Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop
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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