Afganistan: What A Bloody Hopeless War

Yesterday three suicide bombers killed at least 19 people across Afghanistan, including four Canadian soldiers in an attack that tested NATO's claim of success in driving insurgents from this volatile southern region, thus proving that the areas that Nato said that were secured were not secured - why is that? Below is the horrible truth of what is happening to our NATO forces.

Extracted from The Sunday Times
September 10, 2006

The past week 19 British troops have been killed in Afghanistan. An officer who has quit the army in disgust at its strategy tells Christina Lamb of a campaign going wrong

When Captain Leo Docherty of the Scots Guards entered Sangin in May as part of the first British force to seize the Taliban stronghold, he was horrified to discover that they had so little intelligence they did not even know the location for the district chief’s headquarters which they were supposed to secure and use as their base. “We fought our way into town then were literally asking people where the building was,” he recalled. “Our intelligence was zero. Absolutely f****** zero.”

His Carry on up the Khyber story of Sangin epitomises how what was meant to be a low-risk reconstruction mission has degenerated into the bloodiest combat faced by British troops since the Korean war. Since June, the small dusty town with a dry riverbed through its centre has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Helmand and the graveyard of six British soldiers.

There, as in other small towns in northern Helmand such as Nawzad, Musa Qala and Kajaki, British forces have been under siege. Often running out of food because of the dangers of resupply, they have been forced to drink canal water, and left fighting hand to hand or reliant on bombing from the likes of A10 tankbusters. “Every single location where we have troops is now coming under attack every single day,” admitted a senior MoD official.

Docherty’s experience left him so disillusioned that he quit the army on his return to Britain last month. “I don’t want to be involved in this big clumsy operation that’s going on, which is lethal but pointless,” he said. “It’s completely barking mad.”

His damning first-hand account of life in the field confirms the misgivings of many in what has been the worst week for the British forces since they deployed in Helmand, losing 19 men in six days. It was also by far the most violent week in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. On Friday, the deadliest suicide bomb in Kabul since the removal of the Taliban left 18 dead, including two US soldiers. This was the second car bomb in the Afghan capital in four days. In a crisis meeting in Warsaw Nato military chiefs pleaded for 2,000 extra troops.

Yet according to Docherty the problem is not just lack of troops and resources but also ill-thought-out strategy and lack of local knowledge. He is well positioned to comment, having worked as aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, commander of the Helmand taskforce. He then led a team advising the Afghan National Army (ANA) that accompanied British troops to take Sangin. “Col Knaggs said at the beginning that we needed to contain the Taliban and not get sucked in,” he said.

“We had all these study days before deploying, looking at how we dealt with the Malaya insurgency of the 1950s and how we were going to use the same strategy of first creating these secure zones or ink-spots around the main locations of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk and then move out. The whole focus was supposed to be not high-intensity fighting but construction of a nation state. Instead we’ve deviated spectacularly from the plan and scattered in a meaningless way across northern towns of Helmand. To withdraw from these now would be seen as defeat, but the only way to survive is to increase the level of violence.”

Docherty points to Sangin as where it all started to go wrong. He was based at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Robinson, mentoring the ANA, when the orders came to “seize Sangin and re-establish governance”.

Their force was so under-equipped that they had to borrow an old Ford pick-up to transport all the men and had no night- vision goggles. But they nevertheless managed to enter the town on May 25 via the wadi or dry river bed that runs from the east to its centre. Sangin is the centre of the narcotics industry in what is the biggest poppy-growing province in Afghanistan, but there was little fighting as most of the Taliban had melted away. Even though an 11-year-old boy was killed in the capture of the town, accidentally shot through the head, locals were initially friendly. Once they had located their intended base, the British were able to go into the bazaar buying mangoes and fresh nan bread.

“It was a completely wasted opportunity,” said Docherty. “We had a two-week window where we could have done something and shown local people this is why we’re here. But the military is just one side of the triangle and there was no representation by any of the other players (the Foreign Office or Department for International Development). DfID should have been there saying this is the plan, we’re going to sink these wells, pave the bazaar, build this bridge. But they would not come because to them it’s insecure, so they left us unable to offer anything. We did not even get any Information Ops people to explain to locals why we were there. Eventually the Taliban came back and all hell broke loose.”

By late June the British paratroopers who arrived as reinforcements were under siege inside the small compound. “All they were doing was absorbing bullets,” said Docherty. “The only way they could survive was through cannon fire from A10s. FOB Robinson was pounding the town with 30 rounds of heavy explosive from 105mm guns every night. These are hardly surgical tools and I shudder to think of the civilian casualties.”

“All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed or who have had to flee are going to turn against the British,” he said. “It’s a pretty clear equation — if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I would. We’ve been grotesquely clumsy — we’ve said we’ll be different to the Americans who were bombing villages, then behaved exactly like them. To my mind we’ve lost the hearts and minds before we’ve even begun.”

