Mystery over ‘closure’ of defence ministry’s ‘brains trust’

IT most famously predicted the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and had a team of multi-lingual analysts dedicated to the study of future threats to security across the globe, and new ways of solving them.

But, strangely, to save 1.5m the UK’s Ministry of Defence has decided to close the Army Research & Assessment Branch, (more recently called the Defence and Assessments Branch, the D&AB), and which traces its history back over 50 years. Or has it? While sources close to the unit contact me to complain the 30-strong team has received its marching orders — with contractors axed, military staff transferred, and civil servants told to go job-hunting — the ministry insists the unit is not being closed at all.

Based at the UK’s Defence Academy in Shrivenham, the D&AB employed/employs among them analysts (and fluent native speakers) on Iran, Russia, the Caucausus, Arab states, the Horn of Africa, and the Georgian analyst who predicted the invasion, not to mention specialists in strategic communications, research managers, and librarians.

“It’s completely barking to close this down in the middle of active conflict and a strategic defence review,” said a former member of the unit.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman however said that, although the D&AB’s role is to be reviewed over the next six months, its work is continuing and will continue. “The bottom line is that it is not closing”,” he said.

Rupert Hamer: a good man down

I just stepped outside before dawn this morning. It is a drizzling London– warm rain on melting snow. It’s in these moments alone, when all others seem asleep, that I think of those on the frontline: creeping about in the darkness before some attack, the sound of boots crunching on gravel, or faces that glow orange in the reflected light of the twisting flames of a paraffin stove at some campsite in the desert.

Just over two years ago I saw Rupert Hamer again for the first time after some years. With photographer Nick Cornish, I was resting on the dirty floor of a garage in an empty opium market in the centre of newly-captured Musa Qala in Helmand, Afghanistan. We were both reporting for Sunday newspapers.

The last few days had been a shock: our first time under ambush in open ground, witnessing the tragedy of the mistaken killing by NATO soldiers of some Afghan villagers, and then being close by when a British soldier was killed when his armoured vehicle struck a suspected mine. Nick and I were glad to be among old friends, just for a couple of days, when Rupert and photographer Phil Coburn came out of the desert to join us. We bitched and traded stories, as you do. Phil was, as ever, full of rib-crackingly funny stories. After a week of living rough, we were all marvellously un-shaven and un-washed and we laid out our sleeping mats in this filthy hovel like it was the Ritz. No-one was there to tell us you couldn’t smoke in bed.

We swapped a lot of stories from the past. Phil and Nick are old friends from the ‘snapper’s’ circuit. Rupert and I talked about when we had been cub reporters together on the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk. He was in Thetford and King’s Lynn. I drew Lowestoft and then Wisbech. Often cut off in remote district offices, all of us trainees used to drive miles at night past endless startled rabbits just so to meet up in some ancient public house and to share the miseries of the sometimes rather dull diet of golden weddings or disputes over fish prices, the tyranny of our news desk, or perhaps just our unjust lack of sex.

After a while in Musa Qala a reporter from a daily paper arrived on the scene, all freshly laundered. He had already filed a piece about being the first reporter into the town. We bitched a little about that. After these last few days we also had some strange concerns: we all got mad when the reporter kept throwing into the trash bag the brown plastic spoons that came with the American MRE ration packs. Didn’t he know how precious these were?

Rupert and Phil had been through quite a bit. They’d started their trip to Helmand with a few days on board a flight of RAF Chinook helicopters. One lost a wheel and as they came returned to base, there was the hair-raising experience of being beneath these churning twin rotors as the aircraft attempted to land on what sounded like little more than a pile of bricks.

Then came the operation to recapture Musa Qala: about the biggest battle yet undertaken in the war in Helmand so far. Thrown among the thousands of British and Afghan troops and US special forces for this raid from the desert, we felt lucky to have drawn the straw to be embedded on this. We knew this would be something important and one that would make the risk-taking worthwhile. As we arrived, we crossed paths with one luckless reporter for the Daily Mail who’d spent three weeks in Helmand and got the sum total of nothing in his newspaper, despite all his endeavours.

