With a thriving opium industry in Afghanistan, Obama's troop surge has no hope of success.
By Sam Kiley — Special to GlobalPost
Published: December 14, 2009 10:18 ET
HELMAND, Afghanistan and LONDON, U.K. — It was no great surprise that the skirmish was over within a few minutes. A half dozen Taliban fighters lay dead. But the 300 insurgents, who were the target of a joint air and ground assault by two British battle groups on the Regay villages, had evaporated. No self-respecting guerrilla force is going to hang around to be crushed between the anvil of 200 snarling Highlanders and the hammer of 100 bolt-headed British paratroopers.
The mujahideen sensibly opted to down their weapons and wait until the British had cleared off.
It seems daft, therefore, that President Barack Obama has set a date for the start of the withdrawal of the 30,000 extra troops he plans to "surge" into Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban will simply wait the 18 months he's allowed for the surge with their heads down, and then re-start their campaign? As Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader is so often quoted as saying: "You have the watches, but we have the time."
When he announced the surge at Westpoint, the U.S. president simultaneously offered general Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. officer in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, the tools of success (more troops) and then guaranteed failure by revealing his lack of long-term resolve.
The lesson of the assault on the southern end of the Musa Qala wadi in Helmand province in the summer of 2008, and of countless other operations in Afghanistan is that the Taliban refuses to fight on its enemies' terms.
No matter.
A few weeks after the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment left the Musa Qala wadi in their Chinooks they learned another lesson. They swept down on the densely populated string of fortified compounds and hamlets marked as Sar Puzeh on the NATO maps. Here, by the Helmand River and among the lattice of irrigation ditches and rich fields, the Paras found themselves locked in an unrelenting 17-hour pitched battle.
The fighting was so intense that lance corporal Steve Lewis, a ginger-haired former convict from the tough industrial north east of England near Newcastle, shot seven men dead with his sniper rifle. His number two Frank "the Yank" Ward, who hails from the American Midwest, accounted for at least another couple.
As the Taliban fell, more kept coming. Their bodies lay on the sharp stubble of the fields in clumps of bloodied clothing, Apache attack helicopters tore into them, fast jets bombed and artillery pounded, and still them came.
Why?
The answer was sitting in 200 liter drums of frothy brown sludge, and in plastic sacks oozing a black molasses. Opium. Almost every compound the British troops broke into was a processing factory which took opium resin, which weeps from scratches on poppy heads, and turned it into a morphine base for later processing into heroin.
Whether or not the enemy who were fighting the British at Sar Puzeh were genuine ideological Taliban is unknown. Scores of Afghan fighters, and one British sergeant major, were killed that day. The only real difference between the two engagements was the presence of the opium factories.
Helmand produces around 90 percent of Afghanistan's opium. Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's heroin. The business is worth at least $4 billion a year to Afghanistan's drug lords. These barons lead clans with their own militia who depend entirely on the opium trade for their economic survival. Many have links to the Taliban. They pay the Taliban tax and protection money, the Taliban often transports opium out of Afghanistan into Pakistan for export world wide. Some drug lords are part of Mullah Omar's own commanding shura.
Equally, according to Gretchen Peters, author of "Seeds of Terror — How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban," drugs are transported through Pakistan in Pakistani army trucks or on convoys organized with the help of the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) which has ideological and strategic links back into the Taliban.
On top of that, large numbers of senior officers in the Afghan National Police, ministers in Hamid Karzai's government, and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's own brother, are also intimately involved in the illicit trade. Karzai's government's corruption may be lubricated with money from foreign aid — but the whole country is drowning in the pigswill of drug money.
While opium continues to provide around 50 percent of Afghanistan's GDP, the region will remain in turmoil. An outbreak of peace is the last thing that those who profit from opium, the drug lords, the Taliban and senior members of Karzai's own administration would like to see.
And one should not be conned by recent figures which show a 10 percent drop in production — because prices are also at a 10 year low. In a market this tightly controlled, the drug barons are simply cutting back production to boost prices, and save hassle. This is what the Taliban did with its "ban" on opium production in 2000.
Opium has spread a hallucinogenic miasma across Afghanistan which has had NATO stumbling about in a haze of confusion, unable to tell ally from foe, layering a matrix of criminality on top of already baffling clan, tribal, regional and political tapestries.
Get rid of it and the conflict will boil down to a fight against the real Taliban.
This does not mean eradicating poppies from the fields. This would be inhumane and counter productive and would drive Afghanistan's poor into the hands of extremists.
