Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  There was a local truck – what the coalition personnel called a ‘jingly truck’ because they were festooned with chains that jingled as they moved – working its way along the rough road that ran close to the wadi. It was stopping at frequent intervals, but was getting closer and closer to the location of the IED strike.

  Even more curiously, a man was riding a motorbike up and down the wadi and stopping beside the truck at frequent intervals. The fear was that he was some kind of a scout, checking out the wadi and leading the truck, which might easily have been full of Taliban warriors, towards the stranded Americans.

  ‘Jaguar One Five, Recoil Four Five, look due south down the wadi. On the east side, range about three clicks, there’s a truck heading towards you. He’s stopping frequently, and he seems to be working with a motorcyclist who’s riding up and down in the wadi itself.’

  ‘Roger that. We’ll send a couple of the Humvees on ahead.’

  I watched from above as two of the sand-coloured armoured vehicles eased ahead of the slow-moving column and fanned out, making widely separated targets.

  But the truck and the motorcycle suddenly stopped and reversed direction, heading back towards the nearest village, well before the Humvees got anywhere near them, and we never found out what either the truck driver or the motorcyclist had been doing.

  Then there was the village itself, where we saw quite a large gathering of people. This again raised our suspicions, and I passed the information down to Jaguar One Five, but this also proved to be entirely innocent.

  The upshot of the incident was that the American patrol successfully exfiltrated from the area, and made it through the village without encountering any hostile forces. The injured soldier was airlifted out and survived, though he was badly injured.

  That was one of my first experiences of hearing sheer naked fear in a voice on the radio. And the change to genuine relief, once we were overhead and able to reassure the troops that they weren’t about to get massacred by the Taliban, and that it wasn’t their last day on Earth, was very obvious.

  It had actually been pretty unusual to hear the troops sounding at all rattled. These small patrols were usually the coolest guys on the block.

  Most people at Kandahar Airfield – and in fact at all the coalition bases in Afghanistan – wore uniforms of one sort or another, for the unsurprising reason that they were in some branch of the military of their home country. But I noticed that everywhere there were significant numbers of men in civilian clothes, usually cultivating longer than usual hair and substantial beards; men who very rarely engaged in conversation with anyone who didn’t look and dress just like them and who, for some reason, all seemed to favour North Face sports gear. They were clearly military – or ex-military – of some flavour or other and they really were everywhere.

  When our TriStar had landed in Kabul about half a dozen of these guys stepped off it and were met by another bunch of bearded characters, bundled into a wagon and driven off into the middle of nowhere. The beards and long hair seem to be part of their attempt to blend in when they’re out in the badlands, because there’s no such thing as a clean-shaven Talib, though it’s also fair to say that not many Taliban wear North Face sports gear.

  The efforts of regular forces in Afghanistan were clearly being aided and augmented by some of these secretive, ragged-looking men. And, no doubt, as the campaign in Afghanistan continues, their help will continue to be sought.

  Every so often, the media gets its hands on footage of similarly unconventional-looking operators going about their business.

  In late November 2001, after enduring a sustained bombardment from American forces at Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, between 300 and 500 – the exact number is the subject of dispute – Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters surrendered to General Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance. It is still not clear whether this was a genuine surrender or a suicidal Taliban plan of attack.

  Whatever the insurgents’ motivation, the provisions of the Pashtunwali Code meant that the surrender was accepted at face value and, crucially, that the prisoners were not searched for weapons. This is incomprehensible to the Western military mind, but self-respect and respect for others meant that physical searching of the prisoners would be considered a serious insult. The fact that the Taliban had surrendered meant, to the Afghan mindset, that they had ceased being combatants and had, by implication if not in fact, also surrendered their weapons. And the prisoners had, at least, handed over their Kalashnikovs, RPGs and other heavy weapons. Nobody seemed to notice that virtually all of them were carrying pistols, knives and grenades hidden away in their voluminous clothing.

  The prisoners were incarcerated in the huge, nineteenth-century Qala-I-Jangi fort, which Dostum was using as one of his main armouries and headquarters. Significantly, Qala-I-Jangi had until a short time previously been in Taliban hands, so many of the prisoners were very familiar with its layout.

  On 25 November the prisoners revolted, killing or overpowering the guards, and quickly broke into the armoury, where they equipped themselves with assault rifles, mortars and rocket launchers.

  Though heavily outnumbered by the prisoners, the Northern Alliance soldiers fought hard to contain the situation, assisted by American troops and, the film reveals, a handful of rough-looking soldiers wearing mix-and-match kit and speaking with clearly British accents who were also operating in the area. The coalition forces called in repeated air strikes, but despite the ferocity of this bombardment, the Taliban held out for seven days. In ending the siege, about fifty Northern Alliance soldiers and one American perished.

  A number of countries were critical of the conduct of the siege and the use of heavy weapons – tanks and air-delivered ordnance – against the comparatively lightly armed insurgents, but it is significant that, despite their losses, the surviving Taliban refused to surrender until their only alternative was to drown.

  And perhaps that single incident, more than any other, indicated the calibre of the enemy we were all facing in Afghanistan.

