Читать книгу Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan - Patrick Bishop - Страница 12

Towards the end of March, the Paras set off on their first mission. They were going to a place that carried dark historical associations for the British Army. Maywand, in the far west of Kandahar province, was the site of an ignominious defeat. On 27 July 1880, on a sun-baked desert plain during the second Anglo-Afghan war, a British and Indian force was smashed by an army of Afghans. Nearly a thousand of the 2500 troops were killed. The battle was still remembered locally. According to legend, among the victorious fighters was a woman called Malalai, who was killed in the battle. The Taliban, overcoming their habitual, murderous misogyny, revered her as a heroine.

Now the British were back and little had changed, physically or culturally, since their last visit. Maywand was a good place to expand ISAF’s area of operations in Kandahar province. Until now, the Canadians, who made up most of Major General Lessard’s combat troops, had concentrated on Panjwaii, a densely cultivated area west of Kandahar city. It had been infiltrated by the Taliban, whom successive operations had failed to dislodge. The arrival of a substantial British force would allow Lessard to broaden his horizons. The insurgents were believed to have a presence in the Maywand area. But the operation was less concerned with fighting than ‘influence’, persuading the local population that their best chance for a secure and prosperous future was to lend their support to the government of Afghanistan. It was a perfect opportunity for the Paras to show that, contrary to the assertions of their critics, they were comfortable with the ‘warm and fuzzy stuff.’

Their efforts would be centred on Hutal, the administrative centre of Maywand district. Maywand lay on the border with Helmand. Afghanistan’s main east-west road, Highway One, ran through it, connecting Kandahar with the important southern Helmand towns of Gereshk and Lashkar Gah. Until now ISAF troops had paid only fleeting visits. The idea was to establish a strong presence in Maywand that would act as a link in the chain of ‘development zones’, the bubbles of relative safety that the alliance was trying to form around Kandahar, Gereshk and Lashkar Gah.

Hutal was a town by the standards of the region. It had a few run-down public buildings, a school, a number of mosques and a population of several thousand—no one knew exactly how many—living in a cluster of mud and breeze-block compounds. It was close to the Arghandab river system, which irrigated a wide swathe of cultivated land. The main crop in the springtime was opium poppies.

To the south-west of the town was the district of Band-e-Timor. This lay across an important route used by the Taliban to get men and supplies from safe areas in Pakistan to the south to the Sangin Valley in the north, where they had been fighting since 2006. They used the same route to take out opium to Pakistan. It was thought that the absence of foreign troops made Band-e-Timor a potential haven for fighters recuperating from their battles in neighbouring Helmand.

Hutal, which appeared on some maps as Maywand town, occupied a strategic location on Highway One, which ran through the middle of the town. This was a vital social and economic artery, but driving on it required strong nerves. Travellers ran a high risk of running into Taliban checkpoints where they would be forced to pay a ‘tax’, or bandits who simply robbed them. The road was also studded with IEDs, planted by the insurgents to menace the convoys that supplied Camp Bastion, the large British base in the desert north of Lashkar Gah.

The mission was code-named Sohil Laram III. All designations were in Pashto now, to give a more ‘local’ feel. The Paras approached the task with enthusiasm. Most of the soldiers who had been there in 2006 felt sympathy and concern for the people they were fighting among. They were moved by the harshness and poverty they saw in the villages and fields. They were contemptuous of the indifference and cynicism of those who supposedly ruled them, and the cruelty of the Taliban, who wanted to take their place. Their experience in Hutal was to teach them that anyone going to Afghanistan with good intentions should expect to be disappointed, not least by Afghans who were supposed to be on your side.

3 Para had two tasks. They were to secure Hutal so engineers could build a forward operating base (FOB) there. The base would then be taken over by the Afghan National Army (ANA), which would secure the town and the neighbouring stretches of Highway One. The Paras were also to roam the neighbouring district of Bande-Timor, disrupting Taliban operations, fighting them wherever they found them, and preventing them from launching attacks on Hutal. Initially ‘A’ Company were to take charge of the town while ‘B’ Company dealt with the countryside. Later they would swap roles. If the operation succeeded it would establish a centre of stability and security and lay the foundations for growth. The long-term intention was to make the local people friends of the government and their foreign backers, and enemies of the insurgents.

