The Afghanistan border is extremely porous, and it’s been estimated that there could be as many as three million people still in Pakistan who were displaced by the 1980s conflict. The Taliban have a fairly successful recruiting operation running there, based on a heady mix of religion, money and drugs. There is a potentially unlimited supply of new recruits, drawn from the pool of displaced Afghans in Pakistan, from the villages and compounds within Afghanistan itself and, increasingly, from dedicated radical Muslims in all the countries of the world.
This was emphasized after the siege of Qala-I-Jangi in November 2001, when one of the few surviving Taliban was found to be an American citizen named John Walker Lindh. He had converted to Islam and then travelled to Afghanistan to become an active member of the Taliban. When his identity was revealed he became known as the ‘American Taliban’ and was sent back to the United States and there charged with treason.
And I was keenly aware that the Russians – the world’s second-largest superpower, with an enormous and sophisticated military machine at its disposal, fighting the natives of one of the world’s poorest countries who were largely armed with simple assault rifles – had tried taking on the Afghans and they’d been comprehensively beaten. Bearing that in mind, what could we hope to achieve with a handful of Harriers and a few bombs and rockets?
It begged the question: what plan was ISAF actually running? There was no air campaign in the traditional sense of the expression, simply because the air assets were being used to contain an insurgency, not conduct a conventional battle. There was no ‘if we get to this point here then we’ve won’. Nothing like that.
Instead most of the operations conducted by the coalition troops were reactive – they would mount a patrol somewhere in the badlands, get ambushed by the Taliban and call in air support to eliminate their attackers. Or intelligence might be received suggesting that a compound or area was being used as a Taliban safe house, and an operation would be mounted to attack it to kill or capture the insurgents.
The reality of the campaign in Afghanistan is that the coalition forces will never be able to bomb, blast and shoot the Taliban into submission. Arguably, each time a Harrier drops a bomb that kills a group of Taliban, or members of a foot patrol manage to shoot a Talib, the coalition forces have failed. There’s no point in killing the Taliban except for reasons of pure self-preservation – to save your own life or the life of an ally – and certainly no point in a long-term strategy, to use that word in its loosest possible sense, of engaging in conflict with the Taliban. The fact is that there are far more Taliban, either already fighting the coalition, or able to be recruited as willing volunteers, than we have weapons to destroy them.
The best that the coalition forces can do in Afghanistan is to create an area that is free of the Taliban and provide the nation with sufficient breathing space to devise and set up a political solution that it can live with. And our job, as a military force, was to give the Afghans, and the country’s own security forces, primarily the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, the opportunity to take the fight to the Taliban.
Sometimes the Afghan people themselves do manage to assert themselves, and the Musa Qala ceasefire was a good example. In the summer of 2006 much of Musa Qala lay in ruins. The town had been the scene of fierce and continuous fighting for months and it was, in reality, held by the Taliban.
At the start of that summer the coalition forces in Musa Qala comprised Somme Platoon of the Royal Irish Regiment and the 1st Danish Light Reconnaissance Squadron, known as the Griffins, but in August the Danes pulled out, taking with them their Eagle light armoured vehicles and, more importantly, their .50-cal machine-guns. They were replaced by Barossa Platoon of the Royal Irish Regiment and a Headquarters Company formed from 3 Para personnel. This amalgamation nicknamed themselves ‘Easy Company’ as they were the battle group’s fifth company and so took the letter ‘E’ as their designator.
These troops occupied a compound roughly 100 yards square – known as a platoon house – right in the centre of the town, but they were, in every sense, under siege. The base was hemmed in on all sides by narrow streets and buildings that offered excellent shelter for the Taliban, and they were being attacked not just every day, but some days almost every hour. The insurgents fired everything they could at and over the walls of the compound: rockets, mortars, RPGs, recoilless rifles, Kalashnikovs and sniper rifles. The observation post on the main building was hit so many times the British troops nicknamed it ‘the Alamo’. The Royal Irish and 3 Para men replied with assault rifles and machine-guns, but mainly mortars, firing over 850 mortar rounds during their brief tenure of Musa Qala.
The philosophy behind the platoon house concept was that the base would allow coalition troops to quickly establish control over the town or location by mounting aggressive patrols to flush out the insurgents and establishing good relations with the local community.
That didn’t work at Musa Qala – which the troops quickly decided was the worst platoon house in Helmand and nicknamed ‘Camp Shit Hole’ – simply because there was no local community. Almost the only Afghans lurking in the alleyways and buildings were heavily armed Taliban. Patrolling outside the walls of the compound was out of the question because there was no coherent evacuation plan for casualties, and the troops had both limited supplies of ammunition and nothing like enough men to make it work. Even getting resupplies of ammunition and other stores was fraught with danger, because almost everything had to come in by helicopter, and simply securing a landing site normally meant a full-on firefight with the Taliban, who had soon recognized how dependent the coalition troops were on these supply runs.
