A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (20 page)

Brigadier Butler faced a difficult dilemma. He knew that his Task Force was neither ready nor sufficiently manned or equipped to deviate from the development zone plan, and at first he politely refused Daoud's increasingly strident requests for help against the Taliban, who were showing no sign of stopping their southward progress towards them. After Baghran came news that the Taliban had taken control of the district centre of Musa Qala: a detachment of British Pathfinders had observed civilians streaming out of that town. Trouble was brewing in Sangin and Now Zad as well. The pressure on Butler to act was immense. He and Daoud argued about it constantly, sometimes long into the night. On one occasion the Governor stormed out of a meeting at four o'clock in the morning, threatening to resign if the British didn't help. 'His line was, if you're not prepared to defend northern Helmand, then we will lose central Helmand – and you might as well all go home now,' Butler said. 'It may go against military logic, experience and tactical wisdom, but this was a GOA [Government of Afghanistan] strategic imperative. You've got to put it in context. We'd been invited in to a sovereign state, with a UN and Nato mandate. We agreed we'd work for Karzai, and he asked us in. So there were two options, which I put to ISAF, to the GOA, and to Whitehall: do we (a) do as requested, or (b) walk away, and refuse to acknowledge and follow HMG's declared policy of supporting President Karzai, and delivering on the UN- and Nato-backed mandate?'

Governor Daoud had powerful allies in Kabul. He enjoyed President Karzai's full support, and spoke to him on his mobile phone on a regular basis – 'the bungee-jumping approach' to policy-making, as Butler called it. 'Daoud would ring him and say, "The British, Ed and the boys, are not supporting me." Karzai would then talk to the Americans – General Eikenberry, at that stage [Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the Combined Forces Commander in Afghanistan]. So then there was a GOA–American alliance against the Brits, who were not doing what they were told. Then Karzai gets on the phone and he says, "No, you will do something. If Daoud is in trouble you have to help him." I've got what he said jotted down in my notebook. He said, "If the black flag of Mullah Omar flies over the district centres then our credibility and ability to govern is directly threatened." So we were being directly accused of threatening the GOA by not protecting the governorship. It meant that we were already failing on the first and principal reason we were in Helmand, which was to provide security to protect and enable proper governance. In my shoes, what would you do?'

Whitehall played its part in pressurizing Butler too. 'London visitors came over,' Butler recalled. 'The Secretary of State made it very clear. John Reid and then Des Browne both got it from Karzai, and from Daoud when they were bounced down through Helmand . . . so did Hilary Benn [Secretary of State for International Development], and Adam Ingram [the Armed Forces minister], and the Chief of the Defence Staff, and the vicechiefs, and everyone else.'

Butler's position was impossible. He was being second-guessed in London and countermanded by Kabul. Unlike Gerald Templer, who enjoyed 'both the responsibility
and
the authority' to run the counter-insurgency in Malaya, Butler had only been granted the responsibility – 'and it still took Templer twelve years'. Through no fault of his own he was usually stuck in Kabul at the end of a much-attenuated chain of command, obliged to make complex calculations over a battlefield that was distant, dangerous and fluid; and time was not on his side. In the end he was forced to agree to Daoud's demands. Yet there were plenty of senior figures, both civilian and military, who muttered after the event that he should have resisted the Governor and stuck within the parameters of the British plan.

I later corresponded with General Richards on a different matter. I was arguing that had Bill Clinton negotiated with the Taliban rather than bombing al-Qaida's Afghan training camps in August 1998, then 9/11 might never have happened. He replied with a point about the challenges of high military command that humbled me. 'We are where we are today and I do/did not have the luxury of wishing things were different, however tempting and interesting. I am sure you accept this but, especially given the inadequacies and failings of our fellow man, it is much harder to be an active practitioner than to be an analyst/historian/academic/journalist etc, especially when they have the benefit of hindsight and no pressure of time and events – i.e. to do, rather than criticise others who do.'

