History > 2006 > UK > Wars > Afghanistan (IV-VI)

 


Taliban leader ‘killed’

after RAF tracks phone

December 24, 2006
The Sunday Times
Michael Smith

THE Taliban commander in charge of attacks on British and Nato forces in southern Afghanistan was reported yesterday to have been killed in a US airstrike after an RAF aircraft intercepted his satellite telephone.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, the Taliban treasurer, was the most senior member of the group’s leadership to die in the war on terror, according to US officials.

A Taliban spokesman, however, said he was still alive.

Osmani, an associate of Osama Bin Laden, is said to have been part of a triumvirate with Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban military commander, and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Osmani headed Taliban operations in six provinces.

Military souces said he had been killed by a strike on his vehicle as he and his aides left a village in the Zahre area. An RAF R1 monitoring aircraft is believed to have been tracking him. The aircraft was working with a US special operations team, including members of Delta Force, plus intelligence specialists from a unit known as Task Force Orange who tracked him on the ground.

The satellite telephone signal allowed the RAF aircraft to pinpoint Osmani’s location. As he headed out of the village in a 4x4, a US plane dropped a smart bomb onto the vehicle.

The Taliban issued an immediate denial, saying the bomb had killed Mullah Abdul Zahir, a district commander, and three of his men.

Al-Qaeda sympathisers are being encouraged to attack targets in London over Christmas, according to reports on ABC television in America that claimed six “active” plots were being monitored. It added that “precursor chemicals” for bombs had been seized during raids. Scotland Yard declined to comment.

Taliban leader ‘killed’ after RAF tracks phone, STs, 24.12.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2517947,00.html

British soldier

'gave Army secrets to Iran'

December 21, 2006
The Times
Michael Evans and Stewart Tendler

NCO 'helped the enemy' in Afghanistan

Serious charge under Official Secrets Act

A British soldier has been charged with passing secret information linked to the military campaign in Afghanistan to Iran, The Times has learnt. Corporal Daniel James, 44, appeared at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London yesterday, charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act with communicating information “useful to the enemy”.

The case was considered so sensitive that after the charge had been read out, reporters were told to leave and the remainder of the hearing was held in camera.

No biographical details were given — not even that he is a soldier in the Army — and there was no hint in the charge or in the brief part of the hearing held in public to indicate who “the enemy” was.

However, The Times has learnt that the soldier was charged in relation to the passing of confidential information about British activities in Afghanistan to Iran, which shares a border with western Afghanistan, and has a strategic interest and influence in the region.

Corporal James speaks fluent Pashtun, the language of most Afghans, and acts as an interpreter for Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander of the Nato forces in Afghanistan.

Corporal James was arrested in Britain on Tuesday and charged within hours because of the seriousness of the alleged offence. It is understood that an intensive investigation was launched to try to identify the source of the alleged leak of information relating to Afghanistan.

Britain has about 6,000 troops in Afghanistan, the majority based in Helmand province in the south. Action was taken so quickly that Lord Goldsmith, QC, the Attorney-General, had not even given the go-ahead for a prosecution before the soldier was told of the charge under the Official Secrets Act.

The full charge read out at court was that on November 2 this year, for a purpose prejudicial to the safety of the State, Daniel James “communicated to another person information calculated to be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy”.

The charge was under Section 1 (1)(c) of the Official Secrets Act 1911 which says that “if any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State obtains or communicates to any other person any sketch, plan, model, article or note, or other document or information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy”, he shall be guilty of a felony and liable to imprisonment for not less than three years and not exceeding seven years.

Corporal James’s appearance before Senior District Judge Timothy Workman was surrounded by secrecy. The case was not on the court list and police refused to give the defendant’s name before the hearings.

One hearing was held in camera to hear argument about why large parts of the case should also be heard in secret. The judge decided that national security was involved, and only a few minutes of a session lasting nearly two hours were open to press and public.

Corporal James said nothing during the hearing other than “Yes, sir”, when confirming his name and date of birth and that he understood he would be remanded. After the closed hearing, the judge said: “I have been given certain information which leads me to the conclusion that it will be necessary to hear certain facts in camera as there is a possible prejudice to national security.” The prosecution, he said, was asking for a remand to obtain the Attorney-General’s consent for prosecution.

Corporal James stood at ease as the judge told him he would be remanded in custody until December 27. Four Special Branch officers were in court and the defendant sat in the dock with two guards. Martyn Fischer, Corporal James’s lawyer, would not comment.

    British soldier 'gave Army secrets to Iran', I, 21.12.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2513763,00.html

First, I heard a deafening crash as the suicide bomber drove his vehicle headlong into the Nato convoy.
It was followed by a blast that roared through the crowded streets. Then the flames began to erupt

Kim Sengupta in Kandahar witnesses the latest bloody attack on British forces in Afghanistan

Published: 04 December 2006
The Independent

There was a burst of prolonged gunfire, a screeching of tyres, and the screams of people as we ran for shelter a hundred yards away.

As the sirens wailed and helicopter-gunships circled overhead, I could see that there was nothing much left of the suicide bomber amid the smouldering pile of blackened twisted metal which had been his car.

A British Land Rover had been catapulted on to the central reservation, landing right-side-up at a drunken angle, its machine guns sticking up in the air. Two other vehicles lay abandoned, both pockmarked with bullet holes.

I was driving through Kandahar, a few hundred yards away when the attack took place. It was aimed at a British Royal Marines convoy returning to Helmand. Three civilians were killed, and 18 others were injured as were three of the marines.

It took place on the main route to the airport - nicknamed the Baghdad Highway by the locals. Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban, whose resurgence has led to months of ferocious fighting. Altogether 230 Afghans and 17 Nato troops have been killed in 106 suicide bombings this year, a bloody phenomenon new to Afghanistan, mirroring Iraq. Suicide bombings were almost totally unknown during the long war against the Russians, where the Afghan weapon of choice against Soviet attack helicopters was the shoulder-fired Stinger missile.

Today, five years after the official end of the war, the death toll in the past 12 months alone has reached nearly 4,000. And it was the fourth bombing in the Kandahar area in five days. Two Canadians were killed a few days ago and it is a minor miracle that there were no British fatalities yesterday, their soft-sided Land Rovers providing scant protection against suicide bombers and roadside bombs.

The force of this blast took down a wall, and sent red-hot shards of metal flying in a 50ft arc. The British Army Land Rover that took the force of the blast was remarkably unscathed apart from a smashed front and a few flat tires. As I approached, an Afghan policeman was helping himself to a bottle of drinking water from the back.

Local people and police officers claimed most of the civilian casualties were caused when the marines had opened fire after the initial bombing. Doctors at the nearby Mirwais Hospital, where the injured were taken, reported many of the wounds were due to bullets.

But Nato officials insisted the men, from 45 Commando, had acted in self-defence, opening fire on a vehicle which had ignored repeated warnings to stop and appeared to be heading towards them even as they were trying to get away from the suicide bomb.

The five-vehicle British convoy, desperate to escaper a potential trap on a road hemmed in by buildings, roared off with their injured towards Helmand. With helicopters patrolling overhead they headed to the Nato base, leaving Afghan security forces to deal with the carnage left behind.

The car the soldiers seem to have believed was coming towards them for a follow-up attack was a rusty white Toyota Corolla estate. It now lay by the side of the road, full of bullet holes. A man either dead or dying lay half sprawled out of the door. Further along was another man who had been shot on his motorbike. He was clutching his stomach, blood pouring through his fingers. We found him later at the hospital. His name was Abdul Rahim, he was a 30-year-old shopkeeper, and he was alive.

Among others shot was Lal Mohammed, a 29-year-old farmer. He shook his head in shock and bewilderment as he told me: " I was hit twice in the arm. I was coming from my village to the city and I was in a taxi when they started firing. I did not know what was going on. I just remember shouting and shooting."

Rangeen Ali, 24, was walking along the street when the bomb exploded. "Then the soldier started firing, I think they were scared. People were getting hurt. My cousin Abdul Jabbar was shot in the leg. He is just a tuk-tuk driver; he has nothing to do with the Taliban."

Until this week, there appeared to have been a brief decline in violence after a months of attritional fighting. A British withdrawal from Sangin area had followed a controversial deal with village elders at Musa Qala. The Nato forces here in Kandahar had been studying the situation and considering applying the same approach to Panjwayi, an area where there had been bitter clashes with the Taliban and their allies.

But there had been repeated claims from some senior Afghan officials that the deal at Musa Qala and other local agreements was nothing but a Taliban ploy to regroup without the presence of British forces, and they would attack again when ready. They would say this has now started.

The focus of the UK media has been on the British forces in Helmand, but it is Kandahar which is viewed by both Nato and the Taliban as of paramount strategic and symbolic significance. The Taliban had vowed that they would reconquer Kandahar, the symbol of their own Pashtun people.

According to senior Nato sources, the leaders of the predominantly Tajik and Uzbek Northern Alliance had warned that if this happened, they would take over Kabul, effectively splitting the country, and paving the way for a possible civil war.

The battle launched by Taliban fighters, more than 1,500 of them in all, was seen as testing whether the Canadians, the British, and the Dutch, having taken over from the Americans, have the will to fight. In the event Nato's Operation Medusa killed, it is claimed, more than 1,000 Taliban fighters and recovered huge stockpiles of arms and ammunition. Their hold on Panjawayi, it is said was broken.

But although the offensive undoubtedly damaged the Taliban's fighting capacity, the civilian losses, suffered mainly through air strikes, had led to anger among many local people. They are also, overwhelmingly, the principal victims of suicide bombings. For every Nato casualties there are 10 Afghan civilians.

Yesterday, lying next to the wounded from yesterday's attack at the Mirwais Hospital, was Wali Mohammed, a 22-year-old shepherd. " I was going to my home when I saw four vehicles coming towards me. One of them blew up. I tried to cover for myself and I fell unconscious. I had been hit in the stomach by shrapnel. I had 35 camels with me, my entire flock, and they were all killed."

    First, I heard a deafening crash as the suicide bomber drove his vehicle headlong into the Nato convoy. It was followed by a blast that roared through the crowded streets. Then the flames began to erupt, I, 4.12.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2037428.ece

Blair insists Nato is winning the war in Afghanistan

· PM surprisingly upbeat on progress of conflict
· Countries agree deal on troop reinforcements

Thursday November 30, 2006
Guardian
Ewen MacAskill in Riga

Tony Blair made the startling claim yesterday that Britain and other Nato members were "winning" the war in Afghanistan despite increased Taliban activity and a sharply rising death toll.

The prime minister was speaking to the press at the end of a two-day Nato summit in Latvia which exposed continuing divisions within the 26-member transatlantic organisation over the level of commitment to the Afghanistan venture.

Doubts about the military operation have grown this year as a result of a resurgence in Taliban operations that has left thousands of Afghans dead, as well as Nato troops. Two Nato soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb south of Kabul yesterday.

But Mr Blair, who along with George Bush is among the most bullish of the Nato leaders about the prospects for Afghanistan, said: "I think there is a sense that this mission in Afghanistan is not yet won, but it is winnable and, indeed, we are winning."

Nato members agreed a messy and inconclusive compromise on reinforcements for British, American, Canadian and Dutch troops fighting in the south.

Other members have reluctantly promised to supply reinforcements in the event of "an emergency", but there was no agreement on a definition of emergency and no new promises of significantly more troops.

Officials predicted that the test of what constitutes an emergency would come when British or other forces face an onslaught similar to this summer's.

Mr Blair, who had been seeking a promise of 2,000 more troops, admitted that the British government had not secured all he had been hoping for from the summit. Nevertheless, he described the compromise as "significant progress".

But the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, who has allied himself closely with Mr Bush and Mr Blair on Afghanistan and Iraq, said: "The summit did not have the character of a major breakthrough. Not all countries showed the same level of determination." The Polish government pledged several months ago to send an extra 1,000 troops, due to be deployed in January. The Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Spain and Macedonia announced at the summit that they would also send extra troops, but only modest numbers.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, said that, as a concession, he would allow a unit of French troops to operate outside Kabul. Mr Chirac, who was 74 yesterday, an occasion marked by other leaders with the presentation of a birthday cake, will also send planes and two helicopters, but no more troops to Afghanistan.

In an attempt to engage Afghanistan's neighbours, Pakistan and Iran, in trying to establish security, the summit agreed to Mr Chirac's plan, set out in an article in the Guardian on Tuesday, to set up a regional "contact group" to discuss ways of helping with the country's reconstruction. Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been given the task of sounding out Iran, Pakistan and other neighbours about joining such a group.

The US, though agreeing in principle, may in the end decide against sitting round the table with the Iranians until they abandon their alleged nuclear weapons programme, or establish the group without an Iranian presence.

Mr de Hoop Scheffer echoed Mr Blair's upbeat assessment. "There is not the slightest reason for gloom over Afghanistan," he said. The mission "is winnable, it is being won, but not yet won".

In a separate development, Nato leaders yesterday took the controversial decision to invite Serbia and Bosnia to take the first step towards joining the transatlantic organisation, despite their failure to hand over wanted war criminals. The chief UN war crimes prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, expressed surprise and regret at the move.

Nato leaders also declared that a new 25,000-member rapid response force made up of specialist troops to deal with terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other major incidents, was ready for action after four years of preparation.

    Blair insists Nato is winning the war in Afghanistan, G, 30.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1960424,00.html

'We are just watching things get worse'

When Britain and America went into Afghanistan in 2001,
they claimed that the liberation of the country's burka-shrouded women was one of their top priorities.
So did they deliver? Five years on, Natasha Walter visits Kabul - and is shocked by what she discovers

Tuesday November 28, 2006
Guardian
Natasha Walter

Five years ago, when the US and the British arrived in Afghanistan, they sold their mission to us not simply as a way of driving out the terrorist-shielding Taliban, but also as a way of empowering women. As Cherie Blair said in November 2001: "We need to help Afghan women free their spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see." Or as George Bush boasted in December 2001: "Women now come out of their homes from house arrest."

Five years on, however, the Blairs and the Bushes have become less vocal about the women whom we were meant to have liberated. Bush has not commented on the fact that the majority of girls in Afghanistan still cannot go to school. When Tony Blair visited Kabul earlier this month, he did not comment on the recent report by one charity, Womankind Worldwide, which stated: "It cannot be said that the status of Afghan women has changed significantly in the last five years."

I went to Afghanistan soon after the Taliban had been ousted from Kabul, and found that their departure was genuinely allowing women to hope again - even in places where you might have thought all hope would have died. I remember interviewing women in the very first post-Taliban Loya jirga (grand assembly), who said: "The doors of everything have been closed to women for so long. Now we hope the doors are swinging open."

One of the places that stuck most clearly in my mind was a dirt-poor village called Sar Asia, on the outskirts of Kabul. There I met women who had been unable to leave their houses for education during the Taliban regime, who had just set up a literacy course with the help of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: "Of course we do," said one widow furiously. "Even women who are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands and brothers and fathers don't want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us."

Over the past few years, as news from Afghanistan has become less positive, I have been wondering what had happened to these women. Last month I was able to revisit the country, and one of the first things I did was to go back to Sar Asia. The teacher invited me back into the room that once had been crowded with women learning to read.

This time, the room is empty, its net curtains closed against the bright sun. "We're not teaching here any more," the teacher - I'll call her Alya, because she has asked me not to use her real name now - tells me sadly, sitting alone on the cushions on the floor. "They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. For a while we continued, but we were afraid that they might do something worse. This place is a place of Taliban. Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts." I tell her I remember the enthusiasm of the women in the course four years ago. "Yes, we were very happy. Rawa members came and talked about how they could help us to make a literacy course for women. We were all very pleased. But that has stopped now. I think in the west you think that now conditions are good here, that everyone can go to school or go to work for the government. But now we are just watching things get worse."

