A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (23 page)

Some in the Army also wondered why the MoD had chosen Paras, of all people, to spearhead a mission to win hearts and minds. The Defence Secretary John Reid announced in January 2006 that Britain's engagement was expected to last for three years. It was always known, therefore, that the 3 Para battle group would be the first of at least six six-month troop rotations, and that the first ones in would have the difficult and sensitive job of setting the conditions for all who would follow them. The Paras trained for this crucial role for a month in Oman, where they practised entering mocked-up villages and, according to Captain Martin Taylor, 'establishing relations with the locals and displaying a culturally aware attitude to the people [we] would be dealing with'. Yet however much they trained, this kind of work was never a Para forte. According to one very senior officer who asked not to be named, 'What we're not particularly good at is the information operation needed to set the conditions on the ground for what happens next. Is the best person to sell the message a sergeant from 3 Para? Probably not. It's not what he's trained or equipped or briefed to do.'

Tootal's men – and there were only men in this toughest of British regiments – had generally joined up not to go on soft peacekeeping operations but to 'live the dream' of combat. Whatever he or Butler said, the Toms themselves were hungry, even by ordinary Para standards, for the chance to prove themselves in action. Iraq had been a disappointment for 3 Para in terms of war-fighting experience. The battalion's last real fight had been in the Falklands, twenty-four years earlier. Indeed, the feeling among the Paras that they had been passed over for deployment on previous occasions was probably an influence in the decision to send them on Herrick 4.

Tootal was proud of the 'Para ethos' and the spirit of 'controlled aggression' that underpinned it, and it is true that any skill must be practised if it is to be maintained. But were Paras really what was required on such a sensitive 'condition-setting' mission, in a place Butler himself described in his post-tour press conference as 'an empty canvas' which 'thrived off insecurity' before the British arrived there? 'If you take a battle group of Paratroopers that looks like a hammer, they are inclined to look for a nail,' continued the very senior officer, 'and they found a nail. In fact, lots of them. We got what we wanted on Herrick 4, which was a battle,' he said.

'The Army has been driven by the prospects of action, promotion and decorations for hundreds of years and I doubt much has changed,' said Mark Etherington. 'I think there was an urge among the military to get stuck in to the Taliban; and the lure of deep patrols in the mountains and deserts of Helmand, together with the almost overpowering presence of history, tends to eclipse the rather more mundane requirements of "reconstruction". I do not doubt the military's bravery and commitment in Helmand for a moment. But did we lose sight of our objectives? It is at least arguable.'

Part of the trouble, the very senior officer believed, was that British troops are rotated every six months, far more often than American troops, whose standard tour lasts from twelve to fifteen months. 'When people arrive for their six-month rotation there's a danger that they (a) have their private battle and want to prove to themselves that they can do it, and (b) think that they might actually be able to win it. But you can't win anything in six months – obviously. Nor can you lose it. But you can set back the conditions [necessary for ultimate victory] . . . by a considerable measure.'

A twelve- to fifteen-month tour could play havoc with a GI's home life, and it was politically controversial in the US. But it also gave soldiers a chance to become properly intimate with their Area of Operations, to gain deeper intelligence, to learn about the people and their culture. Soldiers on longer tours also tended to take a slower, more considered approach to their jobs – and on a mission as long and delicate as Operation Herrick, that could be critical.

Tootal, of course, insisted that he and his men had done their best to apply the comprehensive approach. If the campaign had become too 'kinetic', it was not the fault of the Paras. His men had done what should have been expected of them, which was to fight. If the plan had gone awry, it was because the Task Force's hand had been forced. He defended the decision to go north, as so many did, by quoting the dictum of the Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, a disciple of Clausewitz and the most talented strategist of his generation, that 'no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy'. Yet was not von Moltke merely describing the effect of the 'fog of war' that swirls around every battlefield? He did not mean that battle plans were of no use. As his brilliant execution of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 showed, he was in fact an obsessive planner whose technique was to try to anticipate everything that might happen. Contingency planning helped him to see through the battle fog, to keep sight of the wider goals of the war – which in Helmand's case was the conquest of hearts and minds. 'War is a matter of expedients,' as he also said. The strategist's role, he believed, was to prepare, and fight, accordingly.

