Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq by Mark Urban

Ever since the fiasco of Andy McNab’s unauthorised publication of Bravo Two Zero (his rather skew-eyed but gripping look at the regiment’s operations in the first Gulf war), attempts to record the SAS’s place in history have been obstructed by a draconian contract of confidentiality imposed on all members of the special forces.

In this ground-breaking investigation into the SAS war in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, Mark Urban has worked his way around all that and, with obvious top access, has put together one of the few truly authentic accounts of the modern SAS outside the world of fiction. Such an account is needed. With the success of the main British mission in the Iraq campaign (namely, running the city of Basra) getting a somewhat iffy verdict, it is only by knowing at least something of what Britain’s special forces did in the war that a fully rounded view of the UK’s contribution can be offered.

Occasionally, Task Force Black is weighed down by the influence of the Ministry of Defence censor. Sometimes the perspective seems a bit too aligned with that of the SAS. But, for all that, there are some re-markable insights here. And the most prominent of them is that, for all the recognition its role has now achieved, the SAS only carved out its place in Iraq after heated infighting with its military superiors back in London.

When the Americans assaulted Fallujah in November 2004, British troops from the Black Watch moved up to support. But after the unit lost five men in the first fortnight, Downing Street started to backpedal. On the ground the SAS’s D Squadron, fuelled by what Urban calls its “airborne aggression” and the Para motto of FIDO (“f*** it and drive on”), wanted nothing more than to join the fray. Filling their wagons, they drove out to a rally point just outside Fallujah. By now, their friends in the US Delta force were already in combat. But then a “red card” came down the command chain and they were told to withdraw.

The arrest of a Taliban’s commander illustrates Nato’s covert war against the insurgency – but, as the coalition advances, author Stephen Grey writes that Operation Moshtarak must herald a new strategy in Afghanistan.

Stephen Grey is the author of Operation Snakebite – a true story about an Afghan desert siege.

A rebellion like the Taliban’s insurgency in Afghanistan is rather like the smouldering embers of a forest fire.

Discontent and grievance are the fuel, and a rebel group’s ideology, organisation and leadership breathe the wind that turns the embers into roaring flames.

The twin strategy of a Nato’s campaign in the region, as explained by top commanders, mirrors that metaphor.

On the one hand are conventional operations led by ground troops and development experts. Their much-publicised campaign – exemplified by this week’s US-led offensive in central Helmand, Operation Moshtarak (”Together” in Dari) – is targeted ultimately at influencing the minds of the people in those war torn districts.

In other words, curbing that discontent and grievance.

But, if the reports are true, today’s disclosure of the stunning capture of the No. 2 of the Afghan Taliban’s Pakistan-based leadership, Mullah Abdul Ghani Berader (or Baradar), is part of the covert but equally important plank of the war now orchestrated by the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

As one US general in Kabul told me a while back: “Don’t be deceived by all the hearts and minds and all the open stuff. As big a part of the war is what we call the manhunt: tracking down and getting the bad guys.”

In an integrated operation with US intelligence outfits – and with the support of UK special forces and intelligence, as well as Australian units – a breathless campaign of raids and strikes is taking place across both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, mirroring the apparent success of a similar secret offensive led by McChrystal when he commanded special forces in Baghdad, Iraq.

The most overt part of this secret war has been the drone strikes launched in tribal areas of north-west Pakistan.

Operated by the CIA, with the co-operation of counter-terrorist officers with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, these have been intensified by President Obama.

Until now, those strikes (combined with other more covert activities involving both spies and special forces), have been confined by agreement with Pakistani forces by those tribal areas – as the map below of the drone strikes indicates. Many of the targets have been Pakistani Taliban with little connection to the Afghan revolt or al-Qaida.
View U.S. Drone Attacks in Pakistan in a larger map

But political pressure in Washington has been growing to expand raids and attacks to the province of Baluchistan and the villages around Quetta, its capital, where the leadership of Mullah Omar’s Taliban-based has been long rumoured to be exiled, under the presumed protection of or at least tolerance by the faction of the ISI agency devoted to supporting the Afghan Taliban.

Capturing the commander
The capture of Mullah Baradar in the port city of Karachi gives credence to intelligence reports, described in the Washington press, that, in the face of threats to crack down in Baluchistan, increasing numbers of Taliban leaders, perhaps even Mullah Omar himself, have sought shelter in the more populated cities.

As the military commander and day-to-day leader of the Taliban’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura, Berader’s capture – kept secret for several days – is a grievous blow to the movement, not least because, if he cooperates under interrogation, he may even lead investigators to the door of Mullah Omar, not to mention reveal much of the operational structure of the organisation. No-one as important in the Taliban has ever been brought into captivity.

The last major capture reported publicly was Mullah Abdul Rahim Akhund, the former Taliban shadow governor of Helmand in July 2008, and before that the Taliban commander Mansour Dadullah in December 2007 (although he was reportedly released in a hostage exchange).

A single capture like this will not end the rebellion, nor can all the strikes and captures organised in this secret campaign.

What commanders’ hope, though, is that the sheer tempo of this campaign can – as it did, they argue, against al-Qaida in Iraq – serve to off-balance the Taliban sufficiently so that efforts of more conventional forces, striving to win hearts and minds, can begin to take effect.

As mentioned, Operation Moshtarak aims to be a template for how the rebellion now gripping much of the Pustu-speaking parts of Afghanistan can be gripped.

