Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

Despite the terminology emphasising the collective nature of the international military presence in Afghanistan, it was the Americans who dominated. They contributed nearly half the ISAF troops spread around the country, leaving Britain trailing a distant second. In the spring of 2008, ISAF was under the command of one American general who a few months later handed over to another.

Apart from dominating ISAF, America was conducting its own separate war in Afghanistan under the aegis of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the anti-terrorism campaign established after the 2001 attacks in America to hunt down and kill or capture Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders. But the apparent separation of structures did not greatly simplify operations for ISAF and the British. America was the senior partner in NATO and insisted on following its own instincts and methods, even when these clashed with the approach that the British were trying to pursue.

The lines of command inside ISAF itself were complex, an inevitable result, apologists would say, of the number of nations involved in the alliance. There would be occasions on 3 Para’s tour when they suffered as a result of the friction caused by the machine’s numerous moving parts. A bigger problem was the differing degrees of commitment that the participants brought to the mission. Most countries were anxious to keep their troops out of the firing line, and all operations were subject to ‘national caveats’, which meant that governments held a veto on the use of their troops in missions that they regarded as unsound or too risky. The fighting was essentially done by the Americans, the British and the Canadians, with gallant support from small nations including Denmark, Holland, Romania and Estonia and special-forces contributions from the likes of Australia and Poland.

In the spring of 2008, ISAF’s Regional Command South (RCS) was under the command of a Canadian, Major General Marc Lessard, who arrived at his post in February. Lessard had more bureaucratic than operational experience. He had seen no combat, unless you counted a spell commanding a UN Protection Force battalion in the comparatively quiet arena of Croatia in 1993 and 1994. He was regarded by the Paras as pleasant and capable with a managerial approach to leadership. He had responsibility for an enormous swathe of Afghanistan, made up of the four provinces stretching from Zabul in the east on the Pakistan frontier, across Oruzgan, Kandahar and Helmand to Nimruz on the Iranian border in the west. He had only 12,000 troops at his disposal. As the RCS Reserve Battlegroup, 3 Para were to provide an emergency force that could be helicoptered in anywhere to do anything. Their task was described as ‘full-spectrum’. It involved, according to John Boyd, ‘addressing the threat as it matured, going wherever the enemy decides to raise its profile’.

They would also be used to try to stretch the thinly spread ISAF presence more widely across the RCS domain. ‘If there was an area that we hadn’t managed to influence because troops had not been there for some time,’ said Stu McDonald, ‘we were all clear that that’s where we were likely to be sent.’ Given the scale of the military task in southern Afghanistan, it was clear that the battalion was going to be kept very busy.

4 Hearts and Minds (#u341fac4e-8716-5611-acc5-9d3865ec293d)

Towards the end of March, the Paras set off on their first mission. They were going to a place that carried dark historical associations for the British Army. Maywand, in the far west of Kandahar province, was the site of an ignominious defeat. On 27 July 1880, on a sun-baked desert plain during the second Anglo-Afghan war, a British and Indian force was smashed by an army of Afghans. Nearly a thousand of the 2500 troops were killed. The battle was still remembered locally. According to legend, among the victorious fighters was a woman called Malalai, who was killed in the battle. The Taliban, overcoming their habitual, murderous misogyny, revered her as a heroine.

Now the British were back and little had changed, physically or culturally, since their last visit. Maywand was a good place to expand ISAF’s area of operations in Kandahar province. Until now, the Canadians, who made up most of Major General Lessard’s combat troops, had concentrated on Panjwaii, a densely cultivated area west of Kandahar city. It had been infiltrated by the Taliban, whom successive operations had failed to dislodge. The arrival of a substantial British force would allow Lessard to broaden his horizons. The insurgents were believed to have a presence in the Maywand area. But the operation was less concerned with fighting than ‘influence’, persuading the local population that their best chance for a secure and prosperous future was to lend their support to the government of Afghanistan. It was a perfect opportunity for the Paras to show that, contrary to the assertions of their critics, they were comfortable with the ‘warm and fuzzy stuff.’

