Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop
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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