Despite all the wild hype, the tactical advantage of seizing the district of Marja in Helmand (along with the parts of Nad Ali, Babaji and Malgir districts being taken by UK and Danish forces in related action) is significant but relatively small.

Though described yesterday in one Nato press release as a “city”, the district centre of Marja is little more than a hamlet, and no more than a few hundred families live dispersed across the entire district. It certainly has become, in recent years, a centre for the production and processing of illegal opium.

As an island of “uncleared” territory in central Helmand it had also for at least a year become a centre for the province’s shadow Taliban government and a staging post for attacks elsewhere.

Under present policies, however, opium production will no longer cease after a Nato takeover. And the Taliban have plenty of other territory in the region from which to base their operations.

Operation Moshtarak, if completed successful, will however produce one important tactical gain: it will repair the rather odd spread of Nato troops across Helmand and by thus filling the gaps will establish a single zone of Nato-occupied territory in central Helmand.

This will finally establish the “Afghan Development Zone” (ADZ) that was originally planned when British troops first entered Helmand four years ago. (They were diverted up to fight in northern Helmand and it never went past the drawing board).

The aftermath of Moshtarak
Provided troops stay true to their aim of avoiding wanton civilian death, what happens next in this ADZ is what matters strategically.

It is on the aftermath to the offensive, and the example of progress he hopes to fashion in central Helmand, that McChrystal rests his hopes for turning this war. The seizure of “Taliban strongholds” with great force and big battle and many promises of future development has been done before.

It was done in the battle of Musa Qala I witnessed in December 2007.

In fact, despite all the talk of counter-insurgency, consolidation and “hearts and minds”, no British commander on a six-month tour of Helmand has been able to resist conducting that one big offensive during his time.

But as McChrystal and his soldiers are now well aware, endlessly ‘mowing the grass’ will not quell this rebellion. He hopes this operation can be different because, in contrast to previous offensives in Helmand, some of the key lessons may have been learned.

First and foremost, President Obama’s surge gives McChrystal the resources both to take these Taliban-ruled districts in strength, but, more importantly, to stay in strength – giving the population greater confidence that the Taliban can be held at bay.

Secondly, the green light for Moshtarak only came after President Karzai’s government finally made good on promises to send additional Afghan security forces into Helmand, not only making Nato troops far more effective in their efforts but also providing a force that might ultimately take over security.

After bringing war to their farm fields, US and British commanders know it will be a lengthy campaign to win the population.

The crux will be to provide evidence that the Afghan government is as capable as the Taliban in providing people what they want – be it security, justice, dispute-resolution, livelihoods and jobs for the many unemployed young people.

As British troops have found in mostly stalemated northern Helmand (where the countryside is mostly still dominated by the Taliban despite more than three years of fighting and sacrifice north of the town of Gereshk and around the Nato outposts in Sangin, Kajaki and Musa Qala), all this kind of confidence-building is incredibly hard, particularly as so far the Afghan government has been unable to provide any kind of competent officials able to match the Taliban’s ability to engage with local tribes and their grievances, nor to deliver on all the promises of development.

Despite the influx of newly trained Afghan troops – and all the tributes paid to them (in public) by military commanders – it is still far from clear that either the police or the Afghans are up to the job, or are even the right force, to restore rule among these unruly tribes.

Mostarak and Marja may have the attention of President Karzai now – as Musa Qala did two years ago – but success in the long term will require a sustained political effort – and will require Karzai to tear up the script for how he has ruled this country.

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.

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.

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.

Afghan soldier opens fire in Musa Qala (Photo: NIck Cornish)

“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.

We headed to Lunn’s base, an Afghan army post north of Musa Qala, in a Vector, the type of armoured vehicle in which Jonno had died. I had mistakenly believed that the Ministry of Defence had phased out these lethally vulnerable trucks from the combat zone.

Lunn’s eight men were living and fighting alongside an Afghan army that is now better armed, better trained and better able to lead its own operations. But, after three years of constant fighting in Helmand, many of its troops are exhausted. Nearly 200 Afghan soldiers have been killed.

Last Saturday, we left the base in single file at 6.30am. We were passing through the village of Towghi Keli, a series of high-walled compounds in the desert just to the west of the Musa Qala valley.

Walking to the front line, premonitions of death come easily. But the soldiers have taught me that everyone gets these feelings. Most are superstitious; one was worried because he had gone on patrol without his teddy bear mascot.

On our left flank, to the east, a company of Royal Anglians was edging up in parallel to us. A handful of Mastiff armoured patrol vehicles from the Household Cavalry was lurking in reserve. Our movements were being covered by a British-manned observation post and artillery up on the Roshan Tower, a hill to the east that dominates Musa Qala.

The Russians seized the hill when they took the town in 1983. American paratroopers made it their first objective in 2007.

Everyone was loaded down with ammunition. Temple was carrying not only a machinegun but a mortar tube and a bazooka-like rocket tube.

It was the Royal Anglians who were ambushed first. We heard the sound of machinegun fire on our flank. The Taliban’s radio announced ominously: “Get ready [for] the big thing.”

Lunn and Temple went ahead with a group of Afghan soldiers to clear some buildings. Suddenly, a crowd came towards us — men on bicycles or motorbikes, sometimes with women in blue burqas sitting behind them. Farmers hastened past, carrying pitchforks. All were moving away from the scene of imminent “contact”.

