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From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World

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Farewell Kabul
I’ve just finished reading Christina Lamb’s latest book ‘FAREWELL KABUL. From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World’ and discovered that I unknowingly walked in her footsteps into Zumbalay – with much the same outcome.

The book asks just how the might of NATO, with 48 countries and 140,000 troops on the ground, failed to defeat a group of religious students and farmers? How did it go so wrong?

FAREWELL KABUL tells how the West turned success into defeat in the longest war fought by the United States in its history and by Britain since the Hundred Years War. It is the story of well-intentioned men and women going into a place they did not understand at all. And how, what had once been the right thing to do had become a conflict that everyone wanted to exit.

During my own FFUI (Find, Feel, Understand, Inform) patrols the locals I spoke with would often exasperatedly and painstakingly explain to me that the Taliban were funded by the US via Pakistan. Although this view was widespread and heartfelt I dismissed it as a distortion of the truth. Christina Lamb has forced me to re-appraise this view.

It is less a question of whether or not the US funded the Taliban via Pakistan but whether they did so knowingly, negligently or naively. Christina Lamb’s credentials as a war reporter are impeccable but Farewell Kabul is likely to spawn a number of conspiracy theories and, sadly, some of them will be true.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

 

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A touchstone of terrible realisation

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The summer holidays are just around the corner and I’m reminded of Harry and Alfie’s 2011 trip to Portugal with their mum:

‘MY RETURN HOME the following evening, after another long sweaty journey in the ageing Wolf, was not a triumphant one. Within hours of stepping across the threshold of our magnificent Edwardian stained glass front door with its enormous hexagonal brass pull and letter plate my spirits were thoroughly deflated.

Harry and Alfie were pleased to see me. Full of questions about my experiences with the real soldiers, wanting to know if they’d given me a shooter, not quite believing me when I told them that I’d slept outside on the ground.

Jane barely acknowledged my presence. After I’d bathed the boys and put them to bed I found myself alone in the front room. I stared at my reflection in the antique gilt‑framed mirror above the mantelpiece and knew I was in the shit. But the silent treatment didn’t last long. The following morning Jane told me she was moving out and taking the boys with her. When she explained that she’d found a cottage for rent close to the city of York, near to her parents and in the catchment area of an excellent primary school, I didn’t object. In truth the news came as a relief. I didn’t know how on earth I was going to continue to pay the mortgage on our trophy property in Dulwich.

Since it turned out that Jane was expecting me to continue to foot the bill for her extravagant lifestyle, perhaps I should not have allowed financial considerations to cloud my judgement. I shall forever regret the fact that I did not properly consider the impact of our separation on our children, Harry and Alfie. I reasoned to myself that, given I was bound for Afghanistan, it actually made sense for them to be closer to their much loved grandparents.

Both boys would later make heartbreaking appeals to me to get back together with Mummy. I would do almost anything for my children, including going to fight a war over 3,500 miles away, but I couldn’t even begin to reconcile my differences with Jane. As Alfie would explain to me, he loved Mummy and he loved Daddy, so why didn’t we love each other?

In the summer of 2011, while I was in Canada training for deployment, Jane and her parents took the boys on holiday to Portugal. In one of their holiday snaps Harry and Alfie are standing together on a golden beach at sunset. Harry has a protective arm draped over his younger brother who is dressed in just vest and underpants. Both boys are waving and smiling directly at the camera.

It’s a perfect picture but also a painful one.

In my imagination the boys are waving goodbye to me. The image became not only a visual metaphor for the possibility that I might not return from Afghanistan, but also a touchstone of terrible realisation of the sense of abandonment that I was imposing on my children, the people I loved most in the world.’

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

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Defending the indefensible as ‘ancient custom’ is no defence at all.

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Victor Barrio
The BBC reports that Matador Victor Barrio has been killed by a bull in Spain.

The bull fighting community is reported to be “distressed and very moved”  by his death and Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy has expressed his condolences.