Alya, who lost her husband and one of her sons during the fighting in Kabul in the 90s, tells me that fewer than half of the girls in the village go to school now. She has managed to find work as a teacher in a government school in Kabul, but hopes that the men in her village don't know that this is what she does. She always wears the burka when she goes out. "We have heard that if somebody kills a male teacher he will get 20,000 Afghanis, but if someone kills a female teacher he will get 50,000 Afghanis," she says. "We don't know if that is true or not, but it makes us very scared."

As I leave Alya's house, she asks me to hide my bag under my coat in case the men in the village see it and think I have a camera in it (which might reveal that she was speaking to a western journalist). I feel immensely depressed.

You can't say that things haven't improved at all in Afghanistan since the Taliban were "removed", and even Alya wouldn't quite go that far. You can now see women moving around Kabul in a way they could not five years ago; the majority do not wear the burka, sporting instead a variety of Islamic dress from shalwar kameez to a short coat with a bright headscarf, as they go to the markets, to the schools, to the university, and to work.

During my time in the city I seek out evidence of change, and I certainly find it. I meet women in the government, including in the ministry of public health, where they are trying to deliver a package of basic healthcare for women. I meet women in non-governmental organisations working on literacy and advocacy projects, women professors and students in the university, and women in the media, including newspaper reporters and television presenters. But each of them has a negative to set beside the positive.

Farzana Samimi, for instance, a television presenter who anchors a weekly programme on women's issues, is the target of constant threats. "It's not for me I'm scared, but for my children - if anything happened to them," she tells me when we meet at the television studio just after her programme. "The situation here has not changed as much as we wanted it to change, and in the last year I have become more afraid. I would like to broadcast political programmes, but I cannot because of the insecurity. It would be too dangerous."

The situation in Kabul, however - which has a tradition of women's education and employment - is inevitably far better than in the rest of the country, however. Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls' schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. "Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe," Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. "We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this." Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising. Even in Kabul many women I meet are talking about not only how change is more elusive than they hoped, but even how things now seem to be moving in the wrong direction.

Malalai Joya is, at 28 years old, the youngest and most famous of all the women in the Afghan parliament. In a way her very presence in the parliament is a powerful symbol of change; a woman who had to work in secret in underground schools in Herat during the Taliban time is now able to speak out against her enemies in the parliament. She rose to fame at the end of 2003, when she made a speech attacking the warlords who still hold the balance of power in Afghanistan. On that occasion, one of the men she was attacking, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, rose and told her that her speech was a crime, announced that "Jihad is the basis of this nation" and asked for her microphone to be disconnected. The then speaker of the house, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a former mujahideen leader, called her an infidel, and said that if she did not apologise she could not attend the next session of parliament.

Since her historic speech, Joya has survived assassination attempts and constant denunciations. Even meeting Joya is difficult; the night before I leave, her sister calls to ask me to drive to the front of the parliament building, where she sends a car to meet my car, and we travel through the darkness of Kabul's night streets in looping circles, to arrive eventually at a house where men with guns wave us quickly inside. The house feels cold and unlived in. "I have only just moved here," Joya says. "I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them." Although Joya hated wearing the burka during the Taliban years, she is still not able to take it off. "I wore it today," she tells me, "while I was travelling, because I am not safe." Joya is a beautiful young woman, with wide dark eyes, simply dressed in a black wrap and long dress. When she isn't speaking she looks calm and poised, but when she speaks she is on fire, raging about the situation for herself and her country.

"Here there is no democracy, no security, no women's rights," she says. "When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, 'Take her and rape her.' These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women."

Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women's rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan last month.

She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear. "Afghan women are killing themselves now," she says, "there is no liberation for them." This is not just rhetoric: the Afghan Human Rights Commission recently began to document the numbers of Afghan women who are burning themselves to death because they cannot escape abuse in their families.

I visit an organisation called Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA), whose director, Orzala Ashraf, is a driven young Afghan woman. "It is 99% tragedy here, but there are always stories of hope," she says. To illustrate that, she begins to tell me a story of a woman whom I'll call Jamila. She ran away from home, in a traditional community near Kandahar, four years ago when she was 15, because she was being forced into marriage with an elderly man. "Her family are Taliban," says Orzala. "I don't mean that they are political fanatics, I mean that they are traditionalists who are against women's freedom - they had already killed an aunt who wouldn't marry according to their wishes." Jamila dressed as a young man and came in a smugglers' car to Kabul, but when she got to Kabul she was arrested and taken to prison - and although she was guilty of no crime, she spent a year in jail. But then Jamila got lucky; HAWCA brought her to the women's refuge it had just set up, where she learned to read and grew in confidence.

In the past there would have been no way for Jamila to survive in Afghan society without her family, but Orzala Ashraf eventually suggested to her that she could try a brand new route - the women's police force. And that is where she is now. A few days later I go to visit Jamila at the new female police academy, which is set on the hills to the west of Kabul. She works there in the administrative office, wearing a uniform of khaki pants and jacket. "Once I was illiterate and I didn't know about anything," she says quietly but decisively, "but I was one of the lucky ones - I began to learn. Now I know that Islam gives rights to women as well as to men."

The principal of the women's police academy, Homera Dakik , a tall 25-year-old woman wearing an elegant leopard-print scarf over her khaki-coloured uniform, is also eager to talk to us. She was forced into marriage 10 years ago with the head of the Taliban secret services. "My father said no, but they kidnapped me. I spent four years in his family's house. I experienced terrible mental torture." After the Taliban fell, her father managed to get her away and brought her home. "It is really my dream now," she says, sitting in her office with Jamila, "that we should be able to tell the world how such criminal things have happened to the women of Afghanistan. Once I thought it was only me who had suffered like this, but now I know that the majority of women in this country have known situations like this."

She and Jamila show us round the academy, which is like a palace compared with the rest of Kabul - it has dormitories, kitchens, lecture theatre, even a kindergarten, all spanking new, clean and lovely, built with money from international donors. But it is empty. How many trainees can this place hold, I ask? 200. How many do they currently have? Four. "Families will still not let their women join the academy," Homera says sadly. "They don't see it as honourable." Whenever they go out, Homera and Jamila hide their uniforms under abayas (cloaks), so that they won't be attacked. Homera is not sure that things will get any better. "For three years after the fall of the Taliban I was happy. Personally, as long as I have blood in my body, I will fight for my rights. But now we have great fear in our hearts that things are not going in the right direction."

The empty academy, fronted by these brave young women, is a powerful symbol of the fragility of Hamid Karzai's government. Although Karzai may speak in favour of women's rights, he does not have the reach and resources to deliver on his rhetoric. His alliances with warlords whose record is little better than the Taliban's and his inability to give any real power to the women in the government have made women leaders sceptical of his commitment to their rights. Alongside that scepticism goes women's disappointment about the promised rebuilding of the country. In order to get grounded in popular support, the government needed to rebuild everything from healthcare to roads in this devastated country. To do so it looked to the international community to help. Five years ago Bush and Blair were quick with promises. But the consensus now is that those promises have not been matched by action.

Everywhere I go, from the offices of big international organisations such as Oxfam, to government ministries, to little Afghan organisations, I hear anger and frustration. Anger at promised money that never arrived, even from blue-chip donors such as the World Bank. Anger at unaccountable donors who set up useful projects, but decided to move on after six months, leaving workers penniless and floundering. Anger at US aid that was tied to using US contractors with little knowledge of the country, so that, say, a vital health clinic in Badakhshan was built in a region where it would only be accessible by helicopter during the winter months. Anger at poor central planning and lack of transparency in the government.

These failures of development mean that people still do not have the clinics, schools, clean water and roads that they need to start rebuilding civil society after decades of war. Even in Kabul most areas are still desperately poor, with no functioning sewage system and just a few hours of electricity a night. But in one area of the city is an unexpected string of half a dozen brand-new wedding halls, each three or four storeys high. These have their own generators, and night after night, against the pitch black of the unpowered city, their neon lights blaze out as hundreds of Afghans turn up to dance and feast.

The men and women sit separately here, and at the wedding celebration that Dr Nilab Mobarez takes me to, I watch women in the kind of outfits that would not look out of place in an 80s nightclub - sequined and spangly, full-length and fabulous, accessorised with pearlised makeup, platform sandals and bouffant hairdos - dancing to a band that jazzes up their traditional songs. Among the silver painted pillars and electric chandeliers I talk to bright-eyed, confident women, from Dr Malika Popal, who works at the ministry of public health where she is helping to deliver a basic package of healthcare aimed at bringing down the rate of maternal mortality, and her daughter Kausar, a tall and ambitious 20 year old currently studying at the university. "My dreams are complicated," Kausar says. "I want to go and study in America. I know I don't want just to get married." But even here you cannot escape the other side of women's lives in Afghanistan.

At one table, I meet Kochai, a serious woman more soberly dressed than the others in a long olive skirt and jacket. She has come to Kabul for the wedding from Kandahar, where she works as a police woman in the airport. She was married into a traditional family, and was abused for years by her husband. It was when her daughter then got married to a relation of her husband's, and started being beaten too, that she decided she had to get herself and her daughter away from these violent men. "I had to defend myself and my daughter," she said. The women now live without their husbands, although her daughter has not been able to get a divorce from her husband. "It is very, very difficult. I am sick of being frightened. During the nights especially I am frightened."

Like all the other women I meet on my trip, Kochai is very sure that despite all the insecurity and lack of progress, life would be far worse if western forces pulled out. "If the British and American soldiers left now, we wouldn't be able to leave our houses. We would lose all that we have."

Yet everyone knows that the Taliban are regrouping in and around Kandahar; Safia Ama Jan, the head of the department of women's affairs, was assassinated there recently, and Kochai says the actual number of kidnappings and assassinations is far higher than we hear about. "In one week six women were killed. They were ordinary women, working women, but the Taliban say they are spies of the government. They tell them, 'Don't work,' and if they do not listen, then they are kidnapped and killed far from the city." She has two bodyguards who take her to work and back, but after work she has no bodyguards - so in a way they only make her more of a target. "I wear the burka, and I change the colour of it regularly so that I hope nobody knows it is me under it. The morale of women in Kandahar is getting worse every day," she says.

When I express my horror, Nilab Mobarez looks at me rather pityingly and says: "This is only one case among so many. So many Afghan women suffer like this."

    'We are just watching things get worse', G, 28.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1958707,00.html

Britain told: do peace deal with Taliban

November 26, 2006
The Sunday Times 
Christina Lamb

THE British will never win in Afghanistan by military means and should open negotiations with the Taliban, according to the former leader of Pakistan’s forces in the border areas.

On the eve of a Nato summit in Riga at which member nations will be urged to send more troops, Lieutenant-General Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, who led Pakistan’s hunt for Al-Qaeda until 2004 and is now governor of North West Frontier province, said: “Bring 50,000 more troops and fight for 10 to 15 years more and you won’t resolve it. The British with their history in Afghanistan should have known that better than anyone else.”

In the past three years Nato and the US have more than doubled their troops in Afghanistan to 43,000. Almost half are American and last week Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander, General James L Jones, said that he was about 15% short of requirements. He said that failure to provide more men would make the mission longer and more costly.

Despite months of lobbying by Britain and the US, Foreign Office officials say it is extremely unlikely that the two-day summit in the Latvian capital will produce more troops. Countries are particularly reluctant to commit to the turbulent south where British and Canadian forces have suffered heavy casualties.

Aurakzai said: “Nato are ignoring the realities on the ground. The reason Taliban numbers have swelled is because moderates are joining the militants.

“It is no longer an insurgency but a war of Pashtun resistance exactly on the model of the first Anglo-Afghan war.”

“Then too [in 1839-42] initially there were celebrations. The British built their cantonment and brought their wives and sweethearts from Delhi and didn’t realise that in the meantime the Afghans were getting organised to rise up. This is exactly what Afghans are doing today and what they did against the Soviets.”

He added: “The British should have known better. No country in the world has a better understanding of the Afghan psyche and very little has changed there in the past couple of centuries.”

Rather than fighting, he says, the only answer is to talk to the Taliban. Over the past few months he has negotiated a series of peace deals in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

“This is the only way forward,” he said. “There will be no military solution, there has to be a political solution. How many more lives have to be lost before people realise it’s time for dialogue?”

Nato commanders have questioned Pakistan’s commitment to the war on terror, claiming it is providing a safe haven and training for Taliban. Aurakzai dismissed the criticism.

“We are doing far more than the whole coalition put together,” he said. Pakistan had 80,000 troops in border areas — more than twice as many as Nato — and had lost about 750 soldiers, more than the entire coalition.

“It pains me to hear people accusing us of allowing border crossing,” he said. “We’re physically manning the border — our troops are sitting there on the zero line . . . Damn it, you also have a responsibility. Go sit on the border, fight like soldiers instead of sitting in your bases.

“The Americans say they can see even a goat on a hillside with their electronic surveillance, so why don’t they tell us where crossings are taking place and we will plug those gaps and kill those people?

“Either they [Nato] are trying to hide their own weaknesses by levelling allegations at Pakistan or they are refusing to admit the facts.”

Aurakzai said that Nato had failed to achieve any of its objectives. “Why did the coalition come to Afghanistan? To find Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and the Taliban; for democracy, reconstruction and development, and [to] leave a stable Afghanistan which wouldn’t be vulnerable to terrorists.

“All very noble, but tell me which one of those objectives have been achieved? I went to Kabul in September and they are all living in a big bunker with no control over Afghanistan. There’s no law and order. The insurgency has become far worse . . . is that a success?”

    Britain told: do peace deal with Taliban, STs, 26.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2471865,00.html

Wounded Taliban treated in Pakistan

November 19, 2006
The Sunday Times
 Tim Albone, Quetta

PAKISTAN is allowing Taliban fighters wounded in battles with British and other Nato forces in Afghanistan to be treated at safe houses.

The Sunday Times found Taliban commanders and their fighters recuperating in the city of Quetta last week and moving freely around parts of the city.

In a white-walled compound in the northern suburb of Pashtunabad, more than 30 Taliban were recovering from the bloodiest fighting in Afghanistan since their regime was ousted five years ago.

Dressed in neatly pressed robes with the black turbans and kohl-rimmed eyes typical of the Taliban, they lounged on cushions, sipping green tea and sucking at boiled sweets while laughing at Nato reports that they have sustained heavy casualties.

Among the most defiant was a young commander who had been shot in the calf last month while fighting British troops in Gereshk, a town in the Afghan province of Helmand, and who had returned to Quetta to be treated. “Fighting the British is as easy as eating a loaf of bread from my hand,” he said in a soft voice. “Fighting the British is much easier than the Americans. They have no faith.”

The proof that Taliban are using Quetta for rest and recuperation — if not also for training as widely suspected — is embarrassing for President Pervez Musharraf, who is due to receive Tony Blair, the prime minister, today. Musharraf has long denied claims from the Afghan government that his military intelligence is providing support and safe havens for the Taliban.

He was outraged when Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, went to Islamabad, the Pakistan capital, last February and presented him with a list of names, addresses and telephone numbers in Quetta of Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, the head of the movement. Dismissing this as “nonsense”, Musharraf accused Karzai of being “totally oblivious of what is happening in his own country”.

In New York in September he told the Council on Foreign Relations that Omar had not been in Pakistan since 1995 and was holed up in the Afghan city of Kandahar. “They (the Afghans) have taken a very, very easy course: the scapegoating of Pakistan,” he again insisted in a television interview last week.

Drawn by the British, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is more than 1,400 miles of largely mountainous terrain that is hard to monitor, largely lying in lawless tribal areas. These border areas were used as bases by the mujaheddin in their fight against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and many of the camps and ammunition stores remain.

But there is growing unease in both Washington and Whitehall about how much of the problem is logistical and whose side Pakistan is on. Not a single known Taliban has been arrested in Pakistan apart from a spokesman, Latifullah Hakimi. That came only after British intelligence intercepted his telephone call from Peshawar ordering the execution of a British engineer.