Sohil Laram was, said Williams, ‘very much an influence operation’. But influencing the people of Hutal and the surrounding countryside was going to be a delicate task. Afghans had grown to mistrust foreigners and their extravagant promises. They had been listening to propaganda prophesying good times ever since 2001. In many places little had happened. In large parts of southern Afghanistan things had got drastically worse.

The Paras began deploying on 26 March. At first light, ‘B’ Company were dropped by helicopter in Band-e-Timor. ‘A’ Company had set off by road shortly before. It was less than a hundred kilometres from KAF, but the journey took twelve hours. There were ninety vehicles all told, a mixture of Viking and Vector troop carriers, Canadian Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) from the Kandahar Task Force and low-loader lorries carrying the stores. There was also a detachment of ANA troops mounted on Ford Ranger pick-up trucks, the advance party for the force that would eventually man the FOB that was to be built in town. They travelled with a Canadian mentoring team.

The convoy moved without headlights. The Afghans had no night vision goggles, which made initial progress painfully slow. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before they arrived. They stayed a few miles to the south-east of the town, setting up a camp in the desert on the far side of the highway, a ‘leaguer’ in army parlance, which would be the logistical base for the operation.

They spent the night there, and the following afternoon ‘A’ Company, the ANA and their Canadian mentors moved into town, travelling along a back route and making many detours to avoid damage to the poppy crop, which was flowering nicely in the surrounding fields.

The company commander, Jamie Loden, together with the colonel in charge of the Afghan force, went straight to the town’s ramshackle administration centre to meet Haji Zaifullah, the leader of Maywand district, and his chief of police. Zaifullah had a residence in the town but spent only part of his time there, preferring to return to the more civilised surroundings of Kandahar city at weekends. He appeared to be in his late thirties, wore a sleek black beard and seemed friendly and hospitable. ‘He was very charming and he was always very welcoming,’ said Loden. But it was clear from the beginning that behind his smiling manner he was determined to resist any challenge to his authority from the newcomers, British, Canadian or Afghan. Governor Zaifullah was to give the Paras a masterclass in the complexities of local power politics and teach them that dealing with their supposed friends could be as demanding as tackling their enemies.

The first item to discuss was the site of the proposed ANA strongpoint. The ANA colonel overrode the translator’s efforts to keep up and began talking directly to the district leader, to the bafflement of the non-Pashto speakers. ‘Inside the District Centre there was quite a high tower,’ Loden remembered. ‘We went up there, myself, the district leader, the chief of police, the Afghan colonel and his Canadian mentor. And we got into this sort of pissing contest about where we were going to locate this place.’ Zaifullah bristled at any perceived slight to his authority. ‘The district leader was trying to say you can go there and the Afghan army guy was saying [no] we want to go over there.’ The point at issue was ‘who was the most important’. As the argument ground on Loden’s anxiety mounted. Dusk was falling and his men had nowhere to stay. Eventually they agreed to suspend the debate until the following day. Everyone dossed down that night in a partially built police station located on some waste ground directly opposite the District Centre on the northern side of the town. The police compound, after being properly reinforced, was to end up being the Paras’ base for the duration of their stay.

The following day the discussion resumed. This time the party made a tour of the town while the colonel and Zaifullah ‘argued the toss about what could and couldn’t go where’. Finally agreement was reached that the FOB would be centred on a series of compounds that lay below an old fort, behind the main bazaar, 250 metres to the west of the District Centre. The colonel departed a contented man. The following day Zaifullah announced that he had changed his mind again. It was only after a further wearying round of talks that he allowed the decision to stand.

When detailed discussions got under way to award the labour contracts for the project there was more trouble. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams’ standard procedure was to give work to locals wherever possible. But the district leader began by insisting that the contracts would go to his nominees. Once again there was a further bout of wrangling before the matter was settled.

The Paras began patrolling as soon as they arrived. The locals seemed friendly. There had been no trouble in the town itself for eighteen months. The Taliban’s interest lay in Highway One. Mainly the reaction was one of curiosity. The inhabitants had seen ISAF soldiers from time to time but in small numbers and not for very long. Now there were several hundred troops in town and they were eager to know what they were planning.

Huw Williams was determined that the Paras would leave Maywand better than they found it. He had tasked 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 understand that it’s your only means of support for your family and until an alternative livelihood is found you can continue this.’