  There has been a lot of hype and groundless speculation about what British Special Forces may or may not have been involved with in Afghanistan. A good example were the breathless reports that appeared following the first major contacts between coalition troops and the Taliban after 9/11.

  In January and February 2002 the British press was full of overheated accounts of what they were calling Operation TRENT, a search, locate and destroy mission, they said, aimed at finding Osama bin Laden and his senior Al Qaeda commanders, and that, they said, saw the SAS pursuing their targets deep into the cave systems of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. It was reported that four SAS soldiers were wounded in the actions, which involved bitter close-quarters combat dubbed the ‘Battle of the Caves’ by the papers. Some of the SAS men were said to have tackled Al Qaeda terrorists with fighting knives or even their bare hands when they ran out of ammunition. When further details of the operation emerged, most of the papers called for the issue of medals for some of the SAS troops, some editors even suggesting that their incredible bravery fully merited the Victoria Cross.

  A significant proportion of the 800 squadron’s effort had been in support of exacting, small-unit operations – sometimes with significant, strategic importance. Vital to the success of the NATO mission in Afghanistan was the protection of the infrastructure. There was little more crucial in this respect than the Kajaki Dam in Helmand, which produces hydroelectric power for a large area of southern Afghanistan and provides local irrigation.

  Despite all the fighting the area has seen, the dam has been kept in constant operation since its completion in 1975. Throughout 2006 the Taliban launched attack after attack on it, but not one of them was successful. They had decided that the Kajaki Dam was one of their prime targets in the region, though the thinking behind this wasn’t clear. Not only must they have known that the dam’s strategic importance would lead to its strenous defence by coalition forces. They would also have guessed
that if, by some miracle, they did manage to seize control of it, troops would be sent there in overwhelming numbers to wrest it back.

  In any case, the structure was too massive to be destroyed by the amounts of explosive the Taliban were likely to possess, and even if they had somehow managed to do so, the immediate result would have been to deprive most of southern Afghanistan of electricity and destroy the irrigation system upon which the narrow strip of arable land in southern Helmand depended. Neither achievement would have endeared the Taliban to the Afghan tribesmen, the very people they claimed to be representing, and whose goodwill and support they ultimately needed.

  There are two peaks on the ridge to the south of the dam, and during our det a small unit of Royal Marines occupied one peak and the Taliban the other, only about 500 metres apart. Each side was living in one of the old Russian observation posts that dated back to the days of the Mujahidin, the insurgents apparently underground, beneath the building. The British troops, who had put out a big dayglo orange tarp to show clearly which peak they held, were keen to flush out the Taliban from what was a very strategic position close to the dam.

  It was during this stand-off that Hoggy achieved quite a feat of precision delivery of munitions. He was airborne on a routine Close Air Support sortie over the area, flying solo because his wing-man had gone unserviceable back at Kandahar and no spare aircraft was available. The JTAC told Hoggy they’d been taking a lot of mortar fire from the Taliban OP and requested that he look out for any suspected mortar baseplates.

  Hoggy spent the best part of an hour overhead, staring down at the enemy position with the binoculars, as well as through his targeting pod, and there was one thing in particular that stood out to him. It was white, small, square and definitely man-made. He just couldn’t tell what it was, but it was certainly something not normally seen on an Afghan ridgeline, so it wasn’t a rock or a goat.

  When Hoggy told the JTAC what he could see, the controller got excited and asked him if he could take it out. The snag was that the Harrier was carrying only 1,000lb bombs and, unless Hoggy’s delivery was absolutely accurate, one of these would make a real mess of the target. Just to make sure there was no pressure at all, the JTAC then said the weapon must only take out the object – which he confirmed also looked like a mortar baseplate to him – and had to leave all the rest of the infrastructure intact so that the British troops could use it when they took the position.

  Hoggy’s other problem was that the two ridges looked identical through the targeting pod, so he did a couple of dry runs to make sure he’d correctly identified the enemy position and not the friendly one. As if that wasn’t enough, the pod was useless at discriminating between the two ridges, and it had been dodgy in tracking and kept losing the target. He ended up having to do the tracking manually on to this tiny target.

  As he ran in for the third time he dropped the weapon. It went smack on to the target and left everything else intact, so everyone was happy.

  About a week later we heard that a small British force had successfully taken the Taliban position and now owned the whole ridgeline.

  Not all these operations went entirely to plan, though. Just days after the episode with the wrecked American Humvee, I was back in the air supporting another small team of US soldiers.

  15

  I pulled back on the throttle as I headed east back to Kandahar. As the RPM dropped I scanned the cockpit instruments, my eyes ranging, almost unconsciously, over displays recording temperatures or pressures, fuel and electrical systems. No cause for alarm. And as I descended I looked down from the Harrier’s big glass cockpit. As always, it amazed me just how spectacularly beautiful Afghanistan is from the air, even if that beauty is rather harder to discern on the ground. It’s a country that runs the gamut of both terrain and climate, from the highest to the lowest extremes of both.

