last phrase would come to have a powerful significance when the battle group began their work.
As if this was not enough, there was a further aspect to the mission. Helmand was opium poppy country. Poor farmers relied on the poppy to make a living, selling their crop to local drug lords. The troops, said Reid, 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’. Nine-tenths of all the heroin on British streets originated in Afghanistan, he claimed. Once again, decisive action in a far-flung place could benefit British society.
It would be claimed later that Reid had presented the mission as a risk-free exercise in nation-building. This was based on an interview he gave to the BBC’s Today programme in April, just as the deployment was beginning. On a crackly line from Kandahar, NATO’s main base in the south, he said that ‘if we came for three years here to accomplish our mission and had not fired one shot at the end of it we would be very happy indeed’.
In the months that followed, as the British mission grew more and more hazardous and shots were fired by the hundreds of thousands, these words would be repeated by critics as evidence of his naivety. In fact the phrase was ripped out of context. Reid had been frank about the risks from the start. In the same interview he declared that ‘although our mission … is primarily reconstruction it is a complex and dangerous mission because the terrorist will want to destroy the economy and legitimate trade, and the government that we are helping to build up’.
The way the task force was structured made it clear that trouble was expected. The Helmand Task Force was drawn primarily from 16 Air Assault Brigade based in Colchester. At its heart was 3 Para, who, as its commander was proud to boast, ‘fight on their feet’. Without air support, however, they could not function. That was to be provided by seven CH-47 helicopters provided by the Royal Air Force. The twin-rotored Chinooks, with their huge lift capacity, were the main workhorses of the task force. They were armed only with three machine guns and needed protection. This was the job of eight Apache attack helicopters from 9 Regiment of the Army Air Corps, which were being deployed for the first time with the British Army. They also played a crucial role in supporting ground troops when they were under attack. Four Hercules C-130 transports would be supplied by the RAF.
The fighting core of the force was 3 Para. They were reinforced by a company from the Royal Gurkha Rifles and a detachment from the Royal Irish Regiment. The Household Cavalry Regiment (HCR) with their Scimitars and Spartans would supply an armoured element. The Royal Horse Artillery’s 7th Parachute Regiment (7 RHA) would contribute a battery of 105 light guns. The operation was supported by a parachute-trained squadron of 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 set to go to Helmand ahead of the main deployment to build camps, protected by a company from the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando. By July, about 3,300 troops were expected to be in place in Helmand, excluding the engineers building the camps. The task force could also call on the assistance of American bombers, support and attack helicopters, and other NATO countries were considering offering fighter cover and transport aircraft.
The size of the ‘force package’, as it was called, had been the subject of long debate in London. Men and materiel were in short supply owing to commitments in Iraq. Reid described the deployment as ‘substantial’, and said that it was sufficient to ‘maximise their chances of success and minimise the risks’. The battle group’s senior officers were reasonably content with what they were given, though like all commanders they would always have preferred to have more. But that view would alter as the original mission changed and the force’s responsibilities spread far beyond their original intended area of operations, stretching manpower and resources to the limits. ‘The fact is’, said a senior ISAF commander after the Paras had returned home, ‘that the 3 Para battle group … was woefully insufficient for the tasks that were being laid on it.’
The operational boundaries of the deployment were vague and elastic from the start. Reid said the British were not going ‘because we want to wage war’, and that the military assets were intended ‘to deter and defend ourselves’. But the political and military landscape they were entering made war fighting inevitable. There were several powerful interests seeking to direct their actions, voices that could not be ignored. They were fitting into a multinational force whose members had different agendas. The most important were the Americans, who had little interest in the reconstruction effort and would expect the British to contribute to their campaign to decapitate the Taliban leadership. They would be leant on by Britain’s ally, President Karzai and his representative in Helmand, to expand the government’s authority into the badlands.
It seemed to the Paras themselves, as they made their preparations, that the fact of their presence in Helmand was bound, sooner or later, to provoke a fight with the Taliban. Will Pike emphasised to his company that ‘we were there to enable development, to enable reconstruction and that the military arm was not the decisive thing, but winning the hearts and minds of the people’. When the Paras talked among themselves, however, Pike said, ‘we all knew that it was easier said than done and we were very aware that this operation was probably going to be the most significant thing we had done as a battalion since the Falklands and it was going to involve fighting on a scale we hadn’t seen since then’.
Pike knew Afghanistan from a previous tour – he had served in Kabul with 2 Para in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. As he understood it, Helmand was something of a sanctuary for the Taliban. The international military presence was sparse – some Americans engaged in targeted counter-terrorism operations – and the central government weak. The place was essentially run by the same people who ran the narcotics trade. ‘We knew that people were going to oppose the strands of development that we wanted to try and secure,’ he said. ‘So whilst the ferocity of the fighting came as something of a surprise … I don’t think we were under any illusions.’
In their pre-deployment training 3 Para hoped for the best and prepared for the worst. Study days were organised and visiting experts gave lectures on the people, history and customs of Afghanistan. Several soldiers were sent off on crash language courses and everyone was taught a few Pashto phrases for basic interaction with the locals. There were bouts of intensive tactical training but it was hard to recreate the conditions they would be operating in amidst the cold and wet of a British winter.
Early in 2006, however, 3 Para were sent for a month’s training to a much more useful environment – the stony hills and wadis of Oman. ‘Much of the training involved going to mocked-up villages, establishing relations with the locals and displaying a culturally aware attitude to the people they would be dealing with,’ Martin Taylor remembered. ‘Much of it had already been learned in Iraq. We were rehearsing the less aggressive “hearts and minds” side of things.’ But at the same time they were ‘always, always rehearsing what would happen if we came under attack. We trained with helicopter gunship and air support. Among the exercises was a live firing exercise in which the scenario is that you are out patrolling and come under attack from the Taliban who are firing from a strongpoint and you have to go and attack that. The blokes trained really hard and were very fit when they came back.’
While they were in Oman, news trickled down to them of what was going on in Afghanistan. It seemed to confirm their instincts that there was trouble ahead. The reports mainly concerned the Canadians who were in charge of the Kandahar area of operations, the sector next to the Paras’. ‘I was responsible to brief the blokes up,’ said Craig Mountford,
so every night in Oman I would sit down with the company commanders then pass it down to the lads. There were regular reports that someone had been killed in Afghanistan. But it wasn’t the fact that people were being killed. It was how they were killed. I heard one particular story about a Canadian officer who went to
