[Marxism] Afghanistan diary

[Louis Proyect]

LRB, 3 January 2008
Diary
Ben Anderson

(clip)

8 September. A big operation started last night and British forces came 
under an attack that went on well into today. We were supposed to be 
going to a meeting with the provincial council but it was cancelled. The 
medical evacuation helicopters would be too busy to be sent to collect 
us in the event of a roadside bomb. Yesterday a trip out to a shura in 
Rahim Khalay, the first of its kind since the town was taken from the 
Taliban, was cancelled when our helicopter broke down. Because it was 
the first time any foreign officials were to appear, more than five 
hundred local elders had turned up. There was a chance the chopper could 
be repaired in time to get us there a few hours late, but then the shura 
was mortared so everyone was told to go back to their offices. We’d been 
repeatedly mortared in the Green Zone and you soon become fairly relaxed 
about it because the mortars are so rarely accurate. But Foreign Office 
officials have to follow different duty of care rules from soldiers. One 
of the six retired policemen training the ANP told me that if one of 
them got hurt or killed the whole mission would be pulled. As a result 
the only training they can do is in offices on the base, or occasional 
brief trips to the ANP headquarters. When anyone does leave the base, 
they do so under the protection of heavily muscled private security 
guards from ArmorGroup, whose $30 million a year budget provides better 
guns and safer and more reliable vehicles than the soldiers get.

Even if the Taliban weren’t thwarting their efforts, I wonder how 
successful the PRT could be. They are an incredibly dedicated bunch: 
some have grown beards, speak Pashtu and understand Afghanistan and its 
tribal complexities as well as anyone (which means they also understand 
how little they can ever know and how hard it will be to win over the 
population here). But they are working with an allocated budget of no 
more than £25 million for the whole year, a sum the military sometimes 
get through in a few days. They number just 30, including administrative 
staff, next to almost eight thousand soldiers, which will hardly win 
hearts and minds and won’t counter the effect of all those bombs and 
bullets.

The truth is that the vast bulk of our efforts is concentrated on 
fighting a war and it’s difficult to see that changing for a long time 
to come. The UN has reported a 30 per cent increase in violent incidents 
this year, with an average of 550 a month. Suicide attacks have risen 
sevenfold. It’s no surprise that many local contractors won’t work on 
the building projects that are underway for fear of being killed for 
collaborating.

This evening, the flags were once again at half-mast. During an 
operation last night, soldiers came under attack again. Two are dead and 
seven injured. What seems to be sapping the morale more than anything 
else is that all this goes largely unnoticed back home. Fatalities get a 
paragraph or two in the papers, but if last night’s operation had been a 
perfect success, without any losses, it wouldn’t have been mentioned at 
all. And because the MoD has a policy of not reporting non-fatal 
casualties, soldiers who lose limbs, eyes or their senses don’t get a 
mention either.

10 September. There is a high threat of a suicide bombing in Lashkar 
Gar. A high threat seems to be in place when there is reliable 
intelligence that people are actually walking around wearing bomb belts. 
When we were here last time, we were allowed to attend every 8 a.m. 
intelligence briefing and I don’t remember there being a day when there 
wasn’t at least one man or car (it always seemed to be a white Toyota 
Corolla) moving around, ready to detonate.

In town today there were police everywhere: because of the suicide 
bomber, I was told. I attended a provincial council meeting where 
elected local councillors told David Slynn, the Foreign Office’s top man 
out here, that the Taliban were hated and it was the perfect time to hit 
them. But they also said that local institutions are so corrupt that 
people still choose to side with the Taliban. They complained that the 
ratio of destruction to reconstruction was far too great, that all talk 
of human rights remained a dream, that outside of Gereshk, Lashkar Gar 
and Sangin, nothing was being done. There wasn’t even any communication 
with locals outside the towns and no aid had yet been delivered.

12 September. I followed the Foreign Office staff to Sangin for another 
shura. At one point the district governor left, so the meeting was 
between one soldier, Major David, who was based in Sangin, and six FCO 
staff who had come from Lashkar Gar. I walked across a small footbridge 
to the house the Grenadier Guards occupy. Jack Mizon was there, and I 
recognised two others as they swam and washed in the river. They seemed 
glum, which surprised me because they only had a week left of their 
six-month tour. Then they asked me if I’d heard about Goolie. I hadn’t. 
They were out on an operation last Sunday, they said, when they came 
under fire. The Taliban had planned their ambush perfectly and knew 
exactly where the soldiers would take cover, behind a small wall nearby. 
As the soldiers crouched behind it they stepped on two freshly laid 
mines. Goolie lost a leg, an ANA soldier lost two legs and an 
interpreter was killed, probably because he was so close to the ground 
ducking the Taliban fire that his entire body took the force of the 
explosion. Even before this, as they got close to the end of their tour 
many soldiers had been getting far more nervous than usual about being 
hurt or killed. Some were annoyed that they had to go out at all. I 
asked Major David why his men couldn’t just be allowed to relax and see 
out their last few days in Helmand in safety. He said that if he allowed 
them to do that, the enemy would see it immediately, take advantage of 
the freedom of movement and make life much more difficult for the 
soldiers who were about to take over. If their last seven days pass 
without incident, the Grenadier Guards will still have paid a high price 
for this six-month tour. Out of a unit of 36 soldiers, three have been 
killed and 12 seriously injured.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/ande03_.html