A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (19 page)

But however useful the Malaya precedent might have been, and however successful that counter-insurgency, there were certain caveats. First, the strategy did not offer a quick fix. The Malaya Emergency lasted for twelve years, from 1948 to 1960. Yet it was not until June 2007 that the Army, in the shape of another speech by General Dannatt, acknowledged that British engagement in southern Afghanistan was likely to last as long, and even then it did so at a meeting closed to the public. Dannatt predicted 'a generation of conflict' for the British Army. Whether the necessary political will can be sustained for so long remains a very moot point.

Second, the effectiveness of the counter-insurgency in Malaya depended on a strong and unified chain of command. As a senior Army figure in a civilian role, Templer provided the perfect bridge between the country's colonial and military administrations, and was able to control both. The Afghan counter-insurgency still has no such supremo, despite repeated calls for the appointment of a 'Paddy Ashdown-type figure' to coordinate the competing priorities inherent in the international approach.
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Instead, and partly as a result of the lack of unified international leadership, the military chain of command was a mess at the start of Herrick 4. ISAF was controlled by Nato, some of whose member nations had no intention of fighting anyone, which was bad enough. Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade from which the 3 Para battle group was drawn, and the officer ultimately in charge of the Helmand Task Force's operations, should logically have come under the command of ISAF. However, the Task Force was initially deployed under the auspices of the American Operation Enduring Freedom, and answered to Regional Command South, based in Kandahar. Neither the task force nor RC South came under formal ISAF command until 31 July.

To make matters worse, in February 2006 command of RC South had passed to a Canadian, Brigadier David Frazer (leadership of RC South rotated between the British, the Canadians and the Dutch, who controlled Helmand, Kandahar and Oruzgan provinces respectively). But because Frazer was a brigadier, the same rank as Butler, it was thought prudent to headquarter Butler in Kabul rather than Kandahar. Having two brigadiers in the same theatre, it was felt, was a recipe for confusion and had to be avoided. This arrangement obliged Butler to begin operations through an intermediary, Colonel Charlie Knaggs, the designated British Task Force commander in Helmand. Knaggs, an Irish Guardsman and not even a member of Butler's brigade, was headquartered not at Kandahar or Camp Bastion but in Lashkar Gah alongside the Provincial Reconstruction Team, the PRT, which was part of a national civil-military outreach project that had been run by ISAF since 2002. This made sense for a mission focused on winning local hearts and minds in a development triangle, but none at all for the gloves-off battle with the Taliban that developed. Knaggs could not even communicate with Kabul at times because of the absence of a secure phone line. All this meant that Butler, an officer with a strong hands-on reputation, was left frustrated in the capital, second-guessing the commanders on the ground and, at least until 31 July, effectively falling outside anyone's chain of command except PJHQ's.

The third lesson of Malaya, and the ultimate key to that campaign's success, lay in an early realization that there could be no purely military solution to the insurgency. It was Sir Henry Gurney, Templer's predecessor, who first appreciated that winning the war would depend not on the ability to pour in more and more troops but on gaining the support of the people. This is standard counter-insurgency strategy today, but it was far from orthodox in 1948. The military, under Major General Sir Charles Boucher, a veteran of Monte Cassino in 1944, was all for taking on Chin Peng's jungle-based guerrillas by conventional means – 'running the military show', as he called it. His attitude was one of 'give us the tools and we'll finish the job'. But Gurney understood that such escalation would not necessarily 'finish the job'. Indeed, it risked making the job much harder. As one of his advisers, Bob Thompson, pointed out, in this kind of war a stray bomb that killed one innocent child could make a thousand enemies – an observation that is often made these days in relation to Helmand. 'It's all very well having bombers, masses of helicopters, tremendous fire power,' Thompson said, 'but none of these will eliminate a Communist cell in a high school which is producing fifty recruits a year for the insurgency.' Exchange the words 'Communist' for 'Taliban' and 'high school' for 'madrasah' and that remark, too, could apply to modern Afghanistan.

