Taliban (19 page)

‘They were just the town mujahideen: they were
literally
the same people who had defended Musa Qala against the Russians in the 1980s. The Russians took the town from the south. That’s why we took it from the north – in order to confuse them.’

He recalled a reconnaissance mission to the top of a hulking mountain overlooking Musa Qala that the British nicknamed Mount Doom, a landmark that the locals avoided because it was considered sacred ground; it was also heavily mined.

‘We found an old observation post that still had bits of Russian kit lying about in it: even a tin of cigarettes with those long cardboard filters that they smoke. It was very creepy.’

The SAS officer had taken part in covert Taliban-hunting
operations all over the country since 2001, and had fought al-Qaida, too, in a celebrated attack on a training camp near Spin Boldak in 2002. In his experience, he said, killing was a way of life for a startling number of Afghans. He had observed that they would pick up a gun for the slightest of reasons, and fight under the flimsiest of flags. As a consequence it was often quite impossible to tell who was who.

‘I think of it as a kind of unholy Venn diagram, with “Taliban” on the left and “al-Qaida” on the right, and this huge, shifting mass of people in the middle,’ he said.

The foundation of soldiering in the rest of the world – loyalty to a cause and to one’s own brothers-in-arms – was often no more than a notional concept in Afghanistan, despite the likely dire consequences of disloyalty. One reason that Mullah Dadullah’s surrounded forces in Kunduz in 1997 were able to hold out for so long was that they were resupplied by their own enemy. ‘The commanders who fought against the Taliban during the day would sneak out of their bases to sell us ammunition at night,’ according to Mullah Zaeef. ‘It was cheap to buy bullets and shells in this way, and guaranteed that our forces in Kunduz had a relatively regular supply.’

On an operation in the Panjshir region in 2003, the SAS officer’s squadron hired some local fighters at
25 a day, an ethnic mix of Tajiks and Hazaras who acted as their guides.

‘We came to the top of a hill above a village and one of them said: “That’s a Taliban village. You need to call in your aircraft to destroy it.” I said, “What, all of them? They are all Taliban?” “All,” he insisted. But of course we didn’t. This was about peasant politics: an ancient tribal feud of some kind, a Sicilian vendetta. They probably didn’t even know themselves why they wanted
the village destroyed. Yet they were utterly unscrupulous about it.’

On another occasion, on a lonely mountain road in the northern province of Jowzjan, his patrol was surrounded by a fifty-strong unit of Uzbek horsemen. There was an uneasy stand-off as the two sides eyed each other’s weapons, until the leader of the Uzbeks laughed and suggested they all sit down to have some tea. He explained that they had been planning to rob the party of foreigners.

‘And would you have killed us?’ said the SAS man.

‘No, not necessarily,’ he shrugged.

‘And what about the Taliban – are there any of them around here?’

‘Yes, we see them from time to time.’

‘And would you fight for them?’

‘Sure, if they paid us – why not?’

It was a reminder, as the SAS man said, that there were ‘an awful lot of bandidos’ in Afghanistan. Organized banditry, or ‘dacoity’ as it is still known in India, is so common in some parts of South Asia that it is considered a kind of profession – and not necessarily an unrespectable one. The Pashtun, according to the poet Ghani Khan, ‘has a proud head and an empty stomach; that is why he makes a great dacoit. I would rather see a man hang for dacoity than see him crawl along a pavement with outstretched palms, asking for alms from those who have found generous buyers for their souls. The Pathan loves to steal because he hates to beg. That is why I love him, in spite of his thick head and vain heart.’

The UK plan for Helmand in 2006 was based on what was known as the ‘comprehensive approach’, an adaptation of the ‘ink spot’ strategy developed during the Malaya Emergency of the 1950s. The
idea then had been to use troops to establish secure centres of development furnished with schools and jobs and clean running water. As the locals got to hear about the good life to be had in these centres, news of them would spread across the country like an ink spot on blotting paper, drawing in grateful civilians and separating them from the Chinese-backed communist insurgents who preyed upon them. The goal, as Chairman Mao once put it, was to ‘drain the swamp’ of popular support for the rebel cause – and in Malaya it worked brilliantly.

