With the exception of 16 Brigade’s Pathfinder reconnaissance platoon and small teams sent to mentor the Afghan National Army (ANA), the Battle Group constituted the fighting element of the UK force. But while the formation of the Battle Group would enhance 3 PARA’s ability to respond robustly if attacked, the mission was conceived as a peace support operation. Any use of force was seen as a last resort and actually having to hunt down the Taliban was not part of the mission. Instead our intended role was to provide security to protect the development and reconstruction efforts of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) that would deploy with the task force. This was made up of both military elements and development specialists from the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (EGO). It was hoped that their efforts would win over the loyalty of the majority population of the Pashtun people and allow the government in Kabul to extend its authority into the province. Intelligence reports as to the reception we would receive when we deployed into Helmand were patchy and inconsistent. However, most assessed that Helmand was relatively peaceful. At one planning meeting conducted in Kandahar before the deployment I presented my proposals in the event of being attacked. At the end of it, I was taken aside by a Royal Marines colonel who worked for the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) who were responsible for planning the overall UK deployment. He told me that I shouldn’t worry too much, as he did not anticipate there being any trouble from the Taliban in Helmand.
I reflected on his assessment as I boarded the aircraft that was taking me back to the UK. I had just spent two days in the neighbouring province of Zabol where US forces were being attacked by the Taliban on a routine basis. The PJHQ team were adamant that the situation in Helmand was very different. As we taxied to our take-off point, the repatriation service for a Canadian soldier who had been killed in action was taking place. His flag-draped coffin was being carried up the rear ramp of a waiting C-130 Hercules with a white-robed chaplain officiating over the first stage of his final journey home. In the background fighter jets were screaming down the main runway on their way to a ‘Troops in Contact’ situation, or what the Americans called a Tic. My mind clouded with doubts as I watched the red-hot glow of their engine exhausts disappear into the night on their way to help someone in trouble, I thought about what I had seen and heard in a country with a history of fierce resistance to foreign intervention. It made me doubt that the Taliban had such notions of there being any sort of peace to be kept.
Lessons of history and a potentially flawed mission concept were not my only concerns: I was also vexed that part of the UK’s mission was the stated intent of eradicating the cultivation of opium poppies. Ninety-three per cent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan, with half of the crop being grown in Helmand. Most of it enters Western cities in the form of heroin and it feeds the habit of 95 per cent of Britain’s addicts. Eradication might have provided a compelling additional motive for intervention in Helmand, but in an agrarian society of dirt-poor farmers, most of the population have little alternative to growing opium. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, intimidation and feudal drug-crop bondage to those who rule with the gun, many are forced to grow poppies. I did not doubt that the opium trade helped fuel the Taliban insurgency by providing money for arms and insurgent operations, but my concern was that the political imperative of eradication ignored the impact it would have on the people who grew it. I raised this issue with the Whitehall officials who briefed us on the mission. I asked them how we would be able to gain the consent of the people if we were seen to support operations that threatened the very basis of their livelihood. Despite these concerns, the advocates of official policy insisted that reducing the production of opium was an essential part of the mission. However, they were not going to be one of the poor buggers at the sharp end, reaping the consequences of a policy that threatened to drive every Afghan dependent on poppy production into the arms of the Taliban.
It was clear that the struggle that we were about to become engaged in would be psychological as well as physical; it would be a battle for the hearts and minds of the people. I doubted whether eradication would help achieve this. We would be operating in a guerrilla landscape, where our protagonist lived and operated among the civilian population. He would be indistinct from them until he decided to attack us. He would do so at a moment of his own choosing, before melting back into the obscurity of the community from whence he had come. While we would be constrained by the norms and conventions of war, such as the Geneva Convention, the insurgent would not. The local population would be their support base. They would provide him with shelter, supplies and information. He would win their favour through popular appeal, propaganda or intimidation. If we fired at him and in the process hit civilians, we would lend support to his claim to be defending the people from an external aggressor. But in turn he would not be immune to using civilians as deliberate human shields or punishing them savagely for supporting foreign troops.
Operating in an alien culture where they are unaware of who is friend and who is foe, death for a British soldier may be just around the corner. A seemingly benign situation can change into an extremely dangerous one in a heartbeat. Is the car approaching the patrol at speed driven by a suicide bomber? Is he ignoring the warning signs because he is an illiterate farmer who fails to appreciate the apparent perception of threat his actions are generating, or is he intent on blowing himself and the patrol to kingdom come? The soldier who has to make the right split-second decision of whether to open fire or not might be eighteen years old, but there is no time to refer the fast-developing situation to higher authority; he has to decide. How he reacts is compounded by the fact that he may not have slept for days, he may be scared and suffering from combat fatigue. This is a snapshot of the type of environment modern soldiers are expected to operate in. It places the most enormous pressures upon them, but despite the relative immaturity and limited world view of many of them, soldiers are expected to get it right regardless of the complex and challenging situations they face. I doubted that Afghanistan would be any different.
