‘Whatever the difficulties and risks of this deployment…those risks are nothing compared to the dangers to our country and our people of allowing Afghanistan to fall back into the hands of the Taliban and the terrorists. We will not allow that. And the Afghan people will not allow that.’

(Defence Secretary John Reid lying to the House of Commons on 26 January 2006 to justify the British Army deployment to Helmand Province, south Afghanistan. Sixteen years later Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban. We allowed it. And the Afghan people allowed it. And do our country and our people feel scared by all those dangers Reid grandly warned us about? No)

But the Taliban kept on coming.
(Situation at Sangin and all the other British outposts, p.230)

This is a thorough, detailed and gripping account of the deployment of the Third Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (3 Para) to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan from April to October 2006. It’s designed to be a popular and accessible account, as the cover of the paperback edition suggests, with its tell-tale embossed letters on the cover and shouty straplines such as you’d see on a movie poster:

AFGHANISTAN 2006. THIS IS WAR.

REAL COMBAT. REAL HEROES. TRUE STORY.

But the text isn’t as dumb as the cover suggests. You can question Bishop’s fairly uncritical acceptance of the Parachute Regiment at their own estimation (men’s men from the best regiment in the British Army) and question his downplaying of some of the issues mentioned but not really explored in his account (notably the vexed issue of collateral or civilian casualties). But that’s not his purpose. He’s not a historian of the entire campaign, writing at a high strategic level. His narrative is deliberately and breath-takingly a boots-on-the-ground, soldier’s eye-view of desperate fighting, against the odds, in an alien country, 5,000 miles from home.

3 Para is a detailed, gripping and immensely authoritative depiction of what the face of modern warfare looks like to the men on the receiving end of Kalashnikovs mortars and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). This book does what it sets out to do really well, crisply and efficiently.

The Parachute Regiment

Bishop gives a good potted history of the Parachute Regiment, describing its formation during the Second World War, notoriety gained in Northern Ireland from the Bloody Sunday killings, glory won in the Falklands. He describes the gruelling training required to join this elite force and the sense of pride teetering on arrogance this gives ‘Toms’, as members of the regiment call each other, over every other regiment in the army, who they collectively dismiss as crap hats or just ‘hats’. (Incidentally, all the officers and men refer to themselves as ‘the blokes’, not guys or lads. It’s always ‘the blokes’, ‘my blokes’ etc, for example p.220.)

He gives a pen portrait of the Paras’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, like many senior officers in the British Army, a formidably intelligent man, with a Masters Degree in International Relations from Cambridge and an MA in war studies from King’s College London.

He describes the background to the deployment of British forces to Afghanistan in April 2006, including Defence Secretary John Reid’s notorious claim that he hoped the three-year deployment would pass without a single shot being fired.

The force package

There’s a great deal about the make-up of the British force which was deployed to Afghanistan. I always find these bits of military books extremely confusing containing, as they do, a bewildering array of names and numbers of regiments and brigades.

The Helmand Task Force was drawn from 16 Air Assault Brigade based in Colchester. At its heart was 3 Para. Air support was provided by seven Chinook helicopters provided by the RAF. The big choppers were only lightly armed and so had to be accompanied by eight Apache attack helicopters which were provided by 9 Regiment of the Army Air Corps. (One Chinook was shot down in Afghanistan, killing all 16 soldiers aboard. The Apache bodyguards were vital, p.67.) Four Hercules C-130 transports were supplied by the RAF.

3 Para, like all infantry battalions, is configured in tiers. It consisted of A, B and C companies which were rifle companies, augmented by Support Company (machine guns, mortars, anti-tank weapons) and D company (intelligence, signals, target acquisition [snipers] and reconnaissance). 3 Para were supported by a company from the Royal Gurkha Rifles and a detachment from the Royal Irish Regiment. The armoured element was provided by the Household Cavalry Regiment with their Scimitars and Spartans. The Royal Horse Artillery’s 7th Parachute Regiment would contribute a battery of 105 light guns. The operation was supported by a parachute-trained squadron of light engineers from 23 Engineer Regiment, units from the Royal Logistics Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and medics from 16 Close Support Medical Regiment. An advance force of engineers were deployed to build camps protected by a company from the Royal Marines 42 Commando (p.28).

I give the list verbatim to show two things. One, it really brings home the importance and the responsibility placed on the planners who had to work out what was needed, where it was going to come from, and how to send it all half way round the world.

Second point is how challenging it must have been for commanders like Brigadier Ed Butler or Lieutenant Colonel Tootal to fully grasp what was available to them and who could be pulled into planned missions or called upon when emergency struck. Their roles required an in-depth understanding not just of the names and numbers but a good working knowledge of what all these personnel were good at, or could be called upon to do, in a pinch, in a crisis.

Too many aims

Bishop explains the problems facing the deployment which were of roughly three types and which were to snarl up and undermine the mission.

