A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (35 page)

General Richards agreed that the development effort was still nowhere near robust enough to counter-balance the destruction and violence the British had meted out. 'In relative and absolute terms we are all putting in far too little money,' he said. 'Only America is putting in the sorts of blood and treasure that can really help Afghanistan. In one case the Americans spent fifty million dollars in just one small valley on roads, job schemes, a new mosque. The British, meanwhile, put ten million pounds into the whole of Helmand province in one year.' He was confident that DfID and the other agencies would deliver eventually; the danger was that they would be too late. Without real and demonstrable developmental progress, there was a real risk that the Afghan people would turn back to the Taliban out of 'tiredness with our failure' – a resigned acceptance that the hardliners, with their promise of stability and security and their perceived lack of corruption, were 'better than our cock-up'.

He thought that the whole structure of the Herrick 4 Task Force, and the battle group within it, was inadequate for the task it had been set. The very term 'battle group' was wrong. 'The Army is structured for short-duration, war-fighting operations. We compensate for the historical shortage of troops with firepower, air power in particular, but you just can't do that in counter-insurgency. You actually want to minimize the use of firepower and maximize the number of boots on the ground, to almost freeze opposition movement. In that state you can do lots of reconstruction. But we couldn't do that during Herrick 4 because we didn't have enough troops.' Britain's Armed Forces, he went on, had failed to adapt fast or far enough to the long-term nature of modern operations. And in trying to perform a job for which they were neither structured, nor trained, equipped or numerous enough to do – first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan – they had become dangerously 'knackered'. What was needed in future was 'more boots in the Army and, if necessary, a few less fighter jets and large ships'. The alternative he prescribed was not far from the idea of 'embedded development officials' proposed by Leo Docherty, the disillusioned ex-Scots Guardsman. 'I'd have more mixed groups. Not just engineers but logisticians, contracts officers, people who understand how to create business.' The theory of the comprehensive approach, Richards still believed, was correct. The problem was that the British were simply not putting it into practice. 'I believe Afghanistan can still be won,' he concluded. 'But my goodness, we've got to get on with it.'

Adam Holloway was less certain. 'We may actually be too late now,' he said. 'Winning or losing always depended on the ordinary Afghan, and I am not sure we still have their consent for this project.' He was hard-nosed about the alternative. 'Maybe we should be less ambitious now. Maybe we should accept that we will only ever contain the insurgency, reduce our troop numbers, massively increase support for the Afghan Police and Army, and bring the reconcilable Taliban into the political process. Are we seriously saying that the British public will put up with the deaths, or even the current level of military spending, for year after year after year?'

'In a sense the horse has bolted now, hasn't it?' said one very senior officer gloomily. 'We're now in recovery mode. Helmand is only going to work if the battle space itself switches to the minds of the people. But the Brits came in, they fought the Taliban, they threatened their poppy and all the rest of it . . . It's bloody difficult to come back from that.'

Stuart Devine, the Irish Ranger, also worried that the legacy of Herrick 4 was irreversible. Like Docherty, he believed that an opportunity to avoid confrontation, even in the hostile north, had been squandered early on in the tour. 'I think the Brigadier was looking to win a war. But it wasn't a war then. You're not really winning anything, are you? It's different now, though. It all goes back to the platoon-house thing. It wasn't until the Paras arrived that it really kicked off.' Devine didn't blame the Toms – 'they were as good as us', he said – but he did blame 3 Para's chain of command, some of whom 'didn't seem to like working with other people'. The commander's greatest mistake, he said, was the failure to engage in dialogue with the locals. Even some Paras had muttered about this to Devine. 'There should have been more
shuras
at the start. We should have spoken to the Taliban and told them we meant no harm. We should have had more troops to start with, then talked to them from a position of strength. That would have avoided the fight.'