Von Moltke would have spotted the main drawback of the British plan for Helmand immediately, and it was this: there was no Plan 'B'. 'The prelim-ops team did a fantastic job on how to implement the comprehensive approach,' said Brigadier Butler, 'but what they didn't do was to foresee the tactical realities of [entering Helmand with a foreign military force] that was never going to own the plan, or the risk – which I ended up doing – when we were the only ones executing it.' He frankly doubted whether the plan had ever been workable as originally conceived. He believed that the 'break-in battle', the military part of the comprehensive approach, was 'always going to surge ahead of the reconstruction, development, governance and counter-narcotic lines of operation', and would remain ahead until, eventually, those other lines caught up. He also firmly believed that the battle was inevitable, and that those who argued that the plan could have been executed without violence were guilty of 'naivety of the first order'. 'I've been in this country twice before, and these people fight – they fight very, very hard. I know – I've done it, I've seen it, on surgical ops and on more steady-state, peace-keeping-type ones in 2002.'

Butler's long experience of soldiering, not just in Afghanistan but in places like Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, had perhaps darkened his opinion of human nature. I struggled especially with his assertion of the need to go through a 'Hobbesian cycle of violence' before the tipping point of popular support for any international peace campaign could be reached. 'I'm not a military historian,' he said, 'but based on my twenty years plus of experience in the operational field, you've got to go through . . . an attritional war to exhaust those physical battles before people start to recognize that there is a political solution which needs to be negotiated.' In other words, he believed that military action was a necessary evil. The imposition of an external foreign force was always going to provoke further peaks and troughs of violence, but over time, given proper management and resources, the violence could be reduced to an acceptable level. 'The Task Force never set out to fight the Taliban,' he insisted. 'But we were entirely realistic in our expectations that by threatening the power bases of all the Helmand stakeholders – the Taliban, the narcos, the warlords – we were always going to provoke a violent reaction . . . What is fundamental to understanding southern Afghanistan is that a minority of the stakeholders only want a failed state, so that their various power bases and finances can prosper. The entrance of the Task Force and Nato forces, with the principal purpose of turning Afghanistan into a non-failed state, threatens their very livelihoods and futures. Hence the fight.'

The only possibility of avoiding a fight in Helmand, he argued, had been lost long before Herrick 4 thanks to the 'Iraq effect' – an opinion in revealing contrast to his riposte to the
Independent
reporter at his post-tour press conference a year earlier. 'I've said this publicly,' he told me. 'A strategic opportunity was missed, by the Americans and ourselves, by maintaining a minimal presence [in Afghanistan] from 2002 onwards. We could have gone where we wanted after all that widespread swing of support to the GOA [after Karzai's election]. The opportunities were all there in 2002. I was there then; you could see it all slipping away. But everything was on the other place [i.e. Iraq], and that's what the Taliban have exploited.'

He spoke of a 'declining glide path of consent' among the civilian population for the foreign presence. As a military man, he said, all he could do was buy space and time for reconstruction and development work to have its effect. But could the British military ever buy enough time? 'That,' said Butler, 'is the six-million-dollar question. How long does it take to start winning and maintaining indigenous popular support? Three years? Five years? It's probably in the two- to five-year bracket.'

He remained optimistic that it could be done. There had been 'significant steps forward' in terms of reconstruction and development since Herrick 4. Sangin had been transformed from a 'narcocentric' town into one of 'relative prosperity' in little more than a year. But he admitted that 'the tide of popular support has yet to jump over the fence' in Helmand as a whole. 'The Afghans all say they hate the Taliban, but they haven't said unequivocally that they support ISAF and the GOA, because they are still not sure that the Coalition is prepared to stay for the long term. If an Afghan sides with ISAF, and we leave, then he is dead. So no matter how much he hates the Taliban, he would prefer to be alive under them than dead if we aren't prepared to invest the necessary time and resources in the campaign, and decide to leave in a couple of years.'