British and American military commanders in Afghanistan are fed up with their men being killed by fighters who slip back across the border where they cannot be followed. General David Richards, the British commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, flew to Islamabad last month to raise the issue with Musharraf, though he insisted his aim was “co-operation, not confrontation”.

The Foreign Office confirmed that concerns about Pakistan’s position were among the main reasons for Blair’s trip to Islamabad — his third since the September 11 attacks turned Musharraf from a pariah into a key ally.

“We fully understand the tightrope that General Musharraf is walking between extremists and helping the West,” a spokesman said. “We know he is fighting a number of insurgencies within his own borders. But he too has said he is concerned about growing Talibanisation in his own country and our message is we want to help.”

The official expressed frustration at the failure of the Afghan government to produce concrete evidence of Pakistan’s alleged training of the Taliban. “They constantly tell us of videos but we never actually get them.”

Musharraf’s insistence that his country is not a safe haven was undermined, however, by what The Sunday Times saw in an area to which journalists are often denied access.

In the safe house in Quetta, the Taliban fighters seemed relaxed, some reading the Koran, others laughing and discussing recent battles. Several regional commanders were present and confirmed they used Quetta to relax and study out of reach of Nato. Although the men said they were regularly “shaken down” by the police, a bribe of as little as £2 usually resolved the issue.

“We find the fighting fun,” said one, a 38-year-old man from Zabul who commands forces in southeastern Afghanistan. “Jihad against the infidels is more important than studying books. A weak man should fight for three months of the year and study the rest. A strong man should fight for six months.”

Another, who introduced himself by his nom de guerre Mullah Qahramaan (Pashto for hero), said: “When I hear the shout of Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest) at the start of battle, I can’t help myself — I just run towards the enemy.” He had just returned to Quetta, he said, after six months of fighting in Panjwayi where in September Nato launched its biggest offensive against the Taliban.

Nato claims as many as 1,500 Taliban fighters were killed but this has been disputed by the Taliban. On a visit to the battlefield during its final days, no mass graves or bodies were seen.

“If they (Nato) killed 500 Taliban, they should show a grave for only 50 Taliban and I will believe this figure,” said the commander. “But nobody has seen even one grave. We only lost 32 fighters, although they killed a lot of civilians.”

Many of the fighters were vitriolic about the British. “We would speak with the British over the radio,” said Mullah Samat, a young man with bloodshot eyes and a white turban who said he had been fighting in the town of Musa Qala in northern Helmand where British troops were pinned down in a platoon house. “We would say, ‘Death to the British, death to the infidels,’ and they would then say, ‘Death to the Taliban,’ back to us.”

He claimed he was from a group of 300 fighters and insisted that only 10% were hardcore Taliban, educated in madrasahs in Pakistan, while the rest were villagers disillusioned with the Karzai government.

He denied foreigners were involved and claimed an Afghan businessman supported them by setting up a hospital to treat the fighters. “We are not fighting for money, we are fighting for faith and the future of our country,” he said.

“When we saw the British fighting, it was a big shame. They were hiding behind walls.” But he added: “I do feel bad, though, that we are killing the British. They are human and I am especially sad for their families . . . they are dying for no reason, just to occupy a country.”

Water protest

Foreign troops in Afghanistan are spending £30m a year on bottled water while Afghans face starvation this winter because of drought, writes Christina Lamb.

The World Food Programme (WFP) received only a third of the donations it requested this year to feed more than 3m Afghans whose crops have failed. A further 100,000 have been displaced by the fighting.

The WFP is seeking £16m in winter food aid, yet the Afghan government says coalition forces spend almost twice this much a year on importing water, when £500,000 would fund a local bottling plant.

    Wounded Taliban treated in Pakistan, ToS, 19.11.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2459906,00.html

UN chief: Nato cannot defeat Taliban by force

Official says alliance failing in Afghanistan as Blair admits Iraq is a 'disaster'

Saturday November 18, 2006
Guardian
Declan Walsh in Kabul and Richard Norton-Taylor

Nato "cannot win" the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job, the UN's top official in the country warned yesterday.

"At the moment Nato has a very optimistic assessment. They think they can win the war," warned Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the UN mission in Afghanistan. "But there is no quick fix."

In forthright comments which highlight divisions between international partners as Nato battles to quell insurgency, Mr Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban was crucial. "They [the ANA] can win. But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win."

He spoke to the Guardian as Tony Blair came the closest so far to admitting the invasion of Iraq had been disastrous.

When Sir David Frost, interviewing the prime minister for al-Jazeera TV, suggested that western intervention in Iraq had "so far been pretty much of a disaster", Mr Blair responded: "It has. But, you see, what I say to people is, 'why is it difficult in Iraq?' It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al Qaida with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Downing Street tried to play down the apparent slip last night. A spokesman said: "I think that's just the way in which he answers questions. His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that [the belief that it is a disaster] is not one of them." However, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Lib Dems, commented: "At long last, the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister. Surely parliament and the British people who were given a flawed prospectus are entitled to an apology?"

British commanders have argued that UK troops should be withdrawn from Iraq to allow the military to focus on Afghanistan. But Nato commanders on the ground have pleaded for 2,000 more troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles, to little effect. Last night Nato secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said countries should lift restrictions on what their troops could do."My plea to governments would be: 'Please help us in lifting those caveats as much as possible ... because in Afghanistan it is a problem."

Des Browne, the defence secretary, made clear yesterday that the future of the alliance was now bound up with the future of Afghanistan. "The Afghan people, our own people and the Taliban are watching us. If we are indecisive or divided, the Taliban will be strengthened, just as all of the others despair," he said.

Attacks have increased fourfold this year and 3,700 people have died, mostly in the south. The US has made 2,000 air strikes since June, against 88 in Iraq.

Last week Acbar, an umbrella group of Afghan and international aid agencies, said the crisis highlighted the "urgent need" for a rethink of military, poverty-reduction and state-building policies.

Nato commanders maintain the Taliban have been on the "back foot" since Operation Medusa, a battle which killed more than 1,000 insurgents in Kandahar in September, and talk of gaining "psycho logical ascendancy". However, Mr Koenigs said any claim of victory was premature. "You can't resolve it by killing the Taliban. You have to win people over. That is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan, and development," he said. Otherwise the Taliban would regroup in Pakistani refugee camps and madrasas and return in greater numbers next spring.

    UN chief: Nato cannot defeat Taliban by force, G, 18.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951222,00.html

From soft hats to hard facts in battle to beat Taliban

· Hearts and minds battle gives way to shooting war
· Despite losses military chiefs feel fight is worth it

Saturday November 18, 2006
Guardian
Declan Walsh in Kabul, Richard Norton-Taylor and Julian Borger in Washington

It was, in retrospect, an age of soft-hat innocence. At the start of their deployment to Helmand last spring, British soldiers acted like preening contestants in a military popularity contest.

Paratroopers spurned helmets in favour of berets, learned pidgin Pashto and armed themselves with friendly smiles. Soldiers on foot patrol in Lashkar Gah kicked footballs with children and sipped green tea with solemn-faced, turbaned elders. Their commanders promised greater sensitivity than the gum-chewing Americans who used to charge around the town at breakneck speed. In Kabul the thoughtful British general in charge of Nato, David Richards, vowed to stay close to the people. "Your best solution is the population around you," he said.

How much has changed. More than 30 British soldiers killed in southern Afghanistan in six months, 18 of them in some of the most intense combat since the second world war; a controversial peace pact with pro-Taliban elders; a heroin trade soaring to record levels under British noses; and a stillborn £50m development plan.

Talk of hearts and minds has been drowned out by demands for armour and bullets. A volley of suicide bombings - such as the one that killed Royal Marine Gary Wright last month - have raised tensions, sometimes with tragic results. On Thursday, British troops fired on a vehicle that failed to stop at a checkpost in Goreshk, killing two civilians.

The Department for International Development has spent only £2m of its £50m three-year budget and the two DFID officials in Lashkar Gah rarely leave their base. The little work that has begun is in the hands of 28th Regiment Engineers and private firms as Helmand terrifies foreign aid workers. A province three times the size of Wales has just three international agencies, of which only one, Mercy Corps, ventures beyond Lashkar Gah.

Meanwhile the military, frustrated by reticent aid agencies, is fumbling for a successful strategy. Having fought courageously through the summer British troops have had to abandon dangerous outposts such as Sangin and Musa Qala. Now they are concentrating on protecting a much smaller triangle of territory. Is it all going wrong? Helmand is one part of a bigger Nato strategy across southern Afghanistan that seems simple and sensible - use military force to clear the Taliban from defined areas, send in millions of pounds of development, and win the support of the "swing voters" that make up an estimated 70% of southerners. In practice, it has been bloody and complex.

The Taliban, partly thanks to bases in neighbouring Pakistan, has proved a remarkably resilient and flexible enemy. In September Nato launched Operation Medusa, a drive into Panjwayi and Zheri, two notoriously Taliban-infested districts where heavily dug-in insurgents threatened to attack Kandahar. Medusa was, in military terms, a roaring success. The enemy was routed and more than 1,000 insurgents were killed, giving what British and Nato commanders call "psychological ascendancy" over the Taliban.

But they privately admit the situation remains on a knife edge. The Taliban has slowly re-infiltrated Panjwayi, returning to older "asymmetric" tactics copied from Iraq such as suicide attacks and roadside bombs. The insurgents no longer hold the terrain but have goaded the alliance into tragic blunders that cost public support.

On October 24, Nato forces attacked a Taliban position in Lakani, a hamlet in Panjwayi. During the battle a US C-130 gunship strafed a group running through a field, thinking they were insurgents. In fact they were shepherds and their families. "Certainly it's difficult to win people's hearts and minds when you are shooting at them," remarked a Nato official.

Tactics have been hampered by limited troop numbers. Captured outposts proved impossible to hold because units were vastly outnumbered by the enemy and because the logistics of supporting remote deployments were complicated by limited numbers of helicopters.

"A lesson the British have learned is the small outpost doesn't work, in part because the ability to put in a rapid deployment force has not happened the way they hoped," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former Afghanistan intelligence analyst at the US state department. "The ink blot approach makes more sense - you go into areas you can secure and spread from there."

But Mr Weinbaum, of the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the dual strategy of a military presence and a development drive was the right one, and should have been implemented earlier.

"We just let this slip away over five years," he said. "If you go back three or four years, things we are doing now would have worked very well. We were pre-occupied with counter-terrorism and border areas. We thought we had all the time in the world to bring in the kind of governance and reconstruction people are talking about now. We discover in the interim, people have lost faith in the central government and there has been a parallel rise of prestige for the enemy."

Nato is hamstrung by disagreements among its members. It relies heavily on air strikes - an effective but blunt weapon - because key allies, notably Germany, refuse to send troops to the south. The US air force has carried out 2,000 air strikes in Afghanistan since June compared with 88 in Iraq. Commanders will redouble requests for more combat troops at the annual Nato summit later this month.

But debate is also stirring about the value of robust military tactics. Tom Koenigs, head of the UN mission to Afghanistan, said Nato cannot win the fight alone and must concentrate on building up the Afghan security forces. "You can't resolve this by killing Taliban. You have to win people over. And that is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan, and development," he said.

Nato and British commanders say Medusa has opened up a vital window for aid. Casualties from roadside bombs and suicide attacks have fallen from 245 in September to 29 for the first two weeks of November, said Brigadier Richard Nugee, and soldiers in Panjwayi have started an $8m reconstruction drive. Some experts warn that the lull might be seasonal; winter warfare is unusual in Afghanistan.

History supports the view that troops and infrastructure have limited value in winning Afghan sympathies. During their 10-year occupation the Soviets deployed 10,000 soldiers and spent billons on major projects yet were defeated. Tellingly, recent fighting between US and Taliban forces in Ghazni province was concentrated in Andar district, which had received the highest concentration of US aid. But the good news - and the major difference with the Soviet era - is that most Afghans still want outside help.

British commanders in Helmand already appreciate the importance of local politics. A deal with local elders in Musa Qala - whereby Taliban and UK forces agreed to withdraw in favour of local militia - led US officers to grumble that they had capitulated to the enemy. But British officials argue they were extricating themselves from a fight between two drug barons - an explanation that highlights the many complexities of an enemy for which the term "Taliban" is sometimes just a convenient catch-all.

But behind the arguments there is broad agreement that the mission is worth it. After two decades of bitter war, Afghans are also desperate for success. But time is running out to convince them that the pain they must endure in the meantime is worth it, too.

"The people here are fiercely independent but are swallowing their pride to bring their country forward," Mr Koenigs said. "We have a limited window to act. Otherwise they will they will chase us out within three years."

    From soft hats to hard facts in battle to beat Taliban, NYT, 18.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951322,00.html

Voices from the Afghanistan front

'We made two mistakes. They punished us'

The men of D Squadron, Household Cavalry, recently returned from a six month deployment in Afghanistan during which they were embroiled in some of the fiercest fighting since the Korean war. At times they spent weeks under attack defending 'platoon houses' in the remote towns of Sangin, Musah Qaleh and Nowzad

Saturday November 18, 2006
Guardian
Interviews by Audrey Gillan

Lance Corporal of Horse George Sampson, 25, from the New Forest, eight years service

"It was a real 360 degree battlefield out there. You never know where it is going to come from. The Taliban are quite good at getting behind you. Snap ambushes are what they are good at. We were getting dicked [informed on] all the time. They use a cordless phonewith a 30km range on it. As soon as we left somewhere and went anywhere, they knew about it.

"Their network was awesome and it aided them in laying ambushes and IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. We are lucky that they are not literate or numerate. We could listen on our net and they would say they could see 150 tanks turning up in an hour and it would be our squadron of 20 vehicles.

"We were told that they were shit hot anyway because they had been fighting for the last fuck knows how long. They have always fought massive formations. Their SOPs [standard operating procedures] are really good. They attack you when you are least expecting it. We made two mistakes and they punished us for that. The first was in Musa Qaleh. The mistake was moving into the town, we should have had support. If the Danes weren't such spineless fuckers people might still be alive. The reason we had to go down there in the first place was because they refused to come out of their camp to get a resupply. The second time we left the gunline at Musa Qaleh and were going to Nowzad. It was as if they were waiting for us.

"I don't think a great deal of the RAF. The Americans are more on side, dropping bombs and using their helicopter assets - they are more willing to help you. The RAF have to be pushed into it. The British are too reluctant to fire. There were instances when they just wouldn't engage targets when our guys were getting shot at - they apologised for that. It was difficult trying to keep your boys going with people around who aren't 100% flat out going for it. It just pisses everyone off. I just don't think anyone had said anything about the RAF before and it came to a point where everyone had had their tits full."

Corporal of Horse Mick Flynn, 46, from Cardiff, 18 years service, interrupted by an eight-year gap

"We had to go forward and provide an overwatch on the district centre at Musa Qaleh so that the Danish could come out of their camp. I was in the lead vehicle and the vehicle directly behind me got blown up. I had driven over the IED, they let me past and blew up the vehicle behind me. I was then trapped and they fired numerous rockets at us. Three RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] hit us and one went over the top. We took out the machinegun posts to the front of us and killed them. The Taliban's main killing group was probably about 10 metres away. There was about 20 or 30 of them. I made a decision to go on through the ambush and I looked behind and saw that there was a lot of smoke coming from the vehicle behind. We turned round and went through the ambush firing phosphorous grenades at them. The bar armour which protected the vehicle had been hit so we had to dismount. The Taliban were coming down the lane towards us. We killed three of them, but the rest kept firing. We had to fight our way along then jump in a ditch.