The Taliban began to fire rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) above the Household Cavalry position. Then, at 9.15am, our battle began. Someone bellowed: “Keep down — watch out for the ricochets.” I hugged a wall.

The roar of machineguns starting up was deafening. There was a boom and a puff of smoke through an archway. I wondered if a rocket had struck — but it was just the afterblast of an outgoing RPG.

An Afghan soldier caused a commotion as he prepared to fire another. He was aiming too low, in danger of hitting the dome of the roof on which he was sitting. He raised his arm and another whoosh was heard as the grenade rushed away — then a distant thud.

The Taliban were in buildings about 100 yards to the north. They seemed unfazed by the torrent of lead pouring from the Afghan army lines.

Time passed. Long bursts of fire ended in lulls punctuated by single shots from either side. An Afghan sniper proudly made a slitting gesture across his throat. He had killed two Taliban.

In the valley, the Anglians had found a suspected factory for the production of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It would take hours to check it out and destroy it.

An American A-10 “Wart-hog” tank-buster thundered overhead: a strike had been called in on a large group of Taliban. The engines rose in pitch as it dived and fired a missile. There was a whoosh and a boom and I felt the shockwave from the explosion.

I moved up the alleyway. Most of the men were in front, across a small field. They popped up, opened fire and then crouched behind a wall. More firing came in from other compounds.

“They’re manoeuvring,” said Lunn. Tall and fearless, he was in his element. “Get some rounds down range, lads,” he yelled.

The Taliban still showed no sign of retreating. “We’re looking for a way to break contact,” said Scott “Georgie” Halliday, the sergeant major. That day our mission was only to hold this line. Perhaps another day they will strike forward.

“The Afghans would like to clear out this village. But holding more ground would take more troops,” said Lunn.

A plane swooped down in front of me and let loose a burst of cannon fire onto the Taliban behind, the prelude to another short lull. It was time to slip away: 3.45pm — 6½ hours since the start of the battle. We marched back in single file through the alleyways, where villagers stood in their doorways, staring.

Returning to the centre of Musa Qala that night, I heard that progress in rebuilding the town had been slow. When we entered in 2007, one of the first promises had been to rebuild a mosque that had been destroyed by a Nato bomb. The work has not even started.

Mullah Abdul Salaam, the district governor, appeared gloomy. He blamed the Afghan government for failing to deliver on “all those promises of improvement that I have made to the people here”.

The British still take comfort that up to 20,000 people are living in the “bubble of security” in Musa Qala. The town centre is safe and the central bazaar is flourishing.

The Household Cavalry Regiment, in command here, says its mission is not to expand but to “bite and hold”. Captain

Roly Spiller, an intelligence officer, said the aim was “to show the tangible benefits of good government”. The safety of the bubble is attracting families to move in from Taliban territory. The Taliban themselves are looking increasingly fractured.

To my mind, Musa Qala does not represent failure. But the continuing clashes here show how much time, blood and treasure must be devoted to secure a small piece of territory in Helmand.

Stephen Grey is the author of Operation Snakebite, the explosive true story of an Afghan desert siege (Viking Penguin)

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.

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.

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. In July, when the number of dead since 2001 overtook the total in Iraq, the debate was couched as politicians versus generals. Our troops demanded more helicopters, reinforcements and money. All of that was true—when Sergeant Johnson’s comrades kept vigil over his body for 24 hours, it was because no helicopter was available to take him off the hill. And a day earlier, many Afghan civilians had died because there were no helicopters to ferry the injured to hospital. But more men and more choppers are not going to win this war, still less address its purpose. Neither the air cavalry nor legions of fresh troops defeated the Vietcong. Unless the strategy is fixed, reinforcement could well make things worse.

Britain’s new Afghan war began shortly after 9/11, with the deployment of special force units to support the US campaign against al Qaeda. But it was a Nato plan to extend the writ of the Kabul government across the country that brought Britain to Helmand, Afghanistan’s largest province, in April 2006. Bloody as it was to be, the mission was defined initially in benign terms. John Reid, then defence secretary, emphasised reconstruction and a “development zone” in the centre of the province, with the 3,300 troops deployed to provide basic security. A commander from those early days told me that the British came equipped for defence, not attack. But from the start, the mission crept forward with dangerous confusion to include fighting terrorism, defeating an insurgency, rebuilding an economy, supporting the government and suppressing illegal drugs.

In spring 2006, a revolt was already underway across Helmand by those seemingly loyal to the former Taliban government. Though the rebellion was poorly understood, the imperative to defeat it pushed all other objectives to one side. Under Afghan political pressure, Britain’s limited combat strength was deployed to establish so-called “platoon houses”—defensive positions in towns across northern Helmand and around the Kajaki dam. It seemed, at the time, that unless the government was defended the rebellion could sweep across the entire south of the country. But this came at a cost. Under siege that first summer, the British defended their ramparts with heavy weapons and air power. The fighting reduced parts of Sangin to rubble, destroyed Musa Qala’s mosque, and drove the population out of other towns. Almost no meaningful reconstruction was carried out. The base at Musa Qala was eventually abandoned in a truce with the Taliban, but during the winter of 2006-07 the British clung on elsewhere. General David Richards, then Nato commander in Kabul (and now incoming head of the army), later told me that hanging on to these outposts had little strategic impact beyond helping to save face with the Afghans.

