3 Para

Afghanistan’s Plains (#u0c01a37c-2577-507e-9b05-956815bb76c6)

Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, published in 1892, contained a poem, ‘The Young British Soldier’, which was much quoted by those predicting the dire consequences of getting mixed up with Afghanistan. One verse ran: ‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains/And the women come out to cut up what remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/And go to your Gawd like a soldier.’

To the Paras arriving at Camp Bastion, in the arid flatlands north of the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, it was heat and dust rather than the bloodthirsty attentions of fierce local women which seemed the main hazard. ‘A’ Company were the first to deploy, arriving on 15 April with the battle group’s tactical headquarters and the Patrols Platoon. They had also been the last to leave Iraq and had less time at home than the other company battalions. There was some whingeing among the soldiers, but the logic of the decision was accepted. It was, in its way, a compliment. ‘A’ Company had the most recent operational experience and the longest-established command structure. Going in first confirmed its members’ belief that they were the best.

First impressions of Bastion, though, did not raise spirits. To Corporal Chris Prosser, a machine-gunner from Support Company who was attached to ‘A’ Company, it came as ‘a complete shock’. The Paras were used to roughing it in the field but expected a few basic comforts back at camp. Instead, ‘there was nothing there. Inititally we were living in twelve-foot by twelve-foot tents with no aircon and nothing on the floor. We were living on ration packs for the first two weeks. Sandstorms came in every afternoon and swept through the tents so your kit was always covered in dust.’

‘Bastion when we arrived was just a dustbowl,’ said Hugo Farmer. ‘There were no hard roads and we were about fourteen to eighteen to a tent.’ The ablutions blocks were not completed and grey pools of waste water seeped into the gritty sand.

Other units at the base seemed to fare better than the new arrivals. Farmer speculated that there was an ingrained army belief that ‘the Paras liked that sort of stuff’. In the end they just got on with it, living out of their bergen rucksacks.

Stuart Tootal, who reached Bastion on 18 April, was more concerned with how the base would be resupplied. As it stood, it was reliant on a fragile air bridge provided by the Chinooks and Hercules. The lack of comfort did not worry him too much. His overriding preoccupation was getting his battle group into place as quickly as possible. The camp conditions, however, were a major concern to the Permanent Joint Headquarters staff who oversaw the operation from thousands of miles away in Northolt, Middlesex. They preferred to hold the remaining troops of the battle group back until Bastion was in a fit state to receive them. Tootal was frustrated at their caution. Dribbling his men into theatre risked losing the initiative. His view was that

[we] were an expeditionary army and we should be able to go out into the field and set up. I was quite prepared to say we’ll just live in the desert. We’ll live off rations and draw water because there’s plenty of water we can access. We’ll shit in holes and we’ll burn it off. We’re going to be dusty and we’re going to be uncomfortable. But actually, I’ve got all my fighting power with me.

In the end it was more than four weeks before all his infantry elements arrived. There was a further wait before key assets such as the artillery were in place. The Household Cavalry light armoured squadron did not reach the battle group until 10 July.

Fortunately for 3 Para, the Taliban were not yet ready to declare the fighting season open. The poppy harvest was about to begin. Once it got under way, the fields along the great river valleys that plough north to south through Helmand would be full of toiling men, women and children. The process was simple. First, the harvesters made four light incisions with a multi-bladed razor in the head of the poppy. They left it for a few days for the sticky, milky sap to collect. Then they returned to scrape it off with a wooden spatula. Each head had to be scraped up to seven times to collect all the ‘milk’. The sap was shaped into slabs which were sold at established markets. They were then passed on for processing and transporting, increasing in value at every stage until the refined product reached the streets of Europe’s towns and cities as cellophane ‘wraps’ of dirty, brownish powder.

The poppy farmers sold their crops to local drug lords, who sold it on to the processors. Helmand province was reputed to supply 20 per cent of the world’s opium. The growers were expecting 2006 to produce a bumper crop – 50 per cent up on the previous year. When the Taliban were in power they had opposed the trade, coming close to eradicating production. But now they were trying to wrest back the power they had lost and were anxious not to antagonise either the peasants or the landowners who exploited them. Poppy was a vital part of the economy. Even a poor tenant farmer could expect to make £1,000 from a plot of land less than 100 yards square, a sum that went a long way in Helmand.

