A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (18 page)

Peter Merriman was as upbeat about all this as one might expect a lieutenant colonel to be. He acknowledged the high level of divorces and separations over the previous year, but argued that these might have happened even without the operational deployments. 'In September, annually, after a long hot summer in Cyprus, there are usually a number of people who have had their fill,' he said. He agreed that 2006 had been 'a big ask for an infantry battalion' and that they had had to 'dig pretty deep' while insisting that it had been professionally satisfying and that they had all 'come out the other end stronger – and I include the wives and all that as well'. He played down the notion of 'overstretch' – 'one of those great words that has been around since the 1980s at least' – but even he admitted that the battalion couldn't have done more in the year without setting themselves up for some serious problems. Apart from two Afghan tours, in the course of 2006 his battalion helped evacuate British citizens from Lebanon, trained the special forces in Jordan and deployed to Iraq twice. In Helmand, when the bulk of Swift's men were at Now Zad, other members of 'A' Company were in action at Gereshk, Kajaki and Musa Qala. At one stage there were Fusiliers simultaneously manning a dozen locations in six different countries. 'It's been finely judged, or lucky, whichever way you want to look at it.'

At Headley Court I was discussing the vagaries of the military honours system with Martyn Gibbons when Phil Fanthome briefly appeared, sallow and underweight, like so many of the patients there. His legs and right arm had been raked by shrapnel. He was still able to walk, even to run, just about, but his right hand was swollen and clenched in an immobile claw as he listened in silence to our conversation. 'There weren't many medals for us,' said Gibbons with a shake of his head. Then he turned to Fanthome and winked. 'But you might get one for the loudest scream, eh, Phil?'

Although Jon Swift was eventually Mentioned in Dispatches for his commander's role, and two others received Joint Commanders' Commendations, the steady nerve it took to defend Now Zad generally went as unrecognized in the end-of-year honours list as the courage displayed by the Gurkhas who preceded them. This was in marked contrast to the Paras, who won a dozen medals for bravery and were Mentioned in Dispatches eleven times. Lieutenant Colonel Tootal, who was himself awarded the DSO, seemed to me to be defensive about the disparity when, much later, I interviewed him at his Colchester headquarters. 'I think they performed superbly,' he said. 'I take nothing away from them.'

Tootal confirmed the Fusiliers' suspicion that the absence of fatalities among them was a factor in the lack of formal recognition. 'But,' he added, 'it was also a measure of intensity . . . There is a difference between doing it for three months and six months. And when you look at due recognition . . . part of that is reflected on people's endurance. It's one thing to do something once or for a very brief period of time; it's an entirely different thing to keep on doing it, day in day out, for a six-month period. That is partly and probably the main reason why there is a difference in emphasis in terms of reflection.'

Yet the Fusiliers on ANP Hill, the Army all agreed when they got back to Cyprus, had just completed the longest defence of a static trench position in British military history, and even Tootal conceded that it was largely a matter of extreme good luck that none of them was killed.

4
The Joint UK Plan for Helmand

When Captain Jim Phillipson died on 11 June 2006, shot in the face when his patrol was ambushed near Sangin, Leo Docherty was wearing the combat holster that he'd borrowed from him. Phillipson, twenty-nine, from St Albans in Hertfordshire, was the first British soldier to be killed on Herrick 4. He was a gunner from 7 Para Royal Horse Artillery who, like Captain Docherty, had been attached to the Afghan National Army as part of the OMLT, the British-run Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team. Docherty had shared a bunk room with Phillipson at Camp Tombstone, the ANA base adjacent to Camp Bastion, and indeed was sitting on the bed next to his friend's empty one when the terrible news came through, watching
Wild Geese
on Phillipson's DVD player. The news filled him with despair. But it also made him angry – so angry that he quit the Army soon afterwards. He was convinced that his friend's sacrifice was futile, and even before his commission was served out he was explaining why he thought so to the press. Not content with that, he went on to write a damning memoir of his experiences called
Desert of Death
. As Herrick 4's first credible whistle-blower his remarks were taken seriously by the media, and they got him into very deep trouble with his Commanding Officer.

