The British Army had gone to Helmand in 2006 with only the sketchiest plan, which had been erased by the first contact with reality. They had been sent to a place which most soldiers regarded as being of only peripheral strategic importance. Once there, they were soon stuck with it, enmeshed in a process whose direction they were unable to control. 3 Para Battlegroup was supposed to create a climate of stability in a small area around Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in which development and reconstruction work could begin. Instead they found themselves riding to the rescue of the Afghan government whose thinly spread forces were under attack from the Taliban. Their area of operations expanded out of the original triangle bounded by Lashkar Gah, the town of Gereshk and the Camp Bastion logistics base to the northern settlements of Sangin, Musa Qaleh and Now Zad.
In the process they became the main targets of the Taliban and sank into an intense attritional slog that lasted throughout the summer. The conflict was later presented officially as the ‘break in battle’, the fighting that has to be done to establish a force in-theatre. But the term was a post facto justification and no such exercise had been envisaged when the soldiers set out. The break in battle decided nothing. The Paras, in the judgement of one of their senior officers, were intent on ‘just surviving’. It was exhaustion which eventually brought the fighting to a close, and the welcome onset of winter.
When spring came the Taliban re-emerged to face a new British force. The Paras had been succeeded by 3 Commando Brigade. They were relieved in turn six months later by 12 Mechanised Brigade. Then in October 2007 their place was taken by 52 Infantry Brigade.
By the spring of 2008 there was an established pattern to the annual fighting cycle. The Taliban remained relatively inactive during the winter. The conditions were against them. Life in the open was harsh and miserable. The fields in the fertile valley floors were bare and provided no cover from which to launch attacks. They used the time to stay in their home villages and rest, or travel to their hinterland across the border in Pakistan to recruit and resupply and confer with their high command sitting safely in the border town of Quetta. By late spring they were busy again, not fighting but farming. The most important task was to harvest the poppies that dance in the breeze in the opium fields covering southern Helmand. The milky sap that oozed from the bulbs was the main source of wealth in the local economy. It was the fuel that powered the insurgency. Some of the fighters grew poppies themselves. The others earned the approval of the peasants by working alongside them in the fields. Once the crop was gathered in, the Taliban took their cut of the profits, using the revenue to pay wages and buy weapons.
Then, rested and invigorated, their armouries and ranks replenished, they were ready to begin another summer of fighting. The Taliban were slow learners. It had taken them two fighting seasons to refine their tactics. They had started out in the summer of 2006 trying to drive out the British by weight of numbers, throwing themselves against the bases at Sangin, Now Zad and Musa Qaleh in frontal attacks that lost them many men but failed to dislodge the defenders. They seemed able to suffer remarkably high casualties without losing their will to keep fighting.
The weight of the losses that they suffered in 2006, though, was unsupportable. Gradually the Taliban developed new approaches which reduced their own casualties while increasing the damage they could inflict on their enemies. By the start of Herrick 8 both sides were engaged in what looked like a classic ‘asymmetric’ conflict.
Wars with insurgents were always unbalanced. One side had modern conventional weapons. The other fought with what was cheap, portable and easily improvised. But in Afghanistan the scale of asymmetry at times seemed blackly absurd. Supported by the Americans, the British had an ever more sophisticated armoury of jets and helicopters, missiles and artillery, operated by men but controlled by computers. The Taliban’s basic weapon was an AK-47 rifle of Second World War design, augmented by machine guns, RPGs and latterly home-made roadside bombs. The Allies’ satellites and spy planes and unmanned drones roamed the skies like hawks, sensitive to the slightest scurrying creature on the ground. The insurgents relied on their own eyes or those of their spies, the teenaged ‘dickers’ who appeared on rooftops or loitered at roadsides as soon as the soldiers arrived. The NATO soldiers were encased like armadillos in body armour and stomped across the fields and ditches in boots, laden with half their own body weight in kit. The Taliban wore cotton shifts and sandals.
But the Allies’ lavish assets were failing to alter the direction of the war. The Taliban showed no sign of losing heart. The level of attacks had been mounting steadily since 2006 and their methods were growing more skilful and effective. The main change on the battlefield when the Paras arrived in 2008 was the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), home-made bombs, packed with powder from old shells or chemical fertiliser and set off by simple electric triggers. They also had to deal with the increased threat from suicide bombers. Anti-American rebels had made great use of IEDs and suicide bombs in Iraq but they had been late arriving in Afghanistan. Together, they now kept the troops in a constant state of alertness and anxiety. The insurgents’ new methods carried less risk to themselves than did their previous confrontational tactics. Even when they suffered losses, though, there seemed to be no shortage of replacements.
Since the first deployment there had been a progressive lowering of expectations about what the British could achieve on the military front in Helmand. One of the articles of faith of the counter-insurgency catechism was that you could not defeat an uprising by military means alone. Twentieth-century armies had shown themselves to be remarkably inefficient when it came to dealing with insurgencies. Guerrilla forces had defeated the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam and, most recently, the Russians in Afghanistan.
Victories, when they were achieved, took a long time, far longer than victories in conventional wars. In the British experience, the struggle to defeat the communist rebels in Malaya lasted from 1948 to 1960. The campaign against the Mau Mau rebels who rose against British rule in Kenya in 1952 took eight years to suppress. The British Army’s active involvement in Northern Ireland stretched for thirty-eight years. As became clear in the spring of 2009, the embers of rebellion still glowed.
Nonetheless, the high casualties that the Allies were inflicting on the Taliban encouraged initial hopes that, in a relatively short time, the insurgents might be worn down to the point where they were ready to give up or start negotiating. Brigadier Ed Butler, the senior British officer in Helmand during the Paras’ 2006 tour, declared as they left for home in mid-October that ‘the Taliban [are] on the back foot and we are in the ascendancy’. He claimed the insurgents were ‘having trouble with their resupply lines, getting resources and ammunition through’ and that ‘the morale of the foot soldier has lowered’. He was speaking after the fighting in Musa Qaleh had been halted by a deal brokered by the tribal elders of the town. They promised to raise a local militia to police the area if the Taliban and British withdrew. The ceasefire that followed lasted until early February 2007, when the Taliban took over the town following the killing of one of their leaders in an American airstrike. They murdered the elder who inspired the plan and terrorised the inhabitants. It was not until December that the Alliance retook the town.
The Alliance commanders tended to be cautious in their military assessments, avoiding talk of ‘winning’ and ‘victory’. Instead they emphasised the holistic nature of the operation. The fighting was unfortunate. But it was necessary to establish the climate of security that would allow southern Afghanistan to be healed, physically and morally.
Throughout the summer of 2007, 12 Mechanised Brigade maintained pressure on the Taliban, mounting vigorous sweeps through the Sangin Valley and driving them out of Sangin town. Whenever they encountered the insurgents they defeated them. But, as their commander, Brigadier John Lorimer, acknowledged, this, on its own, achieved little. ‘When we close with the Taliban we beat them,’ he said. ‘But the critical