Devine didn't have the whole picture. In late May 2006 the Pathfinders, the first British soldiers to enter Musa Qala, had in fact held a series of
shuras
with the tribal elders there. The mood then was promising, but the meetings were discontinued with the start of the Taliban-instigated violence. However, I suspected that Devine was right when he said we should have talked to the Taliban directly – something that never happened during Herrick 4, at least at the tactical level. Talking to the Taliban had been advocated many times before, by President Karzai, who pushed for 'reconciliation committees' throughout 2006, and by journalists in London such as Simon Jenkins, who on the very day of the deaths of Rangers McCulloch and Muirhead published a devastating critique of the war prophesying that eventual negotiation was inevitable. Even Brigadier Butler thought that some form of political settlement was likely in the end. 'I think you're absolutely right that the ultimate legacy will be a government in Afghanistan, in x years' time, with Taliban representation,' he said. 'Some people in the UK are starting to think that way, but not publicly declaring it. The Americans, with their emotional ties to the abuse of 9/11, are absolutely, vehemently opposed to that. But then they said the same thing in Iraq.'

If even he thought that was where the violence in Helmand was headed, why had the British fought the Taliban in the first place? Would it not have been better to avoid it by going straight to the negotiating table? Butler, with his 'Hobbesian cycle of violence' theory, believed it had always been necessary to fight the Taliban first. For all its faults, he argued, the Musa Qala deal exemplified a victory for the kind of 'people power' the Coalition ought to be looking for in future. But was he right? Was violence and destruction really a necessary precursor to this or any other deal?

I was sure that the standard Western view of the Taliban as an austere, illiterate band of ideologues bent on jihad and a fight to the death with the hated infidel was wrong. I had met the Taliban and their supporters often over the previous decade and had always been struck by the variety of opinion within their movement. The Islamic utopia they hoped to create was a work in progress, and they often disagreed even among themselves about the direction of their regime. This could hardly be otherwise, given that their doctrine was based on the Koran – a document written in poetic and antiquated Arabic, an elliptical language open to interpretation even in its modern form. 'If you turned all the trees on earth into pens and all the seas into ink, you would still not explain all the meanings of the Koran,' a religious scholar in Kabul once told me.

The Taliban's beliefs are always passionately held, but that does not necessarily mean that they are fixed. With patience and understanding, even hardliners can be made to see reason. They are as open to persuasion as anyone else, and not always too proud to change their minds. A tradition of slow intellectual deliberation is central to Pashtun culture. Many Westerners find the
shura
system of governance ponderous, with its seemingly endless debates in cushion-filled rooms. Business is always mixed with hospitality at
shuras
, and discussions can certainly meander, but in the end it is not a bad way of reaching a consensus. Even modern Western businessmen recognize the value of 'face time' when trying to strike a deal, and routinely fly across the Atlantic for a meeting when an email or a phone call won't do. Like any revolution, the Taliban's thrives on the exchange of ideas. The main difference is that, while the ideas that drive most revolutions claim to be new, theirs date from the early seventh century. Theology is never far away in an exchange with them, or indeed any pious Pashtuns, who seem genuinely to relish the opportunity for a communal debate with a real-life Christian infidel.

In Jalalabad in 2002, I once argued long into the night with a group of Taliban supporters about Mullah Omar's decision the previous year to destroy the giant sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan – an act of vandalism, I thought, comparable to the Egyptians blowing up the Pyramids. As a group, they wouldn't budge: the Buddhas were evidence of idolatry, and their destruction was justified. But later, in private, one or two of them conceded that Omar had been wrong. There was no Buddhism in Afghanistan any more, so no reason to get rid of the statues. The Koran, they admitted, had little to say about the corrupting influence of ancient monuments – and the move spelled obvious disaster for the tourist industry of the future.