  Immediately to the south of the airfield is the Red Desert, which, when the sun is rising or setting, is blood-red. From the air, in certain lighting conditions, it looks like a crimson sea – quite extraordinary. In the desert there are sharp and craggy rock features – almost aggressive in their appearance – surrounding the very few small clumps of habitation.

  The Helmand River runs down the Kandahar Valley, flanked on each side by a strip of productive arable land that follows the valley all the way down and within which stand most of the district’s dwellings. Scattered around the edge of this area are large numbers of circular holes, almost like bomb craters, but in fact these holes have been caused by a much less dramatic force than high explosive. They’re actually a sequence of unsuccessful drill holes made by the Afghans as they searched for water.

  As you fly north the terrain gets even more spectacular with mountains rising from the plains to ever-increasing heights as they ascend towards the Hindu Kush, the formation that extends well out beyond Afghanistan and up into the Himalayas, rising to 25,000 feet, and all the way down to Kandahar in the south. It then runs even further south towards Pakistan and west to the Iranian border of the Red Desert. Just south of Kandahar Airfield there is a sheer cut-off of this geological feature. This is marked by the range of unmistakable red sand dunes that run as far as the eye can see, before the land rises up to form the mountains that extend all the way down to Pakistan.

  The difference between the mountains and the lowlands – which are actually quite high as the desert there is at some 3,000 feet until it starts to descend towards the border with Pakistan – is stark, especially in the winter. At that time of year the mountains are covered in snow and the temperature on the peaks is well below zero Celsius even during the day, but it will still be very hot in the high desert, with virtually no rainfall.

  The landscape was extreme and spectacular, especially when the sun caught it towards the evening. Further north, from the Kandahar area and the Panjwayi Valley into the Helmand Valley and River, the land rose quite quickly into steep-sided north–south valleys and then further into the high mountain area, where the Taliban usually retreated in the winter to regroup. It was inhospitable yet impressive, especially in the winter, when snow covered the mountain tops.

  The country is arid, apart from a brief period in the spring when some rain falls, and almost everything lives around the rivers, especially in the Helmand and Panjwayi valleys. In each valley the narrow fertile area extends for between two and five miles either side of the main rivers, and virtually everything that grows in the country grows there, a bright ribbon of green that stretches all the way down to the Pakistan border.

  Yet, as vivid as the country seemed from altitude, it wasn’t always entirely clear what was happening on the ground. One of the problems in providing top cover for a patrol is the difficulty of interpreting activity on the ground from a height of certainly several hundred and perhaps several thousand feet. In a hostile environment pilots have to weigh the potential danger from surface-to-air missiles and other weapons against the requirement to observe the ground, and sometimes this didn’t quite work out as planned.

  On one sortie we were out in the Naw Zad area, following the progress of a British patrol that had been attacked by the Taliban every single day that it had been out. Not surprisingly, the troops were staggeringly nervous because of what had been happening to them.

  We knew their exact route and were following it and doing our best to scan the terrain ahead of them. In Naw Zad itself I suddenly spotted a huge group of people moving around on the edge of one particular street, a location that I knew the patrol had to pass close to. I reacted immediately.

  ‘Stand by! Stay there!’ I radioed. ‘There’s a whole mass of people right round the next corner.’

  This produced real drama on the ground. The patrol scattered, fully convinced that they were going to get massacred, and took up defensive positions immediately.

  Above them, I descended slightly to get a better view and continued describing what I could see, the location of the mob and anything else that would help the troops below ge
t a handle on the situation.

  Then the radio operator asked me: ‘Is this near Green Seven?’

  I double-checked the coordinates on my map and replied immediately: ‘Yes, it’s exactly on Green Seven.’

  ‘Good,’ said the patrol member, the tension instantly vanishing from his voice. ‘Right, I should have told you. Every Thursday they hold a market here. That’s what you’re looking at. That’s the Naw Zad Thursday Market.’

  But it wasn’t often that things on the ground turned out to be better than expected. Too often the opposite was true. And as I changed frequencies on my return to base there was a shock reminder of just how grim things could get. I was more or less overhead Kandahar when suddenly I saw the flash of a huge explosion in the centre of the city, as far as I could tell somewhere near one of the mosques. A huge, ugly cloud of dust and smoke rose high above the sandy-brown walls and dark shadows of the city’s familiar streets. Naturally I reported it by radio, but I was surprised when I landed after my sortie that nobody at Kandahar Airfield seemed to have heard anything about it.

  I had to wait for the CNN headlines the following day to find out what had happened. It turned out that what I’d seen from the air was a suicide car bomb attack on a coalition convoy that left eight civilians and a soldier dead. Two other soldiers had been wounded – one of them later died of his injuries – along with a number of Afghan civilians.

  It hadn’t been a good Friday the 13th.

  That suicide bombing, and the IED strike a short time earlier, suggested that the war in Afghanistan might be taking a dangerous new turn. In the early part of the conflict most of the contacts between coalition forces and the Taliban were straight firefights. When the insurgents used IEDs they were normally just a means to an end – a way of stopping a coalition patrol in a location that the Taliban had chosen as an ambush – but the insurgents would then normally attempt to engage the coalition troops with small arms.