Rupert and Phil were sent in with the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, a marvellous bunch of dusty warriors who had already been living rough for weeks – out on one of the longest desert patrols in living memory. They’d arrived, though, at a miserable moment: just the day after the BRF had lost their first casualty. Jack Sadler, a keen-as-mustard territorial soldier fresh out of university, had been blown up and killed by an IED. It wasn’t exactly the ideal moment for a newspaper reporter to be foisted on these men and to make friends. But then that was a testament to Rupert and Phil. I think they just sat quietly in their assigned wagons and just waited for the right moment for the soldiers to come and talk to them.

Judging by all the tales that emerged, Rupert did obviously get on famously with the men. He arrived in Musa Qala full of the strange tales of the desert and the cat and mouse games of the British and the Taliban and the nomadic locals caught in between. Rupert mentioned the story of one local who the BRF kept coming across in the rocky wadis, wandering around in a pair of trainers. They would ask him if he had seen the Taliban. “You come asking for the Taliban,” he replied. “The Taliban come and ask me if I’ve seen the British. And I’m still just looking for my sheep!”

One friend made by Rupert and Phil was Darryl ‘Daz’ Gardiner, the armourer of the BRF and the driver of the only thinly-armoured Pinzgauer truck in which they were travelling. Sadly, in the weeks that followed, Daz was killed by a double mine-strike. Daz had been driving the wounded from one mine strike to the landing strip of a rescue helicopter when his vehicle struck a second mine, killing him at once.

I know this was to hit Rupert and Phil hard. They remained firm friends with so many they met in the desert and, what they’d experienced, drew them into the friendship with many others. Going up to the medals parade of the 2 Yorks battalion, he got himself invited into the sergeant’s mess to share drinks with the soldiers – that was until some bureaucrat got to hear of this, and arranged for him and Phil to be slung out. Still, no-one could stop him making friend after friend amongst these soldiers.

His job was not too easy. Coming to the Sunday Mirror after the debacle of the Piers Morgan’s editorship and publication of faked photographs of abuse by soldiers in the sister daily paper, he started at a moment when the Mirror was something of a pariah among military folk. But, though as sly a weasel as any national newspaper reporter when dealing with his competition (he was very much the lovable rogue), Rupert did not compromise with facts and fairness and the thing valued by those he interviewed was that he came with no pre-conceived agenda. So he was a reporter of the old school. He wrote about what he heard and saw. He did a great deal to repair his newspaper group’s relationships with the military.

So Rupert knew well all the risks. Since that Musa Qala trip he was back again last year in Sangin, in a base locked by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and being driven around the town in the woefully unprotected Snatch Land Rover, just when there were public statements they were being phased out.

I suppose noticing these kind of frontline realities – and the contrast been the public statements back home – might be one reason why I think the job we do was worthwhile, and the reason why some in power try to restrict these kind of forays. But, then again, it is hard to make a judge on the work we do. It’s too easy to try to aggrandise it and clutch at justifications to try to make it sound all too important. The reality is that this kind of work is exciting, rewarding and addictive. Not every risk-taking trip yields result. There is luck involved. And the biggest burden of what we do is born by our families who worry at home and must shoulder the cost if we were injured or never returned. But there is something too about this kind of other parallel world – so far from the routine of daily experience back home and where so many are giving so much – that not only creates a bond, a camaraderie, with those who shared it but also seems to cry out to be told, to be shared with those never see it or understand its rewards, its failures and its complexities. So long as what we write is actually published or broadcast, and doesn’t languish on the copy-editor’s ‘spike’, it feels like the right risk to take. Worst of all is to witness something important but fail to record it, fail to pass it on.

Was his death worthwhile? The same question gets asked about soldiers who died. Same answer. OF COURSE NOT. No one seeks their death and, though they take calculated risks, no rational person goes out expecting to die. Death happens when things go wrong. End of story. But the mission was the right one. He was bound to go, he needed to go, he chose to go, and he was a professional. No editor, friend, soldier or member of his family should blame themselves for anything that happened.

Another good man down. Another friend down.