"I checked the vehicle behind me. Inside I could see one body. The one outside was blown up and was just a mass of meat. It was just another dead body. Without trying to sound callous, I don't have any feelings. I think I have become immune to it. You can't, they are finished, that's it. I just accept that they are dead. Obviously it went through my brain, but my main issue was to get the other two guys out of there alive. My driver was having problems and I said we have to move otherwise they are going to kill us.

"Radders [Lance Corporal of Horse Andrew Radford] came and said there was a body on top of the hill. I said 'why don't you shoot it?' and he said 'no, it's one of ours'. We made our way to the body. I could see it was one of the lads. I thought he was dead, but as I moved his leg, which was jutting out at an angle, he screamed. When I first looked at him he had fish eyes and I thought he was dead. I threw him on to Radders' shoulders and we shot our way back. He was really badly burnt, he had 80% burns. There was a lot of other Taliban coming down to cut us off. We had left two vehicles on the overwatch 1/2 mile away and they engaged the Taliban.

"I could only account for three bodies. I couldn't see the other body. I talked to the Paras and they sent a company to give us support and to get the bodies out. Because I knew where the positions of the bodies were I was asked if I could lead the Paras back in. We still had one body unaccounted for. You have to go back for him. You can't just leave somebody there. There was no question about us not going back. The Paras then formed up and brought in lots of fire and artillery. We pushed forward and cleared their positions with grenades. This is our job. It is what we do for a living."

Lance Corporal Paul Gallagher, 24, from Liverpool, eight years service

"The attacks were constant, two or three times a day, 107mm rockets were the most common ones and mortars. The supplies were far too slow. The officer commanding of the RRF [Royal Regiment of Fusiliers] Major [Jon] Swift was always asking for supplies but we weren't always the main priority. We were dug in in Nowzad and we felt like sitting ducks at times. We asked for protection and we were told we would have to wait a couple of weeks because of logistical problems. Whole rounds were going off over your head. It was such a constant bombardment of attacks it became normal.

"Things change a lot more being under constant barrage. When you are getting shot at you know where it's coming from but when someone fires mortars you have got to run into shelters and hope it doesn't hit you. We got a serious amount of kills and that. It was quite shocking for us. The Afghan national police went to collect the bodies and there were more than 100. Major Swift was strict about when we could engage because he was concerned about collateral damage. We never got any comeback on accidental kills.

"I lost my best mate when we were out there. [Lance Corporal] Sean Tansey. We were all devastated. The worst thing was that it was an accident. A jacking strut snapped while he was under a vehicle fixing it. That affected some of the younger lads but in the end everyone just got on with their jobs. No one had time to stand back and think about it."

Lieutenant Toby Glover, 25, from Guildford, Surrey, three years service

"The Taliban is a force to be reckoned with. They are unbelievably tenacious and they do have access to a whole range of equipment.

"You don't know who your enemy is. One minute they will be walking down the street and have a woman and children surrounding them and the next the woman and children will disappear and he will be firing at you. They were masters of using the art of cover. Very rarely did you see them. It was very much a case of harassing fire from them.

"I can't stress enough that the tenacity of the Taliban was incredible. One time we went into Sangin and the Paras were doing their bit on the ground and were constantly under attack from the Taliban position. They must have known their time was up, we had Apache air and ground forces and yet they still attacked and attacked and they were certainly killed as a result. They either had balls or madness to stay and fight. The problem is you don't know if you kill one Taliban whether you will reap many more.

"I reckon in Afghanistan we can achieve something if we have the right resources and the correct manpower. On the tour that we did, we were overstretched. We found ourselves fixed in positions which meant we couldn't do all the manoeuvres we liked. If we got the resources it could certainly be a success story."

    'We made two mistakes. They punished us', G, 18.11.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1951325,00.html

After the fighting and dying, the Taleban return as British depart

October 30, 2006
The Times
By Anthony Loyd and Tahir Luddin

AMONG the many battles in his life, Nafaz Khan recalls the long fight for Musa Qala as one of special significance. As the former chief of police and militia commander in the northern Helmand town it was there that he fought alongside British troops against the Taleban.

“I loved those British soldiers,” he said. “They were great fighters and knew each of my men by name. Together we killed many, many Taleban.”

Soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment, who were withdrawn from Musa Qala this month as part of a deal with Afghan tribal elders after more than two months of heavy fighting, remember the experience as one of violence, dirt, heat and lack of water. For Mr Khan, though, it held particular deprivation.

“Shrapnel from a Taleban mortar blew off one of my testicles soon after the fighting started,” he said while waiting to petition the governor of Helmand in Lashkar Gah for more men and munitions to attack a Taleban headquarters elsewhere. “But I stayed in Musa Qala with the British and fought on for another two and a half months until we were ordered to leave. The pain was terrible, but there were Talebs to kill.”

But when asked whether the deal to withdraw from Musa Qala had left the town free of Taleban influence, as Nato and Afghan government officials claim, Mr Khan’s face clouded as if in greater discomfort.

“Those British soldiers were cursing with us when we were all told to leave,” he said. “They said that they had fought and lost friends to keep the town. And now these tribal elders who are in charge of Musa Qala are the same who gave the Taleban support when they fought against us. The deal was just a clever trick to get the foreign soldiers to go.”

Musa Qala was one of four towns in northern Helmand to which British troops were sent this summer at the request of the Muhammad Daud, the governor of the province, after his officials and police proved incapable of defending themselves against Taleban attack.

Most observers agree that British commanders had little choice but to respond to Governor Daud’s request for troops. Yet opinion divides sharply as to whether the fighting — and loss of 17 British lives — has improved stability in the province. Today there are neither Afghan police nor British soldiers nor, apparently, Taleban in the centre of Musa Qala, which is governed instead by a shura — council — of 50 tribal elders, each of whom has supplied one gunman to protect the centre of the town.

Under the terms of the 14-point deal leading to the demilitarisation, Musa Qala is supposed to remain under nominal government control with the rule of law, including the collection of taxes, education and redevelopment, administered by the elders. None of that has yet happened.

“It is too early to expect these things to have occurred,” Governor Daud said. “The administration of elders has only had two weeks. Schools remain closed in Musa Qala, but they remain closed in many other districts in Helmand, both for girls and boys.”

He insisted that he was examining costings for redevelopment work in Musa Qala, and hoped to extend stability from the town centre into new territory. But elders said that since the British withdrawal almost all the surrounding district had returned to the Taleban.

They also said that most of the fighters who had attacked the British, rather than being insurgents who had crossed the border from Pakistan, were local people.

“Most of the fighters weren’t real Taleban,” said Wakil Haji Mohammed Naim, one of the elders in Musa Qala’s new administration. “There were some outsiders, but most were local men who were angry with the Government, its robbery and corruption, who were persuaded to fight against the foreigners by our preachers in the mosques. We’ll see how long this deal lasts. The Taleban are respecting it but our people are very angry with the Government.” His words reflected how easily, despite their best intent, British forces in northern Helmand often became embroiled in defending criminalised district officials against a force that was only part Taleban. “I’ll take a hell of a lot of convincing to believe that the fighting in Sangin didn’t start as a struggle between a bunch of drug criminals,” one British official in Afghanistan said, referring to another of Helmand’s battle zones in which British forces saw heavy action. “We should never have gone near it. It was a straight-up face-off between two drug lords and we were used to tip the balance.”

Whatever their success in suppressing attacks, the British may find that the force required and the death toll among indigenous Afghan fighters makes it all the harder to mollify the rural population with redevelopment projects.

To illustrate, Mr Khan pulls out the ID of an attacker killed in the fighting at Musa Qala. It was a United Nations voter registration card, belonging to an Afghan man who only two years ago had believed enough in the political process to vote in the presidential elections.

    After the fighting and dying, the Taleban return as British depart, Ts, 30.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2428038,00.html

British troops hide from bombers

October 29, 2006
The Sunday Times
Michael Smith, Lashkar Gah

BRITISH troops in the two main towns in the southern Afghan province of Helmand have been forced to stay in their barracks by the threat of Taliban suicide bombers.

The decision to keep the troops in their bases follows intelligence that suicide bombers are waiting in the province’s two main towns to attack British troops, said Lieutenant-Colonel Andy Price.

The would-be suicide bombers in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and in the town of Gereshk were wired up with explosives and waiting for a British convoy. “We have suicide bombers physically walking around in Lashkar Gah and Gereshk looking for us — a lot of them are not locals,” Price said. “More and more they’re following the Iraqi example.”

Price, spokesman for the British forces in Helmand, said there was a “lockdown” of the two British bases. “There is no movement, no soldier, no police or the Afghan army,” he said. “We’re not going out and the Afghan police and army aren’t going out.”

The “lockdown” raises questions about how the Royal Marine commandos who last month replaced British paratroopers in Helmand will provide security to allow reconstruction projects to go ahead.

Lieutenant-General David Richards, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, has said that he wants British troops to withdraw from the northern outposts of Helmand and concentrate on creating safe development zones in Lashkar Gah and Gereshk.

By focusing reconstruction efforts on those two towns, Richards hopes to persuade residents that they are better off without the Taliban. But that will be impossible unless British and Afghan forces can provide security.

The lockdown follows the death of the first British serviceman to be killed by a suicide bomb in southern Afghanistan. Marine Gary Wright, 22, from Glasgow, a member of 45 Commando, died in Lashkar Gah 10 days ago when a suicide bomber blew himself up as a Land Rover passed.

Wright was the 32nd British serviceman to be killed in action since the deployment to southern Afghanistan began in May. The bomber also killed two small children.

The situation in Helmand threatens a repeat of that in the Iraqi city of Basra where British troops retreated to barracks after roadside bombs raised the risk to the point where it was too dangerous to go out.

    British troops hide from bombers, STs, 29.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2426616,00.html

Afghanistan war is 'cuckoo', says Blair's favourite general

Sunday October 29, 2006
The Observer
Ned Temko and Mark Townsend


Tony Blair's most trusted military commander yesterday branded as 'cuckoo' the way Britain's overstretched army was sent into Afghanistan.
The remarkable rebuke by General the Lord Guthrie came in an Observer interview, his first since quitting as Chief of the Defence Staff five years ago, in which he made an impassioned plea for more troops, new equipment and more funds for a 'very, very' over-committed army.

The decision by Guthrie, an experienced Whitehall insider and Blair confidant, to go public is likely to alarm Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence more than the recent public criticism by the current army chief Sir Richard Dannatt. 'Anyone who thought this was going to be a picnic in Afghanistan - anyone who had read any history, anyone who knew the Afghans, or had seen the terrain, anyone who had thought about the Taliban resurgence, anyone who understood what was going on across the border in Baluchistan and Waziristan [should have known] - to launch the British army in with the numbers there are, while we're still going on in Iraq is cuckoo,' Guthrie said.

In a unprecedented show of scepticism towards Blair, he said the Prime Minister's promise to give the army 'anything it wants' was unrealistic. 'I'm sure he meant what he said. He is not dishonest. But there is no way you can magic up trained Royal Air Force crews, or trained soldiers, quickly. You can't magic up helicopters, because there aren't any helicopters,' said Guthrie, promoted from chief of army staff to become overall head of the military for Blair's first term of office.

Guthrie said Britain was 'reaping the whirlwind' for assuming too great a 'peace dividend' after the Cold War and risks being ill-equipped for a whole new set of dangers.

He also cast doubt on suggestions of an early pullout from Iraq, saying that Britain could not afford to leave a 'bloodbath' behind.

Guthrie's comments will be given even further weight with the publication of a report on Friday by the National Audit Office that is expected to warn that the armed forces are failing to recruit and retain sufficient numbers to deliver the 'required military capability'. The report will echo Guthrie's warning that the armed forces are likely to remain seriously stretched 'for the foreseeable future'.

Guthrie voiced concern that ministers, civil servants and even some in the military were assuming that 'Afghanistan and Iraq are something we're going to muddle through for another couple of years and then we'll be able to go back' to a period of relative calm. 'I don't see that happening. I think we're in an extremely volatile, dangerous world,' he said. 'It's no good governments saying we're going to keep out of these things. They don't always have the luxury of choice. The type of crisis is actually quite difficult to forecast. But sure enough, we are going to have crises. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the world is going to settle down in the foreseeable future. We're not going to be allowed to graze in Elysian fields with the sun on our backs.'

What was needed, he argued, was a fundamental new look at the needs of the British military in the 21st century - as the last strategic defence review, in 1998, had been geared to a dramatically different world. 'What are we actually going to be faced with?' he said. 'A lot has changed and we do actually need more soldiers to actually do the tasks - and new equipment. And we are saddled with some things that it doesn't look awfully likely we're going to use.'

In Iraq, he said, there were three possible scenarios for British forces. The first would be an immediate pullout and the prospect of civil war. The second was to partition the country, but that would risk the slaughter of minority communities in each of the new states. 'We would have to live with it for ever if we left and they were put to the sword,' he said.

That left the hope of somehow creating a more loosely 'federated' Iraq - a 'last chance saloon' option, but one which Guthrie felt might still be workable. 'We have to stick with Iraq not least because in international terms the price of failure is far greater than in Afghanistan'. Iraq could cause problems in the region for years, he said, with implications for Jordan and Turkey, as well as for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

    Afghanistan war is 'cuckoo', says Blair's favourite general, O, 29.10.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1934382,00.html

Taliban plan to fight through winter to throttle Kabul

Militia fighters are operating just an hour's drive from the capital's suburbs, confident of undermining Western support for the war

Sunday October 29, 2006
The Observer
Jason Burke


The Taliban are planning a major winter offensive combining their diverse factions in a push on the Afghan capital, Kabul, intelligence analysts and sources among the militia have revealed.

The thrust will involve a concerted attempt to take control of surrounding provinces, a bid to cut the key commercial highway linking the capital with the eastern city of Jalalabad, and operations designed to tie down British and other Nato troops in the south.

Last week Nato, with a force of 40,000 in the country including around 5,000 from Britain, said it had killed 48 more Taliban in areas thought to have been 'cleared'. 'They have major attacks planned all the way through to the spring and are quite happy for their enemy to know it,' a Pakistan-based source close to the militia told The Observer. 'There will be no winter pause.' The Taliban's fugitive leader, Mullah Omar, yesterday rejected overtures for peace talks from President Hamid Karzai and said it intended to try him in an Islamic court for the 'massacre' of Afghan civilians.

Since their resurgence earlier this year the Taliban have made steady progress towards Kabul from their heartland in the south-east around Kandahar, establishing a presence in Ghazni province an hour's drive from the suburbs. They do not expect to capture the capital but aim to continue destabilising the increasingly fragile Karzai government and influence Western public opinion to force a withdrawal of troops. 'The aim is clear,' said the source. 'Force the international representatives of the crusader Zionist alliance out, and finish with their puppet government.'

A winter offensive breaks with tradition. 'Usually all Afghans do in the winter is try and stay warm,' said a Western military intelligence specialist in Kabul. 'The coming months are likely to see intense fighting, suicide bombings and unmanned roadside bombs. That is a measure of how much the Taliban have changed.'

The new Taliban, a rough alliance of Islamist zealots, teenagers seeking adventure, disgruntled villagers led by tribal elders alienated from the government, drug dealers and smugglers - is no longer the parochial, traditional militia that seized Kabul almost exactly 10 years ago and was ousted by the American-led coalition in 2001. Tactics, ideology, equipment and organisation have all moved on. The use of suicide bombings, roadside bombs and targeted assassinations of those cooperating with Western forces are methods copied from Iraqi insurgents.

'They can't engage in big groups so... they've moved on to these targeted assassinations,' said Naimatullah Khan, deputy chief of the local council in southern Kandahar province, who has seen several colleagues killed. More than 70 suicide bombings, four times as many as last year, have together killed scores of civilians. In 2001 the tactic was almost unknown among Afghans. French intelligence sources say militants are heading to Afghanistan rather than Iraq.

