The Circuit (40 page)

CHAPTER 39

During my time in Afghanistan I befriended a man whose career read like a recent history of the country’s rulers. He began by serving in the Soviet Army. When the Soviets’ grip on power started to slip, he jumped to the Mujahudeen. Later, he put on a black turban and joined the Taliban. When the Taliban came under threat, he went to work for the American military as an interpreter. Last time I checked, the man was working as a police officer in Herat. He’s a very charming character, but at the end of the day he has no loyalty – whoever is strongest wins his support.

The same is true of most Afghans. Over the years, I’ve worked side-by-side with many of them. A few were rogues but the majority I found to be courageous, honourable and trustworthy – to a point. Because for all their noble attributes, history has taught the Afghans that remaining loyal to a conquering power is a losing proposition. I can hardly blame them. It’s self-preservation because conquerors always cut and run. The Soviets did it, the Taliban did it and many Afghans believe the coalition will as well. The only enduring allegiances Afghans have are to themselves, their families and their tribes, not to whoever happens to be in charge of their country. Yet the west, to its detriment, has failed to recognize this. It doesn’t matter how many sweets are thrown at them – girls’ schools, medical clinics, new roads – Afghans will always jump to the winning side.

For our final day in Kala Gush, the commander had lined up quite a field trip for CNN: a helicopter flight to the north of Nuristan to recce the proposed route for the road inland. Though the views promised to be spectacular, the decision to do the recce by air as opposed to overland wasn’t entirely for our benefit. A few days before we arrived a PRT was ambushed by RPGs and small-arms fire while attempting to recce the route with Humvees. Three people were injured in the attack.

The heli-recce involved two UH60 Blackhawks supported by an AH64 Apache gunship. The Apache is a real mean machine with eight Hellfire missiles, over thirty rocket pods and a 30 mm chain gun that fires ammunition at an awesome rate. It may sound like overkill, but our airborne convoy needed all the firepower it could get. Blackhawks are little more than airborne soft-skin vehicles and even though they were fitted with machine guns, we would still be very vulnerable up there. The Apache circled overhead while the two Blackhawks touched down to collect us. I was impressed by how effortlessly the pilots dropped down into the narrow valley and landed in tandem on the constricted LZ.

Nic and Scotty were both thrilled to discover that the doors had been removed from the Blackhawks. Though it had been done to offer the commander and his staff a better view of the ground for their recce, it would also make Scotty’s job of shooting the landscape much easier. Doors on Blackhawks don’t provide much in the way of protection but they do make the helicopter easier to manoeuvre. I hoped our pilot was skilled enough to compensate for the deficit.

All three pilots kept in constant radio contact with each other throughout the flight. The Blackhawks were flying very close to the ground. Every so often, a valley would open out and I could see the insect-like underbelly of the Apache looming above us. It would shadow the Blackhawks, peel off and check a re-entrant and return to position. It was some of the best tactical flying I’ve ever seen.

Our pilot handled his Blackhawk with great skill, manoeuvring over summits and through mountain passes so narrow that the rotor blades were literally a few feet from the rock face. Blackhawk pilots have considerable courage. Day in and day out they risk their lives to get ground soldiers out of the shit. I couldn’t get over how tiny ours was. I could only see the back of his helmet sticking up from the port seat – no sign of shoulders whatsoever.

It wasn’t until the pilot looked back at us that I realized he was in fact a she. I should have guessed it from the sticker on the back of her helmet:
The louder you yell, the quicker I come.
With all due respect, she certainly gave me the ride of my life. For such a petite young lady to be flying a monster Blackhawk through such difficult terrain was something I never would have imagined. Working alongside some extremely professional women at CNN had gone a long way towards redefining my view on women in war zones. The young lassie piloting the Blackhawk cemented it; there are definitely roles women can execute with equal if not more skill than a man in a hostile environment.

