3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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not hide them from the House or the country – those risks are nothing compared to the dangers to our country and our people of allowing Afghanistan to fall back into the hands of the Taliban and the terrorists. We will not allow that. And the Afghan people will not allow that.’
It was a reassertion of the claim that Afghanistan was the front line in a war whose effects, if it went wrong, would be felt painfully in the cities of Britain. That had been the argument for invading Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, Britain had been under pressure from America to supply troops to continue the ongoing NATO mission of stabilisation in Afghanistan. The plan was now moving into its third stage. The ‘easy’ parts had been done. The area around Kabul and the northern and western regions were relatively peaceful. Now it was time to concentrate on the south. Tony Blair answered the call willingly. Since 9/11, he had committed Britain to playing a major role in Afghanistan. His government had proved that it honoured its NATO responsibilities and would do so again, even though the deployment would place a further strain on the country’s stretched military resources.
The south of Afghanistan had been neglected after the fall of the Taliban. In 2002 the Americans and their allies had put most of their effort into squeezing the life out of what remained of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the mountainous east of the country. Since 2003, their military effort had been diverted into fighting the war, and then the insurgency, in Iraq. The American troops based in Afghanistan concentrated on targeted operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.
The material help that was promised after the Taliban were driven out of the main cities was slow in coming to the south. There had been little reconstruction and no large-scale deployment of troops to secure the region. In the absence of any Afghan or foreign soldiers to stop them, the Taliban, many of whom had fled to Pakistan after their defeat, began drifting back to Helmand and Kandahar provinces. It was their historic home. Kandahar was the birthplace of the movement. Most Taliban were Pashtun and the provinces were Pashtun territory, part of an ethnic belt that stretched across the border to Pakistan. At the beginning of 2006 they were trying to re-establish themselves through violence and intimidation, murdering and terrorising anyone associated with the government and its NATO coalition allies.
ISAF was led by NATO. It was set up by the United Nations Security Council to secure the country and allow the authority of the central government to take hold. Its operations had begun in the capital, Kabul, and slowly expanded throughout the country in planned stages. Now it had reached stage three – the establishment of Regional Command South.
The British would be part of a multinational force of about nine thousand soldiers. The contributing nations included Canada, Holland and Denmark. The command rotated among the lead nations. The Canadians would be the first to hold it. The battle group’s area of operations would be Helmand, which was in dire need of development but was also the scene of increasingly vigorous insurgent activity.
Defence Secretary Reid made it clear that combating the Taliban resurgence would be one of the battle group’s main tasks. The troops were being sent to ‘deny terrorists an ungoverned space in which they can foment and export terror’. The underlying, long-term aim was to ‘help the people of Afghanistan build a democratic state with strong security forces and an economy that will support a civil society’. In the British area of operations this would be done through the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which would work with the military, the British Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) to deliver a ‘tailored package of political, developmental and military assistance’. The specific mission was to ‘help train the Afghan security forces, to facilitate reconstruction and to provide security, thereby supporting the extension of the Afghan Government’s authority across the province’. This last phrase would come to have a powerful significance when the battle group began their work.
As if this was not enough, there was a further aspect to the mission. Helmand was opium poppy country. Poor farmers relied on the poppy to make a living, selling their crop to local drug lords. The troops, said Reid, would be expected to ‘support international efforts to counter the narcotics trade which poisons the economy in Afghanistan and poisons so many young people in this country’. Nine-tenths of all the heroin on British streets originated in Afghanistan, he claimed. Once again, decisive action in a far-flung place could benefit British society.
It would be claimed later that Reid had presented the mission as a risk-free exercise in nation-building. This was based on an interview he gave to the BBC’s Today programme in April, just as the deployment was beginning. On a crackly line from Kandahar, NATO’s main base in the south, he said that ‘if we came for three years here to accomplish our mission and had not fired one shot at the end of it we would be very happy indeed’.
In the months that followed, as the British mission grew more and more hazardous and shots were fired by the hundreds of thousands, these words would be repeated by critics as evidence of his naivety. In fact the phrase was ripped out of context. Reid had been frank about the risks from the start. In the same interview he declared that ‘although our mission … is primarily reconstruction it is a complex and dangerous mission because the terrorist will want to destroy the economy and legitimate trade, and the government that we are helping to build up’.
The way the task force was structured made it clear that trouble was expected. The Helmand Task Force was drawn primarily from 16 Air Assault Brigade based in Colchester. At its heart was 3 Para, who, as its commander was proud to boast, ‘fight on their feet’. Without air support, however, they could not function. That was to be provided by seven CH-47 helicopters provided by the Royal Air Force. The twin-rotored Chinooks, with their huge lift capacity, were the main workhorses of the task force. They were armed only with three machine guns and needed protection. This was the job of eight Apache attack helicopters from 9 Regiment of the Army Air Corps, which were being deployed for the first time with the British Army. They also played a crucial role in supporting ground troops when they were under attack. Four Hercules C-130 transports would be supplied by the RAF.
The fighting core of the force was 3 Para. They were reinforced by a company from the Royal Gurkha Rifles and a detachment from the Royal Irish Regiment. The Household Cavalry Regiment (HCR) with their Scimitars and Spartans would supply an armoured element. The Royal Horse Artillery’s 7th Parachute Regiment (7 RHA) would contribute a battery of 105 light guns. The operation was supported by a parachute-trained squadron of engineers from 23 Engineer Regiment, units from the Royal Logistics Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and medics from 16 Close Support Medical Regiment.
An advance force of engineers were set to go to Helmand ahead of the main deployment to build camps, protected by a company from the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando. By July, about 3,300 troops were expected to be in place in Helmand, excluding the engineers building the camps. The task force could also call on the assistance of American bombers, support and attack helicopters, and other NATO countries were considering offering fighter cover and transport aircraft.
The size of the ‘force package’, as it was called, had been the subject of long debate in London. Men and materiel were in short supply owing to commitments in Iraq. Reid described the deployment as ‘substantial’, and said that it was sufficient to ‘maximise their chances of success and minimise the risks’. The battle group’s senior officers were reasonably content with what they were given, though like all commanders they would always have preferred to have more. But that view would alter as the original mission changed and the force’s responsibilities spread far beyond their original intended area of operations, stretching manpower and resources to the limits. ‘The fact is’, said a senior ISAF commander after the Paras had returned home, ‘that the 3 Para battle group … was woefully insufficient for the tasks that were being laid on it.’
The operational boundaries of the deployment were vague and elastic from the start. Reid said the British were not going ‘because we want to wage war’, and that the military assets were intended ‘to deter and defend ourselves’. But the political and military landscape they were entering made war fighting inevitable. There were several powerful interests seeking to direct their actions, voices that could not be ignored. They were fitting into a multinational force