While his death, any death, is tragic and my heart goes out to his grieving family, I’m personally finding it hard to feel too sorry for Victor Barrio. After all, he died doing something he loved which is better than ending your days eating mashed potato and watching endless repeats of Eastenders. I don’t fear the Reaper and when he calls, as call he must, I hope I am similarly engaged in the pursuit of something I love.

But there’s another reason why I’m finding it hard to feel too sorry for Mr Barrio. Lovers of bullfighting  defend it as an ancient art form deeply rooted in national history in much the same way as the appalling practice of bacha basi is excused as ancient custom in Afghanistan – which is no defence at all.

When the Reaper does call for me I won’t be slaughtering bulls for art or raping little boys for culture.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

Spin Zhira

Is the era of ‘cautious optimism’ over?

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On 6 July 2016, Britain learned that it had joined the invasion of  Iraq in 2003 ‘before all peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted’ that it had ‘sent ill-prepared troops into battle’ and had ‘wholly inadequate’ plans for the aftermath.

Of course, we knew these things already.

Despite the long wait (7 years) the huge cost (£10.4m) and incredible detail (2.5 million words) the Iraq enquiry was less revelation and more affirmation of the things we already knew to be true but dare not speak.

Obama

On the same day, a grim-faced President Barack Obama announced that planned US troop withdrawals in Afghanistan have been shelved, further prolonging the United States’ longest war.

The inability to end the war in Afghanistan does not come as a complete surprise either.

Way back in the spring of 2012, Major General CM Gurganus, USMC confidently asserted, ‘we are winning and the Taliban are losing’. No one really believed him. It was patently obvious that we were not fighting a simple binary war with a winner and a loser.

Later that same year Brigadier Douglas Chalmers, the senior British Commander in Helmand was less assertive and spoke of ‘cautious optimism’ for the future.

Of course, both men were talking bollocks. And I suspect they knew it too.

Just as in Iraq, US led, British backed military intervention in Afghanistan has been disastrous. Many of the findings of the Chilcot report, particularly with regard to post-conflict planning and reconstruction, can be equally applied in Afghanistan.

How did we fail to learn these lessons?

I believe it is because we have a culture of shooting the messenger that pervades both the American and British  Armed Forces. We are so focused on success that we cannot countenance failure. To maintain morale and careers it becomes necessary to spin failure into success, telling people what they want to hear rather than what they need to know. This blindness to failure prevents us from learning from failure.

The language of ‘cautious optimism’ has been very costly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps, after Chilcot, we are now ready to learn this lesson.Spin Zhira header blurb for website v1.3SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

 

 

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Chilcot Report or King James Bible?

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Helmandi Politics

At 11.35 today Sir John Chilcott’s long awaited inquiry into the Iraq War is released to the public. It is expected to be critical of a number of high ranking officials.

Commissioned by Gordon Brown in 2009, the report has been subject to long delays and runs to some 2.6 million words. Many family members of British soldiers killed in Iraq fear a ‘whitewash’ and point out that we don’t need an enquiry to see that ‘Iraq’s actually worse than what is was before we went in’.

Colonel Tim Collins, made famous by his inspirational eve-of-battle speech at the outset of the war in 2003 also believes ‘we shattered Iraqi society’ the very opposite of the instructions he gave his troops to ‘tread lightly there’.

The utility of a report of such magnitude is debatable and it seems unlikely that it will ever be read in full.  To give it some context the King James bible runs to 783, 137 words, the Qur’an is a comparatively slender 77, 934 words while War and Peace weighs in at 587, 287 words.

Sir John Chilcot now hopes that ‘many lessons’ can be learned from his report but had it been shorter, had it been delivered sooner could the lessons of Iraq been applied to Afghanistan?

He has said that future, military action should only be embarked on, if ‘really careful challenge analysis and assessment’ is applied to it. This sounds so extraordinarily obvious it hardly warrants a further 2,599,994 words but the implication – and the evidence – is clear. Britain entered the Iraq  war without careful analysis and both Britain and Iraq have paid a heavy price for this folly.