I met Docherty, by now an ex-Scots Guardsman, over tea and crumpets in the kitchen of a north Oxford flat belonging to his aunt. He had two Flashmanesque pencils of hair sculpted along the tops of his cheekbones – all that now remained of the full beard visible in a photograph on the refrigerator door, a group shot of him and half a dozen other young men in desert fatigues, squinting in the sunshine as they posed with weapons in front of a pair of machine-gun-festooned Land Rovers. The whiskers were both a memento of his tour and a symbol of his new freedom, for they certainly wouldn't have complied with modern Queen's regulations.

The Victorian look was no accident. A linguist who spoke Urdu as well as some Pashto, Docherty consciously saw himself as a modern-day Great Game adventurer. Indeed he was only temporarily in England, having taken time off from a 3,000-mile journey by horseback through central Asia – an attempt to repeat the solo exploit of his hero Frederick Burnaby, whose epic
Ride to
Khiva
became a best-seller in 1876. Burnaby, who was also six feet four inches tall and a Guardsman, was said to have once carried two Shetland ponies, one under each arm, and was reputed to be the strongest man in the Army.

Docherty hadn't changed his mind about Herrick 4, and had no regrets about abandoning his Army career. The Helmand campaign, he said, was 'ignorant, clumsy and destructive – a vainglorious folly'. As an officer attached to the ANA he had been among the first British troops to arrive in Sangin, in May 2006. The town, it had been reported, was 'overrun' with Taliban. His group's orders amounted to just five words: 'Seize Sangin and re-establish governance.' The ANA were included in this early foray because the need to put an Afghan face to the counter-insurgency was still considered paramount – although in the event there were very few ANA available, and the job was largely left to the British.

The Taliban threat had been exaggerated. Docherty found himself patrolling a town peaceful enough to allow him to stop and buy mangoes in the bazaar. The troops wore no helmets and removed their sunglasses in a bid to appear less intimidating. The locals were wary of their intentions, though. One day a friendly petrol pump attendant asked him if the British intended to ban the growing of poppies.

'Well, we will offer an alternative – something for the people to grow.'

'What?' he asks, still smiling.

'Well, it's not certain, but there will be other benefits, like improvements in the town . . . that is, development,' I reply, disappointed at the hollowness of my words.

Sensing my unease, he does not question me further.

The British had entered Sangin with little preparation, and so little intelligence on the town that when they first arrived they couldn't even find the governor's office. Much worse, in Docherty's view, was that they had nothing concrete to offer the locals once they were there. They had certainly not been briefed on how to answer the all-important question about poppies – partly, of course, because there was no answer. The British and Americans were still arguing about counter-narcotics strategy a year later. Docherty regarded this early period in Sangin as an opportunity disastrously wasted, the moment when a 'quick-impact project'(or QIP, pronounced 'quip') like sinking a well or re-paving a road could have demonstrated the Army's peaceful intent and perhaps forestalled the violence that followed. But no QIPs were launched. Instead, as Docherty understood, the British antagonized the suspicious locals by their mere presence. That distrust, he reckoned, led in turn to the killing of Jim Phillipson, an incident that brought a swift end to the days of soft-hat patrolling and altered the dynamics of the town for ever.

Docherty, wondering what the British were going to do now that calamity had struck, went to see the OMLT officer at Bastion HQ.

'What's the form?' I ask, approaching his desk. 'Are we pulling out of Sangin or what?'

'Mmm, no. One of the Para companies is going to stay on at the district centre. Other than that the plan's not really changed, Leo.'

'What plan?' I retort, flashing with anger. 'There is no plan . . . We fucking well made it up as we went along going into Sangin, you know that.'

'Easy, mucker, it's not my fault this has happened,' he says plaintively.

'This is fucking nonsense. We've blundered into that town not even knowing what our objective was, and we've sat there like a bloody great target doing fuck-all.'

'Mate, chill,' he says, standing and raising his palms.