The Taliban are now exploiting modern propaganda such as recruitment videos and mass-produced DVDs and CDs. This has been copied from international terrorist operators such as Osama bin Laden, thought to be hiding either in the eastern zones along the Afghan border with Pakistan or in the heavily wooded northern province of Kunar where there is continued skirmishing between US troops and militants. Civilian deaths - such as the 50 reported during Nato operations last week near Kandahar - are eagerly exploited for propaganda.

The Taliban remain a local phenomenon and are not believed to be in close liaison with the Saudi-born bin Laden or his Egyptian-born associate Ayman al-Zawahiri. 'It is more an ad hoc co-operation between the Arabs and some of the major figures in the broad Taliban movement, especially in the east,' said a French intelligence source. Those fighting British troops in Helmand province are thought to be linked to major clerics and traffickers in Pakistan.

In the south, the Taliban's strategy has been influenced by the doctrine of Pakistani spymasters who ran the insurgent war against the Russians in the 1980s. 'The idea then was to keep Afghanistan just below boiling point,' said one Pakistan-based veteran of the 'jihad' against Moscow's troops. 'The Taliban don't want an apocalyptic explosion of violence. They want a steady draining of the West's resources, will and patience.'

The Pakistani influence on the Taliban strategy does not surprise many observers. Senior Nato officials speak privately about 'major Taliban infrastructure' in the neighbouring country but Western military intelligence analysis has consistently underestimated the group's depth and breadth - it can almost be considered the army of an unofficial state lying across the Afghan-Pakistani frontier that has no formal borders but is bound together by ethnic, linguistic, ideological and political ties.

Centred on areas dominated by Pashtun tribes, 'Talibanistan' stretches from the Indus river to the mountainous core of Afghanistan and comprises tens of millions of people who, as well as language and traditions, increasingly share an ultra-conservative form of Islam.

A political party linked to the Taliban is in power in the two most western provinces of Pakistan. There are powerful commercial lobbies tied to smuggling of drugs and other commodities, while mainstream businesses such as timber and textiles provide vast amounts of cash which can be funnelled into military operations. 'The problem for the Nato planners is that the Taliban have a safe rear area, cash, arms supplies and the support of much of the population,' said a Western diplomat in Islamabad. 'That's all a successful guerrilla army needs.'

Western soldiers and political leaders insist on the need to win over hearts and minds, but many local observers believe that, at least in the south of Afghanistan, the opportunity offered by the defeat of the Taliban in 2002 to bring security and development to this strategically critical and opium-rich area has been missed.

    Taliban plan to fight through winter to throttle Kabul, O, 29.10.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1934251,00.html

Nato's role under fire after death toll mounts

October 27, 2006
The Times 
From Anthony Loyd in Kandahar

“WHAT do you foreigners think you are doing?” an angry doctor demanded of me as three boys, all wounded by shrapnel, were wheeled into Mirawais hospital in Kandahar. One had his right eye blown out and the other two had abdominal injuries. “You bomb civilians, then come in to talk to them? Better if you leave.”

The hospital’s registration book showed that ten civilian casualties, including six children aged 8 to 12, had been admitted on Wednesday morning. There were many more casualties, survivors said. But they claimed that the roads were sealed by Nato troops and that the wounded had escaped across the fields.

Last night one official claimed that as many as 85 civilians had been killed in airstrikes and mortar bombardments around the settlement of Zangawat, in the Panjwayi district of the city. If confirmed, it would be the highest civilian death toll in an operation involving Western forces since the US-led invasion in 2001.

Nato said that a preliminary review by its forces had found the bodies of 12 civilians. The Interior Ministry claimed that 40 civilians and 20 Taleban fighters had died. The accuracy of those figures was impossible to substantiate, and the scene at Mirawais hospital did little to clear the confusion.

“We were under bombardment and airstrike from midnight onwards,” said Toor, 25, an Afghan farmer, lying dust-covered and bloody in a stretcher. “We couldn’t move, there was fire everywhere. Then I was hit in the leg. I crawled out with my wife and three brothers. All of us were wounded. We saw dead and wounded lying everywhere as we escaped: men, women and children.” Before The Times was ejected from the hospital, a second doctor said that 18 civilians had arrived for treatment after being wounded in three villages bombed by Nato.

Relatives of the wounded had only harsh words for their leaders in Kabul, whom they accuse of being bankrupt of courage and integrity.

“I’ve just called President Karzai and he switched off the phone,” said Haji Shah Mohammed, a senior member of the province’s council. “Three of my nephews are dead and three more of my family are wounded. I called the Governor but he switched off his phone too. Who will hear us?”

Afghan officials who travelled from Kandahar to assess the casualties in the Zangawat area said that they could not get close because of Taleban fighters there. “We couldn’t get access to the place we wanted as there were still Taleban in the area,” one official said.

Officials in Kandahar and Kabul claimed that 60 to 85 civilians had died in the attacks, a figure backed by locals. Nato had already said that an estimated 48 militants were killed in three incidents in Panjawi between late Tuesday morning and early Wednesday. The Nato statement made no mention of civilian casualties. Yesterday they increased the claim to suggest that 70 Taleban had been killed in Panjwayi, and admitted that “there may have been civilian casualties”.

It is clear that Nato used airpower and, in at least one incident, mortars, in response to Taleban attacks on government and Nato forces. It is also clear that Taleban fighters are still infiltrating Panjwayi. Nato and Afghan forces remain vulnerable to attack, security is minimal, civilians are dying and local anger towards foreign troops and the Kabul Government is growing by the day.

CIVILIAN TOLL CLAIMS

December 2001: US aircraft attack a convoy transporting tribal leaders to inaugauration of new Afghan government. About 60 killed, US claims al-Qaeda leaders among them

July 2002: 46 die, many from the same family, when a wedding party in Uruzgan province is bombed in error


22 May 2006: Governor of Kandahar province says 16 civilians killed in bombing on suspected Taleban hideout


18 October 2006: Afghan officials claim Nato airstrikes killed nine civilians in the village of Ashogho, Kandahar

There is no official record of civilian fatalities in Afghanistan

    Nato's role under fire after death toll mounts, TS, 27.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2423956,00.html

Britain 'risking defeat in Afghanistan'

Sunday October 22, 2006
The Observer
Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont

Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the former head of Britain's armed forces, has broken ranks to launch an attack on the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, warning that British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.

In one of the strongest interventions in the conduct of the War on Terror, Inge also charged a lack of any 'clear strategy' guiding British operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His comments came as President George Bush met his military and political officials to consider fresh tactics over Iraq, amid a mood of crisis in Washington over the violence.

The remarks by the former chief of the defence staff, who also served on the Butler Commission into intelligence failures in Iraq, follow those by the present head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who warned that the presence of British troops in Iraq had 'exacerbated' security problems in the country.

Inge's intervention, coming amid growing speculation about Britain's exit strategy from Iraq, is the first criticism of operations by a former head of the British army. His comments, made at a meeting of European experts on Tuesday and published here for the first time, reflect the growing dismay among senior military officers and civil servants involved in defence and foreign affairs, that in the critical areas of Afghanistan and Iraq Britain lacked clear foreign and defence policies separate from the US.

'I don't believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we're not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,' he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.

Inge added that Whitehall had surrendered its ability to think strategically and that despite the immense pressures on the army, defence received neither the research nor funding it required.

'I sense that Whitehall has lost the knack of putting together inter-departmental thinking about strategy. It talks about how we're going to do in Afghanistan, it doesn't really talk about strategy.'

The Iraq issue has been brought to a head by the sense of crisis enveloping Iraq, where attacks during Ramadan have increased by 22 per cent, US deaths are touching record levels, and British troops in the south of the country have been confronted by the spectre of Shia gunmen launching large-scale attacks.

Inge's comments come amid growing pressure in Washington from Republican Party loyalists, fearful of a meltdown in Mid Term elections to Congress on 7 November, for a change in direction for US policy on Iraq.

Although Bush has admitted that tactics on the ground could change in response to the latest violence, he insisted in his weekly radio address yesterday that there would be no change in the overall strategy.

Last night there were reports of a 'calm but tense' truce over the Iraqi city of Al Amarah, which was taken over by Shia militia on Friday just two months after the province was handed back to Iraq security forces. A British battle group of 600 troops remained on standby to sweep into the open city and regain control if required, an event that Ministry of Defence officials admitted might prompt a rethink of Britain's exit policy.

A Ministry of Defence source said yesterday that nothing had changed on strategic planning, dismissing reports that Washington and London were working frantically to agree an exit strategy.

'We are not planning on changing our strategy,' said the source adding that there had been no dialogue on the issue between defence secretary, Des Browne, and his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld.

    Britain 'risking defeat in Afghanistan', O, 22.10.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1928576,00.html

Taliban switch tactics to hit cities with suicide bombers

October 22, 2006
The Sunday Times
Christina Lamb

TALIBAN fighters are preparing for a winter of urban warfare, say Afghan and western intelligence, and have established cells in the cities of Afghanistan from which to launch a campaign of explosions and suicide bombings.

While military chiefs have been declaring victory in the south of the country and claim to have killed more than 3,000 Taliban over the summer, diplomats in Kabul warn that security in Afghan cities is deteriorating fast. “This could turn into another Iraq,” said one.

Suicide bombs were almost unheard of in Afghanistan until last year with only five since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. But this year has already seen 81, which killed or wounded more than 700 people.

One report from Afghan intelligence warns that 35 suicide bombers have infiltrated the cities and are planning to launch simultaneous strikes during this week’s Eid holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan.

“The Taliban have changed strategy because their other tactics have failed,” said Mark Laity, spokesman for the Nato-led force in Afghanistan. “As a result we believe they’ve resorted to the weapons of the weaker party — suicide bombs, hit and runs, IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and mines.”

The main targets are foreigners, particularly Nato convoys, three of which were hit last week in the south. A British soldier was killed in one in Lashkar Gah on Thursday, along with two children.

Until recently Kabul was an oasis of calm, but the bombings have turned it into a nervous place where drivers try to pull off the roads when they see a military convoy. The appearance of masked police has not reassured local residents in a country where police earn just £37 a month and are thus easily corrupted.

Discussions have already begun about creating a green zone, where foreigners could be protected. Consultants such as Crown Agents and BearingPoint say it is now more difficult to recruit staff to Kabul than Baghdad because of the lack of protection. Some diplomats threaten to withdraw unless they are provided with a fleet of armoured vehicles.

It is a shocking turnaround from five years ago when, in stark contrast to Iraq, foreign troops were welcomed by cheering crowds after almost 30 years of civil war.

However, Afghans have become disillusioned by deteriorating security. Hold-ups are once again common on the highways. On a three-hour journey from Jalalabad to Kabul, I had to cross three roadblocks where police had slung concertina wire across the road and were demanding bribes. In Farah province, Taliban won local support after they beheaded a group of highwaymen that the local government had failed to stop.

Taliban militants have also started targeting government officials. Abdul Hakim Taniwal, the governor of Paktia province, was killed by a suicide bomber last month. The following day another bomber killed six people at his funeral.

    Taliban switch tactics to hit cities with suicide bombers, ToS, 22.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2415612,00.html

Who are the Taleban? The question that is snaring Nato in Tribal wars

Western Forces are failing to recognise important local differences

October 21, 2006
The Times
From Anthony Loyd in Kandahar

LYING in hospital in Kandahar, with shrapnel wounds in both legs and his left arm, Abdul Qarim has had two days to ponder why his wife, two sons and two daughters were killed in a Nato attack on his village.

“If you call our mothers and children ‘Taleban’ then that could be one reason,” the 60-year-old farmer said yesterday. His family were not Taleban they were Tajiks. “More probably though, some people gave the wrong information to the foreigners — told them we were al-Qaeda or Taleban."

His experience illustrates the big question that dogs soldiers not just in Kandahar and Helmand but in the whole of Nato’s Afghanistan operation: Who exactly are the Taleban?

The airstrikes against a small hamlet at the edge of Ashogha, in Kandahar province, came on Wednesday as the Tajik inhabitants cooked their early meal before daylight and their Ramadan fast. Abdul Qarim heard his son Ghulam Shah, 35, call for help as he lay with blood pouring from his thigh. His father gave him a blanket, then sat down before him. At that moment 15 to 20 soldiers moved into the wrecked compound.

“They were foreigners, with special glasses fixed to their faces and powerful lights on the weapons,” Mr Qarim said. “One lifted the blanket from the edge of Ghulam, put his gun against his temple and fired. The bullets came out of his cheek. I was sitting right in front of them with my two surviving sons.”

As the soldiers searched the ruins, one stirred the body of Mr Qarim’s wife with his boot to check for signs of life. Then they left. They had found nothing, nor offered any medical aid to the survivors. Nine civilians had died and eleven were wounded. Next day, Nato admitted that civilians might have died. It has refused to confirm whether there was a follow-up operation by ground troops, or the nationality of any unit concerned.

“I thought they would be different from the Russians; not destroy my home and kill my family,” Mr Qarim said.

Nato reports are so full of “encounter battles”, “hardcore command elements”, “tactical victory” and “enemy concentrations” that you could almost believe that it was fighting a single insurgent army. The reality is that, often ill-briefed, badly informed or outright misled, Nato is embroiled partly in a counter-insurgency, partly in tribal warfare and partly as an executive arm trying to help anyone sickened by corruption and misrule from Kabul.

Nato officials claimed publicly this month that 500 Taleban had been killed in fighting near the city of Kandahar and privately suggested the figure to be double that.

A senior foreign official with long experience of dealing with tribal elders said yesterday that many of those killed were not Taleban but Noorzai tribesmen, outraged by the presence of a rival Achekzai warlord, Abdel Razak, aiding the foreigners on the battlefield. The warlord, commander of the Frontier Security Force at the border town of Spin Boldak, was enlisted to help Afghan police at the start of the operation. Yet he was already involved in his own blood feud with Noorzais and had been jailed briefly for killing 16 of them. After his release he was deployed with his men to secure Noorzai villages in Panjawi district, the focus of Medusa.

“His soldiers started looting and threatening the people,” the official said. “In two days all the Noorzais in the area united and started fighting the Government just as the Canadians became involved. A lot of them were killed.”

In Helmand province British forces were engaging not only the Taleban, but a conglomerate of non-Taleban tribes, he said, outraged by the corruption and criminality of the outgoing governor, as well as the Afghan staff who are undermining the efforts of Mohammad Daud, the new governor

Afghan intelligence admits that the Taleban is a leaderless hybrid shadow of its original form, with three different and often competing headquarters in Pakistan. That this disparate force of perhaps a few disorganised thousands can operate with such success is due to the fact that the majority of southern Afghans are sick of the squandered efforts of their own Government to improve their lives or give them any security.

At the outskirts of Kandahar yesterday three police checkpoints extorted cash from travellers. One policeman boasted that he made $600 (£320) a month from civilians. The city’s ruined roads and burgeoning unemployment suggest that nobody has benfitted from five years of world support for President Karzai’s Government.

“We’re not here to kill Talebs,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Andy Price, of 3 Commando Brigade. “Kill a Taleb and you make a blood feud with his family. We’re here to try to make them irrelevant.”

The words sound good, and reflect a genuine desire among Nato field commanders. But the organisation has a long way to go to ensure that it does not kill anyone else lumped under the term of irrelevance just because they can no longer tolerate a corrupt officialdom.

RELIGIOUS WARRIORS

Taking their name from the pashtu word Taleb or seeker, the Taleban drew early recruits from Afghan religious students attending madrassas in Pakistan

Allegedly funded in part by the Pakistani intelligence service — a claim which Pakistan strenuously denies — their discipline and ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran gained support from an Afghan population tired of the country’s banditry and corruption

Appearing first in Afghanistan in 1993, they swept up through the south and captured Kabul in 1996

After the 9/11 attacks and before they could capture all Afghanistan, mujahideen and US forces drove them from power

The Taleban leadership fled Afghanistan; most followers returned to home to the southern provinces

    Who are the Taleban? The question that is snaring Nato in Tribal wars, Ts, 21.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2414664,00.html

3.45pm

Marines pay tribute to comrade killed in Helmand

Friday October 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Jackie Dent

The commanding officer of a Royal Marine killed by a suicide bomber in southern Afghanistan said today the soldier was a popular man with a good sense of humour.