The evidence also suggests that precisely the same mistakes have been made in Afghanistan. Like Iraq,  Afghanistan is spiralling into civil war with violence and  corruption endemic. Helmand Province is now a battleground between Taliban and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) – a battle the insurgents appear to be winning – and where poppy cultivation and opium production continues unchecked.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

Spin Zhira

Return to Gooseberry Hall

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Last weekend saw a long overdue return to Gooseberry Hall. The sun shone, as it always seems to do whenever we visit, and I was reminded of an immaculate Afghan homecoming in April 2012:

‘It was a perfect spring day and Rob picked me up in his fancy open top two‑seater sports car. It’s a car I’ve always coveted. With the roof down and the wind in our hair we flew north along the A429 under azure spring skies, through pristine Cotswold countryside dotted with ancient limestone villages and market towns with quintessential English names; Stow‑on‑the‑Wold, Moreton‑in‑Marsh, Stretton‑on‑Fosse. It was all in perfect contrast to the dry barren dashte which makes up so much of Helmand Province.

Britain was flirting with me that afternoon, displaying her beauty, tantalising me with her delights, proving – if proof were needed – that she was worth defending, even if it meant fighting a war over 3,500 miles away.

At my request, we stopped for a pint at the Virgins and Castle in the historic town of Kenilworth. Built in the fifteenth century, about the same time as the siege of Herat, it first became a pub in 1563 when Britain was still burning Protestants at the stake for heresy.

At that time Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, Akbar the Great, the third and greatest ruler of the Mughal Dynasty controlled the Gereshk valley and much of the rest of Afghanistan. Little has changed in the largely rural district of Nahr‑E‑Saraj in the intervening four and a half centuries, except that under Akbar the Mughal Dynasty was a model of religious tolerance, encompassing Islamic, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist faiths.

In truth I needed a bit of Dutch courage before being reunited with Harry and Alfie. I hadn’t spoken to them since we’d said our goodbyes in the school playground back in January. Although I’d written to them every couple of days, I hadn’t received any return mail. I’d missed them terribly and thought of them often but I had to steel myself for the possibility that they might be less eager to see their Dad than their Dad was to see them.

Gooseberry Hall lies to the north of Kenilworth Castle in the heart of the Warwickshire countryside and is about as far removed from Main Operating Base Price as it’s possible to be. There are no battle tanks parked on the magnificent lawn. Its walls are not adorned with Lads Mags pin‑ups or mimetic cock art. There are no Apache helicopters flying overhead.

To my very great delight it seemed my fears had been unfounded. I didn’t even make it to the front door before Alfie threw himself into my arms, clinging to me in a fierce embrace as I was nearly knocked off my feet by his brother Harry.

It was indescribably good to see them, hear them, smell them, touch them. I held them both tight for as long as I was able until they finally felled me like an old tree, collapsing onto the lawn in a bundle of giggling, laughing, writhing limbs.

Afghanistan serves as a constant reminder of the fragile and tenuous grip with which all life clings to planet earth – something it’s easy to forget in our cosseted lives in the west. Even without the armed conflict being waged inside its borders, it is a harsh and unforgiving place.

Average life expectancy is just 44 years. Pregnancy rather than insurgency is one of the primary causes of premature death. According to the World Health Organisation, one Afghan woman in 11 will die of causes related to pregnancy and birth during her childbearing years. In neighbouring Tajikistan, that figure is one in 430, while in Austria, it is one in 14,300. It’s a figure that dwarfs the estimated 21,000 deaths resulting from the conflict since 2003.

Being reacquainted with life’s cruelty and suffering heightens the appreciation of simple pleasures. Rolling around on Gooseberry Hall’s manicured lawn with my kids was an unforgettable reunion, a moment of pure, unrestrained joy that I will treasure my whole life and take with me, smiling, to my grave.