1. Confused aims

The NATO deployment was meant to be:

a) helping ‘the Afghan people build a democratic state with strong security forces and an economy that will support civil society’ (as you can see, there are actually three distinct goals in that one sentence). At the same time

b) it was to work with the Department for International Development to deliver ‘a tailored package of political, developmental and military assistance’ to the Afghan people

AND c) the troops would be expected to ‘support international efforts to counter the narcotics trade which poisons the economy in Afghanistan and poisons so many young people in this country.’ (p.27)

2. Chain of command

Brigadier Ed Butler was chosen to command the force. Canada was in overall command of the NATO effort, with its base in Kandahar. Because of Canadian army base was also being commanded by a brigadier, army etiquette demanded that Butler step aside allow a more junior officer to command his men. This meant Butler would have to oversee operations from Kabul (p.45) Meanwhile Tootal discovered he would have to answer to a new layer of command with Colonel Charlie Knaggs put in formal charge of the Helmand Task Force. Then Butler discovered his headquarters would not be doing the operational planning but that a staff officer from army headquarters in Northwood would be drawing up the crucial operational plan.

The words ‘piss-up’ and ‘brewery’ spring to mind.

3. National and local politics

The brigade and even the British contingent as a whole didn’t have autonomy. They were fitting into an international force whose members had rival agendas. The Americans had little interest in the reconstruction effort and wanted the Brits to support Operation Mountain Thrust, their campaign of ‘decapitation’ i.e. seeking out and killing Taliban leaders. In contrast, the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai didn’t want the Brits to do anything which would alienate local tribal chiefs who, of course, got tribute from all the farmers growing poppies. He wanted the Brits to extend the authority of the Kabul government without ruffling feathers.

Diary of fighting

But all this background is in a sense just the setting, the stage, for the guts of the narrative. This consists of a kind of diary of the deployment and, above all, of the fierce fighting the unit quickly found itself engaged in. Dates are prominent and used to specify the day-by-day series of events. These are all-too-often optimistic outings from the various bases which almost immediately encountered problems and turned into devastating firefights.

Bishop must have had extraordinary access to 3 Para because the text is crammed full of direct quotes from officers and men commenting on all aspects of the story, from the initial deployment and the pitiful state they found Camp Bastion in, through these numerous hair-raising engagements.

A Company arrived at Camp Bastion on 15 April to find their accommodation not built yet. They dossed in tents on the desert sand with no showers or toilet facilities. Tootal arrived 18 April. His brigade was to patrol the triangle formed by Bastion, the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, and the market town of Gereshk, 20 miles north east of the base.

Even on their first patrol of Gereshk seasoned paras who’d served in Northern Ireland recognised the signs. There was a charged vibe and many of the young men stared at the troops challengingly. They realised they were being dicked, ‘dicking’ being a term coined in Northern Ireland to describe the way IRA sympathisers signalled to gunmen the passage of British patrols.

Less than two weeks later on 1 May a convoy returning from a first shura with elders was briefly hit by a scoot and shoot attack i.e. a single concealed gunman letting off a burst from a kalashnikov. Paradoxically, Gereshk remained peaceful for the rest of the deployment; it was all the other towns which kicked off.

The Brits discovered the Afghan police were even more corrupt than the Iraqi version. Some of the 22 checkpoints at the entrance to Gereshk had been subcontracted to gunmen to extort whatever they wanted from civilians who wanted to pass. The training course NATO had set up was at Kandahar 80 miles away. Even keen recruits only stuck it out for a few days then absconded.

18 May Gunmen attacked on the district centre at Musa Qala. On 20 May a convoy carrying Afghan Army soldiers, American and French trainers was ambushed: 15 soldiers and 2 Frenchmen were killed. Convoys got attacked or lost. Troops had to be sent out to rescue them who themselves came under attack and radioed for air cover.

The Afghan government asked for protection for the village of Now Zad and Butler sent a troop of Gurkha soldiers. These were to become stuck in the town and come under fierce attack. A few days later the provincial governor, Daoud, requested help for a village a hundred miles north where one of his supporters was coming under attack, so Butler dutifully flew some men up there, to discover no attack at all.

Butler didn’t like the way the deployment was evolving. 1) He was having to deploy troops to beleaguered towns like Now Zad and Musa Qasa, which then became magnets for heavily armoured attacks by Taliban. Any reinforcements setting out from Bastion were bound to be ambushed on the way. Or 2) he was acting as paid security for Daoud and his backers a job the Afghan police or army or both should have been doing. Both of which were replacing the supposed strategy of securing the Bastion triangle and then systematically expanding the area of peace and security from there. He was becoming too reactive, reacting to events (i.e. the ambushes and firefights launched by the Taliban), losing the initiative (p.85).