The slow pace of progress in Helmand worried Butler far less, ultimately, than the decline of support for the war within Nato and among the British public at home. 'The Taliban know that domestic Western support for this war could well go the same way as Iraq. Five years to them is nothing, never mind the thirty years some people are talking about. That's what will lose us this campaign in the end.'

5
The Chinooks Push the Envelope

The aviator's phrase 'pushing the envelope', first used by test pilots in World War Two, was decisively back in fashion during Herrick 4. The crews of the Army Air Corps' Apaches were, in effect, test pilots, because it was the first time their machines had flown in combat. The Apache was an American machine with a proven track record – it was first used in Panama in 1989 – but the Air Corps were flying a new British version that, for political procurement reasons, was fitted with engines built by Rolls-Royce rather than General Electric. There was much other clever technology and weaponry on board that had not seen active service before. No one knew for sure how the machines or their newly trained crews would perform. Herrick 4 turned out to be the hottest baptism by fire imaginable for both.

The pressure on the Army Air Corps was intense, although moderate compared to what the RAF's Chinook transport helicopters worked under. It was very quickly clear that the platoon-houses could not rely on road transport for their supplies. Instead, the garrisons had to depend entirely on Flight 1310, as the Chinook contingent was known, for their 'bullets and beans' as well as for troop rotations and the evacuation of casualties. The Task Force's whole strategy would have collapsed without them, and everyone, including the enemy, knew it.

Although agile for its size, the Chinook was still almost a hundred feet long and weighed twenty-two tons fully laden, and it was never more vulnerable to attack than when putting down near a platoon-house to unload. The Taliban nickname for the machine was 'big mosquito'; the Paras called it a 'big bullet magnet'. No matter how much the pilots varied the frequency, time of day, speed, height and direction of their approaches, there were only a certain number of places for a Chinook to land near the district centres, which meant the drop zones were frequently 'hot'. 'It was the flights into the platoon-houses that really put people's hairs up,' Squadron Leader Paul Shepherd confirmed. On troop rotations and 'deliberate ops' there were sometimes more than forty soldiers crammed into the back. Destroying a Chinook, therefore, was naturally the glorious jackpot sought by every gunman. A well-aimed RPG in the right place at the right time, or even a single lucky heavy machine-gun bullet, could cause a catastrophe with what Shepherd called 'Mull of Kintyre ramifications'.

The reference was to the fatal accident in 1994, when a Chinook carrying almost the entire top tier of Northern Ireland's military intelligence officials crashed on the west coast of Scotland in heavy fog. The political implications for John Major's government, which was then struggling against a resurgent IRA, were immense – and the stakes were just as high in Helmand now. Ed Butler and the MoD worried that public opinion could turn decisively against the Afghan mission if a fully laden Chinook were to be brought down. That fear intensified after 2 September 2006, when a Nimrod surveillance craft crashed over Kandahar following a controversial technical fault, killing fourteen. Their bodies were repatriated to the Nimrod's base, RAF Kinloss in Morayshire, where a fraught memorial service for the dead was widely publicized. 'I want to know exactly why these guys had to die,' said the distraught wife of Flight Lieutenant Leigh Mitchelmore. 'Leigh went into Nimrods because he said it was one of the safest jobs he could have. It was meant to be a family man's job. He should be coming home. They should all be coming home, and they are not.'

The chances of a successful Chinook strike looked so high in the eyes of some visiting senior officers that, one day in early September, ISAF commander General David Richards was informed that the British would be unilaterally pulling out of all the platoon-houses in three days' time. Richards overturned the decision, correctly arguing that it would be perceived all over Afghanistan as a defeat for British arms. The Chinooks continued to fly. The risks, however, not only remained but increased. The more the Chinooks used the same drop zones, the better the Taliban were able to prepare for their arrival, and the greater the threat became. 'We were flying into the same unsecured landing sites, in built-up areas, in daylight – everything you shouldn't do in SH [support helicopters],' said Shepherd. 'It was only a matter of time before we lost an aircraft. I prepared the boys for that.'