The reality of Musa Qala was that the coalition troops were held captive in their compound, rarely able to venture outside, and were achieving nothing except inflicting losses on the Taliban as the insurgents launched their regular attacks. It was an untenable situation and everybody on the ground knew it, but for political reasons it had been decided that a continued coalition presence in Musa Qala was essential.
For the troops inside the compound it was a stalemate, but salvation appeared from an unlikely, and completely unexpected, direction.
The Afghan authorities were approached by a group of the village elders from Musa Qala. For the town’s inhabitants the continual fighting had been disastrous. Dozens of Afghan civilians had been killed, many homes and shops were nothing more than burnt-out shells and almost everyone who was able to leave had fled elsewhere. And there was, they had realized, little prospect of this state of affairs changing.
The village elders’ proposal was simple: the Taliban and the coalition forces were to stop fighting each other and both leave the area. The people of Musa Qala would take back their town and try to rebuild it.
On 13 September 2006 a shura, a conference or meeting, was held in the desert outside Musa Qala, and attended by both the Taliban and the local military leaders. There an agreement was reached: the coalition forces would withdraw and the Taliban were to leave the village alone.
The ceasefire held for about five months, and then the Taliban moved back in. They killed Haji Shah Agha, the village elder who had formulated the withdrawal plan, and regained control of the town. What a fucking mess, I thought. But in the ultimately depressing story of the Musa Qala ceasefire, I had to believe there was a glimmer of hope. It was a tantalizing glimpse, nothing more, but a glimpse nonetheless of what might be achieved.
I finished my coffee and climbed wearily back into the 4x4 to return to the accommodation area.
When I walked round the corner, one of my pilots was talking – or perhaps arguing – with an officer I hadn’t seen before, right in front of the gazebo. At some point one of the groups of Americans based at Kandahar had built a wooden deck outside the entrance to one of the accommodation blocks used by the squadron. These were all Nissen-hut-type structures, and they’d erected decking and a gazebo and put sheeting over the top of it to create a pleasant – by
Afghanistan standards – sitting area shaded from the sun.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘I think I’ll let this muppet tell you himself.’ With that, the 800 pilot turned and vanished inside the building. I met the other man’s gaze.
‘I’m a health and safety officer,’ he said, ‘and that awning has got to go.’
‘I’m sorry. What?’
‘That awning, sir. It’s a health and safety hazard.’
‘In what way, exactly, is it a hazard?’
‘It’s potentially blocking a fire lane.’
‘No it isn’t,’ I pointed out. ‘We’re inside the blast walls. You can’t get any vehicles in here unless you demolish the blast walls first.’
‘Then there’s the danger that bits of it could fall off and land on somebody’s head and injure them.’
For a few seconds I just looked at him.
Forget that we were standing in an airfield in the middle of Afghanistan. Forget the potentially daily attacks by mortars and heavy machine-guns and 107mm rockets. Forget the fact that the surrounding area was considered so dangerous that people were forbidden to leave the base unless their duties absolutely required it, and even then they had to be heavily armed and part of a group, also heavily armed. Forget the fact that if everything went wrong and the Taliban somehow managed to overrun the airfield they would – and this is not a figure of speech – skin everyone alive. Forget all that. As far as this idiot was concerned, the most dangerous hazard on the entire airfield appeared to be a solidly constructed gazebo with sheeting on top of it, inside the blast walls.
‘Were you anywhere near the rocket attack last night?’ I asked.
‘No, sir, I wasn’t. I was over on the other side of the airfield.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was here, sitting in a bomb shelter and listening to the sound of warheads exploding on the ground all around me. Don’t you think being hit by a rocket is possibly more of a health and safety hazard than the chance of a piece of wood falling off this and giving somebody a mild headache?’
‘No, sir. In my opinion this is a health and safety hazard.’
‘Yesterday I landed after a sortie where I dropped a bomb and probably killed ten or twenty people,’ I continued. ‘I’m flying a high-workload single-engine aircraft in one of the most hostile and unforgiving environments in the world. This base is under almost constant bombardment from an enemy that would happily kill us all, and you’re seriously trying to tell me that this gazebo is more dangerous than any of that?’
‘Not necessarily more dangerous, but in my opinion it is a hazard, yes, so I’m instructing you to take it down.’
‘I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but you do realize that you’re completely fucking mad, don’t you?
The slight smile on the officer’s face vanished instantly, and he buggered off to waste somebody else’s time with another mind-bogglingly stupid request.
That was one of the problems with Kandahar, and with anywhere in the military, in fact. There are rules, rules about almost everything, from the speed you could drive to the structure of a building, and always, it seemed, there were small-minded idiots employed specifically to ensure that those rules – no matter how stupid, pointless or quite simply nonsensical – were obeyed. It was bollocks, frankly. And we were about to be reminded that there were far more immediate threats to our health and well-being than the remote possibility of a piece of wood falling off an awning.
19
I was in Ops getting ready for a sortie when word reached us that the UN Halo had gone down.