There was a feeling among the men that the British were too compliant with the wishes of the Afghans and that their own mission was being twisted put of shape by local political considerations. (p.110)

General points

1. The NATO forces were screwed without air cover. Again and again and again and again, when they come under attack, the Paras radio for jet fighters to come in and strike the enemy positions with 1,000 kilo bombs. Or, when there are casualties, they desperately radio for Chinook helicopters to come and evacuate them. But a) there were never enough Chinooks and b) the Chinooks were so lightly armed and vulnerable that they could only enter the battlespace if accompanied by Apache attack helicopters (p.58).

All these desperate radio calls for air back-up prompt one simple thought. In the end the Taliban won without any super-expensive, gee whizz, air support at all. Just by having the numbers and dogged persistence. Just like the Viet Cong.

2. Second thing I noticed is how, in the second quarter of the book i.e. after the Paras have arrived and as they each individually experience their first engagement, once back at base they each congratulate themselves on how well they’ve performed, how their training had worked, how nobody had faltered or frozen and everyone behaved as trained. Good lads!

‘Everyone was elated, We had all succeeded. No one had backed down or done anything cowardly.’ (p.66 and p.82)

They had blooded themselves, been put the test and proven true, proved worthy of their regiment, their training and, in many cases, of their father and grandfathers who served before them. They had become men.

‘For the first time you felt legitimised. You felt that you had done it for real now and it was good, it was good.’ (p.83)

I know it’s understandable, I dare say I’d feel the same. But it’s a small example of what Frank Ledwidge calls the inward-facing mindset of the British troops in both countries. As the security situations deteriorated, commanders’ number one priority became protecting their men. As time went by, the attacks became more fierce, the outings from fortified platoon camps more rare, simply surviving became the sole priority.

All talk of development, talk of eradicating the poppy crop and restructuring the entire rural economy – something that even in peacetime would have taken years of government funding and careful planning – all this stuff vanished like morning dew (p.265). Within a few months Butler and Tootal had placed their men in situations of mortal danger and their overriding priority had become trying to protect their men from ceaseless attack.

Notable engagements

4 June Operation Mutay to surround and capture an ammunition store, possible IED factory, in Now Zad, which degenerates into a long hard-fought battle in the confusing back alleys and smallholdings of the town.

11 June Mission to retrieve a Desert Hawk unmanned air vehicle that had crashed in the desert. Ambushed by Taliban the convoy of NATO troops get into real trouble.

13 June American convoy ambushed, A company told to fly to the last reported location and extract surviving Americans. The Paras are themselves attacked and forced to bunk down in the desert overnight as water runs dangerously short until a Chinook finally arrives to extract the wounded and drop water. It took 30 hours in all rather than the 2 they were told.

Early June the Support Company’s mortar platoon was sent to reinforce a handful of American security guys and Afghan Army forces guarding the prestigious Kajaki dam, a major source of power and irrigation for the entire province, built with American development money in the 1950s and still just about functioning. The dam was coming under steadily heavier attack which was demoralising the Afghan army inside it. Support company was sent to surprise the next Taliban attack by replying in force with mortars and machine guns.

27 June C Company with support elements rumbled in a convoy to the village of Zumbelay east of Gereshk. After a shura the village elders recommend they leave by a different road on which they run into an ambush, with different troops becoming separated and caught in localised firefights which went on after sunset.

21 June The Paras were sent on an operation to Sangin which should have lasted at most a few days but led to them being stuck there for the remainder of their time in Helmand. It was another reactive and policing action. Two days earlier the Taliban had ambushed a convoy carrying a former district chief killing him and his bodyguards. A posse of relatives set out to retrieve the bodies and they too were ambushed and 25 killed. Among the wounded was the son of the district chief. Once again governor Daoud asked Charlie Knaggs if his troops could rescue the boy and once again the Paras were sent on what was really a policing job. The justification was that it would maintain and/or extend the reach of central government.

The second half of the book focuses on the paras taking over the compound of the district centre just on the edge of Sangin, fortifying it, then coming under probing fire, then sustained attack.

1 July The FSG directly hit by a RPG which killed three and badly injured five. Desperate scenes as the medical officer Harvey Pinn tried to save the wounded. The Chinooks take a long time coming to evacuate them. After this murderous night Tootal considered evacuating the entire force from Sangin but they had got themselves into a political trap. With each new attack fought off Sangin became more and more symbolic for both sides. Defeat and withdrawal would amount to a huge victory for the Taliban and a defeat for both governor Daoud and the Kabul government which 3 Para were there to support. So stay they had to.

5 July Troops were ordered to secure the area south of the compound for helicopters. They are ambushed which develops into a fierce fight during which Damien Jackson was shot through the torso and bled to death despite his colleagues’ frantic efforts.

