A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (6 page)

Nott's was not the only British victory in this valley. In its own way, Arghandab was as significant a British battlefield as Agincourt or Waterloo. In 1880, following an exhausting – and, in Victorian times, legendary – three-week summertime march from Kabul, a force of 11,000 under Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Roberts defeated the army of Ayub Khan, who had earlier beaten the British at Maiwand, forty miles to the west. It was the last and decisive encounter of the Second Afghan War. British and Indian casualties amounted to 248 killed and wounded, against an estimated 2,500 on the Afghan side.

The valley was empty of armies now – at least the visible kind – but otherwise the view was unchanged. A pretty patchwork of ploughed fields and mud-walled orchards, neatly separated by avenues of trees, stretched for miles across a rolling plain. The line of the river was discernible in the middle-distance, with mountains beyond beneath a leaden sky. This land was richly irrigated, the soil thick and loamy. You could tell that in the summer the place would resemble a garden paradise.

We drove a short way to the local police station, the centre of municipal authority, to pay a courtesy visit to the chief, Hajji Ismarai. Senlis was on good terms with him; that winter, the NGO had donated fifty blankets to his village. The station was a dismal, echoing place. Most of the windows had no glass, and pools of water had collected on the rough concrete floors. We found Hajji Ismarai in his office at the end of a lightless corridor. The room contained a safe, a single-bar electric heater and an outsized double-bed with a mirrored headboard. The only window had been coated in red paint. He sat in blood-coloured gloom in the far corner with a colleague, huddled beneath a large, pink-edged rug decorated with flowers. He welcomed the three of us in, turning up one corner of his rug and inviting us to join him (an offer we politely but unanimously refused).

Ismarai looked embattled, and with some reason. He had a serious Taliban problem. He sent out his seven-year-old son to fetch us something to eat and began to explain how, the previous autumn, eighteen local men had volunteered for the insurgency in the firm belief that the government would fall within two months. They had fought ISAF for three weeks in the nearby districts of Panjwayi and Pashmul, but had been soundly defeated by the Americans and Canadians during Operation Medusa. They were now back in their homes, where a neighbour had recently spotted one of them burying anti-tank mines in his garden for future use. Ismarai promptly arrested this man and two others, and was 'investigating' the rest of the troop. His difficulty was that the Alokozai tribal elders, Mullah Naqib included, were in favour of reconciliation with the Taliban, and had ordered Ismarai to release the arrested men.

'But how can I release them?' he sighed. 'They could make a lot of trouble for me. I'm appealing to Naqib to see sense.'
^*7

He wasn't exaggerating the threat. The previous year, the local headmaster had been assassinated in a nearby bazaar. 'He was out on a walk with the young children,' Ismarai told us, nodding at his son, who had returned with some oranges. 'You don't kill people in front of children. That's not a part of our culture. They have no mercy or decency.'

Ismarai himself had been targeted the previous year, twice. By way of proof he produced a small roll of photographs from beneath his blanket and tossed it to us across the room. The pictures were close-ups of a bearded young man laid out on a floor, clearly dead. Everyone whistled in fascinated horror as they were passed around. One of the dead man's arms was twisted back at an unnatural angle, and his face and
shalwar qamiz
were caked in congealed blood.

'I never wanted to be a policeman, you know,' Ismarai muttered. 'I'm a farmer by nature, like my father and grandfather before me. I really just want to go back to the land.'

The dead man was a would-be suicide bomber. No one knew who he was or where he had come from. Ismarai recounted how, the previous summer, he had been picnicking with friends at a nearby shrine, one of the
zyarats
dedicated to local saints that dot the country. This one, commemorating a fifteenth-century holy man called Baba Wali, had been a popular tourist-spot in happier times, with its lovely views and shaded terraces of pomegranates. The bomber had leapt on them from an outcrop of rock above shouting 'Allahu Akbar!' but his bomb had misfired. It was still visible in one of the photographs: two clear plastic bags of explosive taped to his chest and back, connected by wires to a detonator on his hip. Ismarai wrestled with his attacker, overpowering him. But as a bodyguard rushed to help, the bomber reached for his hip again, revealing four hand-grenades. He succeeded in pulling the pin on one of them, severely injuring himself and the bodyguard, before a second bodyguard arrived and shot the bomber through the head. No wonder Ismarai was hiding beneath a blanket.

