Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

Captain Dan came over to speak to me again. He still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he was outraged with the Taliban.

‘It shows you what we are up against. The Taliban were in control of the village, and they sent these vehicles forward, knowing they were going into an ambush, knowing they would be shot at.’

Dan thought it was pretty weird that the children had been locked in the boot. He supposed it was some Taliban tactic to get them killed and give the coalition a bad name. But I wondered instead whether the father of these kids simply thought they would be safer in the boot.

The locals wanted to take the wounded to hospital. But it was four or five hours’ drive away. The soldiers wanted to call a helicopter. They tried to make the locals wait. It got tense. A promised helicopter didn’t arrive. Eventually, the locals just drove off with the wounded.

All this time the battle in the village was continuing behind me. A US fighter jet screeched down to strafe Taliban positions with a cannon that fired with a deep-throated gargle. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) were fired. A Taliban prisoner, a young Pakistani boy, was marched forward in plastic handcuffs. He was taken away to the rear. Heavy machine guns of the Afghan army opened up from the hill behind. The Americans and British feared fratricide and told them to stop firing – or they would be shot at themselves.

As the light began to fade, the battle drew near to a close. The Taliban were firing now from a greater distance, from further down the hill. The Americans were opening up with their .50 calibre (pronounced ‘fifty cal’) heavy weapons over a wall. Finally, there was word that a high-altitude B-1B bomber was coming in to strike. There was a countdown and shouts of ‘Yeeee ha!’ as the blast threw up a mushroom cloud from down in the valley.

Jake now called the retreat. We had done enough for one day, and we trudged back up the track in the orange glow of the sunset. The body of the Taliban fighter was left behind for his comrades to collect; so too were the bodies of the two civilians left by the shot-up truck.

At the top of the track was our camp, surrounded on three sides by a hill.

‘Were you afraid, then?’ asked Corporal David ‘Percy’ Percival as we ate our rations.

‘I was petrified.’

‘I was afraid too,’ he said. Seventeen years in the army and he had never seen anything like it.

Others told me a similar story. When I eventually slept that night, after filing my story to the newspaper and climbing back into my shallow trench, I no longer felt alone in my thoughts.

Our attack had been a diversion, a feint as they call it. For all its ferocity, it was just one of many that day. The aim was to deceive the Taliban into believing that our main attack would come from the south and south-west, the same direction from which the Soviets had attacked this town, twenty-four years before. As we had withdrawn, the real attack had come in from the north. Hundreds of American paratroopers were dropped by helicopter.

The plan called for the Americans to surround and beat the Taliban on the outskirts of the town. If all went well, their enemy would realize it was outgunned and overwhelmed and then flee. We would then enter and secure the town with the Afghan army. The operation would be announced to the world as an Afghan success. The Americans told us the aim was not just a tactical win but an Information Operations win – an ‘IO victory’

What had happened in the village could have been a public relations disaster. It almost was. Except that, at the time, rather lost in my own personal drama, I hadn’t done a great job in collecting the facts. I was to report that two civilians were killed in the fight. But, reporting on the front line in a fast-paced environment, I didn’t really have the chance to get at the full story. The truth, I later discovered, was that many more innocent people were killed, including two children. As the operation unfolded my underestimate of the numbers of civilians killed seemed to become the official word. Right up to Kabul and up the command chain the word was given out: just two civilians died in the operation to recapture Musa Qala.

Does a leaf fall in the forest if no one is there to see it?

Do civilians die in a war if no journalist is there to witness it?

I didn’t then, and I still don’t now, blame the soldiers for those deaths I witnessed. If a car comes hurtling towards you in Afghanistan, there is a high chance it is a suicide bomber, as others have found to their cost. ‘If that was a suicide bomber there would have been fifteen of us dead on the ground,’ one soldier told me that night.

I had arrived in Afghanistan a week earlier as an outsider and a sceptic. My last trip to the country had been ten years earlier when, over three successive trips, I had reported for the Sunday Times on life under the then Taliban government. I wrote a feature about the treatment of educated women in Kabul, about teachers and graduates driven to prostitution and suicide. Radio Sharia, the Taliban radio station, declared me an enemy.

But in the years since I had been equally critical of the way we had responded to the Taliban and to the terrorist threat that grew from guerrilla training camps which the Taliban sheltered. As the ‘war on terror’ erupted after 9/11, I reported from Iraq on the misdirected conflict that seemed to be stoking up hatred against the West. I reported too on the CIA’s programme of extraordinary rendition – another aspect of this new war in which the tactics employed seemed as likely to increase the threat of terrorism as abate it.

The war in Afghanistan was portrayed as another front in this global war on terror. The Taliban were described as proxies for Al Qaeda. From my own experience, however, I knew the Taliban themselves had few global ambitions, regardless of the rogues to whom they gave hospitality. I was aware too of the historical context: that the Helmand River basin, where British troops had now returned, was the scene of one of the British Empire’s greatest military disasters, the Battle of Maiwand, in which more than 1,700 troops of the British army and their camp followers were slain. Some Afghans regarded our return as a vengeance for Maiwand. British and NATO presence on Afghan soil might help suppress terrorist bases, but it might also recruit new volunteers back in the West to the cause of jihadi terrorism.

As we waited at Kandahar Airport for permission to reach the front line, Nick Cornish, the Sunday Times photographer who was travelling with me, had summed up another concern.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘The mission in Afghanistan is to prevent the country being used for training bases for terrorists. Surely in this war, the whole country is now one big training base for them?’

Corporal Gregory Roberts, known as ‘Cagey’ for his remarkable resemblance to the actor Nicholas Cage, was the driver of our Vector, a standard-issue lightly armoured six-wheeled mini truck. Cagey was a wizard with vehicles. A day after the fight in the village, he was trying to fix up an Afghan ammunition truck that had broken down in a small gully that led up from the valley floor where we had spent the night.

We were standing behind the Vector, concerned that the steel tow rope being used was going to snap. Cagey was standing pretty close, and, though it was hardly my business, I said to him then: ‘It’s not worth anyone dying to save this truck.’ A trite remark.

The explosion when it came is hard to remember. All I see now is a thick fog of dust and a shout from Neil ‘Brum’ Warrington, our Royal Marine minder and saviour, of ‘Mortars!’ We jumped in the back of the Vector and slammed the door shut. The dust came raining down through the hatch. But, as the cloud settled, Brum put his head outside and realized what had really happened: a mine strike.