As my anxieties melted away we were joined by the rest of the Gooseberry Hall Gang (GHG), a chaotic, happy‑go‑lucky collective of kids and pets who all call Gooseberry Hall home and who filled the air with noise and laughter as we played in the sunset.

It was a beautiful evening and the perfect homecoming.’

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

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Carl Shadrake, Afghan Veteran, speaks for us all.

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Carl Shadrake

Sgt. Carl Shadrake talks about how the Battle of the Somme is remembered by soldiers serving today in the British Army.

Former Grenadier Guardsman and Afghan veteran, Carl Shadrake is an extraordinary young man who knows the pain and anguish of close quarter battle better than any other living Briton.

On his first tour of Afghanistan in 2007 the vehicle he was travelling in was targeted by a suicide bomber, killing the driver and seriously injuring Carl. After a long recovery Carl returned to his unit, 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and five years later deployed to Afghanistan for a second time in 2012.

Four months into this tour, whilst on a foot patrol,  a colleague close to him detonated an improvised explosive device, losing both his legs. Badly wounded himself by the blast, Carl’s first concern was getting his wounded comrade to safety. It was only after a rescue helicopter had evacuated them both to Camp Bastion that Carl realised the extent of his own injuries.

Carl was put into a medically induced coma and flown by aeromed to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. It was here, a month later that he learned the tragic news that his younger brother, Jamie, also serving in Afghanistan, had been shot and killed.

Despite everything he and his family have been through he speaks with such modesty and humility when measuring his own sacrifice with those of the 19,240 soldiers who died on the first day of the Somme.

It’s impossible not to contrast the measured tones of this extraordinary man with those of our grasping, self-serving politicians as they jockey for position in the race to lead their respective parties.

Spin Zhira

Taliban use ‘honey trap’ boys to kill Afghan police

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bacha bazi

Anuj Chopra reports that the Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of bacha bazi – paedophilic ‘boy play’ – prevalent inHelmand.

Taliban use ‘honey trap’ boys to kill Afghan police

This sickening practice, condemned by the Taliban,  is prevalent across Helmand where young boys become the object of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders. ISAF not only failed to stamp out this vile bent but also shamefully excused it as ancient custom. The Nahr-E-Saraj District Chief of Police was no exception:

“Next on the list was the District Chief of Police, the appropriately abbreviated D‑CoP, Ghullie Khan. Like his boss the Governor, the D‑CoP was predictably involved in the narcotics business. To supplement this income he also used the Afghan Uniformed Police (AUP) department he commanded to collect illegal taxes from local citizens. There were a number of ISAF apologists who defended this unlawful activity as ‘culturally normal’. I even read a paper on the subject, quite possibly published by the DCSU, the same organisation that had come up with the wizard idea of FEOs and then assigned them male interpreters.

Personally, I was deeply sceptical of this point of view. The truth was that ISAF seemed powerless to prevent the endemic corruption that pervaded every level of the AUP, and not a little ashamed that the primary source of these illegal taxes was a levy on the use of the main highways that bisected the district – all of which had been funded at great expense with international aid.

No one in ISAF was really sure how much the illegal taxation business was worth in Nahr‑E‑Saraj but it wasn’t petty cash. Ghullie Khan had previously been a senior police officer in the neighbouring district of Sangin. He had been removed from this post after an ISAF investigation revealed that he’d been sodomizing little boys there. In the wake of this scandal his boss, Nabi Elham – the Provincial Chief of Police – naturally promoted him to be top cop in Nahr‑E‑Saraj, although it was rumoured that he’d first demanded a bribe of half a million US dollars.

There were ISAF papers defending paedophilia and bribery as culturally normal activities too, although I didn’t waste any time reading them. Culturally normal or not, I reckoned that the citizens of those countries that had helped to fund the district’s new highways would be dismayed to learn that they were now being used to line the pockets of a known pederast, drug baron and all round bad guy.