We flew north through valleys, along re-entrants, up steep mountainsides and over snowy peaks. Now and again, we’d spot a tiny hamlet built somewhere you just wouldn’t dream people could live: mountainsides with no apparent access in or out; cliffs perched 2,000 feet above valley floors. It was the harshest, most inaccessible terrain I’d ever seen. Building a road through it seemed a hell of a way to play hearts and minds. Getting whacked by insurgents would be the least of the PRT’s problems. If it were my mission, I’d be far more concerned about driving off a mountain and plunging hundreds of feet into a rocky ravine. As for the other half of the US mission – finding bin Laden – forget it. Bin Laden could elect to live out his life in ten square miles of Nuristan and a thousand ground troops would struggle to find him.

The next morning we were scheduled to leave Kala Gush for the second leg of our embed – a two-day move to a US forward operations base in Naray on the northern edge of Kunar province, practically a stone’s throw from the Pakistan border. The trip would include an overview of Naray’s PRTs as well as a brief heli-recce to a US forward operations base in Kamdesh, Nuristan, perhaps the most dangerous military outpost in all of Afghanistan.

Before boarding a Chinook, Nic piled his fourth collapsed cot into the corner of our tent. He’d managed to break one every night of our embed. I do hope the troops at Kala Gush appreciated the sculpture CNN left behind.

It was early afternoon when our Chinook touched down at US FOB Naray. Located between the foot of a mountain and the Kunar River, the base was even more exposed and vulnerable than the one in Kala Gush. One side was overlooked by a village on the far bank of the river while the other was bordered by a narrow track that cut between the mountains and the blast walls surrounding the base.

The Commander of Naray was waiting at the helipad when we landed. He’d been in his post for twelve months and was anxious to show CNN how much progress his PRT had made over the course of a year. He treated Nic to a very detailed brief including a PowerPoint presentation complete with charts and graphs detailing how much money had been spent on various development projects in his area. The sums were impressive: tens of millions of dollars splashed out on things like roads, schools and recruiting and training local police. But for all the facts and figures, the brief revealed very little about what the PRTs had actually achieved strategically. For example, it didn’t include information on how many troops and civilians had been killed or wounded working on the projects. The US military seemed to measure a PRT’s success in terms of dollars spent rather than ground secured.

I couldn’t wait to see what the Yanks had going in Kamdesh.

The next day felt like Christmas morning. I don’t know who was more excited about the heli-recce to Kamdesh: Nic, as he’d be the first western television journalist to film there, or me, the ex-Special Forces soldier.

FOB Kamdesh is the northernmost American outpost in Afghanistan. The area is so remote that when the Americans arrived there to build their base in 2006, the locals asked if they were Russians. We were invited to Kamdesh to film PRTs but it’s well known that the base is a jumping-off point for US Special Forces probing north and east and along the border with Pakistan. Operations of that nature require a very high degree of skill and training. If the Regiment were there, the lads would be ripping each other’s arms off to get in on the action.

Following an RPG attack on a Chinook at Kamdesh in early 2007, the army temporarily halted all flights in and out of the base. Fortunately, the ban had been lifted in time for our embed. By air it took less than half an hour to travel the twenty-five miles north from Naray to Kamdesh. Overland, the journey would have taken up to nine hours. The only vehicle route connecting the two bases was a nearly impassable, narrow dirt track the Americans had nicknamed ‘Ambush Alley’.

Similar to our heli-recce in Kala Gush, we flew to Kamdesh in two Blackhawks covered by an Apache. The views were a photographer’s Valhalla. Soaring up to 16,000 feet, the smooth-rock mountains surrounding Kamdesh dwarfed the puny, 6,000-foot shale ranges near Kala Gush. Twenty minutes into the flight, we circled around the actual village of Kamdesh: a collection of modest stone and wood houses dominated by an intricately carved wooden mosque. From the air, the village looked like something out of a fantasy; it seemed to be teetering on the edge of a mountain slope.

Five minutes on from the village, we dropped down into a very steep gorge and landed on an LZ near the stony bank of a fast-flowing, trout-filled river. As soon as we dismounted, the crew and I were ushered to cover while the Blackhawks rose swiftly up and out of there. FOB Kamdesh wasn’t a place for helicopters to hover. The base sits on a valley floor surrounded by 3,000-foot peaks. Once a pilot commits to landing, he or she has very little room to manoeuvre if fired on. It was a miracle the Americans were managing to survive there, let alone execute a PRT. Just prior to our visit, the base had been averaging three attacks a week.