By now there were contingents posted at Sangin, Now Zad, Musa Qaleh, Kajaki and Forward Operating Base Robinson i.e. the force was spread thin. Contrary to everything the army general staff told the politicians and the politicians told the country:

• There were simply not enough men to do the job. (p.147)
• The problem was there were never enough soldiers. (p.201)

Cut to the Pathfinders who were sent on a temporary mission to Musa Qaleh and ended up getting stuck there. Bishop describes repeated attempts to relieve them which were driven back by fierce attacks, and the nightly attacks on the compound, until the Pathfinders began to run low on food and ammunition. A Danish relief force under Major Lars Ulslev broke through the Taliban siege on 26 July to reinforce and resupply the garrison, and the two nationalities fought alongside each other for a further 2 weeks. The Pathfinders didn’t leave Musa Kaleh until 6 August. In fact it took an entire battlegroup operation to get them out. A couple of day deployment had turned into 52 gruelling days, subject to daily attacks.

During the endless night attacks, one of the planes the Pathfinders called in for support bombed a mosque. When the Danes met the town elders the latter demanded that the coalition pack up and leave. All their presence did was bring trouble (p.165). When Ulslev made it clear the NATO forces were staying many of the townspeople packed up and left until Musa Qaleh became a ghost town. The NATO mission there would turn out to be a disaster for them (p.256).

14 July Operation Augustus, allotted to the Brits by the American senior officer, Major General Benjamin Freakley, to seize a Taliban leader running a madrassas a few miles north of Sangin. Two hundred Paras were choppered in protected by a Spectre gunship, a UAV, Harriers and Apaches. Bishop gives a vivid detailed description of this major engagement. A lot of blowing up and air support plus the arrival of the Canadians in armoured vehicle, but when they finally blast their way into the compounds the Taliban has left and there’s no sigh of the leader they were sent to capture.

Chapter 13 describes the prolonged ordeal of the 40 or so Gurkhas who held the district centre at Now Zad against wave after wave of Taliban attacks. When they’d arrived the town elders asked them not to stay, knowing it would attract the Taliban, but they remained, in accordance with the wishes of Governor Daoud and were subject to an amazing intensity of attack, in one week being attacked 35 times. Soldiers were forbidden to move around the compound during daylight hours for fear of being sniped by Taliban sharpshooters.

They survived and called down repeated air strikes which exterminated Taliban positions and must have killed over a hundred of them. Yet they kept on coming back. Two points emerge. One: it was a big mistake to be forced to ally with the Afghan police, nominal representatives of the Kabul government, who were in fact a byword for corruption, kidnapping, extortion, rape and paedophilia (pages 184 and 211). Allying with them ruined the NATO forces’ reputation.

Second: as the Taliban moved in, townspeople wisely left. By the time the Gurkhas were relieved by a force from the Royal Fusiliers, the town was a) empty, a ghost town and b) very badly damaged. They had survived, astonishingly with no mortal injuries. But mission accomplished?

Chapter 14

27 July and back to Sangin, manned by B Company which endured up to six firefights a day. A digression on the setup and kit used by snipers (p.195). The Taliban were becoming more organised and effective. Intelligence speculated that losses of local fighters had been made up with imports from neighbouring Pakistan who were much better trained and tactically imaginative (p.217). Hence the Brits rarely patrolled with fewer than 40 troops. Nerves and defeatist talk spread as the soldiers realised that every single patrol would be attacked, some as close as 40 metres from the outpost.

20 August A patrol aiming to find a new path through the area north of the outpost runs right into Taliban fighters. In moments three of Corporal Bryan Budd’s eight-man 1 Section are wounded and down. On the spur of the moment Budd charged the Taliban single handed firing continuously making them desist firing or retreat long enough for the rest of his squad to extract the casualties. Later his dead body was recovered. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross (p.218). His death demoralised the blokes.

29 August A full battle group operation to convoy in and install an air-portable bridge across the river Helmand west of the Sangin outpost. This triggers a fierce firefight in which platoon sergeant Paddy Caldwell is shot in the neck.

The experience of the Danish force, nicknamed the Griffins, which came to Musa Qaleh, 140 strong with 46 light armoured Eagle vehicles. A force from the Royal Irish Regiment replaced the Pathfinders to fight alongside the Griffins and discovered an outpost under unrelenting daily bombardment. They destroy houses close to the base which could provide cover, they blow the backs of houses off so they can see silhouettes moving about.

The battle group’s tenure of Musa Qaleh appeared to be achieving nothing other than the steady destruction of the town. (p.232)

The Royal Irish came to call it ‘Camp Shit Hole’.

14 August a Taliban attack so intense, from so many angles, that the platoon commander described it as like World War III. Our boys withdraw to a large container as shelter from a relentless barrage of mortars.