But soon Nato will have another 40,000 troops. So, so what if the Taleban goes underground — the drug lords and their processing laboratories will still be around to provide targets for the surge. The bulging bank accounts and property investments of the Afghan mafia bosses in the United Arab Emirates and Europe, are easy to trace.
MI6 and the CIA know who these people are. They know where they live, where their children go to school in Europe and the U.S., where their drug labs are. They are the deserving targets of the surge. But, a failure to put them out of business will doom the surge, and all that follows, to failure.
Sam Kiley is the author of "Desperate Glory — At War in Helmand with Britain's Air Assault Brigade" published by Bloomsbury and an Economist "Book of the Year."
News of the World: "We're glad when we get a kill"
‘Women are just another frontline weapon when the s*** hits the fan’
Sam Kiley
Chantelle drops down into the body of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover. Bullets are hitting the sides, making a pinging sound. She bounces back up through the roof hatch, exposing her head and shoulders.
“What the f***?”
A Taleban fighter is standing in a field about 40m (130ft) away. He’s got a gun and he’s shooting at her. Chantelle swings her rifle on to him. He’s so close he almost fills the sights of her stubby SA80 rifle.
Snap. Snap. She shoots twice; each time her gun leaps.
“Contact left! Contact left!” she shouts.
“I can’t f***ing believe it. He’s just standing there, in the field, and he’s shooting at me,” Chantelle thinks.
She pulls off another five shots. The man flops to the ground, out of sight behind an irrigation channel.
Chantelle doesn’t know if she’s killed him or not. Doesn’t care — so long as he’s not shooting at her any more. In the vehicle at the back of the convoy an Argyll soldier has been shot through the abdomen. The commander of the company, Major Harry Clark, is sitting in the front of Chantelle’s Snatch Land Rover.
Clark asks: “What are you lot shooting at? Where is the firing coming from?”
“There’s a dead guy in that field and we’re under fire — sir.”
“Ah. Carry on Chantelle.”
Now 32, she’s been in the Army for ten years. When she joined she’d been working at Topshop. She is blonde and has a no-nonsense walk. Her voice is soft, slightly interrogative.
Charismatic and motherly, she is also feared. The young men under her command want to please and impress her. She’s a fully qualified Urban Operations Instructor, which means that she teaches soldiers how to fight in towns.
“Something is wrong, very wrong,” she thinks. Marjah, 15km (9 miles) south west of Lashkar Gah, is a mixture of town and country. Huge compounds surrounded by high, thick brown mud walls create shoulder-wide alleyways. These open on to fields chopped into quadrangles by irrigation channels. The roads are like tramlines with ditches running either side.Part of a tiny force of about 30 people, she is certain that they are going to get ambushed. She is excited.
She’s done tours in Iraq. She is a highly trained infantry instructor, even though women are not, technically, supposed to serve as combat troops. Like every other soldier in her vehicle, she is anxious to test her skills.
“I’m not going to come over all politically correct and pretend that I’m not first a soldier. When the s*** hits the fan I’m just another weapon on the ground,” she says.
In mid-June Clark is east of Lashkar Gah with his two platoons. They have had a short battle with a large force of Taleban and are following them up. He is with Second Lieutenant Chris Hesketh and an Afghan translator. They approach a building hoping to speak with its occupants. There is no one inside and so they walk farther forward up to an embankment to have a look ahead.
Clark and Hesketh are silent but relaxed. They are farther away from the rest of the platoon than is sensible, they know that, but the slight rise ahead of them gives them the height they need to survey the ground. They find themselves on the edge of a wadi [valley] and 20m (65ft) to their right a group of Taleban are coming the other way.
The two groups immediately fire at each other. Hesketh and Clark fall on to their faces. They are pinned down; their translator runs away. Hesketh pulls out two grenades and tosses them into the ditch. The ground shakes and the air fills with gravel. Hesketh scrambles on to his knees with his rifle ready. The grenades have no effect.
The Taleban are hurrying closer. But they haven’t seen him. He stands up as they get close and fires a long burst into the men below him. One is killed instantly; two or three look like they are badly hit. The two officers run back to the rest of Hesketh’s 5 Platoon.
They return to the site of the ambush with the rest of his men and find the Taleban fighter he has killed.
The body is carried back closer to the road. A small team of four SAS reservists and an Intelligence Corps corporal, Sarah Bryant, are sent to collect it. They turn right off a main route on to a dirt track, crossing a culvert close to Clark’s men, and vanish in a bulge of black smoke and fire. The Land Rover bucks into the air and comes down with a crash.