Within 18 months Britain’s forces had swelled to more than 7,000, giving commanders more room for manoeuvre. But for all that, the British were heading for stalemate. Ordered to engage in bloody “sweeps” along the Helmand river, the army would declare swathes of countryside “cleared” of the Taliban. But without the strength to hold those gains the Taliban, apparently cut down in their dozens, would creep back. Troops despairingly called these sweeps “mowing the lawn.”

***

It was during the following winter, in December 2007, that I first visited Helmand and witnessed Operation Snakebite: the battle to retake Musa Qala and the most important battle fought thus far in the Helmand campaign. After leaving south London on a Sunday, by Friday I was crouching in a ditch with enemy bullets ripping up the dust, wishing I was fitter.

This first attack was a British move on the outskirts of Musa Qala. It was a ruse to occupy the Taliban while US paratroopers landed elsewhere. The plan was typical of a Helmand engagement. We walked across an open, dusty field towards the village. They started firing and we dived to what cover there was. The gunfight underlined the complexity of the war. Five groups were firing at once: the British, the Afghan army, US special forces, US paratroopers and the Taliban. Amid all this were civilians trying to escape. By nightfall seven Afghans, including two children, lay dead.

The battle continued for three more nights. (Sergeant Johnson was killed a day later, by a mine.) From the desert outside we heard the thunder of artillery and air power as the US paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne fought from building to building to the town centre. The population and the Taliban slipped away. We walked into a ghost town, with fresh vegetables and bread lying abandoned on market stalls.

I met the then commander of British troops in Afghanistan, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, when he joined the Afghans as they raised their nation’s flag in the town centre. A thoughtful but blunt Scotsman, Mackay surprised me with his candour. That day he was exhausted but ebullient, having commanded the battle from a trench above the town (even his bodyguards had had to open fire). Sitting on the porch of a deserted shop, Mackay outlined the new approach he envisaged for the campaign. For all the destruction I had just seen, his emphasis was on what he called a “non-kinetic” approach, meaning less fighting. He denounced the body counts of dead Taliban, at the time still routinely announced in US press releases, as a “corrupt measure.” In this war, he said, “the population is the prize”—borrowing a slogan from David Galula, a founder of counterinsurgency (or COIN) theory.

***

The Musa Qala flag-raising was a turning point for the British campaign, something Mackay had conspired to achieve. At 50, he was one of the army’s oldest operational commanders. His was an upstart brigade plucked from non-operational status—previous duties included helping run the Edinburgh Tattoo—which also presumed to rethink Britain’s faltering strategy. Unafraid to dictate orders upwards, he came to be seen as troublesome, if perhaps right.

The big lie Mackay first identified—now belatedly recognised by Nato’s most senior commanders—was the way the “mowing the lawn” sweeps were viewed as a positive outcome, as they would have been in a traditional war. Faced with an enemy prepared to show its face in open combat (in contrast to most of the fighting in Iraq), the fallacy had taken root that this was more of a conventional than a guerrilla war. But this approach to warfare did nothing to tackle the roots of rebellion, and brought little but destruction. One young officer from Mackay’s brigade summed up the first 18 months: “You were talking about blokes put in unfair positions; 30 to 40 soldiers on a parapet dropping JDAMs [satellite-guided bombs] all around them night and day for weeks on end.” The effect on the local population had been disastrous, he felt. “There was no need for those blokes to die,” he confided. “We have gone backwards.” Commanders like Mackay, and also General Richards (who returned to London in 2007 having acquired the sobriquet “Richards of Kabul”), took a calculated gamble with their careers, and began to challenge the direction of the campaign. It was no good destroying a town and then arriving afterwards with cement mixers or wads of cash, as US doctrine seemed to imply.

The 2007 battle for Musa Qala became a test of Mackay’s doctrines. The aim was to take the town without knocking it down and by persuading the Taliban to flee, not fight. An attempt was made to stir up a tribal revolt, and for the assault no bombs or heavy weapons were permitted to be fired at the town centre. A plan for reconstruction was devised to begin on “day one” after the town’s recapture, and a battalion of Afghan troops was earmarked to garrison the town, with Nato troops kept out. After the victory, the US ambassador William Wood declared: “The eyes of the world will be on Musa Qala.”

Did it work? Not entirely. The military did its bit, taking the town with minimal civilian casualties. But even with President Hamid Karzai kept informed and large subsidies available, the civilian agencies, including Britain’s foreign office and development department, and the Afghan government came nowhere near to doing their part. Promised aid arrived at a trickle and the Afghan military provided too few troops. As Mackay would later reflect, a counterinsurgency campaign could separate insurgents from the population only with unity of military and civilian effort. But this was hardly an easy task with a mostly illiterate Afghan bureaucracy, and with little money trickling down to make people believe the Afghan government was a force for good. In May 2009, I got an email from a young officer just back from the frontline. He had read my book, and described the latest from Musa Qala: “Yes, there was a ‘rebuilt’ school, a few ditches dug and the medical centre will be the best for miles if it is ever finished but that is it. The foreign office lead in Musa Qala did not leave the base in the entire six months I was there.”

By the summer offensive of 2009 the army had begun to learn from its failed early strategy. The approach first seen under Andrew Mackay in Musa Qala had been adopted across Helmand, with greater emphasis on the needs of the local population. But, as Musa Qala showed, even this strategy had its problems, not least because of the limits of military power and the need for other agencies to do their part. And there was also another, perhaps more serious concern. Could the new approach, advocated by Richards but first seen under Mackay, address the causes of the rebellion when so many of this same population seemed to support the rebels?