In Helmand, the civil-military wrangling that characterized the early stages of the Malaya campaign was supposed to be forestalled by the adoption of the 'comprehensive approach'. Butler understood the fundamental importance of carrying the civilian agencies along with the military effort. His battle group commander, Stuart Tootal, agreed wholeheartedly that there could be 'no purely military solution' to the Taliban problem. Yet the alternative laid out by the British plan was never given a chance to work. Instead of concentrating on securing the development triangle and the 'soft' mobile operations that had been envisaged, most of the battle group was rapidly deployed to the northern district centres which were cut off from the centre by miles of desert. As a consequence the civilian development agencies, nervous of the security implications in the troop-denuded triangle, could not or did not arrive. Brigadier Butler was to argue later, convincingly, that their nervousness was misplaced; but meanwhile, far from winning hearts and minds in the northern towns, his forces became fixed in fort-like compounds from where they called in astonishing amounts of airborne ordnance, alienating the locals by destroying their homes and, sometimes, accidentally killing their children. As Herrick 4 progressed, it looked more and more as though the British had indeed chosen to pursue a purely military solution. The development triangle towns, Gereshk and Lashkar Gah, began to fill not with itinerant job-seekers but with refugees traumatized by the fighting. It was precisely what Bob Thompson had feared would happen in Malaya if General Boucher's approach were taken.

The key figure in Butler's decision to move his forces north beyond the development triangle was the Governor of Helmand, Engineer Mohammed Daoud, a technocrat with a background in distributing food aid, closely connected to President Hamid Karzai, and effectively Britain's placeman in the province. His predecessor, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, was alleged to have pocketed at least $32 million in protection money from the heroin trade, an accusation he denies. He was once caught by antinarcotics agents with nine tons of opium stored in his office. He said that his men had recently confiscated it, and he was on the point of handing it in. The British felt they couldn't work with such a man, and at the end of 2005 they successfully lobbied Karzai to replace him. Daoud was regarded as the cleanest governor in the country, but he had a serious disadvantage: although his family had lived in Helmand since 1900 he was not a member of any of the local tribes. For all his faults, Akhunzada was also an influential tribal leader who in his three years as governor had kept Helmand remarkably stable. The unconnected Daoud had no chance of exerting such influence. 'Helmand might have been full of druggies, but the Taliban were not dominant,' said General David Richards, who took command of ISAF on 4 May. 'They were there – they were in a lot of those southern provinces – but there was a marriage of convenience between them and the drug lords and Akhunzada, and there was very little violence.'

Daoud's lack of local influence soon caused him problems. By April 2006 it was clear that the Taliban were on the march. First, an American PRT clinic in the village of Bashling, just north of Kajaki dam, was burned to the ground. Then came news that the Taliban had taken over a village in the district of Baghran, further to the north. This was more than an affront to the governor's authority; in Daoud's estimation it was a threat to government control of the province. The risk to Kajaki, a hydro-electric dam that, once repaired, had the capacity to provide power for the entire region, was particularly serious. 'You know, Kajaki is our national treasury,' he told me. 'It's very, very important for the whole country. We had to protect that dam.'

I spoke to Daoud by telephone in his home in Kabul in the summer of 2007. He had been sacked by Karzai the previous December, eleven months after his appointment to the governorship, and was still out of a job – another victim of the revolving-door world of Kabul politics. Daoud's first line of defence against the insurgents, he explained, had been his police force. But as the British troops who fought alongside them found, the ANP were mostly useless. 'Officially we had seventeen hundred policemen in Helmand, but actually we had only two hundred and fifty,' he said. 'The rest answered to warlords.'