Their efforts would be centred on Hutal, the administrative centre of Maywand district. Maywand lay on the border with Helmand. Afghanistan’s main east-west road, Highway One, ran through it, connecting Kandahar with the important southern Helmand towns of Gereshk and Lashkar Gah. Until now ISAF troops had paid only fleeting visits. The idea was to establish a strong presence in Maywand that would act as a link in the chain of ‘development zones’, the bubbles of relative safety that the alliance was trying to form around Kandahar, Gereshk and Lashkar Gah.

Hutal was a town by the standards of the region. It had a few run-down public buildings, a school, a number of mosques and a population of several thousand—no one knew exactly how many—living in a cluster of mud and breeze-block compounds. It was close to the Arghandab river system, which irrigated a wide swathe of cultivated land. The main crop in the springtime was opium poppies.

To the south-west of the town was the district of Band-e-Timor. This lay across an important route used by the Taliban to get men and supplies from safe areas in Pakistan to the south to the Sangin Valley in the north, where they had been fighting since 2006. They used the same route to take out opium to Pakistan. It was thought that the absence of foreign troops made Band-e-Timor a potential haven for fighters recuperating from their battles in neighbouring Helmand.

Hutal, which appeared on some maps as Maywand town, occupied a strategic location on Highway One, which ran through the middle of the town. This was a vital social and economic artery, but driving on it required strong nerves. Travellers ran a high risk of running into Taliban checkpoints where they would be forced to pay a ‘tax’, or bandits who simply robbed them. The road was also studded with IEDs, planted by the insurgents to menace the convoys that supplied Camp Bastion, the large British base in the desert north of Lashkar Gah.

The mission was code-named Sohil Laram III. All designations were in Pashto now, to give a more ‘local’ feel. The Paras approached the task with enthusiasm. Most of the soldiers who had been there in 2006 felt sympathy and concern for the people they were fighting among. They were moved by the harshness and poverty they saw in the villages and fields. They were contemptuous of the indifference and cynicism of those who supposedly ruled them, and the cruelty of the Taliban, who wanted to take their place. Their experience in Hutal was to teach them that anyone going to Afghanistan with good intentions should expect to be disappointed, not least by Afghans who were supposed to be on your side.

3 Para had two tasks. They were to secure Hutal so engineers could build a forward operating base (FOB) there. The base would then be taken over by the Afghan National Army (ANA), which would secure the town and the neighbouring stretches of Highway One. The Paras were also to roam the neighbouring district of Bande-Timor, disrupting Taliban operations, fighting them wherever they found them, and preventing them from launching attacks on Hutal. Initially ‘A’ Company were to take charge of the town while ‘B’ Company dealt with the countryside. Later they would swap roles. If the operation succeeded it would establish a centre of stability and security and lay the foundations for growth. The long-term intention was to make the local people friends of the government and their foreign backers, and enemies of the insurgents.

Sohil Laram was, said Williams, ‘very much an influence operation’. But influencing the people of Hutal and the surrounding countryside was going to be a delicate task. Afghans had grown to mistrust foreigners and their extravagant promises. They had been listening to propaganda prophesying good times ever since 2001. In many places little had happened. In large parts of southern Afghanistan things had got drastically worse.

The Paras began deploying on 26 March. At first light, ‘B’ Company were dropped by helicopter in Band-e-Timor. ‘A’ Company had set off by road shortly before. It was less than a hundred kilometres from KAF, but the journey took twelve hours. There were ninety vehicles all told, a mixture of Viking and Vector troop carriers, Canadian Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) from the Kandahar Task Force and low-loader lorries carrying the stores. There was also a detachment of ANA troops mounted on Ford Ranger pick-up trucks, the advance party for the force that would eventually man the FOB that was to be built in town. They travelled with a Canadian mentoring team.

The convoy moved without headlights. The Afghans had no night vision goggles, which made initial progress painfully slow. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before 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 of its size and the apparent affluence of its owner, whose tractor and two trucks made him 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 troops, people welcomed the presence of the Afghan army. ANA soldiers usually came from outside the immediate area and had no ties to corrupt local officials or to tribal leaders. The news that a fort was being built in Hutal which would establish a permanent army presence was welcomed. When Huw Williams arrived back from Kandahar on 4 April, however, he found that progress on the FOB’s construction was being held up. Once again, the district leader was at the root of the problem. Haji Zaifullah had showed little sign of bending to the new wind blowing through his fiefdom. His response to the arrival of construction workers had been to try to divert them away from their task of building the FOB in favour of carrying out improvements to his official residence. When Williams vetoed the project he tried another ruse to wring some advantage from the situation.