'Don't tell me to fucking chill!' I want to grab his pasty white face and smash it on the desk between us. 'This is a fucking disgrace! More blokes'll die up there, for no reason, and we're doing fuck-all about it!'

Docherty was not the only one in the summer of 2006 who feared that the British were making it up as they went along in Sangin. He was right: they were. But the inference that there was no plan for Helmand was false. The British had in fact spent months in 2005 working out how to proceed, and had come up with a plan that was very detailed. The problem, rather, was that the occupation of the northern district centres was never part of it, and that the Task Force had departed from the script.

The 'Joint UK Plan for Helmand' was finalized in December 2005. Because it was commonly accepted that there could be no purely military solution to the region's problems, the planners were determined to pursue what was known as a 'comprehensive approach' under which the military would work hand in hand with the government's main civilian agencies, the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign Office. The brain-storming was mostly done over an intensive six-week period at the military airbase at Kandahar in November and December 2005. Representatives of DfID, the Foreign Office and PJHQ, the Armed Forces' Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood in Middlesex, were all present. According to one official who took part, 'hundreds' of people were involved. The unenviable task of coordinating these disparate bodies, and of making sure that the plan they produced really was 'joint', fell to a small but dedicated team from the interdepartmental Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit, the PCRU.

The unit was headed by Mark Etherington, who had been in the post-conflict business since Bosnia. As the senior international representative in Kut in Iraq in 2004, his compound was besieged by armed followers of the Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Etherington – who, by strange coincidence, was a former Para company commander – helped to organize the compound's sixteen-hour defence. He was supported in Kandahar by Minna Jarvenpaa, a Finn who was hardly less experienced. She was a former adviser to the Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, and had administered Mitrovica, a particularly turbulent town in Kosovo, on behalf of the UN.

The British plan was ambitious, perhaps overly so. The planning committee was encouraged to 'think big' in Afghanistan. Tony Blair, whose interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone had been such a success, was on the way out as Prime Minister. Helmand was his likely swan-song, and he took a personal interest in it – had done so, indeed, ever since Britain agreed to lead the G8 on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. The PCRU advised a more measured approach, but the sense of purpose emanating from the Cabinet Office was impossible to ignore or resist. Britain was led by a man who had said on many public occasions that he
believed
in the doctrine of intervention.

'London gave us the headline ideas – the strategic aims and objectives,' recalled Jarvenpaa. 'We then discussed them and jointly agreed that they were probably not achievable, and that we needed to moderate our ambitions . . . All of us on the ground had a pretty good idea of what could and couldn't be done. We tried to signal some of that to London, although not all that successfully.' Still, the finished plan was a good one in so far as all the contributors appeared to agree on it. There was a consensus that the 'comprehensive approach' was the right one to take. The difficulty would be putting theory into practice.

The counter-insurgency theories developed in Malaya half a century ago haunted British thinking on Helmand to a surprising degree. 'We had study days at Colchester,' Docherty recalled. 'We did problem-solving practice, and talked about inkspots. The Malaya model wasn't an official strategy – it was more of a history lesson – but "inkspots" certainly became a term of reference among ourselves when we were out there.' A preliminary reconnaissance mission in southern Afghanistan was code-named 'Operation Malaya'. The very phrase 'hearts and minds' was coined by Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, Malaya's ex-military High Commissioner. The legacy of the 1950s was even concealed in the Household Cavalry's Scimitar light tanks, the unusually narrow gauge of which was originally designed to allow manoeuvres between the long lines of trees on the peninsula's rubber plantations.

Some of the similarities between the Malay and Taliban insurgencies were also striking. For instance, like Mullah Omar and many of the other ex-Mujahidin who filled the Taliban's senior ranks – and, indeed, Osama bin Laden – the Malay guerrilla leader Chin Peng had once been our ally. While the Mujahidin fought a proxy war against the Soviets, the Malay Communists fought the Japanese alongside British commandos in 1942. Chin was twice Mentioned in Dispatches, and even awarded the OBE (an honour that was later rescinded). Like the ex-Mujahidin, therefore, Chin came to the battlefield with an insider's knowledge of his friend-turned- enemy's mindset.