In July, by which time the fighting in the northern areas had intensified to Korea levels, Butler became aware that he was being briefed against in London. It was his fault, the whisperers implied, that the 'comprehensive approach' had gone off track. He and his Paras, it was alleged, had effectively scuppered the British plan by being too keen for a fight. Butler bitterly rejected the charge, and still does. 'The philosophy behind the comprehensive approach was right, and I absolutely agree with it, but it's about time and timing – and there was always going to be a reaction, a fight, when we deployed to Helmand . . . people don't understand this. We didn't want a fight. Civvies always say that about the Paras, and it irritated Stuart [Tootal] and me more than anything. We're all human beings . . . No one likes taking another man's life.'

Part of the explanation for the accusation may have lain in Butler's personality. At forty-four he was among the youngest of the Army's sixty or so combat brigadiers, and regarded as one of the brightest blades they had. 'Brigadier Ed Butler has it all – piercing eyes, an Eton education and features that are determined, tough but charming,' gushed one newspaper profile. 'He is a man ready-made to lead.' The grandson of the Tory statesman Rab Butler, a Royal Green Jacket and a former member of the SAS, he was multiply decorated for actions that included a celebrated assault on a suspected al-Qaida camp near Spin Boldak in eastern Afghanistan in 2002. In curious contrast, perhaps, to his famous grandfather (a non-military man who supported the appeasement of Hitler in 1938 and privately opposed the Suez adventure of 1956), he was clearly not a man to shirk an opportunity for a fight. When British ammunition ran out during the attack near Spin Boldak, hand-to-hand fighting ensued.

There were those who accused him of over-confidence, even arrogance. On 17 October 2006, when he was fresh back from Afghanistan, I watched him give a press conference at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, where the way he handled his questioners was certainly businesslike. 'The trouble with him,' one experienced defence correspondent muttered as we filed for the exit, 'is that he's another bloody old Etonian.' Butler subsequently felt some of his words had been misreported by a correspondent from the
Independent
, to whom he sent an angry letter of correction. 'Your front-page story paints a misleading and mischievous picture of what I said,' he wrote. 'It omits some of my comments, and extrapolates meaning and intention from others which is completely false. I did not say the operation in Iraq had cost "years of progress" in Afghanistan; I did not say it had left "a dangerous vacuum"; and I did not say that British soldiers faced a tougher task now because of it.'

Butler, his detractors said, was the kind of commander who felt more comfortable in the field than manning a desk at HQ, a man who instinctively preferred action to words and theory, and pro-activity to caution. In his pre-deployment message to his commanders he paraphrased Rupert Smith, the retired general and author regarded by many as a guru on asymmetric warfare. The Smithism he chose was revealing: 'Command and leadership on operations (even more so in the multinational arena) is about "come on" and "go on",' he wrote. 'Wise words.'

But was he gung-ho? Butler found the allegation insulting. 'To people who say that I just like to get in a scrap, I say, but I've done all that. I've been in a number of contacts; I've experienced close-quarter combat and proved myself at the tactical level. And once you've done that, and risen through the ranks, and experienced all the pressures and adrenalin moments, you do break through a ceiling, in terms of responsibility and leadership requirements, [into a place] where you're in a completely different business.'

He was not surprised by the hunt for a scapegoat in Whitehall. A lot of people, he noted, had hung their reputations on the comprehensive approach working in Helmand. 'We had the same thing in Iraq, when the civilian development mission began to fail in Basra because of the increase in violence. The OGD [other government departments] said it wasn't their fault, and blamed the military commanders for failing to provide security.'

With an MA in international relations from St John's College, Cambridge, and another in war studies from King's College, London, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal understood the principles of counter-insurgency better than most. Mobility and the element of surprise, he knew, were critical to its success. His battle group, he was also very aware, had been trained, manned and equipped for mobile operations, not an occupation. He fretted that his operations were too 'reactive' – which was inevitable, given his obligation to accede to Governor Daoud's ever-increasing requests for help – and that in reacting to crises, his forces were too stretched to focus on the work of reconstruction which was supposed to go hand in hand with military operations.