The Jocks stare as the smoking mess of metal, which is supposed to protect people from bombs and bullets but really just chews them up. Sarah, Corporal Sean Reeve, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin and trooper Paul Stout are killed instantly. One SAS soldier has survived, trapped behind the steering wheel.
Sarah Bryant had been working mainly on psychological operations. She is the first female soldier to die in Afghanistan. Pretty, blonde, recently married and with a movie-star smile, she’d been hard to miss in the claustrophobic camp at Lashkar Gah. The thought of her being torn to pieces by a bomb was somehow indecent, dirty. She was no more, or less, loved than the others who died that day — but she was blonde and pretty.
Now she was a body being zipped into a bag, loaded into a coffin and on to a Hercules aircraft amid bugles and flapping flags.
Her death caused a media sensation in Britain. But given that women are driving convoy trucks, which are attacked and blown up every day; that they are running intelligence and psychological operations, flying aircraft, dismantling bombs and patrolling with infantry every day, most soldiers in Helmand are surprised that more women have not been killed. The sight of a woman on the front line is now routine.
Desperate Glory is published by Bloomsbury on September 7 at £18.99 (available for £17.09, free p&p from Times BooksFirst, 0870 1608080).
From The Times August 29, 2009
‘The Taleban enemy has been smashed: it’s a catastrophic success’ The capture of insurgent territory, with the help of US troops, created a dilemma for British officials Extract from Desperate Glory, by Sam Kiley
The officer in command of Forward Operating Base Delhi in Garmsir district has deep shadows around his eyes. It is hard to tell what colour his hair is: like everything else it is coated in the tan dust of Helmand. Bubbles of baked air bloat and burst in flurries and eddies, briefly whisking talcum dust into the noses of the briefing party with his commander, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith.
“What we have here,” says Major Neil Den-McKay, “is catastrophic success.” He beams, delighted with the phrase. Until four weeks ago A Company of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland (the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders), led by Den-McKay, had been holding the line alone at FOB Delhi. Then 2,200 US Marines from 24 Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), backed up with Harrier jump jets, Cobra attack helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees and other machines of war, roared into town. A Company had watched the movement with envy and delight.
This was war porn at its best. Jets screamed low overhead, heralding the move of the MEU to FOB Dwyer, a sun-baked fort two hours west of FOB Delhi.
“They’re not worried about being blown to f***. They’re just driving along and crossing their fingers they won’t get blown up,” Corporal Lachlan “Lachie” MacNeil said, as he watched the Marines barrel along the roads.
In Kabul, General Dan McNeill (Commander of the International Security Assistance Force) had lost patience with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s equivocation over Garmsir’s future. On April 28, 2008, he had sent the Marines in. He sent a personal message to Colonel Peter Petronzio, commander of 24 MEU: “Stir it up in Garmsir — stick around — and get some defeating done.”
The British had only enough troops to hold the front line with the Taleban. But behind the Taleban trenches the British knew that insurgents were using the Snake’s Head (the area around FOB Delhi) as a gathering point. It was also the Taleban’s training base. Newly arrived from Pakistan, young guerrillas would have a quick crack at FOB Delhi, then move on north up the Helmand Valley to fight in Sangin or Musa Qala. The Jocks hated being thought of as a warm-up for the main events. But they knew that they were.
The MEU plan, Operation Azada Wosa (“Stay Free” in Pashto), would give the British a focus for doing what they most wanted to do — offensive operations. Den-McKay grabbed at the chance to be part of an operation to seize and hold ground, rather than fight and withdraw, the pattern in most areas for two years.
Standing in the briefing area at FOB Delhi at the end of a month of fighting that has been led by the Americans, Den-McKay tells Carleton-Smith: “Sir, the enemy has been smashed. What matters now is what we do with this success. It is, I say again, a catastrophic success!”
The capture of the Snake’s Head began with A Company heading down a road called Route Cowboys alongside a 10m-wide canal. The company moved at night in Mastiff armoured trucks and Land Rovers. The whine of the engines broadcast their move to the Taleban.
Lachie, a Glaswegian who had joined the Army aged 16 and illiterate, and who was now writing a blog on his war, imagined the Afghan fighters lying face down in their foxholes.
Lachie had fought during the siege of al-Amarah in Iraq. But his section was full of teenagers fresh out of training. He had been in for a dozen years. The Army, and reading, were now his life. He took a long look at the hungry group of stringy boys he led.
“If something happens to these lads we’ll smash the f*** out of the enemy,” he thought to himself, and chuckled.
