KABUL: Last October Major Shaun Pendry, leader of a British advance team in Helmand, got his first serious taste of life in the wild south of Afghanistan. He was out with an American convoy when it was ambushed: tracer bullets and machine-gun fire zinged off the armour-plated Humvees as they sped through a high-walled village. They were attacked again four miles down the road, this time with rocket-propelled grenades. At least 10 rockets whooshed past, according to a captain in the last vehicle. Fortunately, they all missed. “Welcome to Afghanistan,” an American officer told him.
Over the next few months, 4,200 more British soldiers will be deployed in this sprawling province wedged against Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The British will be spearheading a Nato force that will attempt to take control of the volatile southern provinces and, in doing so, allow around 4,000 American soldiers to return home. (Counting the British troops already on the ground in Afghanistan, and a further deployment of 1,300 to the Kabul region in May, Britain will have 5,700 troops in the country by July. This compares to 8,500 currently in Iraq.)
The defence secretary, John Reid, announcing the new troops last week, admitted that the south is a ‘more demanding area’ than the north or west of Afghanistan, the regions in which British troops have been deployed so far. This is a considerable understatement. Afghans have an unsettling tendency to welcome foreigners initially, then expel them violently, as the British learned to their cost in the 19th century and the Russians in the 20th.
This remains an extremely volatile region — and Helmand is one of its most unruly corners.
The Nato mission comes at a critical point in efforts to rebuild Afghanistan. Four years after American bombers and their Afghan allies toppled the Taliban, success hangs in the balance. Some things have gone well — two peaceful elections, a growing network of smooth roads and a record number of girls in school, for instance. Three million refugees have returned from Pakistan and Iran. The reopening of parliament last month was an eye-popping sight: crusty warlords, turncoat Taliban, fresh-faced women and former communists all gathered together in one chamber to talk about a future.
But in several key areas, reconstruction is stumbling dangerously. The Taliban, buoyed by brash new tactics, have stubbornly refused to die away. Until last summer suicide bombs were an exotic rarity in Afghanistan. Now there are several a week. In one of the bloodiest attacks, 23 people died on the Pakistani border earlier last month. A Canadian diplomat was killed in Kandahar weeks earlier. The tactical twist carries unnerving echoes of Iraq: on Christmas day Afghanistan saw its first videotaped beheading of a coalition ‘collaborator’ released on the internet.
Meanwhile, despite all the talk of clean government, President Karzai has appointed several former warlords to powerful positions, and the booming drug business — now worth £1.6bn per year, and providing 87 per cent of the world’s heroin — has slithered into the new corridors of power. It is estimated that 17 of the 249 new parliamentarians are drug smugglers; another 64 are believed to have links to mafia-like armed groups. Drugs, thugs and insurgency are an old scourge in these parts, of course. But now they are blending together into what Chris Mason, a former US State Department official, calls ‘a perfect storm’. A drugs war is looming, one that will pit foreign forces against the burgeoning drugs mafia. And Helmand is to be at the heart of the fight.
Its geography is as daunting as its violence. Craggy peaks touch 10,000ft in the mountainous north where the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, took shelter after 2001. The south is carpeted in vast, lonely deserts; summer temperatures average 47C (117F). The cocoa-coloured River Helmand cuts between these two zones, flanked by a green belt of land as it twists sluggishly towards Iran.
The fertile riverbanks were once the site of an ambitious American dream. During the cold war, Washington poured millions into building a giant hydroelectric dam and a web of irrigation canals. Today, these canals help nurture a far more lucrative crop than the wheat they were intended for: poppies.
Countrywide, poppy cultivation fell by almost one quarter last year. In Helmand it soared by 91 per cent. Poppy and its more lucrative derivatives, opium and heroin, grease every wheel of the local economy. In Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, new mansions, complete with gondola-shaped roofs and mirrored green windows, peek over the high walls in the wealthiest suburbs. Businessmen rip around the city in top-of-the-range 4x4 jeeps. Provincial officials and police chiefs have curiously expensive cars and houses considering their official salaries of around $50-100 a month. And at night the southern desert roars with the sound of high-speed convoys — jeeps crammed with itchy-finger gunmen and Class A narcotics — whizzing across the hardened sands.
“Drugs permeate everything here. It’s like asking people in Iowa not to grow corn,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hogberg, the provincial US commander. He should know: during last year’s rainy season a mud wall opposite the gate to the American base in Lashkar Gah collapsed, leaving the sentry staring into a field swaying with poppies.
Hogberg, a marine colonel from Chicago with a tough-guy face that regularly breaks into a toothy grin, is nearing the end of his nine-month stint in Helmand when we meet. His first discovery here, he says, was the paramount importance of the tribe and its subsidiary streams: honour, money and bloodshed. “Being commander in Helmand is like being in an episode of the Sopranos,” he says. “You never know who will be at the dinner table next week because there’s always someone getting whacked.”
Not that he could do much to stop the killing. Of the 19,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan, just 110 are in Helmand. Most are stationed at the provincial reconstruction team base in Lashkar Gah, where officers liaise with the provincial government and help to build new roads, mosques and schools. Their capacity to fight the gunmen is virtually zero. “It’s a bit like the old west,” says Hogberg. “If anyone gets in trouble, it could take a long time for the sheriff to arrive.”
The token international presence has given the Taliban carte blanche to terrorise at will. A mafia-style assassination campaign against Afghans linked to western aid has stepped up alarmingly in the past six months. In June, five men working for an American contractor were executed at the side of the road. Last month, gunmen walked into a mosque in Laskhar Gah, singled out a man named Engineer Mirwais from the rows of worshippers and shot him in the head. He worked for a Bangladeshi aid agency providing clean water.
Teachers, as elsewhere in the south, have been particularly targeted. In recent weeks ‘night letters’ — menacing tracts pinned to mosque doors and shop windows — have warned those teaching girls to stop.
Defiance carries a heavy price. On December 15 the Taliban dragged Laghmani, a teacher from Nad Ali district, from a classroom of teenagers and shot him at the school gate. The bloodshed has left many Helmandis, influential tribal leaders in particular, hedging their bets, Hogberg says. “People are straddling the fence. They do not want to commit to the government yet.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
