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