Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ tactics. Even when they suffered losses, though, there seemed to be no shortage of replacements.

      Since the first deployment there had been a progressive lowering of expectations about what the British could achieve on the military front in Helmand. One of the articles of faith of the counter-insurgency catechism was that you could not defeat an uprising by military means alone. Twentieth-century armies had shown themselves to be remarkably inefficient when it came to dealing with insurgencies. Guerrilla forces had defeated the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam and, most recently, the Russians in Afghanistan.

      Victories, when they were achieved, took a long time, far longer than victories in conventional wars. In the British experience, the struggle to defeat the communist rebels in Malaya lasted from 1948 to 1960. The campaign against the Mau Mau rebels who rose against British rule in Kenya in 1952 took eight years to suppress. The British Army’s active involvement in Northern Ireland stretched for thirty-eight years. As became clear in the spring of 2009, the embers of rebellion still glowed.

      Nonetheless, the high casualties that the Allies were inflicting on the Taliban encouraged initial hopes that, in a relatively short time, the insurgents might be worn down to the point where they were ready to give up or start negotiating. Brigadier Ed Butler, the senior British officer in Helmand during the Paras’ 2006 tour, declared as they left for home in mid-October that ‘the Taliban [are] on the back foot and we are in the ascendancy’. He claimed the insurgents were ‘having trouble with their resupply lines, getting resources and ammunition through’ and that ‘the morale of the foot soldier has lowered’. He was speaking after the fighting in Musa Qaleh had been halted by a deal brokered by the tribal elders of the town. They promised to raise a local militia to police the area if the Taliban and British withdrew. The ceasefire that followed lasted until early February 2007, when the Taliban took over the town following the killing of one of their leaders in an American airstrike. They murdered the elder who inspired the plan and terrorised the inhabitants. It was not until December that the Alliance retook the town.

      The Alliance commanders tended to be cautious in their military assessments, avoiding talk of ‘winning’ and ‘victory’. Instead they emphasised the holistic nature of the operation. The fighting was unfortunate. But it was necessary to establish the climate of security that would allow southern Afghanistan to be healed, physically and morally.

      Throughout the summer of 2007, 12 Mechanised Brigade maintained pressure on the Taliban, mounting vigorous sweeps through the Sangin Valley and driving them out of Sangin town. Whenever they encountered the insurgents they defeated them. But, as their commander, Brigadier John Lorimer, acknowledged, this, on its own, achieved little. ‘When we close with the Taliban we beat them,’ he said. ‘But the critical part is what happens after that…we need to make sure that we can clear the Taliban from those areas so that the government can extend its influence and authority to help the local people.’

      His successor, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, who led 52 Infantry Brigade into Helmand in October 2007, shared Lorimer’s analysis. He said as he took over, ‘we are concentrating our efforts towards a balance between offensive operations we know are required to counter the Taliban…against those operations we know will make a difference in the medium to long term, such as the reconstruction and development, bringing on the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police’. He concluded: ‘What I’d like to be able to do is a lot more of the latter than the former.’

      But that was not how things worked out. Measured by the volume of shooting, the level of violence in Helmand showed a steady upward curve in the eighteen months after the British arrived in 2006. In the course of the ‘break in battle’, the 3 Para Battlegroup fired 470,000 rifle and machine-gun bullets. In Herrick 5, a roulement that covered the supposedly quiet winter months, the number more than doubled to 1.225 million. In Herrick 6 it doubled again to 2.485 million. In Herrick 7, despite Brigadier Mackay’s intentions, it dipped only slightly to 2.209 million. These figures are only for bullets fired by rifles and medium and heavy machine guns on the ground. They do not include tens of thousands of 105mm and 88mm rounds fired by the artillery and mortars, and the thousands of cannon shells, rockets and bombs showered down by the British and NATO helicopters and jets.

      There was little to show for all the spent ammunition. Following the ousting of the Taliban from Musa Qaleh and Sangin, some but not all refugees from the fighting returned home. The bazaars stirred back into life and farmers resumed their weekly trek to the markets to sell their crops, sheep and goats. This was progress, but only if the situation was being compared with the dark days of the summer of 2006. No one would claim that the civilians’ existence was better now than it had been before the British arrived.

      The high hopes at the start of the mission had encouraged visions of grand construction projects that would help pluck Helmandis from medieval squalor and ease them into the twenty-first century. By the spring of 2008 there were few improvements to report. The task of supervising the rebuilding programme lay with the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team, drawn from the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Ministry of Defence. The dangers of life in Helmand had severely restricted their activities. Their work was limited to funding and managing at arm’s length small schemes such as refurbishing schools, cleaning the streets and improving small stretches of road.

      Like the military, the civilian players in Helmand had learned to dampen optimism about what their presence could achieve. They discouraged attempts to measure progress in terms of new hospitals, schools and colleges. They downplayed their own role in the great enterprise. They were there to aid a metamorphosis called ‘Afghanisation’, a transformation by which the government and people of the country turned away from factionalism and alienation and took charge of their own affairs.

      The soldier leading 16 Air Assault Brigade to Helmand was finely attuned to the realities he was facing. Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith impressed almost everyone who came across him. He was short and slight with blue eyes, fair hair and light skin. Despite a traditional upper-class military background he was a very modern British warrior. He was educated at Eton and Durham University and was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1986. He spent the following years alternating sharp-end soldiering in dangerous places with high-powered staff appointments. Much of his active service had been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. When appointed to lead 16 Air Assault Brigade he was forty-two, the youngest one-star general in the British Army, and he was being given charge of its newest and largest brigade.

      Carleton-Smith was charming and intelligent. He had a winning ability to translate his thoughts into pithy, inspirational language. In the pre-deployment preparations he devoted time to going around his units, explaining what he thought they should be doing and how they were going to do it. He talked to everyone, from majors down to privates fresh out of the depot.

      ‘He made a real point of articulating what he saw as the strategic direction,’ said Huw Williams. ‘He talked to all of us, the soldiers as well. Where we were going, not just in Herrick 8 but where we were on the path and where that path ultimately led. We didn’t have any of that last time. Then it was really a case of “well, let’s go out and see what happens.”’

      Carleton-Smith started his talks by stating that violence was not a measure of success. ‘He said that we actually wanted to be coming back saying we hadn’t fired that many bullets or had that many contacts and we didn’t kill that many people,’ Huw Williams remembered. ‘His line very much was that we were not going out to fight at every opportunity and should consider sometimes withdrawing from a battle which we could win but which would have no strategic effect. We hadn’t got that sort of direction before.’

      Among those sitting in the planning meetings was Major Ben Howell, of 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, who would be commanding the batteries providing fire support to the Paras. Howell was clever, well read and had a sceptical and enquiring mind. He thought he recognised the source of some of Carleton-Smith’s СКАЧАТЬ