In Helmand, the British intended to create a ‘security triangle’ between their base at Camp Bastion and the province’s two main towns, Lashkar Gah and Gereshk; aid organizations led by the Foreign Office and DfID, the Department for International Development, would then pour into the breach. But the comprehensive approach was a failure. It is questionable whether the British ever had enough troops to secure the triangle in the first place. They had even fewer available when the Taliban began to press down from the north of the province, obliging Brigadier Ed Butler to garrison the towns of Now Zad, Musa Qala and Sangin, and to send others to protect an important hydro-electric dam at Kajaki. These places were all beyond the scope of the original plan. The ‘ink spot’ envisioned at Whitehall soon resembled an ink splatter. Just as the Special Forces reconnaissance mission had warned, Butler’s garrisons were quickly surrounded and besieged – and as the fighting intensified, Lashkar Gah and Gereshk began to fill not with people looking for work but with frightened refugees. Meanwhile, the British development agencies who were supposed to exploit the army’s sacrifices were so concerned about their own safety that they never arrived in the numbers necessary to make a difference.

The battle for Helmand in 2006 has since passed into British Army legend. The Gurkhas and then the Fusiliers who defended the platoon house at Now Zad compared the experience to the celebrated defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, when 139 redcoats held off a Zulu force of four to five thousand. The Now Zad garrison initially contained no more than thirty British soldiers. The Taliban, who knew that their enemy were unlikely to be so vulnerable in future, and who understood the enormous psychological value of defeating them, attempted to force the compound by frontal assault. Hundreds of fighters armed with AK-47s, sniper rifles and other small arms, backed up by mortar fire and barrages of RPGs, were able to get close up to the buildings across the street from the compound: so close that one Gurkha exchanged grenades with them through an air vent in the garrison’s latrine wall. The defenders would almost certainly have been over-run were it not for the supporting fire-power of Apache helicopters.

This scene was repeated throughout that summer in small Helmandi towns that no one in the West had previously heard of, but which have since become household names. British soldiers were still giving their lives to defend them, four years later. On almost every occasion in 2006 it was airpower that saved the day for the foreigners. An estimated 1,800 Taliban were killed or wounded between April and June 2006 alone.
⁴
The frontal assault tactic was abandoned the following year, when the insurgents fell back on a classic hit-and-run guerrilla strategy. This burned more slowly but arguably inflicted more damage on their enemy. Coalition casualties have risen every year since 2003, when fifty-seven were killed, to a record 520 dead in 2009.

The Taliban’s newest and most controversial tactic was a suicidebomb campaign. The hand of al-Qaida is often seen in this sinister
development, for there is no strong tradition of martyrdom in Afghan culture. Although the mujahideen occasionally used the technique against major Soviet targets in the 1980s, it is regarded by most Afghans as a kind of Arab perversion and it remains highly controversial, even among the Quetta leadership. It is sometimes said that Jalaluddin Haqqani, with his closer ties to al-Qaida, was responsible for the expansion of its use. Whoever’s idea it was, Mullah Obaidullah was certainly keen on it, and announced in November 2005 that he had assembled an army of suicide bombers who were now standing by, ready to deploy. There were just twenty-one suicide attacks in 2005, but 140 in 2006, accounting for over 1,100 dead.
⁵

The Taliban sometimes argued that suicide bombs were justified because they had no air force of their own, and they had to respond to Nato airpower somehow. It was hard to dismiss their complaint that the West’s aerial munitions –
guided
weapons supposedly designed to avoid collateral damage – had been killing innocent civilians by the hundred from the moment the Americans arrived. And yet the impulse to attack the West through suicide has yet to catch on in the national consciousness. There are no videos or posters glorifying suicide attackers as there are in some Middle Eastern countries. The bombers themselves are often from the outer fringes of Afghan society: the mentally ill, the educationally subnormal, and the many others who are susceptible to manipulation in a country traumatized by decades of war. In 2007, a pathologist’s study of the remains of over a hundred suicide attackers revealed that 80 per cent of them were missing limbs before they blew themselves up, or were suffering from leprosy or terminal diseases like cancer.
⁶
Omar eventually came to understand that suicide bombing, with its unhappy tendency to kill innocent
bystanders, was not the best way to win popular support, and reportedly fell out with Mullah Obaidullah over this issue; in 2009 he tried to restrict its use by specifically instructing his fighters to ‘do their utmost to avoid civilian deaths’.

