Lance corporal Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty slumped to the ground. They were killed instantly in the first swarm of bullets from an enemy ambush. Their comrades dragged their bodies along irrigation ditches and across burning fields under intense fire. Rocket-propelled grenades skidded and cartwheeled through the poppy stubble, exploded and showered them in dirt and shrapnel.
The only helicopter available to evacuate the bodies was called away to pick up a another soldier wounded in a battle up the Musa Qala wadi. So the dead were pushed clear of the fighting in wheelbarrows; until a sniper team commandeered a saloon car to carry them back to Forward Operating Base Gibraltar. The rest of the company ran alongside, passing farmers and men sitting in the shade of shops selling dust-covered biscuits and wrinkling tomatoes — all giving the paratroopers the ‘stink eye’.
Bateman and Doherty had been caught by the Taleban in a textbook ambush as C Company of 2 Para patrolled back to FOB Gibraltar after a shura and a ‘key leader engagement’ with prominent locals. Taleban ‘dickers’ (spies) had tracked their every movement and laid the trap.
Gibraltar was about five miles south of the 2 Para battle group headquarters in Sangin, one of a daisy-chain of British forts along the Helmand river valley. Three more paratroopers would die there in the summer of 2008, less than a mile from its ramparts. The Royal Marines who took over, and later the Rifles, would lose more men over the next year.
Finally, in the summer, Gibraltar was closed. The British had killed plenty of Taleban but they had been unable, because there weren’t enough of them, to take and hold any new ground. They had, however, brought violence and death to the Afghans they were trying to win over and ‘protect’ from the Taleban. There was no prospect of ever achieving the British commanders’ aim of ‘closing down the ungoverned space’ and shoving the Taleban off into the desert.
To many who served in FOB Gibraltar, the experience summed up the futility of Britain’s whole effort in Helmand. By using too few troops, not supplying enough helicopters, amid vague and contradictory strategic guidelines from London and Kabul, we were just feeding young men into a meat grinder with no chance, therefore, of winning over any of the hearts and minds of those ‘key leaders’.
So it should perhaps come as no surprise that the new commander of Task Force Helmand, brigadier James Cowan, was dispatched in October with his 11 Light Brigade under strict orders not to capture any new ground. This looks like a typically daft instruction from the government not to win. It looks like we’re giving up, hunkering down in our Rorke’s Drift redoubts, presumably until we can slink away from the whole mess.
The Prime Minister has failed to articulate why we are in Helmand, or indeed in Afghanistan. He has persuaded very few soldiers that their lives are worth sacrificing to prevent al-Qa’eda from training terrorists to attack the United Kingdom — when they know that such attacks are sometimes generated in Pakistan but more often are home-grown.
Taking much of the tactical command away from a commander in the field is usually a recipe for disaster because it hobbles them. Who is better equipped to judge whether or not it makes sense to take a swath of land? A soldier on the ground or a comfortable staff officer in cahoots with a mandarin?
Last year the Foreign Office was dismayed when US Marines, and a company of British troops, captured 30 square miles of territory from the Taleban. Whitehall believed that this would simply extend the territory Nato would need to police and feared that there were not enough reliable Afghan forces to do it for themselves. Equally, neither the Ministry of Defence, the Department for International Development, nor the FCO wanted to know about 16 Air Assault Brigade’s plan to sneak a 120-vehicle convoy carrying a 40-tonne hydro-electric turbine past the Taleban to the Kajaki dam — until the operation succeeded.
But, oddly enough, it’s unlikely that brigadier Cowan objects to the injunction to seek permission before trying to capture new territory. The truth is that, as one senior officer put it: ‘If you try and hold too much ground with not enough force, then the force is weak and vulnerable to attack, which is the position the UK force has been in for much of the time.’ Cowan knows this, as did his predecessors.
‘At the policy level the military have continually and rightly asked for more forces, but each time they have been agreed we have taken more ground and thinned the force again. There is no doubt very sound local military logic for doing this, but the overall effect has, in part, been that the political folks don’t quite believe the military will do what they say they will do. We keep spreading the Marmite too thin,’ he explained.
Since John Reid was widely misquoted three years ago as saying that he expected British forces to leave Helmand without a shot being fired, the government has taken all of the criticism for the mounting death toll and chaos in Helmand.
The lack of resources, and the relentless mendacity of Gordon Brown, who has denied that he was asked for more helicopters and for 2,000 more troops earlier this year, has drawn attention away from what the military have been up to. The learning curve for forces on the ground has been allowed to be pretty flat because they haven’t had to explain too much about what they were doing wrong.
Almost every brigade commander returning from a tour in Helmand has recommended that a brigade headquarters staff should do at least a one-year, not a six-month, tour, so that there is some continuity. In Northern Ireland brigadiers did a two-year stint with their headquarters and battle groups did shorter tours. That this has so far been ignored has been a military decision.
Brigadier Ed Butler’s disastrous move to put small units into ‘platoon houses’ scattered along the Helmand river in 2006 has not been undone; it has been reinforced as the Marmite has been spread over more and more FOBs and patrol bases.
Now it appears that General Sir David Richards, the new commander of the army, has finally ordered a rethink. As a result key members, especially intelligence officers, of the Helmand brigade’s headquarters staff will be put on to 12-month tours to try to prevent the stop-go stop-go of rotating an entire brigade every six months.
He’s listening to the advice of young brigadiers with combat experience. We can expect to see the closing of several more Gibraltar-type bases. And we may also see the concentration of forces in the most densely populated areas, where they may be in sufficient strength to do more than just defend themselves.
This is worth a try. The government continues to fail to understand that the only reason to be in Helmand is to stop the Taleban taking Afghanistan, inspiring an Islamist coup in Pakistan and giving loonies access to the Bomb. But at least the army is fashioning a local strategy that might work and our soldiers might be given the chance to prevail. Then Jeff and Jay, and more than 230 others, will not have died entirely in vain.