That night 2 Platoon settled down in a small abandoned compound. Lachie and Colour Sergeant Davey Ure, commander of the Javelin missile platoon, climbed on to the roof to start sandbagging it against mortar attack. They saw movement in a compound marked Charlotte on their maps.
The air began to crackle with bullets. Rocket-propelled grenades screamed overhead and they both returned fire. Taleban mortars began raining in, about 20m short of the compound walls. Machinegunners rattled back and a helicopter was called in. In a few moments, and as dusk fell, it was as if a giant hand had been slapped down on the mud fortress and crushed it.
At dawn the next morning the platoon set off to clear Charlotte. “There’s people in here for sure, I can smell their stink, their human stink,” whispered Lachie.
Den-MacKay had been clear with his orders: I don’t want our allies being ambushed because we haven’t done a proper job.”
A path led away into a jumble of tumbling buildings.
“Lachie,” whispered Lieutenant Olly Bevan, the platoon commander, his vocal chords stretched with tension.
Something made Bevan bring his rifle to his shoulder. He could hear voices. A flicker of white moved in the fruit trees.
“Who the f***?” Bevan blurted out loud. No civilians here. Taleban.
Lachie and Bevan fired seven shots between them at four armed men who had emerged from the trees 30m in front. Another twelve rounds followed.
Lachie saw a crimson flash as one of his rounds went through a fighter’s right shoulder.
Bevan’s victim had been hit in the chest and side. He doubled up but stayed on his feet, ducked into the trees and made off down an alleyway.
The wounded Taleban fighter was trapped and hiding somewhere. Bevan ordered his men to form an extended line across the compound.
Nick Whelan, a good-natured soldier aged 19, and with a reputation for his easygoing, smiling vanity, appeared alongside Lachie.
“I can see his feet,” he whispered, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder. Nick fired.
Bevan and another soldier ran up and fired into the vines that partially hid the Taleban fighter.
Nick was silent as he contemplated what he had done and kept his rifle trained on the body. Bevan walked up to the dead man. He looked about 25 and was very, very thin. He had been shot in the side and the chest and head. Bevan marvelled at how he had managed to stay upright, let alone run away. “Tough. Nails,” he said to himself as he used the bayonet on his rifle to check for hidden weapons.
“Check that out. F***ing Gucci trainers,” said Whelan. Most local people wore leather or plastic sandals. These were new and well-made Western-style trainers. “Must be a new arrival from Pakistan.”
By now A Company had reached its objective, the point at which the Americans would take over the battle with the Taleban with their 2,200-man MEU.
By the end of May the Americans and A Company of the Argylls had captured about 50 sq km of new territory for the Government in Kabul. The front line lay about 1,000m south of Amir Aga, a village strung out across the Helmand river valley about 7km south of FOB Delhi. It had been under Taleban control for more than two years.
Sayed Gul, a tall man with jet-black hair and coal-coloured eyes that soften as he speaks, gestures towards a group of children who are dancing around his legs: “I can teach these young people now. The Taleban destroyed our school because it had been built by the Government in 2003. They said we were teaching American ideology. They killed and tortured people that they said were spies for the Government and for the Americans,” he says.
Mir Hamza, the local head of the National Directorate of Security, is beaming. He has not been able to get to Amir Aga for years and has travelled down with the American vanguard. “This is the beginning. In a few days you will see farmers returning to their fields and rebuilding their homes.”
But many officials in the Foreign Office are dismayed.
This is an unwelcome victory. British forces could never have taken the Snake’s Head. They are already spread thin across Helmand. The US Marines have shown up two embarrassing truths. First, that if the British want to prevail in Helmand, they will need more troops. And second, that there are not enough British — or Afghan — troops available to hold the ground that the Americans have taken. This, the Foreign Office fears, will be a political problem. How will ministers cope with the military necessity of more troops for a war in Afghanistan which they will not admit is a war, and for which public support is wavering?
During a video conference between Foreign Office officials in Afghanistan and London, Whitehall mandarins moan about the capture of Garmsir district and the inconvenient challenges that it poses.
It takes the intervention of the British Ambassador to Kabul for the civil servants to comprehend that the capture of the Snake’s Head is to be celebrated, not condemned.
“Rejoice! Rejoice!” Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles shouts at a startled room of officials in London. He observes that, since the British military and civilian mission to Helmand is to expand the reach of the Afghan Government, it is churlish to complain when they have done just that.
Mad, bad and dangerous for our Armed Forces If you intervene in a country such as Congo or Somalia (or Afghanistan), you must not lose your nerve halfway through
Sam Kiley A young private resting in the Helmand desert, after a daring secret and successful operation to deliver a hydroelectric turbine to the Kajaki Dam, blew steam across the top of his mug.
