 page)

Each of the operational areas in Afghanistan had its own specificities. Kunduz and the north-east, where the Germans had been based from October 2003, had once been relatively quiet. Detractors of the Germans said this was because the legal restrictions under which the 2,700 German troops operated prevented them actively hunting any insurgents.
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Supporters said their softly-softly approach had tipped few locals into insurgency. Either way, 2006 saw the Germans becoming involved in constant skirmishing and suffering increasing casualties. The eastern province of Kunar was the scene of serious fighting, with American troops engaging a series of different enemies ranging from angry timber smugglers to committed Salafi jihadists from local villages. Many insurgents crossed the frontier from Bajaur in Pakistan to fight and then returned to rest and reorganize.
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Building steadily since 2003, violence there reached a new intensity, particularly in the Korengal valley. In the provinces of Loya Paktia in the east, a different dynamic again prevailed. Local tribes were historically equally distrustful of the government in Kabul and of the
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or tribal leaders of Kandahar and successive American units found themselves caught between a desire to pursue more classic conventional tactics aimed at inflicting heavy casualties on their elusive enemy and the ‘hearts and minds’ approach, which they hoped might bring them leads on the whereabouts of senior al-Qaeda figures. In the end, a mix of both strategies was adopted with predictably patchy results.
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The proximity of the Pakistani frontier did little to ease the situation either. Then there were the various fronts around Kabul. There were dozens of towns like Maidan Shar around the capital and dozens of shifting, imprecise but nonetheless very real frontlines. Each province abutting the capital had its own specificity. In the Jalrez valley of upper Wardak, international forces were marginal to battles between local communities over land and grazing rights.
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In Sorobi, out on the road to Nangahar, a single valley was the epicentre of violence as a result of a peculiarly noxious mix of local political micro-factors.
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The variations extended across the country, giving the impression of a collection of individual campaigns rather than a single conflict. In this the war in Afghanistan was, like that in Iraq, a matrix of interlinked but often remarkably independent struggles evolving on a variety of different levels, from village to nation to region, with a degree of interdependence but significant autonomy too. In this it was, naturally, a microcosm of the 9/11 Wars more generally. Of the various operations undertaken in Afghanistan by Western forces from 2006 that in Helmand was perhaps the most challenging.

Helmand’s strategic importance was due to its population of between 700,000 and 1.2 million, its status as the source of half the world’s illegal heroin in 2007 and its position aside key national communications corridors.
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There was the critical ring road linking Kandahar with Herat, there was the Helmand river itself which swept south and then west in a long fertile arc before losing itself in the sands of the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, and there were also the principal drug trafficking routes along which much of Afghanistan’s narcotics export left the country.

The first force sent into Helmand by the British government was 3,300 strong, a ratio of one soldier for around every 300 local people. With too few troops to even patrol the major roads linking the half dozen main bases the British established, the only secure means of communication was helicopter. As the British only had a handful of aged Chinooks, this was a critical handicap. Beyond the lack of manpower and material, the actions of a resilient and effective enemy and the challenges posed by one of the most hostile physical environments in the world, a number of other factors, largely of the making of British politicians, bureaucrats and senior commanders, also combined to weaken the deployment’s already slim chances of success.