Bombed, blasted and shot yet still the Taliban come

From The Sunday Times
November 15, 2009

Stephen Grey in Musa Qala

TWO years ago Corporal Alex Temple fought like a lion to capture the Afghan town of Musa Qala from the Taliban. Last week he was back, once again in a fierce battle just two miles from its centre.

“It has changed though,” he said. “It’s more dangerous. The fighting is harder.”

Amid the thunder of battle, I saw Temple lead men forward with the same raw courage I had witnessed before. The British soldiers with him seemed more composed, unperturbed by the bullets flying past their heads. The Afghan army on their flanks was better armed and vastly more competent.

Yet the enemy had learnt too. “The Taliban can shoot more accurately,” said Temple. “And they don’t give up so easily.”

In December 2007, with the photographer Nick Cornish, I was embedded with the men of B Company, 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, as they joined hundreds of other British, American and Afghan troops in Operation Snakebite to take what was then a Taliban stronghold.

The capture of Musa Qala was declared a model for how this war might be won. The Taliban were bribed to switch sides, the Afghan army was portrayed as the victor and a reconstruction plan prepared. “The eyes of the world will be on Musa Qala,” said Bill Wood, the former US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Now, we were back with B Company to hold a front line that, after two years of heavy fighting, has moved barely two miles north and south of the “liberated” town centre. We watched as the Taliban were pounded with bullets, grenades, shells, missiles and airstrikes — and still they came back for more.

Two years ago our journey to Musa Qala had been tinged with tragedy. We were standing close by when a B Company platoon sergeant, Lee “Jonno” Johnson, was killed in a mine blast, one of three Nato soldiers who died in the battle. A further 17 British soldiers have died here. This time we joined a B Company team led by Lieutenant Colin Lunn, who in 2007 had “Jonno” as his platoon sergeant. They cut their teeth in combat together, over at the Kajaki dam.

(more…)

The Ghost Town littered with IEDs

From The Sunday Times, November 1, 2009

Stephen Grey in Safar Bazaar
Under the harsh sunlight, a lone grey donkey sauntered across one end of a silent street; halfway down the far end, a US marine lay in the dirt, exposed and alone — brushing the dust from a pressure plate linked to a massive bomb.