In their new, collaborative mood, the Taliban promised to suspend fighting so as not to disrupt the harvest. In return they could call on local chieftains to supply them with reinforcements from their private militias. They also imposed an opium tax which raised tens of millions of dollars to fund their supply and armaments needs. Until the opium had been sold, it seemed the Taliban were content to watch and wait.

Support for the eradication of the opium trade had been one of the stated aims of the British deployment. It was never explicitly said, though, that the military would be used to destroy crops. None of the senior commanders involved in the operation had any intention of doing so. Creating stability for reconstruction to take place depended on winning the consent, or at least the tolerance, of the local population. Burning poppy fields was a sure way of turning potentially friendly farmers and their dependants against the latest batch of foreigners in uniform to descend on the province. Tootal believed it was completely unrealistic to tackle the opium problem without providing an alternative livelihood that came close to matching the income local farmers made from the poppies. The problem had been around for decades. No one had yet come up with a viable solution. However desirable it may have appeared to politicians in London and Washington, the folly of busting up the local economy was fully appreciated by every soldier in Afghanistan, from the Toms all the way up to the incoming ISAF commander, General Richards.

3 Para’s area of operations was the ‘Triangle’. This was the district bounded by Camp Bastion, the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and the market town of Gereshk, the second largest place in Helmand, which lay about 20 miles to the north-east of the base. This was considered a relatively benign environment. It was the most developed region of the province, where there was sufficient existing infrastructure for the reconstruction programme to build on. Both towns lay on the Helmand river. Most of the province was barren. The area around Bastion was called Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death. But the waters of the river were channelled into a web of ditches and canals, creating a broad band of fertile land that sustained life along the valley.

The central Afghan government controlled the two towns but had little authority in the villages. There was a belief that the Taliban regarded the area as something of a sanctuary and chose not to draw attention to themselves. ‘The level of enemy activity was low because actually there wasn’t a lot for them to fight and they were really being allowed to do their own thing,’ said one officer.

The original plan was for the Paras to begin patrolling in the towns and the surrounding areas, advertising their presence and creating an atmosphere of stability. It was classic ‘ink spot’ strategy. According to Martin Taylor the intention was ‘to go into small villages and say “Are the Taliban operating here? We can offer you this, we can offer you that.” If they tell us what their problem is – say that they don’t have running water – then we would get the guys in who could bring them running water. If there were no schools then we would get engineers in to build them schools.’ ‘A’ Company saw its job as identifying what needed to be done. It was then the task of the civil servants of the DfID to come in and make it happen. This, as it was to turn out, was a very optimistic expectation.

The Paras approached the task with genuine enthusiasm. In its short life, the regiment had become a much more flexible and subtle organism than in its early years. Its suitability for any task less than full-scale war fighting had been called into question by the events of 30 January 1972 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, forever known as Bloody Sunday. The Troubles were at their height and 1 Para had been brought into the city to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who were policing a protest march. The demonstration was organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. By now, though, it was the gunmen and bombers of the Provisional IRA who controlled the direction of the Catholics’ struggle for equality.

The march was illegal and the Paras had been given the job of arresting the leading ‘hooligans’. As expected, the gathering quickly turned into a riot. In the confusion the Paras opened fire. When the chaos subsided it was revealed that they had killed thirteen males. Six of them were seventeen years old.

The deaths gave the IRA a propaganda coup and cast a long shadow over the reputation of the Paras. The charge against them was that they had indiscriminately killed unarmed innocents. These accusations were taken seriously by audiences in Britain, America and Europe. An inquiry under Lord Justice Widgery found that none of the dead or wounded had been shot while handling a firearm or bomb. It also judged that there was ‘no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first’. Their training had, however, made them ‘aggressive and quick in decision and some showed more restraint in opening fire than others’.

The charge of mindless violence was to hang around for years. Despite the controversy, the Paras continued to serve in Northern Ireland throughout the period. They were sent in as peacekeepers to Kosovo after the NATO deployment in 1999. By the time they arrived in Afghanistan they had millions of man-hours of experience handling the complexities of operating among civilian populations against a hidden enemy and a fine-tuned understanding of when to shift emphasis. ‘Yes, we have a reputation for being very aggressive,’ said Stuart Tootal. ‘That’s absolutely right. Sometimes we need to be. But we also have soldiers who are very self-reliant. They’re bright, they think things through and they respond well to challenging circumstances, which includes having to decide when it’s appropiate to adopt a non-aggressive posture. They’re very good at it.’