“I don’t think it makes sense that we’re over here trying to change the way other people live, killing people and risking our own lives,” he said — and since he spoke the death toll in Helmand has doubled in just over 12 months. Recent opinion polls would indicate that around half the British public agree with him.
Why do we bother? The place has never had a proper government, those areas not in a state of feral anarchy are run by ultra-violent gangs, there is little hope of any kind of government, let alone of democracy, ever taking root — we should just walk away. This argument has been applied to military interventions in Somalia, Congo/Zaire, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan. And it is wrong.
Over the past 18 years I have covered about 30 conflicts and I have seen foreign military interventions fail more often than they have succeeded. The failures have been because of stupidity or madness, and very often both. Angels very naturally fear to tread where fools have sent them.
This month I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the United Nations has 17,000 blue helmets and a mandate to use force to protect the population from militia groups who have turned rape into the national sport and eat people. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have died in Congo since the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994 and the poor old Congolese played host to those behind the mass killings, the Interahamwe. Genocide as a tactic spread and the Interahamwe catalysed a war that sucked in nine nations. The Interahamwe remain the main problem in Congo. The UN is trying to help the hopeless Congolese Army to flush them out.
“What we really needed is Western special forces to go in and sort out the Interahamwe in a series of co-ordinated strikes,” said a senior blue helmet officer in Goma. “Are we going to get them? No.”
Military intervention (which in Congo costs the UK alone £225,000 a day) is the right thing to do — but it’s being done wrong. The Interahamwe should have been dealt with back in 1994. Not just to stop the horrors that followed but because the carnage has turned Congo into a playground for terrorists and gangsters who threaten our way of life. It is both mad and stupid to intervene with military force and then lose your nerve when it comes to killing.
The uranium for the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs was mined in Congo: it has 40 per cent of the globe’s cobalt reserves, 30 per cent of the copper and, above all, diamonds. Vast mansions in Hezbollah- controlled areas of southern Lebanon have been built with the proceeds of smuggled diamonds — one can only wonder at what the rest of the money has been used for.
In Somalia the US-led Operation Restore Hope ended in dismay. The Americans pulled out after the Black Hawk Down incident, in which 18 soldiers were killed by Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s fighters. Weak American leadership had meant he took on a superpower because the Americans believed that it was enough just to turn up. They realised too late that, on the day the US Marines disembarked, they should have killed those warlords who did not immediately disarm.
In Sierra Leone Britain succeeded in destroying the Revolutionary United Front and restoring democracy because the armed forces, sent there in 2000, elbowed aside a feeble UN effort, killed the leaders of the RUF and terrified their followers into surrender. General Sir David Richards, the new head of the Army, was in charge back then. A subtle thinker, he understands that if violence must be used it must be used with enough will to make it work.
Should we walk away from Afghanistan where the elections have allegedly being rigged, where our taxes are being used to oil the wheels of a staggeringly corrupt government, and where our young men and women are being fed into a meat-grinding machine? No.
We are where we are and we are in peril because the Taleban have come close to toppling the Government in nuclear-armed Pakistan. If Afghanistan fell to the Islamic extremists then Pakistan would surely follow. The Taleban with the Bomb is an existential threat to the planet.
If British Forces pulled out of Afghanistan, the spaghetti alliance of Nato there would flop into nothing and violent jihadists around the world would fall over themselves to kick the British weaklings on their own streets.
But our military intervention in Afghanistan is beginning to look like a failure — a failure redeemed by the spectacular bravery of British troops fighting there. However, the “failure” should not be seen as an argument that military interventions can’t work. It should be seen as an argument that they should be done intelligently.
Gordon Brown continues to insist that there are enough helicopters in Helmand. Did he not notice during his last visit there that half his entourage was unable to follow him on one of the legs of his journey because their Chinook had broken down and there was no replacement? Or that he had an escort of American Black Hawks because all the British Apaches were grounded?
British troops are dying in a worthy cause that is being crippled by the inability of British prime ministers to comprehend reality. The facts are that we are losing troops because we don’t have the manpower to hold the ground we capture, or to search for hidden bombs. And we are being forced on to the roads by the lack of helicopter transport.
This is the worst possible scenario. The Government is wrong to think that we can prevail with what we have got in Helmand — we cannot. But we cannot leave either. To refuse to send more troops and aircraft is not only mad and stupid, it is a waste of lives; and if my experience is anything to go by, it will lead to failure.
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Contact Sam Kiley: +44 (0) 7764906518 Email: SamATkileyDOTbiz