The incoming commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan dislikes the outpost system and wants to withdraw troops from the platoon forts, but is prevented by the Prime Minister who says this would be handing the towns over to the Taliban. Corporal Danny Groves is quoted as very sensibly pointing out the Taliban already control the towns; all the allies control is an area about 100 metres from the walls of their forts and barely that, seeing as they are subjected to hourly attacks (p.235).

The Danish government withdraws its men from Musa Qaleh who are replaced by a cobbled together British force. The Danes had better food, better equipment and more medical officers. And they were a laugh. They were missed. The Danes were extracted in a full battle group operation with a convoy of lorries, persuading the Taliban the outpost was now ripe for taking.

26 August A concerted Taliban attack to take the Musa Qaleh outpost, phased attacks staged by some 150 fighters (p.240). There were seven attacks in the next 24 hours. It didn’t stop and attrition was wearing down the defenders.

1 September Intense mortar attack gets a direct hit on the main mortar launch site, killing a popular Fijian solder, wounding another who died later in hospital.

2 September Mass attack on Musa Qaleh results in six Royal Irish casualties.

6 September Back to the Kajaki dam, which had come under regular attack throughout the period. When Taliban are seeing setting up a roadblock on a road a mile away our boys go to investigate and blunder into a minefield. One is killed, five severely wounded. It’s a traumatic account. On the same day there were casualties at Sangin and Musa Qaleh, causing casualties. Bishop’s account of the bravery of Chinook pilot Mark Hammond who flew to all three sites to evacuate casualties under heavy fire made me cry. What incredible bravery. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (p.250). As Dan Mills says, in Sniper One, balls the size of watermelons.

The occupiers of the Musa Qalej outpost had beaten back over 100 attacks in 40 days. Three had been killed and 15 injured.

Soldiers’ humour

The district centre/compound at Musa Qaleh is under attack, as usual:

Three of the Pathfinders grabbed their kit and ran across open ground swept by fire, up a ladder and along a 30-foot makeshift bridge that led to the roof of the outpost. They began returning fire. Among them was Lance Corporal Tony Robinson, an Australian on an exchange posting. Robinson was keen to fire the 51mm mortar located on the Outpost, something he had never done before. He dropped a bomb into the barrel and it soared off into the night. But there was no explosion. Someone asked him whether he had removed the safety pin. He replied, ‘There’s a safety pin on these things?’ The collective shout of ‘Knob!’ could be heard over the gunfire. (p.160)

How to win a medal

Quite a few of the soldiers received medals after the deployment and Bishop devotes an appendix to carefully listing them all. It’s interesting to learn what kind of behaviour wins a medal. On 24 July the Outpost at Musa Qaleh was attacked and two RPGs hit the sangar, destroying it and destroying the western edge of the roof which collapsed to the ground below. Two Danes were on the roof and when the smoke cleared one was seen doggedly returning fire. But the other, Lieutenant Thomas Rydahl, had fallen with the roof, two storeys down into a pile of rubble where he lay in full view of the attacking Taliban, a sitting duck.

Several Paras ran under fire along a walkway to the roof to join the shooting Dane. The Australian Tony Robinson looked over the damaged bit of roof down at Rydahl lying exposed and had a brainwave. There was an old bedstead on the undamaged part of the roof and Robinson hung it over the side, then climbed down it under direct fire from the enemy. He quickly learned the Dane had a broken leg so wasn’t able to shin up a vertical bedstead, so Robinson rooted around in the rubble and found a ladder, placed it against the rubble stack and pushed the wounded Dane back up onto the roof where his colleagues pulled him up, and so to safety.

For this act of extraordinary bravery under fire Robinson won the Military Cross (p.164). (See also the valour of Bryan Budd, mentioned above.)

A Para poem

The Paras nicknamed the enemy ‘Terry Taliban’. This anonymous poem was pinned up in one of the sangars at Sangin.

Watch out Terry, we’re hunting you down
There’s nowhere to hide in Sangin town
You shit yourself when the .50-cals are fired
No point in running, you’ll only die tired
Got A-10s on call for brassing you up
No food or water, we don’t give a fuck
So do one, Terry, you’ve plenty to fear
We run this town now. The Paras are here.
(p.197)

Bit tough on any of the Brits who were actually named Terry.

In the last furlong of the book more and more of the blokes change their tune and pay tribute to the Taliban. They must have taken casualties in the hundreds of dead with many more wounded but they absolutely would not stop and the tempo of attacks only increased.

The end

As September 2006 drew to a close the mood music changed. The British had intelligence that the Taliban had identified the helicopters as the weakest element in the allied force. Ed Butler realised that all it would take would be for one helicopter to be shot down for him to be faced with the agonising decision of whether to send in another one to extract the casualties but risk undergoing the same fate.

The incoming head of ISAF, General David Richards thought the situation he inherited, with the force distributed among the outposts, had been a mistake. He thought Butler had been mistaken in acceding to Governor Daoud’s wishes to ‘save’ this or that town from the Taliban. But he didn’t want to unilaterally withdraw. That would look like a NATO defeat (as it indeed would be).