Talking to soldiers in Helmand, it struck me how little they saw of their enemy. In combat, you would hear the Taliban’s bullets. It might be a crack and thump right by your ear, or the slower sub-sonic bullets described by a Royal Marine sniper as “like the sound of swallows in flight.” Sometimes their path could be traced by the flicking of corn stems in a field, or on a soldier’s cheek as the rounds scythed the blades of grass above him. Of the living enemy, however, most saw only a muzzle flash from a distant wall. Dead bodies, yes, but prisoners very rarely. There was little to give shape to who these people were. But in a guerrilla war, few questions matter more than your enemy’s motives. And one simple way to find out was to ask them.

Such talks had been standard practice in past insurgencies, including the 1950s Malaya emergency and Northern Ireland. But with the Taliban branded as terrorists few politicians would sanction a dialogue. While I was in Musa Qala, Gordon Brown declared that “we will not enter into any negotiations with these people.” One person, however, did try to talk. A few days after the Musa Qala battle, on Boxing Day in 2007, I heard the news of the expulsion of two foreign envoys from Kabul: an Irish EU official, Michael Semple, and another Irishman, Mervyn Patterson. Their crime, said President Karzai, had been illicit meetings with the Taliban.

Intrigued, I investigated further. Patterson worked for the UN and was an innocent fall guy, I learned. But Semple had indeed gone deep into the rebellion, holding talks with some 200 Taliban figures. Official policy sought reconciliation only with Taliban commanders prepared to change sides. Semple’s move to talk discreetly to active commanders—those killing Nato soldiers—was both difficult and dangerous. No one had attempted anything like this, never mind on this scale. “I probably got to meet more commanders than Mullah Omar himself,” he later told me.

I visited Semple at his farm outside Islamabad in summer 2008. Married to a Pakistani he met at Sussex University, he had been in the region for nearly 20 years, going to Afghanistan for the first time for Oxfam, just after the Soviet tanks rolled out. Clad in traditional clothes and with a long, straggly (albeit ginger) beard, he had adopted local custom and learned the languages. One British officer who met him in Helmand thought he was an Uzbek, or perhaps a lost Afghan child of a Soviet soldier. Sitting cross-legged under a whirring fan, Semple talked to me of the years he had spent building contacts, and how this had led him to set up meetings in Helmand and other hostile areas around the country in 2007. These attempts were endorsed by officials close to the president, but crucially not by Karzai himself. When he found out, Karzai became determined to expel Semple, although quite why has never been entirely clear. US sources told me it had to do with Karzai’s antipathy to scheming by British intelligence, while British sources suggested Karzai suspected a plot to install Lord Ashdown as UN representative in Kabul.

***

Semple got involved with “reconciliation,” as he called it, soon after 9/11—first with the UN and then the EU. As former Taliban leaders began to disarm, Semple was contacted by those who wanted guarantees for their safety. Later he worked with the Afghan government to persuade more Taliban commanders to change sides, although he found a mixture of corruption and sometimes malice meant that the guarantees of protection often had little substance. In public President Karzai spoke about the need for talks, but in private he saw such moves as potential threats to his position, and did nothing serious to advance them. So by the end of 2007, Semple had developed his own methods. Working with a team of Afghans he persuaded Taliban commanders to meet him incognito. While he sometimes travelled to Helmand in secret, he found it easier to stage talks in guesthouses in Kabul; it was a measure of the strength of the insurgency how easily they travelled to see him. The British approved of his work, but from a distance: when Semple was expelled Whitehall officials briefed, disingenuously, that Britain had had nothing to do with his activities.

Had the British and their allies seen the picture that Semple put together of the enemy earlier, and understood it, this might have stopped much of the fighting in the first place. The Taliban of southern Afghanistan, Semple said, was made up of bands of competing fighters. While all of them might accept some orders from the former Taliban government leader, Mullah Omar, what drove them to fight was often less to do with religion, and more with tribe and nation. Semple told me how the hasty US decision after 9/11 to make most former Taliban leaders into wanted men prevented many from retiring, or switching sides. Instead they were driven into Pakistan, where they regrouped and forged closer ties to the remnants of al Qaeda. US counterterrorist efforts made matters worse, as special forces swept across Afghanistan in the next few years, time and again haplessly being used to settle tribal scores.

This lack of engagement with the enemy also kept the newly-arrived British army oblivious of their role in an ongoing drugs war. By 2006, the growth in the opium trade, especially in Helmand, had led to what Semple described as “nothing short of an attempt to corner the world supply of heroin.” When the British army arrived it was at worst ignorant and at best naïve about the way its mission was seen locally as securing the interest of one drug lord against another. In Sangin, for instance, the Parachute Regiment arrived in the summer of 2006 ostensibly to protect the embattled district governor and officials loyal to President Karzai. But most of these officials came from one tribe, the Alokozai, whose local leader ran a private prison, whose men were alleged to have kidnapped and raped local children, and whose tribe was trying to wrest the drugs trade from its rivals. Semple put it this way: “In the run-up to the deployment a lot of the people in Helmand were actually very favourable. But then they found the same drug-dealing network holed up in Sangin next to the British platoon. They thought that somehow the British have got tricked into backing the drug mafia.” Already denounced to the Americans as terrorists, the rival tribal groups were driven into the hands of the Taliban.