'We never used to have suicide bombers in Afghanistan,' Izzatullah the driver muttered. 'First there was Massoud. Then there was my uncle. Nowadays they've got training camps for them in Pakistan. Everything has changed.'

His claim was not quite true – suicide bombs were used occasionally against Soviet targets in the 1980s – but what certainly had changed was the frequency of them. In the preceding two years, 'not-so-smart bombs', as a Canadian officer I met called them, had become routine.

The formalities over, Ismarai assigned us an armed guard, and his deputy led us out to a large and muddy field to meet some farmers. It was late afternoon by now, and the wind blasting across the open ground had turned icy. Despite this the farmers, their faces cracked and leathery from a lifetime out of doors, were working shoeless in the freezing slime. A dozen of them quickly gathered round, curious and happy to talk. The field they were working on was for wheat, but they grew many other things in the orchards and meadows near by: apples, plums, peaches, pomegranates, melons – and poppies.

The farmers' attitude to opium was ambivalent. They were growing poppies, they said, because nothing else they grew was anything like as valuable. On the other hand they were growing less of them this year because in 2006 government soldiers had come to Arghandab and eradicated their crop. 'We were promised compensation but so far we have received nothing at all,' one said. In 2007 they were hedging their bets. One said he hoped the government might simply overlook Arghandab this time – which, actually, was perfectly possible, since the authorities could not hope to eradicate everywhere. Hajji Ismarai had echoed this position earlier. 'If I'm ordered to eradicate this year, I will obey,' he told me with bitter sarcasm, 'but I might just be a little bit late in carrying out the instruction.' Arghandab's loyalty to the central government was clearly not cast in iron.

'The Taliban have protected poppy-growers,' I said to the farmers. 'Aren't the people around here tempted to turn to them?'

They shook their heads vehemently. 'No one wants the Taliban around here.'

'What about in other districts?'

'I'm sure, if you went over those mountains there,' said the lead farmer, nodding to the south, 'you'd find some Taliban supporters.'

'Or over there,' said another, pointing in the opposite direction.

'But not here?'

'Definitely not here,' they all agreed.

'But if you support the government, why are you still growing poppies?'

They looked around at one another as if my question was daft.

'Of course we'd prefer not to grow it,' came the answer, 'but we are poor and have to feed our families. What else can we do? We have received no help from anyone these last five years.'

'But . . . don't you believe that it is against Islam to grow it?'

This, for some reason, prompted uproarious laughter.

'Allah sees into our hearts,' they said eventually. 'He knows that we are not evil, and that we do this only so that our families can eat.'

'But you do know what opium addiction does to people, don't you?'

They knew all right. Lurking at the back of the crowd was a teenager dressed in dirty brown with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. The spokesman farmer reached back and pulled him towards me.

'This boy is from Sangin. He used to be an addict. When I found him he was a crazy man,' he said. 'He couldn't talk. He didn't eat. He was going to die, so I rescued him and brought him here. He's fine now.'

I smiled at the teenager, who stared back with eyes as brown and dull as his clothes. I suspected he was a bit simple, or that the drug had caused some permanent damage to his brain.

'We're sorry if opium causes sadness for people, but we don't make them eat it or smoke it,' the farmer said with a final shake of his head. 'Besides, it's not us who turn it into heroin.'

It was hard to make sense of the farmers' words. They could see no contradiction in rescuing an opium addict and bringing him to work on a poppy farm. I had encountered this kind of illogical thinking many times before in Afghanistan, and suddenly I pitied the British Army and their mission to win such hearts and minds. The culture gap was hilariously wide. But the farmers also saddened me, because there really was nothing benign about the poppy business. The rescued junkie teenager was a reminder that opium was harming Afghans as well as Westerners. The old thinking about the drug – that it is a foreign vice and therefore a foreigner's problem, or else a form of Islamic revenge on the decadent West – no longer holds true. According to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, some 150,000 Afghans are addicted to opium, with a further 50,000 hooked on heroin, and the numbers are climbing dramatically. Some experts reckon that as much as 5 per cent of the country's total production goes to supply domestic demand. Afghanistan was a narco-state in the making, with all the violent suffering that this was bound to entail.