Lacking a clear, defined picture of exactly what might await us, we prepared to do everything. Our training took us from the frozen moorland streams and forestry blocks of Northumberland to the rocky desert of Oman. We focused on re-honing the basic skills of field-craft, shooting and combat first aid, as well as progressively building up training that integrated all elements of the Battle Group together. The artillery of I Battery fired over open gun sights in support of live firing company attacks and the Engineers practised their infantry skills. We placed an increased emphasis on fitness to improve our endurance to cope with the rigours of climate and fatigue. We paid particular attention to the issue of the Rules of Engagement (ROE) so soldiers would know exactly when they could and could not fire their weapons. I wanted my soldiers to have the confidence to open fire when necessary and without hesitation. But I also wanted them to be clear on the constraints and know that any abuse of a civilian or captured insurgent would not be tolerated. I based this aspect on a number of scenarios.
One hypothetical example involved a soldier advancing through a village at night where intelligence reports indicated a high threat of attack. In the shadows he sees an individual who lifts what looks like a weapon towards him. There is no time to shout a warning and the soldier fires and hits the target. The figure turns out to be a shepherd armed only with his crook. As tragic as the action would have been, I told my soldiers that I would support them in such a situation if an individual honestly believed that his life, and those of others, had been under threat at the time. However, I also told them that if in the same situation they had decided not to fire, but then kicked the shit out of the shepherd for giving them a scare, they would find themselves in front of a court martial for abuse. It was a clear message and I felt that my soldiers understood and accepted it.
We also based much of the training on the experience of visiting the Americ
ans in Zabol. We built mock Afghan compounds using hessian cloth and poles to replicate high mud-walled enclosures of small one-storey buildings. This allowed us to practise patrolling in a village environment, where the soldiers used the Pashtun phrases they had learned and practised showing respect for the customary norms of an Islamic society. Paratroopers played angry elders, weeping women and enjoyed putting their comrades under pressure to see how they would react.
We pored over maps and set about learning as much as we could of the terrain over which we would operate. Sandwiched between Kandahar Province to its east and the empty quarter of Nimruz Province running to the Iranian border in the west, Helmand is principally a landscape of flat, featureless desert that extends southward to its border with Pakistan. To its north, the rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush begin to rise sharply and unannounced from the desert plateau. The mountains’ melt waters feed the Helmand River that cuts a diagonal line down its centre from the north-east to the south-west. It brings the one source of nature’s life-blood to the population of a million-odd people scattered among the villages that cling to its fringes and tributary wadis. The river flows all year and its water is sucked out by wells and irrigation ditches to feed belts of fertile land that extend for a few hundred metres on either side of its banks. These are the only areas that can support life and the thin riverside strips of countryside resemble a sun-baked version of the Norman bocage of fruit orchards, cultivated fields and hedged banks among a myriad interconnecting mud-walled alleyways and lanes that criss-cross between the village compounds.
The only tarmac road in Afghanistan cuts Helmand at its mid-northern point. Highway One provides a tenuous link to Kandahar City and Herat to its north-west. To the south of the road lie the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and the second city of Gereshk. As the province’s major population centres, these two towns were initially considered as the principal focus of our operations. But zoo kilometres to the more barren north of the road lie the towns of Now Zad, Musa Qaleh, Sangin and the Kajaki Dam complex. The three towns are situated in the heartland of the Pashtun tribal areas that defy provincial government control from Lashkar Gah. Whoever held them would be seen to have de facto control of the north of the province. The significance of the Kajaki Dam lay in the fact that its ageing hydro turbines provided the one source of electric power to Helmand and much of Kandahar Province. If it fell to the Taliban it would enable them to place a stranglehold on much of the region. The remoteness of these locations and their strategic draw were to make them the future pressure points of our operation. They were to become the scenes of vicious fighting in the months ahead and were to witness much bloodshed. But as I sat in Colchester their significance to our operations lay in the future. As I studied maps and intelligence reports about Helmand, the enormity of the task the Battle Group faced began to dawn on me. Even if our operations could be limited to the region around Lashkar Gah and Gereshk as planned, it was still a huge area for the limited number of troops that I would have at my disposal.
I had no doubt of the Battle Group’s potency if all its assets were concentrated together. But the plan was that the Battle Group be split up into three individual company groups. One would garrison a Forward Operating Base (known as a FOB) at Gereshk, one would operate from our desert base at Camp Bastion and would be sent out to secure areas for the PRT’s development operations. The third would be held in reserve in the event of either of the other two requiring reinforcement. We would be stretched very thinly. Despite being reinforced by a platoon of infantry from the Royal Irish Regiment and thirty men from 4 PARA, the regiment’s TA Battalion, we would still deploy seventy-five soldiers short of our full complement of infantry.