Limited attempts to understand the Taliban were also made more difficult by British and US special forces campaigns to “decapitate” their leadership, beginning in the spring of 2007. Just as in Northern Ireland, conventional operations were mirrored by more secretive manhunts. Although the assassination of so many Taliban commanders made tactical military sense, it was a strategic mistake. Yes, the mullahs were plotting attacks on coalition troops. But if Semple’s analysis held good then the deaths of these men also risked destroying the tribal fabric of Helmand itself, and eliminating the very people who could ultimately reconcile. It was a risk that Andrew Mackay recognised too, telling his staff in 2008 that “we’re at risk of killing the Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness of the Taliban.” Nonetheless, by summer 2009 the decapitation showed no signs of stopping. “Link diagrams” depicting the network of alleged Taliban leaders in Helmand were marked with crosses over almost every name. The new US commander in Kabul, General Stanley McChrystal, came to Afghanistan with a background in running manhunt operations in Iraq. According to one senior US official, only extra demand for special forces over the border in Pakistan threatened to slow down the assassination programme.

Yet even as unmanned Predator drones circled their targets, Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband began a new drive to talk to the enemy, using a major speech in July 2009 to pressure Karzai to help Taliban fighters find jobs or training if they stopped fighting. Officials said this was an attempt to revive and extend the programme that Semple had led in Helmand in 2007. After three years of battles, which the Taliban were always said to lose, British intelligence estimated that the number of active Taliban fighters had actually doubled in the province. This strength, combined with a new psychological advantage, meant that the kind of engagement which might have worked in 2006 was going to be much harder in 2009 and 2010. But belated as it is, it still needs to be tried.

***

In spring 2008 I visited the poppy fields in central Helmand with soldiers of the Yorkshire Regiment. We chatted to a farmer whose crop had been ploughed over by tractors employed by the Helmand governor. “Does he understand that Nato forces have taken no part in poppy eradication?” a British officer asked, somewhat hopefully. The farmer, an old man in flip-flops, replied that he did. “We were warned the poppies would be destroyed, but we gambled that like other years they wouldn’t come. I’ll now grow wheat and water melon,” he said. Yet a year on, men like the farmer are more likely to turn to producing improvised explosive devices. Even as the British and Nato strategy became more refined, and more geared towards winning over the Afghan population, in Helmand as in much of the country the situation was getting worse. Few people today would drive to those fields, just west of the province’s capital Lashkar Gah, in unarmoured Land Rovers as we did. The area is now a “Taliban stronghold.” Retaking it was a central objective of US troops and of the recent assault by British troops known as operation “Panther’s Claw,” the province’s fourth summer offensive in as many years. If 2007 and 2008 saw mostly “mowing the lawn” sweeps, the 2009 attack was a land grab, more akin to 2006. The aim was to extend Nato’s influence, but this time with much greater resources (provided by the Americans) and on a battlefield that stretched some 140 miles.

Panther’s Claw made July 2009 the bloodiest month of the war, and brought renewed media attention. Richard Dannatt, the departing head of army, spoke up for more equipment and men. But as the public rallied to support the beleaguered troops, few addressed the question that Michael Semple had been posing: why were these once peaceful fields now hostile? Some 18 months after Andrew Mackay first pushed the idea, the 2009 offensive was heavily promoted as being “population-focused.” General McChrystal promised new counter-insurgency tactics under the slogan “clear, hold, and build,” with a particular emphasis on the last element. He declared: “The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed; it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” Brigadier Tim Radford, the British taskforce commander, said he was “absolutely certain” that Panther’s Claw had been a success. Lessons had been learned. A new swathe of land had been brought under government control—and it would be held.

But will it? The new slogans still leave unaddressed the tools and resources the military need to turn the population against the rebellion. Having seized such a large slice of Helmand, Nato still has nothing like the troop strength to garrison the province. British troops, meanwhile, remain overstretched in the zones they have held since before the summer. The Afghan army is not ready to step up, despite the appeals for reinforcement Gordon Brown has made to President Karzai. Nor is the Afghan government able to provide officials capable of delivering the security and services that might win over those infamous hearts and minds. Musa Qala showed that there is little point winning ground for an Afghan government regarded as corrupt and unable to deliver basic security. “The problem with our approach this summer,” one senior western official told me, “is that Afghanistan is neither willing nor capable of taking over the areas that Nato troops have captured… It’s a fiction that they’ll soon be ready.”

In Whitehall, meanwhile, government officials seethed at what they regarded as General Dannatt’s opportunism in using recent casualties to spread the blame for three years of bloody stalemate. As seen from London or Washington, the story of Helmand was more often of commanders who pushed soldiers into harm’s way, sent back endlessly optimistic reports, and extended the conflict beyond the resources and political will available back home. Their complaint has merit. Politicians dispatched troops to Afghanistan, but Nato generals decided how to deploy them. Most of the crucial decisions—from sending troops to defend the platoon houses, to “mowing the lawn,” to Panther’s Claw—have been made by soldiers. If an operation was launched with insufficient troops (or helicopters) it should not have been launched at all.

The real problem remains that the US approach of “clear, hold and build” is a tactic, not a strategy. It leaves unanswered just how much of this vast, lawless country should be cleared and held. There have already been calls for tens of thousands of more troops. Yet all of these dreamed-of reinforcements would never be enough to garrison all the areas of rebellion, never mind the whole country. Unlike in Iraq, we have reinforced before we know how to win.