While the senior brass agonised about what to do the elders of Musa Qaleh solved it for them by brokering a peace. They asked the Taliban to stop the fighting which was destroying the town and, once this was agreed, Ed Butler willingly agreed, too. A ceasefire was declared on 12 September just 6 days after the disastrous minefield day. In a historic event 60 or so of the town elders walked out to the bullet-riddled fortress, were welcomed in and given soft drinks, accompanied by a cohort of young intense-looking men dressed in black, who said nothing. The deal agreed was a month of peace then the British would withdraw. The elders would provide family members to police the town. The Taliban would withdraw. Handshakes all round. Within hours the centre of the town began to come back to life.

The Paras expected attacks to start up at any moment but they didn’t. The entire month went by without a shot being fired. In mid-October the garrison of the Musa Qaleh outpost was withdrawn.

But Terry hadn’t given up across the rest of the province, Incidents fell away but whether that was because the Taliban were exhausted, were running short of fighters, that local elders were intervening or it was the start of the poppy season, noone knew. There were 76 shooting incidents between 18 September and the official end of the battle group’s tour on 6 October.

The Para cohort in Sangin were relieved by Royal Marines. The Paras and their battle group comrades had been in Sangin for 91 days during which time they clashed with the Taliban 138 times (p.264). One by one A, B, C and the new E company were moved out. Tootal handed over responsibility for the British Battle Group to the Marines on 31 October 2006.

As to the aid and development we promised all the Afghans in all these different towns and communities, by the time the Paras arrived they’d been hearing the same promises off and on for five years. Bishop describes Para officers attending shuras and making the same promises which the Afghan elders listened to again, with polite disbelief. And then nothing happened. For the full three years.

Little progress had been made on reconstruction, the underlying purpose of the deployment. No ‘quick impact’ projects had been delivered…Instead of construction there had been destruction…the areas around the district centres of Musa Qaleh, Now Zad and Sangin were scarred and battered by the continuous battles. The people of these places had no reason to love the British. (p.266)

A foreign view

The Brits were part of a much wider NATO operation. Bishop occasionally mentions members of other nations’ forces, like the French who are killed in a Taliban attack, or the Danes who battled through to relieve the Pathfinders at Musa Qaleh.

It would be really interesting to read about their experiences, about a different national approach from the Americans or the Brits who I’ve been reading about. Their opinions of the Afghans, the deployment, about us. Would be interesting.

Even more obviously, I wonder if there are any accounts of the Taliban view of all of this, the allied invasion of 2001 or the NATO deployment of 2006.

Broader context

Which leads onto another obvious thought which is – this book is very limited in both subject and time. The British deployment was only part of the much larger NATO deployment. If you look at maps of the campaign you immediately see that US forces held camps and outposts to the north and south of the British, while the Canadians held Kandahar and other NATO members other areas. Presumably it was all kicking off there, as well, but Bishop gives little or no indication of how the other allies were faring, what methods they pursued, how the British effort and experience differed from our allies’.

And, timewise, Bishop ends his account in spring 2007 with a premonition that the Paras are going to be deployed back to Afghanistan but, of course, that was 16 years ago. A huge amount has happened since, up to and including the final US withdrawal in 2021. This is an incredibly vivid of a snapshot in time but reminds me, again, that I need to be reading more up-to-date accounts.

Ledwidge’s view

I came to Bishop’s full-on, soldier’s eye-view account from reading Frank Ledwidge’s high-level strategic analysis of both the campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ledwidge gives perspective. I can see why Bishop, in order to get full access to all the soldiers in 3 Para writes with enormous sympathy and takes them largely at their own valuation. Ledwidge is far more distanced and objective:

Ledwidge says it was a very bad idea to break up the British forces deployed to Afghanistan into small units deployed to miniature ‘forts’ in ten or so regional towns. They should have remained concentrated in the capital, Lashkar Gah, from where they could have projected maximum force. Instead, distributed as small troops to remote and difficult-to-supply towns, the Brits quickly became targets of local insurgents and malcontents, determined to avenge the slight to their honours and manhood created by these invaders.

Their stated aim was to decapitate the Taliban leadership, neutralise the insurgency, and restore law and order so that reconstruction and aid projects could go ahead. In the event, none of those objectives were achieved during the Paras’ tour or, indeed, during British Army’s 13 years in Afghanistan.

Instead the scattered squads found themselves besieged in an archipelago of isolated Alamos, subject to relentless mortar and rocket propelled grenade attacks and liable, the second they tried to leave their compounds, to murderous attacks which almost always caused casualties, thus necessitating the very dangerous visit of evacuation helicopters which, half the time, came under such intense fire they had to retreat without landing. Or calling in air strikes which, no matter how careful both callers and pilots were, unavoidably caused collateral damage. Bishop acknowledges the bombing of the mosque in Musa Qaleh but only once address the question of how many innocent civilians must have been killed or wounded in the endless firefights and regular air attacks (p.205).

