Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

After the Afghan flag had been raised in Musa Qala, I met the British brigadier who commanded all British forces. Sitting outside an abandoned shop, Andrew Mackay candidly revealed his own concerns about the war and his own strategy for beginning to win against the odds. Later, he sent me a copy of his latest thinking, which spoke of avoiding battles and killing. After days of bombardment and fighting, this struck me as rather odd. The centre of Musa Qala had escaped any destruction, but I had yet to see anything of the softer side of this conflict.

Mackay was not alone in his views, though. They were shared by the British ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, and by others. All wanted to stop the needless killing. But Mackay’s new strategy of gearing military operations to winning the support of the Afghan public was easier said than done, as I had seen in Musa Qala.

What follows in this book, then, is not a theoretical or an academic story but a glimpse at how wars are really fought, and how men like Mackay and Cowper-Coles might often share the same opinions but – under the pressure of their commands and in the heat and passion of the moment – might regard each other with suspicion and sometimes clash openly.

The story begins in the autumn of 2007 after a summer of bloody and destructive fighting along the Helmand River. As Mackay arrives with a new brigade of British soldiers, he preaches a message of caution. But, as the weeks pass, the Taliban resume their attacks, and British and allied casualties mount up. Suddenly, as the result of a discreet dialogue with some Taliban leaders, President Karzai wants the military to push north to support a promised ‘tribal uprising’ against the enemy stronghold of Musa Qala. This becomes the biggest operation that the British have conducted in Afghanistan for over a century.

And all for a little dusty town.

About 120 million years ago, a small tectonic plate was driven out of the Indian Ocean and crashed up into the Asiatic landmass. As the plate was compressed, it began to crumple up in front, throwing up to the north the hostile terrain of the central mountains of Afghanistan. More recently, a mere forty million years back, the Indian tectonic plate came smashing in behind, throwing up another range of mountains to the west and south, a wilderness of almost impassable peaks and troughs in what is now western Pakistan and Baluchistan. In between these mountain ranges was left a vast inland basin and a single river that drained all its rainfall: the Helmand River.

The climate in this land-locked basin has fluctuated over the millennia. In some eras the snow that fell on the mountains of Afghanistan was plentiful, and the melt waters that flowed down into the Helmand basin cut deep valleys through the mountain rock, and left layer upon layer of sand and gravel in the land beneath. In arid times – as in the modern day – the snow and rainfall became pitiful, and only the tall canyons in the plateaus to the north preserved the memory of the once plentiful water. Rivers still trickled through them, but most became seasonal: dry-river courses, known to the British as wadis and to Afghans as nalas or mandahs , that occasionally burst into life when sudden mountain storms sent torrents of water tumbling down them, sometimes with no warning. The desert came to be called the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death.

The Helmand River itself, though, continued flowing through the desert, whatever the season, the only permanent desert watercourse between the Indus River in Pakistan to the east and the Tigris-Euphrates in Iraq to the west. Unlike those two other great rivers, the Helmand’s waters were trapped between two ranges of mountains and did not reach the sea. After flowing southwards for hundreds of miles, the river snaked round to the south-west and settled and evaporated, as it still does today, in great shallow lakes in the desert.

For humans who settled in the basin, the constant waters of the Helmand became the source of life. Agriculture, fed by irrigation, sprang up along its banks. Some of the wadis that fed into the Helmand became sparsely settled too, exploiting the alluvial soils. At the mountains’ edge, the ancients began building underground tunnels, or karezes , to tap into the aquifers and underground rivers that still flowed freely beneath the dry surface sands. Access to these water flows and the scarce land into which they fed became the key to power and survival in this desert. And so it also became the source of conflict and war between the tribes that came to occupy these lands.

For wider humanity, the river had a greater strategic importance. As a gap between two hostile mountain ranges, the Helmand basin became – as it has remained for centuries – a great land corridor between East and West, a route for traders between Persia and India. The taxing, robbing or protecting of trade became the other great source of income for local dwellers in this land. It was also a route of conquest: for invaders from Alexander the Great in 329 BC to the hordes of Genghis Khan in 1226, to Tamerlane (or Timur the Lame) in 1383, to the Soviet army in 1979. [3] Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan, a Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002), pp. 37, 102.

Along this strategic route there were few natural barriers to hold back an invading army except the waters of the Helmand itself. Forts sprang up along the River Helmand’s banks. The Sultan Mahmood of Ghazni built the city of Bost in the tenth century, [4] Bost was razed by the Ghorid dynasty in 1150 and completely destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1225. After its irrigation systems were destroyed by Tamerlane in 1383, it never rose up again. Sources: Carol Miller, ‘Bost or Qala-i-Bist’, http://ejournal.thing.at/LitPrim/bost.html ; and Ludwig W. Adamec, Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan , 2nd edn (London: Scarecrow Press, 1997), p. 200. close to the present capital of Helmand province, Lashkar Gah. It was later destroyed by Genghis Khan. Later still, the capital of what became the modern Afghan Empire was established to the east of the Helmand in a place called Kandahar, just north of the Bolan pass through to what was then India. The Helmand valley became, as it is today, both the gateway to and a line of defence for this great city.

But, though protected by forts against advancing armies, the Helmand River itself was never much of a barrier. There were too many easy places to ford. In 1880, during the second Afghan war, the British discovered this to their cost. A British force advanced to Gereshk, the town that controlled the bridge on the great trunk road from Herat, on the Persian border, to Kandahar. Their enemy was a pretender to the Afghan throne, Ayub Khan, who advanced with his army from Herat. Rather than confront the British at Gereshk, he swung up and crossed the river at Heyderabad further north. Outflanked, the British made a hasty retreat and finally came to battle on 27 July at Maiwand, on the road back to Kandahar. It proved to be one of Britain’s greatest military defeats of the Victorian era.

The Helmand the British found in the nineteenth century had much in common with what the British soldiers and their allies found in the dawn of the twenty-first. The people of Helmand were the Pashto-speaking tribes and subtribes, the same ethnic group who formed the majority of Afghanistan and who had overthrown the Persians and ruled the country since 1747. After centuries of dispute, the Pashtun people (or Pathans as they were known in British India) had settled a system of intricate land ownership and water rights that was rarely disturbed and was strictly divided up between tribes, each of whom was generally ruled locally by a pre-eminent chief, known as a khan .