***

So what should be done? As John Lawrence, the 19th-century viceroy to India, observed of policy in Afghanistan, as much may sometimes be achieved by “masterful inactivity” as by action. A lesson of Helmand that seems to have gone unlearned is that it is often better to do less than to risk interventions that stir up, rather than snuff out, conflict. In great swathes of the country Nato and the Afghan government may just have to accept an accommodation with hostile forces: not a truce or a climbdown but a recognition that western intervention has limited value. Not all enemies can be dealt with at once. If a notoriously bad man runs a village, valley or region but poses a limited threat to anyone outside, then leave him be, for now at least. Forget dreams of imposing “governance” on the entire nation. Where enemies do pose a direct threat to stability, do not reach for military action as the first response. Try instead for Afghan-led solutions involving tribal compromise; ones that may weaken an enemy rather than destroy or humiliate him. As Michael Semple told me, one of the most powerful weapons available—peacemaking—is rarely tried.

Where fighting must occur we should learn to pick our battles more carefully. And the decision of when military action is needed should be driven by the rationale of the mission itself. Since early 2008, the west has worked hard to correct its early confusion over objectives: emphasising, like President Obama, a narrower aim of creating a stable Afghanistan that can no longer be a base for al Qaeda and other extremists. But suggesting that the capture of a compound in Helmand somehow advances the defence of Birmingham remains a convoluted and unsatisfying argument. Devising the correct means to deny sanctuary to terrorists may involve counterintuitive thinking. The benefits of a stable Afghanistan are balanced by the cost of achieving it—among them the risk that fighting wars in Muslim lands helps to recruit new terrorists. If the battle really is against extremist Islam, we are not fighting against a terrorist army but against an idea. An operation like Panther’s Claw may kill or drive away the Taliban, but may be counterproductive to winning or losing the longer war. Doing fewer things better—and letting the world know about them—can have greater effect than pouring more troops into an extended offensive.

But, given that we’re already so committed, would such conservation imply a great drawdown of our forces? Not necessarily. Newly vocal Afghan sceptics, like former diplomat and author Rory Stewart, underestimate the human cost of a grand disengagement. Stewart suggests a reduction of foreign troops from 90,000 to “perhaps 20,000,” but this could lead to an explosion of violence and reprisal killing: if Nato forces were to withdraw suddenly, past experience shows that their local Afghan allies risk massacre. A sudden retreat would embolden those who confront the government, and by being perceived as a victory over the US, it could also help to further revive al Qaeda, a movement whose founding myth is of driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Power needs to be put back in Afghan hands, harm undone and deals struck. But not from a position of sudden weakness.

Beyond our strategic interest in stability there also remains a moral case for the fight. Achieving a modicum of stability in Afghanistan would give meaning to all that loss of life. We cannot in good conscience abandon the place to anarchy. And Britain can still do good if it learns deeper lessons from its campaign. Its armed intervention should be concentrated on smaller areas, with a much greater emphasis on local intelligence. This must go hand-in-hand with economic development, and above all matching the scale of the mission with the resources available. Nato special forces need to look closely at the logic of their “decapitation” operations, and concentrate instead on helping indigenous forces. Miliband should be supported in promoting engagement with the enemy, and offering ways out for those involved in violence. All of these approaches require a further transformation of the way Britain and its military do business. The more focus there is on great military offensives, the faster the money and blood is expended; and the greater the pressure for rapid results, the less chance there is that the fight will ever be won.