It came to light that when truck drivers tried to load sand from a local wadi to fill up the Hesco Bastion containers that formed the walls of the fort, they were stopped by Zaifullah’s men, who demanded a tax for trucking the ballast away. When Williams heard about the new scam he decided to adopt an emollient approach. The politics of the situation left him no other choice. The British were in Afghanistan to reinforce the authority of the government. That meant doing nothing to erode the standing of its local representatives, no matter how venal and corrupt they might be. The CO trod carefully when he called on the district leader to broach the subject: ‘I said that he was obviously a powerful man with much influence in the area and I needed his help.’ Williams explained what had happened at the wadi, without letting on that he knew who was behind the extortion attempts, and warned that if the situation was not sorted out the FOB could not be built.

There was ‘a lot of sucking of teeth’ before Zaifullah admitted that it was he who was taxing the trucks. He claimed that the revenue raised would be used on local services and that the system was ‘good for the people’. Williams countered deftly by saying that in that case he would pay the money himself, directly to the government in Kabul. ‘He said, oh no, you can’t do that, it has to be paid here. I said, well, maybe we can pay it in Kandahar.’ After accepting finally that his bluff had been called, Zaifullah issued a letter exempting the truck drivers from the sand tax.

These encounters were wearing and frustrating but Williams understood the necessity of keeping cool and playing the game. ‘I couldn’t go in there and say “stop taxing me” because I would have been undermining him. I knew that I was dealing with someone who is corrupt but I was conscious of the difference between the person and the office he represented. Sooner or later he would be moved on. But the office would still stand and I couldn’t be seen to be weakening it.’

From the outset, Williams had also done what he could to communicate directly with the local notables, calling a shura soon after his arrival to introduce himself. The meeting took place in the open in the district leader’s compound. About seventy elders turned up, men who owed their authority to their relative wealth or membership of a prominent family. Williams and his team explained their mission and asked their guests for their reactions. The response was sceptical. ‘We got the normal accusations,’ said Williams. ‘That you always come and offer but you never deliver.’ He had decided that the best hope of winning any degree of confidence was to ‘humanise myself so I appeared not just as a Western soldier there on a task. I said I was a family man. [I told them that] we didn’t need to come to Afghanistan but the government that you elected has asked us to.’

Williams had reported his difficulties with Zaifullah to his superiors in Kandahar, who passed the information up the political chain. The district leader’s behaviour was annoying and frustrating. It started to become alarming when it became clear that, contrary to the assurances the Paras had given the farmers, he was determined to mount a poppy eradication programme in the area. On 3 April ANP vehicles that had been escorting a convoy of tractors on their way to destroy some crops came under fire from what were said to be Taliban gunmen in fields about eight kilometres north of Hutal. Jamie Loden received an urgent request from the district leader to help his men. Loden was determined not to embroil his troops in a shoot-out over opium and replied that he would assist in extracting casualties but there would be no question of sending reinforcements. By the end of the day no casualties had been reported. The incident, though, had opened a new and dangerous front in the Brits’ dealings with the local authorities.

Zaifullah’s eagerness to wipe out the poppy crop aroused immediate suspicions. For one thing, he was under no compulsion to do anything about opium cultivation in his district. The government eradication programme was selective. It was only in force in areas where there was a viable alternative cash crop available to growers. That was not the case in Maywand, where, as Huw Williams put it, ‘they grow poppy and get money for it or they starve’. When Zaifullah was challenged he maintained that he was under specific orders from the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, to mount an eradication effort.

Enquiries uncovered an alternative explanation for the district leader’s unusual zeal. Zaifullah, it turned out, had extensive poppy fields of his own. His intention, the Paras suspected, was to wipe out his rivals’ crops in order to increase the value of his own. Rumours were later picked up on the ground that farmers could exempt their produce from the attentions of the police by paying a hefty bribe.