Ghullie’s favourite son, Zaibiullah was a chip off the old block and had followed his father into the AUP. When a local shopkeeper failed to pay his taxes on time he tied his arms and legs together and drowned him into the Nahr‑E‑Buhgra canal to teach him a lesson. Such was Zaibiullah’s intellect that it was possible to imagine him warning the drowning man that next time he failed to pay Zaibiullah would put a bullet in his head.

It was just as possible to imagine some obscure ISAF department publishing a paper defending drowning as a culturally normal method of deterrence in much the same way that waterboarding was a culturally normal interview technique in the United States.

Neither Ghullie Khan’s parenting skills, nor his predilection for underage boys, nor any of the myriad illegal activities over which he presided as the district’s chief upholder of law and order did much to temper his indignation when he learned of the Qur’an burnings.

However, unlike their Governor or their Police Chief, and despite our worst fears, the residents of Gereshk seemed unmoved by the turmoil engulfing the rest of the country. We waited with bated breath but much to our surprise there were no violent demonstrations, the bazaars remained open, and even the local Taliban’s attempts to exploit the situation seemed half‑hearted.

If I’d thought there was any chance I could pull it off I would have attributed this muted response to my brilliant engagement plan, but even I had to admit that this was unlikely. There were other forces at work here.

In stark contrast, a few months later angry protests ensued following a series of mysterious child abductions. The most likely explanation was that the D‑CoP had resumed his paedophile activities and this was certainly what the citizens of Gereshk appeared to have concluded. Directing most of their anger towards him in a number of emergency shuras, they demanded that he return their children and bugger off, literally, back from where he came.

In MOB Price our intelligence analysts scratched their heads in wonder. What were the citizens of Gereshk so upset about? Surely child abduction was just another one of those culturally normal activities that we Westerners couldn’t get our heads around?

We were at a loss as to what all the fuss was about and lobbied hard for Ghullie Khan to keep his job. Yes, he was a terrible father; yes, he was corrupt; yes, he was a kiddy fiddler; yes, he was facilitating the illicit opium trade but his Danish Civilian Police mentors assured us he was still much better than the last guy, or than any of his potential successors.”

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

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Around the coast in eighty waves.

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Jonathan Bennet

Jonathan Bennett surfed his way through a midlife crisis. Finding himself ‘without a job, without a girlfriend and without a home’ he decided to go surfing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/jonathan-bennett/

The start and end point of our respective crises seem remarkably similar. I too found myself contemplating a failed relationship and a failing business while dossing down in an empty house. Jonathan’s answer was to buy a clapped out camper van and surf his way round Britain, sleeping by the sea and washing with a sponge and a pan of warm water. I chose instead to relocate to a landlocked country 3,500 miles away to fight the war on terror, also washing with a sponge and a pan of warm water. We have both written books chronicling our crises; Around the Coast in Eighty Waves and SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand.

And that’s not all we have in common. Jonathan says “surfing is about launching yourself into the unknown and hoping for the best,” which is not so very different from the British Army’s initial deployment into Helmand Province.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

 

Spin Zhira

LCpl James Ashworth VC

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LCpl James Ashworth VC, 1st Bn Grenadier Guards was killed in action on this day four years ago in the district of Nahr-E-Saraj, Helmand Province.LanceCorporalAshworth

James Ashworth – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LCpl James Ashworth epitomizes the courage and professionalism of all British soldiers whose sacrifice in Helmand has been confounded by incompetence, corruption and deceit.

By tragic coincidence I learned today from a friend in the neighbouring district of Nad Ali that “Nahre Saraj all Taliban. Just Gereshk bazaar government”. This confirms reports from Kabul that much of Helmand Province is either under siege or already in the hands of the Taliban.

In 2013 Catriona Laing, the head of the Helmand PRT earnestly pronounced: “We have presented the people of Helmand with an opportunity. They have grabbed it enthusiastically, confidently… it’s now in their hands for the future.”

I wonder what she would say today?

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.