Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ tour had already entered military folklore, and if some of the prominent original players had departed, their ghosts still lingered on.

      Williams had taken over from Stuart Tootal, a complex figure who had sublimated himself in the drama of the campaign, reacting emotionally to its triumphs, crises and setbacks and taking each death and injury as a personal tragedy. His demanding personality had made him a few enemies among his senior officers. There were many more, though, who admired and respected him.

      Tootal’s two-year command period ended in November 2007. Early in 2008 he announced he was leaving the army. The news came as a surprise. His bosses thought highly of him and he was assumed to be on a rising path that could take him to the upper reaches of of the army. Tootal was close to several influential journalists. He used his departure to publicise what he said were serious failings in the way the government equipped the men they sent to war and the shameful treatment the wounded received when they returned home. Out of uniform he continued to speak out as a part-time media commentator, which he combined with a top job at Barclays Bank.

      To some, his decision to leave was easy to understand. Nothing could ever match the prestige of commanding an elite unit like 3 Para on the most intense operation it had faced since the Falk-lands War. Tootal told friends that if he had continued his army career, subsequent postings were unlikely to come close to matching the excitement and satisfaction he found in Helmand, no matter how far up the ladder he climbed.

      Tootal was still commanding 3 Para when it was announced that the battalion would be returning to Afghanistan in the spring of 2008 for Operation Herrick 8. The Paras would be playing a multiple role. Their main function was to act as the rapid reaction force for the NATO commander of southern Afghanistan, going wherever he thought they were needed. But they were also expected to work with 16 Air Assault Brigade, their parent formation, which was deploying at the same time in Helmand.

      During early planning meetings for Herrick 8, the brigade got used to the battalion harking back to the experiences in Herrick 4. ‘There was a feeling in 16 Brigade that…3 Para were a backward-looking organisation who only wanted to talk about Herrick 4 and didn’t want to look forward,’ said an officer. ‘Everything [the Brigade] tried to do or talk about was greeted with “well, on Herrick 4 it was like this” and “of course, you don’t understand what it’s like”. The battalion wasn’t overly popular and there was a feeling that they were pulling in a different direction.’

      Huw Williams knew as much as anyone about Herrick 4. He had been 3 Para’s second-in-command during the tour, carrying the unglamorous responsibility of keeping the battalion machine running while the colonel got on with the exhausting but exhilarating job of command. But he felt it was time to let the experience go. He was determined that the shadows cast by the legends of 2006 would not obscure the new tasks and changed circumstances facing him and his men. After taking over in November 2007 he told his men that Herrick 4 belonged to the glorious past. Everyone was to look ahead and prepare for a different situation and different role.

      The British Army had gone to Helmand in 2006 with only the sketchiest plan, which had been erased by the first contact with reality. They had been sent to a place which most soldiers regarded as being of only peripheral strategic importance. Once there, they were soon stuck with it, enmeshed in a process whose direction they were unable to control. 3 Para Battlegroup was supposed to create a climate of stability in a small area around Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in which development and reconstruction work could begin. Instead they found themselves riding to the rescue of the Afghan government whose thinly spread forces were under attack from the Taliban. Their area of operations expanded out of the original triangle bounded by Lashkar Gah, the town of Gereshk and the Camp Bastion logistics base to the northern settlements of Sangin, Musa Qaleh and Now Zad.

      In the process they became the main targets of the Taliban and sank into an intense attritional slog that lasted throughout the summer. The conflict was later presented officially as the ‘break in battle’, the fighting that has to be done to establish a force in-theatre. But the term was a post facto justification and no such exercise had been envisaged when the soldiers set out. The break in battle decided nothing. The Paras, in the judgement of one of their senior officers, were intent on ‘just surviving’. It was exhaustion which eventually brought the fighting to a close, and the welcome onset of winter.

      When spring came the Taliban re-emerged to face a new British force. The Paras had been succeeded by 3 Commando Brigade. They were relieved in turn six months later by 12 Mechanised Brigade. Then in October 2007 their place was taken by 52 Infantry Brigade.

      By the spring of 2008 there was an established pattern to the annual fighting cycle. The Taliban remained relatively inactive during the winter. The conditions were against them. Life in the open was harsh and miserable. The fields in the fertile valley floors were bare and provided no cover from which to launch attacks. They used the time to stay in their home villages and rest, or travel to their hinterland across the border in Pakistan to recruit and resupply and confer with their high command sitting safely in the border town of Quetta. By late spring they were busy again, not fighting but farming. The most important task was to harvest the poppies that dance in the breeze in the opium fields covering southern Helmand. The milky sap that oozed from the bulbs was the main source of wealth in the local economy. It was the fuel that powered the insurgency. Some of the fighters grew poppies themselves. The others earned the approval of the peasants by working alongside them in the fields. Once the crop was gathered in, the Taliban took their cut of the profits, using the revenue to pay wages and buy weapons.

      Then, rested and invigorated, their armouries and ranks replenished, they were ready to begin another summer of fighting. The Taliban were slow learners. It had taken them two fighting seasons to refine their tactics. They had started out in the summer of 2006 trying to drive out the British by weight of numbers, throwing themselves against the bases at Sangin, Now Zad and Musa Qaleh in frontal attacks that lost them many men but failed to dislodge the defenders. They seemed able to suffer remarkably high casualties without losing their will to keep fighting.

      The weight of the losses that they suffered in 2006, though, was unsupportable. Gradually the Taliban developed new approaches which reduced their own casualties while increasing the damage they could inflict on their enemies. By the start of Herrick 8 both sides were engaged in what looked like a classic ‘asymmetric’ conflict.

      Wars with insurgents were always unbalanced. One side had modern conventional weapons. The other fought with what was cheap, portable and easily improvised. But in Afghanistan the scale of asymmetry at times seemed blackly absurd. Supported by the Americans, the British had an ever more sophisticated armoury of jets and helicopters, missiles and artillery, operated by men but controlled by computers. The Taliban’s basic weapon was an AK-47 rifle of Second World War design, augmented by machine guns, RPGs and latterly home-made roadside bombs. The Allies’ satellites and spy planes and unmanned drones roamed the skies like hawks, sensitive to the slightest scurrying creature on the ground. The insurgents relied on their own eyes or those of their spies, the teenaged ‘dickers’ who appeared on rooftops or loitered at roadsides as soon as the soldiers arrived. The NATO soldiers were encased like armadillos in body armour and stomped across the fields and ditches in boots, laden with half their own body weight in kit. The Taliban wore cotton shifts and sandals.

      But the Allies’ lavish assets were failing to alter the direction of the war. The Taliban showed no sign of losing heart. The level of attacks had been mounting steadily since 2006 and their methods were growing more skilful and effective. The main change on the battlefield when the Paras arrived in 2008 was the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), home-made bombs, packed with powder from old shells or chemical fertiliser and set off by simple electric triggers. They also had to deal with the increased threat from suicide bombers. Anti-American rebels had made great use of IEDs and suicide bombs in Iraq but they had been late arriving in Afghanistan. Together, they now kept the troops in a constant state of alertness and anxiety. СКАЧАТЬ