I was reminded of that by the deputy police chief, who led me away from the field to a mud-walled plot across the track for a closer look at Arghandab's poppy crop. There wasn't much to see: harvest time was months away, and the plants were no more than tiny green shoots, barely out of the ground. We perched ourselves on a slippery furrow, where he recalled how he had been attacked the previous year while overseeing the eradication.

'Look,' he said, opening his shirt to the glacial wind. 'This could happen to me again this year, you see?'

I did see: his stomach and one arm were covered by a livid and barely healed scar caused by shrapnel from a grenade.

'Who did that to you? The Taliban?'

'I don't know.' The deputy shrugged in the Afghan way, without rancour, serenely resigned to his fate. 'In any case, who are the Taliban?'

It was a question asked just as often by the British troops who had to fight them in the summer of 2006.

2
Aya Gurkhali!

Of the many stories I had heard about Herrick 4, the one that intrigued me first and most was what happened at Now Zad, a market town a hundred miles north-west of Kandahar and the most isolated of all the outstations garrisoned by the British. From June to November 2006, a platoon of Gurkhas and then a company of The Fusiliers were fiercely besieged in the police compound there, firing tens of thousands of rounds and killing hundreds of their attackers. Unlike the siege at Sangin, the extraordinary fighting at Now Zad went largely unreported. No newspaper journalist or TV crew ever made it to the town, and no gallantry medals were awarded to the men who had held it. When I returned to Britain, therefore, and finally reached an agreement with the MoD under which I could speak to their employees, among the first things I did was to contact Major Dan Rex of the Royal Gurkha Regiment.

It was a warm day, the first of the spring, when I went to see him and his men, six months after their return from Afghanistan and a world away from the din and confusion of battle. Their barracks, named after Sir John Moore, the hero of Wellington's Peninsular campaign, were perched high on a woody cliff above a glittering sea just outside Folkestone in Kent. The regimental band was at practice; the sound of trumpets and even bagpipes spilled from the open windows of rehearsal rooms and was carried away on the salty breeze. The men were just back from Easter leave. I was reminded disconcertingly of an English boarding school, for the Nepalese are a short race, and there was a distinctly headmasterly air about their tall and upright company major as his men clustered about him, fresh and eager to please.

The Gurkhas are still officered by the British, just as they were in the days of Empire – they first fought for the Crown in 1815 – and something of that colonial relationship survives in the respect the men pay to their
washi
, as they called Rex. There is something colonial, too, in the continuing obligation for officers to learn Gurkhali. Each year, a small team of officers travels to Nepal to select new recruits. Joining up remains as highly regarded among the Nepalese as it was in the nineteenth century: in the year that Rex went, a remarkable 57,000 of them applied for 153 places. As he pointed out with pride, his regiment is the only one in the Army that is always fully manned.

Dan Rex was thirty-four. Commissioned in 1993, he had served in Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, although nothing, he said, could have prepared him for Now Zad. An NCO from another regiment told me later that the experience had aged Rex, and swore that the grey on his temples was new. His reasons for joining the Gurkhas in the first place were frankly romantic. His father, now in his eighties, had been in the Indian Army. His great-grandfather, Tom Longstaff, was a famous naturalist and mountaineer who in 1907 had taken part in a record-breaking ascent of Trisul, a Himalayan mountain over 7,000 metres high. He made his family's connection to the days of Empire quite explicit; 'Victorian' was an adjective he readily applied not just to his father but to himself, too. At one point he even compared himself to Sir Louis Cavignari, Britain's emissary to Kabul in 1879, whose murder by a mob after a heroic Residency defence was a
casus belli
of the Second Afghan War.