But even after thirty-four years the events in Londonderry were still remembered. As he set off at the head of Patrols Platoon, the battalion’s reconnaissance unit, Captain Mark Swann was aware of the need to make decisions that ‘not only benefit your soldiers but will also reflect on you in the best way possible. People will say, “This bad thing happened in this village. Typical Parachute Regiment soldiers,” regardless of how we behaved before then. One incident would very quickly give us a bad reputation’.

‘A’ Company were fully committed to the mission. ‘We went there believing that this was a winnable situation,’ said Martin Taylor. ‘Yes, be prepared for very significant contact with the enemy. But we thought the vast majority of people would be on our side and we could win their trust and they would think perhaps the Taliban can’t help us and the British can.’

It was in Gereshk that the first attempts were made to reach out to the local population, and it was ‘A’ Company which was given the task. Gereshk was relatively prosperous by Afghan standards. In the calm that followed the overthrow of the Taliban, the UN had installed pumps that provided clean, fresh drinking water. There was also a hydroelectric plant that supplied energy to about five thousand legal subscribers and an unknown number who simply hooked up a line to the main cable. There was a thriving market and shops on the main street. In its time, it had seen foreign armies come and go. The dominant building was a crumbling fort where the British had held out for sixty days during the First Afghan War. The Paras would be operating from a Coalition base on the outskirts. When ‘A’ Company got there they found that the camp was still being built and they would, initially at least, have to function without an ops room. They were also unimpressed by the state of the sangars – the base’s defensive fire positions. ‘We set to work for the next month tearing things down and building things up,’ said one of the new arrivals. ‘The message was, the Parachute Regiment is here and we are going to start establishing our authority.’

The compound was on the north-west outskirts of Gereshk and was known as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Price. To get into the town meant crossing a major road, Highway One, which loops through southern Afghanistan from Kabul. ‘A’ Company started patrolling immediately. Troops were taken to the edge of town by vehicle and then continued on foot. Walking was considered safer than driving. You were mobile and presented a smaller target. The streets were narrow and if you were stuck in a Land Rover you were vulnerable to the suicide bombers who, it was thought, could be preparing to descend on the town. It also reduced the risk from IEDs, which had already been discovered on surrounding roads.

Stuart Tootal joined the first patrol on 29 April. The Paras’ arrival attracted great interest. The local people seemed reasonably friendly, especially the children. One child came out and offered a jug of cold water. Teenage boys and older men responded well to the soldiers’ carefully rehearsed few words of Pashto. Tootal visited the local hospital and police station and asked what could be done to help their security and provide for their needs.

Even though it was not yet summer, the temperature was 40 degrees Centigrade. Patrolling on foot, wearing body armour and carrying a weapon, ammunition and radios was very hot and heavy work. After two hours on the ground, Tootal noticed how the troops’ concentration and awareness of their surroundings faded as they coped with the effects of heat and fatigue. After nearly five hours, everyone on the patrol was thoroughly ‘licked out’.

The first encounter with the citizens of Gereshk had gone off well enough. But ‘A’ Company’s commander, Will Pike, was not convinced that the mood of the town was welcoming. ‘There was a volatility to the situation,’ he said. ‘I described it as “West Belfast with an Asian tinge”. The patrolling we did there was not dissimilar to what I had done in Belfast. It might seem benign. But there was an edge there.’

Moving slowly through the narrow streets, smiling and radiating good intent, the Paras began to notice that their progress was being marked by the sound of whistling. As they passed, they saw men whispering furtively into mobile phones. They soon suspected that they were being ‘dicked’. ‘Dicking’ was a term from Northern Ireland. It was the name given to the warning system operated by IRA sympathisers to let the gunmen know British troops were approaching. The Taliban were invisible. But the Paras now had little doubt that they were there.