As long as the harvesting went on the calm was likely to continue. The insurgents were as keen as anyone to get the crop in. Some of the men toiling in the field belonged to local Taliban groups or were tied to them by blood or sympathy. The organisation as a whole depended on the profits from opium, through their own processing or marketing of it or the ‘taxes’ they raised from farmers, to fund their operations. In the words of Mark Carleton-Smith, opium ‘supercharged’ the insurgency. When in power, the Taliban had been fierce opponents of the opium trade. Now they relied on it to finance their comeback. The ideological difficulties this turnaround presented were easily overcome on the grounds that it was Western unbelievers who would suffer most from the flood of heroin pouring out of southern Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s intimate connection with the trade was brought home to McDonald a little later, after the company moved into Hutal. He was called up on to the roof of the base to witness an alarming sight. A huge convoy of pick-up trucks was trundling down the wadi, a dried riverbed that ran through the town, heading for Highway One. ‘It was about two hundred vehicles,’ he said. ‘I counted about eight hundred fighting-age males coming down the road, which clearly alarmed us.’ A team from the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence bureau which worked closely with the soldiers, raced out to question them. The men replied innocently that they were just transient workers on their way to help with the poppy harvest. It was clear to McDonald, though, that ‘they were the same [men] we would be fighting in months to come’. The harvesters climbed back into their pick-ups and ‘drove down the wadi. They waved at us and we waved at them.’

‘B’ Company’s stint in the countryside settled down into a routine of daily patrols during which they tried to make friends with the farmers, holding shuras and setting up a clinic where the medics could treat minor aches and pains. The willingness of the local people to talk was an encouraging sign. The patrols came across leaflets produced by the Taliban, warning locals that the penalty for fraternising with the occupiers was death. But it seemed to the Paras that the population felt they had more to fear from the Afghan National Police who were supposed to protect them than they did from the insurgents. The police were under the control of District Leader Zaifullah and appeared to be concerned only with their own interests and his.

The conduct of the police came up at every shura. ‘Every village we went into, they complained to us,’ said McDonald. The locals pleaded with him ‘to stop the ANP coming here, saying they beat us up and they steal our money’. The police were not only corrupt but potentially hostile. Early on the morning of 10 April, a patrol in the vicinity of the desert leaguer came under small-arms and mortar fire from what seemed to be an ANP position. The Paras refrained from shooting back. The police chief later claimed that the shooters were not his men but Taliban masquerading in stolen uniforms.

The identification of friend and foe was a constant preoccupation, whether in town or country. Soldiers were always alert to the presence of dickers, bystanders who passed on information to the unseen Taliban about their movements. Even the most innocent-looking activity might well turn out to be a hidden signal. It was noticed that whenever a patrol set off from the base in Hutal, smoke from a nearby chimney turned from white to black, and one of the children who hung around a taxi rank in the centre of town would run away and talk into a mobile phone when a helicopter came in to land.

The combination of stretched nerves and erratic Afghan driving resulted in some tragic blunders which damaged the soldiers’ attempts to portray their presence as benign. Just after 7 a.m. on 1 April, a Toyota was seen driving erratically near a Para position. Almost daily, the intelligence briefings were warning of the likelihood of suicide bombers, whether in cars, motorbikes or on foot. Often the information was quite specific, detailing the location of the likely attack and the make and year of the car involved. The soldiers all knew the drill for dealing with a suspicious approaching vehicle. First they fired a few rounds over its roof. If it kept coming they shot at the engine block. If that failed to deter the driver they aimed at the occupants. In this episode, as was by no means uncommon, the driver seemed oblivious to the rounds flying around him and continued driving towards the soldiers. They opened up, wounding him and his passenger. There was a similar incident two weeks later when two men on a motorbike were shot after they failed, after repeated warnings, to stop at a checkpoint. In both cases the casualties were evacuated by helicopter to KAF for emergency treatment in the base hospital. They recovered, apologies were issued and compensation paid. But the incidents reinforced the feeling in the fields and the bazaars that the arrival of foreign soldiers brought more harm than good.