The Mil Mi-24 is the biggest, heaviest and most powerful chopper so far manufactured. It’s been built in Russia since 1983 by the Rostov and Kazan manufacturing enterprises. Powered by two Lotarev D-136 turboshaft engines mounted above the cabin, it’s the only helicopter with an eight-bladed main rotor, and is designed to carry up to twenty tons of cargo – a similar load to that of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. It’s an enormous machine and, since we had arrived in theatre, the Halo had been operating from the far end of the airfield.
The Kandahar Halo was all-white with large ‘UN’ markings painted on the side, and we assumed it was being operated by the United Nations for some unspecified purposes. You could almost set your watch by it. Every morning at around 7.30 it would fire up its engines, engage the massive rotors and lift off majestically. It would do a left-hand turn and head off up into the mountains, almost creating a partial eclipse of the sun as it overflew the airfield, and presumably do whatever UN-type things it was supposed to do. Despite its size, it was reasonably quiet for a helicopter, and it seemed quite odd that something so huge could make so little noise and be so graceful, though it was still difficult to miss. About ninety minutes later it would reappear and settle back on the hard standing.
The launch and return of the Halo, and its permanent presence at Kandahar, became a part of the daily routine. In daylight the huge helicopter was a landmark at the western side of the airfield, the opposite end from where the Harrier det was quartered. By night it was, if anything, even more visible to us, because to launch in an easterly direction we had to taxi our aircraft all the way to the western end of the runway, before turning the aircraft through 180 degrees for take-off.
Because the airfield had almost no lighting installed – or at least very little that was ever switched on – we used night-vision goggles and the infrared targeting system fitted to the aircraft to find our way safely to the end of the runway. All the way down the taxiway we would be able to see the Halo on our screens, getting bigger and bigger as we approached it. For some reason, it was strangely comforting to see it parked on the airfield.
And now it had gone down. Maybe a missile, or a lucky shot from an RPG launcher, mechanical failure or even what’s called CFIT, or controlled flight into terrain – simply meaning that the pilot flew the aircraft into the ground. Whatever the cause, the Halo had gone and, if nothing else, it was a stark reminder to us all that flying any aircraft in Afghanistan was inherently dangerous. If the Taliban didn’t get you, there were plenty of natural hazards out there waiting to pounce.
Soon after hearing the news that the big UN chopper had been lost, I was in my Harrier, bouncing down the taxiway towards the end of the runway where the helicopter would normally be parked, and saw with something of a shock that it wasn’t there. A wave of sadness rolled over me at the sudden realization that it had gone for good – it’s one thing to be told a fact and to understand it, but there’s a kind of visceral shock when you actually see, or in this case don’t see, the visual confirmation of that fact. Though I had known none of the crew of the Halo, I knew they were fighting on the same side as us, playing a crucial part in the war against the Taliban, and I still felt as if I’d lost a friend. And, tragic as its loss was, I still felt we were lucky there hadn’t been greater losses among the ISAF forces since we’d arrived in theatre. We were definitely running through our nine lives.
The postscript to the story is that a day later a virtually identical replacement aircraft arrived, and the ‘UN’ sorties carried on exactly as before.
Its quick replacement underscored the fact that the war in Afghanistan is very much a war of logistics, as well as seeing some of the fiercest fighting in recent military history.
The country produces virtually nothing except opium, and that meant external supply chains were essential to keep the coalition forces properly equipped and provisioned. Although a lot of the heavier equipment was shipped to the region by sea, Afghanistan is landlocked, so everything had to reach its final destination either by air or road, and both routes had their problems.
Road convoys carrying supplies routed down to Kandahar and Kabul through Pakistan, and were a frequent target for the Taliban, who knew very well just how fragile that lifeline was for the coalition forces. Despite being heavily guarded by troops, these convoys were often attacked while they were out in the wilds. But it was resupply by air on wh
ich ongoing operations at Kandahar depended. And the sheer variety of nationalities, aircraft types and operating procedures involved always created an atmosphere of barely contained chaos.
Air transport was an attractive alternative to road convoys, and almost anyone who owned an aircraft capable of carrying a reasonable load, and who was prepared to sign a contract, could find work in Afghanistan.
Perhaps predictably, a lot of the aircraft used were of Russian origin, and their countries of registration wildly varied. There were large numbers of cargo planes, mainly old Antonov and Ilyushin aircraft, from the former Soviet-bloc breakaway states like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, ageing Hercules from tiny companies based in South Africa, and a host of others. Kandahar Airfield was stuffed full of the things, like a Wild West town on a new frontier.
The cowboy attitude extended to the aircraft, which were almost all filthy and battered and, in the case of the Russian planes, visibly sagging as well. Maintenance probably wasn’t high on their list of priorities, and every time one of them took off it belched thick black smoke from the engines as it staggered into the air. Nobody who had a choice would be likely to want to climb into any one of them.
The international language of aviation is English, and all pilots are supposed to have a sufficient command of it to allow them to communicate properly and to clearly understand ATC instructions and information. In Afghanistan that rule didn’t seem to be too rigorously enforced.
Joint Force Harrier Page 18
