Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ good intentions. It was a task that required patience, fortitude and an underlying faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings. The last quality was hard to sustain in Afghanistan, especially when dealing with those who were supposed to represent authority. Boardman’s belief, however, never seemed to corrode in the ground mist of nihilism that sometimes appeared to hang over the place.

      The essential purpose of the Paras’ existence, though, was fighting, and at all levels of the battalion there were men who were among the most experienced soldiers in the British Army. Their knowledge and skills would be passed on to the new boys, the young, green Toms who had been in training when the battles of 2006 were being fought. The tales that they heard from the veterans had only increased their thirst for action. Darren Little, from Lockerbie in Scotland, was only sixteen during Herrick 4. He had turned down a place in his father’s building company to enlist in the Paras and was now a private soldier in 4 Platoon, ‘B’ Company. Like all the newcomers he was going to southern Afghanistan ‘with big expectations because what the lads did last time was tremendous’.

      As they settled in to Camp Roberts in the first weeks of March, it was unclear whether those high hopes would be fulfilled. It had taken some time for 3 Para’s precise role in the new deployment to be defined. Initially it appeared the battalion was going to be split in two. One half would go to Kabul for the unglamorous and boring job of guarding the airport while the other went to Kandahar to provide a rapid reaction force. By the end of 2007 their mission had been changed. They were designated the Regional Battlegroup for southern Afghanistan.

      The task would give them many opportunities to demonstrate their versatility. Their duties meant they would be expected to roam all the provinces that fell under the control of Regional Command South of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF was the multinational military coalition that had evolved following the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The ‘assistance’ part of its name was a diplomatic nicety. ISAF troops in the spring of 2008 were doing most of the fighting, though Afghan units that had passed through training camps set up by the Allies increasingly accompanied them on operations. In the seven years since they had invaded, America and its allies had talked much about the need to create Afghan forces that were capable of guaranteeing their own nation’s security. Progress had been made but it was slow, and the Afghan army was still a long way from being able to plan and conduct major operations on its own.

      ISAF had been set up under a UN Security Council mandate in December 2001 following a meeting with Afghan opposition leaders under UN auspices in Bonn which began the process of reconstituting the country post-Taliban. Britain led the negotiations to create the force, which initially operated with soldiers and assets from the UK and eighteen other countries, under the command of a British lieutenant general, John McColl. The coalition of nations willing to commit assets to the mission was to expand over the years so that by 2008 there were forty-one countries contributing about 50,000 troops. In August 2003 NATO took over the command and coordination of ISAF, and two months later the UN authorised it to operate everywhere in Afghanistan. The initial task had been to provide security in and around Kabul. There was a gradual expansion outwards into the more benign and pacified regions of Afghanistan where Taliban support had been lightest. In December 2005, a few months after the country held its first parliamentary elections in thirty years, the Afghan government and its foreign supporters agreed to extend ISAF’s operations to six provinces in the troublesome south.

      Despite the terminology emphasising the collective nature of the international military presence in Afghanistan, it was the Americans who dominated. They contributed nearly half the ISAF troops spread around the country, leaving Britain trailing a distant second. In the spring of 2008, ISAF was under the command of one American general who a few months later handed over to another.

      Apart from dominating ISAF, America was conducting its own separate war in Afghanistan under the aegis of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the anti-terrorism campaign established after the 2001 attacks in America to hunt down and kill or capture Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. But the apparent separation of structures did not greatly simplify operations for ISAF and the British. America was the senior partner in NATO and insisted on following its own instincts and methods, even when these clashed with the approach that the British were trying to pursue.

      The lines of command inside ISAF itself were complex, an inevitable result, apologists would say, of the number of nations involved in the alliance. There would be occasions on 3 Para’s tour when they suffered as a result of the friction caused by the machine’s numerous moving parts. A bigger problem was the differing degrees of commitment that the participants brought to the mission. Most countries were anxious to keep their troops out of the firing line, and all operations were subject to ‘national caveats’, which meant that governments held a veto on the use of their troops in missions that they regarded as unsound or too risky. The fighting was essentially done by the Americans, the British and the Canadians, with gallant support from small nations including Denmark, Holland, Romania and Estonia and special-forces contributions from the likes of Australia and Poland.

      In the spring of 2008, ISAF’s Regional Command South (RCS) was under the command of a Canadian, Major General Marc Lessard, who arrived at his post in February. Lessard had more bureaucratic than operational experience. He had seen no combat, unless you counted a spell commanding a UN Protection Force battalion in the comparatively quiet arena of Croatia in 1993 and 1994. He was regarded by the Paras as pleasant and capable with a managerial approach to leadership. He had responsibility for an enormous swathe of Afghanistan, made up of the four provinces stretching from Zabul in the east on the Pakistan frontier, across Oruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand to Nimruz on the Iranian border in the west. He had only 12,000 troops at his disposal. As the RCS Reserve Battlegroup, 3 Para were to provide an emergency force that could be helicoptered in anywhere to do anything. Their task was described as ‘full-spectrum’. It involved, according to John Boyd, ‘addressing the threat as it matured, going wherever the enemy decides to raise its profile’.

      They would also be used to try to stretch the thinly spread ISAF presence more widely across the RCS domain. ‘If there was an area that we hadn’t managed to influence because troops had not been there for some time,’ said Stu McDonald, ‘we were all clear that that’s where we were likely to be sent.’ Given the scale of the military task in southern Afghanistan, it was clear that the battalion was going to be kept very busy.

       4 Hearts and Minds

      Towards the end of March, the Paras set off on their first mission. They were going to a place that carried dark historical associations for the British Army. Maywand, in the far west of Kandahar province, was the site of an ignominious defeat. On 27 July 1880, on a sun-baked desert plain during the second Anglo-Afghan war, a British and Indian force was smashed by an army of Afghans. Nearly a thousand of the 2500 troops were killed. The battle was still remembered locally. According to legend, among the victorious fighters was a woman called Malalai, who was killed in the battle. The Taliban, overcoming their habitual, murderous misogyny, revered her as a heroine.

      Now the British were back and little had changed, physically or culturally, since their last visit. Maywand was a good place to expand ISAF’s area of operations in Kandahar province. Until now, the Canadians, who made up most of Major General Lessard’s combat troops, had concentrated on Panjwaii, a densely cultivated area west of Kandahar city. It had been infiltrated by the Taliban, whom successive operations had failed to dislodge. The arrival of a substantial British force would allow Lessard to broaden his horizons. The insurgents were believed to have a presence in the Maywand area. But the operation was less concerned with fighting than ‘influence’, persuading the local population that their best chance for a secure and prosperous future was to lend their support to the government of Afghanistan. It was a perfect opportunity for the Paras to show that, contrary to the assertions of their critics, they were comfortable СКАЧАТЬ