Bishop’s entire narrative presents this as the courageous endurance of our brave boys and I don’t for a minute doubt that they showed personal courage which I couldn’t imagine or dream of. But they were only having to fight against such odds because their superiors fucked up. In several places Bishop refers to the Paras’ tradition of holding out and punching above their weight. But to quote Ledwidge:

There is no virtue in entering a fight at a disadvantage. Heroic, outnumbered actions are not primarily accounts of courage; they are often testaments to inadequate contingency planning and poor strategy. The purpose of military action backed by well-thought-out strategy is to apply maximum force to an enemy’s key centres of gravity, not to allow forces too small for the task to be in a position where they can be overrun or fail. (Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge, page 276)

The plucky underdog trope

You can’t help noticing the way Bishop’s narrative of endurance in last-ditch situations plays to tropes embedded deep in British popular history and culture about the plucky Brits battling against the odds.

The Charge of the Light Brigade, Zulu, the Somme, Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, A Bridge Too Far, and now struggling to survive in embattled forts in Iraq and Afghanistan – movies and books have created a deep reservoir of narratives and images and national feeling about our brave boys fighting against the odds, and Bishop’s book is squarely in this tradition.

This explains why it has so many endorsements from reviewers plastered across the back and inside pages – because it reads not just like a movie but a movie filled with reassuring, comforting stereotypes. Tough guys don’t make a fuss when their legs are blown off, the heroic group leader makes firm decisions under great pressure, the brave helicopter pilot goes back into the battle zone to collect the last of our brave boys, the devoted medical officer braves a hail of bullets to try and save the mortally injured man.

This all works very well on its own terms. It’s a gripping and inspiring narrative. But unfortunately Ledwidge, operating at a higher, strategic level, says it’s all bullshit, because it didn’t have to be this way. It only ended up like this – plucky heroes fighting against the odds in embattled outposts – because of a whole series of mistakes made by higher-ups, from the general staff who suggested the deployment and the politicians who believed their overoptimistic claims, and involved lack of clarity about an end point and how to get there, ignorance about the complexity of the political and cultural situations we were blundering into, and bad tactical decisions.

Bishop is aware that the decision to dilute the force by deploying small squads to isolated outposts which would be hard to defend and very hard to resupply was controversial, even at the time. He devotes space to quoting Ed Butler and Stuart Tootal explaining that their task was to extend the rule of the Kabul government, so when the provincial governor told them they had to prevent the town of Now Zad or Musa Qaleh falling into Taliban hands, there was a strong case for doing what he – the local representative of the Kabul government – requested (repeated on p.266).

Nonetheless, it was an operational mistake which doomed the mission to failure.

Footnotes

1. ‘Cracking on’

Frank Ledwidge has a lot to say about the British Army’s mantra of ‘cracking on’ in the face of growing difficulties. This, he says, is entirely wrong. A mature army would step back, assess the situation, rethink the overall strategy. ‘Cracking on’ is the strategic equivalent of throwing good money after bad.

‘Cracking on’ was the Paras’ answer to all setbacks. They tried to forget what was happening and carry on with the mission that now seemed starker and more daunting. Things had stated to go wrong. (p.129)

Having read Ledwidge, then, influenced by my reading of all the places in Bishop’s text where he describes just this attitude of ‘cracking on’, made me realise the words he describes it in betray his and the Paras’ ambivalence about this dogged attitude.

• [After the death of Budd, Lieutenant Andy] Mallett prepared himself to deliver the inevitable ‘cracking on’ pep talk. (p.222)
• The only answer was to crack on, not out of any belief in the War on Terror but from a sense of duty to your mates, your unit and your regiment. (p.224)

At tactical level, this is, indeed, necessary, But at a higher, operational level, this, Ledwidge says, is when you need to stop and rethink your whole approach. In fact, tellingly, this is the final thought in the final sentences of this extremely good book. At the time of writing, early 2007, it seems like the Paras might be sent back to the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan:

In Colchester preparations are already under way for another deployment. The Paras are approaching it with an enthusiasm which seems undiminished by their recent ordeal. There are no dramas. They are just cracking on. ‘It’s what we do,’ said [Regimental Sergeant Major] John Hardy. (p.269)

Exactly.

(In his impressive history of the war, Jack Fairweather links the army mantra of just ‘cracking on’, in which showing emotion was seen as a weakness, to the failure to take post traumatic stress disorder seriously enough or provide adequate psychiatric care for soldiers coming out of combat. See A War of Choice, page 256.)