Mark Swann was walking along with his interpreter at his side when a truck drove by

absolutely full of men in black turbans, brown trousers and dishdashas [the cotton nightshirt-like garments worn by Afghan males]. They had black beards and were wearing eyeliner – why I don’t know. The interpreter grabbed me and said, ‘Taliban, they are Taliban!’ I asked which ones and he said, ‘All of them.’ They drove through the middle of the patrol then shot off. As we turned the corner, we saw them sitting on top of the hill watching us. As we dog-legged left they also peeled off in the same direction.

It was not the Paras’ intention to initiate a confrontation with the Taliban. The rules of engagement stated they could shoot only when their lives were clearly threatened. Swann decided to get his men away as quickly as he could. He recalled later: ‘That’s when I thought, this is actually quite sticky.’

An incident on 1 May seemed to reinforce this impression. Stuart Tootal made another visit to the town for his first shura – council – with Gereshk officials and elders. The meeting was friendly. The district administrator, Abdul Nabi Khan, spelled out his main concerns: worries about security and the lack of decent schools and health facilities. Tootal had arrived at the administrator’s compound in an armoured ‘Snatch’ Land Rover. Soldiers from the patrols and sniper platoons had moved in the night before to secure the complex. As they left the meeting at midday, a warning came over the radio that a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives was on his way to try to catch the party as it left. This, Tootal recorded, ‘added a degree of … urgency to the extraction’. As they hurried away from the compound, the lead Snatch got stuck in an alleyway.

For a moment, chaos threatened. There were six vehicles in the convoy, trying to turn around on a sloping dirt path, now surrounded by a small crowd of curious children, while a Taliban car bomber was possibly bearing down on them. Tom Fehley, the officer commanding 2 Platoon of ‘A’ Company, was in charge. Very soon he had imposed some ‘grip’ on the situation and the vehicles turned round and moved off to the northern suburbs of Gereshk, where they formed a defensive ring and waited for Mark Swann and his men, who had been patrolling in the town, to catch up. They were making slow progress. The backstreets of Gereshk which they had to pass through to reach the rendezvous were ‘rat-runs, dead-ends, alleyways, things like that’.

Eventually, they linked up with the convoy. As they climbed aboard the vehicles to head back to base, ‘all of a sudden there was a burst of automatic fire’, said Swann. ‘I’m sure it was only from an AK rifle, but a burst of automatic fire in our general direction.’ Four or five bullets kicked up puffs of dust from some nearby walls. No one saw where they came from.

It was a classic ‘shoot and scoot’. No one was hurt and the decision was taken to extract immediately. By the standards of what was to come, the incident was barely worth recording. But the contact, in retrospect, took on a symbolic importance. It was a sign that no matter how positive the Paras’ relations with the local population and authorities might seem, there were men among them who wanted to kill them.

The news of the contact, minor though it was, galvanised the battle group. When Swann got back to FOB Price he was called up immediately by his friend Matt Taylor, the Battalion Ops Officer. They had been commissioned into the Paras at the same time and there was a friendly rivalry between them. ‘He was saying, “Right, don’t tell me, you’ve had a contact before me!”’ In the other companies there was some mild annoyance at the fact that it was ‘A’ Company which had been the first to come under fire. This, it was feared, would only boost its members’ already considerable opinion of themselves.

The flurry of excitement in Gereshk proved to be exceptional. The town remained relatively quiet throughout the rest of the deployment. This did not mean, however, that the process of reconstruction was able to take hold there.

The effort was meant to be coordinated through the ‘Triumvirate’ made up of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and DfID. DfID had a presence in Lashkar Gah, where the PRT was supposed to have its headquarters. Until there was stability and security in Helmand, however, there was little for the department to do. The functioning of the Triumvirate was hampered by personnel problems. The head of the MoD’s Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) team was unhappy in his post, and on 21 April it was agreed that he should return home.

At the same time, DfID’s attitude was causing the Paras bafflement and dismay. The department’s officials seemed anxious not to be associated too closely with the military presence for fear that they would come to be regarded as the enemy by the people who they were there to help.

Their approach was exemplified by the story of the Gereshk hospital washing machine. Captain Harvey Pynn, 3 Para’s regimental Medical Officer, had taken up the cause of providing a functioning laundry for the hospital. It was just the sort of ‘quick impact project’ the soldiers were supposed to identify and pursue.