His second line of defence was the Afghan National Army; but the ANA, too, were significantly under strength. Of the quota of soldiers promised him by Kabul, 'seventy per cent were still not in the area', either because they were deployed elsewhere or because they had not yet been trained. It was probably unrealistic to expect even a full quota of this fledgling force to deal with the Taliban – although that did not prevent Karzai from pushing for it. A functioning national army was an important yardstick of progress, and the President was under constant pressure to demonstrate that the billions already spent by the US and other foreign backers had not been for nothing. Karzai also hoped to start eradicating poppies in the region – an ambition that General Richards thought was the purest wishful thinking. 'Karzai said to me, "You're responsible for security. What do you think?" I said, "You aren't ready to handle the second- and third-order consequences of eradication. You haven't got your police force ready. You haven't got your army trained. Half your governors are up to their eyes in it" . . . It just wasn't thought through.'

Governor Daoud, closer to what was going on in Helmand, understood the limitations of his country's paper army. In an armed struggle with the Taliban, foreign troops were really the only option available to him.

Daoud's initial requests for help were not answered. 'I asked the American PRT commander to go back to Bashling and start some operations there. I thought that if the enemy saw there was no reaction from the government side, they would increase their activities. But I received a message that the US were leaving Helmand and that this was now a British responsibility.' With Karzai's support, he began to put pressure on the British. A weekly meeting with Colonel Knaggs had been instituted in Lashkar Gah, and he used these to press his case for Task Force intervention. Leo Docherty, who was then Knaggs's aide-de-camp, remembered very clearly the first occasion he raised the matter. 'It was just after the incident in Now Zad, when a Pathfinder patrol got into a firefight with some ANP.
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Knaggs was summoned to the Governor's office for an explanation. He apologized, and the apologies were accepted, but then the Governor asked us if we'd send troops to Baghran. That was the real point of the meeting. Apparently the Talibs had occupied a school there. Knaggs said he would see what he could do; he told me to make a note and promised to pass the request up the chain of command. That set the tone of our relationship.'

The British, however, were not yet in much of a position to help. Daoud had expected the British Task Force to be in place by February; in reality, they were still arriving in theatre three months later. 'The Brits only arrived gradually,' said Daoud, with some bitterness. 'They had no knowledge of the area, and their logistics came very slowly . . . the exchange took five or six months. There was a vacuum of command, and because of this the exchange plan was not properly designed or scheduled. During that time the Brits had no possibility of controlling Helmand on their own.'

The power vacuum created by the handover from Operation Enduring Freedom to ISAF was evidently critical. Could it have been avoided? Brigadier Butler later referred to the episode as the 'misalignment of the strategic levers of power'. The decision to delay the deployment of British troops was linked to Dutch prevarication over sending their soldiers to Oruzgan province. Responsibility for that decision ultimately lay with the then British Defence Secretary, John Reid.

Meanwhile, in Butler's view, Daoud's expectations of British capabilities were badly mismanaged. The Governor apparently could not understand why, even when it was fully deployed, a Task Force numbering 3,300 people could muster no more than 650 fighting men. The rest, of course, were involved in logistics, communications, technical support, engineering (especially for air and aviation), administration and all the other jobs that kept the British in the field 7,000 miles from home. Afghans did these things differently. To Daoud, a force of 3,300 meant exactly that: 3,300 gun-carrying fighters. To be fair, the proportion of supporting personnel was very high – high enough to make even some of the British wonder at it. 'What are the rest of our people up to?' wrote Tom Burne in an email home on 7 July. 'A common question asked by those of us on the front line.'

Minna Jarvenpaa of Whitehall's PCRU, who spent many weeks in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah working on the British plan, remembered calling a meeting with Daoud to try to ascertain if he really understood what the British were and were not capable of. As a veteran of the reconstruction missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, she knew all about the tendency of local actors to treat foreign forces as a kind of magic wand. She was not alone in suspecting that Daoud had also been dazzled by all the air power and technology at the Task Force's disposal, and she tried to inject some realism into Daoud's expectations. As Daoud saw things, however, his options were severely limited; and even if the Task Force was too small for the job in hand, he not unnaturally assumed that ISAF would provide reinforcements. He could not have foreseen the unwillingness of Britain's Nato partners to do so. The lack of cooperation among the Coalition members evidently astonished him. 'Helmand is not a different country,' he said. 'I am talking about Coalition forces. It was up to the British to ask Kabul for more help.'