Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

By the end of the twentieth century new outside influences were beginning to be felt – arising from both the central Afghan government, now based in Kabul, and from foreigners. Once part of a greater Kandahar region, the lower part of the Helmand River basin had now become its own province, a region stretching from where the Helmand River left the high mountains to the north-east, to Pakistan and the Baluchi mountains to the south, and the empty desert of Nimroz province to the south-west, where the river flowed out to dry in salt pans on the Iranian border. From one corner of the province to another was 302 miles, a little less than the distance between London and Edinburgh.

Between 1946 and 1959, American contractors constructed a new canal system to channel the Helmand waters. [5] Adamec, Historical Dictionary , p. 144. A vast acreage of newly irrigated land came into being along the river to the west of Lashkar Gah, a city that was now reborn and rebuilt along a series of square gridlines that was more akin to the American midwest than the Orient. Crucially for the future, much of the new land was government-owned rather than tribally owned.

Then came the Soviet invasion on 27 December 1979. The war changed Afghanistan radically. It was not so much what the Soviets did themselves but how the foreign-backed war against the Soviets changed society. As the armed struggle gathered strength, powerful and ambitious new warlords challenged and displaced the old tribal khans. With them gone, some of the truces and understandings between local tribes that had kept relative peace in this land for centuries were shattered. And as society began to alter in war, Helmand suddenly discovered a new source of wealth and notoriety.

The first word of this change came in a report from the Helmand town of Musa Qala by a New York Times reporter named Arthur Bonner, who in 1986 had just completed a 1,000-mile journey across southern Afghanistan. He described the scene:

Fields of purple, red and white poppy flowers, contrasting brilliantly with the dull gray of the surrounding deserts, stretched toward the horizon. In one field, where the petals had fallen to the ground, a line of farmers scraped a brownish-black gum from pale green pods about the size of golf balls. [6] Arthur Bonner, ‘Afghan Rebels’ Victory Garden: Opium’, The New York Times , 18 June 1986.

Bonner claimed to have spoken to dozens of rebel commanders who asserted that the opium poppy was now being planted with a vengeance, apparently as a deliberate act of war. The most powerful commander in Helmand, reported Bonner, was Nassim Akhundzada, whose Alizai tribe was scattered over the mountainous north of the province. His home and major landholdings were in Musa Qala. And it was in that town that Bonner found his elderly brother, Muhammad Rasul Akhundzada, who described himself as an Islamic teacher and had ‘a thick gray-and-black beard and large, watery eyes’. In the shade of an ancient tree beside the poppy fields, Muhammad Rasul explained his teachings to the farmers. The article read:

‘We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers,’ Mr Rasul said. Comments like his were heard from dozens of rebels during the journey. Islam does not forbid the harvest, Mr Rasul asserted. ‘Islamic law bans the taking of opium, but there is no prohibition against growing it,’ he said.

In the years that followed the Akhundzada family grew in power, and poppy cultivation spread far and wide. Within two decades, Helmand province would produce more illegal drugs, according to the United Nations, than any country in the world. [7] ‘If Hilmand were a country, it would once again be the world’s biggest producer of illicit drugs,’ said the Executive Director of UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, in a press release reporting that opium production had decreased across the country, except in Helmand, where it had increased. See UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), ‘Opium Cultivation Down by a Fifth in Afghanistan’, press release, 26 August 2008, and ‘Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008’, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2008–08-26.html , p. vii.

When the Soviet army and its Communist puppet regime in Kabul were driven out of power at the end of the 1980s, it was Nassim Akhundzada who became the first governor of Helmand under the Mujahidin who took over. But the civil war continued, and his clan was driven from power in the mid-1990s by a new group of Islamic students who called themselves the Taliban (literally ‘the students’ in Arabic). Nassim Akhundzada and his brother were both assassinated.

Though the Taliban was popular across much of the country for driving out the warlords and restoring security, the movement’s weakness was its close ties with some of the most violent anti-western groups in the world. After Osama bin Laden used a base in Afghanistan to train and prepare for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States invaded the country and toppled the Taliban with the help of its enemies.

Backed by other world powers, the US persuaded the United Nations to help gather a loya jirga , a traditional gathering of tribal elders, to endorse its chosen new ruler, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal elder, as the new president of Afghanistan. The decision was later ratified with national elections.

The toppling of the Taliban also brought the return of the Akhundzada clan to Helmand. Muhammad Rasul’s son, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was now head of the family and became the new governor. He had befriended Karzai in exile in Pakistan. Karzai’s government, for Helmand and much of Afghanistan, meant the return of the warlords.

And the civil war was not over. Osama bin Laden had survived the US invasion, and so had Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive Taliban supreme leader. From a hide-out just over the border in Pakistan, the latter started rebuilding his forces.

In the summer of 2006, the British army returned to the banks of the Helmand after a gap of 126 years. Although the British had been in the north of the country since 2001, this was the first major combat mission. The aim was to bolster the Afghan government and provide security for economic development as part of a multi-nation deployment organized by NATO, known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Soon, like the Soviets before them, the NATO troops were attacked wherever they went. Fighting was intense, probably as intense as anything seen here during the Soviet occupation. Within a year, the British force had swollen from a planned deployment of 3,300 men and women to nearly 7,000 – more troops than the Red Army had ever deployed to the province.

As it had for centuries, power in Helmand rested on three pillars: land, water and the trade routes. With the annual poppy crop of Helmand now estimated by the UN to be worth half a billion dollars a year to farmers, [8] UNODC, ‘Afghanistan Opium Survey 2008’, p. 15. each of these was more valuable than ever. Control of scarce land and water meant control of the poppy crop, and control of the roads meant control over the smuggling of it. The Afghan government under President Karzai claimed that Taliban rebels were intimately involved with the poppy trade and taxed its revenues to fund their guerrilla war. But British and American intelligence also knew a more uncomfortable truth: that Afghan authorities in Helmand were as involved in the poppy trade as the Taliban.

Of all the scarce land in the Helmand basin, the most fertile and best irrigated was the land reclaimed from the desert with the help of American tax dollars in the 1950s. Most of it was government-owned and most of it lay in the central strip of Helmand near Lashkar Gah. The best of Helmand’s poppy crop was in the zone claimed to be under the control of the government backed by Britain and America.