The Ministry of Defence named Gary Wright, 22, from Glasgow, as the soldier from 45 Commando Royal Marines who died from severe injuries after a suicide bomber on foot attacked a military patrol in Lashkar Gah in Helmand province yesterday.

Two Afghan children were also killed in the attack and another British solider remains seriously ill at a military hospital at Camp Bastion, the headquarters for British operations in Helmand.

Marine Wright's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Dewar RM, said in a statement the soldier's high level of professional skills had led to his selection as a member of the specialised reconnaissance unit known as Recce Troop. "Extremely popular, with a good sense of humour, he was very highly thought of by everyone who worked with him," Lieut Col Dewar said.

The MoD statement said the marine had joined the army in 2002 and two years later undertaken a course for reconnaissance leaders. He went on to take part in training exercises in Ghana, California, Senegal and Norway.

"Marine Wright was extremely proud of his Scottish roots and ensured that wherever he was in the world he received a copy of the Daily Record. He was a keen football fan and a passionate supporter of his club, Rangers," the statement said.

"He loved cars and motorbikes, and had a beautiful red MG Midget. He was going to take his motorbike test and was already deciding which bike he was going to buy."

The death of Marine Wright brings to 41 the British forces' death toll in the country since the start of operations in November 2001. Of these, 19 were killed in action; 22 are known to have died as a result of illness, non-combat injuries or accidents.

The defence secretary, Des Browne, said in a statement he was sorry to hear of the marine's death. "I know that his loss will be felt deeply by all those who knew him," he said. "But I have no doubt this will only strengthen the resolve of his fellow marines to carry on with the task in hand."

    Marines pay tribute to comrade killed in Helmand, G, 20.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1927710,00.html

Comment

There is never going to be a Nato victory in Afghanistan

The military option is going nowhere. The way forward is to emulate Pakistan by withdrawing troops and making deals

Friday October 20, 2006
The Guardian
Jonathan Steele

General Sir Richard Dannatt's brave call for an early British withdrawal from Iraq contained one logical flaw. It did not apply to Afghanistan, he said, because foreign troops were invited by the Kabul government. This gave them a different status from coalition forces in Iraq, "which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan". It was an odd remark since US and British forces have a standing invitation from the Baghdad government. There is a clear parallel with Afghanistan, just as there is in his core arguments: Britain's presence in Iraq is exacerbating the security problems, and "we are in a Muslim country and Muslims' views of foreigners in their country are quite clear".

Both points apply to Afghanistan, where a combination of rising nationalism, impatience with Kabul's selection of corrupt governors, anger at the coalition's military tactics, and disappointment with its failure to improve basic services, is creating a tide of resistance. Afghan history shows that foreign interventionists, especially non-Muslims, only have a small window of time to show they are doing good. It runs out fast, particularly in the Pashtun south, the traditional heartland of opposition.

Five years after the Taliban were bombed out of power, Afghanistan is falling into the same morass of bloodletting as Iraq. The country is not riven by the sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni that is fragmenting Iraq, but in every other way security has collapsed. A third of the country is "racked by violent insurgency", in Kofi Annan's words. Suicide bombings are on the rise, with 230 people killed last month; foreign contractors are kidnapped, police officers and government officials murdered.

The Taliban are resurgent. British forces are taking casualties in clashes that Brigadier Ed Butler, the outgoing commander of UK forces, calls more ferocious than anything in Iraq. A retired US general, Barry McCaffrey, reported this spring that, unlike Iraq's insurgents, the Taliban operate in battalion-sized units of 400 men, equipped with "excellent weapons and field equipment" and new technology for roadside bombs.

Britain and Nato are floundering over how to react. Lieutenant General David Richards, the Nato commander, believes in hitting the Taliban hard, using air and artillery strikes, even though they risk killing many civilians. "They think they can face us down. We will prove to them that they are defeatable," he said last week. The defence secretary, Des Browne, is more circumspect. Killing Taliban may provoke massive revenge, he recently warned: "There will be a real danger that their deaths will motivate others ... and potentially turn this into a conflict of a different kind."

The conflict's intensification reinforces the case, argued by a minority in the west after 9/11, that military attack would not solve the Taliban - or al-Qaida - problem. In Washington and London the desire to eliminate al-Qaida was wrongly combined with seeking regime change in Kabul - a goal the security council never authorised. A propaganda campaign demonised the Taliban so as to justify their removal as a victory, even though Osama bin Laden might not be found.

Afghanistan: the Mirage of Peace, an excellent study by Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie, two aid workers with long experience of working there, describes how under the Taliban security was better than it was before or after. In many regions they were flexible and pragmatic: humanitarian aid flowed, and girls' education continued in "home schools".

They also point out that the Bonn accords that followed regime change failed to provide for the demilitarisation of the warlords or a role for middle-ranking supporters of the Taliban. Just as the wholesale purge of all Ba'athists rather than just the leadership alienated an important sector of society in Iraq, ousting every Taliban follower created serious problems in Afghanistan, although the damage was different. People who joined the Ba'ath party out of necessity rather than conviction formed a crucial part of Iraq's professional class, including the army. In Afghanistan Taliban supporters were tribal and rural. But they represented a large swathe of the Pashtun population.

After Bonn they watched and waited. Had foreign troops and all the pledges of aid for Hamid Karzai's government produced quick benefits, Afghanistan's new deal might have stuck. Little was done, and the Taliban was able to regroup by arguing that Afghanistan was getting nothing from its new occupation. The drug barons used their money to stir up opposition. Nato's "hearts and minds" campaign in Helmand and other southern provinces this year came too late.

Two years ago Karzai brought some former Taliban leaders into the fold. A few were elected to parliament last year. But the only way to restore security in the Pashtun south is a comprehensive accommodation with tribal leaders, mullahs, former mujahideen, and the Taliban forces they are related to.

This is the tack Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf has been using in the troubled Pashtun provinces of Waziristan that border Afghanistan. After being bullied by Washington to use troops against the Taliban and their tribal supporters - a strategy that ended in failure - he has switched to making deals, withdrawing forces in return for undertakings of no Taliban attacks on Pakistani government buildings and no parallel administration. Religious scholars, tribal elders and Pakistani officials will monitor the deal.

Musharraf explained it last month in words that echo General Dannatt's: "On our side of the border, there will be a total uprising if a foreigner enters that area. We will never allow any foreigners into that area. It's against the culture of the people there."

There are encouraging signs that the message is getting through in Afghanistan. The best news for a long time was this week's decision by British troops to pull out of the Musa Qala district of Helmand. A ceasefire brokered by tribal leaders has brought peace on the Musharraf model. British officials claim the Taliban were not consulted. Perhaps not directly, but the tribal leaders will surely have talked to them, knowing that otherwise the deal would never work.

If this deal can be replicated throughout the south, there is hope. Britain and Nato will never achieve military victory or "pacify" Afghanistan. Local reconciliation and power sharing are the only basis on which job creation and rural development can at last go forward. In this task foreign armies have no place.

    There is never going to be a Nato victory in Afghanistan, G, 20.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1926820,00.html

Iraq war cost years of progress in Afghanistan - UK brigadier

Commander echoes criticism of Blair's foreign policy by head of army

Wednesday October 18, 2006
Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor

The invasion of Iraq prevented British forces from helping to secure Afghanistan much sooner and has left a dangerous vacuum in the country for four years, the commander who has led the attack against the Taliban made clear yesterday.

Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of 3 Para battlegroup just returned from southern Afghanistan, said the delay in deploying Nato troops after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002 meant British soldiers faced a much tougher task now.

Asked whether the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath had led to Britain and the US taking their eye off the ball, Brig Butler said the question was "probably best answered by politicians".

But echoing criticisms last week by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, he added that Iraq had affected operations in Afghanistan. "We could have carried on in 2002 in the same way we have gone about business now.

"Have the interim four years made a difference? I think realistically they have," Brig Butler told journalists in London. Since then, he added, Britain had "marked time" and British troops were now "starting to make up for that time".

He said later it would be inappropriate to associate Iraq with Afghanistan; they were different problems.

Gen Dannatt last week questioned the decision to invade Iraq, saying the military campaign in 2003 "effectively kicked the door in" and that British troops should leave "sometime soon" - by which he made it clear he meant within two years.

Brig Butler said yesterday that British forces could also have attacked the Taliban more effectively and more quickly if they had had more resources, including helicopters, though he added that British commanders had to face "realities".

There are more than 5,000 British troops in southern Afghanistan and more than 7,000 in southern Iraq. Though British military chiefs say publicly that they could sustain that number for the time being, they make it clear they cannot do so for much longer.

Pressed on the issue yesterday, the prime minister insisted British forces would not "walk away" from either country, and again insisted that he was not at odds with Gen Dannatt. "If we walk away before the job is done from either of those two countries, we will leave a situation in which the very people we are fighting everywhere, including the extremism in our own country, are heartened and emboldened and we can't afford that to happen."

Brig Butler also gave fresh insight into the strain that fighting in two different theatres was creating for the army. He disclosed that at times in southern Afghanistan his men had been down to "belt rations" - water and basic supplies which normally last no more than two days. "It got pretty close. We never actually ran out but that was the nature of the conflict," he said. He added that they were never in danger of being overrun by Taliban forces though on occasion it "got pretty close".

Brig Butler said he believed that they had "tactically defeated" the Taliban. However, he warned they could regroup over the winter; it was now essential to press ahead with reconstruction projects to convince the local population that the Nato operation was worth supporting.

"If we take our eye off the ball and we don't continue to invest in it, there is a danger they [the Taliban] will come back in greater numbers next year," he said.

He said the ferocity of the fighting over the summer had taken some of his troops by surprise. "I think we might have been surprised on occasion how persistent the attacks were and how enduring the scale of the operation was," Brig Butler said.

He said it was "very clear" that the campaign to secure Afghanistan would be a long one. "I suspect there will be some elements of the international community there in 20 years' time," he said, referring mainly to aid agencies.

It was disclosed yesterday that British troops had pulled out of the Musa Qala district in the northern part of Helmand province under a deal with local tribal elders. Brig Butler insisted he had not been involved in any negotiations with the Taliban and expressed confidence that the agreement would hold. "I think it is a positive sign that they are delivering their own security," he said.

    Iraq war cost years of progress in Afghanistan - UK brigadier, G, 18.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1924794,00.html

MoD forced to hire civilian helicopters in Afghanistan

Published: 15 October 2006
The Independent on Sunday
By Francis Elliott and Raymond Whitaker

Britain is so short of helicopters in Afghanistan that military chiefs are being forced to scour the world for civilian aircraft to support its troops after the US rejected a plea to help plug the shortfall.

An ageing fleet of just eight Chinooks is working around the clock to supply and reinforce soldiers in remote outposts facing waves of Taliban attacks. The only Chinook in the Falklands was taken away for use in the campaign.

The revelations come in the wake of the outburst by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the army chief, against the Government's military strategy last week.

The Independent on Sunday can also reveal that reconnaissance and intelligence missions in Afghanistan are being affected by the lack of smaller and more flexible helicopters. But senior military officials said that when UK commanders asked for temporary deployment of US helicopters in Afghanistan, they were told there were none to spare.

Instead, the MoD has been forced to seek out commercial operators for non-combat operations, to free more military craft for use at the front line. So urgent is the need that Britain is understood to be asking other nations that have ordered Merlin helicopters from Westland to allow the MoD to requisition them.

Just last weekend Tony Blair said: "If the commanders on the ground want more equipment, armoured vehicles for example, more helicopters, that will be provided. Whatever package they want we will do."

The revelations reinforce the view of Gen Dannatt that the military is running at full stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan, where yesterday two more Nato soldiers were killed and an Italian photojournalist was kidnapped. But it became clear this weekend that the general would not be sacked, despite saying that the presence of British troops in Iraq "exacerbates" the "difficulties we are facing around the world", and that we should "get ourselves out some time soon".

His outspoken views continued to attract fervent support from ordinary soldiers, some of them serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. One website posting from "Isquared" said: "Well done General Sir Richard. I wish he had said even more about this disgusting and disgraceful 'adventure' into Iraq."

It also emerged yesterday that British forces have detailed plans to scale down forces in southern Iraq in the next few months. Building work has already started at the British base at Basra airport, where forces will be consolidated. The main military hospital is due to move there from the Shaibah logistics base out in the desert, and Shaibah, the largest base in the British sector, would be closed next year.

Smaller bases within Basra city, which attract the bulk of attacks on British forces, would be closed as control passes to the Iraqis. Commanders hope the British deployment of 7,200 would be almost halved by the end of 2007. The Pentagon is planning to maintain US troop levels in Iraq at about 140,000 for at least four more years .

* Private Peter McKinley, 21, of the Parachute Regiment has become the first British soldier in Afghanistan to be recommended for the Victoria Cross after he saved a wounded US sergeant under heavy fire.

    MoD forced to hire civilian helicopters in Afghanistan, IoS, 15.10.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1873831.ece

'They faced fighting that hasn't been seen for a generation'

3rd Battalion, the Paras, back from Afghanistan

Thursday October 12, 2006
Guardian
Audrey Gillan

He fought in both wars in Iraq and on the streets of Northern Ireland - but never had he experienced such intense battles as his troops fought in Afghanistan.

Returning from a six-month tour, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, commander of 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment Battle Group, said as they got home to their barracks last night: "This was the most intense I have experienced. It was a war fighting operation." Soldiers of his group spoke for the first time of life in Helmand province, where they had gone to rebuild a shattered country but found themselves fighting in battles as fierce as any the British army has ever faced. In four months they had fired more rounds than in any operation since the Korean war of the 1950s.

Almost every soldier - mechanics, engineers, and military police - was in battle against the Taliban. One said: "They just used every swinging dick, as they say in the army."

Two Royal Military policemen, whose job is investigating crime, told how they found themselves drafted in as infantry, firing mortars and grenades.

Staff Sergeant Craig Midgeley, 8 Close Support Company, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, said two colleagues had been flown to the remote outpost of Musa Qala to support a Pathfinder team and fix a vehicle. "When they came to be extracted, the Chinook [helicopter] couldn't set down to land, because of dust in the air. The Pathfinders can't just sit around - so the two REME blokes were embedded with them and ended up in a seven-hour firefight with the Taliban. They got put on the crew, and they loved it. A hot shell landed on the back of one of their necks. It is not what your average REME soldier expects to be doing."

Regimental Sergeant Major John Hardy, 38, fought in Iraq. "Iraq is insignificant compared to what soldiers have gone through in Afghanistan," he said. "At times they have been fighting daily. Sometimes four and five times every day. But we are Paras."

Lance Corporal Richie Astin, 29, a military policeman with 156 Provost Company, said: "We did things the RMP had never done before. We experienced firefights We used many different weapons, [though] we are just trained to use rifles." His colleague, L/Cpl Matt Carse, 25, said: "I was firing 51mm mortars, and I guarantee no RMP has ever done that. We were throwing grenades as well."

The intensity of the fighting was at times overshadowed by deaths within their ranks, and by disputes over resources . Questions were raised over the vulnerability of vehicles. A soldier from the Household Cavalry died when his Spartan armoured vehicle was hit by a rocket. Army commanders were also worried about a shortage of helicopters.

Lt Col Tootal warned that the new battalion due in Afghanistan, 3 Commando Brigade, needs to be ready to fight at the same intensity.