Pynn came from a military background. His father was in the RAF and his grandfather had been an RSM in the Parachute Regiment in the 1950s and 1960s. He was attracted to an army career but he also felt a vocational pull towards medicine. He combined the two by joining the Royal Army Medical Corps after studying at Guy’s and St Thomas’s. Following a stint with the Royal Greenjackets he joined 3 Para in the summer of 2005.

In normal times the MO’s job was to look after the general health of the battalion. In war, there was the crucial duty of keeping the wounded alive until they could receive proper treatment. Pynn believed in being where the fighting was going on. He got his wish. The battle group overturned the normal procedure and posted their doctors forward with individual companies rather than keeping them back at base. He and other battle group MOs were to find themselves doing most of their work in the platoon houses, rather than at the high-tech hospital that had been set up at Bastion.

Pynn had a strong idealistic streak. He took the development side of the mission very seriously. When ‘A’ Company deployed in Gereshk he set to work surveying the health provisions in town. He was welcomed at the hospital and shown round. The conditions were grim. There was a resident surgeon and anaesthetist but very little equipment. Above all, the place was dirty, and bloodstained sheets littered the trauma room.

What they did have was a washing machine, which had been given to the hospital by USAID, the American international development agency, some time before. It sat there, still wrapped in factory plastic, useless without a water supply to plumb it in to. Pynn thought it would be a simple job for the battle group engineers to sink a well. It was cheap, easy and a palpable demonstration of the soldiers’ goodwill.

The DfID office in Lashkar Gah was told of the plan. Word came back that there was no question of military engineers being allowed to do the work. The hospital was part of the Afghan healthcare system and an Afghan non-governmental organisation had already been given the contract. As far as the soldiers were aware, no NGO had been near the hospital. But the issue was a political one and they were forced to let it drop.

The failure to implement such a trivial piece of assistance did nothing for DfID’s reputation with the soldiers. Their inability to carry out quick-impact projects (QIPs) was a continuing source of frustration for ‘A’ Company. Tootal shared their feelings. He made regular, forceful appeals to his superiors in the PRT, stressing the need for action. At a meeting at the Kandahar airbase, the NATO headquarters in southern Afghanistan, on 13 May he argued that DfID were wasting an opportunity. His men were unable to deliver small, goodwill-building measures not because of a lack of resources, but because of a bureaucratic doctrine. The Paras thought DfID’s reluctance to associate with the military was naive. Most people in Afghanistan lumped all foreigners together. The first troops in Gereshk spent much of their time explaining that they were British. The locals assumed that any foreigner in uniform was American. The soldiers believed DfID would do better to work around perceived problems rather than surrender to them. After the meeting, Tootal went off to have dinner with the DfID reps. The potential for further disagreement was cut short when the meal had to be abandoned owing to one of the regular, but largely ineffective, Taliban rocket attacks on the base.

The Triumvirate structure did not render decision-making easy. But the complexities of the military chain of command complicated matters yet further.

It was Tootal’s misfortune throughout 3 Para’s tour to have to answer to several bosses. The multiplicity of nations and organisations involved in Afghanistan meant that direction came from a number of sources. The result was a lack of clarity about aims and coherence in achieving them that fogged the mission throughout.

When the Para battle group arrived in Afghanistan the Americans were in overall charge. They operated under the banner of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which had been launched in the wake of 9/11. They were due to hand over command to the NATO-led ISAF, headed by the British general David Richards, at the end of July.

ISAF operations in the south were controlled by a Canadian brigade, led by Brigadier General David Fraser. 16 Air Assault Brigade operated under the Canadians. Its boss, Brigadier Ed Butler, did not have a formal tactical role in the Canadian chain of command. A joint command had been ruled out, and it was deemed improper for Butler to be subordinate to Fraser on grounds of military protocol – a brigadier should not take orders from another brigadier. Instead, he occupied a place outside the architecture of command. He took his orders directly from the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood and had political oversight of the operation. Butler had a rich array of talents and accomplishments which marked him for high command. He glowed with the special confidence that an Eton education seems to bestow. He was clever and looked beyond the obvious. In his opinion, the instability in Helmand was not a simple matter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda stirring up trouble. It had deeper causes, rooted in tribal dynamics and the struggle for resources.