McDonald had found on his travels around the villages of Band-e-Timor that for all their antipathy to the police and ambivalence towards foreign troops, people welcomed the presence of the Afghan army. ANA soldiers usually came from outside the immediate area and had no ties to corrupt local officials or to tribal leaders. The news that a fort was being built in Hutal which would establish a permanent army presence was welcomed. When Huw Williams arrived back from Kandahar on 4 April, however, he found that progress on the FOB’s construction was being held up. Once again, the district leader was at the root of the problem. Haji Zaifullah had showed little sign of bending to the new wind blowing through his fiefdom. His response to the arrival of construction workers had been to try to divert them away from their task of building the FOB in favour of carrying out improvements to his official residence. When Williams vetoed the project he tried another ruse to wring some advantage from the situation.

It came to light that when truck drivers tried to load sand from a local wadi to fill up the Hesco Bastion containers that formed the walls of the fort, they were stopped by Zaifullah’s men, who demanded a tax for trucking the ballast away. When Williams heard about the new scam he decided to adopt an emollient approach. The politics of the situation left him no other choice. The British were in Afghanistan to reinforce the authority of the government. That meant doing nothing to erode the standing of its local representatives, no matter how venal and corrupt they might be. The CO trod carefully when he called on the district leader to broach the subject: ‘I said that he was obviously a powerful man with much influence in the area and I needed his help.’ Williams explained what had happened at the wadi, without letting on that he knew who was behind the extortion attempts, and warned that if the situation was not sorted out the FOB could not be built.

There was ‘a lot of sucking of teeth’ before Zaifullah admitted that it was he who was taxing the trucks. He claimed that the revenue raised would be used on local services and that the system was ‘good for the people’. Williams countered deftly by saying that in that case he would pay the money himself, directly to the government in Kabul. ‘He said, oh no, you can’t do that, it has to be paid here. I said, well, maybe we can pay it in Kandahar.’ After accepting finally that his bluff had been called, Zaifullah issued a letter exempting the truck drivers from the sand tax.

These encounters were wearing and frustrating but Williams understood the necessity of keeping cool and playing the game. ‘I couldn’t go in there and say “stop taxing me” because I would have been undermining him. I knew that I was dealing with someone who is corrupt but I was conscious of the difference between the person and the office he represented. Sooner or later he would be moved on. But the office would still stand and I couldn’t be seen to be weakening it.’

From the outset, Williams had also done what he could to communicate directly with the local notables, calling a shura soon after his arrival to introduce himself. The meeting took place in the open in the district leader’s compound. About seventy elders turned up, men who owed their authority to their relative wealth or membership of a prominent family. Williams and his team explained their mission and asked their guests for their reactions. The response was sceptical. ‘We got the normal accusations,’ said Williams. ‘That you always come and offer but you never deliver.’ He had decided that the best hope of winning any degree of confidence was to ‘humanise myself so I appeared not just as a Western soldier there on a task. I said I was a family man. [I told them that] we didn’t need to come to Afghanistan but the government that you elected has asked us to.’

Williams had reported his difficulties with Zaifullah to his superiors in Kandahar, who passed the information up the political chain. The district leader’s behaviour was annoying and frustrating. It started to become alarming when it became clear that, contrary to the assurances the Paras had given the farmers, he was determined to mount a poppy eradication programme in the area. On 3 April ANP vehicles that had been escorting a convoy of tractors on their way to destroy some crops came under fire from what were said to be Taliban gunmen in fields about eight kilometres north of Hutal. Jamie Loden received an urgent request from the district leader to help his men. Loden was determined not to embroil his troops in a shoot-out over opium and replied that he would assist in extracting casualties but there would be no question of sending reinforcements. By the end of the day no casualties had been reported. The incident, though, had opened a new and dangerous front in the Brits’ dealings with the local authorities.

Zaifullah’s eagerness to wipe out the poppy crop aroused immediate suspicions. For one thing, he was under no compulsion to do anything about opium cultivation in his district. The government eradication programme was selective. It was only in force in areas where there was a viable alternative cash crop available to growers. That was not the case in Maywand, where, as Huw Williams put it, ‘they grow poppy and get money for it or they starve’. When Zaifullah was challenged he maintained that he was under specific orders from the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, to mount an eradication effort.

