Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ Steve Board-man, the head of the NKET team, whose raison d’être was ‘influence’, with identifying some projects that could be completed in the four weeks the battalion was scheduled to be there. Williams ‘said to him I want to have an immediate impact because I’m going to be standing in front of locals and they’re going to say “what can you do for us?’”

      Working on information gleaned from previous ISAF visits, Team Pink decided the school would be a good place to start. ‘We’d been told that the structure of the building wasn’t too bad,’ said Boardman. ‘But they were in dire need of desks and chairs and pupils’ The story of the school would be dispiriting for anyone going to southern Afghanistan expecting quick and lasting results. The building was almost new. It had been built only four years before by a Japanese charity, which had arrived in Hutal while the Taliban was still recovering from its 2001 defeat, done its good deed and moved on. Now, when Jamie Loden saw it for the first time, ‘the windows were broken and the paint was peeling’. There were, as reported, no chairs, no desks and few pupils. The school building could accommodate nearly a thousand children, but no more than a hundred were turning up, and then only intermittently. The teachers’ attendance was equally haphazard. Their absence was partly due to Taliban intimidation, and partly because most of them lived in Kandahar which, although not far away, was still a difficult and dangerous commute. The reasons why the building had fallen into such disrepair were never explained.

      Within a few days of the Paras’ arrival life began to return to the school. ‘It didn’t need very much work from us to freshen it up,’ said Loden. ‘We arranged for it to be repainted and for a whole load of new desks and tables to be brought in as well as exercise books and Afghan flags’ They also distributed footballs and found, as British soldiers did everywhere they went, that the game was ‘a universal language. We went in and through an interpreter talked about football and had all the kids cheering.’

      At the end of the Paras’ time in Hutal there were 450 children and adolescents going to classes, drawn from the town, the surrounding villages and nearby nomadic settlements. They were being taught Pashto, some maths and the Koran. All the pupils were male. Local custom did not allow boys and girls to be taught together, and to extend education to females would require building a separate school.

      The builders and suppliers all came from round about, paid by Williams from funds put at his disposal to help the influence effort. One source of money was the Post Operational Relief Fund, which had been established to soothe local feelings if fighting had destroyed buildings or killed humans or livestock. In total, Williams had £20,000 a month to spend, which went quite a long way in Afghanistan.

      ‘A’ Company had not anticipated much trouble during its deployment in Hutal. ‘B’ Company under Stu McDonald, along with Huw Williams and his Tactical HQ group, landed in the countryside to the south-east of the town in the expectation of a fight. Intelligence reported that it was home to a number of low-level Taliban leaders who lived in compounds in the fertile strip along the Arghandab river. The company had been supplied with a list of likely targets. They were also expecting to encounter Taliban fighters on their way to and from the Sangin valley from Pakistan, whose border lay about 200 kilometres to the south. At the same time the Canadians were conducting another operation to push the Taliban out of Panjwaii, which lay east, along the river. The hope was that the insurgents would flee into the guns of the waiting Paras. ‘As it transpired,’ said McDonald ruefully later, ‘nothing happened.’ He led raids on several compounds that were supposed to be occupied by insurgents to find empty beds and blank faces. The Paras soon suspected that the intelligence they were working on was old, and if the Taliban had ever been in the locations they were targeting they had now moved on.

      The exercise did at least have the merit of familiarising the newcomers to the battalion with the sights and sounds of rural Afghanistan. The scenes they witnessed in the fields and compounds of Maywand seemed strikingly rough and primitive. To Lieutenant Tosh Suzuki, a twenty-five-year-old who had chosen the Paras over a banking career, ‘it was really like going back in time. They were using the same irrigation methods almost as in the Middle Ages. The way they were channelling their water, building their mud huts, the tools they used…It’s pretty impressive that they have such a hard life but they’re still very determined to carry on with that livelihood’.

      The cultural gulf between soldiers and peasants was brought home to him the first time he went out on patrol. Suzuki and his platoon had been tasked with searching a compound. It had attracted attention because of its size and the apparent affluence of its owner, whose tractor and two trucks made him a man of substance in Maywand. This wealth pointed to a connection with the drugs trade, and the drugs trade was enmeshed tightly with the Taliban.

      Suzuki took a six-man section through the front door, leaving another section of ANA soldiers to wait outside. It was a mistake. They were surrounded instantly by ‘screaming, banshee women, hysterical essentially’. There was no man present to act as an intermediary as the males of the household had apparently fled at the first sight of the soldiers. Suzuki and his men beat a retreat. He then sent the ANA in to try to calm the situation. Eventually the women agreed to gather together in one room and the search went ahead. The lesson was that Afghan faces should front such operations and that, if things were to go smoothly, you needed a male in the compound who could usher the women out of sight. On subsequent searches, Suzuki was always careful to push the ANA to the fore.

      Ten days into the deployment a similar search turned up an interesting discovery. The Paras stumbled on two large shipping containers lying in a corner of a compound. They broke open the doors and found five new electricity generators, which, it turned out, had been trucked in for use in UN offices in Kabul but had been hijacked somewhere along Highway One. McDonald, frustrated at the lack of action, consoled himself that the discovery was ‘worth something’. The generators had cost £2 million new and if they had made it across the border to Pakistan could have been sold to buy weapons or hire gunmen.

      The Paras now had to decide what to do with the loot. It seemed easiest to regard it as Afghan government property, and the generators were moved to Hutal for disposal. District Leader Zaifullah decided that the prizes were his to distribute and had to be persuaded to release one for use in the local clinic and another to power the new FOB. He was given one for his compound where, it was reckoned, it would at least have some valid use, providing electricity for the room set aside for shuras, meetings with representatives of the local communities. The ANA decided that they were taking the other two. ‘They said they were taking them off to their general to show him, because they had seized them,’ said McDonald. ‘When we pointed out to them that we had seized them and they had no part in the operation they said don’t worry, we’ll bring them back. We told them they couldn’t [take them]. We woke up one morning, they were on the back of their truck and they were driving through camp.’ McDonald was told not to worry about it and to regard it as a heartening display of initiative.

      There was a simple explanation for the calm in Band-e-Timor. The Paras had arrived just at the start of the poppy harvest. It was a laborious business involving every able-bodied member of every farming family from the ages of eight to eighty. They moved through the fields, making incisions in the bulb below the delicate pink and white petals with a multi-bladed knife. The plants were left for a few days for a milky sap to ooze out, which was then scraped off with a wooden spatula. The process was repeated two or three times until all the resin had been collected.

      The arrival of a patrol in the fields was the signal for work to stop and suspicious and hostile eyes to turn towards the interlopers. ‘Their initial concern was that we were there to eradicate the poppies,’ said McDonald. ‘As soon as it became clear that we weren’t, they were quite happy’ The message was reinforced at the impromptu shuras the Paras held in every village they visited. ‘The elders would come out and want to speak to you,’ McDonald said. ‘And in order to get our message across as to why we were there and to reassure them, we sat down and had a chat with them at every opportunity and said, listen, we’re not here for the poppy…we СКАЧАТЬ