The command structure that we would operate under also had a number of deficiencies. Although the headquarters of the UKTF was made up of staff officers from 16 Air Assault Brigade, it was not going to be led by their normal brigade commander, Brigadier Ed Butler. Command had instead been given to Colonel Charlie Knaggs. Knaggs was an Irish Guardsman who had been brought in at short notice because the UKTF would be subordinate to a Canadian multinational brigade commanded by a Canadian brigadier called David Fraser. The MOD and PJHQ felt that it would be inappropriate for a British brigadier to work to a Canadian one, so they appointed Knaggs because of his subordinate rank as a colonel. Butler still deployed to Afghanistan as the senior British representative, but, much to his chagrin, was given no tactical control of UK troops. It was a confusing command arrangement. In essence it meant that I had three bosses to work to: Butler because he was the senior British officer and my normal boss, Fraser because he was the multinational commander and Knaggs because he was my immediate superior officer. It would not be an easy arrangement for Knaggs either. He would have to take orders from Fraser, but would then have to get them endorsed by Butler. To make the issue even more complicated, Fraser reserved the right to give me direct orders as one of his multinational Battle Group commanders without reference to Knaggs. I in turn would then still have to get Butler’s endorsement as the senior British officer who was expected to clear the political use of UK troops with PJHQ.
I felt for Butler. He had been my immediate boss since arriving in 3 PARA and his frustration at not being able to command his own brigade that he had trained and prepared was an understandable source of personal irritation. Over the months before the deployment we had built up a good relationship based on mutual trust. He had a level of highly relevant operational experience and I respected his judgement, but my command link to him would now be convoluted rather than direct. At forty-four he was one of the Army’s youngest and brightest brigadiers and had lobbied unsuccessfully against the decision to split him away from tactical command of the troops on the ground. Butler had already seen active service in Afghanistan and had a hands-on approach to soldiering that appealed. Although self-assured, and despite his experience, he was always willing to listen to the advice of others and demonstrated an obvious interest in the welfare of the ordinary soldiers under his command. However, his role in Afghanistan would base him in Kabul and divorce him from direct command of front-line operations. I would still have access to him, but I would have to work through the sensitive layers of two other senior officers, which would require diplomacy and tact. Designed to meet the political expediencies of multinational sensitivities, it was not a logical command arrangement that would have been recognized in any decent military staff college.
Besides the lack of manpower and overly complex command structure, we had not received our full allocation of specialized communications and electrical equipment that we knew would be vital for operating in Helmand. I was also convinced that the six Chinook troop-carrying helicopters and their authorized flying hours that were being made available for the operation were insufficient. As well as hindering operational flexibility, the lack of helicopters would increase risk. It would force greater reliance on vehicles and if we were forced to drive when we should be flying we would be more vulnerable to mines and roadside bombs. The issue was raised up the chain of command and supported by Butler, but it fell on deaf ears in the MOD and PJHQ. I thought it a sufficiently serious matter to raise with the Prince of Wales when he came to visit the battalion two months before our departure.
Before leaving, the Prince asked me if I had any concerns about the forthcoming operation. ‘Sir, among other things we don’t have enough helicopter flying hours for what we need to do and that is going to increase risk,’ I said. The Prince asked me if I wanted him to raise it with the Secretary of State. I paused for a moment. I realized that I would be breaching the chain of command which wouldn’t take kindly to a mere lieutenant colonel raising such issues with a prince. ‘Sir, I would be very grateful if you would.’ The Prince of Wales rang John Reid the next day, which was a Saturday. By Monday the shit had hit the fan in the MOD and cascaded back down to me. The Prince’s intervention didn’t lead to an increase in flying hours, but plenty of people in the ministry were upset with me f
rom the Secretary of State down. I got a mild bollocking, but a more severe rebuke was forestalled by Ed Butler, my brigade commander, who shared the concern about helicopters. Perhaps more significantly, General Sir Mike Jackson spoke up in my defence.
Notwithstanding these concerns, by the end of March we were trained, packed and ready to go, but we would not be deploying together. PJHQ planned to send 3 PARA into theatre a company group at a time, with the other attached arms following on thereafter. It meant that the Battle Group would not be complete in Afghanistan until July. A concern that insufficient logistics and accommodation would be in place to support us was cited as the reason for the delay. To me it seemed to smack of over-caution. Operations are always subject to the art of what is logistically feasible, but we were an expeditionary army and I was content to begin operations with a minimum logistic footprint. I needed to have all my combat power available even if that meant being a little less comfortable. We were Paras after all and were prepared to rough it if we had to. But my arguments to fly everyone in together were ignored and it meant that I had to make the difficult decision as to which company would deploy first. I elected to take my Tactical Headquarters party (Tac) with A Company Group and the reconnaissance Patrols Platoon in first, much to the chagrin of the other elements of the Battle Group which would have to follow on later.
For those of us who would deploy first, the final few days before our departure were filled with last-minute preparations and saying goodbye. People wrote their wills, updated their personal insurance, completed next-of-kin cards, received final inoculations and spent precious time with family and friends. I spent an evening briefing the wives of the soldiers. I wanted to tell them something about where their husbands would be going and what we would be doing. It was a difficult balancing act: while I didn’t want to alarm them, I also didn’t want to mislead them about what we might be entering into. I said that we weren’t going looking for trouble, but that we were more than capable of looking after ourselves if we came across it. I concentrated on explaining the stated mission and focused on how our task was to spread goodwill, win consent and provide security for development and reconstruction. We were about to find out if our stated mission and intelligence assessments stacked up to reality.
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