Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

They had a little argument.

‘Seriously, I’m gonna do it… He’d do it for me, he would of,’ said Don.

‘No, you don’t want to break down. It would make a mess of it.’

‘Seriously, sir. There’s no options in this. I’m doing it!’

He had been practising since, steeling himself to be strong and not let Jonno down. As he rounded the corner into the morgue, he knew everyone outside was nervous for him. ‘I needed to get the initial shock out of my system.’ It wasn’t a nice place – full of the freezers you see in morgues. He saw the coffin draped in the flag.

‘I walked round,’ he remembered, ‘and whew, I think that’s when it sank home for me that he had really died. It was really hard. Then for some strange reason I started laughing. I think it put a smile on everyone’s face. I don’t know, I had a little cry and I had a little giggle. Then I had this real proud feeling. I felt really proud for some strange reason. It was almost as if he’d wanted… I cannot get away from the feeling that maybe he wanted it happening. I felt proud of him there.’

What had made Don feel this way?

‘He was a big drinker, oh my God he was a big drinker and he was a party animal really. I mean he was the best fucking soldier I’ve ever met, he really was. He was like Jake and that. They used to go drinking in the day when Jake was only a platoon commander. They were as bad as each other, a different breed, excellent soldiers, but they will drink till five or six o’clock in the morning. And he’s… I think they’ve got the most of him and I think if he had a choice of any way he wanted to die, that would have been the one. He would have went that way, maybe not in a mine strike but some sort of way, otherwise he would have been like sixty or seventy years old if he had made it out of there, living in a terrible state. I was just, I was just so proud of him. But he knew it was going to happen. That was the worst bit.’

Governor Asadullah Wafa finally switched his gaze to Michael Semple, the EU official sitting next to him. He frowned. ‘Michael, what are you up to at the moment?’ he asked.

Semple and his party had already been there for some minutes, but Wafa, who took little account of Afghan courtesies, had been deep in conversation with his intelligence chief, Muhammad Naeem. The atmosphere was already claustrophobic. The living room of the governor’s residence was long and narrow, and the windows were all shut off. Wafa was clutching a notebook. For someone who never appeared to listen to a conversation, it seemed a rather strange thing.

Joining Semple on the over-ornate couches was his Afghan partner, the former air force chief General Naquib (the man who had first made contact with Mullah Salaam). Also there were his close friend, the UN diplomat Mervyn Patterson, and his assistant, Amini. Judging by the time of their invitation, they could expect to stay for dinner.

Semple, who was following Wafa’s lead in switching from Persian to Pashto, tried to think of a way of introducing the idea of the training camp. What were Wafa’s thoughts on the follow-up to Musa Qala? He didn’t want to present the plan to train former Taliban as a given. But Wafa already knew about Semple’s idea. And he had an agenda.

‘Do you want to set up a military unit for the Taliban?’ Wafa asked.

‘No. But we are suggesting some rehabilitation training for them – something to make humans of them!’

Semple tried to expand the conversation, asking those around the room to give a summary of the ideas they had for exploiting the success of Musa Qala. He asked Naquib to speak. Naquib was very measured.

‘Nobody wants to set up a military unit, but there is this idea of a training camp to provide a destination for the Taliban who have fought –’

Wafa suddenly interrupted his flow, his face tensing with anger. ‘Guards, arrest these men!’ he bellowed, pointing at the Afghans in Semple’s party.

At this point, Naeem’s plain-clothes officers stepped into the room. Silent, they looked in their element and produced metal handcuffs.

Semple turned to Wafa: ‘This is out of order. Naquib is an officer; you don’t need to handcuff an officer.

But Wafa burst into a torrent of abuse, calling him a ‘fake general’ and a ‘son of a Pakistani dog’. Semple urged him to calm down. Wafa was still shouting, telling the guards to arrest Amini too. Another man walked in, the cousin of the head of the Human Rights Commission, who had come round to drop off Semple’s luggage.

‘Arrest him too,’ said Wafa.

‘But he’s from the Human Rights Commission,’ said Semple.

‘They are all drug dealers, drug dealers!’ said Wafa, boiling with rage.

It was not typical Afghan behaviour. Even the cruellest of betrayals are customarily delivered with great courtesy. In a land bedevilled by feuds that last generations, every move of an Afghan chief is calculated, in normal circumstances, to minimize an enmity that may linger.

‘It’s the president’s orders,’ shouted Wafa when Semple protested. ‘Talk to the president, not me. It’s the president’s orders. Don’t ask me,’ he shouted again, as the Afghans were led away.

It was only eleven days since the flag had risen on Musa Qala, but events had been moving swiftly in Helmand, and mostly in the right direction, until this meeting.

Mackay and his headquarters always knew they would be judged by what came after the battle of Musa Qala, not by the fighting itself. Above all, Musa Qala should not be ‘another Sangin’, a town captured with almost no plans for how to rebuild it afterwards. Brian Mennes, whose men had now led the recapture of both towns, agreed. In Musa Qala, a British team arrived the day after the flag-raising to deliver a plan they had indeed prepared earlier. The head of the ‘stabilization team’ was the second-in-command of the Coldstream battalion, Major Guy Bartle-Jones. Sitting in the garage of a former opium market, his men opened up their laptops, and he spread out an architect’s plan for a new mosque.

Next to him was the moustachioed Brigadier Mohaydin, the leader of the victorious ANA force. All that morning, Simon Downey, the 2 Yorks commanding officer, had been struggling with the ANA. As far as Downey was concerned it was all hands on deck to secure a new camp for the Afghan troops in the centre of the town. Downey and his regimental sergeant-major, Richard Hind, had led by example, filling sandbags at dawn. But the Afghans were not interested.

‘Heroes don’t fill sandbags!’ said Mohaydin, with a certain twinkle in his eye. The lack of security had put the Green Berets from Task Force 32 in a spin. They had been warning Downey of suicide bombers that would soon wander in. And before Downey knew it they had pulled away their entire force, claiming their job was over.

Bartle-Jones was outlining 3 million dollars of expenditure. It was to include repairing roads and renovating a medical clinic and the school. There were two options for the mosque – one for 300 worshippers and one for 800. In the following days, those sincere promises of reconstruction became a mantra, used to impress the townsfolk as they drifted back to their homes and shops, and to tell the press. The hard thing was turning it all into reality.

What General McNeill and Cowper-Coles in Kabul had warned about had immediately happened: the town had been taken from the Taliban, but President Karzai had yet to appoint anyone to run the place instead. The idea had been for the Afghan army to take Musa Qala and garrison it under an Afghan governor. To fill the vacuum, Mackay now told Simon Downey to take command in Musa Qala. All of a sudden his 2 Yorks headquarters was not only mentoring an army but running a town.