Enquiries uncovered an alternative explanation for the district leader’s unusual zeal. Zaifullah, it turned out, had extensive poppy fields of his own. His intention, the Paras suspected, was to wipe out his rivals’ crops in order to increase the value of his own. Rumours were later picked up on the ground that farmers could exempt their produce from the attentions of the police by paying a hefty bribe.

In the absence of any intervention from outside Afghan authorities, Williams had little choice but to appear to cooperate. On the evening of 8 April, Zaifullah visited him and told him that an eradication operation was taking place the following day. By now the distict leader had managed to obtain reinforcements from the provincial ANP to support the local police, who, it was increasingly clear, functioned when needed as his personal militia. Williams agreed to position vehicles from his Patrols Platoon near the fields scheduled for eradication but said they would intervene only if the ANP got into trouble. There would also be air support available if needed. As it was, 9 April passed without incident. The dangers of coalition forces being seen to support the nefarious activities of a notoriously corrupt official were obvious. But still nothing was done by the provincial or national authorities to restrain their man in Maywand.

On 11 April the Paras were told that the police would be carrying out a week-long eradication mission in the area of Now-Khar-Khayl, which lay on a bend of the Arghandab river about sixteen kilometres south-east of Hutal. Williams agreed that Patrols Platoon would watch over Afghan policemen involved in the operation but go to their aid only if they were in serious difficulties. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts reported that the Taliban were aware of the operation and were prepared to attack the police once the work got under way.

The operation began the following day. Around noon, Patrols Platoon heard gunfire coming from the fields. Williams ordered it to stay put and await instructions. The district leader, however, radioed his men to tell them to stand and fight, shoring their morale with the news that the British would shortly be coming to their rescue. When it became clear that no reinforcements were on the way he contacted Williams with ever more alarming reports from the battlefield. Just after 1 p.m. he claimed that fifteen to twenty of his men were dead and those remaining were running out of ammunition.

Williams was sceptical. He requested an overflight by a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with an on-board camera. The images it beamed back told a less dramatic story. There was no sign of any major clash and the Paras stayed put. The district leader’s appeals had also been relayed back to Kandahar via the ANP. The Americans responded by sending two attack helicopters. They hovered over the supposed battlefield but found nothing to report and returned without engaging. The true story of what happened in the fields of Now-Khar-Khayl never emerged. It seemed probable that any shooting directed at the ANP was as likely to have come from farmers defending their livelihood as from the Taliban. In this instance, the two groups could have been one and the same thing.

Zaifullah’s failure to inveigle British forces into backing him rankled and he complained to the governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khalid, to whom he was closely allied. The governor backed his protégé in Maywand, issuing a media statement claiming that a senior British officer in the district was encouraging local farmers to grow poppies. The row bubbled up the political chain until it reached Kabul and the British envoy Sherard Cowper-Coles. The ambassador dismissed the accusation and declared that the Paras were obeying the government’s own instructions, which stated that the eradication programme did not apply to Maywand. The row subsided, but in the Paras’ eyes the district leader had forfeited all respect.

Zaifullah’s standing with the people he governed was made clear a few days after the eradication debacle. At mid-morning on 14 April, four men turned up at the base at Hutal asking to see the senior British officer. They were representing a group of forty elders from Band-e-Timor who had come with them to the town. Williams was away at a meeting in KAF and they were welcomed by Stuart McDonald, who had moved with his men to the town to change places with ‘A’ Company. The visitors were angry and agitated, complaining about a raid that had taken place in their area the previous night. Men had been arrested, compounds had been damaged and vehicles set on fire. McDonald replied truthfully that it had nothing to do with the British. Later it transpired that it was an American operation that the British had not been informed of, a regular occurrence in southern Afghanistan. McDonald was backed up by an Afghan army mullah, who was as vociferous as the elders. ‘[He] spent about five minutes angrily shouting them down, saying I’ve been with these people for a number of weeks and they’re genuinely here to help you.’ He also emphasised the common religious ground between them, claiming that the soldiers were ‘good Christians’. He assured them that ‘whereas we believe in different gods they do have our respect for religion [and] this isn’t part of some crusade’. The mullah was a valuable ally in the struggle to win trust. ‘His presence was probably the single greatest factor in creating a very amiable atmosphere right from the outset,’ said McDonald. ‘They seemed to be quite reassured by virtue of the fact that he was there.’