As 150 Paras returned to Hyderabad barracks in Colchester after a brief "decompression period" in Cyprus of beach, beers and a barbeque, their brigade commander, Brigadier Ed Butler, said: "What has shone through is the resilience, resolve and raw courage of all the British soldiers, airmen and aviators. The Taliban underestimated what they were capable of."

In four months, Operation Herrick, as Afghanistan is codenamed, fired 450,000 rifle rounds, 4,300 high-explosive shells, more than 1,050 hand grenades, 7,500 mortar rounds, and 85 anti-tank missiles. One senior Para officer said: "No doubt about it, these guys have faced an intensity of combat not faced for a generation, though it hasn't been a Rorke's Drift [in 1879, in the Zulu war], with people taking buckles off and using them as weapons. Supplies have got through." He did admit that some soldiers had been days without food or water because it was "too dangerous" for a Chinook to land.

Soldiers from the elite Pathfinder regiment had gone on a six-day mission to Musa Qala, but had to remain for 52 days - and were shot at for 26 of them. "In Sangin, they had a 70% chance of contact with the Taliban; in some areas that rose to 90%," said the senior officer. "It takes a pretty special kind of courage to go out into that day after day, particularly when they see their friends killed the day before."

The defence secretary, Des Browne, was at the barracks last night: "What these men have accomplished is truly outstanding," he said. "They have worked in the most difficult, extreme and hazardous conditions. But sadly, this success has been at a cost."

Handing over to 3 Commando Brigade, Brig Butler said: "When we prepared, we knew there would be rocky times ahead, and that things would get harder before they got easier. That has certainly been the case, but I judge we have turned the corner. We have achieved a huge amount."

    'They faced fighting that hasn't been seen for a generation', G, 12.10.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1920272,00.html

Taleban thieves banished me from my home and my children's graves

Our correspondent tells how he can see his village from a new road but cannot return because he works for the West

October 09, 2006
The Times
From Tahir Luddin

From the road I can see my house. But I can no longer look at it. It is too painful. Going there is impossible.

My village of Spinagbaragha is only seven miles from Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul province, yet government forces and the American soldiers based there were helpless when my father was beaten, my house searched and my money stolen, and I was threatened with death if I ever returned. This was all because I work with Westerners and they accused me of being a spy and a Christian. Both accusations are false and, as a devout Muslim, hard to hear.

It is five years since American forces first entered my country offering the peace and stability that we had been denied for the past 30 years.

Thousands have died since that day, the countryside is overrun by Taleban rebels and thieves, and the prospect of a peaceful Afghanistan remains but a dream.

Even the road from Kabul to Kandahar, which cost $500 million (£270 million) in Western aid money to build, is becoming too dangerous. Earlier in the year I would drive Western journalists working for The Times. Now that would be a death sentence.

When I drove along the road two weeks ago armed Taleban rebels had set up a checkpoint less than two miles from Qalat. The roadblock was in clear view of a police post, yet the officers did nothing.

My own troubles in my village, the place where I grew up, started three years ago. After repeated threats I decided to move my family to the relative safety of Kabul. The threats were partly because I was working with Westerners, but also because I had a job and was making money; unemployment is high in Zabul after seven years of drought.

The night before we were set to leave, four armed men burst into our house while another eight waited outside. They claimed that they were Taleban and were looking for things that proved I was a spy. (I once worked for the Taleban as an official, including in the public works and interior ministries in Zabul province between 1998 and 2001, although I never carried a gun.)

They found nothing that night but money, and they took more than $4,000. One of my wives managed to hide some money, so we were not left penniless.

This time they did not beat my family. Luckily I had already returned to Kabul to work, otherwise they may have left my five children fatherless.

Although those who broke into my house said that they were Taleban, they could just have been bandits; many people commit crimes and blame it on the Taleban.

My father was the first member of my family to return to the village, a year later. He had to sort out a land dispute and collect the grape harvest. His trip almost cost him his life.

Six armed men burst into the house and grabbed him. They tied his hands and legs, staked him to the ground and put a noose around his neck. He was then beaten with a metal pipe and the butt of a Kalashnikov rifle for being “the father of an infidel”.

My father was 76, an old man, and he lost consciousness. He was saved only when another of my relatives managed to alert villagers, who chased off the attackers. My father was lucky to survive; they broke two ribs, blinded him in one eye and dislocated two vertebrae. He still walks with a stick and suffers great pain during the winter cold.

I knew after this attack that nothing would be the same.

Yet it is not only my family who is suffering. The youth of my village are being deprived of an education. Even under the Taleban there were two schools. In the years immediately after their fall, there were three serving 2,000 children from the five surrounding villages.

Today not even one is open. A campaign of intimidation, which included the beating and murder of teachers and the burning of schools, has closed them all. The Taleban say that the schools represent a government that they do not recognise and, as such, are a legitimate target.

My village is the site of our family graveyard. Eight of my brothers and sisters are buried there. Two were martyrs; they died after a Soviet rocket hit our house in 1983. The graveyard is also the home to five of my children, all born prematurely. They died because there is only one hospital in the province.

We used to go to the graves every Friday to pray; now it is impossible. For us — my wife who has lost five children and my mother — that is the hardest part of all.

    Taleban thieves banished me from my home and my children's graves, Ts, 9.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2395240,00.html

Bounty for Afghans who replace British soldiers

October 09, 2006
The Times
From Tim Albone in Ghazni

British troops in the most dangerous and isolated parts of Helmand province are to be withdrawn and replaced by Afghan forces.

The British will be substituted within weeks by Afghan security forces, to be paid a bounty comparable with what the Taleban pays its fighters — at present about three times the $120 a month earned by an Afghan soldier in Helmand. It is hoped the increased pay will ensure that they remain committed to the Government.

The withdrawal of British forces from the northern district towns of Musa Qala, Nauzad, Sangin and Kajaki, where they have been facing almost daily attacks, could start within a fortnight.

The change of strategy is intended to give British forces a better chance of fulfilling their reconstruction mandate. It was derailed when they were rushed to the outposts under pressure from the Afghan Government, which feared an imminent Taleban takeover.

The reconstruction efforts will be concentrated in larger population centres, a return to the “inkspot” strategy under which Nato forces are supposed to extend steadily the rule of the Afghan Government.

But Afghan officials said that the move could play into the hands of the Taleban. The deputy governor of the province, Amir Mohammad Akhunzada, told The Times: “We don’t have enough police or army to replace the British. These towns are on a smugglers’ route. If they leave the area the Taleban will get stronger.”

General David Richards, the British officer commanding Nato troops in Afghanistan, said yesterday that 70 per cent of Afghans may start supporting the Taleban if their lives did not improve in the next six months.

The hardship endured by soldiers has become the focal point for claims that British ministers failed to prepare the forces or the British public for the hazards of the campaign. The so-called platoon-houses, nothing more than reinforced government centres, have few amenities. Fighting has been so intense that helicopters have been unable to resupply troops.

The Pathfinder platoon had been sent to Musa Qala for four days in June. But, a Pathfinder source said, “We were there for eight weeks, three of those were under constant attack.” No one from that platoon died during their deployment, although all 16 of the British troops killed in combat in the south have died in the four northern outposts.

British commanders say the withdrawal means they will have a floating force with which to patrol the province. Freeing up the troops will also lead to the creation of secure “development zones”.

The withdrawal from the four towns depends on British forces striking a deal with village elders to guarantee to keep Taleban rebels out of the district centres. A deal was struck with village elders in Musa Qala weeks ago. Although British troops have yet to withdraw, the town has been peaceful.

    Bounty for Afghans who replace British soldiers, Ts, 9.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2395241,00.html

British hire anti-Taliban mercenaries

October 08, 2006
The Sunday Times 
Christina Lamb, Kabul

BRITISH forces holed up in isolated outposts of Helmand province in Afghanistan are to be withdrawn over the next two to three weeks and replaced by newly formed tribal police who will be recruited by paying a higher rate than the Taliban.

The move is the result of deals with war-weary locals and reverses the strategy of sending forces to establish “platoon houses” in the Taliban heartland where soldiers were left under siege and short of supplies because it was too dangerous for helicopters to fly in.

Troops in the four northern districts of Sangin, Musa Qala, Nawzad and Kajaki have engaged in the fiercest fighting since the Korean war, tying up more than half the mission’s available combat force. All 16 British soldiers killed in the conflict died in these areas.

“We were coming under as many as seven attacks a day,” said Captain Alex Mackenzie of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who spent a month in Sangin. “We were firing like mad just to survive. It was deconstruction rather than reconstruction.”

Lieutenant-General David Richards, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has long been critical of tying up troops in static positions, while the British government has grown increasingly concerned that it was affecting public support for the mission.

Since taking command of the British forces at the end of July, Richards has been looking for a way to pull them out without making it look like a victory for the Taliban.

“I am confident that in two to three weeks the securing of the districts will be achieved through a different means,” he said. “Most of the British troops will then be able to be redeployed to tasks which will facilitate rapid and visible reconstruction and development, which we’ve got to do this winter to prove we can not only fight but also deliver what people need.”

The districts will be guarded by new auxiliary police made up of local militiamen. They will initially receive $70 (£37) a month, although it is hoped that this will rise to $120 to compete with the $5 per fighting day believed to be paid by the Taliban. “These are the same people who two weeks ago would have been vulnerable to be recruited as Taliban fighters,” said Richards.

“It’s employment they want and we need to make sure we pay more than the Taliban.”

The withdrawal of the British troops will coincide with the departure of 3 Para, whose six-month deployment is coming to an end. The battalion will be replaced by Royal Marines from 3 Commando Brigade who started arriving last week.

Locals in these districts are fed up with the fighting that has led to the destruction of many homes, bazaars and a school. A delegation of more than 20 elders from Musa Qala met President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday evening and demanded to be allowed to look after their own security. “The British troops brought nothing but fighting,” they complained. They pledged that if allowed to appoint their own police chief and district chief, they would keep out the Taliban.

The other crucial factor has been Nato’s success last month in inflicting the heaviest defeat on the Taliban since their regime fell five years ago. The two-week Operation Medusa in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province left between 1,100 and 1,500 Taliban dead, many of whom were believed to be committed fighters rather than guns for hire.

“Militarily it was against the odds — it was only because the Taliban were silly enough to take us on in strength when we had superior firepower and because of very, very brave fighting on the part of Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch, as well as the Afghan national army,” said Richards.

The Taliban, emboldened by their successes in Helmand, had changed their strategy from hit-and-run tactics to a frontal attack, apparently intending to try to take the key city of Kandahar. They had taken advantage of a change of command of foreign troops in the south from American to Canadian and eventually Nato to move large amounts of equipment and men into the Panjwayi district southwest of the city. The area was a stronghold of the mujaheddin during the Russian occupation and contains secret tunnels and grape-drying houses amid orchards and vineyards alongside the Argandab River.

After initial setbacks, including the crash of a British Nimrod aircraft in which 14 servicemen died and an incident in which an American A10 bomber strafed Canadian forces, killing one and wounding 35, Nato forces turned the situation around. Wave after wave of Taliban arriving on pick-ups to join the fight were mown down. More than 100 are believed to have been captured and reports from Quetta in neighbouring Pakistan suggest that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, has instructed his men to return to their old guerrilla tactics.

The number of daily “contacts” between troops and insurgents has since dropped from a high of 24 in September to just two, although the lull in fighting may be partly because of Ramadan, the fasting month.

Richards believes that the victory has won his forces a six-month window during which the international community must make visible changes for the people of southern Afghanistan or risk losing everything.

“Fighting alone is not the solution,” he warned. “We’ve got to win over the 70% of people in southern Afghanistan who are good peasant stock and basically want security and the means to feed their families. If it’s only fighting they see ahead of them for the next five years, chances are that they will say well, we’d rather have the Taliban and all that comes with it.

“The means to persuade them is not just to show we can win, as we have done, but also that it’s all worth it, which means pretty visible and ready improvements.”

He added: “The military can’t do much more — it’s up to the government and development agencies. At the moment somehow it isn’t happening and we’re beginning to lose time.”

The military is locked in a debate with the Department for International Development (DFID) which has £20m to spend in Helmand but feels that the situation is too insecure for development and believes the focus should be on long-term projects.

Asked last week what reconstruction it had carried out in Helmand so far, a DFID representative could cite only the rebuilding of market stalls in two districts. The official added that the department did not want to draw attention to any improvements because that might make them targets.

The military want the DFID to hand over some of its funds to enable them to carry out work. “We have to prove to the population today that tomorrow is worth waiting for,” said Richards.

He said that in Helmand’s main town of Lashkar Gah last month, only one young man in a group of 20 he met had a job. “If there aren’t any jobs and the Taliban come along and say we’ll offer you $5 a day for taking pot-shots at the Brits then they will,” he said.

“That’s where we should be spending our money — creating jobs. And it really isn’t good enough just doing the long-term stuff.”

Karzai will chair a meeting on reconstruction this week, including ministers and foreign donors, in the hope of kickstarting programmes such as road building and irrigation.

“We’ve got six months to prove to the 70% that it’s all worth it, that we can not only deliver security but the things they really want,” Richards said. “If we do, I think things will be much better and we will have turned the curve. If we don’t, then my prognosis is that next year will be even worse than this year.”

    British hire anti-Taliban mercenaries, STs, 8.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393659,00.html

Betrayed: How we have failed our troops in Afghanistan

Military chiefs warned John Reid: 'Don't try to fight war on two fronts'
British soldiers six times more likely to die in Afghan conflict than in Iraq

Published: 01 October 2006
The Independent on Sunday
By Francis Elliott, Marie Woolf and Raymond Whitaker
 

Britain's most senior military chiefs warned John Reid not to commit UK troops to "a war on two fronts" in Iraq and Afghanistan more than 18 months ago, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Despite clear advice that a "significant" withdrawal of troops from Iraq was needed before a new mission, Mr Reid went ahead with the Afghan deployment after coming under pressure from Tony Blair. The advice, prepared by military planners and endorsed by the Chiefs of the Defence Staff, was given to Mr Reid on his arrival as Secretary of State for Defence in May last year. Despite the warnings, he went ahead with the deployment in January.

Mr Reid was accused last night of having taken "a gamble" by the Conservative spokesman on foreign affairs as the political and military fall-out from the conflict continues to grow. The present Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, has been forced to deny persistent reports that military chiefs are pressing for significant withdrawals from Iraq in order to shore up the Afghanistan operation.

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war this Saturday, stark new evidence of the suffering being endured by British troops on the ground emerged in a series of leaked emails published in The Mail on Sunday. They amount to a harrowing account of terrified soldiers tormented by heat and sandflies engaged in brutal combat with Taliban fighters. One soldier wrote: "You see the Taliban cutting around on dirtbikes, their weapons in one hand, their kids in the other. They think we will not shoot them. There have been some terrible incidents. It is horrible to kill a kid, nothing could prepare you for it."

In another email, also sent by a member of 3 Para, a rescue operation is described in vivid detail. "I could not believe we were going to charge off this helicopter into a wall of lead. Not everyone wanted to get off, one guy actually defecated." The operation came too late for the French forces who had been ambushed by the Taliban. One of the Afghan survivors said the French had been tied up then gutted alive by the Taliban. "It is one of the most shocking things I have ever heard," said the British soldier.

The MoD has been accused of seeking to censor reporting from the front line, but a spokesman last night welcomed what he described as "these gritty, hard-hitting reports".

"The 3 Para battle group has performed magnificently in extremely difficult circumstances. We salute them."

Meanwhile, a detailed statistical analysis of the mission, obtained by this newspaper, shows British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are dying at six times the rate of those engaged in combat in Iraq. Forty UK soldiers have been killed and 86 wounded in Afghanistan since 2001.

Britain has nearly 5,000 troops in Afghanistan and 900 more on the way. Around 7,500 UK troops are serving in Iraq. Keith Simpson, the Conservativespokesman on the Middle East, said: "It is clear that Reid took what he probably regarded as a low-risk gamble."