LIKE most of those in the inner orbit of General David Petraeus, the American commander whose ‘Baghdad surge’ helped to turn the war in Iraq, Colonel Peter Mansoor is forthright and blunt.
As the general’s former chief of staff in Baghdad (technically his ‘executive officer’), Mansoor says the American army fought with the wrong strategy in Iraq for as long as the US fought Hitler in Europe in World War Two and “that nearly led the United States and its allies to defeat in Iraq.”
But the difference between the US and Britain, his article in the British Army Review makes clear, is that American learned its lesson – realizing the Iraq war would be won not just by offensive operations to kill or capture terrorist leaders, but by recognizing it was a so-called “counter-insurgency” like Vietnam. The key to winning lay not with destroying the enemy but with securing and winning over the population.
Britain by contrast, says Mansoor, misread Iraq as a peacekeeping operation like the Balkans and regarded their own experience as more suitable than that of the Americans. “This conceit led to a serious understanding of the situation in southern Iraq,” he said.
Misreading an initial calm in southern Iraq, British forces had failed to deal with the growing threat of Shi-ite militias like the Mehdi Army of Muqtadr al Sadr. And when security deteriorated in 2006 they engaged in “futile” attacks against the militias without the ability or resources to protect the population from the Medhi Army’s death squads. And then at the end of 2007 they pulled out of Basra completely – just as General Petraeus was doing the opposite in Baghdad.
“Rather than protecting the Iraqi people in Basra and thereby insulating them from militia violence and intimidation, British political and military leaders had abdicated responsibility for their security – the exact opposite of what was happening in Baghdad and elsewhere, as US forces were moving off their large forward operating bases to position themselves among the Iraqi people where they lived.”
Operation Charge of the Knights, launched on March 3, last year (2008), to recapture the city proved, says Mansoor, that at least one person, the Iraqi prime minister, knew what was happening. When the initial attack faltered, General Petraeus “piled on support”, including US troops from Baghdad, that helped turn the tide of the battle in Basra.
The “British failure in Basra” was not due to conduct of British troops, “which was exemplary”’ but rather to “a failure by senior British civilian and military leaders to understand the political dynamics at play in Iraq, compounded by arrogance that led to an unwillingness to learn and adapt, along with increasing reluctance to risk blood and treasure to conduct effective co-insurgency warfare.”
With the British public losing their will to fight, British forces were hampered by political constraints and had a government that “insisted on running operations from Whitehall”. Meanwhile, British “attempted to cut deals with local Shiite leaders to maintain the peace in southern Iraq, an accommodation that was doomed to failure since the British negotiated from a position of weakness.”
Is Mansoor alone in his views? To prove he is not, the Army Review publishes two further papers that support his thesis, although a third more controversial one was blocked by the Ministry of Defence.
Dr Daniel Marston, an American military historian who was a regular adviser to UK forces in Basra and is an acknowledged expert on counter-insurgency, claims that many officers and soldiers blame many of the Army’s bigger mistakes on Whitehall and the lack of a joined-up approach with other agencies “and they are correct to do so.”
With its past experiences, many expected the British to do better in a counter-insurgency war than the Americans but the British Army, in practice, “appeared to be losing its way” with applying its theories. While the Americans turned their efforts to protecting the population, Marston says that agitation by mid-ranking British officers for British strategy to follow suit were ignored for too long.
Although the British, he says, did play their part in the Charge of the Knights and turn a defeat into success but the Army “cannot turns its back on a difficult campaign and disregard the lessons some of which are admittedly very tough to swallow… Whitehall and also some senior officers failed to understand the nature of the growing insurgency in the south and as a result they failed to implement a counter-insurgency strategy until the 11th hour.”
Anthony King, a professor of sociology at the University of Exeter who has been studying change in the Army, writes that the British Army is “currently in a predicament which as a close to a crisis that any public institution can likely to get… as even senior generals admit” the Army has emerged from Iraq with a damaged reputation.
Suggesting that commanders realise the need for a top-to-bottom transformation, King suggests: “Reform – and that means admitting mistakes – is bad for morale. Strategic defeat is worse.”

AFTER all the terrible trauma and military failures of World War One, the Imperial General Staff, notes Mansoor, chose not to even establish a committee to examine the lessons learned until 1932. Even then the chief of the general staff “suppressed the report because it was too critical of army performance.”
Likewise after the Vietnam War, the US Army did adapt its doctrines but it chose to wish away the concept of counter-insurgency warfare. The special forces centre at Fort Bragg was told by army leaders to throw away their files on the subject “since the US would supposedly never fight that kind of war again.”
As American and Britain are embroiled ever more deeply in the so-called “brushfire” conflict of war against guerrillas, an ever growing contrast has emerged, say many generals, between the open public debate that now characterizes US military strategy, and the attempts in the UK to stifle that debate.
And while the Army Review edition reflects a certain glasnost when it comes to Iraq, ever more vital lessons, say commanders, need to be drawn rapidly from nearly eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, including three years of intensive conflict in Helmand.
While US Afghan commander General Stan McChystal was this weak talking openly of revising a failing strategy, Britain’s own chief of defence staff, Sir Jock Stiirrup, spoke in Helmand of Britain’s own successful strategy.
Banned from the British Army Review by the Ministry of Defence was a paper published by two academics at King’s College department of war studies, David Betz and Anthony Cormack, both with extensive access to the military, and who described what they called a “strategic defeat” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The plain fact of the matter is that, at the time of writing, it seems entirely possible that the Britain will suffer what amounts to a strategic defeat in both its ongoing counterinsurgency campaigns.”
Always struggling through a lack of resources — whether numbers of troops or numbers of helicopters — the Army has been undermined in Afghanistan because of past decisions taken to slim-down the British military to make for a “high tech” fighting machine designed to deliver huge combat power for fighting the Soviets or other major armies but not support the “boots on the ground” required for guerrilla warfare.
But because “given that a fish rots from the head,” they say, the root cause of military failure is British government is itself lukewarm in its commitment to the Afghan war and therefore unwilling to provide the resources needed for success. “The confluence of these factors has created a strategic void into which the Army has fallen.”
The decision to ban such words from a British Army publication was surprising, said Betz, because the same paper had already been published in the US
“It is very disappointing,” said Betz. “It’s important to learn lessons from Iraq but even more important to learn lessons from what’s happening in Afghanistan and apply them fast while there is still an opportunity of changing things.”
According to Army insiders, the decision to impose line-by-line censorship came after a previous edition of the British Army Review in which a military intelligence officer described the British presence in Helmand as an “unmitigated disaster”. A total of three articles were removed by the censors and the editorial was also watered down to remove a reference that implied a criticism of politicians.
“The line from Whitehall is that it’s OK to talk about mistakes in Iraq but not helpful to reveal errors in Afghanistan,” said one senior Army officer.. “The Army is being openly self-critical of itself and is really trying to learn the lessons from Iraq, “ he said, and “attempts to censor debate to limit short term embarrassment of ministers or ambassadors in the end loses wars and gets soldiers killed.
General Richards, meanwhile, is to press on with attempts to stir a public debate. He is to call for the creation of a British version of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) that the US set up after the Vietnam War to completely overhaul its army. For now, he hopes, Afghanistan is not quite Britain’s Vietnam. But to win, he believes the Army still needs a radical transformation

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.”