The British were largely unprepared for the very tough fight they found themselves caught up in. In part this was due to the dearth of useful intelligence before the deployment of the British troops. Beyond the gross underestimation of the potential numbers of fighters that might oppose the new British intervention – General Chris Brown, the most senior British officer in Afghanistan, told the author in the summer of 2006 that there were around 1,000 Taliban active in the entire country, a ludicrously low estimate at odds with almost every other intelligence assessment at the time – there was also a severe lack of understanding of the nature of the enemy and the form resistance was likely to take.
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Between 2002 and 2005, the south of Afghanistan had been without satellite coverage after surveillance assets were switched to Iraq.
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Intelligence services were preoccupied with other theatres too. Though pre-deployment briefings for soldiers on their way to Afghanistan had improved since 2003, when troops had listened to veteran sergeant majors talk to them about how they had patrolled the streets of Belfast, the men of the 3rd Parachute Battalion were, a month or so before their deployment, yet to be briefed either on hazards such as the roadside bombs that would inevitably greet them or, far more seriously, on the combination of latent hostility and pragmatic neutrality which would characterize the response of the local population to their presence.
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Ideas about the battlefield tactics of the Taliban were also extremely vague. A team from the SAS, MI6 and British defence intelligence had spent six months with American troops who had been in the Helmandi towns of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk but, not least because the Americans themselves had remained very constrained in their movements and had little to pass on, a remarkably small amount of useful knowledge had filtered back to the incoming force.
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The vacuum allowed policy-makers and senior officers to conclude more or less what they wanted. A confidential report later commissioned on what was going wrong in Helmand spoke of how in the run-up to the deployment ‘the Ministry of Defence was sanguine about security [in Helmand] and not disposed to negative messages’.
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With the aims of the mission unclear and no real grasp of the environment the troops were to be entering, British military planners themselves turned not to the new thinking about counter-insurgency operations that was coming through in the USA and elsewhere (and already in part being implemented in places like Kunar or in the eastern Afghan provinces) but once again to the supposed counter-insurgency successes of British colonial and postcolonial campaigns.
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Most senior British officers continued to be convinced that, certainly compared to the Americans and other Europeans, they were inheritors of a long tradition both of ‘understanding’ foreign societies and of successfully fighting counter-insurgency wars.
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This was a dubious claim that was based on an anachronistic and distorted view of what had actually happened in Kenya, Malaysia, Northern Ireland and elsewhere and, as it had done in Iraq, once more led to a complacency that successive setbacks did little to puncture. An example was the idea, derived from campaigns in south-east Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, that ‘inkspots’ of security could be established which would become attractive nodes of economic development and gradually spread across the blotting paper of Helmand’s myriad valleys, plains, deserts, towns and villages. In Afghanistan, these inkspots, defended as they were by foreign troops, naturally found themselves under attack from insurgents, thus forcing the exodus of the very local people the forces had been sent to protect. ‘The inskpots are black because there are no lights on. Everyone has left,’ bleakly joked one local Afghan NGO worker.
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These various complex and interlinked problems were further exacerbated by the political necessity of reducing casualties in order to maintain support for the war among domestic populations increasingly sceptical of further expense of ‘blood and treasure’ after five years of controversial and often inconclusive campaigns in various theatres. This was a key consideration not just for politicians back home but among senior officers in Afghanistan. When Brigadier Ed Butler, then the commanding officer of British forces in Afghanistan, spoke of the ‘battle for public opinion’ in Kabul in July 2006 he was referring to that of his compatriots in the UK, not Afghans.
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The result was the dogmatic prioritization of ‘force security’. This meant a very natural reliance on the international troops’ greatest advantage: their firepower. Between just June and November of 2006 American airplanes and helicopters had conducted 2,000 strikes, using an average of 98 large bombs and 14,000 bullets a month, three times the previous year’s total.
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One evening at an outpost at the Kajaki dam hydroelectric plant, a key strategic objective of the British deployment, the author witnessed troops respond to a couple of rounds fired into their positions from a compound a kilometre or so away with heavy machine-gun fire, a dozen or so mortar rounds, a Javelin heat-seeking missile and finally a 500 lb bomb dropped from a Harrier jet. The result, said the officer in charge, was two dead insurgents, although this was unconfirmed.
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Then there was the question of narcotics, a dominant factor in Helmand but important throughout most of the south and some of the east. The opium boom had begun in 2002, after a year in which farmers and traffickers waited to see what policy the new rulers of their country would adopt.
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The factors lying behind the post-war boom in narcotics cultivation were manifold and included the destruction of irrigation systems over decades of war, patterns of debt and credit, the approbation or otherwise of the clergy, the size of landholdings and the price of wheat. One significant element in the vast increase in the area under opium – from 104,000 hectares in 2005 to 165,000 in 2006 alone and increasing year on year thereafter – was the deliberate and intensive drive by major actors in the local drugs industry.
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In what must have constituted one of the most effective rural support programmes anywhere in Afghanistan at the time, traffickers had provided improved varieties of poppy seeds, fertilizer, technical advice on methods of cultivation and generous banking and loan facilities and paid for the temporary employment of hundreds of thousands during the poppy harvest.
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The traffickers also developed close ties with the insurgents, who levied the customary 10 per cent tax on agricultural produce on the opium and thus generated tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.
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Documents seized from traffickers listed sizeable ‘donations’ – sometimes of several hundred thousand dollars – both to insurgents and to senior officials.
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By 2007, it was calculated that the narcotics industry in Afghanistan was worth some $3 billion (out of a gross national product of $8 billion). Production in 2008 would top 7,700 tonnes of opium, twice the level of 2002, of which a substantial proportion was for the first time turned into high-value heroin locally rather than in laboratories in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, the Balkans or central Asia. In the north-east, where security – and governance – was stronger, drug production had fallen away markedly. However, in the space of just six or seven years, southern Afghanistan had developed a complete and self-sustaining alternative economy based on narcotics.
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The business had got so big that some senior Taliban figures even expressed misgivings over its size, worrying that the power and influence of the drugs industry could eventually surpass their own.
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As with the insurgency, Western officials systematically downplayed the drugs problem. British officials, particularly sensitive as the UK had been the ‘lead nation’ on counter-narcotics since 2002, stressed how only between 12 and 16 per cent of the farming population were involved in opium cultivation.
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However, this missed the point. The problem was not necessarily the drugs – though Afghanistan was developing a problem with its own addicts of a scale never previously seen – but with the cash the drugs generated. Only a fifth remained with the hundreds of thousands of farmers, analysts from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said.
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The rest went to the traffickers. Naturally this mountain of money – perhaps $4 billion in 2008 – fuelled massive corruption among government officials with positions such as police chief in a potentially remunerative location costing applicants up to $300,000 in bribes.
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Interminable debates about the correct strategy to tackle the problem continued throughout 2006 and 2007, pitting Americans who favoured aggressive eradication against Europeans who preferred broader programmes with more carrot and less stick, and led to deep confusion over the coalition’s policy on drugs. One result was that the British deployment in Helmand had no clear instructions about how to tackle the vast opium industry in the province.
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To start with, soldiers who came across syringes, piles of chemicals or stacks of raw opium were simply told to leave them. ‘Otherwise we’ll have the whole place up in arms,’ said Tootal. Six months later, there was a move towards limited programmes of eradication of the crops of ‘the greedy not the needy’, in the words of one British senior civil servant in Helmand, which would be undertaken by the Afghan government and contractors.
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But the confusion brought the worst of both worlds. The drug traffickers who funded many of the hardest fighting insurgent factions in Helmand, particularly in the north, continued to earn huge sums of money, while the limited eradication allowed the Taliban to claim that the West was set on destroying the crops that many farmers depended on. In any case, the wealthy could simply bribe the police to leave their fields alone. A study in Kandahar revealed that poppy farmers were disproportionately represented in insurgent ranks. Many of the fighters interviewed by the researchers said they saw the Afghan government and its international allies as a threat to their livelihood. This was far from the only motive for taking up arms – others included the loss of family members in air strikes or crossfire, for example – but was a significant factor nonetheless.
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