Tootal sometimes suspected that the battle group's services were being abused. On 21 June, for instance, Governor Daoud told Colonel Knaggs that the son of a friend and ally, the District Chief in Sangin, had been critically injured in a fight with the Taliban, and urged the British to rescue him. Tootal didn't want to do it. Intelligence reports said the Taliban were strong in the area. A successful rescue would require a company-sized operation at least, and he feared the political consequences of sending such a force into the febrile environment of Sangin. He passed his concerns up the chain to Kabul, but was overruled. Supporting Governor Daoud was paramount, and a company of Paras was duly dispatched. Yet when they reached the chief's son, the Para medical officer found his condition wasn't critical at all, but actually 'very, very stable'. He had already been operated on and needed nothing more than another shot of antibiotics and some pain-killers. The rescue operation was supposed to last a few hours, but it ended up marking the beginning of an occupation of Sangin town which was to last until the end of the Paras' tour, and on into Herrick 5.

Did Daoud deliberately exaggerate the medical condition of the District Chief's son? Or was it a genuine case of miscommunication – or else panic? Some of those who dealt with the Governor suspected that he was prone to 'flap'. Was Knaggs, who had spent many weeks building a close friendship with Daoud, too quick to acquiesce? If Butler had been located in Lashkar Gah instead of Kabul, might he have read the Governor differently? The only certainty was that the locus of the battle group's activity shifted incrementally northwards. By the end of June, Tootal's troops were strung out across the province in half a dozen locations and uncomfortably dependent on vulnerable helicopters for survival. His battle group had become irrevocably 'fixed', and the mobile operations necessary to make the comprehensive approach work had become a distant dream.

Despite the pressure they put on Butler to support Daoud militarily, the Americans were not best pleased by the consequences. Bitter experience of the region had taught them the importance of staying mobile; getting stuck meant losing the ability to take on the Taliban on the Coalition's own terms. Operation Medusa, in early September, was a case in point. Although British forces did take part in that battle – notably the fourteen killed when an ageing Nimrod reconnaissance plane exploded in mid-air following an avoidable fuel leak – the operation was Canadian-led, and effectively won by American air power. Perhaps as many as a thousand Taliban fighters were wiped out there – a devastating setback for them and the single biggest Coalition victory in years. Yet Britain was unable to contribute more than a handful of troops because they were all tied up in platoon-houses in Helmand.

US Major General Ben Freakley, the commander of Task Force 76 under whose control Regional Command South fell, was furious with Butler for allowing this to happen, and complained to his superior, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the Combined Forces Commander in Afghanistan. A veteran of both Gulf Wars, Freakley was reportedly so irritated at the manner of this upstart British brigadier – a one-star general whom he outranked but, because of the tangled chain of command, was unable to control – that he 'came close to causing a diplomatic incident', according to one source.

'You nearly had to send me to Leavenworth,' Freakley told Eikenberry, referring to the US military penitentiary in Kansas.

'Why?' said Eikenberry.

'Because I nearly knocked that Limey's lamps out.'

Butler, for his part, was well aware of Freakley's feelings, but was surprised at quite how 'tactical' a perspective he took. Butler felt that Freakley's conviction that the military should always act independently of their political masters was 'rather naive', although it didn't particularly surprise him. In his experience, American two-star generals had 'neither the benefit of higher-level training, nor the exposure, in places such as Northern Ireland or the Balkans, to the pol-mil [political-military] level of command'. Freakley, in Butler's view, had no appreciation of the role a British national contingent commander was expected to play. Nor did he seem to understand the pressures under which Prime Minister Tony Blair was labouring at the time – either domestic ones, such as the cash-for-honours scandal then breaking over the House of Commons, or foreign policy ones, such as Iraq. Their disagreement was neither the first nor last time that the allies clashed over strategy in Helmand. The problem was partly cultural – a re-run, perhaps, of the falling out between Eisenhower and Montgomery during World War Two.

Was the choice of northern Helmand as a battle ground – whoever's choice it was, and whatever the tactics used – the right one? Not everyone thought so. Among its sternest critics was Sarah Chayes, an American author and former National Public Radio journalist who covered the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. After the overthrow of the Taliban she decided to stay on, although not as a journalist: for the last seven years she has lived alone in Kandahar running a women's soap-making collective. Clever, on friendly terms with the Afghan President, a fluent Pashto speaker and protected by affiliation with powerful tribes in Kandahar, she remains the only Westerner now living 'amongst the people' in the city, and as such knew better than almost anyone what was going on in the region at the time of Herrick 4.