A spokesman for the Home Secretary failed to deny that planning assumptions for the Afghanistan mission in May 2005 involved a significant withdrawal of troops from Iraq. "The force package for Nato was not finalised at that time," he said.

    Betrayed: How we have failed our troops in Afghanistan, IoS, 1.10.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1777868.ece

Blood & guts: At the front with the poor bloody infantry

This is the war they do not want you to see: but while the media are kept from the action,
emails and videophone images from the troops tell a terrifyng story.

Published: 01 October 2006
The Independent on Sunday
By Raymond Whitaker

"We headed off to what can only be described as the Wild West." Those are the words, not of a beleaguered British squaddie, but of a Canadian officer in a unit sent to help rescue our troops in the lawless Afghan province of Helmand. His account, emailed to family and friends back in Canada, is the most detailed to emerge from what commanders have called the most desperate fighting British troops have seen since the Korean War.

"A British company from 3 Para had been isolated and surrounded by Taliban in... Sangin district centre," the officer relates. "They had lost four soldiers and were being attacked three to five times a day. They were running out of food and were down to boiling river water." An attempt to air-drop supplies had failed, with the supplies landing in a Taliban stronghold, so the Canadians were ordered to conduct an immediate emergency resupply operation with their light armoured vehicles (LAVs).

"When we arrived in Sangin, the locals began throwing rocks and anything they could at us; this was not a friendly place," the officer reports. "We pushed into the district centre, and during the last few hundred metres we began receiving mortar fire." By the time they reached the British position, the Canadian convoy had to stay overnight. "We were attacked with small arms RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and mortars three times that night. I still can't believe the Brits have spent over a month living there under these conditions."

According to Brigadier Ed Butler, whose 16 Air Assault Brigade spearheaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq, nothing his men experienced there came close to what they have undergone in the past few weeks in Helmand. The Ministry of Defence has been accused of seeking to keep the reality from the British public by excluding journalists and television cameras from the front line. But it has learned that in the 21st century it cannot shut down all flows of information, as a stream of mobile phone videos and emails have made clear.

Soldiers have painted graphic pictures of all-out fighting amid scorpions and sandflies, with ammunition running out, equipment malfunctioning and reinforcements and supplies failing to arrive. One email described a soldier soiling himself with fear; another said there had been attacks by Taliban militiamen on motorbikes who open fire while clutching children in front of themselves.

"You see the Taliban cutting around on dirt bikes, their weapons in one hand, their kids in the other," said an email reported by The Mail on Sunday. "They think we will not shoot them. There have been some terrible accidents. It is horrible to kill a kid, nothing could prepare you for it."

In many cases, however, it was the troops who were on the receiving end. "Two days ago, we ran out of GPMG [general purpose machine gun] ammunition in our forward location," said an email to a Tory MP, Patrick Mercer. "The Taliban were dodging around in great numbers at about 700 metres and firing at us from there from behind all sorts of cover.

"We ran out of LINK [the linked-up ammunition for a general purpose machine gun] and we couldn't get any more in overnight because of the darkness and the weight of fire. We were within RPG range which they use superbly. We used our mortars to good effect, but again, ammunition ran short."

Similar complaints came from another officer, who said that his troops' SA80 rifles melted in the heat. "You would go to pull the trigger and a piece of the gun would come away in your hand," he wrote.

Even though the intense fighting ebbed nearly three weeks ago, and the British forces have since been able to resupply and draw breath, accounts of what they went through are still emerging.

Last week it was disclosed that an elite Paras Pathfinder platoon, sent on a four-day mission to Musa Qala, in the north of Helmand Province, ended up spending 52 days under siege by the Taliban. "We were there for eight weeks; three of those were under constant attack," said a senior officer.

Resupply was difficult: it was dangerous for helicopters to land inside the compound the Paras were defending, and there were not enough soldiers to secure a landing field outside. A force of 120 Paras supposed to relieve them had to be sent to Sangin instead. But, amazingly, the Pathfinders did not lose a single man, although the Sergeant Major was shot through the arm and several men suffered broken bones.

What happened in Sangin was related by the Canadian officer, who wrote: "We received orders that we were now [under] the control of 3 Para for their upcoming operation north of Sangin. We rode all through the night and arrived right as the Paras air-assaulted on to the objective with Chinook helicopters. There were helicopters everywhere.

"It was a hot landing zone, and they took intense fire until we arrived with the LAVs, and the enemy ran away. It was impressive to watch them ...They are unbelievable soldiers."

A less glorious account of a similar engagement was given by a British soldier, however, who reported on an operation to rescue Afghan troops and French special forces who had been ambushed by Taliban. "I could not believe we were going to charge off this helicopter into a wall of lead," he wrote. "Not everyone wanted to get off. One guy actually defecated. He sat rigid with fear inside the cargo hold until we pulled him up and pointed him towards the door.

"We had to manoeuvre across open ground for 200 metres. The scene was like a human abattoir. We fought off the Taliban, but were too late to save the French guys. All of us were shaking when we were flown back to base. One of the Afghan survivors said the French had been tied up, then gutted alive by the Taliban. It was one of the most shocking things I had ever heard."

But one soldier claimed that "scare tactics" were being used against anyone revealing such details, complaining: "It is not fair. The commanding officer said that he would mallet anyone he found was speaking about this."

The army chief of staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was drawn into public controversy after an email from a 3 Para officer serving in Helmand, Major James Loden, criticised support from the RAF as "utterly, utterly useless". The major complained: "Twice I have had Harriers in support when [companies] on the ground have been in heavy contact, on one occasion trying to break clean. A female Harrier pilot 'couldn't identify the target', fired two phosphorous rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming RPGs, and then strafed our perimeter, missing the enemy by 200 metres." In contrast, he said, the US air force was "fantastic".

General Dannatt said Major Loden's comments were "irresponsible" and defended the RAF, which also drew more favourable comments from the Canadian officer. Describing another clash during his time with 3 Para, he wrote: "The company quickly came under attack from what was estimated as 100+ fighters. For about 15 minutes we lost communications with the company commander and a whole section of infantry as they were basically overrun. The section had last been seen going into a ditch that was subsequently hit with a volley of about 15 RPGs; I thought we had lost them all. I had Brit Apaches check in and they did an absolutely brilliant job at repelling the enemy."

Although senior commanders have dismissed some of the criticisms from serving soldiers as partial, and a "snapshot", the MoD said last night: "Incredible efforts are being made to ensure that front-line soldiers are given the best possible support in every way. The tough realities of combat will inevitably create friction about particular incidents, but each individual is doing their very best in the most challenging of circumstances.

"The MoD welcomes these gritty, hard-hitting reports, which portray the reality of difficult work on the front line. The 3 Para battlegroup has performed magnificently in extremely difficult circumstances. Alongside the Afghan National Army, they have stood up to the Taliban, who offer nothing to the Afghan people. We salute them."

At least two officers have quit as a result of their experiences in Helmand. The only one to be named was Captain Leo Docherty, aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, the operational commander in the province. Calling the campaign "a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency", he told The Sunday Times: "We've been grotesquely clumsy - we've said we'll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them."

Yet another leaked email from a front-line officer endorsed this, saying: "We are not having an effect on the average Afghan. We are no better than the Taliban in their eyes, as all they can see is us moving into an area, blowing things up and leaving, which is very sad."

The British contingent in Helmand learned the brutal lesson some time ago that what was a reconstruction mission has turned into a war. Judging from comments on internet message boards, such as the British Army Rumour Service, that message is getting through to soldiers' families and the public back home.

    Blood & guts: At the front with the poor bloody infantry, IoS, 1.10.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1777869.ece

Above & beyond: Tales of courage under fire

One VC already, five more in the pipeline; 132 honours in Afghanistan so far: more than the Falklands or the first Gulf War.
These are some of their stories.

Published: 01 October 2006
The Independent on Sunday
By Jonathan Owen

George Cross

Awarded to Cpl Mark Wright

The George Cross ranks with the Victoria Cross as the nation's highest award for gallantry and is awarded "for acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger". Since its inception in 1940, the George Cross has been awarded posthumously to 84 recipients and to 71 living people.

He had wanted to be a soldier for as long as anyone could remember, but 27-year-old Mark Wright's promising army career was to be tragically cut short. It happened on 6 September when a foot patrol of about half a dozen soldiers searching for a suspected Taliban position in Afghanistan's Helmand province walked into a minefield.

Without any thought for his own safety, Cpl Wright ran to the aid of two soldiers injured by exploding mines. After helping to treat their wounds and calling for a helicopter to winch them to safety, he himself fell victim to a landmine and died before he could be taken to hospital.

It is understood he is to be posthumously awarded the George Cross, with Britain's military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler, having hailed his "act of exceptional bravery".

Cpl Wright was born in 1979. He lived in Edinburgh with his fiancée Gillian, whom he was planning to marry this year. He joined the Army in January 1999, passing the selection tests to join the Parachute Regiment a few months later.

By the age of 23, he had completed three tours of Northern Ireland and in 2003 was sent, along with the 3rd Battalion, to Iraq, where he served with distinction. In May this year Cpl Wright was sent to Helmand, where he provided mortar support for his fellow soldiers. Senior officers said his "accurate and timely fire control" saved many lives and was "instrumental in fending off Taliban attacks".

His commanding officer, Lt-Col Stuart Tootal, said: "Cpl Wright died attempting to save the life of a fellow paratrooper... His actions were typical of the type of man Cpl Wright was. Quietly determined... he possessed exceptionally high moral and physical courage." The Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, has also paid tribute: "His selfless commitment and professionalism are an example to us all."

Cpl Wright's grieving family has said: "We are extremely proud of Mark and the profession that he chose. He leaves a large empty space in our lives."

Distinguished Service Order

Awarded to Wing Cdr Martin Sampson

This recognises outstanding leadership and is awarded "for distinguished services during active operations against the enemy". During the Second World War the Distinguished Service Order was awarded to 870 RAF officers.

The veteran of more than 100 missions during two tours of Afghanistan, RAF Wing Cdr Martin Sampson came to the rescue of soldiers who were pinned down under heavy fire earlier this year.

Described as a "fearless and courageous airborne warrior" by his commanding officer, Wing Cdr Sampson was last week awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his command of the Harrier Squadron - providing life-saving air support for ground troops - in southern Afghanistan between December 2004 and May 2006.

His citation described him as a "fearless and courageous airborne warrior", and commended his "inspirational command... in the face of a persistent and hostile enemy".

Conspicuous Gallantry Cross

Awarded to RSM Bob Jones

The Conspicuous Gallantry Cross is awarded "in recognition of an act or acts of conspicuous gallantry during active operations against the enemy". It has been awarded 15 times since its introduction in 1993.

It was during fierce fighting in the caves of Tora Bora, a Taliban stronghold, as part of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 that SAS RSM Bob Jones (his name has been changed) took on the enemy armed only with his commando knife, despite having been seriously wounded. He was hit at least twice by enemy fire, yet he somehow managed to get back to his feet and continue fighting, before resorting to his knife as the conflict descended into savage hand-to-hand contact.

In a private ceremony with the Queen in 2002, the SAS veteran was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. Officials described his "outstanding leadership in drawing his knife and charging the enemy, inspiring those around him at a time when ammunition was running low and the outcome of the battle was in doubt". He is one of many SAS soldiers who have been privately presented with awards for bravery in Afghanistan.

A married man in his forties with children, RSM Jones has served in some of the world's most notorious troublespots, including Bosnia and Northern Ireland. Still recovering from his injuries a year after the battle, he was given light duties at the SAS regimental headquarters near Hereford.

Military Cross

Awarded to Royal Marine Liam Armstrong

The Military Cross recognises acts of bravery during combat and is awarded "for gallantry during active operations". Around 11,000 were issued during the Second World War.

In 2003, Royal Marine Liam Armstrong, 23, became the most junior serviceman ever to be presented with the Military Cross as a result of his actions in seizing a 45-tonne cache of mortar rounds, rockets and bullets near the Pakistan border. The operation took place in al-Qa'ida heartland in 2002, against a compound thought to contain extremist militia and weapons.

His heroics in breaking into the compound, forcing nine Afghan fighters to surrender and taking them prisoner without having to fire a single shot, before dealing with an angry crowd that had gathered nearby, were described as showing "great bravery, initiative and leadership beyond that expected from such a junior rank".

Major Rich Stephens MBE, the commanding officer of 45 Royal Marine Commando's Zulu Company, said Marine Armstrong's actions were "truly exceptional".

    Above & beyond: Tales of courage under fire, IoS, 1.10.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1777867.ece

British troops in secret truce with the Taliban

October 01, 2006
The Sunday Times
Michael Smith

BRITISH troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people.

Over the past two months British soldiers have come under sustained attack defending a remote mud-walled government outpost in the town of Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan. Eight have been killed there.

It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same. The compound is one of four district government offices in the Helmand province that are being guarded by British troops.

Although soldiers on the ground may welcome the agreement, it is likely to raise new questions about troop deployment. Last month Sir Richard Dannatt, the new head of the British Army, warned that soldiers in Afghanistan were fighting at the limit of their capacity and could only “just” cope with the demands.

When British troops were first sent to Afghanistan it was hoped they would help kick-start the country’s reconstruction. But under pressure from President Hamid Karzai they were forced to defend Afghan government “district centres” at Musa Qala, Sangin, Nowzad and Kajaki.

The move — opposed by Lieutenant-General David Richards, the Nato commander in Afghanistan — turned the four remote British bases into what Richards called “magnets” for the Taliban. All 16 of the British soldiers killed in action in southern Afghanistan have died at Musa Qala, Sangin or Nowzad.

The soldiers risk sniper fire and full-scale assaults from experienced Taliban fighters who can then blend into the local population after each attack.

The peace deal in Musa Qala was first mooted by representatives of the town’s 2,000-strong population. About 400 people living in the immediate area of the district centre compound have been forced to evacuate their homes, most of which have been destroyed in the fighting.

Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of the British taskforce, flew into Musa Qala 18 days ago, guarded only by his military police close-protection team, to attend a shura, or council of town elders, to negotiate a withdrawal.

Butler was taken in a convoy to the shura in the desert southeast of Musa Qala where the carefully formulated proposals were made. The British commander said that he was prepared to back a “cessation of fighting” if they could guarantee that the Taliban would also leave.

The deal — and the avoidance of the word ceasefire — allows both sides to disengage without losing face, an important aspect in the Afghan psyche. Polls suggest that 70% of the population are waiting to see whether Nato or the Taliban emerge as the dominant force before they decide which to back.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally takes place in the summer and there are concerns that the Taliban could simply use the “cessation of fighting” to regroup and attack again next year. But there are clear signs of the commitment of the people of Musa Qala to the deal, with one Talib who stood out against it reportedly lynched by angry locals.

“There is always a risk,” one officer said. “But if it works, it will provide a good template for the rest of Helmand. The people of Sangin are already saying they want a similar deal.”

There is frustration among many British troops that they have been unable to help on reconstruction projects because they have been involved in intense fighting. An e-mail from one officer published this weekend said: “We are not having an effect on the average Afghan.

“At the moment we are no better than the Taliban in their eyes, as all they can see is us moving into an area, blowing things up and leaving, which is very sad.”

The Ministry of Defence announced this weekend that 10 British soldiers had been seriously injured in fighting in the last few days of August, bringing the total number of troops seriously injured in the country this year to 23.

A total of 29 British servicemen have lost their lives in southern Afghanistan in the past two months, including 14 who died when their Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft crashed on September 2.

A new poll published last week revealed a lack of public confidence over the deployment of troops in Afghanistan. According to the BBC poll, 53% of people opposed the use of British troops in the region.

    British troops in secret truce with the Taliban, STs, 1.10.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2383232,00.html