A few days ago this town, deep in Taliban territory, was thronged with up to 800 residents and traders. This is Helmand’s biggest drugs market, but today all but a handful of Kuchi, the Afghan nomads, have vanished.
Somehow the Taliban knew the marines were coming. Rather than fight openly, they left behind a booby-trapped ghost town littered with improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Since July, two bomb disposal technicians attached to the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion have been killed in such circumstances.
For all the techniques they employ, this work still boils down to one man of courage making a lonely walk. The man I was watching asked not to be named. “I am just glad to be helping save lives,” he told me.
As we sheltered beneath an awning of thatched twigs, there was a sense of foreboding, broken only by black humour. “I’d be totally amazed if no one gets hurt today,” said one sergeant.
“I wish they’d get back to shooting at us, rather than this s***,” said another marine. As two Cobra attack helicopters flew over, one man joked: “Shoot the road! Shoot up the bazaar!”
After what seemed an age, the pressure plate was disarmed and a charge placed to blow the bomb apart. “Get back into cover. Watch out for secondaries!” yelled the bomb technician before the warning of “Controlled det! Two mikes! [minutes]” and then the sharp blast, throwing up a cloud of debris and leaving a 6ft crater.
A year ago, a strike like this into the Taliban’s heartland would have led to a gunfight. But by using explosives made from fertiliser, the insurgents have mastered the IED. Their next best choice is a stand-off weapon like a mortar or a rocket and we would see those, too, before too long.
Last summer the US marines brought 10,000 soldiers to join British and other Nato forces in Helmand. But the existence of Taliban strongpoints such as Safar Bazaar is testament, said marine officers, that the number deployed is still far too short of that required to control this province.
Commanding his marines from an armoured vehicle flying the Jolly Roger as they advanced through the desert, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Grattan, the battalion’s commanding officer, said the best that could be done was to disrupt Taliban havens. “They can’t be left thinking any place is safe,” he said.
Deploying to Helmand with only two companies of infantry, less than 40% of his battalion’s strength, Grattan blamed an “artificial cap” on troop numbers set in Washington.
He said his battalion, after an initial fight in July and August, was beginning to establish a 20-mile security zone along the Helmand river.
But the American drive south is still 70 miles short of Pakistan and a chain of smuggling towns that dot the border. It has also left pockets of Taliban strength, including the 30mile stretch of riverside that separates Grattan’s bases in the district of Khan Neshin from other marine units based farther north.
“There is no doubt we can interdict and deny the Taliban a route in from Pakistan, but we need the forces to do it,” Grattan said.
The most critical shortage is of Afghan forces — the centrepiece of Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal’s strategy for turning this war. Fighting alongside the 5,000 marine combat troops are just 700 Afghan soldiers. None was deployed to Grattan’s sector last week. Khan Neshin district has barely a dozen policemen and a few border guards, although others are in training.
In the ruined castle that is the Khan Neshin administrative centre, the governor said he sometimes felt abandoned by the government in Kabul.
“The government does not support me,” said Massoud Ahmad Rassouli, a 27-year-old who had trained as a pharmacist. “It’s the marines who support me. Not even my salary is paid by the government.”
The marines and civilian agencies have in four months opened a school, funded the rebuilding of long-derelict canals, held shuras [(town meetings]) with elders, opened a radio station, funded a job creation scheme and are doling out cheap loans to tradesmen. All this has helped to prove the value of evicting the Taliban.However, Grattan cautioned that until the surrounding areas were cleared the Taliban would try to return.
The raid had begun when a convoy of more than 40 vehicles forded the Helmand river from the base at Camp Payne, east of Khan Neshin.
In a ruse, the marines at first pushed west into the desert until darkness fell. Then they turned and looped north, stopping only to dig out bogged-down vehicles and staying hidden, to reach an attack position just after 2am. They swooped in at dawn on Thursday.
For all the deception tactics, the Taliban had seen them coming. “Anyone who thinks they’re not being watched in this country is being a bit foolish,” said Captain Christopher Conner, whose Charlie Company conducted the raid. In July, when they first raided this place, the marines found tons of poppy seed. This time the Taliban had removed any illicit produce and left only a nest of IEDs. Seven were found and destroyed.
As the marines pushed slowly through the bazaar, the Taliban sprung the next part of their trap. At 12.40pm two mortars nose-dived into homes beside the market.
From where I stood, the Taliban firing points were across fields to the left.
Puffs of smoke appeared as the marines began counter-fire, then came the deep belly-thumps of cannon firing from the light armoured vehicles (LAV) on the near left.
The marines could see men loading the mortar tube into a truck and speeding off, but the vehicle got away. After six hours the soldiers had barely cleared 100 yards down the streets of squat brick buildings, cutting open locked metal shutters in their search.
An order came not to bother trying to recover any more IEDS — to destroy them instead. By now helicopters were circling, jets were flying overhead and a Predator drone was high above, trying to spot the Taliban firing team.
Finally, the crew of an LAV perched on a hill to the west saw men unloading a rocket from a truck in a clump of trees.
This was the signal to unleash hell: thuds from the LAVs’ heavy cannon, orange sparks of explosive rounds detonating and grey smoke rising. Then came mortars — a pop from the launch site behind me, then the crump of the explosion. First a round to check they were on target. Then the order “Fire for effect!” and a barrage.
Artillery came, too — a screech of rounds and then sharp thuds, explosions, a flame and billowing smoke that enveloped the fields.
The artillery was off target and was told to stop shooting. More mortars and more cannon were fired instead.
It was hard to imagine anyone could have survived. The Taliban disappeared, the smoke cleared from the fields and the town returned to silence. Just before sunset the marines finished clearing the bazaar, jumped into their trucks and drove back into the desert.

US Marines at Afghanistan’s most southern combat post fight an elusive enemy.

First published in The Sunday Times, October 25, 2009
In a remote part of Helmand troops are dismayed by the ambivalence of locals and a sense that the Taliban can outlast them.