United Nations statistics show that the incidence of suicide bombing in Afghanistan is growing nevertheless, with 239 attacks recorded in 2008. Yet it is difficult to say how many of them are now directed by the Quetta shura. Suicide bombers are usually impossible to identify after the event, and a great many attacks are never claimed by anybody. Omar’s spokesmen frequently deny they have anything to do with an attack, and it is certain that militant groups not under Omar’s control are sometimes responsible. The devastating attack on a CIA base in Khost in December 2009 was carried out by a Jordanian triple-agent who had been radicalized by his experience of violence in Gaza.
⁷

But in any case, suicide bombing has never been more than a terrifying adjunct to the Afghan Taliban’s new guerrilla strategy. The centrepiece of their campaign has proved to be the IED, the Improvised Explosive Device. The Afghans learned the art of booby-traps in the 1980s and they hadn’t forgotten their skills. There was no shortage of materials to make the bombs with, or of targets to choose from. The British, particularly, didn’t have enough helicopters, and were increasingly forced to use the roads to get around in Helmand. The vehicles they use have become more and more heavily armoured, but the Taliban always seem to stay one step ahead. The Taliban destroyed their first large British armoured vehicle, an eight-ton Spartan manned by the Household Cavalry, at Musa Qala in August 2006, using the ludicrously simple method of burying two or three Soviet-era anti-tank mines stacked one on top of the other. When the foreigners deployed sappers
armed with metal detectors, the Taliban developed IEDs made of plastic and wood; when they brought in sniffer dogs, they learned to urinate around their bomb to mask the scent of explosives.

The statistics showed who was winning this deadly game of cat and mouse. In 2006 there were 2,000 IED attacks which killed seventy-eight Coalition troops, amounting to 30 per cent of the total killed in that year. In 2009 there were 7,000 IED attacks which killed 275 troops: 61 per cent of the total in that year.
⁸
Attacks of all kinds on US forces and their Nato allies totalled 21,000 in 2009: a 75 per cent increase over 2008.
⁹
No wonder the insurgents regarded 2009 as their most successful year to date.

As the Taliban well knew, IEDs grind away at the morale of the foreign troops who have to face them each day. ‘This is probably the most scared I’ve ever been,’ wrote one British press photographer embedded with a US/Afghan National Army Humvee patrol. ‘You literally start shaking as the convoy’s engines start up. Even the briefings scare you when they explain what you’ll be expected to do if they have to amputate a limb.’
¹⁰
But this was only part of the point of IEDs. Equally important was their continuous demonstration, both to ISAF and to the Afghan population, that the Taliban could strike their enemy whenever and wherever they pleased.

This was the propaganda thinking behind the Taliban’s regular set-piece attacks that even ISAF describe as ‘spectaculars’. Perhaps the most astonishing example came in June 2008 when they orchestrated a mass prison-break from Sarposa jail in Kandahar, less than two miles from Camp Nathan Smith where hundreds of Canadian ISAF troops are based. There had already been unrest at the jail, where conditions were dire even by Afghanistan’s low standards: a hunger strike by two hundred prisoners, in the course of which forty-seven of them physically stitched their mouths shut. The
break-out began when a tanker truck approached the main entrance and was blown up, killing all the guards and destroying the gates. In the confusion, another suicide bomber made his way to the back of the jail and breached the perimeter wall for a second time. Meanwhile, a squad of sixty fighters mounted on thirty motorbikes poured through the front to attack the remaining guards with machine guns and RPGs, and to open up the cells. It was several hours before any Canadian troops arrived on the scene, by when all 1,200 inmates, who included almost four hundred suspected Taliban fighters, had either slipped away into the surrounding pomegranate groves or else were brazenly loaded on to waiting minibuses. Only a handful of them were recaptured later in the town.