For all their undoubted abuses of human rights and crimes against women, the Taliban are not stupid people; they understand how much the West has to offer in terms of economic assistance, investment and technical advice. Nor is their rejection of Western values absolute. Indeed they are theologically inclined to respect all Christians, if not Jews. Muslims call the Bible 'the Book of the Sky' after all, and Jesus was one of their prophets, too. They may once have hosted al-Qaida, but they have never exported terrorism themselves. Their manifesto has always been inward-looking, and still essentially ends with the local establishment of their version of an Islamic state. For all the sophistication of their propaganda machine, it has never once been used to denigrate the West in any targeted way – as, for example, the Soviet Union did throughout the Cold War, or the Ayatollahs did in Iran in the 1980s. Where, in all this, is the threat to the Western way of life?

However improbable it may seem now, there was a time when even Americans found it acceptable to treat with the Taliban. In December 1997, in the days when Mullah Omar controlled 90 per cent of his country, a black-turbaned delegation travelled to Sugarland, Texas, to discuss the construction of a trans-Afghan gas pipeline with the energy firm Unocal. Their visit enjoyed the formal backing of the US government. In Sugarland, the Talibs dined at the palatial home of a Unocal vice-president, Martin Miller, where they were fascinated by his Christmas tree and, especially, the meaning of the star on top of it. They visited Houston's zoo and the Nasa space centre, and shopped happily at Omaha's Super Target discount store. There was even a rumour that they had played in Miller's garden with a frisbee. Civil war, the emergence of al-Qaida and the hardening of the US's stance towards the regime after the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya conspired to ensure that the pipeline was never built. But the Sugarland meetings proved that dialogue had at least been possible in the past, and perhaps could be so again.

Finally, the Taliban had a recognizable political agenda – a return to government power – and I felt certain that some of them, at least, understood that violence was rarely the best way to pursue that. I couldn't help wondering what difference a less 'kinetic' approach during Herrick 4 might have made. Even fanatics could agree with Churchill's Cold War dictum that 'to jaw-jaw is better than to war-war'. Might the Taliban not have been prepared – might they not
still
be prepared – to make certain concessions in order to achieve their ambitious political ends? It was time to find out.

9
Amongst the Taliban

Meeting the Taliban was the main purpose of my trip to Afghanistan in February 2007. In London my friend Mir had introduced me to a young Pashtun acquaintance who he swore was competent, trustworthy and in possession of all the necessary contacts. The acquaintance and I met in an Islington café, carefully chosen for its anonymity, where he agreed to help for a large sum of money, and only on condition that I did not reveal his identity. I was not even to use his real name; instead, I would address him as 'Mohammed' – the 'John Smith' of the Muslim world. A down-payment changed hands, discreet phone calls to Taliban High Command in Quetta were made, and within a month I found myself in the Hotel Continental in Kandahar.

Now that Britain was effectively at war with the Taliban, my arrangement with Quetta, 100 miles to the east over the Pakistani border, was necessarily a secret. I had been told to wait for a signal and had no means of contacting the insurgents myself; everything was in the hands of Mohammed. He was supposed to be in Quetta now, arranging my meeting in person. All he had told me was that I would be picked up from the hotel when the time was right, and spirited off to who knows where, probably by a taxi flagged down at random in the street outside. I had been ordered neither to discuss the forthcoming meeting with anyone, nor to call his mobile unless absolutely necessary, because 'spies were everywhere'. I swapped my Western clothes for some local ones, a pale blue
shalwar qamiz
and a dark waistcoat bought from a tailor called Gulab around the corner, and settled down to wait.

After five days in Kandahar there was still no news from Mohammed. James Bays and the al-Jazeera film crew were called back to Kabul, and I was beginning to run out of things to do. On the morning of the sixth day I sent out one of the hotel boys to buy a local, pay-as-you-go
Roshan
SIM card on the black market – a new and unused number, I reasoned, would be impossible for military intelligence to intercept – and dialled the Pakistani mobile number Mohammed had given me. He answered at once, although he was evidently unable to talk.

'Send me some
Roshan
credit,' he murmured. 'I'll call you back on this number.'

I dispatched the hotel boy once again, texted across a string of numbers, and waited. An entire day went by. I sat on my bed in the cold hotel room reading Joseph Heller's
Catch 22
and wondering what was going on across the border.