When the British forces held shuras or meetings with local elders, the tribesmen openly told them they were also attending shuras held by the Taliban. If there was any doubt that southern Afghanistan is now a battlefield, Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, said last week that his men have already expended 400,000 rounds of ammunition. “The fighting is extraordinarily intense,” he said.

The number of casualties is alarming. Last weekend alone, Nato reported killing 200 militants near Kandahar.

Numbers are hard to verify as the Afghans immediately remove the bodies, and the total reported killed this summer comes to more than Nato’s own assessments of Taliban in the area. “We are killing far too many people,” says a top British military officer. “They can’t all be Taliban.”

“Before I went to Afghanistan I was excited, but our approach has been simplistic,” said Docherty. “We keep talking of Taliban to refer to the whole spectrum from the diehard militant to farmers.” “The trap the coalition forces are in is that the Taliban are no longer the Taliban, they are disillusioned Afghans,” said Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council, an international policy think tank that has offices in Helmand. Last week his organisation put out a report entitled The Return of the Taliban in which it warned that half the country is once more under Taliban control.

“We’re adding violence to violence,” he said. “Each time we kill so-called Taliban we’re creating new enemies. Not only is there no hearts and minds happening in the south, it’s the exact opposite. The international community needs to realise that the whole nature of the insurgency has changed. You’re no longer fighting a small group of troublemakers but a civil war where you’re perceived as having taken one side.”

After having personally experienced a hearts-and-minds mission to a village where we were ambushed and pinned down in trenches for more than two hours, I can vouch that it certainly feels like a war on the ground.

One of the big problems is the pervading belief that the British forces are really in Helmand to eradicate the poppy. “The Taliban have won the information war,” admitted a senior military officer last week. “Everyone is convinced we’re there to destroy the poppy and thus their livelihood. We’ve not provided any information to farmers so why should they think any different?” As if to underscore the challenge facing the alliance, UN officials announced last weekend that Afghanistan’s opium harvest grew by 59% this year, to a record 6,100 tons — about 92% of the world’s supply.

Poppy aside, there was a clear intelligence failure in terms of massively underestimating the numbers and commitment of the Taliban. But Docherty believes many of Britain’s woes in Helmand can be traced to an incident near the start in May in which some British Pathfinders mistakenly killed some Afghan police. Although the police had not been wearing uniform, the governor was furious. “He gave the colonel a real dressing-down which set the tone for a relationship in which the governor’s will has been dominant.”

It was this that led to British troops being scattered across northern Helmand, where they are exposed. “Far from containing the Taliban, we’ve been sucked in and put ourselves in such a precarious position that we have to increase the level of violence in order to protect ourselves. Having troops in these places is not achieving anything.”

General David Richards, the British general who recently assumed command of Nato forces in Afghanistan, had expressed his reservations about this strategy and was expected to withdraw them when he took over at the end of July. But so far this has not happened. A senior MoD official insisted: “Our presence in these places means the Taliban cannot take over the towns and also dissipates their presence elsewhere in Helmand.”

Although he argued that Sangin was of strategic importance as the entrance to Baghran valley, where Taliban commanders are thought to be, he conceded it was harder to make a case for Nawzad and Musa Qala. “But to withdraw would be exploited by the Taliban.”

According to testimony gathered by the Senlis Council, the subsequent fighting has led to displacement of thousands of people into makeshift camps where children are starving. “Hunger creates anger,” warned Reinert. “We are facing an emergency-scale humanitarian crisis. What people need is not democracy but food and water.”

He points out that $82.5 billion (£44.25 billion) has been spent on military operations since 2002 compared with just $7.3 billion on development. There is anger too that even in Helmand’s main city of Lashkar Gah, where the British headquarters is based, they have failed to provide protection to the headmistress of the girls’ school, who receives daily death threats from the Taliban.

While the battle for the control of Afghanistan rages in the south, the Taliban’s influence has been steadily creeping north. Last week the UN sent a memo to its staff warning them against consuming alcohol in public places and advising female workers to cover their heads.

Britain is belatedly focusing on the other side of the border in Pakistan where they believe the Taliban are being trained. Soldiers and diplomats were horrified at Pakistan’s sudden decision last week to withdraw its troops from the border province of North Waziristan, believed to be a safe haven for senior Al-Qaeda. It was no coincidence that all three British service chiefs were present at the Pakistan Defence Day reception at its high commission on Wednesday.

Everyone admits that the British forces left it too late to go into Helmand, allowing the Taliban to regroup and train while the West was distracted in Iraq. Although the deployment is officially for three years, all senior military officers are now talking in terms of a 10-year campaign. It is thought they will request a further 1,000 British troops to be sent next spring on top of the 4,000 already there.

In the meantime Afghanistan is becoming increasingly like Iraq: “The day Corporal Bryan Budd’s death in Sangin was reported last month, it was on page 10, while Pete Doherty’s mother was on the front,” complained one of his commanding officers. “How do you think that makes soldiers feel?”