of the time in Iraq, Farmer led 1 Platoon on patrols along the border with Iran. He found it ‘actually quite interesting’. The only real threat was from IEDs – improvised explosive devices made from artillery shells which the insurgents planted by the roadside and detonated remotely when a patrol passed by. There was an easy way of countering it. The patrols, operated in armoured modified Land Rovers, simply kept off the roads, an easy thing to do in the flat country bordering the Shatt al-Arab waterway which marked the Iraq–Iran frontier.
Their task was to stop Iranians sneaking in bombs, weapons, drugs or any other contraband. The border was long and porous and smuggling was part of the local economy. Farmer thought it ‘a very good introduction as to how to run a platoon on operations … It wasn’t high tempo by any stretch of the imagination but it was a nice way to learn.’ The Paras were also supposed to mentor the Iraqi border security forces. That meant visiting border posts strung along the frontier, ‘making sure they had the right equipment, making sure that they were trained and knew how to run it, and also to give them a warm fuzzy feeling that they were being looked after and that what they were doing was important’.
Iraq did not prove an uplifting experience for many in 3 Para. The Iraqis themselves seemed feckless and ungrateful. Martin Taylor had, like Farmer, turned his back on a conventional, modern career. After a media studies degree at Sussex University he spent two and a half years working for a recruiting consultancy and commuting to London from Kent every day. His family and friends were surprised when, restless with his life, he started talking about the army. ‘But the more I looked into it the more I heard people saying, “I can see you doing that sort of thing.”’ He initially applied for the Royal Artillery but after his second term decided he wanted to join the Parachute Regiment.
He too spent his first operation patrolling the border. Taylor was cheerful, good natured and inclined to think the best of people, but he found it ‘an enormously frustrating chore. For some reason the Iraqis just did not want to help themselves. It was frustrating just watching these guys living in squalor.’
If there was a lesson to be learned from Iraq, it was how not to do things. Stuart Tootal had watched the aftermath of the triumph of America’s ‘shock and awe’ strategy with an expert eye and increasing dismay. He believed that ‘our approach was fundamentally wrong. We rather assumed that once we’d finished the fighting it was merely a case of putting a new government in place, and we underestimated the difficulty of winning over the consent of the people for that regime. What we failed to achieve from the outset was proper security, and [we] stood by allowing a lot of looting to go ahead. And then we didn’t improve the lot of the people.’
Tootal’s background in counter-insurgency studies convinced him that there was much in Britain’s imperial past that could be applied to the present. He was impressed with the example of General Sir Gerald Templer, the high commissioner appointed by Churchill in 1952 to find a solution to the communist uprising known as the Malayan Emergency. It was something he shared with another British officer, Lieutenant General David Richards, who had been appointed commander of ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan), which was due to take over the whole NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) operation in Afghanistan from the Americans. Templer had wielded complete control of every aspect of military and civilian life in Malaya and had devised an intricate committee system that integrated counterinsurgency operations with the reconstruction effort. He once declared: ‘the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’, thereby coining a phrase that would echo through counter-insurgency operations ever after.
The political situation in Afghanistan, which had a democratically elected government under President Karzai, would not allow such overt control. But there was one aspect of Templer’s approach in Malaya which could be applied without offending political sensitivities. This was the application of the ‘ink spot’ theory. It held that the best way of tackling an insurgency was to concentrate on securing specific towns and improving local services, including schools, hospitals, sewerage, water, roads and electricity. Life would then be so good that no one would want to support the rebels and the uprising would wither away.
John Reid had presented the situation in Afghanistan as another emergency. He told the Commons: ‘Whatever the difficulties and risks of this deployment – and I do not hide them from the House or the country – 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.’
It was a reassertion of the claim that Afghanistan was the front line in a war whose effects, if it went wrong, would be felt painfully in the cities of Britain. That had been the argument for invading Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, Britain had been under pressure from America to supply troops to continue the ongoing NATO mission of stabilisation in Afghanistan. The plan was now moving into its third stage. The ‘easy’ parts had been done. The area around Kabul and the northern and western regions were relatively peaceful. Now it was time to concentrate on the south. Tony Blair answered the call willingly. Since 9/11, he had committed Britain to playing a major role in Afghanistan. His government had proved that it honoured its NATO responsibilities and would do so again, even though the deployment would place a further strain on the country’s stretched military resources.
The south of Afghanistan had been neglected after the fall of the Taliban. In 2002 the Americans and their allies had put most of their effort into squeezing the life out of what remained of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the mountainous east of the country. Since 2003, their military effort had been diverted into fighting the war, and then the insurgency, in Iraq. The American troops based in Afghanistan concentrated on targeted operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.
The material help that was promised after the Taliban were driven out of the main cities was slow in coming to the south. There had been little reconstruction and no large-scale deployment of troops to secure the region. In the absence of any Afghan or foreign soldiers to stop them, the Taliban, many of whom had fled to Pakistan after their defeat, began drifting back to Helmand and Kandahar provinces. It was their historic home. Kandahar was the birthplace of the movement. Most Taliban were Pashtun and the provinces were Pashtun territory, part of an ethnic belt that stretched across the border to Pakistan. At the beginning of 2006 they were trying to re-establish themselves through violence and intimidation, murdering and terrorising anyone associated with the government and its NATO coalition allies.
ISAF was led by NATO. It was set up by the United Nations Security Council to secure the country and allow the authority of the central government to take hold. Its operations had begun in the capital, Kabul, and slowly expanded throughout the country in planned stages. Now it had reached stage three – the establishment of Regional Command South.
The British would be part of a multinational force of about nine thousand soldiers. The contributing nations included Canada, Holland and Denmark. The command rotated among the lead nations. The Canadians would be the first to hold it. The battle group’s area of operations would be Helmand, which was in dire need of development but was also the scene of increasingly vigorous insurgent activity.
Defence Secretary Reid made it clear that combating the Taliban resurgence would be one of the battle group’s main tasks. The troops were being sent to ‘deny terrorists an ungoverned space in which they can foment and export terror’. The underlying, long-term aim was to ‘help the people of Afghanistan build a democratic state with strong security forces and an economy that will support a civil society’. In the British area of operations this would be done through the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which would work with the military, the British Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) to deliver a ‘tailored package of political, developmental and military assistance’. The specific mission was to ‘help train the Afghan security forces, to facilitate reconstruction