We had approximately three hours on the ground to film Kamdesh’s PRTs. Not surprisingly, the projects were modest compared to those we’d seen in Kala Gush. The first stop was a local police station the PRT had established in a village just over the riverbank from the base. The station was a small stone building the size of a double garage. Eight recruits were inside. Their uniforms didn’t match and they looked more like a ragtag militia than a proper police unit. It was humble but as the US soldier showing us around said, ‘It’s a start’. I agreed. It was amazing they’d managed to accomplish even that much.

Next we were shown a medical facility and a school. The Americans told us that a few weeks earlier both buildings had been attacked by insurgents, the school being hit by an RPG. Before the Americans showed up, insurgents had left the village alone. Just like Kala Gush, the development projects in and around Kamdesh were drawing al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters down from the mountains.

I felt sorry for the villagers and for the US troops assigned to help them. Both groups were being treated as pawns in the War on Terror. It was outrageous. The US ground troops and middle management I met in Kunar and Nuristan were good, professional lads. But their military leaders, no doubt spurred by politicians back home, had sent them on a losing mission. Instead of administering development projects from vulnerable bases on valley floors the troops should have been soldiering in the mountains. With the benefit of good OPs, the US military could dominate the high ground without ever disturbing the villages below.

The same applied to the rest of Afghanistan. PRTs are not silver bullets. The US and its coalition partners can lay roads and build schools all over Afghanistan and it still won’t compensate for the fact that the number of troops needed to secure the country was grossly underestimated from the word go. The US and NATO need to come clean about their past mistakes and commit more soldiers, including highly trained troopers, to win and hold the ground.
²⁹
Only then will the conditions exist for PRTs to have a lasting impact.

Even with a fundamental shift in strategy, however, total victory in Afghanistan could take decades. It’s not an area a foreign army can secure in two to three years, hand over to local forces and withdraw from. Pursuing long-term objectives like winning a war isn’t for the faint-hearted.

The soldiers in Kamdesh and the rest of Nuristan deserved better than to have their commitment, passion and, in some cases, their lives squandered on token gestures that probably wouldn’t stick. In Kamdesh, the troops’ faces seemed to reflect the impossibility of their task. Morale looked very low indeed. I found out that some of the soldiers were entering month fifteen of their Afghan tours. Talk about stretched to the limits! British soldiers would never spend more than six months at a time in a theatre of war. Anything beyond that risks psychological damage.

Three hours in Kamdesh was enough for me. The soldiers there were like fish in a barrel and though my heart went out to them, I had no desire to stay in there with them. While we were waiting for the helicopters to collect us, an infantry captain asked me what I thought of the PRT tour. Having seen how tough his mission was, I didn’t want to bring him down with a totally honest critique.

‘It’s the best embed I’ve ever been on,’ I said. ‘Thank you for looking after us so well.’

‘What do you think of our location?’ asked the captain.

Again, I didn’t want to take the wind out of his sails, but for his own safety and that of his men, I couldn’t hold back. ‘To be honest, I feel very, very vulnerable here,’ I said.

The captain tried to reassure me, saying that attacks on the base had subsided and that the insurgents appeared to have been contained.

‘I take on board what you’re saying,’ I said. ‘But please, don’t let your guard down. Two men could unleash mass destruction on this place.’

‘How so?’ asked the captain.

I pointed to a ridgeline hanging 2,000 feet above us. ‘See those boulders?’ I asked. ‘Twenty pounds of low explosives placed under one of those overhanging boulders by Mr Taliban and his cover man and this place would be buried.’

The captain turned white. ‘Shit, man, we thought we’d looked at everything but we hadn’t even considered that one.’

Within minutes he was sharing the scenario with his mates.

SUMMARY

In all my years on The Circuit I’ve never fired a shot in anger. I hope I never do. If you were expecting to read about a gun-toting madman shooting up terrorists from Baghdad to Kabul, I’m
not
sorry to disappoint.