2. The influence of films

I’m predisposed against films, especially American Hollywood movies. I think movies, as a form, are a corrupting and degrading influence. To put it at its simplest, many American movies send one message – that you’re not a real man, or nowadays a real person, till you’ve picked up a gun and shot someone.

Justified revenge

To justify killing, many American movies set up a scenario where the professional assassin, government spook etc has retired, left the business – but then someone kills his wife and children and from that point onwards the film is just a list of horrific revenge murders. Thousands of American movies tell one story, the narrative of Justified Revenge.

Good guys, bad guys

And they’re always numbingly simplistic: there’s good guys (often just one guy, single) and bad guys. The good guy gets to kill tens (these days scores and scores) of bad guys. The John Wicks movies make entertainment from showing a superhumanly gifted killer shooting scores and scores and scores of people in the head.

Arguably these two dumb stupid tropes – justified revenge and good guys/bad guys – underlay George W. Bush’s entire War on Terror. Bad guys attacked us; we are justified in taking unlimited revenge.

To give a concrete example, from Iraq not Afghanistan, on 31 March 2003 gunmen ambushed four American contractors outside Fallujah, a city to the west of Baghdad, beat them to death, burned their bodies and hung them from a bridge over the river Euphrates while jeering crowds danced in celebration. Footage of all this was beamed round the world. Bush was horrified and vowed revenge. He ordered the US Army to go into the city to seize the ‘bad guys’.

This ridiculously impossible task of course led to all-out war with the insurgents and the First Battle of Fallujah. All round the world were beamed footage of houses being destroyed, terrified civilians being rounded up, and thousands of refugees fleeing the city as the civilian casualties grew into the hundreds. All round the Arab world young men decided they had to go to Iraq to fight these genocidal invaders.

Fairweather quotes part of the Bush speech on the original atrocity where Bush says: ‘the American people want to know that we’re going after the bad guys’ (p.111).

The simple-minded dichotomies, the binary polarities of a thousand Hollywood movies, which divide people up into the Good Guys (John Wayne, Bruce Willis) and the Bad Guys (wearing black hats), governed US policy throughout the twentieth century. This worked fine when there really were unambiguously Bad Guys, like the Nazis, but not so well in societies riven with complex ethnic, religious, social and political divides, such as Vietnam or Iraq.

Back in Fallujah, inevitably, in order to bring the ‘murderers to justice’, many times more US troops were killed and injured than the original 4 contractors. In the end 37 US troops were killed and over 600 Iraqi civilians. The city was devastated. Thousands fled. America suffered a huge PR disaster across the Arab world. Not only this but it imperilled US policy at the highest level when the entire Sunni membership of the provisional Iraqi government threatened to quit.

Lastly and with thumping inevitability, the supposed murderers of the contractors were never found. So was this a wise decision, balancing tactical kneejerk response in the broader framework of strategic requirements? No. It was a crass, dumb and counter-productive move.

So, back to films. All this explains why, when I read the inevitable comparisons the Paras make to firefights and situations to movies, it triggers the thought process outlined above and makes me realise how deep the baleful, immoral and misleading influence of simple-minded movie narratives extend into both American and British military thinking and policy making, with disastrous results.

• ‘It was like a case of duelling mortars, like you imagine gunslingers in the Wild West. You stand at one end of the street and you go for your guns and the first one who hits the other guy wins.’ (Captain Nick French, p.98)
• The dilemma of the citizens of Sangin was close to the plight of Wild West settlers threatened by marauding outlaws, as seen in many an old cowboy movie. Like the peace-loving townsfolk of the Wild West Sangin residents hated the intimidation and extortion imposed on them by the bad guys. (p.115)
• ‘It was like the gunfight at the OK Corral. There were rounds whizzing by us. (Corporal Stuart Giles, p.209)
• ‘The bass throb of the .50-cals put heart into the men in the ditches.’ C Company’s sergeant Major told Mackenzie afterwards that ‘when they heard us firing, they felt their whole morale lift – it was like something out of Star Wars.’ (C Company’s sergeant major, p.104)
• Before the convoy arrived the American quick reaction force that had arrived from the forward to rescue their comrades conducted a ‘clearance by fire’ – drenching the area with heavy machine guns and grenades from rapid-fire Mark 19 launchers. ‘It was like a scene from Apocalypse Now,’ said [Major Nick] Wight-Boycott. ‘The green zone just erupted in flames.’ (p.155)

Thus the simplistic tropes of Hollywood movies influenced Allied thinking from the highest strategic level (President Bush) down to the lowest tactical level (Paras on the ground). Not an influence for detached rational thought but for gung-ho mindless aggression, not an influence for the better understanding of the highly complex societies we were invading, but encouraging the tendency to reduce entire societies down to the simplistic binary of good guys and bad guys. With disastrous results.

Credit

3 Para by Patrick Bishop was first published by Harper Press in 2007. References are to the 2008 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

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