Stephen Grey in Khan Neshin
A mile from South Station, an outpost of US marines in Helmand province, the tribal chief was openly hostile. “The Americans threaten our economy and take our land for bases. They promise much and deliver nothing,” he said.

“People here regard the American troops as occupiers,” said Haji Khan, a leader of the Baluch tribe, who rules like a medieval baron. “Young people are turning against them and in time will fight them.”
Inside South Station, soldiers are proud of the progress they have made. Until they arrived, this remote part of Helmand had not had a government presence for years. But many are pessimistic about where the conflict is heading.
“I’m not much for this war. I’m not sure it’s worth all those lives lost,” said Sergeant Christian Richardson as we walked across corn fields that will soon be ploughed up to plant a spring crop of opium poppy.
A New Yorker who joined the marines after 9/11 and served two tours in Iraq, Richardson, 24, said his men had achieved much. “You can see we are making progress, slowly. But when we leave, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda will surely return.”
With enough effort, resources and time, the marines are confident the population can be won over. But, with the platoon’s influence limited to a small area around their base, many soldiers wonder if the Taliban and Al-Qaeda may simply outlast them, or if the US and Afghan governments have the resolve to send enough troops to win.
Third Platoon, Charlie Company of the 2nd Light Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, came last July to Khan Neshin, as far south as Nato soldiers have reached in Afghanistan. It was part of a summer offensive by more than 4,500 troops of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which has joined British and other forces trying to turn the war in Helmand.
Although they have read the manuals on counterinsurgency and heard generals speak about how to defeat the Taliban, the reality has been bloody, painful and frustrating.
The platoon knows there are at least 20 booby-trapped bombs on the high ground around the base. More than half the men have already been caught in blasts. One marine explosive expert was killed; others suffered broken legs and amputated feet. Three have survived two explosions and come back to fight again.
General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, says the mission is to protect the population and isolate them from the Taliban, but the marines are finding it no easier to defeat the Taliban than it has been for the British, who have fought in the province for three years. Villagers are rarely willing to express a simple opinion, let alone inform soldiers where the enemy is hiding. One marine described the way the Taliban blended with the population as “unbelievably frustrating”.
In terrain crisscrossed by canals with weak and narrow bridges, the platoon has to approach villages on foot. Even when they have surrounded the Taliban, the marines have found the enemy has an uncanny ability to slip away in the ditches. All this adds to the strain of facing improvised explosive devices, which are the main threat.
“We are all brothers here,” said Lance-Corporal Corey Hopkins, 22, from Georgia. “And it hurts to see your brother hurt or put him in a bag for the last time. It pisses you off. It makes you mad. You know people out here know what’s going on, but they won’t tell you.”
Corporal Gregory Williams, 22, from North Carolina, said: “It’s going to take a lot of proving out here to make them talk to us. It’s working so slowly.” The marines are trying to implement a strategy dictated from Washington that bids them separate the population from the insurgents. But attempting that means a battle not only against the Taliban but against a feudal system that places real power in the hands of landowners such as Haji Khan.
When we talked to the grey-bearded men in the village, in the shade of one-room mosques, most appeared friendly. Asked if they wanted a school or more doctors, all said such questions were a matter for those who own the fields.
The marines hope to open a school and provide medical facilities. They are also offering to pay Khan and others to provide jobs to improve the canal system.
At a shura, or village meeting, at South Station last Friday, Khan showed up with 40 elders and heard Captain Chris Conner, commander of Charlie Company, promise development. “From the bottom of my heart, I want to say that we are here to help you,” he said.

The villagers welcomed the canal scheme and the idea of making use of a doctor at the base. But Khan and another landowner rejected the idea of a school. “Security is still too bad. We’ve seen how they are burnt down [by the Taliban] elsewhere.”
Some marines were unconvinced about paying money for the canal to a tribal leader and drug baron who gave them almost no help and would probably keep the cash.