As they talked it became clear that anger over the raid was just the catalyst for the visit. They wanted to talk of many things, and most of all about the behaviour of the district leader.

McDonald invited them to return with the rest of the group later in the day when the CO would be back. The initial plan was to hold a shura in the schoolhouse, but an intelligence tip warned that there was a threat that the meeting would be attacked. They gathered instead, at five o’clock, out of the sun in a large room inside the Paras’ compound. Williams sat with McDonald, Steve Boardman and the ANA mullah at the front, facing the visitors. The first ranks were filled with the most venerable of the elders. Behind them came the younger men, who would move forward to whisper their contributions in the ears of their seniors.

The spokesmen started off by spelling out to Williams the simple facts of their harsh life. ‘They said they were just farmers,’ he recalled. ‘They had families and they simply wanted security for them and their children. They didn’t want to fight us and they didn’t want to fight the Taliban. They just wanted to get on with farming.’ They were disarmingly frank about the source of their livelihood. ‘They told me they did grow poppy but they didn’t care what they grew. It made no difference to them whether it was poppy or wheat—but no one was buying wheat. People were buying poppy. So what choice did they have?’

The men seemed to be between about thirty and eighty, though it was hard to tell precisely. The harshness of life and the scorching sun dried skin and ironed in wrinkles, ageing adults far beyond their actual years. Only a few dominant males spoke. Occasionally, when they made a forceful point, others would jump to their feet in passionate agreement. They told Williams that the Taliban had been active in their area but insisted that none of them was a Taliban supporter, though Williams was disinclined to take this at face value. They certainly seemed to have no reason to have any warm feeling towards the Taliban. ‘They said they take our food and don’t give us any money move into our compounds, beat us.’

The local police, however, treated them just as badly. An old man got to his feet to show off a large bruise, the result of a beating at the hands of the ANP the previous week. Then the elders came to the point. They had come to ask for the Paras’ help. They hated and feared the police. Only the British could provide real security. What they wanted was an army base in Band-e-Timor like the one that was being built in Hutal.

Williams was impressed by what he had heard. ‘I was convinced that they were genuine because it wasn’t all good news. They weren’t saying we don’t grow poppy and we don’t let the Taliban in. They were saying, yes we do, because it’s the only thing we can sell. And we let the Taliban in because we’re scared and how can we not? If we don’t put them up for the night they’ll kill us.’

At the close, Williams promised to hold another shura to which every elder in the district would be invited. He promised to try to secure the attendance of a senior government official from the province as well as a general from the Canadian-led Task Force Kandahar. Local and national media would be invited to make sure that their concerns were given the widest possible airing. If all went well there would be more than a hundred people coming, so to accommodate everyone they would have to meet at the school and a security plan was drawn up to protect against suicide bombers.

The great shura never took place. The meeting would mean little without the presence of the main power broker in the area, Governor Asadullah Khalid. But when the Canadians at the head of Regional Command South approached him to request his presence he flatly refused to attend. A few days before, the Canadian Foreign Minister, Maxime Bernier, had visited Afghanistan and received briefings from NATO officers, diplomats and Canadian soldiers on the ground in southern Afghanistan. By the time he met Afghan President Hamid Karzai he had formed a low opinion of the president’s representative in Kandahar. He accused Asadullah of corruption and of holding up Canadian humanitarian aid donations to the area. At a press conference after the encounter he effectively called on Karzai to sack him. Bernier’s intervention was presented as a diplomatic faux pas and nothing happened. Asadullah ceased cooperating with the Canadians in protest and the elders of Hutal lost their chance to vent their feelings. It fell to Stuart McDonald to break the news. He found it ‘professionally embarrassing. You tell these people in good faith that you’ll do your utmost to try and help them and then it didn’t happen. There were a few disappointed looks coming across the table.’

After the shura with the elders of Band-e-Timor, McDonald had come to the conclusion that any further operations in their area would ‘do more damage than good given that it [affected] the same people who had come to us and asked for our help’. Williams agreed and a plan for ‘A’ Company to raid some suspected insurgent compounds was called off. Instead they were sent on another mission, in line with the Paras’ role as Regional Command South’s mailed fist.

