Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

‘Those poor fuckers!’ he said, reaching for his weapon.

I stepped outside, and it was clear things were serious. A British Vector had blown up. I stayed alongside Captain Nick Mantell, Jake Little’s fresh-faced no. 2. He had been standing beside the Vector when it hit the mine, and his face was now streaked with blood. I watched as he called through the nine-liner, a standardized casualty report. ‘One casualty T1,’ said Nick on the radio, a codeword for a casualty requiring immediate evacuation. ‘Both legs gone,’ added Nick. Clearly he might be dead.

A little later we moved away from the scene and away from our own vehicle, which was the command wagon. We were told that one of B Company’s most beloved men had died, a man whom Jake had known for years. Being there at this moment of tragedy presented us with a dilemma. We had been with B Company for only three days. We asked Jake if we should move across to another unit, but he asked us to stay. He had spoken to the lads. And though they hardly knew us, the feeling was it was better we stayed. Maybe that death might get more than the usual few paragraphs in a newspaper.

Throughout the day it was impossible to move the soldier’s body. There was no helicopter available to bring an explosives disposal team to clear the potential minefield. In the evening, B Company decided to do the job themselves. Even so, there was still no helicopter to bring back the soldier’s body. So we spent the night outside on the hilltop while the body lay in our ‘wagon’, and I wrote my news report that night from the inside of my sleeping bag, shielding the laptop’s bright lights so it did not give away our position.

Before they went to sleep or stood sentry, Jake gathered his men in whispers on the hilltop. He was struggling, he said, to find the right words. ‘I’m shit at this,’ he confessed to the men. He spoke of how their comrade died doing what he loved. ‘He would have been proud of what each and every one of you did, both today in this incident, and yesterday in the village,’ he said. ‘We have to move on but not forget.’

During the night that followed the skyline was lit not only by shooting stars but also by the sparks of tracer fire, of flares spinning up and then floating down, and the deep thunder and flashes of heavy ordnance. As the rain began to fall and the temperature dropped towards zero, there was a steady drone of planes and helicopters circling above.

Three days later, when the men were preparing for the final advance into Musa Qala, they paused for reflection again. There was a feeling there would be more dead by nightfall. In the orange light of the morning, by the belching black smoke of burning stoves, the men gathered by a soldier from Fiji, Private Lawrence Fong, who led a prayer in his own language. The men said ‘Amen’. Jake shook hands with every man of his company and urged them to put fear to one side. Some looked excited and eager, others looked worn and apprehensive. As we drove forward to the drop-off point, there were legs that were shaking like scissors.

When it was all over and the town had been taken, the commanders arrived with TV cameras. American gun trucks were frantically hidden and then the brigadiers, one Afghan and one British, arrived to celebrate the Afghan army victory. Someone called the president. The national flag was raised on a precarious scaffold, and the soldiers cheered.

The legend began from there that the Afghans had done the ‘heavy lifting’ to take the town, proof of the emerging strength, it was said by commanders, of the Afghan National Army (ANA). All poppycock, of course. But it served as useful propaganda for the British, to help strengthen Afghan confidence.

After days with little sleep and so much drama, it all felt like an anticlimax.

‘Another battle for another pile of rubble in a far-off place whose name the world will soon forget,’ I said with a weary smile to a special forces gunner.

‘Roger that!’ he replied.

But should it be forgotten?

In these few days, I had seen a snapshot of the front line of this war. I had glimpsed the intense pressure under which these soldiers operated and seen the horror both they and ordinary Afghans had to cope with. But I was a reporter, and all this had just whetted my appetite.

After being with soldiers who coped with death, I wanted to know ever more urgently what they really thought of this war. Was their sacrifice really worth it? Were we close to winning this war, or at least just making some progress? As I posed more questions and tried to gain more access to the military, I discovered I was pushing at an open door. The same questions that I was asking were being asked at the same time by the soldiers themselves, and by their commanders too.

When I returned to England I heard the critics deride the war. In the following months, many more soldiers died. The public began to ask: why are we in Afghanistan at all?

Just after Christmas there was an intriguing development. Two envoys – one from the European Union mission and another from the United Nations – were expelled from Afghanistan for unauthorized contacts with the Taliban. The expulsion was made, it was said, after they had undertaken a trip to Musa Qala. There were rumours the officials were working with the British. Another story, in the Daily Telegraph , had mentioned contacts by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service with leaders of the Taliban who were fighting the British.

What were the secret dimensions of this war, I wondered. And how did what happened in the shadows affect the lives and progress of the soldiers who fought on the ground?

I set out then to report this story from many points of view – from soldier to general, from diplomat to president. It seemed to me that only by getting behind the scenes could anyone pretend to understand what was happening. And it seemed far better to understand one battle in its complexity than span a great history and learn nothing new.

I soon discovered the real story of the Battle of Musa Qala, and the events leading up to it, had all the dimensions of a thriller – courage, love and betrayal, intrigues at the palace in Kabul, tension between friends, assassination and intelligence blunders, and occasionally high farce.

But it also seemed to sum up the whole Afghan war.

What became clear as I began speaking to soldiers and diplomats was that the Musa Qala battle occurred when the Afghan war was at a crossroads, at a point where all involved were beginning to see that quelling the Taliban revolt was going to need more than a military solution.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people called ‘the enemy’ have been killed since the war began. Hundreds of the innocent – ordinary Afghan villagers caught in the fighting – have been slain too. They have been the victims of both ‘enemy’ atrocities and of NATO bombs. Whole towns and villages have been laid waste, and others are almost ghost towns, from where the population has fled in terror. The new Afghan war was launched in the name of combating terrorism and defeating the allies of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But soldiers know their ‘enemy’ included many ordinary men and boys from the villages who were inspired to defeat the foreigner. ‘In the early days we probably wound up – maybe still are – killing lots of farmers,’ the head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, told me.

The new Afghan war is being fought also in the name of the new ‘democratic’ Afghan government. But soldiers know this government is corrupt and often reviled by the local population. Crops of illegal opium poppies are grown on government lands. Soldiers have met an Afghan army hooked on hashish and a police force addicted to heroin. Many police set up checkpoints not to provide security but to rob the traveller and control the movement of drugs.