Later, a marine intelligence officer said the drug economy and the feudal system made the strategy of winning hearts and minds extremely complex. As drug producers, men such as Khan had a “working relationship with the Taliban”.
Nobody knew of the announcement last week in Kabul of a new round of national elections. Nobody voted in the first round. “We never even heard of elections. If we had, I suppose we might have voted,” said one villager.

Cracking on in Helmand

(Published in Prospect Magazine 27th August 2009 — Issue 162)

---

A cartoon was on the television but little Lilly grabbed the album and leafed through the photos of her father, the late Sergeant Lee Johnson. I was talking to her mother about his death, which I had witnessed in Afghanistan. When I saw Lilly up in Stockton-on-Tees last November, and I thought of my own young child, I struggled to reconcile my doubts about this war with wanting to remember Johnson’s death as honourable and meaningfulEven in chaos and dysfunction, the British army is good at preserving a belief in order and purpose. And when men die their officers steel them and move onwards with poetic speeches, just as Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thomson did on 10th July 2009, after a dreadful day near the town of Sangin in Helmand in which five of his men were killed. In his eulogy Thomson wrote about men saluting the fallen, and returning to the ramparts. “I sensed each rifleman tragically killed in action today standing behind us as we returned to our posts, and we all knew that each one of those riflemen would have wanted us to ‘crack on’… And that is what we shall do.”

Crack on. From Basra to Sangin, I’ve heard that phrase as regularly as Amen in church. Cracking on: the army’s greatest quality, and perhaps its greatest weakness. I remember standing vigil on Sergeant Johnson’s body at dusk on a hilltop, after he had died in the battle for the town of Musa Qala in December 2007. His fellow soldiers were silhouettes, drawn close to their commander. On the horizon muffled bombs flashed through the drizzle. Major Jake Little told his men to put their grief to one side, to deal with it later. After the battle.

Cracking on could also mean failing to challenge impossible orders, or unwillingness to expose a flawed strategy. In the year I spent studying the Helmand campaign for my book, I sensed a questioning, a doubt about whether it was worthwhile. One senior Whitehall figure stunned me by declaring, almost as his first words, that Helmand “was a terrible strategic blunder.” His views were not uncommon.

The public debate has rarely reflected the mixed-up reality of the war. (more…)

Retreat from Basra – learning the lessons

By Stephen Grey
IN the dark of the night, as the bugler sounded the “advance”, the British Army began its retreat, quitting its last base in Basra and leaving the Iraqi city in the hands of a murderous Shi-ite militia.
That withdrawal from Basra Palace on September 2nd 2007 marked, in the eyes of many in the British Army, the nadir of this country’s entire military reputation.
As was revealed later in the Sunday Times, the pull out from Basra proceeded without incident and un-molested only because of a secret British deal with the Mehdi Army enemy who had killed 11 of the departing British battalion and who, according to one officer present, “provided security all around for our convoy.” It was he said, an “utter humiliation.” (more…)

Aiding the Enemy?

This is the official response to my piece on the British Army Review.

British Army Review
MOD Director of Media and Communication Nick Gurr has responded to Stephen Grey’s article in The Sunday Times in which the MOD is criticised for ‘blocking’ publication of a piece about UK efforts in Afghanistan in the British Army Review (BAR) – an official Army publication.

Mr Gurr said: “British Army Review has for many years published thought-provoking and controversial articles from a wide range of contributors about the British Army and its activities. It continues to do so. Mr Grey quotes at length from a critical piece in the latest edition of BAR by US Colonel Mansoor in his article and his colleague, Mike Evans, ran a double page spread earlier in the week on a number of others.

“Unfortunately, BAR has been seized upon in recent editions for easy stories and cheap headlines. A Sunday newspaper ran a splash in July about one article written last year by a junior officer based in Whitehall as evidence of ‘failing’ strategy in Afghanistan. This was seized upon as an authoritative and up-to-date ‘view from the ground’ – which it was not. At no point was it made clear that this was a dated article written by someone who had never served in Afghanistan. In order to avoid giving such propaganda gifts to the enemy in future we have found that, regrettably, we need to be a bit more cautious about what we publish or – in this case – republish. Hopefully, this will not always be the case.”