Williams passed a report of his meeting with local elders up the line. The truth was there was nothing he could do then and there to meet the elders’ concerns. No matter how cautious Williams had been with his promises, the Paras’ presence had raised expectations that, owing to the dearth of men and resources, they could not fulfil. ‘We weren’t about to expand down there and I wasn’t going to build a base,’ he said. There were many other places that demanded ISAF’s attention before they reached Band-e-Timor. It would be another four months before the Paras returned to the region.

Nonetheless, as they prepared for their withdrawal on 25 April, they could feel some sense of achievement. The FOB was finished and ready for the arrival of a company of ANA soldiers, who would patrol the town and secure the neighbouring stretch of Highway One. More than $200,000 had been spent on reconstruction. School attendance figures had gone up fourfold. The reactions of the local people suggested they could be persuaded to see the British as potential friends rather than aggressive interlopers.

The Paras could also claim that their stay in the area had hastened the end of Haji Zaifullah’s colourful political career. At one of the shuras organised by McDonald, the district leader had been left in no doubt about how people felt about his rule. They made some pretty strong accusations’, said McDonald. They were pointing at him, saying, “You’ve done nothing for your people. You’re here to line your own pockets.”’ The police present carefully noted the names of anyone who spoke out against their boss.

Zaifullah, though, seemed unconcerned by the criticism. He told McDonald afterwards that his accusers were ‘all Taliban’. Jamie Loden had had plenty of time to study Zaifullah. He felt that he had learned something important from their encounters about the subtleties of local power structures and the fluidity of interests and allegiances. ‘He wasn’t noticeably anti-government and he wasn’t pro-Taliban. He was just concerned with improving his own lot in life. In many ways what that operation illustrated for those who hadn’t appreciated it was the complexity of the Afghan problem.’ Anyone involved in development had to understand that ‘individuals in power will be corrupt to varying degrees, and their interests will be dictated by furthering their own influence or power’. There was a lesson there for everyone. ‘Perhaps some of the people and particularly the young soldiers thought that when you get to Afghanistan [the people you come across] are either good people or enemy. This made them appreciate that it is actually far more complex than that.’

Nonetheless, the Paras’ reporting of Zaifullah’s activities and attitudes had emphasised his unsuitability in the brave new world of good governance and accountability that they were there to promote. The stories also added evidence to the dossier piling up against his patron, Asadullah Khalid. Although the Canadian Foreign Minister’s candour concerning the Kandahar governor was interpreted in the media as a blunder, his remarks could not be ignored. Four months after the Paras left, Khalid was sacked and Zaifullah was fired with him.

The Paras got back to KAF to a warm welcome from Major General Lessard. For a while Sohil Laram III was talked of as a model influence mission. But long-term success required continuity of commitment and energy. The British were replaced in Hutal by soldiers drawn from Portugal’s contribution to the ISAF force. There had been some uncertainty about the date of their arrival following discussions about the terms and conditions of their deployment. The Portuguese had requested the same standards of comfort that they were used to in KAF. They included canteen-quality food and an ice-cream machine. They also wanted air-conditioning units for their accommodation and a cash dispensing machine. The requests were all rejected.

On 24 April the Portuguese arrived in Hutal. ‘B’ Company under Stu McDonald were there to conduct the handover. The new arrivals went to the now almost completed FOB. The Portuguese commander announced that he and his men belonged to a crack unit, a claim that was met with some surprise by the Paras. ‘They were overweight, sweaty and wore very tight uniforms,’ said one. ‘They did not look like serious soldiers.’ The commander sought confirmation from McDonald that the Paras patrolled in vehicles. McDonald replied that they patrolled on foot. The commander said that they would be operating mounted patrols as they were ‘only a company strong’. McDonald pointed out that the Paras were only in Hutal in company strength themselves.

Later that day a convoy arrived bearing the Portuguese stores. The Paras watched them unloading the containers. ‘When they cracked the first one open it was full of booze,’ said one surprised onlooker. That night the newcomers strung up lights and held a party. In the morning the Paras waited at their base to formally hand over to their replacements. At the appointed hour no one had appeared. After twenty minutes, a platoon commander arrived who seemed the worse for wear from the previous night’s revelry. McDonald left ‘with a twinge of sadness…we genuinely felt we were making a difference in the latter stages’. At least some of the local people would agree with that assessment. As always in southern Afghanistan, the question was: how long would it last?