3 Para. Patrick Bishop

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       5

       The Road to Sangin

      By the second week in May, all the elements of 3 Para had arrived in Bastion. Tootal felt he now had a battle group to command, although he was still waiting for some of his gunners and engineers and all of the HCR’s D Squadron. The engineers in place were making constant improvements to the camp. Bastion was expanding all the time. No one could complain about the conditions now. There were rows of air-conditioned tents connected by duckboard runways. Soldiers could get their laundry done, eat decent food and call home on the welfare phones. Mobile phones had to be surrendered on arrival, for ‘operational security’ reasons. There was also a high risk that homesick Toms would run up crippling bills calling their loved ones in the UK.

      At night you could sit outside a Western-style coffee shop, enjoying the relative coolness, drinking Cokes and smoking. Bastion was a cigarette-friendly zone, with men and women sparking up with abandon. Booze was another matter. The camp, like every other military facility in the area, was dry.

      Tootal thought the time was now right to start delivering the ‘Sangin effect’. This was his plan to expand the British presence northwards into the towns and villages that ran along Helmand’s river valleys. It would deliver the British government’s wish to ‘deny terrorists an ungoverned space’. Discussions went on throughout April between the battle group and the Canadian forces in neighbouring Kandahar province as to how this could be done.

      The intention was given impetus by the new governor of Helmand, Engineer Mohammed Daoud. The appointment of Daoud appeared to be proof of the central government’s resolve to bring order to the province. He was a ‘technocrat’ from the east of Afghanistan who had headed an NGO distributing wheat to the poor before the arrival of the Taliban. He was forced to flee over the Pakistan border to Quetta, where he met and became close to Hamid Karzai. His reputation contrasted favourably with that of his predecessor. Sher Mohammed Akhunzada had been forced out of office by pressure from NATO. Suspicions that he was a player in the drugs trade seemed confirmed, early in 2006, when counter-narcotics agents raided his offices and discovered nearly 9 tons of raw opium. His own men had seized the dope, he explained, and he was just on the point of handing it in. He was given the consolation prize of a seat in the upper house of the national assembly. To placate the powerful Akhunzada family, his brother, Amir, was put in as Daoud’s deputy.

      Daoud was considered to be as honest as it was possible to be in the treacherous and venal world of Afghan politics. He was a Pashtun, like most people in Helmand, but had no strong tribal affiliations. He was close to President Karzai and was identified with the forces of progress and modernity. ‘He was the right man for the job,’ said Ed Butler. ‘He was a developer. He was a reconstructor. He could think long term.’ He was also very insistent that the British were there to support him and that he had a right to call on their resources to shore up his authority wherever it was challenged.

      Daoud had formed the unfortunate belief that the battle group was much more powerful than it in fact was. He assumed that the great majority of the 3,300 soldiers arriving in Helmand would be ‘bayonets’ and that, in the words of a senior British officer, ‘there were going to be three thousand Paras running around all over the place’. The number of fighting soldiers in the battle group, including the Royal Irish, the Gurkhas and, later, the Fusiliers, was less than a third of the overall number. The others were there to support them. Try as they might, British commanders never succeeded in managing Daoud’s extravagant expectations.

      Daoud was also frustrated by the battle group’s late arrival. The deployment had been delayed while the Dutch prevaricated over their contribution to the NATO effort in southern Afghanistan. As a result, said Daoud, there was a ‘security gap’ in Helmand, which the Taliban were now exploiting energetically. Encouraged by the security vacuum, they had been arriving in large numbers from exile in Pakistan and were urging local leaders to join them in a holy war. Four out of the twelve district police chiefs had been killed in the six months before the Paras arrived. In the spring of 2006, the outlying northern district of Baghran fell under insurgent control.

      The British plan was to secure the Triangle, then gradually extend their presence northwards up the heavily populated Helmand river valley as conditions and resources allowed. The obvious place from which to begin delivering the ‘Sangin effect’ was a bleak desert camp, a few miles south of Sangin town, called FOB Robinson, which had been built by the Americans. It was easily defended and well placed to disrupt the insurgents’ movements up and down the valley.

      The possibility of putting a British company in there had been discussed. But Tootal was wary of placing his men in a fixed location where half their energies would go into defending themselves. His preference was to man the base with Afghan National Army troops who had passed through training courses that, in theory at least, had turned them into decent soldiers. They then received further instruction from British OMLTs (Operational Mentoring Liaison Teams) provided by soldiers from 7 RHA. The CO of 7 RHA, Lieutenant Colonel David Hammond, was happy to put an Afghan battalion, under the control of his OMLTs, into Robinson.

      That would leave a Para company free to patrol the area, supporting the ANA and carrying out their own operations, engaging with the local people and generating a climate of security. They would spread the message about development and prepare the ground for the PRT, but also fight the Taliban where they found them.

      This arrangement would be easier to sustain than a fixed presence. The force’s movements would be unpredictable and, it was hoped, keep the enemy off balance. It required fewer men than the labour-intensive business of garrisoning a fixed base. Above all, the risk of getting bogged down was minimised.

      Before the operation could be launched, however, the Taliban seized the initiative. On 18 May, gunmen launched a fierce attack on the district centre in Musa Qaleh, a small but symbolically and strategically important town in northern Helmand. About twenty members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) were killed. Musa Qaleh was 60 miles south of Baghran, which was already in insurgent hands. The attack suggested that the Taliban were now set on a campaign to seize the towns of the north, and use them as a springboard for the conquest of the whole area.

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